A PERCEPTION OF INDIA

[This column was published in Business World of 7 October 2008.]


FOLLIES OF OUR MARKETERS

In July I interviewed Yasuo Hayashi, chief of Japan External Trade Organization. After the economic reforms of 1991-93, in which I played a small part, India has received growing volumes of foreign investment. Little of it has been from Japan, which exports enormous volumes of investment otherwise. I wanted to ask Hayashi whether Japan was not missing an opportunity in India. In his diplomatic manner, he gave an interesting answer - that India has not opened up its economy enough, and so it has not become a member of the supply chain formed by Japan, China and Southeast Asia, which all work like a single economy. The following is my interpretation of what Hayashi meant.

Japan is the country that has invested most abroad, next only to the USA. Its investment has played a large role in the transformation of Thailand and Malaysia into prosperous middle-income countries. Vietnam is in the middle of the same Japan-led transformation. At the end of the war with the US 30 years ago, Vietnam was dirt poor. Today it looks like a rich cousin of India.

Japan reached heights of prosperity in the 1980s, but also ran short of investment opportunities within the country; that is when it started investing heavily abroad. Japanese companies have poured investment into every significant country in the world. But they have largely avoided India. After the reforms of the 1990s, India attracted much foreign investment, but Japan’s share in it was not large. I used to think this was a result of Japanese miscalculation. Some Japanese investments in Indian automobile units went sour in the 1980s. The news spread in Japan, and turned all Japanese companies away from India.

That was my explanation for Japan’s lack of interest in India until I recently met Yasuo Hayashi, chairman of Japan External Trade Organization. I met him on his way to Bombay, where he was going to open a second JETRO business support centre. I asked him a question: All the world’s major companies have been investing in India. Why not the Japanese? Have they not missed the bus?

Mr Hayashi said that Japanese investment in India was not so negligible as I implied; Japan is the sixth largest foreign investor in India after Mauritius, USA, UK, Singapore and Netherlands. It invested $512 million in 2006 and 1.506 million in 2007. Indian statistics include only fresh investment, and exclude reinvestment – for instance, the Rs 160 billion that Suzuki proposes to invest in India in three years. Over 80 per cent of Japanese companies in India are making profits, and more than 90 per cent experct further growth. These figures are the highest for any host country in Asia. Nearly 500 Japanese companies are operating in India, and the number has been increasing by 80-100 in the past three years. According to JETRO’s annual survey of Japanese firms operating in ASEAN and South Asia, India is the most attractive destination in the medium term. Indo-Japanese trade too was growing. It almost doubled to $10 billion in the past three years, and Mr Hayashi expected it to touch $20 billion by 2010 – mostly Indian iron ore against Japanese machinery. And trade will act as an incentive for investment.

But he agreed that India was not a prime destination of Japanese investment, like China. His explanation was that Japan is a major manufacturing country, and so is China; India is not. Japanese and Chinese economies are complementary in a way India’s is not. India is not a part of the supply chains. What the East Asian countries did – Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and most recently, China – was that they abolished trade barriers between Japan and themselves: no tariffs, and minimum procedures. As a result, goods and components moved without obstruction between them and Japan. Japan, for instance, has free trade agreements with ASEAN and eight other countries. So parts of a product could be made anywhere, assembled anywhere else, and sold somewhere else. Thus, for instance, China would assemble an entire CNC lathe. The computer for it may come from Japan, the chips from Taiwan, and the box from Vietnam. All would be flown to a Japanese joint venture in Shanghai, and the lathe, once assembled and tested, may be exported to Mexico. The Japanese could produce each component where it was cheapest, and coordinate production in factories in different East Asian countries as if they were one country. They could send technicians to any country on long-term, multiple-entry visas; there were no limits on the number they could send. That was what Mr Hayashi was talking about – that East Asian countries form a supply chain with Japan, and India does not. This is a kind of enormous free trade area which permits each country to maximize economies of scale and to learn from others. Mr Hayashi did not say it in so many words, but it is the low costs and the access to neighbouring markets that have enabled East Asian countries to grow so much faster than India. Now Australia is being integrated into the East Asian supply chain.

Japan would like India to become a part of the supply chain. The Indo-Japan Free Trade Area agreement is partly about that. Japan is saying: let our inputs in duty-free into India, and we will let in Indian pharmaceuticals and agricultural products, which are just now barred by Japanese standards, otherwise known as non-tariff barriers. If the FTA were signed, Japanese carmakers would be able to import parts duty-free; then they could produce vehicles in India cheaply enough to export. The Japan-Malaysia FTA, for example, aims to do something similar: it creates a market for Japanese auto components in Malaysia, in exchange for textile exports from Malaysia to Japan.

Kamal Nath’s enduring refrain has been that he would not sacrifice the poor Indian farmer in trade negotiations. He does not have to when it comes to Japan; Japanese agricultural products are so expensive that they cannot be exported. So Japan is the only country with which he should have no difficulty in signing an agreement. But he has tarried for three years. What is holding up the FTA?

It is the products on which India is not prepared to give tariff concessions. In all the FTAs India has entered, it has inserted enormous sensitive lists of products on which it would not reduce tariffs for many years. These include products in which Japan is interested. Indian auto part makers are a strong lobby; they oppose the opening of the market to imported components. It is India’s protectionism that prevents it from emerging as an Asian tiger.

I also asked Mr Hayashi about the use of Indian brain power. The US has for many years been very open to Indian intellectual workers, especially IT workers. As a result, it has attracted lacs of them. In the 1990s, Indian IT firms came up and began to compete for the software engineers that American companies were luring away to the US West Coast. In response, those companies also came and set up affiliates in India. By now over a hundred MNCs have research centers in India. Why has Japan lagged behind?

To this, Mr Hayashi said that Suzuki and Nissan have announced plans to set up R&D centres in India. Toshiba, NTT, NEC and Fujitsu are sending young Japanese workers to their partner companies in India to train them in English and IT. But the Chinese learn Japanese in larger numbers, so more of them are used by Japanese companies.

That answer also made me think. We are proud of our Anglophonicity and our connection with the US. But it is possible to learn from any technologically advanced country, and people can do so by learning its language. Thus, the Chinese access Japanese knowledge, and the Poles and Russians access German knowledge. Japan and Germany have not missed out on Indian brains; they just use other brains.

Mr Hayashi said that Japanese multinationals were international and used English; but Japanese small and medium enterprises were more comfortable with Japanese. He mentioned the career development plan for Asian students run by the Japanese government. It runs courses which include courses on Japanese language and Japanese business culture. It offers career consultation, and provides placement opportunities. It hopes to reach a target of 30,000 students from all of ASEAN-South Asia in 2010, of whom perhaps 10,000 may be from India. This figure is dwarfed by the number of East Asians who know and learn Japanese.

Japan was badly hit by the first oil crisis in the 1970s. But it implemented a rigorous energy conservation programme. By 1980 it was the world’s most energy-efficient country – it produced more dollars of GDP per joule of energy than any other country. Still, Japan has negligible domestic energy resources and imports the bulk of its requirements; so it is highly vulnerable to oil prices. I asked Mr Hayashi how Japan had tackled the recent rises in oil prices. Being highly energy-efficient, Japan has less room to improve its efficiency; how did it deal with the current oil crisis?

Japan has been trying to replace oil and economize on it; it has brought down the share of oil in its energy consumption below 50 per cent. It has instituted an award for Top Runners – companies that achieve the highest energy efficiency. Other producers learn from these model companies. Nissan and Toyota are pioneers in energy-efficient cars, and have gained market share in the US on that account. Japan is now a leader in energy conservation policies, and would like to export them, including to India. It will showcase its energy technologies in the 2009 Indian Engineering Trade Fair in Bangalore next February, where it is going to be the guest country. It will also set up an Indian Institute of Technology, which will act as a bridge between industry and academia in the two countries.

CHINA IN THE PATENT RACE

[I wrote this in Business World of 15 July 2008.]

