India shining mirage

My Two Indias — A Journey to the Ends of Opportunity by S. Mitra Kalita; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.399; 209 pp

This is an interesting book written by a bewildered ABCD (America born confused desi) who reverse migrated to India in 2006 to experience the India shining growth story. A senior deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), New York, S. Mitra Kalita (34) volunteered to help with the launch of the now successful business daily Mint, published by the Hindustan Times group in collaboration with WSJ. Born in the US to Assamese parents who fled socialist India to the land of opportunity three decades earlier, she took an eighteen-hour “non-stop Continental flight” to Delhi with artist husband Nitin and two-year-old daughter Naya, not only to help with Mint but also re-connect with the family her father left behind in Assam.

Back home she quickly discovers that while a new India of steel and glass malls, luxury brands, gourmet restaurants, gated colonies and high-rise apartments, 126,700 dollar millionaires, yuppie IT professionals and a highly aspirational middle class which is routinely hyped up by business publications including WSJ, has indeed emerged, there’s also a not-so-hyped old India bypassed by liberalisation and the India shining growth story. She discovers soon enough that in old India’s fetid slums and medieval villages over 836 million people live on less than Rs.20 per day, nearly 665 million don’t have access to piped water and sanitation facilities, and there’s the neglected rural outback where over 2,000 farmers commit suicide every year.

Within two weeks of arriving in Delhi, Kalita, whose debut non-fiction book Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and their Passage to America from India was published in 2003, gets a taste of the “real India” when she begins a harried search to rent an apartment and encounters untrained real estate brokers, greedy landlords, sky-high rents (Rs.53,000 upwards — “rent in India basically pays for four walls nothing else”), black money (“that formed an entirely parallel economy in this capital of capitals”), black market gas cylinders, invertors and illegal booster pumps to siphon off scarce water supply into luxury apartments.

In the workplace she discovers that US-style efficiency is entirely lacking and “hierarchy and deference to elders ingrained in Indian culture” makes her task of getting reporters to think out-of-the-box and approach every story “as a blank slate with no assumptions” formidable. Outside work, she and Nitin by virtue of being expatriates, are welcomed into the capital city’s happening party scene, into farmhouses and plush bungalows, among people who think “nothing of dropping Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000” at nightclubs to have a good time.

As a business journalist Kalita experiences first-hand the much-too-familiar woes of Indian industry — grave shortage of skilled workers, unemployable graduates, steep in-house training costs and corruption in government. Unwittingly, she stumbles upon the hidden truth that India’s crumbling higher education system produces the world’s largest number of low-calibre graduates and postgrads. “Even the best colleges in India struggle to give students the tools needed to input, analyse and produce — the basics of any job. India’s system of weeding out had created a country of robots who embraced degrees, but not true learning,” laments the author.

On her journey of discovery beyond the rah-rahs of the business mags and pink papers (including the all-white Mint), Kalita discovers that if the country’s universities produce robots with degrees, the K-12 private schools sector is nothing to write home about either. Within six months of her daughter Naya enroling in a “bright two-storey” pre-school “with a kiddy pool, rabbits, wooden toys and a music room”, she realises that it’s a high-intensity, stress-inducing prep school for admission into Delhi’s handful of upscale primary-secondaries. She pulls her child out in favour of an alternative pre-school run by the Aurobindo Society. But when Naya turns three, it sets off another harrowing hunt for nursery school admissions.

As the helpless native middle class knows too well, in the nation’s capital admission polices related to nurseries and primary-secondaries are highly contentious involving flip-flops on admission guidelines, confusion over cut-off ages, patronage, and several public interest litigations which have resulted in interventions by the Delhi high court and the Union HRD ministry. “Combined with rampant corruption at the admission level, applying to schools in New Delhi became a game of who-knows-who and who-pays-who. The schools weren’t entirely to blame, most of the best schools had just 65 seats and over 3,500 applications — making the odds for getting in under 2 percent, less than Harvard,” writes Kalita.

In this snapshot of her two-year (2006-08) sojourn in India, the perfect foil to Delhi where she’s “spoilt for choice” is her native Assam, and the remote nondescript village of Sadiya in particular. The economic reality of her home state where there are few jobs, even fewer schools and colleges, crumbling public infrastructure, pathetic law and order conditions and minimal governance, reflects the tragedy of the other languishing India. Through her stay in Delhi Kalita is flooded with relatives’ pleas for jobs, advice and guidance on higher study options. Her initial anguish and frustration gives way to empathy and understanding as she realises that “if Assam failed, India had failed to create employment, to hold together a diverse people, to foster development and entrepreneurship…”

My Two Indias is an honestly painful record of a young journalist’s reflections on the challenges confronting the world’s most populous democracy. At the end of the narrative she admits that the gargantuan problems of pervasive corruption, poverty, rapidly obsolescing education system, unemployable graduates, shortage of skilled workers and poor governance remain unresolved.

