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Category: Excerpts

How did Abhinav Bindra win an Olympic gold medal? Read the story in his own words

Posted on by Penguin India

Bright-eyed aspirants in sports-from badminton to gymnastics-are training across the country. Homegrown leagues are attracting the world’s best athletes and professionals. The country boasts multiple World No. 1 teams and athletes, and sporting achievements are handsomely rewarded.

Go! features a never-before-seen collection of essays by leading athletes, sports writers and professionals, who together tell a compelling story of India’s ongoing sporting transformation.

Read an interesting excerpt from the chapter, “Building Indian sports Champions in India”, written by Abhinav Bindra:

——————————-

Sourcing yak milk, balancing on the top of a pole 40 ft high, using screwdrivers and Allen keys, shaving off a few millimetres on a specially sourced shoe sole, eye-tests and matching sights, excess-baggage payments carrying special equipment, the colour of a wall, the wattage of a bulb, Bollywood movies, the right meal, a mother’s love, a father’s resolve, a sister’s belief, a coach’s patience.

What have these motley elements got to do with high performance?

Most often, nothing.

And, as my own journey shows, sometimes it means everything!

Given the type of life I have led over the last twenty years, I won’t blame you for believing that I might have some secret recipe for ‘being a champion’. But honestly, I don’t. I have experimented with my diet, overcome my fears, tweaked my equipment, modified my environment and surrounded myself with the right mix of people who have challenged and supported me unconditionally.

As you can probably tell, I spent a lot of my time experimenting. Trying to be the best shooter I could be. Ask me how this shooter became an Olympic gold medallist and I will happily tell you my story. I can only hope others will find it interesting.

It is true that I have lived the quest to be perfect on the imperfect day. In doing that, I have sometimes succeeded and most times failed. It has been a journey of ups and downs from day to day, season to season, Olympics to Olympics.

Let me tell you a little about the only subject on which I can call myself an expert—myself!

Twenty-two years of competition, 180 medals, five Olympics, three Olympic finals, one Olympic gold. All of it seems a daze. Until it doesn’t.

Looking back, I can now see it all much more clinically and dispassionately. I am no longer a stakeholder in my shooting career. I have exited my investment, as venture capitalists would say. That is my past. And I have a future to think about. But that makes retrospection all the more interesting for me.

I was not a natural athlete. In fact, I was a reluctant sportsperson. Introduced to shooting by my first coach, Colonel Dhillon, I instinctively felt that this was for me. This was something I could see myself doing, making a life of and a career from. For this chance, I navigated my way from dream to reality and built the personal skills that were necessary to win. What do I consider to be the skills that made the difference?

In my early career, I was extremely focused. I was trying all I could to make a name for myself as a young shooter. Inexperience meant that my quest was for perfection, and in my mind, that objective was a stationary target. You can’t blame a shooter for that, can you? To my mind, the goal was clear and the ‘system’ a perfect one. All I needed to do was understand the system and crack the code.

Athens 2004 was a wake-up call. In perhaps the most defining incident of my career, I came a disappointing seventh in the Olympic final after shooting what I thought was the perfect game. Only much later did I find out that the lane position I was allotted had a loose tile underfoot, which reverberated every time I shot. In a game of millimetres, it was amazing that I even hit the target! I went into a depression (literally) after Athens. Months later, I had two obvious choices—one, quit the sport or, two, carry on and accept the incident as a case of ‘bad luck’. I chose a third, and it defined me.

I chose the quest for Adaptability—to try to be perfect on the imperfect day. I started training under deliberately imperfect conditions, even installing a loose tile in my home range and practising regularly while standing on it. I trained in low light and under bright lights, adjusted bulbs and added peculiar shadows, painted the walls the same colours as the relevant Olympic ranges. Extreme behaviour perhaps. But it worked for me and even came to my rescue at Rio 2016, when my carefully chosen rifle-sight, through which I focused on the target, broke just a few minutes before my event. I was able to remain composed and made it to fourth. Had I chosen option two after Athens, I would have probably accepted it as fate and given up! Did I ever again encounter a loose tile? Honestly, I don’t know, and it was not something I thought about ever again when competing. Adaptability gave me versatility and the ability to not latch on to excuses, external conditions or stimuli. My attitude changed to acceptance of the fact that the only thing within my complete control was my own performance—but I was also ready for all the rest that wasn’t!

Go! features a never-before-seen collection of essays by leading athletes, sports writers and professionals, get your copy today!

Delve into the Universe of Algorithms with Kartik Hosanagar

Posted on by Penguin India

In his new book, A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence, Kartik Hosanagar surveys the brave new world of algorithmic decision making and reveals the potentially dangerous biases to which they can give rise as they increasingly run our lives. He makes the compelling case that we need to arm ourselves with a better, deeper, more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of algorithmic thinking. The way to achieving that is understanding that algorithms often think a lot like their creators-that is, like you and me.

Here is what the author has to say about his journey towards writing the book!

Tell us what your book is about.