INVENTED IN CHINA

In 1970, India broke away from the world patent system. It abolished product patents in food products and pharmaceuticals, and opened the gates for its firms to break other countries’ patents and produce any drugs they liked. Thousands of small firms came up and started making copycat drugs. India became the haven of cheap drugs. It became such a serious threat that industrial countries had to bribe it to bring it back into line. In the Uruguay round they offered India a bargain: if it and its lawless allies such as Brazil enacted proper patent protection, the industrial countries would open up their textile markets to developing countries. Both sides had ten years to fulfil their bargain after the Uruguay round agreements were signed in 2005. The industrial countries kept their side of the bargain. India dragged its feet as long as it could, but finally kept its promise in 2006. Altogether, patent protection is stronger across the world than it was ten years ago.

The impact can be begun to be seen. According to a Thomson-Reuters study, the number of primary patents filed in ten countries – G8 plus China and South Korea – increased 16 per cent between 2003 and 2006; the total number, including refiling in countries other than the country of origin, went up 21 per cent. On the average, refilings in 2003 were roughly two-thirds of original patents; in 2007 they were about four-fifths. Patenting activity remains primarily national; few patentors seek protection in other countries as well. But their proportion is going up.

The United States is the world’s leading country in most things, but not in patenting; the country that hands out the largest number of patents is Japan. In 2007 it registered almost 600,000 patents, while the US registered about 400,000. The reason is that Japan has two categories of patents, major and minor. Significant advances in science and technology qualify for major patents. But there are many small improvements in techniques of research and production; Japan gives them patents too. The object is not so much to give the patentor a monopoly, but to give small improvements publicity, so that patentors can find licensees for them.

However, the world supremacy of Japan in patenting, achieved by means of this administrative trick, is declining. Patents registered in Japan went up about 15 per cent between 2003 and 2007; patents in the US went up by about 30 per cent. But Chinese patents almost doubled. China is still an infant compared to the US and Japan; its patents have just exceeded 100,000.

Patenting is primarily a business activity; it is businesses that invest in innovation and obtain patents for those innovations that they want exclusive use of or would like to license out. Patents taken by universities and laboratories are less than 5 per cent of the total in most countries. The two exceptions to this rule are China and Russia; 10-15 per cent of their patents are given to academic institutions. Both countries have traditionally spent heavily on universities and laboratories; and as in India, the number of patents taken out is taken as one of the parameters to judge academic institutions. In India, the incentives lead to at most a few hundred patents; in China and Russia, the number of academic patents runs into thousands.

Many patents are the result of incentives such as those just mentioned; some are a measure of pride. Most of the economically valuable patents come from corporate laboratories or plants. Of them, multinationals look for patents of high value, and try to maximize the value by taking out secondary patents in the big industrial markets – the US, the EU and Japan. Japan doubled its share of these triple patents between 2003 and 2007; now almost one out of two such patents is Japanese. The American share used to be over a third; it has come down to a fifth. Germany used to be the third, with roughly 10 per cent of the total; its share has come down to less than 5 per cent. The ascending country is not China; it is South Korea, whose share has grown from just about 2 per cent to over 10 per cent. South Korea used to be pretty isolated on account of its language; but it is rapidly latching on to the global innovation system.

And India? India figures nowhere. Not that it has not been trying; ever since Independence it has been investing ever larger sums in its government laboratories and universities. But their patent output has been measly. Ramesh Mashelkar, when he became director general of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, tried to change this culture of “spend, spend and forget results”; he tried to make laboratories take out more patents. But he was unlucky enough to get Murli Manohar Joshi as minister. The score was love-all. India continues to wait for a return on its investment in science and technology.

A SCINTILLATING CONVERSATION

[Lester Brown, the maverick ecologist, visited Delhi for the release of his latest book, Plan 3.0, in 2008. I interviewed him with two colleagues. We discovered that we had almost passed by each other in 1956: on his first trip to India, his boat got through the Suez Canal just before it was blocked by Abdul Gamal Nasser; mine just got to Aden when the canal was closed, and my boat to England went round the Cape of Good Hope . We got on very well. Here is a transcript of our conversation. It was published in the Telegraph of 1 July 2008]

INTERVIEW WITH LESTER BROWN

AD: In your career of 50 and more years, have you ever gone wrong in a major way?

LB: Yes! In 1996, when I was president of Worldwatch, we got a call from the office of the German Environment Minister who was coming to town saying she'd like to have a meeting. So I went over to the hotel where she was staying to meet with her. It was a great meeting, very informal, talking about global environmental issues. Then a couple of weeks later, i got a letter from her asking if I'd be interested in co-authoring a book on global environmental issues. But I had a bunch of deadlines because of my work at Worldwatch. I knew if I tried another major project, I'd go over the edge. So I wrote back and declined. But now that Angela Merkel is Chancellor of Germany... (laughs). So, that's my big mistake. I have a file for big mistakes and that's where that one goes. But I take solace from the fact that if indeed we had written a book together, she probably wouldn't be chancellor of germany!

She's had a really remarkable career. One, she's east german; two, she's a woman and she came into politics maybe 15 years ago and worked her way up through the system. She's also interesting because not too may politicians have a PhD in Physics. So you can talk science to her and you don't have to draw pictures. She gets it. It's remarkable. The only other politician with a similar career is Marina XXXXX, who recently resigned as environment minister in Brazil. She's been environment minister since Lula became President. She was born in a rubber tapper’s family in the Amazon. At age 16, she got a job as a domestic for a well-to-do family not far from where she'd grown up. That's when she learned to read. At age 35, she was the youngest member of the Brazilian senate. Can you imagine learning to read when you're 16? And then having a political career?

AD: You haven't co-authored too many collaborative books. Most of them are your own. It is very difficult to write with someone isn't it?

LB: Well, for two reasons. One, you have to mesh your thinking and that can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. There's also a matter of efficiency. Some people aspire to be writers; I never wanted to be a writer. I still don't. It's just that there are some ideas you want to share with people. But I don't really write, I dictate everything. That's partly because I never learned to type. As long as I have someone to transcribe, my career will come along.

SN: You never learned to type?

LB: No, never. I was a farmer and I was going to be a tomato farmer the rest of my life. In late 1956 I came to India under the International Farm Youth Exchange Program and went back and grew tomatoes for a couple more years with my brother. We were marketing that year a million and half pounds of tomatoes. So we'd put together a fairly substantial operation. But I realised that I really wanted to work on the world's food and population problems. So I went to Washington to join the farm agriculture service in the US department of agriculture in 1959; and have been in Washington ever since.

AD: Tomatoes are a very labour-intensive crop...

LB: They are indeed. When you're planting, you've got to move really quickly. At harvest of course it's really labour-intensive. For a million and a half tomatoes it takes a lot of labour. So we hired classmates and housewives who wanted short-term pay. And we brought in, under contract, Puerto Ricans and blacks from nearby cities who wanted summer-time work on farms. This was in southern New Jersey. That's where I was born and that's where I grew up.

The other sort of amusing thing to me is you hear people who say they were the first from their family to graduate from college, I was the first in my family to graduate from elementary school!

AD: Incredible!

LB: It's amazing. I think my father got to fifth grade. He was a hired hand on a farm and then we sharecropped for a few years. He was too old for the draft in World War 2. So we were farming during the war when prices weren't very good. Even then we were sharecropping. And we accumulated enough cash to buy a small farm of our own. So that's where we finished growing up and that was the base. My brother and I, who is three years younger than I am, we learned management very early. It turns out that management is the same whether you're growing tomatoes or managing a research institute. The challenge is to get good people and then give them the leeway to unfold and develop their skills.

AD: Your first degree was in agriculture, right?

LB: Yes, agricultural science. When you think about, at that time there were no environmental science majors. I mean, environmental science didn't exist. Because I was going to be a farmer, I took a lot of agricultural courses; there was a major called general agricultural science. But I had a scholarship so I took a lot of other courses – sort of like a kid in a candy store. And when you think about the array of courses, it's about as close as you could get to environmental science without actually being in environmental science. I took chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, soil physics, entomology, plant pathology, meteorology, climatology, geology.

