Interview with Kishore Mahbubani for Hindustan Times

Saaz: Your childhood was marked by hardship, malnutrition, and poverty. You’ve spoken of the strength and skills this gave you – how did you develop them? As a diplomat, what solutions would you suggest for helping children in similar situations?

Kishore: Since Singapore is now one of the most affluent countries in the world, many Indians are unaware that at independence, Singapore was one of the poorest countries in the world. In 1965, its per capita income was the same as Ghana in Africa: $500. I experienced this poverty personally. I was put on a special feeding programme when I went to school at the age of 6 as I was technically undernourished. Our home had no flush toilet. Debt collectors would come to our house regularly. My father went to jail. Yet, I was able to overcome many of these adversities because I had an unusually strong mother who never broke down under all these pressures. The resilience I developed in my life was a gift from her to me.

One reason why I wrote my memoirs is that I wanted to give hope to young people who may be suffering the same kind of difficult childhood I had experienced. It’s good for young people to understand that people like them have overcome difficult circumstances.

 

Saaz: Your book praises Lee Kuan Yew (who often gave you a tough time) extensively. What measures from his leadership could India adopt for better development?

Kishore: Singapore’s exceptional success as a country was due in large part to three of its exceptional founding fathers: Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee, and S. Rajaratnam. One of the great privileges of my life was getting to know all three of them well. From them, I learnt a lot about how countries could succeed in development. I distilled many of the lessons I learned from them into the acronym “MPH”. In this case, it doesn't stand for “miles per hour” but for “Meritocracy, Pragmatism and Honesty”, which is the secret formula for Singapore's success.

Meritocracy is about choosing the best people to run your organisation, society or country. Lee Kuan Yew was insistent that only the best should be selected to serve in the government.

Pragmatism is about being willing to learn best practices from any source anywhere in the world. Dr Goh Keng Swee once said to me that no matter what problems Singapore encounters, somebody somewhere must already have encountered it. Hence, Singapore should proactively learn lessons from other countries. Dr Goh also pointed out that since Japan was the first Asian country to succeed, Singapore should study Japan carefully if it wanted to succeed as well. India could also learn lessons from Japan's development.

Honesty is about eliminating corruption. This is crucial as trust and stability are essential for an economy to thrive. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest principle to implement.

I believe that any society in the world, including India, would succeed and do well if it implemented the secret Singapore MPH formula.

 

Saaz: Could you tell us something about the different diplomatic communities you encountered?

Kishore: Walking into the UN headquarters and experiencing a real global village of representatives from 159 countries was always a thrill for me. Though we all came from strikingly different cultures and traditions, we were able to forge many close friendships with each other based on our common humanity.

When I joined the UN in 1984, some of my Arabian colleagues declared that I belonged to their tribe because my surname, Mahbubani, comes from an Arabic/Persian word, “mahbub,” which means “beloved.” Most Sindhis are Muslims. Due to my Sindhi roots, I felt some degree of cultural affinity with both the Arab countries and Iran. And since I sported a beard then, I was occasionally mistaken for an Iranian diplomat when I was seen without a tie.

The ambassadors from the five founding member states of ASEAN—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand—came together like comrades in arms to defend our common interests. I also became very close to the African ambassadors, whom I found to be incredibly reliable and trustworthy. If you became friends with them, they would remain steadfast and stick with you through thick and thin.

I also worked with US ambassadors who were polar opposites: Ambassador Vernon Walters was incredibly warm and generous and won many friends for the US, while Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick was harsh and condescending towards the UN community in a bid to win favour with right-wing politicians at home. While American diplomats could be very direct and candid, they could also mingle easily with all nationalities. By contrast, European diplomats seemed to have an irrepressible desire to preach to other countries about human rights issues. I was therefore shocked to witness the incredible evasive skills of the Western diplomats when I chaired the oversight committee of the UN Programme of Action for African Economic Recovery and Development (UNPAAERD). They expertly avoided making any concrete and binding commitments to help the African countries despite the passionate speeches they had given in the UNGA about wanting to do so.

 

Saaz: Please tell us about your visit to Sindh.

Kishore: When Shaukat Aziz, whom I had met in New York and Singapore when he was the Vice President of Citibank, became Prime Minister of Pakistan (2004 to 2007), he invited me to visit Pakistan. I went to Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad and Lahore. It was a fascinating visit. Then Pakistani High Commissioner to Singapore Ambassador Sajjad Ashraf also arranged a special visit to Hyderabad, where my mother had grown up. While my mother was sadly no longer with us, her brother, Mr Jhamatmal Kripalani, was able to draw me a map to their childhood home. Fortunately, we were able to find it.

Since I had grown up listening to stories of how Muslims and Hindus had killed each other during Partition, I expected to encounter hostility in Hyderabad when I went to search for my mother's home. Instead, every Muslim person I met in Pakistan received me very warmly and was delighted to see me. The reception could not have been warmer. I was glad to learn that a lot of the hostility from the Partition days had dissipated.

 

Saaz: As someone who has made Sindhis proud with your exceptional success, please suggest measures by which members of your community could enhance the way they are perceived.

Kishore: Sindhis are a remarkable people. There are very few ethnic groups in the world who have managed to succeed in all corners of the world. The Sindhis are one of them. Having visited most of the major cities in the world, I'm always pleasantly surprised to see members of the Sindhi community thriving and succeeding in all corners of the world. Indeed, I have first cousins in all corners of the world: in Suriname and Guyana in South America, in Texas and Florida in North America, in Ghana and Nigeria in Africa, in Japan and Hong Kong in East Asia, and of course in Mumbai and Kolkata in India. I also have relatives in Europe. The entrepreneurship of the Sindhi community is truly admirable.

In the next chapter of its development, India will have to engage the rest of the world more. Its trade and investment links with other countries will also increase. One of its major assets as it plunges ever more deeply into globalisation will be the strong and successful ethnic Indian communities overseas. Undoubtedly, the Sindhis will rank among some of the most successful Indians overseas. Their contributions should receive greater recognition within India.