If you read the news, you have probably heard the term algorithms: computer code that seem to control much of what we do on the internet, and which are landing us in all sorts of jams. Elections are swayed by newsfeed algorithms, markets are manipulated by trading algorithms, women and minorities are discriminated against by resume screening algorithms — individuals are left at the mercy of machines. There is a lot of fear mongering and we hear terms such as “weapons of math destruction.” But a key question remains unanswered: what are we supposed to do about it? We can’t wish algorithms away – and, frankly, we wouldn’t want to. But they come with huge implications to our personal and professional lives that we need to understand if we’re going to attempt to offset the challenges they pose. This book offers us a way in.

Why did you write this book?

I spend my days helping students understand technology; designing and analyzing studies that probe algorithms’ impact on the world; and writing code myself. And while my subject gets a lot of attention in popular journalism, I feel the public lacks the right mental models to understand algorithms and AI, and as a result the conversation is too fear-oriented, at the expense of being solution-oriented. This is my attempt to address these problems and start a conversation on what the solution should look like.

The germ of the book itself began in my research lab. I was conducting a study I thought would confirm accepted notions that the Internet was democratizing taste and choice; in fact, it showed that commonly used algorithms did the opposite. That led me to work on how to design systems to achieve better social goals and business targets. We need to do something similar here, with this broader challenge – take a forward-looking view to solve the problems, not just worry or create fear about them.

Are algorithms too complex for most of us to understand?

They are not. Many of us are overwhelmed when we hear words like algorithms and AI. But they are concepts all of us can understand and, in fact, need to understand given their growing importance.

Today’s most sophisticated algorithms aren’t simple sets of instructions; they’re black boxes too technical for most of us to get our heads around. Even the regulators trained to monitor these things are years behind the AI that underlies modern algorithms. That’s what this book offers: a way in. In the course of trying to explain why code goes rogue, I came upon a novel insight that offers not only an understanding of algorithms, but points us towards a framework for controlling their power. I found that algorithmic behavior, like human behavior, can be influenced by both nature and nurture – in algorithms’ case, this means how they are coded by their programmers and the real-world data they soak up and learn from. In other words, algorithms go rogue for some of the same reasons humans do: they’re creative and unpredictable, they’re usually wonderful, sometimes dangerous.

This way of viewing algorithms helps us understand what causes algorithms to behave in biased and unpredictable ways, and in turn helps move us away from a fear-driven conversation towards practical solutions to these problems.

So, how concerned should we be that AI and algorithms have biases?

The biggest cause for concern is not that algorithms have biases; in fact, algorithms are on average less biased than humans. The issue is that we are more susceptible to biases in algorithms than in humans. First, despite our emerging skepticism, most people still see algorithms as rational, infallible machines, and thus fail to address and curb their (so-called) “bad behavior” quickly enough. So, elections are swayed, markets are manipulated, individuals are hurt due to our own attitudes and actions towards algorithms. Moreover, human biases and rogue behaviors don’t scale the way rogue software might. A bad judge or doctor can affect the lives of thousands of people; bad code can, and does, affect the lives of billions. So I finish the book by proposing concrete steps we can take towards a solution, including an algorithm bill of rights – a set of basic rights we should all demand and that regulators should provide us.

Is there anything I can do as an individual? Or am I at the mercy of large powerful tech companies?

As individuals, the power we have is knowledge, our dollars, and votes. I have four concrete steps individuals should follow.

  1. Be aware of when algorithms are making decisions a) for you and b) about you.
  2. Understand how this might affect the decisions being made. (Reading this book will help you with this!)
  3. Decide whether this is acceptable – to you as an individual, and as a member of society.
  4. If this is not acceptable, demand changes. Or walk away from algorithms that you think undermine the fabric of society.

What would this look like in a real-life example?

Suppose you are active on Facebook and discover news stories to read on the platform. You wonder if you are getting the full breadth of perspectives on an issue or even if the news and posts are false or manipulated in some way. You can do the following:

  1. First, remember that Facebook’s algorithm has essentially decided which of thousands of stories and posts to show you.
  2. Recall what you’ve learned in my pages: that Facebook’s algorithms choose the news stories from the ones posted by your friends and prioritize them based on which friends’ posts you engage with the most. If you want a breadth of perspectives, then don’t unfriend disengage with people with whom you disagree.
  3. If you find false information has been posted by someone, inform them. Also, with one click you can notify Facebook that the information is false. Facebook’s algorithms can now use your feedback to stop circulating false stories.
  4. Finally, demand transparency from Facebook on why certain posts are shown and others are not.

It works for other examples too where algorithms make decisions about us such as whether we get a mortgage loan or which school our kids can go to. If you’re unhappy with how you’re being treated, ask whether an algorithm was used and what factors were considered. Vote for politicians who will support some basic algorithmic rights for all of us: being informed when algorithms make decisions about us, and some simple way of understanding those algorithmic decisions.

What should we expect from the government and our elected representatives?

