(Published in the Business Standard, June 7, 2011)
1. The fact that I possess a womb should disqualify me from commenting on V S Naipaul’s latest broadside. A writer who believes that no woman is his equal as a writer, that women suffer from a “sentimentality, a narrow vision of the world” and that women writers are “quite different” is not going to take the criticism of women readers seriously.
2. Which isn’t going to stop me or other owners of wombs anyway.
3. Not that Mr Naipaul’s criticisms should shock anyone, after all these years. A list of Sir Vidia’s targets over the decades includes Africans, Muslim invaders in India, infies (inferior people) of all colours and races, Indian women writers, his wives, his lovers, his friends, his editors, including the nonagenarian Diana Athill, the issuers of worthless degrees (Oxbridge), foolish people, people who do not serve him his vegetables in separate dishes, people who have not read his writings, people who have read but not understood his writings, people who have read and understood his writings but have also read writers he disapproves of, which is most writers, regardless of whether they own wombs or not.
4. So the best way to approach this fracas is to repeat the apocryphal line Ved Mehta is supposed to have said after Mr Naipaul had a spat with the German ambassador’s wife in Neemrana: “You’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.” The spat, now forgotten, was over Mr Naipaul’s dismissal of a certain woman intellectual, to which the German ambassador’s wife is supposed to have said: “We all know what your views on women are, Sir Vidia, we don’t have to take them seriously,” which put the Nobel laureate in a towering rage.
5. There’s a very old pattern at work here; the wide, and widening, gap between Mr Naipaul the public figure and Naipaul the writer. The bulk of the pronouncements made by Mr Naipaul the public figure are rubbish — cantankerous, peevish statements meant to provoke anger and irritation. Some commentators suggested that this was a version of the West Indian tradition of picong — the swift trading of insults and banter as a kind of conversational game — but the truth is that it’s just spleen. The few interviews given by Mr Naipaul the writer, most notably his Paris Review interview, in 1998, are illuminated with insight and wisdom, despite all the bigotry and the petulance of the public man.
6. Read this sentence by Mr Naipaul: “I think the world is what you enter when you think – when you become educated, when you question – because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.” And then this sentence by Jane Austen, whom he slammed for her “sentimental ambitions”: “The literary world is inspiring, but it is not all there is. I let my daily life be my raw material, even if paintings, fiction and sonatas are the fire in my forge.” They led such different lives; Mr Naipaul wrested for himself the freedom to travel, to learn and to explore. Ms Austen, trammelled by the twin lack of independence and income, wrote her novels from the observation of the limited world around here, but she shares with Mr Naipaul several things: the sense of humour, the detached accuracy and the lack of sentimentality. They had a similar, excoriating wit, though Ms Austen’s was caustic, Mr Naipaul’s splenetic.
7. There is little need to address Mr Naipaul’s central grouse, with its implication that women cannot write, or that women writers are by definition sentimental. It displays his lack of reading — could anyone who had read Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Marilyne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, Susan Sontag and company actually believe this? You could, of course, if you were a fossil, a relic from another age.
8. I could go back to Mr Naipaul’s work — not the disappointing late novels that show the waning vigour and drooping powers of a played-out novelist, or the feeble African travelogue, but the humour and sharp acuity that marked books like A House for Mr Biswas, or The Mimic Men, or A Bend in the River. Books from the time when Mr Naipaul’s ability to see things clearly had not been overtaken by his arrogance and his choler. But instead, I find myself reaching for Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s comedy is restorative, and nothing could be more appropriate to the present situation than the title.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Speaking Volumes: Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim
(Published in the Business Standard, May 31, 2011)
Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”
There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.
This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.
Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”
Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.
For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.
TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.
Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.
It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.
The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.
Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”
There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.
This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.
Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”
Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.
For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.
TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.
Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.
It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.
The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Speaking Volumes: Badal Sircar--the conscience keeper
(Published in the Business Standard, May 17, 2011)
What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer.” Badal Sircar, letter to The Drama Review, November 1981.
There were few headlines; the death of Badal Sircar this Friday at the age of 86 in Calcutta, as it was called, was tucked away, eclipsed by the toppling of the Left Front. It had been years since homage had been truly paid to the playwright, but it is almost certain that he would not have cared. For Sircar, immersed in writing and reading (one of the last books he was reported to be re-reading was Sukumar Ray’s fantastic gem, Abol Tabol) right up to the end of his days, tributes were unnecessary.
I did wonder, though, whether the office-goers of Calcutta knew what they had lost. So many of them must have remembered the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Badal Sircar, unable to afford the fees of a proper proscenium theatre, began to hold performances in the open air — at Nandan, in the maidans, often timing the shows for the lunch hour, making a ritual of the Saturday performances.
Sircar has often been called the most middle class of playwrights, and he was that; but he was so much more than that. He was a town planner, who became an actor, influenced by his memories of the London stage, in the 1950s. Perhaps that’s where his empathy for the ordinary Calcuttan came from; he wrote of Satabdi, his theatre troupe: “None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories: they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport.” They were, in effect, just the same as the audience he attracted when he came up with the idea of the Third Theatre, which eschewed the props and formal paraphernalia of the stage and pulled the audience in as participant.