 

Saaz: Your advice for young people who wish to follow a career in diplomacy?

Kishore: Diplomacy is one of the best professions in the world to join. Since we live in a small and shrinking world, all countries must now make a major effort to understand other countries and cultures all over the world. And the people who are best placed to do so are diplomats.

As I explain in my memoirs, I had no intentions of staying on in diplomacy, as I wanted to return to academia after graduating. However, I discovered diplomacy to be a more fulfilling profession than academia. I realised that in trying to defend the interests of a small country like Singapore in the international community, I was defending an underdog. Ambassadors from smaller countries have to work harder than ambassadors from larger countries. Fortunately, with the help of reason, logic and charm (as I describe in my memoirs) I managed to succeed in furthering Singapore’s interests in the United Nations and in the ASEAN community.

Golf proved to be very useful. Indeed, one reason why Southeast Asia, the most diverse corner on planet Earth, has had no wars in 50 years is that many of the Southeast Asian diplomats and leaders play golf with each other. This is also a lesson that South Asian countries can learn from Southeast Asian countries: it’s important to invest time in developing personal connections with each other. Trust building and cooperation at the national level is incredibly difficult when there is no warmth or trust on the interpersonal level.

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 This interview was published in Hindustan Times on 30 April 2025.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/kishore-mahbubani-india-will-have-to-engage-the-rest-of-the-world-more-101746012772995.html

Review of My Silk Road by Ram Gidoomal for thewire.in

Book Review: An Intimate Glimpse Into the Life of a Sindhi ‘British Asian Refugee

The most striking – the most intense – experience Ram Gidoomal describes in his memoirs is the feeling that overwhelmed him when he arrived in Bombay at the age of 14. Suddenly, unexpectedly, for the first time in his life, he knew what it felt to fit in. It brought home the paradox of “home” for an immigrant: on one side homesickness for the country of origin, a sense of cultural belonging, allies in appearance, and the freedom from fear these bring. And on the other, the cords of daily life that tie one to the birthplace and local community.

Ram’s family endured the transition from citizen to refugee twice. Displaced both times by political whim, they experienced a harsh wrenching from community, culture, status and education, and were summarily swept from wealth and comfort to situations of continued struggle – twice. Once as refugees when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned and Pakistan was formed, and the second when his family was removed from Kenya. As a teenager he would discover, in immigration queues, that he was an “alien”. And, despite his academic brilliance and significant contribution to early workplaces, he would remain painfully conscious that he was different.

In this book about his life, Gidoomal begins by describing his happy childhood in Kenya, followed by the challenges of adapting to Britain in the late 1960s – unwelcoming, and one where this family with a multinational trading operation begins afresh with a corner shop – and yet an obvious choice for the time.

There are intimate glimpses into a family of large and complex but congenial groups, and the poignancy of family tragedies including the loss of his birth father and then of his father-figure uncle who brought him up; precious memories handed down from the past, including those of links to the lost homeland of Sindh. There are fascinating peeps into business practices and secret codes. Later, during his blissful days with a young family in Switzerland, he was that role-model father who changed his working hours so that he could spend time with his children, returning to office after they went to bed. As the years passed, Ram moved from his life in the corporate world to one centred on social issues and philanthropy, using his business skills to transform others’ lives. His contribution earned him a CBE, Commander of the British Empire, from the Queen of England in 1998.

In between comes a huge, surprising transformation: “By my early twenties, I had lost two fathers but gained a heavenly one in God.”

This wholehearted embracing of Jesus is disconcerting, coming from one whose community sacrificed all they had to escape conversion. As a child in a Sindhi family, Ram grew up Hindu with Sikh influences. At the Aga Khan School in Mombasa, he absorbed Islamic teachings. The choice he later made, with the backdrop of his exceptional intelligence and crystal-clear rationality, resulted from the pull of faith. Succumbing to the warmth of its embrace, he selected a life of devotion to the Church.

Through it all, his Sindhiness remained intact. He writes of his feeling of comfort on reading Matthew chapter 27 verse 59, about Joseph of Arimathea wrapping the body of Jesus in cloth: “The Greek word for this cloth is Sindhon, a cloth from Sindh. A cloth created in my homeland, holding the body of Christ.”

Indeed, the Sindhiness pervades his life: English was the language of instruction but Sindhi was the language his mother spoke to him in, the language the old men swore in, the language he was scolded in. When he fell in love, it was to a highly eligible Sindhi girl – one who, however, was initially forbidden to him as she was of another “caste”. Sunita was from a progressive Amil family, too progressive to consider caste and perhaps just worried about how she would adapt in his traditional Bhaiband family. Indeed, Ram Gidoomal observed with admiration that his father-in-law treated his daughters and sons equally, inspiring him to do the same with his own children.

One of the most prominent themes of this book is Ram Gidoomal’s tremendous network of relationships in every area of life. As a young executive in the 1970s, his complacent and supercilious managers failed to comprehend this tremendous asset which could have taken the bank into new markets with valuable new customers. For Ram, the connections were simply a way of life, partly the community and business networks inherited from his family; partly his own aptitude to thrive on and develop relational networks – ties of location as much as shared cultural traditions among the diaspora flung across the continents. Working at Inlaks, a global company with a huge base in Nigeria, he could speak in Sindhi with the senior executives who preferred to do so when communicating confidential commercial information.

This book has an elegant story-telling style, weaving in humour, and creating a build-up of suspense as the plot unfolds. Despite being put together by a professional writer, Ram Gidoomal’s voice comes through clearly and is the same as in his 1997 UK Maharajas which was also written by a professional. Through the book, Ram Gidoomal’s personal motto stands out clearly: “Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can.”

My Silk Road

The Adventures & Sturggles of a British Asian Refugee

Ram Gidoomal CBE

Pippa Rann books & media

MRP Rs799

270 pages

Review by Saaz Aggarwal

Published on 4 December 2022 

https://thewire.in/books/ram-gidoomal-book-review-my-silk-road

    

Interview: Mark-Anthony Falzon, author, The Sindhis; Selling Anything, Anywhere

 By Saaz Aggarwal

How did you manage all this research during lockdown?

