{"id":1384,"date":"2012-12-26T17:52:41","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T12:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=1384"},"modified":"2012-12-26T17:52:41","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T12:22:41","slug":"top-10-in-indian-non-fiction-books-more-reasons-to-skip-chetan-bhagat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/12\/26\/top-10-in-indian-non-fiction-books-more-reasons-to-skip-chetan-bhagat\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 10 in Indian non-fiction books: More reasons to skip Chetan Bhagat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chetan<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul<\/strong>
\nIt is that time of the year when newspapers, magazines and websites get around to making top 10 lists on various things in the year that was. So here is my list for the top 10 books in the Indian non fiction category (The books appear in a random order).
\nBreakout Nations \u2013 In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Ruchir Sharma (Penguin\/Allen Lane -Rs 599)<\/strong>
\nThe book is based around the notion that sustained economic growth cannot be taken for granted.
\nOnly six countries which are classified as emerging markets by the western world have grown at the rate of 5 percent or more over the last 40 years. Only two of these countries, i.e. Taiwan and South Korea, have managed to grow at 5 percent or more for the last 50 years.
\nThe basic point being that the economic growth of countries falters more often than not. \u201cIndia is already showing some of the warning signs of failed growth stories, including early-onset of confidence,\u201d Sharma writes in the book.
\nWhen Sharma said this in what was the first discussion based around the book on an Indian television channel, Montek Singh Ahulwalia, the deputy chairman of the planning commission, did not agree. Ahulwalia, who was a part of the discussion, insisted that a 7 percent economic growth rate was a given. Turned out it wasn\u2019t. The economic growth in India has now slowed down to around 5.5 percent.
\nSharma got his timing on the India economic growth story fizzling out absolutely right.
\nThe last I met him in November he told me that the book had sold around 45,000 copies in India. For a non fiction book which doesn\u2019t tell readers how to lose weight those are very good numbers. (You can read Sharma\u2019s core argument\u00a0here<\/a>).
\nIn the Company of a Poet \u2013 Gulzar In Conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir<\/em>(Rainlight\/Rupa -Rs 495)<\/strong>
\nThere is very little quality writing available on the Hindi film industry. Other than biographies on a few top stars nothing much gets written. Gulzar is one exception to this rule. There are several biographies on him, including one by his daughter Meghna. But all these books barely look on the creative side of him. What made Sampooran Singh Kalra, Gulzar? How did he become the multifaceted personality that he did?
\nThere are very few individuals who have the kind of bandwidth that Gulzar does. Other than directing Hindi films, he has written lyrics, stories, screenplays as well as dialogues for them. He has been a documentary film maker as well, having made documentaries on Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Ustad Amjad Ali Khan. He is also a poet and a successful short story writer. On top of all this he has translated works from Bangla and Marathi into Urdu\/Hindi.
\nIn this book, Nasreen Munni Kabir talks to Gulzar and the conversations bring out how Sampooran Singh Kalra became Gulzar. Gulzar talks with great passion about his various creative pursuits in life. From writing the superhit kajrare to what he thinks about Tagore\u2019s English translations. If I had a choice of reading only one book all through this year, this would have to be it.
\nDurbar<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Tavleen Singh (Hachette \u2013 Rs 599)<\/strong>
\nSome of the best writing on the Hindi film industry that I have ever read was by Sadat Hasan Manto. Manto other than being the greatest short writer of his era also wrote Hindi film scripts and hence had access to all the juicy gossip. The point I am trying to make is that only an insider of a system can know how it fully works. But of course he may not be able to write about it, till he is a part of the system. Manto\u2019s writings on Hindi films and its stars in the 1940s only happened once he had moved to Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. When he became an outsider he chose to reveal all that he had learnt as an insider.
\nTavleen Singh\u2019s Durbar is along similar lines. As a good friend of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, during the days when both of them had got nothing to do with politics, she had access to them like probably no other journalist did. Over the years she fell out first with Sonia and then probably with Rajiv as well.
\nDurbar does have some juicy gossip about the Gandhi family in the seventies. My favourite is the bit where Sonia and Maneka Gandhi had a fight over dog biscuits. But it would be unfair to call it just a book of gossip as some Delhi based reviewers have.