Sircar’s plays had a way of surviving and moving far beyond the confines of Bengal — college theatre troupes across India have had Evam Indrajit and Michchil in their repertoire for decades, but his reach was greater than that. His plays travelled often to villages, the script sometimes transforming to meet the needs of that set of local players; every street theatre group in India paid homage to either the plays themselves or to Sircar’s stagecraft.
In so many ways, he is still a playwright of our times — especially these times, when the middle class is discovering its conscience at Jantar Mantar, or attempting to make sense of the Maoist insurgency. Evam Indrajit, written in 1963 and first performed in 1965, introduced a writer, a cast of “normal” characters, Amal, Bimal and Kamal, whose lives were sedate, ordinary and not appropriate fodder for theatre — and Indrajit. In an exchange between Indrajit and the writer, Indrajit asks: “Then how shall we live?”
The Writer replies: Walk! Be on the road! For us there is only the road. We shall walk. I now have nothing to write about — still I have to write. You have nothing to say — still you have to talk. For us there is only the road — so walk on.”
This exchange, which could have come from Brecht or Beckett, was pure Sircar, written in a clipped, colloquial Bangla few playwrights had mastered before him. His plays, from Michchil to Baki Itihas and Pagla Ghoda were timely and disquieting; the attempt was to stir up the dormant middle-class conscience, and in the maidan crowds of Calcutta, he had the audience he needed.
Bashi Khabar took Sircar’s growing obsession with the Santhal revolt — the unsung war of the tribals against the state — and made it as deathless as Mahasweta Debi’s Birsa Munda would; Michchil, written in 1972 against the background of Naxalism about the state-sponsored disappearance of young men finds just as many echoes today. About Bashi Khabar, which featured a murdered man who wandered silently among the chorus and among the audience, his existence denied by another young male protagonist, Sircar wrote: “Each of us was that young man, trying our best to deny the existence of the ‘killed man’ in our midst and yet not wholly succeeding.”
But of all of Sircar’s plays, the much-performed, the almost-forgotten, the adaptations he did so skillfully from Brecht, the original plays that passed into the alphabet of the country’s theatre performers, what stays with me most are the figures of Kena and Becha (Bought and Sold), the two thieves who appear in Hattamala. This was one of Badal Sircar’s most light-hearted, if most political, plays, and children have been amused for decades by this story of two thieves set down in a land where money and possessions have no meaning.
In Sircar’s world, though, Kena and Becha loomed large; if we didn’t learn how to live, how to speak or write the things that mattered, we would give over our lives to thieves who only understood a world where everything could be bought and sold. Every one of his plays, and his performances, militated for a better world than this.
What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer.” Badal Sircar, letter to The Drama Review, November 1981.
There were few headlines; the death of Badal Sircar this Friday at the age of 86 in Calcutta, as it was called, was tucked away, eclipsed by the toppling of the Left Front. It had been years since homage had been truly paid to the playwright, but it is almost certain that he would not have cared. For Sircar, immersed in writing and reading (one of the last books he was reported to be re-reading was Sukumar Ray’s fantastic gem, Abol Tabol) right up to the end of his days, tributes were unnecessary.
I did wonder, though, whether the office-goers of Calcutta knew what they had lost. So many of them must have remembered the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Badal Sircar, unable to afford the fees of a proper proscenium theatre, began to hold performances in the open air — at Nandan, in the maidans, often timing the shows for the lunch hour, making a ritual of the Saturday performances.
Sircar has often been called the most middle class of playwrights, and he was that; but he was so much more than that. He was a town planner, who became an actor, influenced by his memories of the London stage, in the 1950s. Perhaps that’s where his empathy for the ordinary Calcuttan came from; he wrote of Satabdi, his theatre troupe: “None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories: they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport.” They were, in effect, just the same as the audience he attracted when he came up with the idea of the Third Theatre, which eschewed the props and formal paraphernalia of the stage and pulled the audience in as participant.
Sircar’s plays had a way of surviving and moving far beyond the confines of Bengal — college theatre troupes across India have had Evam Indrajit and Michchil in their repertoire for decades, but his reach was greater than that. His plays travelled often to villages, the script sometimes transforming to meet the needs of that set of local players; every street theatre group in India paid homage to either the plays themselves or to Sircar’s stagecraft.
In so many ways, he is still a playwright of our times — especially these times, when the middle class is discovering its conscience at Jantar Mantar, or attempting to make sense of the Maoist insurgency. Evam Indrajit, written in 1963 and first performed in 1965, introduced a writer, a cast of “normal” characters, Amal, Bimal and Kamal, whose lives were sedate, ordinary and not appropriate fodder for theatre — and Indrajit. In an exchange between Indrajit and the writer, Indrajit asks: “Then how shall we live?”
The Writer replies: Walk! Be on the road! For us there is only the road. We shall walk. I now have nothing to write about — still I have to write. You have nothing to say — still you have to talk. For us there is only the road — so walk on.”
