Throughout history Britain’s ruling class has created crisis after crisis – just like now

Boris Johnson’s run of bad decisions on Brexit and Covid have their roots in a saga of elite entitlement and superficiality writes John Harris in The Guardian

‘Then came the Brexit trade deal, and a familiar idea returned, that under the shambling exterior, the prime minister is some kind of swashbuckling genius.’ Photograph: Pippa Fowles/No10 Downing Street


When the novelist John le Carré died earlier this month, among the passages quoted by journalists was a short excerpt from The Secret Pilgrim, published in 1990. In the book, the words are spoken by Le Carré’s fondly loved character George Smiley. “The privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman, if you will allow me – is the greatest dissembler on Earth,” he says. “Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.”

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The words are a cutting summary of the far-off era of upper class treachery and cold war subterfuge, but also fit the less romantic time of Brexit, the pandemic and a Conservative party whose leadership by two public schoolboys has so pushed us into disaster. Therein lies a huge part of the national tragedy that, amid stranded lorries, a shamefully high death toll and some of the greatest peacetime blunders this country has ever made, has recently seemed to be reaching some kind of awful climax. Of late, some of the best writing about the mess we are in has focused on Boris Johnson’s character flaws, which are undoubtedly a big part of the tale. But what has been rather less examined is the fact that his shortcomings blur into a much longer story about our longstanding ruling class, and its habit of creating crisis after crisis.

The year 2021 will mark the 80th anniversary of George Orwell’s inspirational essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, his warmly patriotic text about the English national character, and his belief that this country’s efforts in the early stages of the second world war were being compromised by the fact that he was still resident in “the most class-ridden country under the sun”. Here, too, there are plenty of characterisations of the English elite that seem as pertinent now as they were then. “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there,” wrote Orwell, and as an Etonian himself he surely knew what he was talking about.

Of the ruling-class politicians who had overseen Britain’s domestic travails during the 1920s and 30s while pursuing the disastrous foreign policies that culminated in appeasement, he said this: “What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable.” Back when Conservatives at least partly understood such criticism and successively embraced first postwar consensus politics, then the populist meritocracy most spectacularly embodied by Margaret Thatcher, they were harder to malign as chancers and stuffed shirts. But in the buildup to Christmas, as I watched Johnson deny the nightmare of a no-deal Brexit, row back on his stupid promise of a normal Christmas and then yet again offer the prospect of a return to normality (this time, he seemed to suggest, by Easter), Orwell’s words once again made perfect sense.

Since the election as party leader of David Cameron back in 2005, even if the Conservatives have stuck with a post-Thatcher view of the world, many of the inner circles of Tory politics have reverted to a way of doing things more rooted on the grouse moors of old than in the modern world. Johnson’s arrival at the top revived a familiar mixture of entitlement, superficiality and lives that most people would think impossibly opulent. We all know what those things have led to – a seemingly endless run of terrible decisions, from the calling of the 2016 referendum to the chain of stupidities that has defined Britain’s experience of Covid-19.

Just to be clear: the downsides of a certain kind of privileged leadership have flared up on all sides of politics, from the messianic arrogance that led Tony Blair into the Iraq disaster, to Nick Clegg’s virtual destruction of the Liberal Democrats. But in the main, this is a Tory story. If your Christmas presents included the horrifically readable memoir, Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire (whose husband, Hugo, was a minister under Cameron and part of his social circle), you will have a sense of what all this looks like up close. Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, described Swire’s book as a portrait of people who are “unserious, entitled, snobbish, incestuous and curiously childish” – obsessed with the subtle distinctions of taste and status that separate the middle from the upper class, and drawn to politics and power not out of any sense of mission or duty, but a dull belief that such things are what people like them do. Under Johnson, the same culture of entitlement and mutual back-scratching has hardened into the so-called “chumocracy”. Oligarchy is rarely an efficient or sensible way to govern, but that doesn’t seem to have got in the way.

Just before Christmas, dismay about the Johnson government and its apparent distance from reality seemed to be reaching a peak. But then came the Brexit trade deal, and a familiar idea returned – not least in the rightwing press – that under the shambling exterior, the prime minister is some kind of swashbuckling genius. This is an archetype that depends on the glib charm cited by Le Carré, and draws on a deep well of deference. The reality is surely that a reckless project driven by the alumni of private schools (Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg et al) has resulted in probably the only trade deal in history that puts up barriers to commerce rather than removing them, and will be rushed through parliament with a sickening disdain for any scrutiny. Combined with the economic effects of the pandemic, the result will be damage and uncertainty that is only just starting: all the talk about Brexit now being finished is further proof of the ditch we have been led into.

The disasters, then, will continue to mount up, but will they result in any change? If history teaches us anything, it is that this country’s mixture of cap-doffing and unassailable privilege tends to keep even the most rotten hierarchies in place, and the saga grinds on. This is the essence of the very British mess that we seem unable to escape.

Ideology and the pandemic

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

THE niece was in school in the US when she saw Nadia Comaneci live on TV in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In India, one could only dream of such pleasures although the kindly radio ensured we wouldn’t miss the cricket action at Old Trafford, Karachi or Kanpur thanks to John Arlott, Omar Qureishi and Bobby Talyarkhan weaving magic with the running commentary.

Coming back to Delhi the following year, the niece was greeted with fanfare reserved for people returning from a pilgrimage. She had seen the wondrous Nadia perform her fabled Perfect 10s on the beam and uneven bars. But, uncle, the schoolgirl moved quickly to alert me to a flaw in my eagerness. “Nadia is a communist.” And so? Didn’t we like the Romanian girl’s captivating smile? “Yes, but, you know, communists are trained how to smile.” Probing her reading list in school in America, out came the resolution to the puzzle. George Orwell’s Animal Farm had taken its toll.

The anti-communist primer had come up also for exams at our school in Lucknow, but somehow for most students it was water off a duck’s back. Indeed, the common man’s grip of political reality has remained at variance with, say, Ayub Khan’s, as the dictator turned his hatred of partisans into a bloody mess, or Nehru, who would abandon his fabled democratic instinct to dismiss the world’s first popularly elected Marxist government in Kerala over a disputed school curriculum.

When the Cold War was over, there was a sense of anticipation that the ‘free world’ would tone down the admixture of cretinism and propaganda, which it spewed for decades to describe a communist’s horns and canines. One thought the shrill imagery would give way to a sensible critique of many things that had gone wrong with communist systems.’

Within no time at all, however, the Cold War-era slogan for free democracies turned into an insidious prescription for ‘free-market democracies’. That should have been figured out as early as 1955 when popularly elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in Iran by an American-British intelligence-led coup over the prime minister’s nationalisation of the oil industry.

One of the triggers for Orwell’s outburst against communism was his disenchantment with Stalin, though the British writer never reneged on his own commitment to socialism, provided it remained democratic. Much of Orwell’s anger deepened with his experience of the Spanish Civil War where he saw partisans turning on each other, aligning against Stalinists or supporting them.

As the world continued to see in the fable of Animal Farm the turning of an egalitarian dream into a nightmare, particularly for those that led the allegorical revolution, not much was said or discussed of Orwell’s ‘Man’ who symbolised the animals’ class enemy. It was Man in the form of the drunken farm owner, one Mr Jones and his perpetually snoring wife, whose untold cruelties set off the upheaval.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” the Old Major confided to the secret barn house meeting. The ageing pig was the intellectual fountainhead of the rebellion. “[Man] does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.”

Replace Man with Capitalism and it reads like a fine précis of the Communist Manifesto. This critique of capitalism in the very beginning of the book has been lobotomised from popular memory. The Covid-19 pandemic may have pushed it back centre stage again, nudging societies to rephrase their worldview. The millions we saw on the roads in the wake of the badly called lockdown in India were as much victims of a callous state as of a reality in which the rich are the privileged and the poor their grovelling minions.

That equation may have been jolted. The world’s four best friends are definitely in trouble. Benjamin Netanyahu has lost his popularity from 70 per cent approval ratings to around 15. The virus has ensnared Jair Bolsonaro in more ways than one. He has a rebellion brewing. Donald Trump is fighting everything and everyone except the virus. His lack of leadership, when it was most needed to save American lives, looks primed to cost him the election in November. Narendra Modi, according to The New York Times, has used the virus-related lockdown to arrest more critics, indicating he is on the back foot.

The Times mentions the case of Natasha Narwal, a student activist accused of rioting by the New Delhi police. When a judge ruled that she be freed for she was merely exercising her right to protest against a divisive citizenship law, the police slapped fresh charges of murder and terrorism, sending her back to jail.

Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has been studying the way in which governments in places like Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and Vietnam — and one Indian state, Kerala — have tackled the coronavirus.

Both Laos and Vietnam border China, where the virus was first detected in late December 2019, and both have thriving trade and tourist relations with China. India is separated from China by the high Himalayas, while Brazil and the US have two oceans between themselves and Asia; nonetheless, it is the US, Brazil, and India that have shocking numbers of infections and fatalities. Asks Prashad: “What accounts for the ability of relatively poor countries like Laos and Vietnam to attempt to break the chain of this infection, while richer states — notably the United States of America — have floundered?” Orwell should have been around to figure that out.

Dickens and Orwell — the choice for capitalism

When this is all over, there is likely to be a new social contract. Which way will we go?  asks JANAN GANESH in The FT

This year is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death and the 150th of Charles Dickens’s. Never spellbound by either (“The man can’t write worth a damn,” said the young Martin Amis, after one page of 1984), I was inclined to sit out all the commemorative rereading. And I did. But then the crisis of the day took me back to what one man wrote about the other. 

More on that in a minute. First, you will notice the pandemic is putting large corporations through a sort of moral invigilation. Ones that rejig their factories to make hand sanitiser (LVMH) or donate their knowhow (IBM) are hailed. Ones that behave like skinflints (JD Wetherspoon, Britannia Hotels) are tarred and feathered. 

Companies have to weigh how much discretionary help to give without flunking their narrow duty to survive and profit. 

This is the stuff of Stakeholder Capitalism or Corporate Social Responsibility.The topic has been in the air all of my career. It has been given new urgency by events. It is the subject of much FT treatment. 

