Samanth Subramanian

On the New York Times‘ India Ink blog, I write about the Haridas Mundhra scandal, “the first scam of free India”:

Mr. Chagla worked remarkably fast. His report, submitted in less than a month, is still a marvel of transparent investigation and concise analysis; his questioning must have been just as robust. Mr. Krishnamachari dithered and dissembled during his interview; later, as Taya Zinkin revealed in her book “Reporting India,” he would tell Mr. Patel: “I had not expected that the Judge would ask so many questions and I got flustered.” Mr. Chagla pored over the letters of Mr. Raman, the RBI research officer who had industriously been studying Mr. Mundhra and who had recommended an inquiry even in September 1957. The last of Mr. Raman’s letters, Mr. Krishnamachari observed, did not “make good reading.”

The hearings of the Chagla commission were conducted in public; such huge crowds attended that loudspeakers had to be set up for people who remained outside the court room, in the dilute sunlight of Delhi’s winter. In several of these depositions, as Ms. Dalal wrote in her A.D. Shroff biography, Mr. Chagla learned about how obviously rotten Mr. Mundhra’s companies were. Bhagwandas Govardhandas, a member of the LIC investment committee, told Mr. Chagla that he would not have touched Mr. Mundhra “with a pair of tongs.” Mr. Shroff said about Mr. Mundhra that he had “an infinite capacity for not telling the truth. From my long experience I have learnt that when a man is in difficulties, if he comes to you, he will never disclose the truth about himself.”

More here.

There is now also a Long View archive on India Ink, which is here.

Out June 1!

In Caravan, I write about Subramanian Swamy, including that one time he had a pillow fight:

Swamy is sustained, in this daily life, by an energy that is tiring even to contemplate. Every morning, he is awake at 4 am for a spell of yoga, and he is rarely at rest, at least in any Newtonian sense, until he goes to bed at 10 pm. He eats so sparingly that it can be cause for alarm; at a late lunch in an RSS worker’s house in Dhar, the rest of us fell upon our food, but Swamy, who had spoken at the rally, and who had been hustled and jostled and hugged and fêted, ate two pooris and nothing more. He sleeps, if he can, on flights, but more reliably, he will pilfer a nap out of his afternoon’s schedule. Once, when we were rattling along on a truly dreadful stretch of road, he interrupted himself to say, “Okay, now I’m going to sleep.” It was as if a switch had been flipped; for 25 minutes, he fell into deep slumber, not woken even by the most lunar of potholes, his chin slumped into his neck. Then he woke up and, after only a momentary pause, resumed precisely where he had left off.

In some of his habits, Swamy’s brother describes him as “almost Gandhian” in his rigidity. In person, and in photos dating back more than 30 years, I never saw Swamy in any attire other than a white kurta-pajama, with perhaps the addition of a waistcoat in colder weather. (Thus dressed, he secretes away his three mobile phones in various pockets, so his waistcoat has the disconcerting tendency to chirrup or beep softly every few minutes.) Some years ago, when Swamy was in Washington, DC, Burki invited him to dinner at the Cosmos Club and told him, “Swamy, you’ll have to put on a jacket and a tie.” Swamy refused. Burki said with a laugh, “I had to call the club and tell them that he was a former minister and that he wanted to come in his national dress. They said that if he put on some kind of shawl, they would let him in. So Swamy borrowed a shawl and put that on.”

In conversation and in repose, Swamy is largely inscrutable, his heavy-lidded eyes revealing little of his thoughts; although his innate restlessness leaks out of him through the occasional tic, he is a careful listener and a conscientious observer. He is also, his brother Subramanian said, inordinately sensitive, and he keeps a limpet-like hold on old grievances, however trivial. Subramanian remembered learning the phrase “black sheep” in school, when he was a little boy, and casually aiming it at Swamy during a pillow fight. For years thereafter, Subramanian told me, “Swamy went on repeating it. Even today, he’ll say, ‘You called me the black sheep of the family.’ I was a boy of—what?—eight or nine years?” Panini described Swamy as a man who would “go all out after you, to decimate you, if he thinks you have crossed him or done something wrong”. MD Nalapat, a close friend of Swamy and a former Times of India editor, suggested in a Sunday Guardian column last November that Swamy’s ruthless legal pursuit of P Chidambaram is really part of settling an old score. In 1997, Nalapat wrote, when Chidambaram was finance minister, he had tried to arrest Swamy for his involvement in a trust set up by Chandraswami, the self-appointed Tantrik godman accused of serial financial fraud. In his views on revenge, Nalapat wrote, “Subramanian Swamy is Sicilian.”