This exchange, which could have come from Brecht or Beckett, was pure Sircar, written in a clipped, colloquial Bangla few playwrights had mastered before him. His plays, from Michchil to Baki Itihas and Pagla Ghoda were timely and disquieting; the attempt was to stir up the dormant middle-class conscience, and in the maidan crowds of Calcutta, he had the audience he needed.
Bashi Khabar took Sircar’s growing obsession with the Santhal revolt — the unsung war of the tribals against the state — and made it as deathless as Mahasweta Debi’s Birsa Munda would; Michchil, written in 1972 against the background of Naxalism about the state-sponsored disappearance of young men finds just as many echoes today. About Bashi Khabar, which featured a murdered man who wandered silently among the chorus and among the audience, his existence denied by another young male protagonist, Sircar wrote: “Each of us was that young man, trying our best to deny the existence of the ‘killed man’ in our midst and yet not wholly succeeding.”
But of all of Sircar’s plays, the much-performed, the almost-forgotten, the adaptations he did so skillfully from Brecht, the original plays that passed into the alphabet of the country’s theatre performers, what stays with me most are the figures of Kena and Becha (Bought and Sold), the two thieves who appear in Hattamala. This was one of Badal Sircar’s most light-hearted, if most political, plays, and children have been amused for decades by this story of two thieves set down in a land where money and possessions have no meaning.
In Sircar’s world, though, Kena and Becha loomed large; if we didn’t learn how to live, how to speak or write the things that mattered, we would give over our lives to thieves who only understood a world where everything could be bought and sold. Every one of his plays, and his performances, militated for a better world than this.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
If we discussed men the same way that we talk about women…
(Thousands of women come out on the streets to protest via SlutWalks, after a Toronto constable suggests that women could protect themselves better by not dressing like sluts.)
“Of course he’s a rapist, did you see the trousers he was wearing? And that vest? Why would a man wear that kind of clothing if he wasn’t out cruising for a victim?”
“The give away is the brand of jeans. If you see a bunch of guys walking down the road wearing Levis or Diesels, it’s all right, they’re not going to rape you. Other brands—well, I’d be careful. Just saying. You never know what a man wearing another kind of brand is thinking.”
“We always suspected he was a rapist. He’d leave the house every day wearing pajama-kurta—it’s obvious now that he didn’t want to waste time undoing buttons and zips.”
“According to police experts, women should be careful around men in tight jeans. Men in tight jeans are showcasing their sexuality and drawing attention to the power of their libido. Women should also be careful around men in loose jeans. Men in loose jeans have something to conceal, and may either be covering up an excess of sexuality or compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Many experts caution that men who wear pajama-kurta, shalwar-kameez, dhotis or lungis are subliminally indicating intent to rape, because these clothes are less restricting than Western wear.
Men in business suits, say some studies, are considered high risk because they are already accustomed to wielding power and carrying out certain forms of corporate violence. And women should stay far away from men in shorts, boxers and swimming trunks, who are sending out signals that rape would be expedient and easy for them. Police experts on rape suggest that in order to avoid becoming rapists, men should stay at home, not venture out after dark and dress in several layers of clothes—four pairs of jeans, six pairs of shorts—to indicate their willingness to support women’s rights and their intent never to rape.”
But these are things we never do. We never look at male behaviour; it's always the women in the spotlight. We never ask questions about what makes men think they have the right to rape, or to harass; we never look at what a man's wearing when he whistles at, or grabs, or attacks, or assaults, a woman; we never demand that men change their behaviour, their attitudes, their habits; we never shame rapists the way we shame the raped.
“Of course he’s a rapist, did you see the trousers he was wearing? And that vest? Why would a man wear that kind of clothing if he wasn’t out cruising for a victim?”
“The give away is the brand of jeans. If you see a bunch of guys walking down the road wearing Levis or Diesels, it’s all right, they’re not going to rape you. Other brands—well, I’d be careful. Just saying. You never know what a man wearing another kind of brand is thinking.”
“We always suspected he was a rapist. He’d leave the house every day wearing pajama-kurta—it’s obvious now that he didn’t want to waste time undoing buttons and zips.”
“According to police experts, women should be careful around men in tight jeans. Men in tight jeans are showcasing their sexuality and drawing attention to the power of their libido. Women should also be careful around men in loose jeans. Men in loose jeans have something to conceal, and may either be covering up an excess of sexuality or compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Many experts caution that men who wear pajama-kurta, shalwar-kameez, dhotis or lungis are subliminally indicating intent to rape, because these clothes are less restricting than Western wear.
Men in business suits, say some studies, are considered high risk because they are already accustomed to wielding power and carrying out certain forms of corporate violence. And women should stay far away from men in shorts, boxers and swimming trunks, who are sending out signals that rape would be expedient and easy for them. Police experts on rape suggest that in order to avoid becoming rapists, men should stay at home, not venture out after dark and dress in several layers of clothes—four pairs of jeans, six pairs of shorts—to indicate their willingness to support women’s rights and their intent never to rape.”