\nTavleen Singh offers us some fascinating stuff on Operation Bluestar and the chamchas surrounding the Gandhi family and how they operated. The part that takes the cake though is the fact that Ottavio Quattrocchi and his wife were very close to Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, despite Sonia\u2019s claims now that she barely knew them. If there is one book you should be reading to understand how the political city of Delhi operates and why that has landed India in the shape that it has, this has to be it.
\nThe Sanjay Story<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Vinod Mehta (Harper Collins \u2013 Rs 499).<\/strong>Technically this book shouldn\u2019t be a part of the list given that it was first published in 1978 and has just been re-issued this year. But this book is as important now as it was probably in the late 1970s, when it first came out.
\nMehta does a fascinating job of unravelling the myth around Sanjay Gandhi and concludes that he was the school boy who never grew up.
\n\u201cIntellectually Sanjay had never encountered complexity. He was an I.S.C and at that educational level you are not likely to learn (through your educational training) the art of resolving involved problems\u2026 He himself confessed in 1976 that possibly his strongest intellectual stimulation came from comics,\u201d writes Mehta.
\nThe book goes into great detail about the excesses of the emergency era. From nasbandi to the censors taking over the media, it says it all. Sanjay was not a part of the government in anyway but ruled the country. And things are similar right now!
\nPatriots and Partisans<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Ramachandra Guha (Penguin\/Allen Lane \u2013 Rs 699)<\/strong>
\nThe trouble with most Delhi based Indian intellectuals is that they have very strong ideologies. There sensitivities are either to the extreme left or the extreme right, and those in the middle are essentially stooges of the Congress party. Given that, India has very few intellectuals who are liberal in the strictest of the terms. Ramachandra Guha is one of them, his respect for Nehru and his slight left leanings notwithstanding. And what of course helps is the fact that he lives in Bangalore and not in Delhi.
\nHis new book\u00a0Patriots and Partisans<\/em>\u00a0is a collection of fifteen essays which largely deal with all that has and is going wrong in India. One of the finest essays in the book is titled A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri. This essay on its own is worth the price of the book. Another fantastic essay is titled Hindutva Hate Mail where Guha writes about the emails he regularly receives from Hindutva fundoos from all over the world.
\nHis personal essays on the Oxford University Press, the closure of the Premier Book Shop in Bangalore and the Economic and Political Weekly are a pleasure to read. If I was allowed only to read two non fiction books this year, this would definitely be the second book. (Read my interview with Ramachandra Guha\u00a0here<\/a>).
\nIndianomix \u2013 Making Sense of Modern India<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya (Vintage Books Random House India \u2013 Rs 399)<\/strong>
\nThis little book running into 185 pages was to me the surprise package of this year. The book is along the lines of international bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist. It uses economic theory and borrows heavily from the emerging field of behavioural economics to explain why India and Indians are the way they are.
\nOther than trying to explain things like why are Indians perpetually late or why do Indian politicians prefer wearing khadi in public and jeans in their private lives, the book also delves into fairly serious issues.
\nRight from explaining why so many people in Mumbai die while crossing railway lines to explaining why Nehru just could not see the obvious before the 1962 war with China, the book tries to explain a broad gamut of issues.
\nBut the portion of the book that is most relevant right now given the current protests against the rape of a twenty year old woman in Delhi, is the one on the \u2018missing women\u2019 of India. Women in India are killed at birth, after birth and as they grow up is the point that the book makes.
\nMy only complain with the book is that I wish it could have been a little longer. Just as I was starting to really enjoy it, the book ended. (Read<\/a>\u00a0my interview with Vivek Dehejia here)
\nTaj Mahal Foxtrot \u2013 The Story of Bombay\u2019s Jazz Age<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Naresh Fernandes (Roli Books \u2013 Rs 1295)<\/strong>
\nBombay (Mumbai as it is now known as) really inspires people who lives here and even those who come from the outside to write about it. Only that should explain the absolutely fantastic books that keep coming out on the city (No one till date has been able to write a book as grand as Shantaram set in Delhi or a book with so many narratives like Maximum City set in Bangalore).
\nThis year\u2019s Bombay book written by a Mumbaikar has to be Naresh Fernades\u2019s\u00a0Taj Mahal Foxtrot<\/em>.
\nThe book goes into the fascinating story of how jazz came to Bombay. It talks about how the migrant musicians from Goa came to Bombay to make a living and became its most famous jazz artists. And they had delightful names like Chic Chocolate and Johnny Baptist. The book also goes into great detail about how many black American jazz artists landed up in Bombay to play and take the city by storm. The grand era that came and went.