My first and most intensive period of fieldwork was in 1999-2000, in London, Malta and Mumbai. I was at the Gateway of India for the millennium celebrations, and remember watching the first sunrise of the third millennium at the lakeside in Borivali. I have since been to India six more times, and the results of that work are contained in my scholarly writing. I also draw on them in this book, though Selling Anything, Anywhere is not aimed at the academic reader. I did intend to spend some months updating my notes in India in 2020-1, but had to resort to Zoom. There was also a fair bit of desk research, which was unaffected by Covid.       

2.      Was it really the Sindhi businessman Bhojoomal and his sons who founded Karachi?

If the memoirs of Seth Naomul Hotchand are anything to go by, then yes. Hotchand was a merchant who lived in Karachi in the nineteenth century, and who wrote the history of his family. He wrote that his ancestor Seth Bhojoomal (who originally hailed from Sehwan in Sindh) settled and established business in Kharrakbandar around 1720. The place, however, quickly silted up, and Seth Bhojoomal and his fellow Sindhi merchants relocated to a new place, later named Karachi, and developed it into a port of considerable prominence.      

3.      Claude Markovits published his findings about the Sindhi global traders in 1999. Why did it take so long for this centuries-old phenomenon, well known among the Sindhis themselves and the local populations where they live, to be identified and written about?

The Sindhworki network goes back to the 1850s, and involved traders from Hyderabad-Sindh who travelled quite literally around the world in search of potential markets (usually in port cities, especially in the earlier phase). That of the Shikarpuris goes back to at least the early eighteenth century, and involved men from Shikarpur who ran an elaborate banking trade in Central Asia. You’re right in saying that it took scholars a long time to get the hint. Some early examples were Anita Chugani’s 1995 MA thesis on Sindhworkis in Japan, my undergraduate thesis on Sindhworkis in Malta in 1996, Markovits’ benchmark book of 2000, and my book of 2005. I think the reason is that Sindhis are so adaptable and flexible in their ways, that they are easily overlooked as generic ‘Indians’. It took Markovits considerable detective work to tease out the Shikarpuri presence in Central Asia; and Sindhworkis can be even more difficult to identify as such. For all their globetrotting and business acumen, Sindhis tend to fly under the radar.            

4.      Why are there no women in your book? There’s a brief indication of them as secret agents, and later the ones to prepare ‘poppadums’ and pickles which the men hawked. What about the many who had the gene and the connections and used them, the entrepreneurs and the captains of industry?

I do mention that in some contexts Sindhi women are increasingly directly involved in business, and that women played a key role in the circulation of information – crucial to business success – back in Shikarpur and Hyderabad, and that well-connected Sindhi women in India and elsewhere play an important part in the making of networks. Still, I think your observation is justified. Mine is a partial story that leaves room for many more. Some have already been told by Rita Kothari, Subhadra Anand and yourself, and there’s a new breed of scholars (some are Sindhi women – Trisha Lalchandani, Radhika Chakraborty and others) who are researching doctorates on various aspects of Sindhis, and there's Aruna Madnani’s ‘Doorway to Sindh’ webinar series for her Sindhi Culture Foundation.          

5.      “Poppadums”? Seriously Mark?

It’s papad I had in mind – not least since I must have consumed hundreds in the course of my fieldwork. Sindhis can be good hosts. You’re quite right to say papad is iconic. In part that’s because of their unique peppery taste and blistered appearance (they always remind me of Neapolitan pizza dough). But as I mention in the book, the making and selling of papads and pickles is a defining episode in the story of how many Sindhi refugees survived, and overcame, the economic hardships of Partition. 

6.      Why does your book not mention the Sindhi tradition of philanthropy? And why do you have mostly only stories of plodders and small-time dealmakers - yes, the bell-curve people – but no representative of the huge population of rags-to-riches and the "my mother's blessings took me to where I am" people, who would have loved to be mentioned by name?

This book does not cover every aspect of Sindhi business and culture. It was prescriptively intended as a short and readable text, aimed at a popular audience. Besides, I cannot claim to have worked with a mathematically representative sample of Sindhis. That's also why this interview is welcome: it complements the contents.

Many Sindhis are in fact involved in philanthropy. In the case of some of the big Sindhworki and other firms, this can be as prominent as full-scale hospitals. But I’ve met people of more modest means who funded and ran small homeopathic clinics, for example, in India and elsewhere. I think the point really is that, contrary to some of the more toxic stereotypes, Sindhis do not form isolated moneymaking enclaves; rather, they are embedded in the societies they live in in various ways that include philanthropic giving. Seth Naomul writes that on one auspicious occasion in 1805, his ancestors spent “large sums of money in charity and in feeding Brahmins and fakirs, and acquired such renown on account of their liberality that Bhats and Brahmans chanted their benevolence in songs especially composed”.  

7.      Did you observe cultural differences between the solidly Sindhi communities in Panama, Hong Kong, the Canaries (and other locations) through local influences?

You’ve put your finger on one of the most fascinating parts of the Sindhi story. Simply put, Sindhis live in places.

The very first Sindhi I interviewed ran a retail business in Malta which had been in the family for many decades. In a corner of the shop was a little shelf, and on it photos of departed family members and figures of Ganesha, Lakshmi and the Virgin Mary. When I asked, he told me he was ‘100% Hindu’ but also a follower of a number of Catholic devotions.

In Indonesia today there are about 10,000 Sindhis; many are businesspeople involved in many different lines. Perhaps the best known is the production of sinetron (soap operas), which they have been heavily invested in since the 1980s. The Sindhi producers even came up with an innovative product, sinetron Ramadhan, which in turn evolved into a new genre of Indonesian television known as sinetron Islam (Islamic soap opera). These are two small examples of their linguistic, cultural, economic and social diversity. And yet, Sindhis retain a strong sense of a networked cultural affinity, which makes it possible for them to relocate should they wish or need to.        

