Clinton reads up for Indian 'yatra'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 12. It is not all dry statistics and geo- political strategy documents which the U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, is busy digesting as he prepares for his India visit. He is also trying to get a hang of modern Indian fiction, brush up his history of the subcontinent and catch up with Indian philosophy, not to forget what the West finds most irresistible about India: its mythology.

One of the books selected for his reading list is Mr. Jonah Blank's Arrow of the Blue-skinned God, a retelling of the Ramayana, interwoven with what a critic has termed a ``lively and sympathetic account of the author's encounters across the subcontinent.''

Mr. Jonah Blank is an American journalist who travelled through central India ``retracing'' the journey of Lord Rama - or the ``blue- skinned God'' as the author calls him - into exile 3,000 years ago. Writer, Mr. Shashi Tharoor, has called it a ``travel book unlike any other'' and a critic in The Washington Post Book World termed it as ``quite possibly the most perceptive book that I have come across on India''.

With such testimonials, it is not surprising that Mr. Clinton's ``literary'' advisers thought it was just the sort of book the boss should read before embarking on his Indian ``yatra''.

Though other specific titles on Mr. Clinton's reading list are not known, the buzz is that he has been ``devouring'' India- related books ever since the visit was planned. Among the books which he has already ``tasted'' are Mr. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Ms. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Mr. Stanley Wolpert's Nehru. Last Christmas, three of the four books he ordered ``online'' were on India.

The U.S. President is known to be a voracious reader with a very eclectic appetite, and on the eve of his visit the diplomat circuit here is buzzing with stories of his interest in areas way outside his vocation. On a visit to a cathedral in Cologne, he apparently ``lectured'' the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, on the intricacies of European architecture. Mr. Blair, it is safe to assume, must have been tempted to detect in Mr. Clinton's scholarship a touch of his Irish descent: what James Joyce might have called the ``Portrait of a U.S. President as an Irish Immigrant''.

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