IIMA-RAVI MATHAI

Brick by Red Brick by Prof. T. T. Ram Mohan ; Published by Rupa Publications; Price Rs.495/- Pages 281.

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India is rightly proud of its Management Institutions which rival the best in the world. Pre-eminent is the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad which was  established in 1961 and   has completed 57 years of glorious existence. Vikram Sarabhai , the Father of India’s Space Programme, had a crucial role in the  choice of  a young corporate executive, Ravi Matthai, to head the team of academics he had assembled . This in spite of , many of the Faculty having  been trained at Harvard Business School. Matthai was thirty-eight years old when he was appointed the institution's first full time director.  Matthai succeeded in creating a dynamic  institution that became  unique in the world of education.

 This is a book that discusses threadbare how this miracle was achieved  and the role of an extraordinary leader forms its subject. The author  of this fascinating book  Prof.T.T.Ram Mohan is  an alumnus of IIM Kolkata and a Professor in the IIMA and author of six books. He writes regularly in financial dailies.

The volume  is a fascinating story of institution building, of a coming together of a “constellation of forces” of personalities, Governments, bureaucrats, and the  Harvard Business School and other  academicians who all were inspired to build something different.

 We learn why the  first two IIMs were established   in Kolkata and Ahmedabad and not  New Delhi and Mumbai. Ram Mohan has gone through   the IIMA records minutely and held detailed  discussions with concerned individuals and  delved into the rich archives.   Prof. Mathai came to the IIMA without much academic credentials and was  a greenhorn. The choice of Ravi Mathai was a game-changer, one that was to augur well not only for IIMA but also for management education in India.

He continued to work as a Professor   till his untimely demise at the age of 57 years. After a brief career in industry as CEO and a two-year stint as Professor in the IIM-Calcutta, Mathai joined the IIMA in 1965 at an incredible age of 38 years. When he stepped down as Director in 1972, everyone in the IIMA was taken by surprise, but his action was by no means impulsive. It was deliberate, a kind of self-abnegation born out of a sense of detachment. He  continued to be on the faculty, working in an area that was close to his heart — rural education.  He  travelled extensively in Rajasthan  spreading financial literacy.

The author brings out a balanced view of his personality making the story at once  inspiring and insightful .He writes  - “With people in high office, one assumes certain things. They are in it for the money -- they like to project themselves at every turn, they enjoy the power that goes with the office and, all too often, they view their current office as a launching pad for a bigger and more lucrative one. Matthai just didn't seem to care for any of these things. His was a state of not wanting, that ordinary mortals would almost find impossible to relate to. He didn't seem to want anything for himself, he was simply delighted in building the institution, in watching people grow and flower. He practised the Gita ideal of nishkam karma  without ever preaching it.”.

Three things about Mathai were—“ his clarity of mind, his values and his leadership skills”.

 The  book should be read by all management students, directors of academic institutions and people dealing with academic matters .Ram Mohan is eloquent-- “No national honours came the way of this pioneer in management education. --- Men like Matthai need none. The institution that he helped build - brick by red brick - and that is hailed as a centre of excellence is a greater tribute to him than any award that anybody could confer. In the initial decades after Independence, India was fortunate in having institution-builders of the highest calibre. Nehru showed the way by building the institutions of democracy. Then we had the likes of Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, J. R. D. Tata, V. K. R. V. Rao and R. K. Talwar. In that constellation of institution-builders, Ravi Matthai shines brightly.”

 The IIMA has  made it a point to nourish and encourage a spirit of freedom with diligence.  “Faculty Governance” enables Faculty members to play  a role in the decision-making process and this  leads  the teaching fraternity to innovate and feel a sense of ownership.

 Ram Mohan provides  an account of Ravi Mathai's parentage — he was the son of  Dr.John Mathai who had distinguished himself as Finance Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's Cabinet — his family background and formative years.

How the IIMA came to be built in the structural as well as institutional sense — is explained in detail: moving from temporary premises into permanent quarters; selecting and training faculty; designing courses and their content; creating a framework for further research; and also, sourcing adequate funds for sustenance and development. Then comes the  software  element — the culture of fostering academic freedom, creativity, and the democratic pattern of governance

 Mathai worked relentlessly on problems related to rural regeneration, and his missionary zeal and punishing work schedules are legendary. He won universal acclaim for his role as an educational entrepreneur nonpareil.

The last moments of Mathai's life are described poignantly; he passed away in 1984. Perhaps, he would have lived longer but for his hectic and tireless working style. He comes across as a man who had no complex and was totally at ease with himself and the rest of the world.

The book is  an excellent story of a remarkable  man and his mission that helped build a world-class institution.   Persons influencing included  Vikram Sarabhai--a remarkable modern day renaissance man, responsible for the founding of many of India's famous institutions, Lalbhai, a prominent industrialist and great institution-builder , Prof Kamla Chowdhury, responsible for  the academic framework in the initial years, and, of course, the main protagonist and IIMA's first director, Ravi Matthai, who many credit with the unique culture and appeal that IIMA continues to have even today.