And Orwell, I suspect, would see through it like glass. 

In a 1940 essay (how spoilt we are for round-number anniversaries) he politely explodes the idea of Dickens as a radical, or even as a social reformer. His case is that, for Dickens, nothing is wrong with the world that cannot be fixed through individual conscience. 

If only Murdstone were kinder to David Copperfield. If only all bosses were as nice as Fezziwig. That no one should have such awesome power over others in the first place goes unsaid by Dickens, and presumably unthought. And so his worldview, says Orwell, is “almost exclusively moral”. 

Dickens wants a “change of spirit rather than a change of structure”. He has no sense that a free market is “wrong as a system”. The French Revolution could have been averted had the Second Estate just “turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge”. 

And so we have “that recurrent Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man”, whose arbitrary might is used to help out the odd grateful urchin or debtor. What we do not have is the Good Trade Unionist pushing for structural change. What we do not have is the Good Finance Minister redistributing wealth. There is something feudal about Dickens. The rich man in his castle should be nicer to the poor man at his gate, but each is in his rightful station. 

You need not share Orwell’s ascetic socialism (I write this next to a 2010 Meursault) to see his point. And to see that it applies just as much to today’s economy. 

Some companies are open to any and all options to serve the general good — except higher taxes and regulation. “I feel like I’m at a firefighters’ conference,” said the writer Rutger Bregman, at a Davos event about inequality that did not mention tax. “And no one is allowed to speak about water.” 

What Orwell would hate about Stakeholder Capitalism is not just that it might achieve patchier results than the universal state. It is not even that it accords the powerful yet more power — at times, as we are seeing, over life and death. Under-resourced governments counting on private whim for basic things: it is a spectacle that should both warm the heart and utterly chill it. 

No, what Orwell would resent, I think, is the unearned smugness. The halo of “conscience”, when more systemic answers are available via government. The halo that Dickens still wears. You can see it in the world of philanthropy summits and impact investment funds. 

The double-anniversary of England’s most famous writers since Shakespeare meant little to me until the virus broke. All of a sudden, they serve as a neat contrast of worldviews. Dickens would look at the crisis and shame the corporates who fail to tap into their inner Fezziwig. Orwell would wonder how on earth it is left to their caprice in the first place. 

The difference matters because, when all this is over, there is likely to be a new social contract. The mystery is whether it will be more Dickensian (in the best sense) or Orwellian (also in the best sense). That is, will it pressure the rich to give more to the commons or will it absolutely oblige them?

‘Reflections on Gandhi’: George Orwell’s assessment of Mahatma Gandhi after his assassination

By George Orwell

Wikimedia Commons



Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity – by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power – and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?

To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favour, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him – home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism – were unappealing, and his medievalist programme was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence – which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever – he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted.

The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.

But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion.

Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded.

Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as EM Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavourably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority.

Colour feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a colour war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European friends.

Written in short lengths for newspaper serialisation, the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. 

He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess.

As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi’s possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be purchased for about £5, and Gandhi’s sins, at least his fleshly sins, would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without “doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper – that is about the whole collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense of direction.

His first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organiser, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions.

His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive . Whether he was also a loveable man, and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it.

Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realise that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that god exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from.

It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which – though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail – he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either god or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one’s strength.

Secondly, if possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally – this is the cardinal point – for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing.

This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love god, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi – with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction – always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth.

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which – I think – most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between god and man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen man.

Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in the truth”.

In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not – indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not – take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialise in avoiding awkward questions.

In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”

After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government.

The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.

Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally?

Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilisation can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles. One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking.

I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.


It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another.

On the other hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air?

That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Data is not the enemy

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Taking the stats at your disposal into account does not mean your players cannot play a fearless and instinctive brand of cricket


The information is available to the players. It's their choice whether to use it or not © AFP



Poor Peter Moores couldn't have chosen a sentence more likely to turn him into a human dartboard. He needed to "look at the match data," Moores said after England's disastrous defeat to Bangladesh. To a press corps increasingly convinced that the England team has become formulaic and nerdy, this was the worst answer Moores could have reeled off.

It did, however, open up a whole new range of possibilities for the post-match interview. One wondered how historic sports interviews might have been different in the age of referencing match data.

Interviewer to George Foreman after he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974: "What did you make of the fight, George?"

Foreman: "Haven't seen the fight data yet."

Interviewer: "Well, two men were standing up at the start of the eighth. Then there was one. You were on the canvas. In an algorithm: 2; 8; 1."

Foreman: "Right, got it."

And how would a data-inspired interview have run after the 1978 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when Cambridge sank into the Thames, live on television?

Interviewer to Cambridge captain: "Disappointing race out there, I imagine?"

Captain: "Impossible to say before seeing the race data."

Interviewer: "Glug, glug, glug - ring any bells?"

All this mischief, however, does not explain very much why England crashed out of the World Cup. Are we really to believe that the central figure in the catastrophe was Nathan Leamon, the mathematician and former schoolteacher who is now England's stats analyst? That is ridiculous. It is Leamon's job to supply evidence that may help the management to make better decisions. It is the job of the coaching staff to use that information appropriately. So even if you believe, as I do, that England need to play a more fearless, instinctive brand of cricket, it does not follow that having access to potentially useful data prevents you from doing so.

The real problem is not maths, which by definition is flinty, pitiless, robust and unsentimental. No, the problem is management-speak, learned jargon and corporate-style snake oil. The unfortunate thing is that coaches can now use the phrase "match data" as just another thing to say when they are avoiding the subject. It slots into the lexicon of cliché, alongside "taking the positives", "skill sets" and "plan execution".

The irony is that real maths, in fact, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from jargon. Maths is exclusively content; jargon is content-free.

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell despaired of political jargon: "As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of words that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." Sport soon surpassed politics for meaningless waffle. Orwell deserves a new epitaph: "The man who foresaw the evolution of the post-match interview."

The former England captain Mike Atherton made several good points about the rush to blame data for all England's woes. First, analytics now has less influence over the team than it did in the more successful Flower-Strauss era. Secondly, Leamon's work is not pushed down players' throats. Stats for the particular ground, videos of an opposition bowler's range of slower balls, these things are available if players want to see them. If they don't, fine.



Nathan Leamon has a gift for numbers but he doesn't believe they provide all the answers © PA Photos

In 2006, while I was writing my book What Sport Tells Us About Life, I dedicated a whole chapter to the remarkable success of a school rugby team, unbeaten for three seasons, a sequence of 33 games. From the author's perspective, drawing lessons from a school coach was an unusual and risky approach. After all, other subjects of my book included Zinedine Zidane, Billy Beane and Michael Jordan. What was a school coach doing in that company?

The answer is that I thought his methodology was worth bringing to a wider audience. The coach was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Lancastrian who pared down his comments to players. Rather than talking for talking's sake - as most coaches do - he researched what really happened in the matches and fed back small chunks of highly useful information. The quest was to find insight, concision and meaning; and to avoid noise, chatter and cliché.

Who was this progressive but unheard-of coach? Nathan Leamon. His approach, then and now, is thoughtful, flexible and open. His character is modest without being deferential, self-contained without being standoffish. Now, nine years on, he must find the way he is portrayed in the media as unrecognisable. Far from being a credulous geek, Leamon is an understated sceptic, a sensible and balanced man who happens to have a gift for numbers. Leamon is the last person to argue that data can provide all the answers - he's much too smart.

While England were exiting the World Cup, the retired NBA player Shane Battier was addressing a sold-out audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. If you want to understand how data can help a sportsman perform better, read Michael Lewis on Battier's playing days.

Or this, exploring why it is so hard, with the naked eye, to understand the way that Mesut Özil, the Arsenal footballer, creates space on a football pitch.

Like it or not, as professional sport evolves it will provide greater scope for academic rigour. A lot of clever people like sport and they are constantly developing ideas - some good, others less good - that may eventually become absorbed into the mainstream. Bill James' understanding of data changed baseball forever. Eventually no coach could afford to ignore James' ideas because it would cost them games.

That is why the status of the sports analyst is going up. Nate Silver, who has become the most important analyst of American presidential elections, cut his teeth modelling sports matches. Ideas that originate in sport are finding wider application in the outside world.

And yet I am equally confident that a central task for sports coaches - now more than ever - is to liberate players, to free them from stifling anxiety and fearfulness.

Those two truths exist in parallel, not in conflict. Coaches will inevitably want to use every tool at their disposal, including relevant data. Then they must have the psychological nous, the feel and the common touch, to allow players to express themselves.



In the future of limited-overs cricket, can batsmen build dominant positions early enough to reduce the risk of getting out so much as to take it out of the equation? size: 900 © Getty Images

In the end, the discussion of data in sport tends to reveal more about prejudices than the underlying reality. It's all too easy to blame other people for using either too much or too little evidence en route to their decisions. I am intuitive, you are strangely convinced, he is delusional. Or, if you prefer, I am rational, you are a reductionist, he is a slave to numbers.

There is another story to emerge from this World Cup. The central innovation, which has now transferred from T20 to ODIs, is that talented batsmen are lethal - perhaps unstoppable - when they play without any fear of getting out. In 2003 I played in the first ever T20 league. I wrote at the time that it allowed players to play as they do in the nets, when they are totally uninhibited.

This powerful freedom, however, is partly earned by the match situation, especially in the middle overs. If the batting team is behind in the match, and there are few wickets in hand, it is far harder to bat as though another wicket wouldn't matter. The challenge now, in all white-ball cricket, is to build a position so dominant that there is no risk attached to getting out. If you are batting at 360 for 2 with seven overs left - with, say, Glenn Maxwell padded up and waiting - there is literally no risk in trying to hit a six and getting out. Paradoxically, of course, that makes you more likely to hit the ball for six!

Perhaps someone can show me the data on how quickly this underlying dominance turns into an impregnable lead. If I was coach, I'd certainly want to know.