AD: That's really broad...

LB: Yeah, it provided a really broad, at least rudimentary familiarity with basic science, which is good for farming, and that's what I had in mind.

PF: That's still eight or ten years before Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring came out and sparked off the environmental movement...

LB: Right. It was an evolutionary sort of thing. I was working in the department of agriculture on international issues. I began in the Asia branch. After a period, I became the administrator of the international agricultural development service, which was the technical assistance arm of the US dept. of agriculture. And we'd work with USAID program. Then, I was the youngest agency head in the US government. But before that when I was in the department, I was working on countries in Asia, my goal was to get to know world agriculture. I learned time management very early. So I brought that same work ethic to the department.

AD: You're very efficient. You produce a lot...

LB: I suppose. By some standards at least. But I also enjoy what I'm doing. I enjoy the analytical challenges. They intrigue me. The exciting thing is to discover new linkages; how issues and problems relate to each other. That's something that you don't get with more traditional academics, when all your degrees are in one field. I really enjoy the analysis. The writing is not as exciting.

AD: The process of discovery...

LB: Yes.

AD: You read a lot. You pick the most unexpected sources in your books. Do you look for things which you are not familiar with?

LB: It's a combination of things. I read a lot and in many different fields. My colleagues at the Earth Policy Institute feed me a steady flow of articles and information. We have a staff of eight, five do research. So the others in various ways, sort of support the research I do. They also do their own things but they don't do books. So we do come across a very rich variety of things that are part of the analysis that we do.

AD: Your initial interest was in agriculture. When was it that you broadened out into energy and the environment? Was it the oil crisis?

LB: I'd been head of the international development service at the department of agriculture from 1966 to 1969. When Nixon won and took office in January, I resigned the day before. As an agency head, I was politically expendable and also, I did not particularly want to work in the Nixon administration. That's when I helped Jim Grant start the overseas development council, so I worked on issues across the board. Over five years, I began to sense the need for a research institute that would focus on global environmental issues. By chance, one afternoon at a conference in Aspen, late in the afternoon after the conference was finished, there Jim and me in the swimming pool and the other happened to be executive vice president of the Rockefeller Brothers ? foundation. We got talking and we each sensed the need for a research institute on global environmental issues. One thing led to another and the Rockefeller fund gave us a half million dollars as start-up and that's how the Worldwatch Institute was formed. I was there for 26 years, moved from President to Chairman and then realised I had a lot of things I still wanted to do. So I started the Earth Policy Institute as a place to do those things.

AD: Why did you come to India the first time?

LB: I had been nominated for the International farm youth exchange program from New Jersey in 1956, the year after I graduated from Rutgers. It was decided that someone should come to India. And, it was an interesting experience in that I had never been out of the country before. We sailed from New York to Bombay. It was New York to Naples on a ship called Queen Frederica and from Naples to Bombay through the Suez on an Italian ship called the Victoria.

AD: Yes, Lloyd Triestino!

LB: You've been on it?

AD: Yes.

LD: And the Victoria was the sister ship, as you remember to the Andrea Doria, that went down off the coast of Massachusets in the late spring. We were sailing in late August! So we were well aware of the risk.

AD: Did you have a good storm in the Indian ocean?

LB: No, but in the Atlantic! As we were leaving New York, I got caught in Hurricane Betsy that was coming up the East coast. I remember the third day, when I came down for breakfast, only four people had showed up!

AD: You get automatic exercise with the ship going up and down and up and down...!

LB: (Laughs) I remember looking out the porthole; you'd go down and see waves, then go up and see clouds!

AD: Yes, you stood at one end and you could see the sea right over the funnel!

LB: It was amazing.

AD: I travelled the first time when I went to England; the Suez crisis broke out just as we entered the Red Sea. So we had to go right around Africa, stopping in Durban and Capetown. That's where we had a terrific storm.

LD: So you were sailing in October 1956?

AD: Yes! As you came through to India, I was going around Africa to England.

LD: Well, we took the ship through, and had tickets to go back. But obviously, by December, you couldn't. So we took a flight to Europe because we were catching the SS United States from Southampton to New York.

AD: Where did you spend your time in India?

LB: I lived with three families. One was in a small village maybe 60 miles north of Nagpur called Pardi. And that was an interesting experience, because the last several miles we went by bullock cart to get to the village! The second one was near Trivandrum and the third was North of Lucknow. Not a typical village family, I was staying with the Raja of Mankapur at his palace! And it was really interesting because he had two modes of transport – a Buick and an elephant! So, depending on where we were going, we took the car or the elephant!

AD: So you had very varied experiences...

LB: Geographically too. A lot of interesting things happened. When we arrived in September in New Delhi for our orientation, there were ten of us actually; six men and four women. After we got to Delhi, we separated to each of our families and didn't see each other till we got back. We spent about a month with each family. But while we were in Delhi, I saw that India was having the wrestling finals to select the team to go to the Melbourne Olympics. So we went and because we were from abroad, we got ring-side seats. We got talking to some of the officials about US collegiate wrestling and its differences to the Olympics. There were two of us who'd wrestled - a guy called Armstrong from Oregon state and me. So after they'd selected their team, we were invited by the Indian officials to give an exhibition of American collegiate wrestling! They gave us some of the wrestling tights of the Indian wrestlers. We changed into these and did this exhibition. For some reason, it was in the newspapers! And so, as I went about India, to stay with all the families, the local wrestlers always wanted to challenge me to a bout! (Laughter).It was a good way to establish social contact and to sort of get to know people....

AD: You got very close to people!

LB: (Laughs), Indeed! And the interesting thing was that they didn’t have mats. They had these pits of sand. It was great fun though! But there were many interesting experiences living in the villages.

AD: Do you find India frustrating in the sense that the government is not terribly concerned about global warming or even about the running out of oil...

LB: No more so than the government of Washington. We're not very well prepared for what lies ahead. I think of peak oil...

AD: I got a feeling from reading your work that you think that the age of oil is going to be followed by an age of electricity. Is that right?

LB: To a substantial degree, yes. Electricity largely from renewables. One of the things I find so interesting about the oil situation, my sense is that we've either reached peak oil (it might have been last year), or we're if not, it's imminent. And the thing that's so fascinating and frustrating, is the projections of the International Energy Agency in Paris. They project that world oil demand will go from 85 million barrels today to 120 million barrels in 2030. And these are based economic growth and income changes and so forth. But then, the way they do the supply projects is what's surprising. They project demand and they assume that supply will match that demand! Because that's the way it's always been!

AD: What about prices? I mean, I just can't believe that the price elasticity of demand for oil is zero. That people will continue to consume as much oil as they do, whatever the price...

LB: There was an interruption in the growth in oil production after the price hikes of the 1970s. But then it resumed growth. For whatever reasons, they began with demand and they never, to the best of my knowledge, did any analysis of supply. Many geologists have been aware, for some time, that we're never going to reach even a hundred million barrels, much less 120 million. In my own thinking on this, I'm not an oil analyst, but one thing I did was to look at the 20 largest oil fields. And they were all discovered between 1914 and 1979, which means that the youngest of these really big oil fields, is almost 30 years old, with the others obviously much older. And that, to me, is the most convincing evidence that world oil production is not going to increase much longer. And it may, in fact, not increase at all.

In support of that, is the recent indication by a couple of different Russian officials that Russian oil production probably peaked in the last quarter of last year. In recent months, it's been going down. They don't see this as a temporary decline. They think this is probably it. If that's the case, then peak oil cannot be far away.

I have a feeling that the oil industry, which is reflected very much in the International Energy Agency and also in the international side of the Department of Energy in Washington, that neither the oil exporting countries or the oil production companies want the world to be fully informed and fully aware of the fact that oil fields are being depleted and production is not going to increase. Because, if it became clear that peak oil was imminent, there would be a flurry of activity to develop alternatives.

Up until a couple of years ago, oil companies and oil countries were saying “Don't worry, there's plenty of oil,” and suddenly everything has changed.

