A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Tawang

Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Trans. Arunava Sinha) (2018), On a Truck Alone to McMahon, Oxford University Press, New Delhi

A great way to begin this year is to embark on this journey with the inimitable Nabaneeta Dev-Sen to the edge of imagination! Prof Dev-Sen, who recently passed away, was a prolific author of eighty books (written in Bengali), poet, public intellectual and a much-loved teacher. It was only in 2018, that her widely-read travelogue originally published in 1984 in Bengali was translated into English. I must acknowledge the terrific editorial work done by Dr. Mini Krishnan of Oxford University Press (India), under whose discerning eye and able guidance, some of the amazing writers in regional languages in India have been made accessible in English. So, I grabbed a copy and happily jumped into the dizzying ride of pure impulse and spontaneity with one of the funniest adventurers I have ever had the pleasure to read!

Edgy Ride

Armed with a double masters and a doctorate, a young Nabaneeta is invited to a literary conference in Assam in the North Eastern part of India. The absent-minded professor is at her goofiest best from the word go! She boards the wrong flight just in time to make it to the right one. She goes off on a wildlife safari as monsoon rages and fellow academics dig into warm comforts. She sets off to Tawang, literally the edge of India, alone and without a travel plan, hitch hiking her way up the mountains. We fear on her behalf, only to be outwitted by her gift of the gab that pulls her out of every sticky wicket.

On her way to Tawang, the narrator meets seedy truck drivers who give her a ride up the hills and puritanical bureaucrats who share their cottages over-night for rest. She makes friends with nuns in a Buddhist monastery and understands how pragmatism rules the decision to join religious order in the high mountains.  She learns to live with shepherd families, sipping yak tea, unperturbed by the gaping language barrier that makes conversation impossible. The first Buddhist gompa (temple) she reverently visits ends up being a fan house dedicated to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in the middle of nowhere.

Spirited and Spiritual

Tawang is a place of pilgrimage thoughtfully planned by visitors from all over the world. In this book, the subversion of accidental journey to a spiritual centre is a perfect foil devised by the author to reveal something more profound as the book unfolds. Soon enough, Tawang becomes a pathway to transient comradeship and compassion between people who are as different as they can possibly be. Through this journey, the narrator and the unwilling fellow-travelers jump hoops, break walls and bend mountains to open their homes and hearts to a stranger.

As the journey closes and the last glimpse of the gompa fades out, we realize that all along, it was a spiritual journey in the truest sense of the term. Tawang stands for love, loss and longing and this impulsive solitary adventure was a way to pick pieces of life and start all over again. And that is why this book is the perfect way to begin a year, start all over again, pick up pieces, grieve for what is lost and embrace what is to come.

I wish you the warmth and comfort of books the year around! We made it to a new decade, fellow travelers!

Delhi and the Dark Arts

Elizabeth Chatterjee (2013) 

Delhi Mostly Harmless: One Woman’s Vision 
of the City 

Random House India, pp. 283

I began the year reading Liz Chatterjee’s portrait of Delhi based on the one year she spent collecting data as a doctoral student of the University of Oxford. There are many portraits of modern Delhi, beginning with the elegy written evocatively for the older courtly Delhi in 1940 (Twilight in Delhi by Ahmad Ali), to the modern project in the making that Delhi has become in the recent decades penned by academics (Unsettling Memories by anthropologist Emma Tarlo). My personal favourite books are those by that incorrigible breed of Flâneurs (City of Djinns by William Dalrymple) and novelists (Midnight’s Children and The White Tiger). There is also the attempt to know Delhi through its people (Capital by Rana Dasgupta) or visuals (Delhi: The Making of the City by Malavika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee).

Liz Chatterjee is part flâneur and part anthropologist. Her memory of the city, its people, and its stories come out not in anecdotes or metaphors but as disjointed parts of a person. She literally senses the city around her and her chapters are arranged in anatomical terms- eyes, noses, hearts, veins and so on. And sometimes she gropes the pragmatic old lady Dilli followed by rubbing shoulders off the new city of Delhi. The savvy that carries an Indian along, part oblivious and part accommodative to the paradoxes and contradictions of any part of India she resides in-with  boisterous openness to outsiders and cold conservatism that builds hierarchy, the invisible ropes of high morals and low traps of indignity, can be mind boggling.