100 Best Books of all time - the views of Outlook India jury

THE 100 BEST

Ink, Mortar And Canon

A hundred essential books, chosen by our jury, and the reasons they should be read—and reread

1984
George Orwell
1949; Pages: 267
The novel that made ‘Orwellian’ synonymous with oppressive regimes that use surveillance to control its citizens, it had a great opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The dystopian novel features Win­ston Smith, an emp­loyee of the Ministry of Truth. His doubts lead him to secretly begin a critique of the Party. He also falls in love with Julia, a co-wor­ker, and in an eerie twist they have to betray each other to survive. Smith is re-educated to be filled with unsurpassable love for Big Brother, the supreme leader.

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A History Of The World In 100 Objects
Neil MacGregor
2010; Pages: 707
A simple idea—to tell the history of the world through the artefacts and objects collected in the British Museum—touched by the genius of its director Neil MacGregor. It started as a radio series for the BBC, which was later turned into a book. So, for instance, object 33 is a slab from the Ashoka Pillar, 68 is the Shiva and Parvati sculpture and 82 is the miniature of a Mughal prince, telling the history of India in these periods.

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A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
1993; Pages: 1349
If Rushdie served up a dense, rich, fantasy-laden tale of modern India, Seth aspired to Tolstoyan simplicity and insight. Mrs Rupa Mehta’s quest for a husband for her daughter Lata spirals into a 1,500-page-long perambulation among four large Indian families, and plunges boldly into the political, social and economic life of newly-independent India. In this, it captures the zeitgeist in unusual depth and colour.

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A Time To Be Happy
Nayantara Sehgal
1958; Pages: 292
In this book about an elite family in the newly independent India by Nayantara Sehgal, nothing really happens. It’s all about atmosphere and mood. But it captures the time so vividly, full of rich details, it remains undated. Sehgal is a prolific writer, her other books and essays may be more serious but this novel by a woman writing in Eng­lish, one of the very few in the ’50s-60s to do so, captures the social mil­ieu, especially women’s place in an urbane setting.

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Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
1884; Pages: 366
The story Twain tells through Huck Finn, in his own words and native Missouri dialect is, firstly, an immortal picaresque adventure and a journey towards manhood. Huck’s runaway thrills with the kind-hearted slave Jim on a raft down the Mississippi, their encountering and surviving a series of challenges from outlaws, murderers, mobs and a general culture of cruelty is dealt with in a breezy, satirical manner. Villainy rears its head, fortuitous coincidences occur, situations are saved. Yet the book has a moral dimension rare in an adventure story, as it is a savage indictment of the practice of slavery. At its end, Huck seems to repudiate the cruel world he inhabits, denying people a chance to ‘sivilise’ him. Huck’s decision is our hidden dream.

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Alice In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
1865; Pages: 192
All sorts of analyses—political, social, Freudian, Lacanian and many more—have been (and continue to be) applied to this hyperkinetic frolic through the illogical and ever-ramifyingly anarchic world of mystery and delight that a math don created for children, who were beloved to him. Despite the anatomisations, Alice and the oddball inhabitants of her frabjous world will endure in the minds and hearts of children and adults for many generations to come. Let’s say ‘Callooh! Callay!’ to that as, in some place ethereal, Carroll chortles in his joy!

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All The President’s Men
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
1974; Pages: 349
Bernstein and Woodward broke the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of president Richard Nixon. The details are well-known, the break-in at the Demo­crat national committee’s offices in the Watergate hotel, the dogged pursuit by two young Washington Post reporters, the trail finally leading to the White House itself. Written in the third person, the book focuses on how the story came together, one lead at a time.  The story, which ran for two years, was described by the Post’s rival NYT as ‘maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time’.

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Annihilation Of Caste, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
1936; Pages: 100
Ambedkar’s explosive, erudite and evocative short treatise on Hinduism and its curse of caste will make the hair stand on end of every reader even on multiple readings. Ambedkar takes on Gandhi on his stand on the caste issue and shakes up the reader from the inside with the power of his language, his incisive arguments and his sharp wit to bare the gangrene that caste inflicts on Hindu society. It was to be a speech, undelivered eventually, for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, a reformist Hindu group in Lahore in 1936. The organisers found the content ‘unbearable’ and demanded a few changes, but Ambedkar shot back: “I will not change a comma.”

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Behind The Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo
2012; Pages: 256
It took Boo’s rigour and vim to show us the inside of what we pass every day in cities without a thought—an urban slum. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism, combined with an empathy for the people she is writing about that makes it a compelling book. Like in great fiction, it commands readers’ attention with its narrative power. Now, the book is a successful play running to full capacity in London.

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Beloved
Toni Morrison
1987; Pages: 256
An honest examination through ‘white’ eyes is one matter, but speaking of the long injustice from the inside, as it were, is another. In this Toni Morrison dons the mantle of Richard Wri­ght, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The death-haunted world of Beloved is the years immediately after the Civil War, its protagonists are ex-slave Sethe, her daughter Denver, Paul D. and the spiteful spirit of her murdered daughter. Morrison’s lyrically muscular prose proves equal to the task of expressing the brutality and pain of plantation slavery. This is one of the greatest novels of the exorcision of bondage ever written.

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Bitter Fruit
Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Khalid Hasan
2008; Pages: 708
Manto appeared in the literary firmament like a meteor; in a brief span of time he established himself as one of the first modernists in the subcontinent. Savage, bitter, cynical, darkly humorous, Manto exhumed the noxious and the malodorous of society—most significantly the sham, absurd hypocrisies of Partition (on all sides)—to lay them bare. The writer of Toba Tek Singh, Kaali Shal­war and Colder Than Ice also wrote about the dropouts of society’s reviled figures like prostitutes, pimps, profligates, and the flotsam. True to his death wish, in the art of the short story he can give God a run for his money.

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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
1985; Pages: 327
As literary westerns go, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian can hold its own in both the gruesome stakes and the grand sweep descriptors. The setting is the 1840s and his hero, The Kid, prone to violence himself, joins up with the Glanton gang who have a contract with the Mexican authorities to bring in Indian scalps. Which is where Judge Holden, he of the bald body (a constant on Ame­ri­can lists of the top 20 villainous characters) holds forth. In the border badlands the gang terrorises, there are no ‘civilised devices’ anymore. As one character put it, “When God made the man, the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anyt­hing”.

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Book of Ecclesiastes
The Bible
Remove the few references to God and to keeping His covenant, and this short and powerfully poetic tract by an anonymous preacher, with eerie, pluripotent images like the blossoming of almond trees, the grasshopper being a burden unto itself, and the low sounds of grinding stones, becomes a melancholic song of nihilism. It sings of the vanity of earthly desires. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.

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Capital In The Twenty-first Century
Thomas Piketty
2014; Pages: 696
It has the dubious distinction of being the most unread bestseller in a straw poll by a British paper. But those who get beyond the longish Introduction are in for a real treat of lucid writing and clear thinking of this French economist on income inequality in the US and Europe since the 18th century.  Piketty argues that if return on income is greater than the economic growth of a country for a long period of time, it makes for the rich getting richer, the poor poorer and leads to grave social unrest.

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Citizens: A Chronicle Of The French Revolution
Simon Schama
1989; Pages: 976
The French Revolution has attracted the services of some of the best historians of the past 200 years. Schama’s book, published in the bicentennial year of 1989, covers the first momentous years and shatters received wisdom of a decrepit monarchy and a grasping, backward-looking reactionary nobility. Revolutionary violence, says Schama, was spurred more by hostility to modernisation than by a will to achieve it. The inability to introduce tax reforms and manage the huge debt led to the disaster. Indeed, the ‘profligate’ monarch and his queen spent far less than their British counterparts and the bureaucracy was so efficient that they were recalled by Napoleon to mend the chaos of the revolution years.

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Cleopatra: A Life
Stacy Schiff
2010; Pages: 432
Cleopatra—queen, master schemer, lover of Caesar and seducer of Anthony and tragic heroine—has fascinated everyone for two millennia. Stacy Schiff, in this celebrated biography, tries to uncover the person from layers of myth that cling to her larger-than-life persona. What emerges is a portrait of a ruthless ruler and an astute gambler. At the height of her powers, Cleopatra controlled the whole of the Levant and “for a fleeting moment she held the fate of the western world in her hands”. Schiff rescues Cleo’s image from the well-worn idea of a ‘sexual temptress’ to reveal a complex individual and describe her world in compelling detail.

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Collected Poems
Philip Larkin
1988; Pages 240
Larkin is the great poet of the demotic, the domestic, the crass, cruel, even cringe-worthy. He is also the least solipsistic. Part of his genius lies, like that of Eliot, in the exquisite phrase-making. The poet who’d write movingly about the dead of the Great War (“Never such innocence,/never before or since. / As changed itself to past/without a word—the men/Leaving the garden tidy./The thousands of marriages/Lasting a little while longer:/Never such innocence again”) would also capture the ’60s zeitgeist in slangy aptness (“When I see a couple of kids/And guess he’s f***ing her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphr­agm,/I know this is paradise.”). This explains his sheer quotability. In Larkin, pessimism found its Keats.

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Communalism In Modern India
Bipan Chandra
1984; Pages: 412
One of the best historians of India’s freedom struggle, Bipan Chandra was also a vocal, lifelong opponent of communalism. In his seminal 1984 book, he inquires into the roots of communalism in India—looking at its social roots, the role of ideological, social and cultural elements, role of British policy and the use of history as a communal tool. As it took roots in the second half of the 19th century, says Chandra, communalism took the form of an ideology, a belief-system through which society and polity was viewed. Though some historians feel this book is historiographically dated, the book’s centrality in understanding a phenomenon that continues to plague India remains undiminished.

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Crime And Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1866; Pages: 545
Deluded enough to believe that crime—even grave crime, like murder—is permitted to individuals like him (or Napoleon!) who are driven by a greater purpose, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, an indigent student in mid-1800s St Petersburg, axes an old pawn-broker and her sister to death. His confession to Sofia (also called Sonya), a prostitute, gradually diverts him from the febrile ramblings of his mind, his frenzied night walks through the gas-lit streets and his cat-and-mouse game with the police, leading him towards clarity, acceptance of his punishment and eventual redemption.