In the book, I call for a bill of rights that would make it much easier for individuals to follow the process I describe above; our elected representatives need to support this, as well as create channels for complaints – ways for individuals to flag problematic algorithmic decisions, and ways for the government to act. The EU has incorporated some relevant provisions in its GDPR regulation including a right to explanation, where consumers can demand explanations for algorithmic decisions that affect them. GDPR may not be the right solution for all governments but we need to think hard about how we grant people some basic rights regarding how algorithms make decisions about them.

I also believe in an idea first that was put forward by Ben Schneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. We need a national algorithmic safety board that would operate much like the Federal Reserve, staffed by experts and charged with monitoring and controlling the use of algorithms by corporations and other large organizations, including the government itself. The board’s goal will be to provide consumer protection and minimize and contain risks tied to algorithms.

A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence is an entertaining and provocative look at one of the most important developments of our time

An Excerpt from the Prologue of The Tiger and the Ruby

Posted on by Penguin India

In 1841, Nigel Halleck left Britain as a clerk in the East India Company. He served in the colonial administration for eight years before leaving his post, eventually disappearing in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, never to be heard from again. A century-and-a-half later, Kief Hillsbery, Nigel’s nephew many times removed, sets out to unravel the mystery. Tracing his ancestor’s journey across the subcontinent, his quest takes him from Lahore to Calcutta, and finally to the palaces of Kathmandu. What emerges is an unexpected personal chapter in the history of the British Empire in India.

Here’s an excerpt from the prologue of The Tiger and the Ruby!

Your loving Nigel

“Who was Nigel?” I asked my aunt.

That would be my uncle, she said, many times removed. He had gone out to India.

I asked why.

To help those poor people, she said. “Many men did in those days.” India, she explained, had figured in the lives of several of my ancestors.

A consulship in Burma was mentioned, and there had been a couple of vicars, and someone in railway administration — no, not an engineer, of either sort. Driving a train, she informed me, was common, and as for devising a railway’s route — grades and bridges, tunnels, beds for track — a head for such figures never sat on the shoulders of anyone who bled our blood, she was absolutely sure of that.

How long were they in India, I wondered, and what was it they did afterwards, back in England, and after she told me — two or three years for the consul and the clergymen, five she supposed for the railwayman, and more or less the same as what they did in India, practised their professions — I returned to Uncle Nigel: what did he do?

“Do?”

“In England. After India.”

Actually, she said, he never came back. He stayed in the East.

“His whole life?”

“Indeed he did.”

“He must have liked it.”

“I suppose he must.”

“Was he the only one ever? Who stayed?”

“Heavens, no. Many have. Why, Mother Teresa —”

“In our family.”

No others came to mind, she said. Not for India. There was my mother, of course, who married my American father after the war and decamped across the pond.

“Did Nigel get married? Was that why? To an Indian?”

“Certainly not. Of course not.”

“He never had a wife?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The brooch had been a gift to his mother, she said. Then she changed the subject, leaving me with both a clear sense
that she disapproved of Nigel and the vague notion that there was more to his story than my aunt thought suitable for sharing with my ten-year-old self. A decade later, when I was on the verge of heading East myself for a college year abroad in Nepal, my mother confirmed my suspicions.

Nigel, she confided, had separated from the East India Company under some sort of cloud. Afterwards he had supposedly “gone native” in Nepal and lived until his death in 1878 as one of a handful of Europeans admitted to the then-forbidden Himalayan kingdom.

According to family legend, his exile was forced — he couldn’t stay in India or come back to England. But no one quite knew why. He might have been a jewel thief, he might have been a spy. He was, everyone agreed, a hunter of big game, and one story had it that he met his end in the mouth of a man-eating tiger in the Terai jungle, on the border of Nepal and India.

Get your copy today!

Why Do We Need to Know about the Sea?

Posted on by Penguin India

In a crumbling neighbourhood in New Delhi, a child waits for a mother to return home from work. And, in parallel, in a snow-swept town in Germany on the Baltic Sea coast a woman, her memory fading, shows up at a deserted hotel. Worlds apart, both embark, in the course of that night, on harrowing journeys through the lost and the missing, the living and the dead, until they meet in an ending that breaks the heart – and holds the promise of putting it back together again.

Here is an excerpt of Raj Kamal Jha’s book The City and the Sea

“Like all children, I have a father.

We shall meet him in just a little while.

An odd character, my father. Sometimes, it seems, I am the one who is the adult and my father is the child. But then that’s the way Papa is. I cannot do much about it, Ma told me about Papa, I love him but I am no longer sure how much. If you ask me, I would tell you that I think Ma deserves someone better. I know that’s a hurtful thing to say but I will say this behind Papa’s back, he won’t know because there’s no way he’s ever going to read any of this.

That, I am absolutely sure of.

 *

As was her routine Monday to Friday and one working Sunday a month—which was that day—Ma should have been home latest by 4 p.m. from the newspaper where she worked on the copy desk, most of the time on the morning shift. It began at 8 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m., during which she edited stories and made pages. She had to send out at least two or three inside pages to bed, to the press, ready for plating and printing before the night shift came in and began work on the front page and the national pages.