8.      Priya Ramani sent me an indignant message about the title of this book and I realised that it could be seen as demeaning to the community. I told her I’d ask you.

There’s the joke about the Sindhi on the moon who approached Neil Armstrong and tried to sell him a flag – old and weary, but telling. Everywhere you look you will find pockets of Sindhis selling things as diverse as souvenirs, textiles, electronics and carpets; financing films and developing real estate; manufacturing industrial plastics in West Africa and snack foods in Ulhasnagar, making bespoke suits in Hong Kong and running restaurants and hotels in dozens of locations worldwide. Selling Anything, Anywhere is my homage to a tremendous lifeforce of adventure and enterprise.  

 Published on 11 November 2022 in Hindustan Times

https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/interview-mark-anthony-falzon-author-the-sindhis-selling-anything-anywhere-sindhi-women-play-an-important-part-in-the-making-of-networks-101668184240034.html

Keeping in Touch by Anjali Joseph

A writer's life

Her father, Mathai Joseph, is one of India’s earliest computer scientists. Her maternal grandfather, Principal Bannerjee of Elphinstone College, was one of the most revered educationists of his time. Anjali Joseph studied English at Trinity College, and completed PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at University of East Anglia. In 2010 she was listed by The Telegraph as one of the twenty best novelists under forty. Her books detail ordinary life, delving inner lives and familiar realms.

A reader and a writer all her life, in her youth she may have experienced, as many of us do, the torturous periodic shedding and renewal of skin. The years passed – perhaps not (as she once wrote) as painlessly as that clause implies. She followed her whims and explored possibilities. Call them massive research projects, or immersion experiences, or the ashram life of renouncing this and that. And then out comes a novel, a space to lose yourself, experience new things, understand life in a different way – in the process, as she says, of becoming the person who wrote that novel. 

1.      What got you started with writing this book?

I was chatting to a friend in Norwich some time in around 2014 and she said she was terrible at keeping in touch. The phrase hovered in the air, illuminated for me, and I went home and wrote it down, convinced I’d write a book called Keeping in Touch. That was also the year I moved from Norwich to Guwahati in search of a new adventure, both at home and very much not at home, but fascinated by Assam. I had the character of Keteki in mind for a while as I was finishing The Living, and had even started writing about her, but Ved came along a little later, in 2015 when I wrote a short story that turned into the opening chapter of the book. The lightbulb called Everlasting Lucifer was a short story I’d begun writing when I was about eight years old, and not finished.

2.      And the symbolism of that lightbulb?

Maybe it’s some form of the light that’s in everybody. Maybe a sort of objective correlative of something that is much bigger. Besides, each of us wants to light up. But maybe the prospect is also a little threatening. What would really happen if that light were seen?

I don’t know where the name came from.  I was reading a lot of F Scott Fitzgerald at the time, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and several other of his stories. I must have at that time or sometime earlier learnt that Lucifer meant ‘light bearer’ or read about the story of how Lucifer was the fallen angel, but that it’s not necessarily a pejorative name. It was there as one of those ideas and half-ideas, some of which you write down and some that remain at the back of your mind.

3.      Did your characters change as you wrote?

Well, they meet at a time in their lives when they are ready for change. Their encounter is the catalyst that makes them step outside the comfortable shells they have created.

Both of them evolved as characters in the way I wanted to show them. My friend, the wonderful writer Tim Pears, was kind enough to read a draft and from his responses, I realised that the initial iteration of Ved was too off-putting, and Keteki a little too oblique.

At the opening of the book, Ved is a toxic bachelor, but he’s also in coming to the end of a time of getting over his earlier geekier self. He’s enjoying a period of his life when he feels he can be in control. But obviously he’s also still at least in a latent way open to the possibility of more. And then he falls for her. And Keteki – I had to say more about her in subsequent drafts; initially I wanted to show her mainly through the effect she had on other people.

4.      Your books have always run quite close to your own life adventures.

When a child growing up in a provincial English town I was waiting to start my life, the fiction that I read was about all sort of things and these novels almost seemed to be carrying messages, telling me, maybe your life will be like this! Or maybe it will be like that! I drank it all in. In a way, reading fiction is a way of thinking about how to live.

Now I get interested in one thing after another, and sometimes that’s what my next novel will be about. Maybe the other things that I’m learning around that time also become relevant. But I wouldn’t say most of my life goes into my novels. There are lots of things I do and read about that don’t directly feed into what I write.

I suppose for me, writing a novel is partly about finding out more about the characters and place I’ve decided are interesting. But it’s also a process of becoming the person who will have written the novel I’m writing. It’s something that gets revealed as I go along. Each individual step is in the dark, but there is a kind of feeling of what the next thing is.

5.      Why Assam?

When I went to live in Guwahati in 2014, Assam was a new place for me. I started learning Assamese, a beautiful and elliptical language. I think there might be a flavour of that in the book. After a while of studying, I realised that being able to say what you mean in Assamese hardly means you can speak it. That is not how Assamese is used. As I wrote in an essay for Unbound, most people  say something indirectly related to what they mean; the person they are talking to then responds by saying something indirectly related to the first thing.

I had two lovely teachers of Assamese, Dimpy Deka and my friend and neighbour Babu’s grandmother, Bimal Rajkhowa, herself a writer and lyricist. My Assamese remains halting but I can read and write, and some of my learning comprised reading aloud books in Assamese and asking about the phrases or words I didn’t know. It was a beautiful introduction to a sensibility as well as a language. The culture of Assam has so much depth, so many layers. There is a certain way of seeing life. It was just lovely to live there. And in Assam, everyone is a reader, it’s a place where people understand books and literature. In Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi if you say you’re a writer people will ask whether you know this writer or that writer, or if you’ve written for films, things like that. But in Assam people will want to tell you about what they’ve been reading. I’ve had conversations like that with a taxi driver, the man who works in the gas agency. Everybody is excited about reading, and for a writer that is truly special.