More here.

In June, the wonderful Atlantic Books will publish the UK edition of Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, with this spanking new cover:

In the New York Times' India Ink blog, I write about the colonial roots of the briefcase held up smugly by India's finance minister every budget day:

That briefcase is now perhaps the most notable throwback of the entire exercise – etymologically, to the French “bougette” or “small bag” that was once considered sufficient to hold an individual’s wealth, but also materially, to the red briefcase that has held the British budget papers on almost every Budget Day since 1860. (The most pragmatic of the exceptions came in the early 1990s, when Norman Lamont once carried his budget papers in a plastic bag because the budget box had to accommodate a restorative bottle of Highland Park whisky.) Unlike in Britain, however, there is no single briefcase being passed on from one Indian finance minister to the next; Pranab Mukherjee alone has been photographed holding twovery different budget briefcases.

The particular briefcase in use in Britain until 2010, when it was retired in frail condition, was a red leather-on-pine box lined with black satin, with the letters VR – for Victoria Regina – embossed on its surface. It belonged to a large family of red briefcases that have been manufactured, since the early 1800s, for British ministers by the London firm Barrow and Gale. Britain’s longtime budget briefcase was made for the imperiously sideburned William Ewart Gladstone, who delivered, according to his biographer Colin Matthew, “budget speeches epic in form and performance.” One speech, in 1853, ran to nearly five hours; during these marathons, Mr. Gladstone would fortify himself with a concoction of sherry and beaten eggs, prepared for him by his wife.

More here.

The winter 2011 issue of PORT magazine carried an edited version of this essay, on Thums Up, India's favourite soft drink:

Parle Bisleri arrived at this party fashionably late, in 1978. "The delay was because we were agonising over the name, whether to call it Thums Up or not," Chauhan said. "We were hesitant, because the name seemed to signal a sort of 'Up yours' and I didn't want it to become derogatory. I thought only westernised Indians, who were familiar with the gesture, would recognise it as a positive thing. We struggled a lot with that. But our ad agency leaned heavily in favour of the name, so we went with it." Chauhan has no particular explanation for the dropped "b" -- a spelling quirk that has variously been interpreted as a mistake, a trademark bid, and an Indianism. In Satyajit Ray's Agantuk, a worldly-wise, ever-didactic gentleman even points it out to his grand-nephew Satyaki as some breed of obscure wit: A letter can be subtracted from a word, yet its import can remain the same. He chortles when Satyaki grasps this and shoots him back a grin and a cocked thumb.

Parle Bisleri also tinkered longer with the drink's taste. Chauhan, with a sort of impish glee at the consternation he was about to cause in his interrogated, told me: "Come on, let's admit it. Honestly speaking, all these drinks -- Thums Up, Campa Cola, 77 -- taste pretty bad, right?" I demurred politely at this point, but he plugged away at his theme, like a pontiff speculating that the good book was perhaps not so good after all. "No, no, it's true. Cola is like beer, or like smoking. It's an acquired taste." Thums Up was created, he said, following a specific logic. "First it had to stand up to comparisons with Pepsi or Coke, so we had to prove that we could do an equivalent. Then we added a little twist. It's like a guy with just a little scar on his face, which makes you remember the face." What was the twist? I asked. "Oh, it was something," he mumbled. "I can't say. The Coke guys probably wouldn't like that very much."

The full original essay here.