If I sound as if I know quite a bit about Ma’s work it’s because Ma often talked to me about it, once she took me to office when there was no one there. She showed me how she made a page on QuarkExpress, how she drew text boxes into which she flowed the text, picture boxes into which she placed the pictures. She showed me how she typed in the headline, chose its size and font from the style sheet that popped up on the right-hand side when you hit F9 on the keyboard. Many of these stories and pictures that I edit are from The Sea, she said, about people who live there, things that happen to them. If we don’t put these stories out, no one will get to know what’s happening in The Sea.

Why is that important, I asked, why do we need to know about The Sea?

What kind of a question is that, Ma said, if you want to live in this city, you can never run away from The Sea so why not get to know what’s happening there? That way, you will always be prepared.

Prepared for what? I asked.

When someone from The Sea comes visiting, she said.

I didn’t understand what she meant, it was 3 p.m., her shift was over, it was time to go home.

  *

That evening, however, 4 p.m. became 5 p.m. became 6 p.m. and it was shortly before 7 p.m., more than three hours after I had returned from school, had lunch, washed, even changed into my night clothes, when Papa walked up to me and said—he was speaking to me for the first time that day—your mother still hasn’t come home, did Ma tell you anything this morning about coming home late?

No, I said, she didn’t tell me anything like that.

  *

You aren’t going to hear much about Papa, I will tell you that up front, because he is here, he is not here, he comes and he goes. He is at home most of the time when Ma is at work and I am at school. Or, he wanders around the city all by himself because he lost his job a year ago. When we are home, all three of us, most of the time Papa rarely gets in our way, he lives and moves in spaces in our house constantly draped in shadow. Maybe a bit of The Sea has slipped into your Papa, mixed with a little of his blood and that’s what has made him seem lost all the time, as if he’s missing a vital piece, Ma whispered to me once, and I think she felt sorry for saying this because she tried to be nice to him the rest of the day even though he remained, as ever, cold and distant.

One night, when they thought I was asleep, Papa and Ma were in my room talking and Ma told him to keep meeting people, keep going for job interviews but he said there was no point, no one wanted him, they would like to get the same work done for half his salary to which Ma said forget the salary, take anything they give you, you need to be out of this house working, you need to be with other people, forget about us, you need to feel safe and secure, I can’t be the only one dreaming around here. I would love to take a vacation with all of us, I would love to walk on a beach, I would love to go abroad, to watch the snow fall, how is all this going to happen, how is any of this going to happen?

The way she said all of this, angry and defiant, set Papa off. He shouted back at her, don’t tell me about your dreams, he struck his palm hard on the dresser table, making things fly away, do you think I should work as a security guard? As Santa Claus? I should beg at the streetlight, scrub the toilet floor at the mall? That, too, is a job, isn’t it, he said, and he walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Ma followed him a few minutes later.

She was crying.

I heard all this, I saw all this with my eyes open just a chink.

I am very good at watching with my eyes closed, at making people believe I am sleeping, that I am not listening when I am, actually, wide awake, fully alert.”

This is a book about masculinity – damaging and toxic and yet enduring and entrenched – that begs the question: What kind of men are our boys growing up to be?

The Lost Art of Scripture – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Today we see the Quran being used by some to justify war and terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions are often employed selectively to underwrite arbitrary and subjective views. They are believed to be divinely ordained; they are claimed to contain eternal truths.

In our increasingly secular world, holy texts are at best seen as irrelevant, and at worst as an excuse to incite violence, hatred and division. So what value, if any, can scripture hold for us today? And if our world no longer seems compatible with scripture, is it perhaps because its original purpose has become lost?

In her book The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen Armstrong, a world authority on religious affairs, shows in this fascinating journey through millennia of history, this narrow reading of scripture is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Read the excerpt from the first chapter here!

The fall of Adam and Eve is one of the most famous stories of the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh, the divine creator, placed the first human beings in Eden, where there was every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden”. But Yahweh gave Adam a stern warning: he could eat the fruit of all these trees except the fruit of the tree of knowledge,’ for on the day you eat of it, you shall most surely die’. But, alas, Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent and she and Adam were condemned to a life of hard labour and suffering that could end only in death.

This story is so deeply embedded in the Judaeo- Christian consciousness that it is, perhaps, surprising to learn that in fact it is steeped in the Mesopotamian Wisdom traditions that embodied the ethical ideals that bound the ruling aristocracy together. Civilisation began in Sumer in what is now Iraq in about 3500 BCE. The Sumerians were the first to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community in the fertile plain that lay between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and create a privileged ruling class. By about 3000 BCE, there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. The Sumerian aristocrats and their retainers – bureaucrats, soldiers, scribes, merchants and household servants – appropriated between half and two-thirds of the crop grown by the peasants, who were reduced to serfdom. They left fragmentary records of their misery: ‘ The poor man is better dead than alive,’ one lamented. Sumer had devised the system of structural inequity that would prevail in every single state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilisation.