But these are things we never do. We never look at male behaviour; it's always the women in the spotlight. We never ask questions about what makes men think they have the right to rape, or to harass; we never look at what a man's wearing when he whistles at, or grabs, or attacks, or assaults, a woman; we never demand that men change their behaviour, their attitudes, their habits; we never shame rapists the way we shame the raped.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Speaking Volumes: The Bin Laden bookshelf
(Published in the Business Standard, May 2011)
“We pray that you do not take these statements out of turn or consider them to step outside the bounds of etiquette.” In 1994, the words of the late Osama bin Laden were measured, almost diffident, as he began to articulate his sense that the Muslim world was under siege.
Just two years later, in 1996, Osama bin Laden had found his voice, as Steve Coll records in Ghost Wars. In August, he issued his declaration of jihad on America, and accompanied this with a poem to the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry: “O William, tomorrow you will be informed/ As to which young man will face your swaggering brother/ A youngster enters the midst of battle smiling, and/ Retreats with his spearhead stained with blood.”
On Monday, news spread of the assassination of bin Laden in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad. Looking back at the two decades the world’s most wanted man shaped and defined, is it possible now to understand the forces that created and shaped him? The profusion of books on bin Laden included several cut-and-paste biographies, collections of quotes and speeches and other detritus. There were interesting asides—among the books Osama was said to have enjoyed were John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, for instance. But these are the books about bin Laden, and the perspectives, that have lasted.
Steve Coll, The Ghost Wars (2004): Ahmed Rashid, no mean expert himself, said of Coll’s magnum opus: “No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events.” It was Coll’s insider knowledge, both of the workings of the US government and of the Af-Pak area, that made The Ghost Wars so good, as he explained the entwined connections between the CIA, Afghan warlords and Pakistani intelligence, and explored what made the region the perfect headquarters for bin Laden.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (2006): Wright began his quest to understand Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in 1948, with the journey made by Sayyid Qutb, the man who inspired Al-Qaeda, “Western in so many ways”. And yet, Qutb hated America, seeing Americans as “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money”. Wright tracks the radicalization of bin Laden and attempts to understand his interpretation and version of Islam—perhaps the most definitive book yet on the rise and philosophy of Al-Qaeda.
Ahmed Rashid: Taliban, Descent Into Chaos and Jihad: In November 2010, Rashid wrote a prescient article on the worsening relationship between the US and Pakistan, noting in parantheses that the Pakistan Army had not gone after Al Qaeda in the country since 2006. And in 2006, Rashid had guessed that bin Laden was “probably just a few hours drive away” from Islamabad.
Rashid emerged as an early expert on the Taliban, and then Al-Qaeda as well as the US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan very early on, drawing from his own experience as a (disillusioned) revolutionary who attempted a failed rebellion against Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He has often been criticized by the likes of Tariq Ali for his hawkish stance—Tariq is a strong critic of the US military presence in Afghanistan, and his politics differ sharply from Rashid’s perspective. (It should be noted that Rashid slams the incompetence, incoherence and indifference towards Af-Pak that the US and Europe have demonstrated, in Descent Into Chaos.)
But it is impossible to understand the shifts in contemporary Islam and the global corporate politics that contributed to the rise of the Taliban, or that helped someone like bin Laden spin hatred into terrorism, without reading Rashid. If anyone could have predicted the plot twists in the bin Laden saga, it would have been Rashid; and if anyone understood how the son of a Saudi billionaire came to wage a religious war against the US, it would be Rashid, again.
Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (2011): Scheuer is a former senior CIA operative who followed Osama bin Laden’s life and career for just over two decades, making this one of the most interesting and definitive of the bin Laden biographies. Setting aside Scheuer’s biases, what comes into play is simply the unusual relationship, so to speak, between the spook and his assigned object of obsession.
He makes the case for the late bin Laden being the product of a sophisticated background, an education buttressed by immersion in the Wahhabi culture, which Scheuer marks as aggressive, misogynistic and intolerant in the Saudi Arabia of Osama’s youth.
In his version, Osama bin Laden emerges less as the bogeyman of Western imagination and more as the sophisticated, often urbane and yet unpredictable adversary. This is a surprisingly intimate, if not always convincing, portrait; perhaps no one gets to know a terrorist better than a man whose objective is to bring about his destruction.
“We pray that you do not take these statements out of turn or consider them to step outside the bounds of etiquette.” In 1994, the words of the late Osama bin Laden were measured, almost diffident, as he began to articulate his sense that the Muslim world was under siege.
Just two years later, in 1996, Osama bin Laden had found his voice, as Steve Coll records in Ghost Wars. In August, he issued his declaration of jihad on America, and accompanied this with a poem to the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry: “O William, tomorrow you will be informed/ As to which young man will face your swaggering brother/ A youngster enters the midst of battle smiling, and/ Retreats with his spearhead stained with blood.”