AD: Is it true that only 15 per cent of world oil production, now, is in the hands of oil companies.

LB: It's a very small amount; surprisingly small. I don't know the exact percentage, but I think that that number is consistent with my impression of where things are. Some of the oil companies are buying most of their oil now. And their share is getting smaller all the time because they're working their own fields pretty hard.

AD: So, as oil nationalism gets stronger, international distribution of oil will get less equal. So, while Saudi Arabia may continue to float in oil for some time, India may have to take many early steps to economise.

LB: One of the interesting things of peak oil, is that once we pass it, no country gets more oil, unless another gets less. And that world is very different from the one we spent our lives in, where oil production was almost always increasing so everyone got more oil. But that era is about to come to an end. I see this happening at about the same time that the world food situation is tightening. What we're seeing is the emergence of a politics of food scarcity. Exporting countries like Russia and Argentina - wheat exporters – restricting their exports or even banning exports for some months. And Vietnam, a rice exporter, not exporting any rice for several months, all in order to keep domestic prices under control. In response to this, importing countries are becoming very nervous and we're seeing what I think is a new chapter in world food security. For the first time, countries are looking for land in other countries. Libya, which imports 90 per cent of its great, has at least 100,000 hectares in the Ukraine on which to grow wheat and ship back. Egypt is working on a similar deal because they import close to half their grain. One reason they've been able to do that is because the Libyans gave Ukraine some of their oil and Egypt did the same thing with natural gas. It was in Ukraine's interest to do this because they've been trying to get out of Russian control of oil and natural gas. So here we have an interesting intersection of the politics of oil and natural gas and food coming together.

AD: So Libya exports oil to Ukraine?

LB: I think what they've done is to give one of the Ukrainian companies access to their fields. I think there was a historical tie there that had been broken but they restored it. Other countries are doing the same thing. South Korea is looking for land in Siberia and in the Sudan and some others. They import 70 per cent of their grain. If they get land in Siberia, they will employ North Koreans to work on the land. This is cheap labour for them, but good for the North Koreans. Some entrepreneurs from India are looking for land in Uruguay and Paraguay; not huge sums – some 25,000 acres – to grow grain and oilseeds. China is looking everywhere; Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Siberia, Brazil. The Chinese had actually signed an agreement with the Philippines for a million acres or something, to grow and ship back to China; probably mostly grain. Then the Philippines had trouble finding rice to import, and the deal was off. This deal had been worked out with a few Philippine government officials; sounds like one of those special deals.

AD: Yes, Philippines works like that; the President and the Army, and so on...

LB: Yes. So the government was forced to break that agreement because of all the political pressure. What is happening is that there will be a lot of bilateral deals working out between countries that are more affluent and have some special influence to work out long-term trade deals. This will work for the more affluent countries, but will leave out a lot of poor countries which, a year or two from now, will have to import grain and won't be able to find it. Then we're going to have a lot of desperate people in these countries. Desperate people do a lot of desperate things. They loot, they overthrow their governments, they migrate to more food secure countries. What we're beginning to see with more and more food insecurity is that more and more countries are looking after their own narrow self interest and that is potentially a dangerous thing for the world....

AD: Because the world market for food is breaking down...

LB: Yes! And it begins to weaken the network. The world works today because we have a network of functioning, cooperating nation states. Whether it's controlling the spread of infectious diseases or maintaining the integrity of the international monetary system and what have you, I mean there are so many things that depend on this cooperative mentality and mindset. With the community fracturing because of food shortages, it makes me feel uneasy.

AD: One could imagine the world going back to the 19th century with colonialism...

LB: That's one thing. But it could go much further than that. Because there'll be a number of countries, failing states, then the whole system could start to unravel.

AD: Failing states are also states that are ripe to be taken over.

PF: This is interesting because you find fractures happening over food, in energy supplies.... this sort of colonialism does seem to be returning. There are a bunch of books out that talk about what happens after American power weakens. Now you have the US, China and the EU...

AD: Well, it's natural. When people see a change coming...

LB: Especially changes that are threatening...

AD: Yes, it is natural for political scientists to think of models from the past. Colonialism is such a model. What will happen will not replicate what happened in the past. But we're just playing with different models. I think Lester is pointing out things that are already happening – countries taking tracts of land in other countries, sort of becoming 'landlords’.

SN: But what could stop these countries from snatching more land in case there is a food crisis?

LB: Your point is well taken. I think if there were a food shortage in the Ukraine, for example, and food prices rose, there would be political pressure on the government to nationalise the land and take it back.

PF: So effectively, multilateralism is dead...

AD: Well, markets are breaking up. That's already happened in food grains. The market is much less unified than it was 10 years ago. This is partly because the US had declined as the world's major food grain exporter. And that could be because of ethanol. Lester, is ethanol the most likely substitute for oil, or would something else emerge?

LB: From an agricultural point of view, the demand for auto fuel is insatiable. If the entire US grain harvest was converted into ethanol, it would answer maybe 16 per cent of our automotive fuel needs.

AD: So that's no solution. And, in fact, if you took the whole world's harvest, it would perhaps just about cover America's requirement, since American produces a seventh of the world's grain.

LB: About 1/5th. Yes, It would come close but certainly wouldn't make it. Keep in mind that it takes a certain amount of oil to produce the corn and ethanol. So it's not a net gain. To look at this at the micro level, the grain required to fill a 25 gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year. In a bushel of corn, there are about 2.5 gallons of ethanol. So, 25 gallons of ethanol would be 10 bushels which is about 600 pounds of grain. The average Indian consumes less than 1 pound of grain a day, so this tank full could feed 1 and a half indians a year. At the global level, where grain consumption is around 300 kgs a year, this would feed 1 person a year. So, it's not a solution. You mentioned electricity; my sense is we're going to move first in the US towards plug-in hybrid cars on one hand and wind farms on the other, which basically means our cars will run on wind power. This is a very exciting possibility, but the technologies are already out there. They're still wrestling with getting the wrinkles out of the batteries to get lithium ion batteries, but of the five companies coming to market, the winner will probably be Toyota or GM. Both have said they'll be in the market by 2010.

I have a feeling Toyota will try to do a plug-in version of the Prius. GM's Volt is a different kind of hybrid; it's got lithium ion batteries that are more advanced than the Prius's nickel metal hydrides. But The Volt is an electric car with an auxiliary gasoline engine that doesn't power the car. It generates electricity when the batteries drop below a certain point. GM expects the Volt, under typical driving conditions in the US, to get about 151 miles per gallon. The US fleet average is maybe 22 miles per gallon. I have a feeling this is a good bet technologically. It's simple. The Toyota hybrid is a remarkable piece of engineering where the motor and engine power the car at the same time. That's really a major achievement. The software that manages all that is also fairly complex. In fact, when Ford tried to get to market with a small SUV Hybrid, they couldn't get the software right. So they licensed Toyota's software for the Prius.

AD: So the end of oil need not lead to a contraction of transport.

LB: Need not, because countries everywhere have access to renewable energy. I mean, it might be wind, it might be geo-thermal, it might be solar, a certain amount of hydro power, these will be part of the equation. Wave power will find a place. We're still in the early stages of enormous potential there, especially for countries with long coastlines like India. But, I don't think the end of oil will necessarily be the end of automobiles. It may cause some contraction, but the energy to run cars will be available. Texas is developing 23,000 megawatts of wind energy. That is enough to take off 23 coal fired power plants.

PF: Do you see hydrogen playing a major role? Shell and others have already invested billions in research. India too has some large-scale industrial experiments..

LB: Four or five years ago, it looked as though fuel cell automobiles were going to be the next thing. Especially since they were clean. You'd still have to produce the hydrogen, but in my model, at least, it would have been mostly wind energy for the US. But in the end, the advances in fuel cell technology have not occurred and they're still very costly; prohibitively so. I think that they're going to lose the race to plug-in hybrids or pure electrics will do it.