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Discovery Of India
Jawaharlal Nehru
1946; Pages: 584
One of the makers of modern India, he wasn’t just concerned about politics and policy-making. While incarcerated in the ’40s, he wrote this classic, a somewhat rambling account of the history and culture of India—from the Indus valley civilisation to the British Raj. A reflection of Nehru’s depth of learning, he looks back at the harmony in which diverse peoples had lived in India and argues for freedom from the foreign yoke. This is a book that generations of Indians—and people across the world—have turned to, to discover India.

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Dispatches
Michael Herr
1977; Pages: 272
Dispatches did for the Vietnam war what Ernie Pyle, John Steinbeck and Alan Moorehead’s reports did for WW II. It brought to entire generations the hallucinogenic absurdity of war—the bloody courage, the many motives and the various perversions of bravery. Herr’s writing has an awful music; the tone is harsh, and scenes shift with nouvelle vague rapidity. In the stink of war is mixed the smell of hash and the pleasures of flesh. “In Saigon and Danang we’d get stoned together and keep the common pool stocked and tended,” writes Herr, Esquire’s war correspondent.  Dispatches is hell after rock n ’roll.

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Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
1968; Pages: 210
Philip K. Dick’s dystopian 1968 offering is set in 2021 San Francisco, a nuclear wasteland where people are encouraged to migrate to Mars and androids are “almost human”.  Which means some of them do go rogue and have to be “retired”, which is where our hero, bounty hunter Rick Deckard, comes in. So far, so good, but then Dick takes a giant leap from the usual SF sweeps to the grand scheme questions: what is human, what is not? Is empathy the ultimate test?  Is collective suffering a way to stave off the “bleak decay” that surrounds you? Then, as now, there are no easy answers. Oh, and the electric sheep in the title, well, would you still love your pet as much if it could be repaired in a shop?

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Epic Of Gilgamesh
Author Unknown
Mesopotamian Civilisation
The oldest extant story of humankind (c 2000 BC), Gilgamesh is a Baby­lonian epic poem. In its present form it is pieced together from nearly 30,000 tablets or fragments in three langua­ges, including Sumerian. It tells the adventures of Gilga­mesh, a harsh ruler who battles a primitive figure, becomes his staunch friend, loses him despite trying his best, and finally confers with his shade in the land of the dead. One of its most interesting sections is the talk of the Flood—a remarkable precursor to the story of Noah’s Flood in Genesis.

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Ex Libris
Anne Fadiman
1998; Pages: 162
The Fadiman family sits down to dinner at a restaurant, takes up the menu and...starts correcting the typos on it. Journalist and editor Fadiman’s book is a celebration of bookishness, book-love and bibliomania. Through a series of essays—‘Never Do That To a Book’, ‘My Odd Shelves’—Fadiman explores the world of books and characters who are immersed in it. Fadiman’s subjects, presented in her playful, witty prose, range from butterflies and insomnia, Antarctic explorers (her favourite topic) and writers such as Coleridge, Caroll and Lamb. This list deserves a book about books, and their hopelessly smitten lovers.

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Gandhi And Churchill
Arthur Herman
2008, Pages: 721
In this fresh approach to history, Herman falls in step with the lives of two great 20th century lives to show how each man’s starkly different worldview was informed by nationality, clan, upbringing and that, when pitted against each other through opposing ideologies of their respective nations for 40 years, the final conclusions were momentous. Chu­r­chill saved the hour for Britain through five years of resolute leadership, but had a big role in losing its crown jewel. Gandhi’s great moral leadership gave spine and purpose to the freedom stru­ggle. The former’s contempt for the latter was legion; the feeling was probably mutual. Their lives were entwined, but they only met once.

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Ghosts Of Empire
Kwasi Kwarteng
2011; Pages: 488
Even in this age of post-colonial studies, there exist apologists of empire. Kwasi Kwarten, a British MP of Ghanaian origin, examines the long history of the British Empire through the eccentrics, egoists, oddball romantics and know-alls who populated the colonial services, and whose callous and misguided policies were responsible for the disorder and chaos of the past, and their present problems. Personalities like Younghusband, Gertrude Bell, Harry St John Philby and Cecil Rhodes might add colour to the colonial canvas, but are guilty of transplanting the snobberies and gradations of rank of Britain on to the colonies. This is empire stripped off its ideals, glitter and pageantry—only of its human costs.

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Globalization And Its Discontents
Joseph Stiglitz
2002; Pages: 304
“In terms of wealth rather than income, the top one per cent control 40 per cent”, wrote Stiglitz in an article in, guess where, Vanity Fair, in 2011 and it ignited the imagination of millions, leading up to Occupy Wall Street. One of the few rockstar, Nobel-winning, left-leaning Ame­rican economists in the world working today, this book rubbishes the policies of the International Mone­tary Fund and The World Bank, saying their policies are grossly against the interests of poor countries. Coming from an insider, (he was the chief economic advisor to the World Bank), Stiglitz’s arguments that much more stinging.

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Godaan
Munshi Premchand
1936; Pages: 352
The trials and travails of the poor farmer Hori Mahato and his family caught the period perfectly—the hopes, the fears, the despair, the greed, the urbanisation of 1930s India, waiting to be freed of foreign rule. Godaan was Premchand’s last full novel and perhaps modern Hindi literature’s first. Numerous films, other books, were loosely based on the various strands this novel unfolds, and many of the questions it raises about inequality and injustice are unanswered even today. It’s also perhaps the cheapest book to buy in this list: Rs 30 online, a little less than half the price Mahato borrows from Bhola to buy a cow, which starts off Godaan.

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Gora
Rabindranath Tagore
1910; Pages: 497
Gora is a quintessential novel of ideas. The central question is the idea of India, the correct path of progress, nationalism itself and the age-old clash between tradition and modernity. Gora’s austere, highly-strung Hinduism meets the ambivalence of Binoy; Pareshbabu and his daughters Lolita and Sucharita practise the different orthodoxy of Brahmoism, while the devout Krishnadoyal is a classic case of radicalisation turning reactionary with age. Gora is a fascinating echo-chamber of debate and discussion, yet shows the power of emotions to influence even the hardest-held ideologies. The knowledge of his true identity frees Gora from the carapace of religious rectitude and sets him towards a liberal acceptance of his world; modern India needs a similar reawakening.

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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
1860; Pages: 544
The story of Pip’s expectation of being a gentleman throws the reader into a journey from the mist-swaddled Kentish marshes to the upwardly mobile clubs of London, by way of the timeless, catatonic Miss Havi­sham in Satis House, gol­den-hearted Joe Gargery and the eternally grateful Magwitch. It was Dickens’s unique achievement to create characters who live on in readers’ memories, and so it is here: the mysterious Jaggers, Herbert Pocket, the histrionic Wopsle and the eccentric Wemmick. Despite its neatly melodramatic plotting, this is a book of sober purpose; at the end of it Pip learns both loyalty and Christian humility. Pip’s narrative voice, through various stages of his ‘expectations’, gets our complete sympathy. After all, don’t each one of us have our own Estella?

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Guns, Germs And Steel
Jared Diamond
1997; Pages: 480
This book is a rarity—a bestselling science book which people read enthusiastically. Jared Diamond, an American scholar of physiology, ecology and evolutio­nary biology, explains why things happened in the various parts of the world as they did but consciously steers clear of it becoming a racist treatise. Instead, his focus is on how geography, linguistics and cultures spurred or spurned the rise of capitalism, mercantilism and scientific inquiry. And of course it’s about the nasty germs “that killed peoples of other continents when they came into contact with western Eurasians”.

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Heart Of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
1899; Pages: 200
Conrad fictionalises his experience of commanding a steamboat on the Congo for a Belgian trading company into a forceful damnation of colonialism that uses a framed tale for psychological distance. Conrad’s narration is the holder and the picture is a yarn Charles Marlow spins of a dangerous quest for the storied Mr Kurtz, manager of an inner station supplying highly profitable ivory. The station is found ringed by stakes topped with the skulls of natives and Kurtz turns out to be depraved, mad and ill. He dies uttering, “The horror! The horror!”

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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
1969; Pages: 304
Any notion that the Ame­r­ican classics of being Black are treasured relics of a bygone era was dispelled by the recent racial tensions in the country. Like Richard Wright’s Native Son and Claude Brown’s Manchild in thePromised Land, I Know... depicts what it’s like to spend one’s childhood and youth in a defiantly racist society. Angelou’s memoir follows her from ages 3-17, and speaks of her emergence as a future civil rights activist braving poverty, displacement and prejudice. Not only deprivation, Angelou was also a victim of rape and molestation. Her masterpiece is a testament of the triumph of the human will.

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In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
1966; Pages: 368
In clean prose, milestoned with concrete details, Capote recreates the Kansas hamlet of Holcomb, down to the lurching tumbleweed. Six years in the research and writing, In Cold Blood used fictional techniques to holistically capture the 1959 murder of four members of the prosperous Clutter fam­ily—Herbert, a farmer, his invalid wife, and two of their children—and get into the minds of the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, who were hanged in 1965. Smith said he hadn’t intended to kill the soft-spoken Herbert right till the moment he slit his throat.

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In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin
1977; Pages: 240
A piece of a ‘Bronto­saurus’s skin’ in a family spurs a child’s dream of Patagonia, “at the far end of the world”. Years later, the man made the long journey to the wind-carved, remote Chilean province. A book that is as much about wandering, exile (with a cast of anarchists and bandits in Argentina and Chile), as about the fact of arrival and exploration past and present, Chatwin’s richly anecdotal book wears its erudition lightly. Along with The Road to Oxiana and Arabian Sands, In Patagonia is a true travel classic.

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India Discovered: The Achievement Of The British Raj
John Keay
1981; Pages: 224
The early colonial players in India—the Dutch, Portuguese, French and English—mostly dismissed it as a place with little culture and the pop­u­lation little better than barbarians. Yet, within a few decades of firming up their possessions, a remarkable group of Orientalists descended upon the country. Their story for the next 150 years—parallel to that of the British Raj—is one of learning and discovery. Art, literature, linguistics, sculpture, architecture, ethnography, geology, arc­h­aeo­logy—their assiduous cataloguing and the writing of texts of knowledge was undertaken. Keay’s book is the tale of changing British attitudes to their colony through the awe-inspiring adventure of coming to terms with its ancient culture. This is the story of the reconstruction of Indian history, piece by piece, by generations of scholars.