On Monday, news spread of the assassination of bin Laden in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad. Looking back at the two decades the world’s most wanted man shaped and defined, is it possible now to understand the forces that created and shaped him? The profusion of books on bin Laden included several cut-and-paste biographies, collections of quotes and speeches and other detritus. There were interesting asides—among the books Osama was said to have enjoyed were John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, for instance. But these are the books about bin Laden, and the perspectives, that have lasted.
Steve Coll, The Ghost Wars (2004): Ahmed Rashid, no mean expert himself, said of Coll’s magnum opus: “No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events.” It was Coll’s insider knowledge, both of the workings of the US government and of the Af-Pak area, that made The Ghost Wars so good, as he explained the entwined connections between the CIA, Afghan warlords and Pakistani intelligence, and explored what made the region the perfect headquarters for bin Laden.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (2006): Wright began his quest to understand Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in 1948, with the journey made by Sayyid Qutb, the man who inspired Al-Qaeda, “Western in so many ways”. And yet, Qutb hated America, seeing Americans as “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money”. Wright tracks the radicalization of bin Laden and attempts to understand his interpretation and version of Islam—perhaps the most definitive book yet on the rise and philosophy of Al-Qaeda.
Ahmed Rashid: Taliban, Descent Into Chaos and Jihad: In November 2010, Rashid wrote a prescient article on the worsening relationship between the US and Pakistan, noting in parantheses that the Pakistan Army had not gone after Al Qaeda in the country since 2006. And in 2006, Rashid had guessed that bin Laden was “probably just a few hours drive away” from Islamabad.
Rashid emerged as an early expert on the Taliban, and then Al-Qaeda as well as the US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan very early on, drawing from his own experience as a (disillusioned) revolutionary who attempted a failed rebellion against Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He has often been criticized by the likes of Tariq Ali for his hawkish stance—Tariq is a strong critic of the US military presence in Afghanistan, and his politics differ sharply from Rashid’s perspective. (It should be noted that Rashid slams the incompetence, incoherence and indifference towards Af-Pak that the US and Europe have demonstrated, in Descent Into Chaos.)
But it is impossible to understand the shifts in contemporary Islam and the global corporate politics that contributed to the rise of the Taliban, or that helped someone like bin Laden spin hatred into terrorism, without reading Rashid. If anyone could have predicted the plot twists in the bin Laden saga, it would have been Rashid; and if anyone understood how the son of a Saudi billionaire came to wage a religious war against the US, it would be Rashid, again.
Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (2011): Scheuer is a former senior CIA operative who followed Osama bin Laden’s life and career for just over two decades, making this one of the most interesting and definitive of the bin Laden biographies. Setting aside Scheuer’s biases, what comes into play is simply the unusual relationship, so to speak, between the spook and his assigned object of obsession.
He makes the case for the late bin Laden being the product of a sophisticated background, an education buttressed by immersion in the Wahhabi culture, which Scheuer marks as aggressive, misogynistic and intolerant in the Saudi Arabia of Osama’s youth.
In his version, Osama bin Laden emerges less as the bogeyman of Western imagination and more as the sophisticated, often urbane and yet unpredictable adversary. This is a surprisingly intimate, if not always convincing, portrait; perhaps no one gets to know a terrorist better than a man whose objective is to bring about his destruction.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Speaking Volumes: Untold stories: India's non-fiction
(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011)
In the first chapter of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Shakespeare, and a personal story about a patient, Carla.
He runs through the conversation he will have with her, and notes ruefully that there is something rehearsed even about his sympathy, given the demands of the months he’s spent working as a cancer fellow: “In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation — vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt.” Two paragraphs down, without ever losing sympathy for the individual struck with cancer, Mukherjee has moved deftly to Solzhenitsyn, to a bigger picture, using, as he writes, “the past to explain the present”.
Reading The Emperor of All Maladies before it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, I was struck, as were many other reviewers, by how polished Mukherjee’s writing was (“The emperors of exploration”, Business Standard, February 1, 2011). Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, had no creative writing or journalistic background — the two traditional catchment areas for non-fiction writers.
But in the middle of his busiest years as a surgeon and a cancer fellow, he had served a kind of apprenticeship — pieces by him had appeared in medical reviews (Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine) and in mainstream publications known for their demanding editorial standards (The New Republic, The New York Times). Mukherjee’s recording eye for detail, matched with a deep empathy for his patients and an ability to do the historical research required, made this not just a prize-winning book, but a classic and lasting work of non-fiction.
In 2010, when Basharat Peer’s memoir of Kashmir, Curfewed Night, was published, one of its most enthusiastic champions was William Dalrymple, who called Peer a “new star of Indian non-fiction”. A few months later, Dalrymple spoke of his excitement at what seemed to be a new trend — the slow shift towards non-fiction replacing our somewhat obsessive focus on Booker-winning novels and other fiction.
Samanth Subramanian, like Sonia Faleiro, is one of the new stars of non-fiction; Following Fish, narrative journalism exploring India’s coastline, remains one of the best food and travel books of recent times. “This is just the beginning,” he says. We both agree that a handful of authors and non-fiction books from the subcontinent isn’t enough to call a movement, yet.