AD: So it's not an oil problem. It's an energy problem. And the energy problem is also to a large extent the green-house problem. There also, just as countries are not going to be able to agree easily on food or oil, here too, they will find it difficult to agree. We could live through an age of global warming.

LB: We may. It's hard to say. We're seeing in the US, the emergence of a powerful grassroots movement to ban the construction of coal- fired power plants. A year ago, there were 151 proposed new coal-fired power plants in the US; 59 of them are now off the list. This is either because state regulators refused to license them or because local opposition was so strong. Another 48 are being challenged in the courts largely on the grounds that the utilities did not do at least a cost-analysis of efficiency and they didn't look at renewables. We've been building gas-fired power plants, but the price of natural gas has gone so high, that the utilities automatically wanted to go back to what they knew best, which was coal-fired power plants. There's another 40 on that list that haven't been challenged because they haven't reached the permitting stage, but when they do, I think every one will be challenged.

Even Wall Street represented by three major banks – JP Morgan, Citibank and Morgan Stanley, issued a statement,

PF: The Carbon Principles...

LB: Right... saying basically that they would no longer fund coal-fired power plants. So Wall Street has turned its back on the coal industry. So it's quite possible that by the end of this year, we'd be close to a sort of de-factor moratorium on coal fired power plants in the US. And it's happened so fast. It's one of those political tipping points that once it started, it couldn't be stopped. The other interesting thing is that this is grassroots. It has nothing to do with Washington. What's interesting is that at no point has this movement said “We're going to do this if the rest of the world does it.” They're just doing it. That, if we make it, is how it's going to be. It's not going to be internationally-negotiated agreements. Time will run out long before we succeed on that front. This to me is one of the most exciting things to happen. It could be our first big win in the effort to stabilise the Earth's climate. If this happens in the US, not that other countries will automatically follow, but it will influence the way the rest of the world thinks about this. And particularly if we get the kind of leadership in the White House that we need, we could see some really exciting things on that front.

PF: Could the next President pass something like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Change bill, that's looks unlikely to go through Congress?

LB: I think it will be much more ambitious than that. One of the things that I see in Obama that isn’t in Clinton or McCain, both of them are incrementalists. Obama is capable of taking bold steps and mobilising support for it. He's sufficiently charismatic. I think he can do that. I mean, we may be disappointed, but that's still my sense. When you think of what he's done, a year ago, the Clintons had donor lists from two Presidential campaigns, to New York senatorial campaigns; they knew everyone in the party who had money. Who could possibly take them on? Not only did Obama take them on, but he beat them decisively! It's amazing when you think about it. It's also interesting because, there was an interview on TV. A reporter was being interviewed on analysing the Primaries. She'd gone to observe a corporate executive training program. The speaker on that occasion was the CEO of the company and he was talking to the trainees. He said, “If you want to look at a good model of modern management, look at the Obama campaign. And I say that as a lifelong Republican. That's the way to do it.”

THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

[I was intrigued by the storm in South Africa over David Bullard in 2008. I am an Indian and I am dead against racism; but I was thrilled by a column for which he was accused of racism. So I got interested in how South Africans tackle race. I haven't been to South Africa for 52 years; and even then I spent a day in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town while my ship replenished itself on way to England. At that time, racism was official in South Africa; I remember separate benches and toilets in gardens. Although all that is gone, racism continues to live a clandestine life in South African languages; that is what fascinated me. This column was published in the Telegraph of 6 May 2008]

THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

When Harbhajan Singh was ticked off for racist abuse of Andrew Symonds, most Indians were befuddled. He is supposed to have called Symonds a monkey; in defence, he said he had only said “Maa ki…” at which the match referee laughed and reduced his penalty. Our colonial ancestors used to be quite well versed in the intricacies of racism; they had rigorous lessons from the British. Every schoolchild knows the story of Gandhiji being thrown out of a train in South Africa because he entered a first-class carriage (and he had bought a first-class ticket). But after our independence in 1947, we did pretty thorough racial cleansing. Whites almost disappeared from India – certainly racist whites. So we are somewhat uneducated in racism. We could do with some lessons from South Africa, where race remains a live issue although non-whites have been in power since 1994.

Let me start with David Bullard, who has just been sacked as a columnist by The Sunday Times of Johannesburg. He describes himself as follows: “Bullard’s meteoric rise to fame as a newspaper columnist and media celebrity came after a hugely successful and obscenely profitable twenty-four years in the financial markets trading bonds and derivatives. He is an opinionated sod who is as impervious to criticism as he is to bullets. He’s also old enough and rich enough to not give a damn what other people think. When he’s not driving fast cars, drinking expensive whisky, traveling down the sharp end of planes and eating absurdly expensive meals in swanky restaurants he enjoys the simple things in life such as reading “A Brief History of Time” and making critical pencil notes in the margin. He has had his teeth whitened, doesn’t dye his hair and has it on good authority that the halitosis is curable.”

On 7 April, he wrote a column in Johannesburg Sunday Times. He imagined a South Africa uncolonized by whites: a South Africa without cars, television, internet, cellphones, newspapers, magazines, shopping malls, cigars or wallpaint. The people live an idyllic life. They have enough and want nothing more. They have discovered fire and are developing the wheel. Despite this blissful existence, they miss something: they do not know what. Then one day, the Chinese arrive looking for minerals, land, water and labour. Then the South Africans know what was missing in their lives: someone to blame.

This summary does not capture Bullard’s style, which I found riveting. It was good entertainment – I would have been chuffed to write it. As to content, obviously Bullard was blaming black South Africans for blaming whites. This had local relevance. A local reader may disagree with him, and may think of counterarguments. It is not inevitable that if whites had not exploited Africa, the Chinese would have. Africa might never have been discovered; or it might have been too remote and might have been neglected by the whites, like Japan; or it might not been rich in minerals. There are so many alternative scenarios that can be imagined; none is more probable than another. It was possible to controvert or dismiss Bullard’s argument; but I could not see how it was racist.

Then, after being dismissed, Bullard wrote an apology which listed what his readers found offensive about the column. He called his subjects “simple tribesmen”; that was interpreted to mean they were stupid. He wrote that if a child was eaten up by a lion or a crocodile, its parents would mourn for a while and then have another; that was considered insensitive. He wrote that the huts were built so as to catch most of the day’s sun; that was taken to mean that blacks were lazy.

Bullard’s remarks may have been impolite or unpleasant. But I thought they were well within the kind of discourse that goes on in any democracy. They reminded me of some Indians’ habit of taking umbrage at their opponents’ remarks and asking for an apology. The Hindutwits are particularly good at this; Muslims also indulge in it sometimes. Children do it all the time – picking up fights over real and imagined insults. It is the context that defines racism. In particular, certain epithets from the Apartheid era are taboo as classic racism – boertjie or plank (white Afrikaans – that is, of Dutch descent – generally known as Boer), roeinek, bhulu or soetie (English South African), kaffir, bushcat, groenewald or baboon (black), boesman or bushman (tribesman from South-west Africa), hotnot, baster, gam, ghoffel or geelbek (mixed-race), meid (black or coloured woman, from maid), koelie or coolie (South Asian), skeepfokker (Australian) or kwerekwere (foreigner visiting an African ghetto). Indians had their own terms: for instance, gora for whites, bruin for coloured people, ravan or pekkie for blacks, slum for Muslims, roti for north Indians and porridge for Tamils. It was not only other races for which people had rude descriptions. The police also attracted many epithets: for instance, gatta, boere (because most policemen were Boers), or kerel (the Dutch word for boy).

Boer is a wonderful transplant of Dutch, of special interest to me because of its affinity with German. Take, for instance, boekkie, which means darling or honey. If you are in love with her, you can say you are hard up. Bok means a goat, whence come Springboks – leaping goats – a name for the South African cricket team. Boekkie means a little goat, a kid. That would be the right word for a girl friend; so would tjerrie (cherie) or stukkie (from stuck, Dutch for a small piece). But if it is a non-girl friend, you can greet him, “Howzit, china!” China means a mate: china plate – mate – it is a typical Cockney derivation. On the same lines, “I must get some tom” means I need money; it comes from tomfoolery, which rhymes with jewellery. There are many words for something admirable or cool. For example, kief comes from gif, which means poison, but has come to be used for local marijuana, hence cool. Tit, lekker, befok and kwaai mean the same thing.