Adam and Eve, however, lived at the beginning of time, before the Earth yielded brambles and thistles and humans had to wrest their food from the recalcitrant soil with sweat on their brow. Their life in Eden was idyllic until Eve met the serpent, who is described as arum, the most ‘subtle’, ‘shrewd’ and ‘wise’ of the animals.’ Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ the serpent asked her. Eve replied that only the tree of knowledge was prohibited on pain of instant death. The arum serpent’s prediction of what would happen to Adam and Eve drew heavily on the terminology of Sumerian Wisdom: No! you will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.’ Of course, Eve succumbed: she wanted to transcend her humanity and become godlike, The couple did not, in fact, die as soon as they ate the forbidden fruit, as Yahweh had threatened. Instead, as the serpent promised,’the eyes of both were opened’ – words that recall the exclamation of a Mesopotamian student to his teacher:

Master-god, who [shapes] humanity, you are my god!

You have opened my eyes as if I were a puppy;

You have formed humanity within me!

Get your copy of The Lost Art of Scripture today

Examining the Muslim Demographic through ‘Siyasi Muslims’ – Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

How do we make sense of the Muslims of India?

Do they form a political community?

Does the imagined conflict between Islam and modernity affect the Muslims’ political behaviour in this country?

Are Muslim religious institutions-mosques and madrasas-directly involved in politics?

Do they instruct the community to vote strategically in all elections?

What are ‘Muslim issues’?

Is it only about triple talaq?

While these questions intrigue us, we seldom debate to find pragmatic answers to these queries. Examining the everydayness of Muslims in contemporary India, Hilal Ahmed’s Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India offers an evocative story of politics and Islam in India, which goes beyond the given narratives of Muslim victimhood and Islamic separation.

Here is an excerpt from Siyasi Muslims Triple Talaq as an MCQ:

————————————————————————–

The question of ‘triple talaq’ is posed as an objective-type MCQ (multiple choice question)! We are given two options—support it (say yes) or oppose it (say no). The meaning of yes and no are also premeditated in this schema: Yes refers to closed Islamism, while No stands for gender equality and progress.

This dominant (and somewhat stereotypical) representation of the triple talaq issue is based on a  few strong assumptions about Muslims in general and Muslim men in particular:

  • The Muslims of India constitute a single, closed, homogeneous community, which is inevitably male-dominated.
  • This male-dominated community is governed by a few established Islamic norms which are highly anti-women in nature. Islamic religiosity as well as Islamic practices, hence, are intrinsically patriarchal.
  • The Islamic clergy functions as the true representative of the community. It has an ultimate right to interpret religious texts and, at the same time, speak on behalf of all Muslims.

These convictions, interestingly, are often presented to us as hard facts—not merely by the government, political parties and the ulema class but also by those who prefer to be identified as ‘liberals’. As a result, a media-centric discourse of political correctness emerges, which virtually freezes any possibility of a nuanced and meaningful discussion on the nature and functions of patriarchy among Muslims.

The recent debate on triple talaq is an example of such stereotypical public imagination. No one bothered to look at the arguments and positions of various Muslim women’s groups on the status of Muslim women in India, the internal debates among them on the question of Muslim patriarchy, their varied interpretations of the Quran and Hadith, their critical responses to the much-debated idea of the Uniform Civil Code and, above all, their critique of Muslim personal law and the role of the ulema in nurturing the anti-Muslim attitude of Hindutva politics.

The triple talaq debate, surprisingly, is seen as a battle between the conservative ulema represented by the All Indian Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and the committed BJPled NDA government. The discussion in the Parliament on the triple talaq bill and, later, on the triple talaq ordinance seems to ignore the nuanced arguments made by Muslim women’s groups, especially the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA). The purpose, therefore, of this chapter is to clarify and contextualize the public debate so as to make sense of the various aspects of the controversy. In addition, an attempt is made to analyse the politics of triple talaq in the wake of emerging Hindutva.

Let us begin with a few frequently used terms:

  • ‘Triple talaq’ refers to a practice which empowers a man to divorce his wife by saying ‘talaq, talaq, talaq’ in one go.
  • ‘Mehr’ is a sum of money or other property to be delivered to the bride by the bridegroom at the time of the nikah as a prerequisite for the solemnization of their marriage, as specified in the nikahnama.
  • ‘Iddat’ is the period of time (approximately three to four months) during which a divorced woman/widow cannot remarry another man.
  • ‘Nikah’ is a contract of marriage between a man and a woman. The nikahnama is a document which specifies the terms and conditions of this agreement.
  • ‘Sharia’ or ‘shariat’ is a collection of rules and norms that have been codified following the Quran and Hadith (laying out the sayings and acts of Prophet Muhammad). Since this codification is subject to various interpretations, there are various shariats among Sunnis and Shias.
  • ‘Nikah halala’ is also a frequently used term. Once a woman has been divorced, her husband is not permitted take her back as his wife unless the woman undergoes nikah halala, which involves her marriage with another man who subsequently divorces her so that her previous husband can remarry her.