But as Subramanian points out, what may be changing – and where Dalrymple is correct – is a sensibility, as our curiosity about our own stories is matched by the willingness to actually go out and tell them. “There’s never been a paucity of academic non-fiction – good or bad – in India,” Subramanian notes. “But general non-fiction, journalistic non-fiction hasn’t had much of an outlet.”
Even among the journalists, someone like Sonia Faleiro, who wrote Beautiful Thing after reporting on the lives of bar dancers for Tehelka, or even Suketu Mehta, whose Bombay biography Maximum City sparked a curiosity about Indian non-fiction seven years ago, narrative non-fiction is something you have to earn. Few Indian publications support essays longer than 1,500-2,000 words; and even fewer would offer that space to issues other than politics.
The Caravan, run by Jonathan Shainin and a crack team of writer-editors, who include author Anjum Hassan and former Random House editor Rajni George, is one of the few magazines that look for and nurture narrative non-fiction, aside from a handful of men’s magazines that occasionally commission lengthy essays. (You could make the argument that magazines like Esquire and Playboy contributed much more than centrefolds to US culture —by commissioning short stories, long interviews and long journalistic essays, they helped several generations of writers to survive and grow.)
It’s tempting to see Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer triumph as confirmation of the Indian success story in non-fiction; but in a way, Mukherjee’s success as a writer is a very American, not Indian, success. What would it take to have a The Emperor of Maladies come out of India? More supportive publishing houses, more magazines with demanding editorial standards, more imagination and willingness to go after the untold stories on the part of writers? I don’t really have the answers, but it’s an interesting question.
Tailpiece: The release of the Ibn-e-Safi thrillers (Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) could revive nostalgia for the days of “clean” blood-and-guts fiction. Ibn-e-Safi’s son says his father, already a well-known Pakistani writer when he considered writing the Jasoosi Duniya series, rose to the challenge when he was told that the books wouldn’t sell in India without sex and violence. He refused to include women, and his spy stories proved successful all the same.
There may have been precedent, though. Indian tastes ran to Alistair Maclean, whose thrillers were notable for his stern abjuration of romance. Maclean famously said that sex gets in the way of the action, a sentiment he may have borrowed from yet another creator of largely celibate heroes, Desmond Bagley, who said that sex gets in the way of the plot. How James Hadley Chase managed to juggle both will, presumably, remain a mystery.
In the first chapter of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Shakespeare, and a personal story about a patient, Carla.
He runs through the conversation he will have with her, and notes ruefully that there is something rehearsed even about his sympathy, given the demands of the months he’s spent working as a cancer fellow: “In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation — vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt.” Two paragraphs down, without ever losing sympathy for the individual struck with cancer, Mukherjee has moved deftly to Solzhenitsyn, to a bigger picture, using, as he writes, “the past to explain the present”.
Reading The Emperor of All Maladies before it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, I was struck, as were many other reviewers, by how polished Mukherjee’s writing was (“The emperors of exploration”, Business Standard, February 1, 2011). Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, had no creative writing or journalistic background — the two traditional catchment areas for non-fiction writers.
But in the middle of his busiest years as a surgeon and a cancer fellow, he had served a kind of apprenticeship — pieces by him had appeared in medical reviews (Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine) and in mainstream publications known for their demanding editorial standards (The New Republic, The New York Times). Mukherjee’s recording eye for detail, matched with a deep empathy for his patients and an ability to do the historical research required, made this not just a prize-winning book, but a classic and lasting work of non-fiction.
In 2010, when Basharat Peer’s memoir of Kashmir, Curfewed Night, was published, one of its most enthusiastic champions was William Dalrymple, who called Peer a “new star of Indian non-fiction”. A few months later, Dalrymple spoke of his excitement at what seemed to be a new trend — the slow shift towards non-fiction replacing our somewhat obsessive focus on Booker-winning novels and other fiction.
Samanth Subramanian, like Sonia Faleiro, is one of the new stars of non-fiction; Following Fish, narrative journalism exploring India’s coastline, remains one of the best food and travel books of recent times. “This is just the beginning,” he says. We both agree that a handful of authors and non-fiction books from the subcontinent isn’t enough to call a movement, yet.
But as Subramanian points out, what may be changing – and where Dalrymple is correct – is a sensibility, as our curiosity about our own stories is matched by the willingness to actually go out and tell them. “There’s never been a paucity of academic non-fiction – good or bad – in India,” Subramanian notes. “But general non-fiction, journalistic non-fiction hasn’t had much of an outlet.”
Even among the journalists, someone like Sonia Faleiro, who wrote Beautiful Thing after reporting on the lives of bar dancers for Tehelka, or even Suketu Mehta, whose Bombay biography Maximum City sparked a curiosity about Indian non-fiction seven years ago, narrative non-fiction is something you have to earn. Few Indian publications support essays longer than 1,500-2,000 words; and even fewer would offer that space to issues other than politics.