The English have their own slang in South Africa, though it is not nearly as colourful as Boer (“Dutch” is South African Englishmen’s slang for Boer.) They use “now” in peculiar ways. “Just now” means some time – not necessarily soon. “Now now” may mean recently or soon. If they say, “I am scheming”, they have nothing sinister in mind; they are only thinking.

I am not familiar with local African slang. But some words have become well known. For instance, an indaba is a conference, while dagga is marijuana. At football matches, one shouts, “Ladooma!” which I think means a goal.

This is a very superficial and amateur introduction to South African lingo. South Africa is known in India only for its lions and elephants. But its people are equally interesting. The mixture of Africans, English and Dutchmen has produced a fascinating mélange. Every community that has gone to Africa has turned into a tribe, and developed a tribal language. India may have been like that at one time, but now it has become too integrated and boring. For the true colours of tribal differentiation, one must go to South Africa.

PORTRAIT OF A TALIB

[While trawling Canadian press in 2008, I came across a gripping account of the Taliban by Graeme Smith, a Globe and Mail Correspondent. This is what I wrote about it in The Telegraph of 8 April 2008.]

GETTING CLOSE TO THE TALIBAN 

Indians know Graeme Smith well. He is the youngest captain of a test cricket team ever: he was 22 when he captained South Africa in the 2003 World Cup. He scored 277 against England at Edgbaston in 2003, and 259 at Lords in the next test, breaking Don Bradman’s record of 254 for the ground.

But there is another Graeme Smith – a Canadian reporter who has done an extraordinary video series for Toronto Globe and Mail on the Taliban. Canadian troops are fighting the Taliban along with other NATO troops, so it would have been unhealthy for Smith to go anywhere near the Taliban. But he engaged an Afghan who went and interviewed 42 Taliban fighters without their knowing they were being interviewed.

Indians are perfectly familiar with the Taliban; they were created by the Pakistanis in their madrassahs and sent to Afghanistan to fight the Russians in the early 1980s. Pakistan got much American money and arms for the service. This impression is correct but outdated. Today’s Talib fighter was barely born at the time of the proxy war against the Soviet Union; he remembers none of it. Of the 42 fighters, 12 had lost close relatives in the indiscriminate bombing that NATO specializes in, and 21 had their opium fields, the only source of comfortable living, destroyed. The Americans use helicopter gunships liberally in Afhganistan – more than in Iraq. They flew 2,764 sorties in Afghanistan in 2007 against 1,140 in Iraq. Air strikes killed about 1000 Afghan civilians in 2006 and 1500 in 2007; it is these killings, indiscriminate and unjust, that feed the Taliban. The other factor is opium. That may surprise, because the original Taliban government was very active in destroying opium cultivation. But the current generation of Taliban fighters often cites destruction of opium fields as the cause for joining. They justify opium cultivation by saying that opium is exported to and harms only kafirs.

Insurgency is most active in the south, around Kandahar; so Pashtoon tribes that inhabit that region are more heavily represented amongst the Taliban. Noorzai and Eshaqzai tribes were the source of 16 out of the 42 fighters. Only two were from the Popalzai, the tribe to which Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, belongs; one had lost relatives, and the other an opium field. When the Taliban took over in 1994-96, three tribes – Popalzai, Barakzai and Alokozai of the Zirak Durrani group – lost power; Hotak branch of Ghilzai, the tribe of Mullah Mohammed Omar, gained power. On the fall of the Taliban, the three tribes regained power, and the Ghilzai lost it.

The Taliban find refuge in Pakistan; they get medical treatment in Pakistan, and go there for R&R (rest and recreation), as the American troops in Vietnam used to go to Bangkok and Hong Kong. But their soldiers were not very complimentary towards their host country; they openly abused Pervez Musharraf. They had aggressive designs on Pakistan; they considered Peshawar and Quetta as parts of their own domain and wanted to annex them. One said that these areas were sold to Pakistan by Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan.

There is no doubt that the Taliban were originally created and trained by Pakistan; many of that generation continue in the present Taliban. Musharraf claimed to have severed relations with the Taliban in 2001, but ISI is widely believed by people in India and elsewhere to have continued secretly to support and finance the Taliban. But the current generation of the Taliban shows no sense of obligation to Pakistan. It seems to have changed its stripes in other ways too. A family in Kandahar was celebrating a wedding when four Taliban walked in with guns. The people in the wedding party were petrified; when the Taliban was in power, they could have been shot for revelry. But the fighters asked them to relax, saying they were no longer shooting revelers.

The Taliban are sophisticated users of communication technology; they distribute videos for propaganda, and send news to foreign reporters by SMS. But their view of the world is extremely naïve. They have heard of America, and identify it as the enemy. But in general, they believe they are fighting against Kafirs for an Islamic government; the content of Kafirs is extremely vague. Three of the fighters could not identify President Bush; he was called a Jew, King of America, and son of Clinton W.

Suicide bombings have been a matter of controversy amongst the Taliban. Some argued that wearing an explosive vest was cowardly, as it prevented the fighter from fighting his enemy face-to-face. In 2006, a Taliban faction even took out an advertisement in a Kandahar weekly blaming foreigners for suicide attacks and promising to stop them. But the Afghan interviewees were solidly in favour of suicide attacks, which they equated to their enemies’ air attacks. The Taliban are not very competent at suicide bombing; more than three suicide attacks were required to inflict a single casualty. But lack of competence does not reflect lack of faith; all the Taliban were convinced that suicide attacks were justified by the Quran. They did not know which part of the Quran. One told a story about a battle waged by the Prophet, where a wall could not be breached, so one fighter hauled another over the wall, knowing full well that he would be killed. But the story is apocryphal. Islam prohibits suicide; and it requires that a fighter must declare his intent to fight.

What struck me about Graeme Smith’s reports and videos was not what was there but what was not: Al Qaeda did not figure at all. This would surprise everyone who bought propaganda that the Americans invaded Afghanistan to stop Al Qaeda from attacking the west. The propaganda was persuasive in the aftermath of the New York bombings. But the Afghan mujahid does not care a hoot about a global war between Muslims and Kafirs. He is all for the expulsion of Kafirs from Afghanistan, but has no great ambitions of clearing the earth of Kafirs. He is ignorant and parochial. Graeme Smith thought, though, this might be local: that there may more Arabs and Pakistanis in eastern Afghanistan.

As Smith drove across the green fields of Pakistani Punjab, he thought that many valleys of Afghanistan could be equally lush but for the war. Everyone – Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Russians – is intent on rescuing the Afghans from others. But this international rescue game has kept the Afghans poor and primitive, while they might have shared our good fortune.

We Indians must bear our share of responsibility for the Afghans’ plight; if we were not so keen on using the Afghans to spite the Pakistanis, their country would not be so war-torn. Pakistan has a young new leader in Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani. In all these days he has still not uttered the K-word. Maybe the time has come when we can make peace with Pakistan.

And yes – we should remove the ban on opium. Since Ambumani Ramadoss is determined to put an end to tobacco, we need another addiction. Let us take to opium in small doses; it will transform Afghanistan.

FUTURE OF TEA ESTATES

[This was a column I wrote in the Telegraph of 25 March 2008 after an enchanting trip to a tea garden in the hills of South India in 2001.]

