10-07-2008, 04:11 AM
Couple of books reviewed in Pioneer, 6 Oct., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Phoenix Phenomenon: The Rise and Rise of India
<b>India Express: The Future of a New Superpower
Author: Daniel Lak
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499</b>
<b>The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline
Author: Sanjeev Sanyal
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499Â </b>
Debraj Mookerjee journeys through two recent books on the great Indian story and discovers fresh approaches to a truism that is almost becoming self evident these days. The deeper contexts, the hidden narratives and the leaps of faith that underline the miracle this country is witnessing come alive in Daniel Lak's India Express and Sanjeev Sanyal's The Indian Renaissance --
<b>What is the one defining feature of India today? All manner of people are asking, and more importantly seeking to find answers to, this question. For the reviewer the answer is rather obvious.</b> Fifteen years back, every bloke on the road meekly bleated out the same lament: "There's nothing that can be done to save this country" ("Is desh ka kuch nahin ho sakta"). <b>Today everyone</b>, from the guy on the street, to the retired BBC correspondent, to a top international bank's chief economist, <b>has great hope for this country's future. Along with that hope there is the desire to understand the process by which this new reality has come to be; more significantly, questions are now being asked about how close to the top of the heap this once great nation will be thirty years on.</b> Will this century be the one <b>India has been waiting for since the erasure of the Harappan civilisation?</b>
One story; two narratives. One hope; two different explorations. India Express: The Future of a New Superpower by Daniel Lak, and The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal, are two recent works that are best read together.
Daniel Lak, a Canadian, covered India for over 20 years for the BBC. His tribute to India follows perhaps in the trajectory of his predecessor Sir Mark Tully, whose No Full Stops in India (1991) was an immensely insightful read. Sir Mark followed the 1991 work with the more flattering India in Slow Motion (2004). Even the latter text, while praising the achievements of post-liberalisation India, was still trying to make sense of "a country at odds with itself" (blurb). Daniel Lak sheds some of Sir Mark's diffidence to actually call the dice. Witness <b>Chapter 11 of Lak's book is titled 'Becoming Asia's America - The Next Liberal Superpower?'</b>
Sanjeev Sanyal took the Delhi University, Rhodes Scholar route to corporate success as the Singapore based Chief Economist for the region with Deutsche Bank, but accumulated strong views on what made the Indian economy: <b>India crawled up to 1991 and galloped thereafter</b>. And yet he explores ideas beyond economics and from a time much before modernity overtook the world. Whereas Lak's work is marked by the impressionistic brush of a pair of western eyes meandering though the crazy kaleidoscope of the Indian tamasha, politically engaged yet neutral, Sanyal's journey is more textbook like, studded with figures, propped up through close analyses, and driven by a systemic dislike for Nehruvian socialism. Read together however, they offer a rounded introduction to the India of the future.
<b>Lak clears the pitch early on in his introduction when he writes, "In this book I argue that India has arrived at the world's top table, and is awaiting due recognition."</b> Whether the recently signed Nuclear Deal is a sign of the times is debatable, but the churning has begun. To see India's awakening merely in terms of the economy is to narrow the focus a little too much.
<b>The economy is the more visible face of India's march into the future. It is not however the only barometer for judging India's transformation. Indian writers are fattening the purses of the top publishers, Indian activists have hit the big league with the likes of Arundhati Roy having gained cult status among placard holders, and Indians are joining the league of global leaders in diverse fields.</b>
Lak begins by taking stock of the new economy, beginning with the Y2K debugging boom and moving on to suggest how the work Indians are doing is slowly moving up the value chain. But he also stops to register the anxiety of the other side of the software boom in the chapter 'Silicon and Slums - new economy, old problems'. He garners the views of a certain JP Natraj in Bangalore, "An unapologetic leftist and trade unionist," who chides the author for being "another one of those IT worshippers." <b>That slums exist cheek by jowl with the steel and glass towers of the new economy is a problem that will not go away in a hurry. However, there is also the dhobi from Chennai Lak writes about, who laboured to successfully put his two kids through IT education, indicating the sort of social mobility now possible in India.</b>
Lak records other voices as well, like Professor Ashish Bose's, India's leading demographer, the man who first theorised the BIMARU concept, and who makes a great case for empowering women to improve social demography. Prof Bose also introduces him to Nathi Devi, a Rajasthani activist headed (then) for Honk Kong to participate in a WTO meeting to, in the words of Bose, "give them a piece of her mind" about how "agricultural subsidies in rich countries kept small poor farmers like her trapped in rural poverty."