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Interpretation Of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
1899; Pages: 630
Freud, who formulated psychoanalysis, drew his understanding of the unconscious largely from the study of dreams. This was a pioneering work: dreams had till then been seen as an occult subject. Freud’s genius lay in positing that dreams were symbolic manifestations of wish-fulfillment; the symbols could represent repressed sexual desires. His ‘talking cure’ was built upon dream analysis, through which he helped patients gain insight into the inner conflicts that caused their neuroses.

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Into The Darkness
Gitta Sereny
1995; Pages: 400
A journalist and writer of German-Hungarian parentage, Gitta Sereny was among those who saw the rise, rule and defeat of Hitlerism. Into that Darkness is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism; its centrepiece is Sereny’s interview with mass murderer Franz Stangl—one-time commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps. A steadfast denier of responsibility, Stangl adm­itted his guilt under Ser­eny’s close interrogation. Hours after his final capitulation, he was dead. Ser­eny’s great work shows that evil wasn’t ‘banal’; it was frighteningly ordinary and commonplace. It is in us.

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Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
1974; Pages: 165
Fabulist, folklorist and novelist Italo Calvino brings together an ageing Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo, where the Venetian traveller regales the Tartar emperor with tales of all the cities he has seen—each imbued with memory, desire, signs, eyes, the dead, the sky. It has the charm of the travelogue, perfumed by a curious medieval mysticism. His are cities of ideas, feeling long-forgotten dreams and unquenched thirsts. Like Isidora: “The dreamed of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age”. Desires are already memories.” Or Tamara: “You leave Tamara without having discovered it.” Isn’t life, so like a dream, just like that?

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Lord Of The Flies
William Golding
1954; Pages: 182
Golding’s allegory dee­ply explores human savagery and the conflicting needs for peaceful society and for individual power. A group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island start out decently enough. But they soon des­cend into primitive rivalry. Simon, the mystic, and Piggy, the intellectual, are killed. Drawn by a fire intended to kill Ralph, the isolated leader of the boys, a naval officer from a passing ship arrives just in time to save him. He is stupefied by what he sees.

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Lords Of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World
Liaquat Ahamed
2009; Pages: 576
The timing of Ahamed’s book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, could not have been better. The book, which deals with the fallacies of the heads of the central banks of the US, UK, France and Germany betw­een World War I and the Great Depression of the ’30s, came out bang in the middle of the financial crisis of the late 2000s. It had many lessons for the present times, but it seems few were learnt.

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Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
1954; Pages: 256
Lucky Jim, in a way the forerunner of the ‘campus novels’ of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, is renowned as a great comic novel. Jim Dixon, a gauche lower middle-class lecturer of history at a redbrick university, gets into awful scra­pes—setting fire to his bed while smoking, drunkenly delivering a rebellious lecture—and draws the laughs. But Amis goes beyond farcical comedy. Dixon, in his own way, is a radical and, clumsily attacking the moth-eaten Bri­tish class system of cozy privilege.

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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
1856; Pages: 256
Flaubert’s novel is one of the crown jewels of the genre. The tale of a bored and disillusioned housewife taking lovers and coming to a sorry end is gripping, but not unexceptional. But the restrained, yet poetically vivid style, the realistic tre­atment of the country-town environment, and life-like characters we all know. With a cast of characters like Homais, Lheureux and Charles Bovary, Flaubert painted a gallery of the shallow, shabby and vulgar that symbolises the middle-class scratching at life and their thwarted ambitions. At its centre is Mad­ame Bovary, wrapped in dreams, delusions and debt, walking towards the end.

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Making Sense Of Pakistan
Farzana Sheikh
2009; Pages: 274
As Pakistan lurches from crisis to crisis, its woes have been traced to weak civilian rulers, corrupt politicians and most importa­ntly, rule by the self-serving military. Shaikh delves into the very idea of Pakistan, and crucially, the ambivalent role of Islam in it. The country’s problematic relationship with Islam has decisively frustrated its quest for a coherent national identity, she writes. This dithering started with Jinnah himself, as he veered between the idea of a multi-religious secular state and an Islamic one. The nation’s constitution too became a zone of competition, as religious parties pus­hed for greater Islam­isation. The bitter, bloody squabble that we see today der­ives its potency from Pakist­an’s decades of military rule, broken by inte­rmittent spells of dem­ocracy, where each one used Islam to his own end, always decla­iming the so-cal­­led “Islamic purpose of the state”. Yet, there’s eno­ugh in this comp­lex country—a free press, pow­erful judiciary, educa­ted middle class and increasing opposition to jehad—for Sha­ikh to be optimistic about its future.

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Man’s Search For Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
1946; Pages: 184
From the abysmal darkn­ess of the soul that conc­entration camps rep­res­ented, Frankl brought back sustaining life lessons—going bey­ond endurance to create mea­ning, even beauty. The lessons are from Frankl’s distillation, as a trained psychiatrist, of how inmates like him used imagination to transc­end the demoralisation that killed before the labour, the torture and the gas did. Fra­nkl’s dispassionate eye picks out the states of mind of a prisoner in different stages of the interment, the different techniques of survival, to keep hope alive. Contempl­ation in the constant shadow of death leads Frankl to conclude the high truth, “love is the ultimate, the highest goal to which man can aspire”.

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Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
1980; Pages: 647
Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, Salim Sinai’s life is yoked to the history of his country and to others born at that fortuitous moment, with whom he shares a str­ange telepathy and magical gifts. Linguistically rich, formally inventive, this fantastic saga of independent India won Rushdie the Boo­ker, the Booker of Bookers and remains a cult classic.

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One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1970; Pages: 448
The years of rain passed, so did the insomnia plagues, Macondo and the Buendias continued to live, brood, breed, prosper. Six generations of them, in fact, compressed into one magical book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In between, they warred, against the priests, against the foreign banana company, and in that ‘pox of solitude’ with their own illegal loves. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s lyrical, fecund, incestuous book opened up Latin American writing to the western world, pig’s tails, marauding ants and all.

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One Thousand Years Of Annoying The French
Stephen Clarke
2011; Pages: 685
For the insufferable Brits, the French are ‘frogs’, their greatest man merely ‘Boney’; their superiority over the French couched by Crecy, Agin­co­urt and Wat­er­loo, 1066 be damned. Clarke, in an engaging, historically rich and boastfully prejudi­ced book, puts forth the thesis that the English always were open to accepting the French; it’s the latter who have been duplicitous, besi­des being second-best at everything. Clarke’s list of French historical blunders range from the murder of Thomas Becket to the 100 Years War, personalities crucified include Napoleon and De Gaulle. And finally, Brit­ownership of great Fre­nch traditions—like cha­mp­a­gne, guillotine or even the unassailable French cuisine— is claimed. This is history at its most palatable.

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Origins Of The Second World War
A.J.P. Taylor
1961; Pages: 296
That Taylor’s book is a classic is indisputable now, and many generations have grown up with it. But when it first appeared in 1961, it broke new ground and punctured old wisdom too. Peering into Europe’s crisis-ridden two decades that sowed the seeds of another conflict—from Versailles and Locarno to the Saar plebiscite, the Czechoslovakian affair and the final crisis over Dan­zig—Taylor debunks the theory that laid the blame solely on Hitler’s door. He masterfully shows how the origins go back to confusions and intellectual dishonesties of the western, especially Brit­ish, leaders and to the injustices of Ver­s­ailles, and says that Hitler, a master opportunist without a grand blueprint of world domination, acted as any nationalist German politician would do.

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Other Inquisitions
Jorge Luis Borges
1964; Pages: 223
A man so bewilderingly versatile in his labyrinthine short stories and informed by unmatched erudition would naturally gravitate towards non-fiction too. Much of Other Inquisitions, a collection of his essays from 1937-52, have circular arguments woven through them. Borg­es’s prodigious knowledge of everything is apparent from the subject matter: Joyce, P.H. Gosse, John Wilkins’s Analytical Lang­u­age, literary descriptions, Coleridge, Beckford’s Vat­hek, Apollinaire, Wilde, Buddha, Pascal, Kafka, Edw­ard Fitzgerald, Flaub­ert, a history of the Tango. The cerebral metaphysician carries into his non-fiction his other signature property—an extraordinary bre­vity. The book includes such classics as A New Refutation of Time, The Wall and the Books and A History of the Echoes of a Name. “I have always ima­gined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” says Borges. He seems to have arranged his life in like manner.

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Peter Pan
J.M. Barrie
1911; Pages: 267
Barrie’s timeless fantasy play has had its hold over generations of child­ren. Peter, a boy who ran away the day he was born, visits the Darlings and stri­kes up a friendship with their three children, especially Wendy, and teaches them to fly after getting back his shadow, left beh­ind when he had fled with their dog. He takes them to Never Land, a country of lost boys who haven’t grown up and who are protected by a tribe of Red Indians, where a life-and-death contest ensues with the evil pirate gang of Captain Hook. Wendy becomes a mother figure to the boys and Hook is killed in the final fight. Peter takes the Darling children back home, with a promise that Wendy would return once every year to do the spring-cleaning. Peter Pan gave us Never Land, a place where we may escape the artifices of adulthood.

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Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth
1969; Pages: 274
American Jewishness has been put under the fictional scanner before (Bellow, Malamud, Schw­a­rtz), but no one was ready for Roth’s comic-abs­­urd-insulting scream in Port­noy’s Complaint. Alexander Portnoy, his domineering and guilt-inducing mother, wimpish and constipated father, and pious sister are all agents of Portnoy’s guilt, chronic rebellion and reve­nge (through constant masturbation, and as an adult, affairs with thoroughly obj­ectified Gentile women). Indeed, along with the solipsistic and agonising Jewish hero concerned with shvitz, goys and shiksas, Portnoy’s world is sch­long-obsessed, and Roth’s lexicographic explanation is a masterpiece of mischief. Clarity, at last, comes to Portnoy in Israel, with a Jewish girl, who confronts him with the contradictions of his existence. The Yid finds his shetl.