The Caravan, run by Jonathan Shainin and a crack team of writer-editors, who include author Anjum Hassan and former Random House editor Rajni George, is one of the few magazines that look for and nurture narrative non-fiction, aside from a handful of men’s magazines that occasionally commission lengthy essays. (You could make the argument that magazines like Esquire and Playboy contributed much more than centrefolds to US culture —by commissioning short stories, long interviews and long journalistic essays, they helped several generations of writers to survive and grow.)
It’s tempting to see Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer triumph as confirmation of the Indian success story in non-fiction; but in a way, Mukherjee’s success as a writer is a very American, not Indian, success. What would it take to have a The Emperor of Maladies come out of India? More supportive publishing houses, more magazines with demanding editorial standards, more imagination and willingness to go after the untold stories on the part of writers? I don’t really have the answers, but it’s an interesting question.
Tailpiece: The release of the Ibn-e-Safi thrillers (Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) could revive nostalgia for the days of “clean” blood-and-guts fiction. Ibn-e-Safi’s son says his father, already a well-known Pakistani writer when he considered writing the Jasoosi Duniya series, rose to the challenge when he was told that the books wouldn’t sell in India without sex and violence. He refused to include women, and his spy stories proved successful all the same.
There may have been precedent, though. Indian tastes ran to Alistair Maclean, whose thrillers were notable for his stern abjuration of romance. Maclean famously said that sex gets in the way of the action, a sentiment he may have borrowed from yet another creator of largely celibate heroes, Desmond Bagley, who said that sex gets in the way of the plot. How James Hadley Chase managed to juggle both will, presumably, remain a mystery.
Speaking Volumes: Greg Mortenson's Bitter Brew
(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011. This was such a sad column to write; Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea set me and several other friends on a journey of exploring how best to make donations of money, books or time to local libraries, and briefly inspired a few very big dreams. The sense of betrayal is very strong, for many of us who were Mortenson fans, and I'm hoping that the Central Asia Institute will get its accounting and focus in order and continue to build and maintain schools.
But even if the Three Cups of Tea story has been tinged with bitterness, I am grateful that reading that book years ago led me (and others) to so many interesting library and literay efforts. It was through Mortenson's book--and through the generosity of a friend who gave me Wood's book--that I discovered Room To Read, and the work it does in India among other countries, for instance.)
If you wanted to change the world, 2006 was a good year in which to find inspiration, in the lives of restless men with a will to make the world better and a yen for mountaineering.
Two of them, Room To Read’s John Wood and the Central Asia Institute’s Greg Mortenson, released books in 2006 that would continue to inspire people around the world for the next five years. One of them is in trouble, his story questioned after an investigation by CBS’ 60 Minutes.
There are many parallels between Wood’s story and Mortenson’s tale. Wood, trekking in the Himalayas, stumbled across a Nepali school and was struck by the absence of books for the children. The Microsoft employee returned with the promised books, building what would become the first of many libraries and schools as part of the Room To Read network. Wood founded Room to Read in 2000, writing about the experience in Leaving Microsoft to Change the World in 2006.
Wood’s focus was on Room To Read’s roughly 1,128 schools and 10,000 libraries, built and maintained across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. His book is a corporate memoir — inspiring, but crisp and blunt about the challenges of running an organisation that wanted to change the way the world’s children read. His teachings are blunt, gleaned from experience; it’s from Wood that you learn how much better the small, open-to-all reading room works in India, for instance, rather than the intimidating, closed space of the government library.
Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea belongs on the inspirational literature shelf. His story was gripping: in 1993, Mortenson wrote, his passion for mountaineering got him into trouble, and he stumbled into the tiny village of Korphu in Pakistan’s Karakoram range. Nursed back to health by the villagers, Mortenson promised himself he would return and build them a school, which he did despite the rugged terrain and despite being briefly held captive by a group of men who appear to be from the Taliban. The Central Asia Institute, founded by Mortenson, has established 145 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But what made the book a bestseller was the drama, and Mortenson’s ability to touch people’s hearts. The title is drawn from an incident where he sits down with the statutory wise man of the village, Haji Ali: “...Haji Ali spoke. ‘If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea….’”
It was this kind of wisdom, as well as the message of hope, and Mortenson’s clearly etched passion for educating girls that made Three Cups of Tea such a bestseller, much-loved in India and elsewhere in the world. As with Wood, Mortenson’s lesson seemed to be that it was possible to change the world – “one school at a time” – though the numbers make you wonder which man was more focused on the actual goal.
It is this aspect of the book, and the Mortenson legend that the CBS television show sought to investigate. The accusations carry weight because they are made by a respected writer — wildlife and mountaineering expert Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air and Into The Wild. Krakauer casts doubt on Mortenson’s story of stumbling into Korphu at death’s door — the reality seems to have been more prosaic, with Mortenson pledging to build a school after a normal trek. He also challenges Mortenson’s account of being held by the Taliban, with one of his “captors” denying the story. Mortenson’s responses have been evasive, and he has no good reason for refusing to appear on the 60 Minutes show.