The practice of triple talaq, we must note, is legitimate among Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi shariat. Although we do not have adequate statistical information about the sect-wise population of Muslims in India, it is believed that Sunni Hanafis are in the majority, at least in the northern states. But there are four other schools of Sunni shariat—Hanbali, Shafi, Maliki and Ahle- Hadith. These schools have their own interpretations of rituals and customs and specific norms for divorce.

The AIMPLB itself recognizes this Islamic religious plurality in India. In fact, one of the stated objectives of the AIMPLB is:

To promote goodwill, fraternity and the feeling of mutual cooperation among all sects and schools of  thought     among Muslims, and to generate the spirit of unity and coordination among them for the common  goal of safeguarding the Muslim Personal Law.1

There are two questions are important here: Does the AIMPLB determine the everyday conduct of the religiously diversified Muslim communities? If so, do Muslims, particularly the followers of the Hanafi shariat, practise triple talaq precisely because of their religious adherence to Islam?

Know more in Hilal Ahmed’s Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India

Getting off at a Place not Printed on the Ticket – an excerpt from Ali Smith’s ‘Spring’

Posted on by Penguin India

Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the Earth, things are growing. 

Yesterday morning, a month to the day since the memorial service (they’d had her privately cremated some time before the memorial, he doesn’t even know when, close family only), he is walking along the Euston Road and as he passes the British Library he sees a woman sitting against its wall, thirties, as young as twenties, maybe, blankets, square of cardboard ribbed off a box on which there are words asking for money.

No, not money. The words on it are please and help and me.

He’s passed countless homeless people even just this morning coming through the city. Homeless people are the word countless again these days; any old lefty like him knows that this what happens. Tories back in, people back on the streets.

But for some reason he sees her. The blankets are filthy. The feet are bare on the pavement. He hears her too. She is singing a song to nobody – no, not to nobody, to herself – in a voice of some notable sweetness, at a quarter to eight in the morning.

It goes:

a thousand thousand people

are running in the stre-eet

oh nothing nothing nothing

oh nothing nothing nothing

oh nothing

Richard keeps going. When he stops keeping going he is just past the front of King’s Cross station. He turns and goes in, as if that’s what he meant to do all along.

There is a stall in the middle of the concourse beneath the giant Remembrance poppy. The stall is selling chocolate in the shapes of domestic utensils and tools: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, cutlery, cups and so on; you can buy a chocolate cup, a chocolate saucer, a chocolate teaspoon and even a chocolate stovetop espresso-machine (the stovetop machine is costly). The chocolate things are extraordinarily lifelike and the stall is thronged with people.  A man in a suit is buying what looks like a real kitchen tap, made of silver-sprayed chocolate; the woman selling it to him places it delicately into a box she first lines with straw.

Richard puts his card into one of the ticket machines. He inserts the name of the place that’s the furthest a train from here can go.

He gets on to a train.

He sits on it for half a day.

An hour or so before the train reaches this final destination he’ll see some mountains against some sky through the window and he’ll decide to get off the train at this place instead. What’s to stop him doing what he likes, getting off at a place not printed on the ticket?

Oh nothing nothing nothing.

King Gussie, to rhyme with fussy, is how he’d always thought it was said, like the robot announcer pronounces it over the speakers in London King’s Cross above his head before he boards the train.

Kin-you–see is how it’s said by the guest house people whose door he knocks on when he gets there. They will be suspicious. What kind of person doesn’t book ahead on his phone? What kind of person doesn’t have a phone?

He will sit on the edge of the strange bed in the guest house. He will sit on the floor and brace himself between the bed and the wall.

By tomorrow his clothes will have taken to the air-freshener smell of the room he’ll spend the night in.

Get a copy of Ali Smith’s Spring here!

The Reluctant Billionaire – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Dilip Shanghvi is one of the most interesting and least understood business minds whose journey has been shrouded in mystery because of his reticence.

The Reluctant Billionaire reveals the riveting story of the fiercely intense personality that lies beneath his calm demeanour. Based on interviews with over 150 friends, family members, rivals, former aides and Shanghvi himself, it traces his transformation from a quiet, curious child working in his father’s small shop to an astute strategist, who built India’s largest pharma company, Sun Pharma, despite being untrained in science.

Here’s a gripping excerpt from the book that talks about the acquisition of Taro and Ranbaxy.

Should a story be told when the subject is unwilling? Maybe ‘not’ if it’s an ordinary story of a private person, or maybe ‘yes’ if it’s in the guise of fiction where it is easy to speak the truth. But what if the story happens to be of a man who arose from the anonymity of a small wholesaler to become the richest man in a country of a billion-plus people and as many dreams? And he did so, not by creating a conglomerate, which depends on cronyish connections and government concessions, but by building a global firm focused only on making medicines. Isn’t his story more than just his, a story that belongs to a generation, a nation?