6.      And your book has such a strong yoga component too!

Well, I had a scientific, post-enlightenment sort of upbringing. In my family, there was not much ritual or religious observance. Still, as a child I was fascinated by religion, magic, and wonder. I’d read a storybook and hark back to the missing word in a spell, thinking, one day I’ll find out what that word is! And then I’ll be able to be invisible or do whatever the spell was for. That interest in spirituality found its expression much later, in my thirties, when I did a yoga teacher training. And there we studied Vedanta and some yoga philosophy: that was the first time I felt, here is a description of the world that makes intuitive sense to me.

Yoga training, then learning about tantra, were ways into these systems of thought. It was kind of liberating. And of course, if you are a fiction writer, you can use that fiction to offer people the idea that reality might not be quite as monolithic and quite mechanically materialist as we – certainly my generation – were told when we were young. The idea is important to me and the book is sort of soaked in that.

7.      The uses of a novel, then?

I believe in the novel as a machine that can re-configure a reader’s way of being in some way, perhaps for more lightness, or just more joy. Imagination can bring us back to ourselves, and that’s something I’m always aiming to do. Here I wanted to take the reader, while reading about Ved and Keteki, through the idea that in some ways the past is imaginary, and its weight that we have been carrying can be exploded into lightness. I don’t necessarily see ‘enlightening’ as a one-off process after which one transcends and everything is bunnies and angels. I think it’s part of human experience that there is an intermittence to keeping in touch with that real self inside, as well as with others and the way we really feel for them. It doesn’t matter that this awareness drops; we can pick it up again, and that’s the process of keeping in touch which also enables compassion, for ourselves, and for others.

8.      Your life has centred around writing since a very young age but in your books you come through as someone who has led many lives through others. Knowing what you know now, would you have chosen another path?

I didn’t really choose writing; I just always knew that was what I would do. And as you say, in a way through writing I can do anything else I like.

First appeared in the Hindustan Times books page on 10 July 2021

Colaba The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai by Shabnam Minwalla

Shabnam's vale of serendipity

It was an online talk in which the author presented some of its intriguing photos, experiences and learnings, that led me to this book. Her discoveries, couched in the easy wit and bubbling energy so compelling in the talk, were just as much of a pleasure to read. 

“What Colaba doesn’t have is easy to list. What Colaba does have, is not. Its qualities are concealed by voluminous skirts and peeling paint,” writes Shabnam Minwalla, and proceeds to treat the reader to a comprehensive expose, weaving personal experiences from a range of people interviewed, with widely diverse secondary sources.

The latter include facts and administrative data from Gazetteers; iffy maps and exaggerations from travellers’ accounts; colourful descriptions from novels; even gravestone epitaphs (“doleful postcards from the past”). The one I enjoyed most was an August 2002 Busybee column which lampoons the Arabs who for decades holidayed in Colaba to revel in rain, a novelty rendered anachronistic by global weirding. The exuberant snippets provide information, they create atmosphere, and their depth and diversity well represents contemporary Colaba, a place whose character transforms from corner to corner, sometimes quite dramatically.

As for the people interviewed, most are long-term residents and colourful neighbourhood characters. The best stories come from the author herself, memories of Colaba haunted houses, lingerie shops that date back to before the word lingerie arrived in Colaba, glimpses of a prim schoolgirl, one of a horde, who transformed into hoydens tumbling down the staircase the instant the evening bell rang, only to be harangued on the way home by the fierce battleaxes of Cusrow Baug. Biographical details are introduced not in a self-congratulatory or coy manner or even in bland lists, but in a festive jumping-about that interweaves energetic adjectives, provides vivid pictures, and sometimes has you laughing aloud. The creative happiness is impressively balanced with deep, fault-finding, nit-picking research into this unabashedly grimy district of India’s financial capital.

Colaba has no medieval fortresses, tales of tragic queens, or echoes of bloody battles. Just two hundred years ago it was a jackal-infested island – fine-grained diorite, composed of feldspar and hornblende! – separated from the emerging metropolis by a temperamental creek, ghastly shipwrecks, and a cemetery greedy for colonizers. When a causeway was built, the inconvenient outpost transformed into a place of buzzing industry, and the malodorous creek with mosquito-riddled mangroves and criminal-infested bays was eventually replaced by traffic-choked streets lined with art galleries, cakeshops, and more. Who doesn’t love Colaba for its street shopping – those cool, billowing cottons, coolly-replicated designerware? Amidst the thronging crowds, familiar faces pop up and cheery “Hieee!”s ring out in Shabnam’s vale of serendipity, the place of which one well-known resident (read the book to know who) is reported as having instructed, “When you go shopping down Colaba, Ma, don’t forget to give everybody my love.”

Besides the extraordinary energy of the haphazard streets of the southernmost tip of a city rapidly sprinting northwards, this book also documents nooks and structures: Colaba Lunatic Asylum, Royal Alfred Sailor’s Home, the garden of a Mrs Hough and its magical mango tree which fruited twice a year; the reincarnation of Buckley Court from a haunted Indo-Saracenic mansion to a guesthouse packed with fascinating residents to a ‘luxury skyscraper’; dragonflies fluttering by enroute to East Africa. And the fascinating stone which clarifies the boundaries between Colaba and Old Woman’s Island of yore – inside a residence encroaching into, of all places, the trendy and laidback Colaba Police Station.

When I called Shabnam Minwalla to tell her how much I had enjoyed her book, we naturally compared notes and, though we’ve never met, and even claim different territories of Colaba, found much to celebrate.

Colaba is still somewhat in the nature of ‘native place’ to me, the venue of childhood winter vacations escaped to from bone-chilling frost, sultry evenings strolling on the Cuffe Parade promenade, playing in the piles of rubble waiting to take their place in swanky buildings, snacking on peanuts and sometimes even illicit bhel (because typhoid). “Which building?” Shabnam asked and when I replied, she knew exactly which one, and together we moaned the decaying grandeur and eventual demise of the townhouse with its authentic stained-glass windows, Minton tiles, sagging wooden staircase and unpolished banisters, residence of former presidency magistrate KJ Bijlani for nearly fifty years.