<b>After profiling British rule in India as one that was totally deleterious to the economy, he also makes a short presentation on the transition from foreign yoke to freedom, before again profiling those smaller voices that have brought about social change, like Dr Bindeshwar Pathak's (who started Sulabh International). Lak's final hypothesis is encapsulated in the chapter where he sees India becoming a great liberal powerhouse of a nation in the years ahead. "The world's largest democracy is thinking big," Lak seems to conclude, underscoring his assertion with the conviction that not only does India have every right to do so, but that indeed the world needs it to.</b>
Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist, and it shows. <b>For him, posterity will view the year 1991 in the same light as 1947. It is the year when a new India was born, when Indians gained freedom "from a cultural attitude embodied in the old inward-looking regime." Three things stand out in Sanyal's book for going beyond received opinion" a) that India has been backward looking for a thousand years, and to blame its woes on either the Mughals or the British is to take a limited view, b) that most economists miss the exponential opportunities India will enjoy due to the 'second demographic' shift that will peak by about 2020, and, c) that urbanisation is inevitable, and will ultimately offer the solution out of the labour surpluses and underemployment the rural economy faces.</b>
<b>India's inward looking mentality stifled culture, language and the spirit of enterprise. Nehruvian socialism merely helped cement this lethargy by institutionalising a client-patron relationship in politics and rent seeking by the apparatchiks of the state.</b>
Sanyal's views are extreme but worth pondering. They run against the grain of nationalist histories; which is exactly why they force us to examine our civilisation decline though the prism of the present, the extant reality that is witnessing the shaping of a different India by the young and the talented.
These young people, more numerous than in any other country of the world, are the new workforce. <b>India's skilled labour force, and the contribution of a parallel school education system, will throw up opportunities unthought-of, like very high savings that will provide capital for indigenous investment.</b> The new workforce will scavenge the by then labour-deficit manufacturing base of China, just as that country scavenged Taiwan, and Taiwan scavenged Japan. <b>India's demographic shift will be the next big story, the manufacturing story we are unable to see, bedazzled as we are by the services sector boom. The services sector has created pockets of affluence, especially for the children of the elite. The manufacturing boom with mark the next phase of urbanisation that will create an entirely new middle class; the existing middle class numbers at present, accordingly to Sanyal, merely 50 million and not the inflated figure of 200 million people rave about.</b>
<b>Both Lak and Sanyal essentially believe India has a great future ahead, and they both give credit to the Liberalisation Policy of 1991 for the great burst of energy that is pulsating through the nation of the future.</b> Perhaps they could have dedicated their efforts to the incumbent Prime Minister of India.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Phoenix Phenomenon: The Rise and Rise of India
<b>India Express: The Future of a New Superpower
Author: Daniel Lak
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499</b>
<b>The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline
Author: Sanjeev Sanyal
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499Â </b>
Debraj Mookerjee journeys through two recent books on the great Indian story and discovers fresh approaches to a truism that is almost becoming self evident these days. The deeper contexts, the hidden narratives and the leaps of faith that underline the miracle this country is witnessing come alive in Daniel Lak's India Express and Sanjeev Sanyal's The Indian Renaissance --
<b>What is the one defining feature of India today? All manner of people are asking, and more importantly seeking to find answers to, this question. For the reviewer the answer is rather obvious.</b> Fifteen years back, every bloke on the road meekly bleated out the same lament: "There's nothing that can be done to save this country" ("Is desh ka kuch nahin ho sakta"). <b>Today everyone</b>, from the guy on the street, to the retired BBC correspondent, to a top international bank's chief economist, <b>has great hope for this country's future. Along with that hope there is the desire to understand the process by which this new reality has come to be; more significantly, questions are now being asked about how close to the top of the heap this once great nation will be thirty years on.</b> Will this century be the one <b>India has been waiting for since the erasure of the Harappan civilisation?</b>
One story; two narratives. One hope; two different explorations. India Express: The Future of a New Superpower by Daniel Lak, and The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal, are two recent works that are best read together.
Daniel Lak, a Canadian, covered India for over 20 years for the BBC. His tribute to India follows perhaps in the trajectory of his predecessor Sir Mark Tully, whose No Full Stops in India (1991) was an immensely insightful read. Sir Mark followed the 1991 work with the more flattering India in Slow Motion (2004). Even the latter text, while praising the achievements of post-liberalisation India, was still trying to make sense of "a country at odds with itself" (blurb). Daniel Lak sheds some of Sir Mark's diffidence to actually call the dice. Witness <b>Chapter 11 of Lak's book is titled 'Becoming Asia's America - The Next Liberal Superpower?'</b>
Sanjeev Sanyal took the Delhi University, Rhodes Scholar route to corporate success as the Singapore based Chief Economist for the region with Deutsche Bank, but accumulated strong views on what made the Indian economy: <b>India crawled up to 1991 and galloped thereafter</b>. And yet he explores ideas beyond economics and from a time much before modernity overtook the world. Whereas Lak's work is marked by the impressionistic brush of a pair of western eyes meandering though the crazy kaleidoscope of the Indian tamasha, politically engaged yet neutral, Sanyal's journey is more textbook like, studded with figures, propped up through close analyses, and driven by a systemic dislike for Nehruvian socialism. Read together however, they offer a rounded introduction to the India of the future.
