Mayank Chhaya Daily

'Stranger to History'

Aatish Taseer as he appears on http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780771084256#bio

There is something deeply satisfying about shallow judgments. So read this post in that spirit. I am just getting familiar with a young journalist turned writer called Aatish Taseer whose debut book “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” is drawing considerable attention in India and elsewhere. 

What qualifies the 29-year-old Aatish to hold forth on profound questions concerning the intersection between Islam and culture and suchlike is that he is a son of an Indian Sikh mother and a Pakistani Muslim father. That he was estranged from his father in his childhood apparently lends his story the weight so necessary for a writer who chooses to tackle questions of faith and its overarching influence on culture.

Aatish’s mother is a well known Indian journalist called Tavlin Singh who had a short relationship with the Pakistani businessman turned powerful politician Salman Taseer.  It was an angry letter from a father he did not know in response to an article by Aatish that triggered the book.

I have not yet read the book but have read some excerpts on its publisher McLelland’s website. Although excerpts are by no means enough to evaluate the entire book, they are enough for me to clearly point out the predominant literary influence. The prose and observations are decidedly Naipaulian. V. S. Naipaul has a very spare yet telling style. I am not surprised that the famously abrasive master has called Aatish’s book “A subtle and poignant work by a young writer to watch.” The book seems like an update of Naipaul’s own celebrated work “Among the Believers.”

“Once the car had driven away, and we were half-naked specks on the marble plaza Hani said, ‘I’ll read and you repeat after me.’ His dark, strong face concentrated on the page and the Arabic words flowed out,” is how ‘A Pilgrim’s Prelude’ begins. This could have been a beginning by Naipaul. I am not sure if what worked in Naipaul so powerfully can necessarily work in Aatish. That’s what I meant by shallow judgment. The 35 pages that I read on this particular chapter convinces me that Aatish has consciously or otherwise internalized Naipaul.

Naipaul himself may have thought he was reading his own book and that is probably why he felt compelled to call it “subtle and poignant.”

I will read the book when I get to it in due course but I find all such self discovery books set against the complex cultural/religious backdrop pointless. That may have something to do with my near biological indifference to faith.

Read excerpts here: http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780771084256#bio

Sonal Shah eschews VHP ties;So what?

In a move that smells disingenuous Sonal Shah, a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has renounced her formal association with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a fundamentalist Hindu group that is often at the center of revanchist battles.

"Had I been able to foresee the role of the VHP in India in these heinous events, or anticipate that the VHP of America could possibly stand by silently in the face of its Indian counterpart's complicity in the events of Gujarat in 2002 - thereby undermining the American group's cultural and humanitarian efforts with which I was involved - I would not have associated with the VHP of America," Shah said.

The contrition has apparently been prompted by the possibility that the Obama team may ask her to pack her bags. She says so herself in as many words "I need your help," wrote Shah an email to her supporters. "This is gaining legs as the National Journal also picked it up and likely Fox (News channel). I need to mobilize people against the leftists and the right wing. There is a likely chance that they will ask me to resign as the team does not need my publicity." She is right. The Obama team does not need that kind of publicity, particularly in light of the Rod Blagojevich scandal in Illinois, the president-elect’s home state.

I am skeptical about Shah’s assertion that she was not able to foresee of the VHP in India, particularly when one considers how extensively reported and debated the VHP’s role in the violence was. No reasonably informed person, the least of all one who once worked as a senior executive with the Internet search giant Google. I would like to believe that as an executive of the company she had at the very least as much access to Google’s brilliant search functionalities as you and I have.

It is entirely possible that Shah, who may not have been particularly enamored of the VHP’s unabashedly fundamentalist Hindu platform, believed that its network could be used to achieve a larger good.  In the process she might have chosen to disregard all that the VHP stood for. Whatever is the case she is obviously worried about that the controversy surrounding her association with the VHP could undo her appointment by the Obama team on a three-member team to develop technology policy.