And when he became the richest man of the country in 2015 and was asked how he felt, he replied, ‘Uncomfortable, very uncomfortable.’ Despite living what could be argued as one of the most remarkable life of his generations, his mind feels like a black box. Dilip Shanghvi is one of the most interesting and least understood business minds of India today. For someone, unschooled in degrees of sciences and management, who worked his way up from a tiny shop in the bylanes of Dawa Bazaar in Calcutta of the 1970s to create one of the country’s most valuable enterprises, he is also one of the least documented and least studied capitalists. One reason behind this is his own unwillingness to share his story.

He doesn’t care about being celebrated, and stubbornly disapproves, even casts off attempts to document him. Another part is because with no drama, no modulation in pitch, few words and fewer expressions, he neither fits the bill of a conventional inspiring pin-up business leader nor does he make for a great colourful flamboyant story. It is easy to miss the intensity of someone who is more presence than personality. What compounds this conspicuous absence from mainstream is a past yet unsearched but which, on the surface, doesn’t show up juicy controversies to merit an investigation, and a lifestyle that could appear normal enough to be boring. No wonder the media was ready to spare him the limelight he so avoided.

From time to time, when the need arose, he was profiled with a few recycled facts thrown in—that he borrowed 10,000 rupees from his father to start his firm Sun Pharma with two medicines for psychiatry and that in his sixties now, he is a fan of Harry Potter books. What happened in the interim was left to the imagination.

This un-deliberate arrangement of mutual disinterest worked fine till one day—the maths of life changed it all. That day in March 2015 his net worth crossed that of Mukesh Ambani and he was pronounced India’s richest man. The country was curious to know who this guy was, how he had done it.

If the search and discovery had been so easy, answers to these questions wouldn’t have remained so elusive. Shanghvi, known to shun press conferences, interviews and parties expressed his unwillingness for this book when approached initially. ‘You will probably put my face on the cover and I would be recognized by many more people on the streets and that’s always a problem. It takes away from my freedom.’

The Reluctant Billionaire is a tale for everyone who has once had a secret dream, an insanely bold one.

Ruskin Bond on friendship and farewells

Posted on by Penguin India

‘It was 1947, and life was about to change quite dramatically for most of us’

In the third part of his memoir, thirteen-year-old Ruskin Bond is back at school, doing what he loves – reading, goal-keeping, spending time with his friends and eating lots of jalebis. But things seem to be rapidly changing all around him. Whispers of a partition haunt the corridors of his school. Does the formation of a new, independent India mean saying goodbye to old friends-and, with it, the shenanigans they got up to?

In Ruskin Bond’s inimitable style, Coming Round The Mountain gives us some wonderfully wistful and poignant snapshots of friendship and the farewells brought on by the relentless change at the end of an era. Here are some of them:

~

The fearsome-sounding cliques one forms in childhood

‘I was turning thirteen in May that year. My best friends were Azhar Khan, who was my age; Brian Adams, who was a year younger; and Cyrus Satralkar, who was the youngest. We called ourselves the ‘Fearsome Four’, although there was nothing very fierce about us.’

*

The best friends are those who extend a hand when we need it most, whether or not we know precisely that we need them

‘I’d been going through a different period, adjusting to my stepfather’s home in Dehra and learning to cope with the world at large. Although a shy boy, I needed friends, and I was quick to respond to those who offered me friendship.’

 *

The irrelevance of cultural barriers in schoolboy comradeship

‘We were not in the least interested in each other’s religions or regional backgrounds. Adults seemed to think it important; but at thirteen, friendship and loyalty seemed to matter more.’

*

When adversity (or at least a compatibility of vices) brings you together

‘The catalyst for our bonding was that early -morning rouser for PT. For some reason— or different reasons—the four of us overslept one morning and failed to turn up on the first flat for our exercises. Our absence was duly reported by a senior prefect, and we were summoned to the headmaster’s study for the usual punishment. At least three strokes of the cane were to be expected.’

*

A friend who feeds is a friend indeed

‘World War II had been over for more than a year, but some food items—butter, cheese, chocolates—were still hard to come by. Brian divided his Kraft cheese into four portions, and each of us had his share. Now, there was a friend!’

*

The difficult feelings of older people who have to see enormous upheaval in all they have held dear

‘Dunda Hawkes had been deeply affected by the division of India. He was a simple man who, like my father, had been to army school and spent most of his life in barracks or on the march. He had become a boxing champion and was responsible for making sportsmen and athletes out of most of us.’

 *

The poignant uncertainty of goodbyes in that year of changes

‘Azhar was beside me, his arm around my shoulders. ‘Time to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’ll write to you. We’ll meet again—some day, somewhere.’ Surely we would meet again. The world hadn’t come to an end. But the light was going out in a lot of lives, and it would be some time before it came on again.’

*

 When the absence of a friend seems like a removal of an aspect of one’s own being
Front cover of Coming Round the Mountain
Coming Round the Mountain || Ruskin Bond

‘Sometimes we don’t really value our friends till we have lost them. Azhar’s departure left quite a gap in my life. He had been someone to whom I could talk freely, someone to whom I could confide and share my dreams.’

 *

The love of a friend does not need to be put in words for one to know that is there 

‘Send me lots of beautiful postcards,’ I said. We shook hands. In those days we were not given to hugs and demonstrations of affection. But I loved my friends, and they knew it and loved me too.’