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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
James Joyce
1916; Pages: 329
Stephen Daedalus’s growing consciousness—art­istic, emotional, political—is the stuff of Joyce’s immortal work. Formally and linguistically, it’s a prog­ression from innocent baby-talk to complex half-tones: schoolroom banter, Father Dolan’s cane at Clongowes, temptations of the flesh and inte­nse Catholic remorse for­t­ified by the terrifying ‘Hellfire’ sermon, the seductions and rejection of priesthood, and the formation of Stephen’s artistic credo to encounter ‘the reality of experience’, and to ‘forge the uncreated conscience of his race’. With its hazewrapt Dublin, richly symbolic prose, impressionistic setting and the brilliantly-lit central character, Portrait of an Artist leaves a lasting impact.

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Pride And Prejudice
Jane Austen
1813; Pages: 272
The plot of Austen’s great comedy of manners and sensibilities does not bear to be repeated. It’s made of Mr and Mrs Bin­g­ley, of Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia, of Darcy and Bingley, of Lon­gbourne, Netherfield and Pemberley, of country balls and carriage drives, of pride, prejudice and redem­ption, of rejection and acc­e­ptance of love. But now con­­s­ider this. How does Austen’s novel, published in 1813, with a first draft dated almost to 1796, survive two centuries to remain as fresh and immediate as if it were written yesterday? In the answer to that lies the key to Jane Austen’s genius.

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Psmith In The City
P.G. Wodehouse
1910; Pages: 122
Before Wodehouse crea­ted a long line of unge­n­tlemanly aunts and bum­­bling gentlemen of leisure, he created Psmith—loose and long of limb, animated only by his madcap schemes. In this novel, circumstances force Psmith to don the bowler and take up a banker’s job in Lon­don. He rebels in exhilarating fashion, with close fri­­end Mike always at hand. His adventures in the city is a torrent of timeless fun. It shows that Wodehouse’s world of inspired madness has a lunatic logic of its own.

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Raag Darbari
Sri Lal Shukla
1968; Pages: 334
Perhaps the greatest state-of-the-nation novel to have come out of north India, Raag Darbari, as suggested by its name, is a measured, melancholy look at the Hindi heartland after two decades of Nehruvian idealism. The premise is a well-tested one: an outsider’s view of a well-structured society. The Uttar Pradesh village of Shivpalganj is scrutini­sed by an educated, idealistic young man, Ranga­nath, who spends six months in the house of his uncle, Vaidji, an influential and dishonest power-broker. Shukla’s unsparing critical eye satirises every level of this smallest unit of society—the economy, education, social structures, the pol­itics, nothing escapes. Needless to say, the rot that Shukla laid bare in his celebrated work is there for all of us to see even today, if we choose to look.

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Savaging The Civilised: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals And India
Ramachandra Guha
1999; Pages: 416
This Englishman who worked in India in the 1930s was many things: anthropologist, social worker, evangelist, Gandhian, politician, social activist, writer and commentator but he is most remembered for his work with the tribals—first in Central India, specifically on the Gonds and Baigas, and later after Indep­end­ence in the Northeast. Guha’s book brought the limelight back on Elwin amid some controversy about Elwin’s description of free sex and the hedonistic attitude of the tribals.

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Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure Of Humanity In Rwanda
Lt Gen Romeo Dallaire
2003; Pages: 592
There have been many books and documentaries on the genocide in Rwanda, but French-Can­adian Lt Gen Dallaire’s is unique and particularly heart-rending because it’s by a man who was on the forefront of it as the United Nation’s force commander in 1994 during the horrific period of Rwanda’s history. The force did help save thousands of lives but also had to stand helplessly and watch Hutu terrorists massacre many more Tutsi people. A compelling and traumatic account of a war by an armyman.

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Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
1962; Pages: 378
Few ‘isms’ have a truly great source book. Modern environmentalism though has Silent Spring. Emerging in 1962, amidst the boom years of econo­mic progress, degradation of the environment was far from everyone’s mind. Carson’s long concern for the deleterious, often fatal consequences of using chemical pesticides, especially aerial spraying and other uses of DDT, led to years of research, and the unearthing of hundreds of cases of poisoning in humans and animals and a definitive establishment of pesticide carcinogenesis. Carson’s revolutionary achievement was to show the general public, with particular moral force, how pesticides—essentially poison—killed germs, but also entered the food chain, threatened birds and fish and ultimately humans. In her warning to humankind about the dangers of poisoning nature which would, inevitably, poison us, Carson not only pioneered modern conservation and ecology but laid the path on which others would follow.

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The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
1962; Pages: 884
Lover of the Levant and the Near East and one of the most celebrated men of letters in the mid-20th century, Durrell’s Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea was termed an “investigation of modern love”. Mid-century Alexandria, in its perfumed decadence and shadowed by its cosmopolitan history, is evoked in classically allusive and sensuous prose through a rich cast of characters—the vibrant, diva-like Justine, her lover and the narrator Darley, prince Nessim, Scobie, the artist Clea and the insightful Balthazar—and a sprinkling of Cavafy’s poems. The four novels are also unified—Justine expl­ains Balthazar on one level, while Clea explains it at another, deeper level, and Mount­olive keeps time moving.

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The Arabian Nights
1706
Full of magic and fantasy, valour and romance, ribaldry and eroticism, tales from the One Thousand and One Nights is something that everyone has read in some form or the other. The orally transmitted Arabic tales were popular as early as the 10th century, and through centuries of accretion and framing, gained their current form around 1450, when some of them were known in Europe. Since then, the jealous sultan Shahryar and his resourceful young wife Shahrzade have become a staple of story-telling. The first European translation was the French one by Anto­ine Galland (1704-17) and distinguished English ones include one by Richard Bur­ton. The Arabian Nights—with stories such as Ali Baba, Aladdin and Sinbad the Sai­lor—is an important cultural artifact, and played a role in forming western assumptions of the “exotic east”.

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The Baburnama 
Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur
1529; Pages: 446
Of all potentates who ever took up a pen—Caesar’s campaigns and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations spring to mind—Babar holds a special distinction, for his Baburnama is the only true autobiography from the medieval Islamic world. “In the month of Ramadan of the year 899 and in the twelfth year of my age, I became ruler in the country of Ferghana,” says Babar in the opening sentence. It ends in mid-sentence in September 1529, a year before his death. Written in Chagatai (later translated into Persian), Babar tells of his struggle to defend his throne, his early failures, the move and consolidation in Kabul and his famous foray into India. But Baburnama is perhaps more famous for the emperor’s lyrical observations of new lands, people, flora and fauna, cities with their distinctive architecture, and music and literature. Lover of the fruits, wines, poetry and gardens of central Asia, Babar found India “as a place of little charm”. In wealth of detail, Baburnama remains one of the most significant royal memoirs of all time.

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The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting
Milan Kundera
1979; Pages: 320
Like many 20th century novels, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting aspires to being many things—memoir, philosophy, political tract, erotic speculation and fantasy. Moreover, the personal in Kundera is also the political. It starts from the notorious airbrushing of Communist leader Klement Gottwald in 1952, and plunges into 1971, in Mirek’s life, who says, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Kundera’s fragmentary, seven-part structure allows him to explore his great theme—the public ironies and private tragedies (soaked in litost, “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self”) of post-war Czech history. Magic impinges when Kundera comes across the Communist poet Paul Eluard dancing on a street in a ring of people, mouthing a poem, as the group takes off and floats in the sky. It is a circle of Communist exclusivity and self-deception that is happy to forsake dissidents like the author. As such, to the reader, the airborne circle remains rooted to the ground of realism. Only a great novel can achieve that.

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The Communist ManifestoKarl Marx & Friedrich Engels
1848; Pages: 287
The Communist Manifesto famously starts with the lines “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, and ends in the celebrated clarion call: “Working men of all countries, Unite!” In the intervening 12,000 words, Marx and Engels lay bare their understanding of society and their prediction for it—history stretching back to antiquity and towards the future, its internal mechanism a conflict between rulers and the ‘proletariat’, spanning ancient, feudal, early modern, modern economies, each society pummelled by the ructions of ever-changing ‘modes of production’ and exchange, throwing up new superior classes. The modern world of rapid industrialisation is the age of bourgeois dominance, says Marx, and would in the end, through the system of natural competitive materialism (‘dialectical materialism’), lead to a glorious future—socialism and rule of the proletariat. One of the most influential books ever, this purportedly ‘scientific’ text took on the role of a holy book, with millions counting Com­m­unism as their creed. Communism might have been on the wane everywhere, but in an unequal world of continuing capitalistic exploitation of both humans and their environment, the Manifesto has continued relevance.

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The Dark Valley: A Panorama Of The 1930s 
Piers Brendon
2000; Pages: 701
It is the ’30s, experts say, that created the framework of world politics that we see to this day. The decade’s early years were spent cowering before an unprecedented economic depression, which itself fanned the fire of totalitarian regimes in three European states. But the ’30s were also a time of bourgeois comfort, with mass-produced cars and home appliances changing middle-class lives forever. Though criticised for overly blaming the tribulations of the Depression for the rise of Fascism, Brendon’s lavishly detailed account of the innards of the decade, including personal lives, is wonderful history.

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The Diary Of A Young Girl 
Anne Frank
1952; Pages: 360

“I should like to call you all by name,
  But they have lost the lists.”

— Anna Akhmatova

The six million victims of the Holocaust are usually voiceless. This diary (of a period covering 1942-44) of a German Jewish girl hiding with her family in Amsterdam stands for the faceless dead. Written to a series of imaginary friends, Anne pours her heart out over everyday situations of domestic want, conversation and personal equations in their stifling hideout. She conveys the first stirrings of adolescence too. Signifi­cantly, Anne drafted and rewrote sections of her initial diary in order to preserve it for posterity, as if egged on by a dire presentiment. For the reader, living vicariously, yet authentically, in hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland, the rude shock comes with the sudden cessation of the entries.

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The End Of Nature 
Bill McKibben
1989; Pages: 224
McKibben’s ominous title points to man’s tinkering with the earth’s natural processes that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and nature’s revenge through the vagaries of global warming—unpredictable weather patterns and natural disasters of increasing ferocity and frequency. McKibben shows the tight links our speedily multiplying species has with processes harmful to nature—everything from cars, houses, pesticides (thus, through food), infrastructure. In his plea that we take a less dominant relation to nature and make a ‘humbler world’, McKibben eschews easy solutions for more practical ones—an internationa­lly-agreed and ‘managed world’ with cautious control of climate, genetics and ecology.