WHAT THE BRITISH LEFT BEHIND

I have been to paradise – well, as close to it as I am likely to get this side of the earth. It was a 100-years-old bungalow called Stanmore in a tea garden off Valparai, some 50 miles west of and 4000 feet above Coimbatore. It is a 10,000-sq-ft single-story building with just three enormous bedrooms, a drawing room with ancient novels, and a dining room. A long verandah runs along one side where I spent most of the time, reading or surveying the green carpet of tea bushes spread over the surrounding hills as far as I could see. This is not the picking season, so for hours I saw no one at all. Apart from a station wagon maybe twice in a day, there were no vehicles in sight at all. So everything I hate about modern India – the traffic, the cacophony, the crowds, the chaotic energy – was banished. When Ranga’s dishes incited overeating, I could go for a walk down to a stream in the valley below and back up again; it took two hours. If I was too lazy, I just sprawled on a bench under a tree and read.

I must admit to a weakness for bungalows. They were standard housing for the well-to-do in my childhood. The tall hall in the centre was cooled by currents rising and going out of the skylights, which also let in light. There was a verandah in front, from which one entered the hall; the back also generally had a verandah. Bedrooms were attached to the two sides of the hall. The dining room was usually at the back, often in the verandah. Beyond the back was an outhouse which housed the kitchen, pantry and the stables, or in later times, the garage.

But Stanmore was different. It was not meant for a district collector, but for a tea estate manager, who did not expect to receive a large number of people. So he did not need a large hall. It was quite small; it had a cosy drawing room on one side, and a dining room on the other. Then a passage led down to three bedrooms. Unlike an official bungalow, where the hall is the centrepiece, Stanmore had none; it devoted most of the space to the bedrooms. Each would be about 1200 square feet. Half of it would be the bedroom itself, a quarter would be a bathroom, and a quarter a dressing room. People a hundred years ago wore cottons; and the British had a lot of clothes. So they needed plenty of wardrobe space. Everyone wore hats, so there were hatstands in strategic places. I saw some other bungalows belonging to the group as well. One had jacarandas showering flowers in front; another had a bignonia venesta laden with orange flowers. If I had had the time, I would have tried out a number of bungalows.

Well, I did try out another bungalow some weeks ago; it is in Matheran, some 50 miles from Bombay in the Sahyadris. It is called the Verandah in the Forest; at one time it was known as Dubash bungalow. I cannot say whether this was the Ardeshir Dubash who made it rich in World War I from stevedoring, or the Nariman Dubash who sold the plot to Shah Rukh Khan where he lives now, or the Homai Dubash who was with me in college, or another one. But the Verandah is a two-story construction. The ground floor has three or four bedrooms. But it is the upper floor which is its glory. It has one long hall, with skylights, which is divided into half a dozen big suites with a drawing room in the centre and a dining room behind it. All open out on a vast, 25-feet-wide verandah in the front. It has beautiful colonial armchairs whose arms can be stretched out and brought together in front; one can put one’s feet up on the chair’s arms and doze off. If it is warm, one can withdraw to the back of the verandah; if it is cold, one can sit at the edge and sun oneself.

But going back to Stanmore, it is difficult to imagine today what an ambitious feat tea gardens were. For on the way to it, one passes through forests which are pretty impenetrable; all one finds in them even now is elephants, bison and langurs. The hills that grow tea today must all have been covered with such forest once. They must have been cleared with axes and machetes by armies of men. Food for them must have been brought on ponies. The British made a massive investment in the tea gardens, and in the process changed the landscape unrecognizably. A politically correct environmentalist would shudder at the thought, but I do not mind the sacrilege. I think the tea gardens look lovely; I would take a holiday in them any day.

Indian tea gardens are no longer profitable. They have largely lost the international market to newer competitors – Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam. And the domestic market does not have much taste for quality; it mostly consumes tea dust, the cheaper the better. Most tea gardens have a resident labour force. Minimum wage legislation has made it expensive, especially in West Bengal. The workers have children for whom they would like to have jobs; but the tea gardens cannot employ more.

The gardens in Tamil Nadu have a different problem. Industry is booming in Tamil Nadu, which is experiencing labour shortage. There is so much employment in the textile factories of Coimbatore and Tiruppur that they have drained surrounding areas of labour. As one drives out of these cities, it is difficult to find a rice field any more; vast tracts have been put down to coconut because it needs less labour. And labour has been getting scarcer in Valparai as well.

It is these rising costs that are compelling tea estate managers like the Woodbriar Group to explore conversion of tea bungalows to tourism. I am all for it. But I did think that managers’ bungalows were not enough to turn tea estates into profitable tourist resorts. The tourist density would have to increase.

That in itself would not be a problem, since the current density is so low. But estate owners would have to keep two things in mind. One is unity of architecture. Our hill and forest areas are being ruined by ugly, storied houses built by hungry hoteliers. If the tea estates built such houses, they would ruin the ambience of the estates. They would be well advised to stick to low-rise bungalows, which blend so well with the landscape. And second, they should site new bungalows so as to preserve the ambience. This is not difficult. But it is important to realize that the attraction of tea gardens lies in the way they have refashioned nature; the less signs they show of the human hand, the more successful they will be in attracting human tourists. I look forward to the spreading of a new tea culture which would enable us to get away from the madding crowd, and to recapture a century-old way of life.

MAIDAN-I-JUNG

[This was written in the Telegraph on 26 February 2008. when on a petition of green jihadis, the Calcutta High Court banished the Calcutta Book Fair from the Maidan, the sprawling open space at the heart of Calcutta.]

MAIDAN-I-JUNG

Calcuttans have been fighting a sanguine battle over whether the book fair should be held on the Maidan. The row evokes strong emotions on both sides. On the one side, booklovers, amongst whom Buddhadev Bhattacharya counts himself, think that there is something beautifully Bengali about the book fair, as with Shantiniketan’s Poush Mela. The picture of young women going to the fair and returning laden with books is as romantic to them as one of young women going to the village well and returning with pots balanced on their heads is to less literate Indians. On the other side, the sight of the Maidan being ravaged by uncouth booksellers digging holes, spreading shop-soiled books that they want to get rid of on rickety tables in jerrybuilt stalls, outrages the Bengali who orders his books from Blackwells and would rather use the Maidan for cricket and racing.

In the time-honoured Bengali tradition, the two sides talked at each other instead of to each other. Each wanted an extreme solution, and would settle for nothing less. So typically they ended up in Calcutta High Court, and typically it intervened in a matter that had little to do with law. If law were involved, it would be relevant only to deciding who, if anyone, had the right to dispose of the Maidan, and whether he had followed whatever rules he was subject to. This matter was illuminated in The Telegraph; apparently, the army was the relevant authority, and it was unwilling to host any more book fairs. However, there was still the Park Circus maidan, which belonged to the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. It was not charging the usual rent, and there could be doubt on whether it had given a discount correctly or not; this was the full extent of possible controversy as I saw it. But the High Court had other ideas; it simply stopped the booksellers and their benefactors – the government, the corporation, the communist party – in their tracks. Just what it sought to achieve thereby, apart from favouring one side, is not clear to me. And if it was only a matter of taking sides, one hardly needs the High Court to do it; any old Bengali can do it with passion.

But then, Calcutta has the habit of taking its quarrels to the courts. Some years ago, Calcutta was plagued by street processions of disaffected trade unionists. Whereas Shiv Sainiks, when they get worked up about anything, go out, smash taxis and ravage shops, Calcuttans form a procession, shout slogans, and fling their arms about. It is not their intention to disrupt traffic; but if motorists insist on using the roads precisely when the affected processionists have to pour out their passions in public, it is hardly the latter’s fault.

That was not the view taken by an honourable judge of Calcutta High Court when a procession delayed his proceeding to the court. I cannot remember whom he hauled up, but he was quite effective. Nowadays, when I go to Calcutta, I miss the sight of miscellaneous workers enjoying themselves on the roads. It used to be as if people who did not know the ABC of dancing had invented what they thought was Bharat Natyam. It is a tragedy that with the exodus of industry and commerce from Calcutta, the tribe of strikers is dying out. Whilst those who came to Calcutta for board meetings might not have appreciated the screaming workers outside the door, I am sure that many tourists came just to see those workers; if the latter die out, Calcutta will lose many a visitor.