Super Century – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

What is it about the Indian psyche that makes us so incapable of fulfilling our promise as a nation? Why are we so averse to risk, resigned to mediocrity and mired in a collective lack of confidence? India has so much potential but seems forever stuck on the brink of actualization, unable to muster the political will and geo-economic force to clear the final bar. The stakes are higher than ever, and India’s moment is now.

In Super Century, Raghav Bahl offers a cogent and candid assessment of how we got where we are and a clear blueprint of what we need to do, both at home and in the world, to fulfil our promise going forward.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

—————-

The dawn of the twenty-first century brought new geopolitical opportunities for India and the other fast-developing nations christened the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). In the first decade of the new millennium, the twin catastrophes of 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown deeply shook America, weakening its position as the world’s sole superpower. With the US suddenly vulnerable and preoccupied with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the BRICS— especially China—stepped into the void, asserting themselves in the economic and diplomatic spheres. They got a boost from the forces of globalization, which levelled the playing field and transformed the very nature of geopolitical power. No longer could a strong, successful state impose global influence solely through its military; the new world order valued economic prowess—leveraged by citizens, businesses and nongovernmental agencies through trade, aid and culture capital—above all else. For India and other rapidly rising countries with huge populations and untapped potential, that shift opened up a world of new possibilities.

As India’s economy grew, Delhi gradually adopted a larger and more defined role in global affairs, increasingly willing to take a principled stand on matters of national—and international—importance. Still, we struggled to win the world’s respect, denied a seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council and membership in the Group of Seven (G7)—even though India’s economy is bigger than both Canada’s and Italy’s, which do belong to the G7. Such snubs only feed our national insecurity and spur greater defensiveness.

When Modi took office in 2014, he enthusiastically advanced the narrative of India as a leading power, and Indian confidence swelled. The government abandoned all vestiges of non-alignment and introduced an expansive new policy of multi-alignment, centred on increasing engagement—bilateral as well as multilateral and with friends as well as rivals. Delhi revitalized its partnership with Washington, stepped up its leadership in Southeast Asia and artfully managed China through a balance of engagement and containment. Modi took a more assertive stand against Pakistan, retaliating against persistent small-scale crossborder attacks with open and unapologetic surgical strikes, rather than employing covert actions while pretending to ‘turn the other cheek’. And he gave maritime strategy top priority, particularly in the Indian Ocean, with a focus on new security agreements and greater cooperation with India’s democratic neighbours; in 2015, Delhi agreed to build its first overseas military base in the Seychelles.

Modi himself relished the role of traveller-in-chief. In his first three and a half years in office, he visited forty-nine countries— including the US four times—and met with a dizzying array of heads of state, foreign dignitaries and business leaders, among others. His tireless jet-setting may have helped elevate India’s standing abroad, but it earned him ridicule at home, with critics mocking his jovial banter and awkward bear hugs. In retrospect, all that time on the road might have been better spent overhauling India’s economic policy. But Modi was determined to demonstrate his commitment to multi-alignment; in 2016, he became the first Indian leader since 1979 to skip the annual Non-Aligned Movement summit.

In keeping with this mandate, India has asserted itself diplomatically in sophisticated new ways. While continuing to seek entry into traditional Western-dominated international organizations such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the UN Security Council—as well as gain commensurate influence with the West in bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF—Delhi has also embraced the newer, more nimble BRICS-based alternatives, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Against all odds, India has become a leader on climate change; after years of complaining that emissions caps were unfair to developing countries, Delhi abruptly changed course at the 2015 Paris Climate talks, with Modi joining France’s then President

François Hollande to create an India-based international solar power alliance. And India has taken more initiative in addressing global crises; when a Saudi attack trapped thousands of foreign nationals in Yemen in 2015, India rushed to the rescue, safely evacuating not just its own citizens but civilians from more than two dozen countries—including the US and Pakistan. Indian troops make up one of the largest national contingents of UN peacekeepers.

Going forward, India must continue to pursue greater global engagement. We must look not just West or East, but North and South too, working with big powers and small to shape the global agenda. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain from participating in such diverse multilateral groupings as the ‘Quad’ talks (with Japan, the US and Australia)—as we did for the first time in 2017—and the RIC (Russia–India–China) annual foreign ministerial meetings. Our country’s sheer size, geography and status as the world’s largest democracy make it essential—if not inevitable—that we assume a bigger leadership role in preserving peace and security, both in Asia and the world. That is especially true given today’s rapidly evolving world order, with the US retreating from its multilateral commitments and China eagerly stepping in to fill the void. With Xi Jinping consolidating power and hot-headed rulers in both Russia and the US, India looks relatively stable, reliable and transparent by comparison. It would be a shame to waste that political capital at a time when the world is starved for decisive, rational leadership.

In Super Century, Raghav Bahl offers a cogent and candid assessment of how we got where we are and a clear blueprint of what we need to do, both at home and in the world, to fulfil our promise going forward.

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