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The Female Eunuch 
Germaine Greer
1970; Pages: 432
Greer’s 1970 work is one of the seminal texts of feminism and is read, discussed, criticised and enjoys fervent partisanship to this day. Through a furious fusillade of logic, polemic, scholarship and a willingness to speak of the dirty and embarrassing, Greer talks of the sexual submission of women through history, and agrees that modern, consumerist society, through its patriarchal politics, mores and cultural products, tries to perpetuate it. Written at a time when relatively fewer professions were open to women, Greer’s book is a howl of protest as well as an appeal to women to do their part in being truly liberated—economically as well as sexually.  For this, she says, accepted norms would have to be ruthlessly challenged—marriage, the nuclear family, the obligation to breed.

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The Fire Next Time 
James Baldwin
1963; Pages: 128
Racial discrimination (or the ‘Negro problem’ as Baldwin bruisingly calls it) has often been approached through memoir and fiction (including by Baldwin in his famous first novel). In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin tackles it head-on. Drawing from his experiences of growing up Black in Harlem, he delivers an angry indictment on America: “The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.” Yet, in spite of the bitter despair he feels, Baldwin is hopeful for the future: “to end the racial nightmare”. In his second essay, Baldwin deems the Church to have failed Blacks miserably, to have been another instrument of white supremacy, and to have acted with “unmitigated arrogance and cruelty”. Finally, however angry he may be, Baldwin tempers his anger with a genuine hope of reconciliation and rejects violence in favour of a moral regeneration.

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The Go-Between 
L.P. Hartley
1953; Pages: 336
The Go-Between derives its wistful charm from its presentation of an adolescent’s view of being an unwitting “postman” for an upper-class friend’s sister, Marian, and her lover, a farmer, during a visit to the countryside Brandham Hall in turn-of-the-century England. Everything is imbued with a magical, translucent stillness that draws the narrator, Leo Colston, now well past middle age, back to the pain of being used and being linked, though at some remove, to the suicide of the lover, Ted Burghess. It opens with the indelible ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, and ends with an aged Marian asking Leo to again take a message—to the son of her child with Ted.

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The God Of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
1997; Pages: 321
“Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a tea bag”, wrote Arundhati Roy and set a new tone, rhythm and cadence in Indian writing in English. The Booker winner follows the lives of twins Rahel and Esthappen in Ayamanam, with its Love Laws, pickle factories and Capital Letters. Roy went on to become a social activist and is a powerful voice against big dams, nuclear power stations and big money. She has written extensively and movingly about the exploitation of the marginalised, taken on Gandhi on his attitude towards the caste system, saving the environment and has been a refreshing anti-establishment voice. But when do we see the next novel, Ms Roy?

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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925; Pages: 180
The drama that engulfs the lives of Nick Carraway, Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby not just only captures the Jazz Age in all its tinny glitter, this transcendentally great modern novel deals with the universal—the naive-cynical onlooker, the unhappy rich, the ferocious climber and, most of all, the persistence of desire. The expensive new toys and posh accents, the giant advertising hoarding on the freeway, the Saturday night high jinks and that green light winking at the end of Daisy’s pier stand forever for a certain innocent immersion into an age of excess.

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The Guns Of August
Barbara W. Tuchman
1962; Pages: 511
Tuchman’s 1962 history of the first month of the First World War doesn’t just recount the pulsating month of July 1914 when the lamps were put out and Europe went to war. She describes on the one hand the inexorable progress of the German Schlieffen Plan till it was stopped at the gates of Paris at Marne, and on the other the decimation of an entire Russian army in Tannenberg in East Prussia by the Germans under the redoubtable Hindenburg-Ludendorff duo. Tuchman’s adroit weaving of the tactical with the personal makes this a model of narrative military history.

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The Idea Of Justice
Amartya Sen
2009; Pages: 304
There was some argument among the jury whether to have this or Sen’s later book in the list and Idea of Justice won for being more original and thought-provoking. It’s largely a critique of American economist and philosopher John Rawls’s The Theory of Justice, upholding some of his ruminations and debunking others. The Economist said The Idea of Justice is “a feast, though perhaps not one to be consumed at a single sitting”.

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The Left Hand Of Darkness 
Ursula K. Le Guin
1969; Pages: 286
Lists such as this scarcely consider the special pleasures of science fiction, unless convincingly set in a future world of dystopia. It is set in the fictional Hainish universe and interplanetary collaboration and expansion, and among the inhabitants of the planet Winter who are physically and emotionally ‘ambisexual’. Le Guin’s achievement is to present a fully realised world in great vividness and imaginary possibility. This is one of the classics of the genre.

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The Leopard 
Giuseppe Tomasi
Di Lampedusa
1958; Pages: 330
The Leopard is one of literature’s great novels of decline and decay and as such—like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard and Roth’s Radetzky March—is infused with a charming melancholy. Set in mid-19th century Sicily, its tale is that of an aristocratic, pastoral society torn apart by revolution, death and decay. Its main characters—Don Fabrizio, prince of Salina— struggle against the drastic changes that the Risorgimento heralded, and which would be the death of a patrician way of life. In its recreation—in all its warts and absurdities—of an old existence, The Leopard remains unsurpassed. Guiseppe, the impoverished and despondent last prince of Lampedusa, dreamt of this novel, based on one of his ancestors, all his life. He died within a few months of its being published.

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The Mahabharata 
Veda Vyasa
India’s greatest epic is not just the story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas that culminates in devastating warfare and blood feud. It hosts a bewilderingly rich store of stories and characters in its capacious body—some its own, many woven in from the myths that predated it. Philosophically and psychologically acute, there runs a vein of the moral, amoral and the morally complex through it.

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The Master And Margarita 
Mikhail Bulgakov
1967; Pages: 360
On a hot spring day, the Devil, aka Woland, app­ears in the godless Moscow of the 1930s. His retinue includes a grotesque valet and an enormous, vodka- swilling cat. Their primary target is the Soviet writers’ community which, through the ensuing bedlam brought on by witchcraft and black magic, is shown up at its soulless, shifty, hypocritical self. But the visitors from the netherworld also bring relief to an author in despair (like Bulgakov himself)—the Master and his devoted mistress Margarita. Woland’s depiction and discussion about Jerusalem in the time of Pontius Pilate ties up with the subject of the Master’s novel. Bulgakov serves up an intricate, exuberant extravaganza, richly parodic and profound in its light-hearted philosophic erudition. An attack on stony bureaucracy at many levels, this is a modernist masterpiece.

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The Moral Animal 
Robert Wright
1994; Pages: 496
Natural selection does explain much of our species’ physical habits; the forces of evolution impel us to behave as social animals. But are our moral choices—loyalty, love, commitment to principles, resistance to evil—also an evolutionary impulse? In this popular and path-breaking book, Wright explains the riddles of moral psychology in the light of Darwinism. The practices of love (parental, filial, erotic), courtship, care-giving—each is discussed threadbare, and Wright argues that morality is designed to maximise genetic self-interest. This witty book offers one more delight—it examines the life of Darwin, and examines it vis-a-vis the topic under discussion, in the light of Darwinian psychology.

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The Remains Of The Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
1989; Pages: 245
Ishiguro’s Booker-winner is a quintessential English book—set primarily in the 1930s in a stately English home, once the seat of Lord Darlington, and told entirely from the point of view of the ageing butler Stevens, who recounts the great days of the house from the vantage point of 1956. Ishiguro’s great merit is to impart the stiffly formal style of the gentleman’s gentleman—bereft of wit or flourish—a curiously moving tone. Its significance also lies in the inadequacy in conveying what it describes—especially momentous negotiations revolving around the political crisis—through the hedgings and omissions of its singularly unreliable narrator. Ishiguro the novelist has chosen a handicap and made a triumph of it.

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The Sandman Series
Neil Gaiman
1996- Present
Neil Gaiman already had a wunderkind reputation after Black Orchid when DC Comics gave him the all-clear to develop the Sandman series. The result was the Endless family, a dream cast (sic!) with Dream aka Morpheus the hero and his siblings Death, Destiny, Despair, Delirium (who was once Delight) etc who are each lord of their realm. And as big bang ideas go, the first story starts with a ‘coven of wizards’ plotting to end Death, but who end up capturing Dream instead.  Storylines in later books bring in little sister Delirium, missing brother Destruction and did we mention Lucifer locking the gates of hell and handing the keys to Dream? The Sandman series wasn’t just a breath of fresh oxygen that revived DC but also was the start of the great reawakening of the graphic novel.  The series ran for 75 issues from 1989-96, after which Gaiman and Sandman called it quits. The spinoffs continue.

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The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
1976; Pages: 224
Dawkins, a diehard rationalist-atheist, mustn’t be too happy that most of the attention this path-breaking book has attracted comes from the pathetic fallacy in its title. The big idea, simplistically stated, no doubt to the author’s annoyance, is that every gene pushes in a direction that ensures its own survival through maximal replication, damn the organism (species or individual) it’s part of. This is Darwinian evolution at the genetic-molecular level. Despite the easy writing style, understanding the book and Dawkins’s extrapolation of the idea to the propagation of useful ‘memes’ could take more than a couple of readings.

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The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
1988; Pages: 246
Ghosh’s Sahitya Akademi-winning novel speaks of the blurring of boundaries—between memory and forgetting, togetherness and separation, and love and loss. Like Rushdie and Seth, the setting is the momentous years before and after Partition, following the fortunes of the Datta Chaudhuris, specifically the narrator Tridib and the family’s grandmother. The lines of the plot move from Dhaka, Calcutta and London, in a progression of quietude, unrest, tragedy and reconciliation. Bengal’s Partition, and its cost, has rarely been told better in English fiction.

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The Siege: The Attack On The Taj
Cathy Scott-Clarke and Adrian Levy
2013; Pages: 344
It’s that rare non-fiction page-turner. It’s about an event that’s etched in our minds very clearly, it would seem the TV coverage and news stories of those four days didn’t leave anything more to be said about the 26/11 attack but British journalists Cathy and Adrian dig up such detail and nuance that the reader is left in a daze. Open the book and you can’t put it down before you’ve read the last page.