The usual dilemmas of finding a safe perch, making friends, settling into a routine in a new city is there; but what makes Liz’s story poignant is the solitude of a researcher, a foreigner, a non-Delhite- who is both an insider and outsider to the story. Liz is an enterprising raconteur and this comes out best in her uncanny ability to get her analysis right- she calls jugaad, the dark art that requires ingenuity to fix things, to have savoir-faire and not such technical skills. She is blunt and direct when describing the hundred indignities a woman goes through in private and public space, some very specific to the city. Through every difficult experience, what remains intact is her sense of humour.

What make her book delightful are those parts where she tries to preserve the experience of being with someone who is hardly likeable. She uses her sense of olfaction to store a million things that is worth a thousand words or photographs of the city she has lived in for a year. In one of my favourite parts of the book, she says, of the faint coconut oil that scents a woman’s hair, to the stink of stolen cigarettes, the mixture of sweat and cheap cologne and names a number of such things that made this story her own, ending with the glorious fragrance of burnt flat in the first rain of the season. Then she finds the right words for such a nose for nostalgia- manvasanai in Tamil and petrichor in English for describing the Greeks God’s blood through the veins of rock.

And in the end, she concludes, ‘Delhi, the delirious city, city of the tense present, future imperfect’. Comparing her across the globe, New York  may be a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo, Berlin a wicked uncle and London an old lady- Delhi looks like an ageing Tsarina- ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid and like all grandes dames, jingles with theatricality, bling and the so –bad-it’s-good.  At the same time, the modern city of Delhi, built for rulers and administrators,   is a sophisticated cougar, modelling herself to the twenty first century with overconfidence and attempts at self assertion of an adolescent. This duality of a theatrical old-hand who has witnessed human history and a restless adolescent trying to seek attention and assert her presence, makes the city difficult to like or understand but hard to ignore.

A Veritable Kaleidoscope

An Economist’s Miscellany, 2011, KaushikBasu, OUP, 240 pages

Kaushik Basu is that rare being- an economist with the flourish of a litterateur. As a professor of Economics at Cornell University, former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India and presently the senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, he has adorned many roles. In each of his passing act, he has left an indelible mark of individuality and impression. After a long series of serious academic work and popular essays for the common reader, this book comes as a potpourri of the many threads Basu holds close to his heart.

This book is a delightful mix of the various interests in Basu’s life that spans economics, sociology, art, literature and philosophy. It has essays on an array of fields of academics, musings on everyday life, travel memoirs and impressions, translation of two classic Bengali short stories from the nineteenth century, introduction to two engaging games created by the author and even a play set in an academic world! In its scope and diversity, this volume transcends genres and its lightness and brevity, it excites the reader to foray into a number of worlds held together by Basu’s wide interests and inimitable humour. Written at a juncture in life when he was moving from his comfort zone of academics (with a fairly predictable routine) to the mind boggling world of policy making as he took up the challenging job of Chief Economic Advisor, this book also offers a unique glimpse into his inner world including the many surpirses that he encountered, his apprehensions, hope and expectations.

Reinventing the world around

Basu delivers on his usual cocktail of  political economy, foreign affairs,  trade and economics obliquely shedding light on the inner world and workings of professional economists and researchers. ‘Philosophy has to be deductive, poetry romantic, plays and fiction humorous, and politics intriguing if they are to catch my attention,' remarks the author as he prepares to lead us into the book. This is a presage of things to come since the book is a veritable kaleidoscope of crossing boundaries among different sketches of life Basu paints in his vast canvas.

He begins a section with essays and commentaries on the contemporary world including a comparison between China and the emerging India. After a few delightful essays covering some of his work, he moves on to draw personalities like AmartyaSen and Paul Samuelson with a few deft strokes. There are anecdotes and tales about ‘personnages’ that Basu has come across in far away land. What I enjoyed the best are the travel memoirs, including the one in which the author uses the logic of game theory to nab a pickpocket on the streets of Europe. Witty and eloquent, these stories reveal economists as a special ‘species’ with a vision of their own, viewing the world and its conundrums differently from others.

An Economist’s Miscellany is a playful book that questions our assumptions about the world and life around though the eyes of a versatile intellect. In disarming generalisations and provoking new thoughts and ideas, it succeeds through a conviviality of making the reader an accomplice and an active partner in discussing and engaging with Basu’s ideas.