Every chapter of this book ends with a pithy ‘Colaba lesson for life’, and the one I’ve picked to pass on here, one that sears me with regret, instructs: “Quick! Talk to your grandparents before it’s too late.” 

First appeared in Hindustan Times books page on 2 July 2021 

Wall Paintings of Sindh by Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro

Secret treasures

In India, Sindhis are most often seen as a mercantile community – hardworking and enterprising, but almost entirely focussed on material gain and pursuits, with limited interest in art and culture. Sindh itself, the ancestral homeland which the Hindus left after Partition took place in 1947 and to which they have almost no access today, is seen as a hot and dusty place of limited opportunity. So this book is a real eye-opener which showcases a very unexpected dimension for Indian Sindhis to understand something about their lost heritage.

In 1998, early in anthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro’s career, a field visit took him to the necropolis of Mian Nasir Muhammad Kalhoro, where he saw many beautiful paintings on the exterior and interior walls of its monuments. He could see that they were crumbling and in urgent need of restoration. Feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the art around him, feeling equally disturbed that it would all soon be lost, Zulfiqar resolved that he was going to travel all across Sindh to seek out every other similar site he could find, and record whatever he saw in them. This book is a result of many fulfilling journeys the author made over more than 20 years, to do so – and a great gift to people who are interested in the history of art, and in particular the history of the art of Sindh.

What I learnt from this book is that Sindh is strewn with monuments of many kinds and these include tombs, places of worship, and palaces. Most of these are filled with works of art, and besides architectural flourishes, ceramic embellishments and tiling, many of the walls are covered with paintings too.

In many places, Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro noticed that in the process of maintenance of the tombs by their followers, they were whitewashed on the inside, and the paintings were damaged. For example, in the tomb of Mian Yar Muhammad Kalhoro in Khudabad, Zulfiqar found it all whitewashed except for some paintings which may have required too much effort to reach. From these traces, he deduces that

“the whole interior of the tomb was adorned with stylized flower vases, fruit dishes and a variety of flowers covering every panel, soffit, niche, squinch and arch recess of the tomb.” 

His research indicates that the art was a tradition of long-standing, but very little of what was created before the seventeenth century remains and this book largely covers art of the Kalhora, Talpur and British periods of Sindh’s history. Many of the previous era, glimpses of which sometimes pop up in historical records, no longer exist.

Zulfiqar has covered tombs of rulers and tribal chiefs, as well as the tombs of Sufi saints, and the book has excellent illustrations of the structures as well as of the art inside them. 

Royal tombs, Zulfiqar points out, are not embellished with figural motifs, except for birds. They carry gilded Quranic verses in striking calligraphy; traditional geometric patterns; and floral, vegetal, plant and tree motifs. The lily flower, Zulfiqar points out, is a favourite motif of the Kalhora artists in both paintings and glazed tiles. Zulfiqar also explains the symbolism of other favoured motifs such as the cypress tree, and varieties of birds and flowers. Monuments of other rulers and saints, however, carry all kinds of figural depictions including scenes of a bird feeding its offspring, rooster fight, mourning scene in a tomb, action-packed animal fight scenes, hunting scenes and battle scenes, as well as representations of cultural activities, such as dance, music and sports, and many romantic folk scenes. In all, they provide a rich illustration of the social and political life of Sindh. There are even tombs which also show domestic activities such as dancing, cooking and churning, such as the tomb of Othwal Faqir, located south of Mian Nasir Muhammad Kalhoro’s shrine. In fact, locations of each monument have been meticulously provided – a poignant resource for the many who may want to visit but are unlikely to ever be able to do so.

Through Zulfiqar’s commentary, and through the rich colour schemes of the illustrations, we get a sense of the people of Sindh and their daily occupations through history. He has also linked these paintings with recognized schools of other neighbouring regions, and compares their features. All these give us a rich visualisation of various historical events as well as folk stories and together they bring alive folk romances, battle scenes, and a broad spectrum of social life in eighteenth-century Sindh.

Zulfiqar has detoured with extensive coverage of the folk tales he found illustrated, sometimes two or three adjacent inside a single monument. Along with the commentary and symbolism, he has also recounted some of the most loved folk tales to accompany the illustrations, and these add depth to his book.

We also learn from this book that Mihrab, the arched niche on the qibla wall that indicates the direction of prayer in every mosque, is also seen in the monuments of Sindh. It was a common feature in the tombs, and evolved into the depiction of actual mosques. Many tombs carry these and most tombs built during the Kalhora, Talpur and British periods also depict Makkah and Medina.

I was also intrigued to observe the presence of Khudabadi on some of the monuments, because this was a script thought to have been developed and used by the Hindu traders of the province.

Most of these art treasures, Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro reports, are in sad repair. In the twenty years of his quest, he has seen them decay before his eyes, under the ravages of extreme climate. It is sad to think that in the decades to come, most will vanish, unrestored, and live on only in the pages of this book. It’s not just the government which is responsible for the neglect – but who can blame needy peasants who till the protected land close the beautiful monuments to fulfil their simple needs?

What I learnt from this book moved me deeply. What I saw and read made me feel connected with a precious and distinctive heritage which has been frittered away and is only saved from complete obliteration by books like this one.

BEYOND THE CARICATURE by Rajesh Pant

Many years ago, as a child in class three, I saw something amazing. A tall for his age boy, a classmate, proudly walked up to the Maths teacher and presented him a cake. “It’s my birthday”. The Master who was about to read the results of a quiz, stopped him; read out his marks. He had failed the boy. Then in a rage he threw the cake on the ground, kicked it out the door and roared “don’t try and bribe me you dirty Sindhi”. (Those were the days of course, where Teachers were forgiven for being impolitic!)