\nWhile growing up I used to always wonder why did Hindi film music of the 1950s and 1960s sound so Goan. And turns out the best music directors of the era had music arrangers who came belonged to Goa. The book helped me set this doubt to rest.
\nThe Indian Constitution<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Madhav Khosla (Oxford University Press \u2013 Rs 195)<\/strong>
\nI picked up this book with great trepidation. I knew that the author Madhav Khosla was a 27 year old. And I did some back calculation to come to the conclusion that he must have been probably 25 years old when he started writing the book. And that made me wonder, how could a 25 year old be writing on a document as voluminous as the Indian constitution is?
\nBut reading the book set my doubts to rest, proving once again, that age is not always related to good scholarship. What makes this book even more remarkable is the fact that in 165 pages of fairly well spaced text, Khosla gives us the history, the present and to some extent the future of the Indian constitution.
\nHis discussion on caste being one of the criteria on the basis of which backwardness is determined in India makes for a fascinating read. Same is true for the section on the anti defection law that India has and how it has evolved over the years.
\nLucknow Boy<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Vinod Mehta (Penguin \u2013 Rs 499)<\/strong>
\nOne of my favourite jokes on Lucknow goes like this. An itinerant traveller gets down from the train on the Lucknow Railway station and lands into a beggar. The beggar asks for Rs 5 to have a cup of tea. The traveller knows that a cup of tea costs Rs 2.50. He points out the same to the beggar.
\n\u201cAap nahi peejiyega kya? (Won\u2019t you it be having it as well?),\u201d the beggar replies. The joke reveals the famous tehzeeb of Lucknow.
\nVinod Mehta\u2019s Lucknow Boy starts with his childhood days in Lucknow and the tehzeeb it had and it lost over the years. The first eighty pages the book are a beautiful account of Mehta\u2019s growing up years in the city and how he and his friends did things with not a care in the world. Childhood back then was about being children, unlike now.
\nThe second part of the book has Mehta talking about his years as being editor of various newspapers and magazines. This part is very well written and has numerous anecdotes like any good autobiography should, but I liked the book more for Mehta\u2019s description of his carefree childhood than his years dealing with politicians, celebrities and other journalists.
\nBehind the Beautiful Forevers \u2013 Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Katherine Boo (Penguin \u2013 Rs 499)<\/strong>
\nAs I said a little earlier Mumbai inspires books like no other city in India does. A fascinating read this year has been Katherine Boo\u2019s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Indians are typical apprehensive about foreigners writing on their cities. But some of the best Mumbai books have been written by outsiders. Gregory David Roberts who wrote Shantaram arrived in Mumbai having escaped from an Australian prison. There is no better book on Mumbai than Shantaram. The same is true about Suketu Mehta and Maximum City. Mehta was a Bombay boy who went to live in America and came back to write the book that he did.
\nBoo\u2019s book on Mumbai is set around a slum called Annawadi. She spent nearly three years getting to know the people well enough to write about them. Hence stories of individuals like Kalu, Manju, Abdul, Asha and Sunil, who live in the slum come out very authentic. The book more than anything else I have read on Mumbai ( with the possible exception of Shantaram) brings out the sheer grit that it takes to survive in a city like Mumbai.
\nSo that was my list for what I think were the top 10 Indian non fiction books for the year. One book that you should definitely avoid reading is Chetan Bhagat\u2019s What Young India Wants. Why would you want to read a book which says something like this?
\nMoney spent on bullets doesn\u2019t give returns, money spent on better infrastructure does\u2026 In this technology-driven age, do you really think America doesn\u2019t have the information or capability to launch an attack against India? But they don\u2019t want to attack us. They have much to gain from our potential market for American products and cheap outsourcing. Well let\u2019s outsource some of our defence to them, make them feel secure and save money for us. Having a rich, strong friend rarely hurt anyone.
\nAnd if that is not enough let me share what Bhagat thinks would happen if women weren\u2019t around. \u201cThere would be body odour, socks on the floor and nothing in the fridge to eat.\u201d Need I say anything else?
\nThe article<\/a> originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 26, 2012.
\n(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul It is that time of the year when newspapers, magazines and websites get around to making top 10 lists on various things in the year that was. So here is my list for the top 10 books in the Indian non fiction category (The books appear in a random order). Breakout Nations \u2013 … <\/p>\n

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