This is a problem that other countries have faced, and some have worked out quite ingenious solutions. In New Zealand, for example, Maori tribes died out long ago. But without them, New Zealand is indistinguishable from, say, Wales. English may be spoken differently there, but then, every speaker of English has a right to murder it in his own way. Hardly any tourist is likely to travel halfway round the world just to hear the New Zealanders speak English. So New Zealand has turned some places into Maori villages, with antique huts and so on. When tourists are to visit them, they gather Maori-looking bartenders and bus drivers, take clothes off them and drape them in cowhide, give them a spear and get them to make warlike noises. To me it looked quite authentic. And if you cannot go to New Zealand, you only have to go to Gujarat at Navratri and see 10,000 young men and women do garba on a Maidan to get my point.

I would recommend this solution to Buddhadev; he must, for Calcutta’s prosperity, get some of his followers to dress up every Sunday morning and march to the Maidan shouting revolutionary slogans. It does not have to be so drab as it used to be. He can dress them up like, say, Santal tribesmen, and pay Indian Ocean, that wonderful half-Bengali band, to compose music for them. If he does it cleverly, West Bengal can make much more money out of tourism that it ever will out of a chemical factory.

But let me come back to the point: is a fair the best way to sell books? I can think of a better way: a book street. One of the most enchanting places I have visited is the old fort of Damascus, which was built by Knights Templar a thousand years ago. Inside the fort, there is no traffic; it is an entirely pedestrian area. Each street in this fort has shops selling only one product. There is a street for jewellery, another for wedding dresses, and so on. It is like walking into a fairyland.

It would be nice if Calcutta, or some of part of it, came to be organized like that, with streets devoted to books (and now, CDs and DVDs). I am told that College Street was one. But nowadays when I go there, it looks little different from the rest of Calcutta; the few books one finds there are mostly textbooks and popular books. A book street is what Buddhadev should work on; he will be remembered more fondly for it than for a car factory.

And fairs – have they any life left in them? I think so. Calcutta is not a linear city, with streets purposefully marching off in one or other direction. It is an engagingly confused city with streets that often go nowhere in particular. Calcutta has many neighbourhoods off main roads. They should be turned into pedestrian areas on Sundays, and residents should be encouraged to spread tables outside their homes and offer all their considerable junk for sale. To attract custom they may make and sell delicacies. They may revive the old Bengali art of making toddy. They may put up posters of film stars. They may start practicing, in a small way, the Gujarati art of buying and selling; and who knows, in a few years they will become the best shopkeepers in India. It would only be jest if they were to inherit the title of a nation of shopkeepers which the British vacated some time ago.

THE MERCHANT OF WORDS

[This was published in the Calcutta Telegraph of 8 January 2008]

THE MERCHANT OF WORDS

The mind of the Indian media consumer underwent carpet bombing last month. Whatever channel, whatever newspaper he opened, he encountered the same face; when it was not the face, it was its mask. The face was that of Narendra Modi. The only other face he saw with nearly equal frequency was that of Shah Rukh Khan – and his promoters had to pay through the nose for the exposure he got. Modi got publicity without paying a penny. If he had been so minded, he could have made millions from sale of masks, teashirts and coffee mugs.

Modi’s exposure was largely visual. His Hindi is good; it is more comprehensible than Vajpayee’s. But it was not his words that the media carried so much as news about him. No doubt they reported what he was saying; but it was they, not he, who told us. For Modi does not suffer from verbal diarrhoea like Advani. He is economical with his words; he gifts them only to a select few in the media.

That need not have handicapped the rest, for in the past two months, Modi could not afford to be economical with his words. He was fighting for survival. His only weapon was his words. So he spread the word liberally. My estimate is that he made at least 150 election speeches.

However, these words were largely wasted on the media – at least those media we received in Delhi or Calcutta. For this time Modi was a figure of national interest; all the media had sent correspondents to cover him. And somehow, there was hardly a Gujarati amongst the correspondents. Even those non-Gujaratis were touched by Modi’s eloquence; seldom has an Indian politician been so frequently quoted in his own language. And never has he been quoted so inaccurately. Consider Modi’s most quoted sentence: “Hoon khaato nathi, ney khaavaa deto nathi” (I don’t eat, and I don’t let anyone eat) and compare it with the transliterations of it you saw in the press. Seldom has a politician been listened to by so many correspondents with so much attention and so little comprehension.

I am so firmly prejudiced against Modi the politician that I had not given much attention to him as a man. The prejudice is unlikely to wear out any time soon, for it has nothing to do with him as a person. It emanates from my belief that Hindutwits are India’s most dangerous enemies. In the name of unifying the country, they work assiduously to divide it, by marginalizing Muslims. They actively work to make traitors out of people who only want to earn a livelihood and bring up their children.

But this time, television channels often carried cuts out of his speeches. I realized for the first time that he is a very good speaker. He speaks, not just to express himself, but to influence his audience. He speaks simple, idiomatic Gujarati. He does not disgorge a flood of words at his audience. For him, each sentence is an arrow to the listener’s heart. He delivers it, and then waits to make sure it has hit the mark. He often pauses dramatically. He is not just a speaker; he is an actor.

Good speakers are rare; I have not heard many. Nehru was one. Till the end of his life he could draw listeners in lakhs, and they would listen to him with rapt attention for hours. He was not particularly dramatic; but he too was a master of the pause. His forte was his ability to simplify, to explain even his foreign policy to the worker or the student. He was a master of language.

Churchill was a better speaker. His linguistic skills were as good as Nehru’s; his sentences were short and dramatic. But he modulated his voice better. I noted Modi’s ability to use sentences like arrows; that is what Churchill was a master of. His leonine growl did the rest of the work.

But by far the best speaker I have heard in that genre was Hitler. He had what Modi and Churchill had, but something more. He too could construct arrow-like sentences; but he spoke in long paragraphs. Listening to him was like reading a detective story. He carried you along in an avalanche. He not only raised your emotional temperature; he made you impatient to hear what he was going to say next. He built up suspense. The result was that when he delivered his punch line, his audience went into a cathartic ecstasy. The dramatic effect was enhanced by the props he used. Standing below him would be Nazi cadre; at appropriate junctures they would repeat slogans after him, burst into cheers, act as his orchestra. I do not know whether Modi’s hit on Sohrabuddin was rehearsed or orchestrated; but the performance reminded me of Hitler. In short, staccato sentences, Modi characterized Sohrabuddin as a terrorist one could only fear and hate. Then he asked, “What should we do with such a man?” As if on a cue, the audience screamed, “Kill him.” Compare this with Sonia, at the end of her speeches, asking her audience to shout Jai Hind. Where is the context? Where is the drama? Where is the intensity? It is not oratory, it is ritual. Nehru also used to ask his audience to say Jai Hind; but it was at the end of a speech which explained to them what India and Indians stood for. He made essentially patriotic speeches, to which Jai Hind was a fitting conclusion.

I cannot write about Modi’s language with equal confidence because I did not pay attention to him earlier. But I find a distinct transition. My early impression of Modi was that he specialized in abuse – of the Congress, of Sonia, of secularists. He concentrated on creating and reinforcing paranoia in his audience. That has not quite disappeared; note his use of Sohrabuddin. But uncharacteristically but very effectively, he is turning the other cheek. He replied to Sonia and Manmohan Singh in such gentle terms; often he just twisted the things they had said and made them sound wrong, unfair or anti-Gujarati.

This change, I think, has something to do with his experience as chief minister. He came up as an RSS hatemonger; all he knew was hatred and abuse. But for 12 years he has been meeting politicians above his rank; he has had to persuade them to give him favours or ward off disfavours. So instead of abusing opponents, he has learnt to deplore their abuse, to make them feel guilty about being so nasty, and to make them grant him something because they have been nasty.

To sum up, Modi has a mind that I do not understand very well; even if I did, I do not think I would be fond of what I would find in it. But now I find it a fascinating mind. He is not stupid by any means. He has been learning, and he will learn more. He has developed into an excellent speaker and communicator – skills that make all the difference in leadership. Soon he will leave his Hindutwit colleagues far behind.