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The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914
Christopher Clark
2012; Pages: 736
It’s rare in the constantly ploughed field of ww-i scholarship that a new book immediately acquires classic status. That seems to be the case with Sleepwalkers. Clarke’s magisterial account of the pre-war years’ continental politics expertly explodes myths that have endured for a century. For example, he debunks the theory of the inevitability of war between two armed camps of European nations, and reveals levels of mistrust between allies on both sides, so much so that, in the summer of 1914, Britain had contemplated dropping Russia and seeking an understanding with Germany.

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The Sonnets Of Orpheus And The Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke
1996; Pages: 224
Rilke spent much of his life as an unattached wanderer and traveller—in Russia, Italy, Germany and Paris. While the poems of Heine, steeped in folklorish wit, were an early influence, he developed a highly personal style soon after. His use of nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns, of everyday words in highly lyrical context, of abstraction in concrete senses, provides a vantage point suited to the probings of his existence. In Duino Elegies and The Sonnets of Orpheus (1923), his late, great works, he aspires to “find, in art, a way to transform the emptiness, the radical deficiency of human longing into something else”. Authentic experiences are exasperating: “Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s/curtain?” The mercantile world is often repellent:“For adults only/there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,/right there on stage, monkey’s genitals, nothing concealed...” Yet he is also witty: “Squares, oh square in Paris, infinite showplace/ where the milliner Madame Lamort/ twists and winds the restless paths of the earth...”; and tender and loving: “Call me to the one among your moments/that stands aginst you, ineluctably: / intimate as a dog’s imploring glance/ but, again, forever, turned away....”

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The Story Of My Experiments With Truth
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
1927; Pages: 528
Mahatma Gandhi’s celebrated autobiography covers his remarkable life till 1921. In it Gandhi recounts incidents from his childhood, early influences, his marriage at 13, death of his father, his years as a lawyer in South Africa, his struggle against discriminatory practices against Indians, his return and the start of the great phase of political agitation using the method of non-violence and Satyagraha. The ‘experiments’ in the title referred to the moral and the spiritual, as well as the political. One might agree or not with Gandhi’s political methods, but has to marvel at his introspective nature and fidelity to truth.

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The Stranger
Albert Camus
1942; Pages: 123
The Outsider has for long borne the burden of a great existential novel. Does not Meurseult’s terrifying indifference to guilt and mortality stand for the absurdity, the emptiness of high-minded lip-service in a morally corrupt mid-20th century? But Camus’s novel is also a plea for total honesty and self-absorption in a world of half-tones and adulterated feelings. Meurseult is misunderstood and mistaken for a monster because he stands close to “the tender indifference of the world”, because this immensely perceptive person (how acutely he understands other’ motives!) wouldn’t play the game of self-preservation.

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The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass
1959; Pages: 576
Like his compatriot Heinrich Boll, much of Grass’s work is an examination of his country’s darkest episode and a quest for an answer to the question: How was it that an entire generation of 30 million people was seduced by the evil of Nazism? In the Tin Drum, he takes recourse to the fantastic and the inexplicable. Memoir, allegory and Bildungsroman rolled in one, it tells the story of the ugly, dwarfish Oskar Matzerath in Danzig, and that of greater Germany. In Oskar’s personal choice not to grow, in the dissonant banging of the titular drum is a raucous cry of protest against the crazed 20th century, its concern with only the profit motive and its deadly political pustules.

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The Valley Of Death: The Tragedy At Dien Bien Phu That Led America Into The Vietnam War
Ted Morgan
2010; Pages: 752
Sixty years ago, the French empire in Southeast Asia was reduced to a pulp in the floodplain of Dien Bien Phu—where a 10,000-strong French garrison was ground to dust in siege warfare of horrific proportions. Morgan depicts the war in blood-and-guts luridness—the astonishing bravery of the garrison in the face of doom; the amazing resilience of the Vietminh, and Gen Vo Nguyen Giap’s willingness to take great casualties. He intersperses this with the great powers’ conference at Geneva to resolve the issue and answers the riddle of what led the US, a ringside viewer of the French debacle and delusion, to wade into the quagmire presided over by Ho Chi Minh’s men of wire. Morgan, a Frenchman who fought in Algeria, knew a colonial war first-hand; his tale of American hubris remains a classic.

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The Voyage Of The Beagle
Charles Darwin
1839; Pages: 448
Charles Darwin shocked Victorian society by suggesting that humans and apes shared common ancestry and triggered a seismic shift not only in politics, art, literature and society but in the very mental make-up of modern man. The voyage of the HMS Beagle (1831-36) half-way across the globe to the South Americas and the Pacific gave him an unprecedented opportunity to examine unspoilt tropical forests, grasslands, exotic animals and birds and scores of fossils. In 1835, on the voyage back home, he visited the Galapagos islands and noted the mockingbirds that were to play a crucial role in his theory of evolution through natural selection. The book he wrote on his return is a classic; a happy marriage of natural science and adventure hasn’t been made.

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The War Of The End Of The World
Mario Vargas Llosa
1981; Pages: 568
Some nations and certain times  are more ‘epic’ than others—the ancient world, for example, or 19th century Russia with its vast interiors. The Peruvian Llosa’s millenarian tale is set in the backlands of Brazil’s Bahia state in 1897—a time of optimism for the new republic and for millions of its Blacks just freed from slavery. The story is about the mysterious spiritual leader Antonio Conselheiro, or the Counsellor, and his complete sway over the masses, whom he ignites with his anti-republic, ultra-orthodox-Catholic rants. The stage is set for a showdown between mystical orthodoxy and the combined power of the Church and the state. Llosa’s vast novel points at the truth behind revolutionary zeal at all ages, and recapitulates its eternal and elemental struggle with the establishment.

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These Old Shades
Georgette Heyer
1926; Pages: 352
Georgette Heyer is a genre in herself. This Janeite sometimes surpassed her mentor, some readers feel: her historical romances are so well-res­earched that they serve as definitive documentary of the period she sets her stories in. She was highly prolific, writing a thriller and a romance each year, finishing with 48 books in all. These Old Shades, an early work which became an instant hit, follows the fortunes of Justin Alistair, the Duke of Avon and Leon Bonnard, a Paris urchin who becomes his page. But Heyer never gained the adoration Austen did.

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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
1958; Pages: 148
One of the foundational texts of post-colonial literature, Achebe’s novel is set amongst Nigeria’s Igbo people—inheritors of a proud and ancient culture, and describes, in dry, deceptively simple language, the tale of the strong, wilful head of the clan Okonkwo’s rise, overweening pride and fall. The prime agent in his misfortune: ruthless western missionaries. Achebe’s cycle of class warfare and tournaments, premium on honour, sacrificial killing, exile and disillusionment and the importance of pre-ordained fate is all rooted in Igbo culture. But there are parallels to the Greek tragedies. What sets Achebe’s tale apart is his dispassionate portrayal of the destruction of an ancient way of life by European civilisation. In that, Things Fall Apart is a refutation of the white man’s burden, while using his own cultural tools.

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Thirukkural
Thiruvalluvar
Akara Mudhala Ezhuththellaam Aadhi Pakavan Mudhatre Ulaku, the first of 1,330 couplets in Tamil, written about 2,300 years ago by the poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, roughly translates to: As Aa is the first of letter of all languages, eternal God is the first of all living beings. These timeless couplets give insights into the human condition with wit and rhyme.

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To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee
1960; Pages: 324
Race, a horrible miscarriage of justice and the warmth of childhood in the American Deep South of the 1930s—alive in memory with romance as well as horror—is the subject of Lee. Jem, Scout and Atticus Finch, ‘Boo’ Radley, Dill, Tom Robinson and others are players in a drama, ultimately, about friendship, integrity and dignity in the face of disappointment. A classic forever, Mocking­bird is also a stepping stone to the more complex handling of ‘race’ in the works of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

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Train To Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
1956; Pages: 181
Partition is seared in the nation’s consciousness, especially in Punjab and Bengal. Singh places his story in the Sikh-Muslim village of Mano Majra, on the border with Pakistan, and describes in prose of simple beauty the descent of a peaceful community into hatred, brutality and chaos. Singh particularly spends energy on recreating the ecosystem of half-truths, rumours and the new ideology of nationalism that fed and fanned communal terror. Partition has been well-served by Bhasha literature. In English, its depiction in Train to Pakistan is unsurpassed.

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Twilight In Delhi
Ahmed Ali
1940; Pages: 304
E.M. Forster described this 1940 novel calling for a free India “new and fascinating­—poetic and brutal, delightful and callous”. Ahmed Ali and his friends wrote the collection of short stories Angaarey in Urdu, which was banned by the British for being inflammatory. There were two translations of this collection in English this year, incredibly, for the first time since its publication in 1932.  Twilight in Delhi is one of the first books of that time to be written in English and published in London. Ali, one of the founders of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Movement, moved to Pakistan in 1948 and was its first envoy to China.

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War And Peace
Leo Tolstoy
1869; Pages: 1296
Tolstoy’s amphitheat­rical sweep of impe­r­ial Russia during the Napoleanic invasion intertwines the lives of the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and countless other characters, memorably limned only as the great master could. Plodding through it all, and participating in it, is the corpulent, bumbling Pierre Bezhukov, reminiscent of the author, now dissolute, now saintly, always human. Tolstoy’s clear and passionate vision captures inscapes and landscapes, joy, tragedy, humour, guilt, indeed every facet of life, using, as he once boasted, every rhetorical device of the Latin grammarians.

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Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
2009; Pages: 672
The epitaph ‘the greatest living novelis’ is often used to describe many writers but perhaps the superlative suits Mantel the most in the present crop practicing the art of the novel in the English language—she is a consummate wordsmith who takes the reader along with her in her adventures and it feels as if both are meeting the characters and exploring the places together. Wolf Hall, a historical novel on the fictional Thomas Cromwell family, a politician in Henry VII’s court, is part of a trilogy, the second of which is Bring Up The Bodies. Both the books have won the Booker Prize.