In The Daily, I review Kate Boo's magnificent Behind the Beautiful Forevers:

On either side of this self-immolation, Boo tracks a cast of peripheral characters, and she tracks them so closely — spends so much time with them, interviews them so repeatedly — that she can assume an unusual role for a journalist: an omniscient narrator. Describing Sunil, a 12-year-old scavenger bearing a marked resemblance to his father, Boo can reveal his deepest fear, that he had also “inherited his father’s puniness.” She can discuss the innermost ambitions of Asha, a woman who aspires to be Annawadi’s slumlord, and she can convey, verbatim, quotidian conversations between Rahul and Manju, Asha’s children. (“Rahul, not so much cream!” Manju exclaims, as her brother appropriates her cosmetics.) Boo even describes scenes she did not witness first-hand: When a terrified Abdul flees from the flaming Fatima, well past midnight, into his small shed of waste, he hears snores from “a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.”

More here.

I was fortunate enough, a week ago, to moderate two discussions that dealt with works of journalism. The first, one-on-one with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, focused on his book The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, in a session titled (much to Remnick’s dismay) “The Disappointment of Obama.” The second, featuring five stellar journalists in Remnick, Philip Gourevitch, Jason Burke, Katherine Boo and Joseph Lelyveld, was titled “Journalism as Literature,” and it ranged far and wide over these journalists’ experiences in writing narrative non-fiction. Full-length, sometimes grainy videos of these sessions are below:

1. The Disappointment of Obama

2. Journalism as Literature

I have been writing a series of columns, titled The Long View, for the New York Times' India Ink blog. The Long View examines Indian current events through the telephoto lens of history, relying on primary sources to establish context and precedent for many of today's news. (This would be a good place to say: If you have an idea for a Long View, do please leave a comment below!)

Here are the first three installments of The Long View --

On Sonia Gandhi's mysterious illness:

In this, Sonia Gandhi appeared to be following in an established tradition, by which Indian political leaders guard news of their health as if it were a state secret. Not for them the publicly fought battles of Rudy Giuliani against his prostate cancer, of Dick Cheney against his troublesome heart, or of Hugo Chavez against his recent pelvic abscess. Even the example of Mahatma Gandhi — who let it all hang out, often greeting his ashram’s residents with updates about his bowel movements — is an aberration in Indian politics. The health bulletins that Mr. Gandhi issued during his various imprisonments and protest fasts may have been tools of political leverage, but they were also ways to reach out to a population that loved him deeply.

On how the renaming of West Bengal as Paschimbongo validates a colonial decision:

The choice of “Paschimbanga” has been puzzled over, since it is simply a near-direct translation of “West Bengal.” The name defines the state in opposition to an “East Bengal” that no longer exists, that is now the country of Bangladesh. In retaining this geopolitical marker, Paschimbanga appears to have validated, rather than reversed, a colonial decision: the halving of the state of Bengal, which occurred first not in 1947, during the partition of India, but in 1905.

At the time, united Bengal straggled over much of east India, with a population — of roughly 84 million — greater than that of present-day France. The viceroy of India between 1898 and 1905, Lord Curzon, thought a Bengal of that size too difficult to govern. Curzon held strong views on the inefficiency of big administrative bodies; in 1892, when he was undersecretary of state for India, he had argued that such bodies in India were “apt to diffuse their force…in vapid talk.”

On the bitter roots of the AFSPA:

For a divisive bill, the historian Srinath Raghavan informs me, the debates in Parliament were surprisingly short: two hours in the Lok Sabha on Aug. 18, and a few hours per day in the Rajya Saha on Aug. 25, 27 and 28. But even in these brief periods, parliamentarians staked out their positions and defended them with vehemence. The home minister, G. B. Pant, referring icily to “misguided Nagas … indulging in mischievous activities,” called the proposed act “a very simple measure.” It was not possible, he said, “over such a vast area to depute civil magistrates to accompany the armed forces wherever there may be trouble, because [trouble] happens unexpectedly.”

Pant met fierce opposition. Some MPs accused the government of obfuscation on the precise nature of the Naga troubles. One Manipuri parliamentarian argued that his state’s residents were already being harassed enough by the army. Naushir Bharucha, of the Praja Socialist Party, quoted the bill’s focus on armed land forces and, laying the sarcasm thick, said: “That probably means that the government very mercifully has not permitted the air forces to shoot or strafe the area.”

More as I write them!