After class, the boy went out, quietly picked up the cake, and took the first bite himself and shared it with us saying his mother had baked it, why waste it? The memory of the incident has not left me because it was the first time I had heard a Teacher being abusive and the first time I had heard of someone being called a Sindhi. Before that I only knew that the boy’s name was Pooran. The ‘Sindhi’ caricature of a scroogish person who accumulates cash and real estate while constantly prattling ‘vari sai’ is widespread; egged on by actors playing bit stereotypes of Sindhis in yesterday’s Hindi films. And thereby hangs a tale.

Caricatures are an unfortunate sociological phenomenon, particularly in our country; we draw upon them and use them very matter of factly mostly disrespectfully. This in turn causes diminution of our strength as a society. Constant usage somehow cements these social and untruthful caricatures till they becomes part of our believed folklore – said by elders, repeated by the young who will ape anything. And so it will go till we mature as a Society.

Murli Melwani's collection of short stories ‘Beyond the Rainbow* goes a ways in breaking the caricature. It is a melange of colourful people, exotic locales and some adventure. All characters and events are supposedly fictional. But I suspect, very strongly, each story is true or at least has a broad element of truth. It is said that a people whose homeland is sparse – or who have no homeland at all - causes them to move to far and foreign lands. To make their living or ply their trade. True of Marwaris, Jews and Scots and certainly Sindhis. The sweep of the locations of the people and stories is ample evidence of the truly international spread of this group of people.

Stereotypically Sindhis have settled in Haang Kaang and have shops in Chunking Arcade! Melwani’s book serves us a different and exotic cocktail – Curacao, Toronto, Taipei, Bangkok, Bombay, New York, Honduras, Darjeeling and of course HK and Ulhasnagar. He paints a picture of their fads, foibles, beliefs, customs, strengths, weaknesses. These stories illustrate the ease with which they adapt to (or do not) to stressful, and strange situations.

In one of the longer short stories – the protagonist is called to the Holiday Inn in HK for an interview. This took me years back on my own first trip overseas and to HK; I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Kowloon and was amazed to see a small statue of Lord Shiva near the entrance with a ‘fountainette’ from his locks depicting the source of the Ganges. I was told that the property was owned by the Harilela’s. “Sindhi, you know, flom your contly” – the Receptionist informed me Though I believe they are Hongkongers stretching back a century. Coming back to the tale, ‘Head of a Chicken’ is a textbook narrative of poor boy, with remarkable insights “…but, a Sindhi would not ask a question without a motive…” he is economical with ethics, makes good and then faces the same situation he had left his earlier employer. An interesting take on ethics and business, a motif which runs through a some of the other stories.

Another facet about Melwani’s writing is the simplicity and honesty. In one of his stories he writes “there’s a writer in each one of us”. He does not use artifice; the story is what the story is – and that is where the writer’s true craft comes in. It is very complex to keep a narrative simple. This is exemplified when he writes a commentary on one of the most intricate machinations of our society, almost like a Rube Goldberg contraption – the fixing of a marriage, narrated by the Marriage Broker. It is mirth and thought provoking in equal proportions. Explaining it is like instructing a Martian the process of lacing-up shoes and knotting them. ‘The Bhorwani Marriage’ is a treat. Having made a fair amount of money in the transaction, which is what arranged marriages generally are, the Broker adds his punch line “One must be grateful for the crumbs that life throws one’s way”.

Sex is is not taboo. This is refreshing because our public posturing is prudish and fairly Victorian. So when a well off and retired businessman has a romp with a Bar girl; it does not seem shocking. The twist is later in the tale like in the thought process of a man in another story, watching a call girl undress. And more – a Father who can shoot to kill – to dictate a marriage in his family. As they say - you can take a man out of the home but you can take the home out of the man.

Like all those who have spread across the globe and settled; names soon change to suit or accommodate or better still to merge with the chosen country of abode. Meaning we are here to stay and be a part of you. An endearing quality which makes Jetharam convert to Jimmy and Metharam change to a more suitable Mike. A subtle change of status too? Which brings me to another story.

Years ago in the middle eighties, my Boss called me to substitute for him and make an unscheduled presentation to two gentleman sitting in the Conference room. The object was to present India, as a country full of promise yet not hide the pitfalls. The two were obviously ‘from overseas’. Post the presentation I introduced myself and the young guy stuck out his hand saying “Tommy, Tommy Hilfiger. I’ve just started a line back home with him and this guy brought me here because he’s very hot on India though he’s never lived here.” The other gentleman’s calling card was a folded affair. The top read Gloria Vanderbilt and the card opened to reveal his name ‘Mike’ Murjani.

Rajesh Pant

Pune, December 2020

*Beyond the Rainbow.

Murli Melwani.

Published by Black-and-white Fountain.

Learning to read all over again

When the lockdown commenced, life turned grim overnight; stranger than fiction. I was reading the Memoirs of Seth Naomal Hotchand of Karachi (1804-1878), a well-told narrative of a wealthy merchant of Sindh. Being the elaborate personal account of someone who belonged to a community about which not much documentation exists, the book, with an interesting history of its own, is fascinating. However, my eye lazed mid-sentence while my mind wandered, and the pages stayed put.

In despair, unable to read, unable to write, I dug into my files seeking comfort, and came across Forgotten Stories from my Village, Harwai by Hari Govind Narayan Dubey. In 2015, I worked with the author to translate this charming book, based in rural India during the freedom struggle, into English. It has dramatic stories – pots of gold uncovered by a farmer ploughing his fields, a spectacular jailbreak, the impact of caste division and social boycott, and more. What makes it a classic is the ringside view of the lifestyles, thought processes, and other subtleties of an epoch of Indian history invariably dominated by political figures with vested interests. To make it easily accessible to all, I uploaded it for free download on this link .

