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Literary Review
Faith in change
GURCHARAN DAS is that rarity amongst Indian authors, a boxwallah by training and profession, but a creative writer by temperament. He is a well-known playwright ("Mira", "Larins Sahib") and has also written a novel set in modern Punjab. The only near parallel one can think of is the other celebrator of all things Punjabi, P.L. Tandon, who spent much of his career at the company which is the global rival of the one that Gurcharan Das led in India. He has also recently turned commentator on India's business and economic scene and indeed social and political arenas. This book, The Elephant Paradigm, is the result of a series of short pieces on the lines of regular journalism that he contributed over the years to various dailies. Divided into three sections, it deals first with a broad-brush appreciation of the global setting for the systemic changes taking place since 1991 and the private and public "spaces" as the author calls them, which bring out the introspective and the spectator element in the author's observation.
The daily newspaper column is necessarily an ephemeral affair, reflecting the transient crises, priorities, and obsessions of a reading public that soon loses the thread of interest. To string disparate pieces together into a book is a bold attempt and one that publishers are generally wary of. Despite this, one must confess that in the end Das manages to pull off a difficult trick passably well, if not in full measure. The range of coverage is elephantine and wide but has a central preoccupation, namely, the imperceptible and continuous changes taking place under our very eyes since the new economy was ushered in 12 years ago.
The selection has been done more or less thematically and the linking pieces try to give it a semblance of a chapter. This does not always happen, as each segment is a patchwork quilt of ideas and questions and exclamations. Generally the tone is one of admiration for the work of the Narasimha Rao administration, the revolution in local self-governance, particularly in places like Madhya Pradesh. The regret and criticism is for the unconscionable delays in implementing changes announced and the disconnect between rhetoric and reality.
The sections on the few corporate success stories, brands and strategic thinking do not stand out, as there is little new by way of insight, while those closer to the ground might see in the writer's treatment of the issues a tendency to facile oversimplification. And yet the author is an uncommonly widely-read man of diverse interests and sympathies and indeed writes very engaging and unpretentious prose. He captures the spirit of a place well and for me the best passages of the book are not at all about India's economic problems or political travails. It is the reflective and personal elements, a journey to rediscovering one's roots, which many of us who have spent a considerable time in the western world or in its shadow, can easily relate to. His essay on a visit to a Radhasoami ashram on the banks of the Beas was especially evocative of a meditative mood, a mellow scene of a sensitive mind coming to grips with a timeless reality. The apparent weakness of the book is also its strength, which is the familiarity of much of the ground it covers and the predictability of a liberal, urban, upper-class mind and viewpoint.
What is attractive despite its lack of a sound basis is the overriding optimism. Gurcharan Das still seems to believe that an essentially liberal humanist democracy based on secular values and a free market economy will work — and serve us well. While that surely is plausible and possible to achieve and perhaps what all PLU's (people like us) would devoutly wish, the prevalent mood of the country seems to be rather different. Especially since the publication of the book we seem to be pointing in the opposite direction, towards intolerance and absolutism, led by an unwillingness to respect institutions, least of all the primacy of the rule of law. It is this that makes one wonder what the lumbering elephant will eventually do — run amok or just trot along, or merely dawdle as it has done for centuries?
The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change, Gurcharan Das, Penguin Books India, 2002, p.301, Rs. 295.
S. RAMACHANDER
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