Reflections

The Indian Cultural Centre at Kuala Lumpur is one of 24 centres set up at different capitals to showcase Indian culture and to project what is now called its “soft power”. It has a fine library and an Ayurvedic Information centre as well as a small auditorium where lectures and other shows are held and, we are told, movies will also be shown at a later date.It makes me feel proud that now we have centres like this in important cities. In our younger days we frequented the USIS and the British Council libraries as well as Gorky Sadan, now I can, in Kuala Lumpur visit the Indian Cultural Centre. There is a fairly large library, and they appear to be buying books all the time. The choice is eclectic and there does not appear to be much political bias in the buying. Jawaharlal Nehru rubs shoulders with Lal Krishna Advani and there are many coffee table books on various aspects of Indian culture and history that I find very attractive. There is a wide array of fiction. Amitava Ghosh, my

I am reading a lot of American fiction nowadays. The reason is the access I have to the collection at the Malaysian National Library via the TPM library at my workplace. Earlier whenever I thought about American fiction, i used to think of thrillers and suchlike. While Dan Browne and Michael Crichton are a good read, one would not really think about them as novelists. Because of the anglophilia of our newspapers and because of the colonial hangover, we think that British fiction, or that published in Britain is the best. I used to think that American novelists stopped being born after the death of Steinbeck and Hemingway. Perhaps this only showcases my ignorance, but that is the way it was. Now thanks to the library, i have recently read two marvelous books. Both of them, in my opinion, are far better than many that have won the Booker prize. One of them has , in fact won the Pulitzer prize, but for some reason the Pulitzer prize is not reported in our press perhaps because an Indian

Sometimes a good politician does not realise that he is getting past his sell by date. I strongly suspect that this is what is happening to Dr Manmohan Singh. There is no doubt that he is deserving of our respect and gratitude for his work during the nineties and also during his first term as Prime Minister where he cooled down passions generated by the arrogance of the BJP following the success of their Gujarat line, declined to behave as if the poor did not exist and to my mind, most importantly, told Karat and co where to get off. However now it seems increasingly obvious to all of us , if not to his own party and to himself that it is time that he retired. He should learn from the experience of his predecessor. Atal Behari Vajpayee was all set to retire in 2004. However I think he was seduced by the power and I strongly suspect, wanted to trip up Advani and was prevailed upon to try again with the disastrous results that we have seen. He had to face the unnecessary humiliation o