Still unsure about being able to concentrate, I decided to attempt a slim volume with an uncomplicated cover: The Impossible Journey by James A Coghlan. This lovely story of a Scottish boy’s experience of serving in the Indian army is fiction, but, based on the diary of the author’s great uncle’s accounts of a road journey from Rawalpindi to London in 1936, is quite as alive with engaging detail as Naomul’s memoirs. Along with glimpses of world history and geography, the reader understands a little about the connection between India and Scotland, while revelling in the wry turn of phrase that permeates the book.

And then, a drowning woman who miraculously began to swim, I picked up The Strange Case of Billy Biswas by Arun Joshi. This book shows that IWE were quietly turning out classic prose decades before the term IWE was coined. Billy Biswas belongs to two peculiar and mutually exclusive communities: the privileged anglophiles who once governed India, and an ancient tribe, both groups reduced today to appendages verging on extinction. Though I found its traces of schoolboy fantasy a little annoying, the plot captivated me and I read in long happy bursts, freed at last from lockdown.

This column was written for The Hindu and appeared on Monday 3 August 2020 

Circus Folk and Village Freaks by Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal

There are organs and organs

 This attractive-looking hardcover book turned out to be a surprising treat. Each of its eighteen stories, all written in verse, are about people who are different. Not just different but significantly so, some quite peculiar, and the stories deal with different aspects of how the difference arose, how it was dealt with, and what happened in the end. Along the way, each story has earthy overtones. It starts quite naturally – I was surprised at first and then admiring, but as it went on and the bonking got more intense, I wondered whether it wasn’t just to say that people who are different are actually like everyone else – or that by virtue of their difference they are more highly sexed. Though the question occurred to me while reading, I forgot to ask it to the author when I had the chance. The former, I suppose, based on what she revealed of herself and her book through the discussion.

Aparna told us that she woke one day about a year and a half ago, with a strong vision of a character. “It was about 5 in the morning,” she said. “I tapped my husband on the shoulder and I said, ‘Subramanyam’. So he said, ‘No, darling, it’s Abhijeet,’ and he turned around and went back to sleep.” The Strange Case of Subramaniam the Crocodile Man was forming rapidly in her mind. Noyon, their son, was not yet four and though Subramaniam was clamouring to be let out, Aparna was a busy mommie and did everything she had to do until finally, at the end of the day, she could sit down at her computer and write down the story.

Over the next three weeks, she had written eighteen stories, waking every morning with new circus people and village freaks performing various antics through which they conveyed meaningful messages about human beings and the way we lead our lives. After a rapid, fully-charged run, Aparna stopped and only looked at her stories two months later: “The first thing I said to myself is, ‘You are sick!’ I could not believe I wrote these stories.” (And her mother would moan, “Where did I go wrong, was it I who filled such nonsense in your head?”) For Subramaniam had turned out to be a ‘Crocodile Man’, a source of income but unable to gratify his wife, who had to make her own arrangements. Pablo the Clown had a ‘foot-long schlong’ which women thronged to view and engage with. Vishu, the Village Exterminator, came between a husband and wife in an unusual way. Urvasi, the Devadasi, developed culinary skills that threatened to make the entire village and its surroundings obese. Miss Rita, born a bonny, baby girl, developed a ‘fertile chinny-chin-chin’ which sprouted a thick crop of hair. Murali, the Metal Eater, is a reverse-Midas who eats and coolly digests metal:

Sweet Murali, with a whistling throat and surreal digestion within –Never ate a bit of meat or gran, but gorged himself on mountains of tin

Miss Luxmi, The Daredevil Dart Thrower, highbred, born wealthy and fancy free, happened to be too dusky-toned to attract any good Brahmin boy.

Of Sita and Gita, the Siamese Twins,
Who separated themselves in a bid to winLove, and for half a heart each, a home –
Instead, lost it all and grew old alone.

Twisted passions, lustful charity, drunken brutality, servitude and fawning delight, accommodating girl, dumbstruck wife, furiously praying, gilded cage – these are a few themes; they are also phrases picked at random from these tales – or fable, allegory, parody, if you will.

People close to Aparna told her that the book reads like an autobiography: “I grew up feeling like an outsider. I dealt with mental health issues for a very long time. I have major recurrent depressive disorder, and it took me a very long time to find a kind and compassionate neuropsychiatrist. Growing up, I felt like a square cog in a round hole. So the book addresses a lot of issues to do with a person not fitting in – a freak, as it were. I grew up in a conservative town and people would look at me and say, ‘What is this?’ So I guess this reflects my experiences. Issues are important to me, whether the LGBTQ community, caste, physical appearance or others.”

Aparna’s stories veer towards South Indian motifs including names, features and other hints, and this Aparna explained by saying while she had tried to be geographically neutral, she had grown up with the work of RK Narayan and when constructing this world, the visuals that came to her said, “Malgudi”.

While each one had turned out pretty much whole in terms of its theme and content, the rhyme in which it manifested was lacking. Aparna said that her work had been published in international journals like Pen Review and others, but more abstruse and in free verse. She now began a rigorous study of metre with the help of a mentor, Shantanu Anand, and every syllable in the book was read and re-read at least eight times to put it into the exact metre. Still, these eighteen pieces do not follow a satisfactory structure. They are not in the same metre; some verses change metre in the course of the verse; in some, I was unable to stretch them to fit a metre at all. Aparna is not, she said, a master like Vikram Seth who wrote Beastly Tales from Here and There, and maybe one day would be skilled enough to write in a particular metre. Meanwhile, her next book is short-form prose and is on the theme of variations in ways people torture each other.

This book is hugely amusing but it’s also strewn with pathos. Its plots are inventive, and the illustrations by Rachna Ravi, aesthetically pleasing, are a great lead-in to each story. Most interesting, a stroke of genius I felt, was that while the male organ is bandied about quite lasciviously, when female organs are brought to the page, they turn out to be brain, lungs, liver and heart.

This review was written for Hindustan Times and appeared on Saturday 30 November 2019 

https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-circus-folk-and-village-freaks-by-aparna-upadhyaya-sanyal/story-UEhVmc2zxnu0PBxPCIolaM.html