<b>Lak clears the pitch early on in his introduction when he writes, "In this book I argue that India has arrived at the world's top table, and is awaiting due recognition."</b> Whether the recently signed Nuclear Deal is a sign of the times is debatable, but the churning has begun. To see India's awakening merely in terms of the economy is to narrow the focus a little too much.
<b>The economy is the more visible face of India's march into the future. It is not however the only barometer for judging India's transformation. Indian writers are fattening the purses of the top publishers, Indian activists have hit the big league with the likes of Arundhati Roy having gained cult status among placard holders, and Indians are joining the league of global leaders in diverse fields.</b>
Lak begins by taking stock of the new economy, beginning with the Y2K debugging boom and moving on to suggest how the work Indians are doing is slowly moving up the value chain. But he also stops to register the anxiety of the other side of the software boom in the chapter 'Silicon and Slums - new economy, old problems'. He garners the views of a certain JP Natraj in Bangalore, "An unapologetic leftist and trade unionist," who chides the author for being "another one of those IT worshippers." <b>That slums exist cheek by jowl with the steel and glass towers of the new economy is a problem that will not go away in a hurry. However, there is also the dhobi from Chennai Lak writes about, who laboured to successfully put his two kids through IT education, indicating the sort of social mobility now possible in India.</b>
Lak records other voices as well, like Professor Ashish Bose's, India's leading demographer, the man who first theorised the BIMARU concept, and who makes a great case for empowering women to improve social demography. Prof Bose also introduces him to Nathi Devi, a Rajasthani activist headed (then) for Honk Kong to participate in a WTO meeting to, in the words of Bose, "give them a piece of her mind" about how "agricultural subsidies in rich countries kept small poor farmers like her trapped in rural poverty."
<b>After profiling British rule in India as one that was totally deleterious to the economy, he also makes a short presentation on the transition from foreign yoke to freedom, before again profiling those smaller voices that have brought about social change, like Dr Bindeshwar Pathak's (who started Sulabh International). Lak's final hypothesis is encapsulated in the chapter where he sees India becoming a great liberal powerhouse of a nation in the years ahead. "The world's largest democracy is thinking big," Lak seems to conclude, underscoring his assertion with the conviction that not only does India have every right to do so, but that indeed the world needs it to.</b>
Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist, and it shows. <b>For him, posterity will view the year 1991 in the same light as 1947. It is the year when a new India was born, when Indians gained freedom "from a cultural attitude embodied in the old inward-looking regime." Three things stand out in Sanyal's book for going beyond received opinion" a) that India has been backward looking for a thousand years, and to blame its woes on either the Mughals or the British is to take a limited view, b) that most economists miss the exponential opportunities India will enjoy due to the 'second demographic' shift that will peak by about 2020, and, c) that urbanisation is inevitable, and will ultimately offer the solution out of the labour surpluses and underemployment the rural economy faces.</b>
<b>India's inward looking mentality stifled culture, language and the spirit of enterprise. Nehruvian socialism merely helped cement this lethargy by institutionalising a client-patron relationship in politics and rent seeking by the apparatchiks of the state.</b>
Sanyal's views are extreme but worth pondering. They run against the grain of nationalist histories; which is exactly why they force us to examine our civilisation decline though the prism of the present, the extant reality that is witnessing the shaping of a different India by the young and the talented.
These young people, more numerous than in any other country of the world, are the new workforce. <b>India's skilled labour force, and the contribution of a parallel school education system, will throw up opportunities unthought-of, like very high savings that will provide capital for indigenous investment.</b> The new workforce will scavenge the by then labour-deficit manufacturing base of China, just as that country scavenged Taiwan, and Taiwan scavenged Japan. <b>India's demographic shift will be the next big story, the manufacturing story we are unable to see, bedazzled as we are by the services sector boom. The services sector has created pockets of affluence, especially for the children of the elite. The manufacturing boom with mark the next phase of urbanisation that will create an entirely new middle class; the existing middle class numbers at present, accordingly to Sanyal, merely 50 million and not the inflated figure of 200 million people rave about.</b>
<b>Both Lak and Sanyal essentially believe India has a great future ahead, and they both give credit to the Liberalisation Policy of 1991 for the great burst of energy that is pulsating through the nation of the future.</b> Perhaps they could have dedicated their efforts to the incumbent Prime Minister of India.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->