Nor does Kalita have any worthwhile prescriptions for India’s socio-economic development. My Two Indias begins with a promise of offering new insights but loses steam midway and ends with the NRI author throwing in the towel and heading home for New York. Ambi-tion should be made of sterner stuff.

Nevertheless, this memoir serves the valuable purpose of presenting over-hyped India and its possibilities from an outsider’s perspective — possibilities which resident natives too caught in the daily grind have little time to evaluate.

Summiya Yasmeen

Revealing odyssey

The Lost Kingdoms of Africa — Through Muslim Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat and Camel by Jeffrey Tayler; Abacus; 274 pp

Even though for the vast majority of Indians who tend to be West-fixated or deeply colour prejudiced, the black continent of Africa (pop: 1 billion) is an area of disinterest and darkness, since childhood I have been entranced by this yet less-than-fully-discovered landmass. Thus far my sojourns in this complex and much-wronged continent have been limited to the north-west of Africa, namely Morocco, where I made my way down the Atlas mountains to the Berber oases of Ouzanne and Ouzazzat straddling the Mauritania border.

In a second expedition I visited Aswan and Abu Simbel in southern Egypt, to the frontier with Sudan. Admittedly, those were not quite the odysseys of British explorers into the depths of black Africa that I dreamt of. But intrepid Moscow-based traveller-writer Jeffrey Tayler has vicariously realised my dream, impressions of which he relates with great finesse in this absorbing travelogue.

The Lost Kingdoms of Africa begins in northern Nigeria and recounts the author’s passage through Chad, Niger, Mali, and finally to the ‘slave coast’ of Senegal. Despite Islam being the dominant religion in this part of Africa for centuries, it receives scant attention in ongoing discussions about Islam and Muslims.

Interweaving ethnographic details with perceptive insights from local histories, the author keeps a low profile while narrating his myriad experiences and encounters with people and places to comment upon the societies he passes through. It’s an informative account of numerous Muslim countries and societies in the throes of tumultuous change consequent upon a heady mix of religious, political, economic and cultural factors, both local and transnational, as they play themselves out among the believers of various ethnicities inhabiting this little-known belt of Africa.

Common myths and motifs link the 20 chapters of the book, and countries visited by the author — abject poverty, voodoo and illiteracy, civil war, the lingering legacy of predatory Western colonialism, political instability, dictatorial rule, endemic corruption and banditry, deep-rooted tribal and religious strife, the spectre of radical Islamist movements, and widespread resentment of the West, particularly the United States, perceived as the mortal enemy of Muslims and their faith. This stretch of Africa seems all set for the revolutionary mass movements which Arab nations to the north are currently experiencing.

In northern Nigeria, Tayler encounters Christian and Muslim extremists, whose politics of hate in the name of faith have caused the deaths of several thousands in the past few decades. There are glimpses of authoritarian emirs who rule over their subjects like medieval potentates. In Chad, he meets African Muslims highly resentful of their Arab co-religionists for promoting Arab hegemony under the guise of Islam, and who still harbour bitter memories of the slave trade in which Arabs were heavily complicit. He also encounters Muslims who regard all non-Muslims as despicable infidels; and in Mali, he finds vestiges of the slave trade still alive and thriving.

A curious observer, Tayler notes that traditions and customs of local Muslims are besieged by Saudi-inspired Wahhabis, who openly preach a brutal and drab version of Islam in the name of religious authenticity. In Niger, he discovers poverty, hunger and venal corruption. By the time he reaches the Senegal coast — bringing to an end the last leg of his journey — Tayler seems quite glad to be returning home, although with some fond memories of a hazardous journey that few outsiders have ever undertaken.

The larger story that Tayler tells about this slice of Muslim Africa is of the predicament of Muslim societies in their encounter with modernity. The dismal economic and political conditions of these countries are not unique, but shared with many communities of the ‘Muslim world’. Covering a broad social and political spectrum, Lost Kingdoms of Africa describes the realities of Islamic Africa — chronic poverty, racism, gender injustice, and religious intolerance. But the author also suggests that ideological posturing — whether in the cause of capitalist free-market democracy, or Islamist militancy — is definitely not the answer. It will only exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the pathetic conditions of people living bleak lives in Islamic Africa.

This book is a valuable contribution for Africa buffs, as well as for readers interested in the dangerous direction the Islamic world is heading.

Yoginder Sikand