But the real damage arises from the 60 Minutes investigation of how the money raised by Mortenson’s charity is spent —the implication is that the charity spends almost as much on funding Mortenson’s book tours as it does on actually setting up schools.
The CBS show has spread dismay and sadness around the world; the accusations suggest that Mortenson exaggerated much of the truth — and that his charity is unprofessional. No one questions the real, if limited, value of the work he has done; and if organisations like Room To Read have done more in roughly the same time-span, it is not a crime for a charity to be disorganised. There is, as Krakauer and others have pointed out, a more serious breach of trust — those who believed in Mortenson’s legend and the power of three cups of tea are entitled to ask why there weren’t more schools, and fewer book tours.
The real sadness is in having to separate the wisdom of Three Cups of Tea – listen to the people you’re trying to help, believe that you can make a difference, slow down and take time to understand the way things run – from its accuracy. I thought, like many other readers across the world, that this was a true story, and it is heartbreaking in a way Mortenson may not understand to be told that it is, instead, a very colourful one.
But even if the Three Cups of Tea story has been tinged with bitterness, I am grateful that reading that book years ago led me (and others) to so many interesting library and literay efforts. It was through Mortenson's book--and through the generosity of a friend who gave me Wood's book--that I discovered Room To Read, and the work it does in India among other countries, for instance.)
If you wanted to change the world, 2006 was a good year in which to find inspiration, in the lives of restless men with a will to make the world better and a yen for mountaineering.
Two of them, Room To Read’s John Wood and the Central Asia Institute’s Greg Mortenson, released books in 2006 that would continue to inspire people around the world for the next five years. One of them is in trouble, his story questioned after an investigation by CBS’ 60 Minutes.
There are many parallels between Wood’s story and Mortenson’s tale. Wood, trekking in the Himalayas, stumbled across a Nepali school and was struck by the absence of books for the children. The Microsoft employee returned with the promised books, building what would become the first of many libraries and schools as part of the Room To Read network. Wood founded Room to Read in 2000, writing about the experience in Leaving Microsoft to Change the World in 2006.
Wood’s focus was on Room To Read’s roughly 1,128 schools and 10,000 libraries, built and maintained across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. His book is a corporate memoir — inspiring, but crisp and blunt about the challenges of running an organisation that wanted to change the way the world’s children read. His teachings are blunt, gleaned from experience; it’s from Wood that you learn how much better the small, open-to-all reading room works in India, for instance, rather than the intimidating, closed space of the government library.
Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea belongs on the inspirational literature shelf. His story was gripping: in 1993, Mortenson wrote, his passion for mountaineering got him into trouble, and he stumbled into the tiny village of Korphu in Pakistan’s Karakoram range. Nursed back to health by the villagers, Mortenson promised himself he would return and build them a school, which he did despite the rugged terrain and despite being briefly held captive by a group of men who appear to be from the Taliban. The Central Asia Institute, founded by Mortenson, has established 145 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But what made the book a bestseller was the drama, and Mortenson’s ability to touch people’s hearts. The title is drawn from an incident where he sits down with the statutory wise man of the village, Haji Ali: “...Haji Ali spoke. ‘If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea….’”
It was this kind of wisdom, as well as the message of hope, and Mortenson’s clearly etched passion for educating girls that made Three Cups of Tea such a bestseller, much-loved in India and elsewhere in the world. As with Wood, Mortenson’s lesson seemed to be that it was possible to change the world – “one school at a time” – though the numbers make you wonder which man was more focused on the actual goal.
It is this aspect of the book, and the Mortenson legend that the CBS television show sought to investigate. The accusations carry weight because they are made by a respected writer — wildlife and mountaineering expert Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air and Into The Wild. Krakauer casts doubt on Mortenson’s story of stumbling into Korphu at death’s door — the reality seems to have been more prosaic, with Mortenson pledging to build a school after a normal trek. He also challenges Mortenson’s account of being held by the Taliban, with one of his “captors” denying the story. Mortenson’s responses have been evasive, and he has no good reason for refusing to appear on the 60 Minutes show.
But the real damage arises from the 60 Minutes investigation of how the money raised by Mortenson’s charity is spent —the implication is that the charity spends almost as much on funding Mortenson’s book tours as it does on actually setting up schools.
The CBS show has spread dismay and sadness around the world; the accusations suggest that Mortenson exaggerated much of the truth — and that his charity is unprofessional. No one questions the real, if limited, value of the work he has done; and if organisations like Room To Read have done more in roughly the same time-span, it is not a crime for a charity to be disorganised. There is, as Krakauer and others have pointed out, a more serious breach of trust — those who believed in Mortenson’s legend and the power of three cups of tea are entitled to ask why there weren’t more schools, and fewer book tours.
The real sadness is in having to separate the wisdom of Three Cups of Tea – listen to the people you’re trying to help, believe that you can make a difference, slow down and take time to understand the way things run – from its accuracy. I thought, like many other readers across the world, that this was a true story, and it is heartbreaking in a way Mortenson may not understand to be told that it is, instead, a very colourful one.
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