What Ram Mohan also clearly shows is the way frameworks and processes were designed and implemented in a manner that contributed to IIMA's unique way of working at different levels — be it the active involvement of the faculty in key policy decisions; the autonomy that IIMA sought and got from the beginning; the deliberate creation of a culture of informality with accountability; thinking big as evidenced by the choice of Louis Kahn as the architect thereby, rendering IIMA's old campus a tourist attraction even today!.Kahn was described by Time magazine as enjoying a “near divine status in the world of architects.”.

Above all this, what absolutely stands out is Ravi's clear determination, right from the time of his joining to stepping down as Director after seven years; he actually did that, much to everyone's utter shock at that time, and continued  as a regular faculty member.

A key lesson that emanates is what Ram Mohan enunciates  — “You do not need extraordinary people in order to create great institutions, you need ordinary people who are highly motivated and are driven by a shared sense of purpose.”

A Ravi Mathai is a miracle that happens once in the lifetime of an institution. Just as the nation threw up a Gandhi, a Nehru and an Ambedkar who moulded its destiny, so also the IIMA was blessed by the leadership of an exceptional individual. "Mathai was unique; he is non-replaceable”

A very well written book about a remarkable Indian who laid the foundations of a commanding  non-pareil management   institution.

                                                      

PPR

29/07/2018

AANCHAL    MALHOTRA

Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory by  Aanchal Malhotra; Published by HarperCollins; Pages 385 ; Price Rs.799/-

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Sir Cyril Radcliffe  who drew the line that demarcates India and Pakistan , upon seeing the bloodshed his actions had caused, so repulsed by the horrifying consequences of his duty, refused to accept his fee, left for England, destroyed all his maps and papers pertaining to the Divide and made sure, in his long illustrious career as a judge, never to speak of what had happened in India ever again.

Alas ! Such silence is not easily obtained.

The Radcliffe Line has been drawn in blood and is littered with the possessions of those who crossed it—a piece of cloth here, utensils scattered there, jewelry, riches and money strewn across the sand.

Aanchal Malhotra’s book  is an unusual one that establishes “the ability of an object or a possession to retain memory and act as a stimulus for recollection”.

The author is an artist and oral historian --the  co-founder of the digitised  Museum of Material Memory.  She bases her  book on objects taken across the bloodied border created by Partition and what they meant to the people who carried them. These objects  speak of the owner's pasts as  testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. Malhotra dedicated the better part of her twenties curating this museum – finding people who crossed the border and people who remained, hearing their stories, and making it available to us.

 The book is in the form of a narration  by the last surviving generation that had undergone the trauma  firsthand.

Malhotra begins with  her  own grandparents. They came from the other side of the border;  she traces their  histories  through heirlooms, their value determined not by antiquity or price but by ‘the vulnerable act of unfolding a painful past’ and ‘the intimate nature of this experience.’ Some objects were carried for their value. Others were packed for their deep ties to family history. Most items   reveal haunting  tales of  survival.

Among the objects that find their way into this book from the millions that made the crossing are a ghara (a pot) and a gaz (a measuring device), a gift of pearls from a maharaja, a maang-tikka (bejewelled adornment for the forehead), a hand-stitched shawl that’s still worn with deep affection, a stone plaque. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh, presently part of  Bangladesh. A rusted pair of scissors, now used to cut flowers, narrates the tale of how precarious women's safety was at that time.

 The author has selected  19  stories, recounting them with colourful descriptions of their settings. "I was consumed by the stories. There came a time when I started having vivid dreams about Partition, as if all the stories that I had heard were yearning to be told and the only way to do justice to them was to write them down,"

 The author writes in first person, the conversations are colloquial, and we have quotes told cohesively. Her “special cases of migratory objects” include those that bind several generations, that people seek upon returning what they had abandoned years later, that relate to occupations, that were rediscovered  by sheer chance.

Malhotra writes with acuity---“ Memory  hides in the folds of clothes, among old records, inside boxes of inherited jewellry...it seeps into our years, it remains quiet, accumulating the past like layers of dust.

Writer and former Procter & Gamble CEO Gurcharan Das’s grandmother carried in a guchcha a set of fifty-one keys across the border believing she would return to unlock the fifty-one doors and cupboards she had carefully secured before leaving.

Malhotra’s  grandparents too were Partition survivors and it required a lot of effort before they decided to share their feelings. "They had a complex gamut of feelings – shame, agony, sadness – and so remained silent. My grandfather was a fiery 19-year-old when it happened. And, perhaps, the regret that he could do nothing to save his land and had to flee, never left him."

According to the author “The book is about childhood memories, friends and mohallas that have been left behind, but remain an inextricable part of you,"

Malhotra has  started a new contiguous project  - The Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository of material objects, tracing family histories and roots. The museum will provide a collective space to share stories of their struggles, sacrifice, pain and uprooting from their land.

The Partition affected the rich and the poor with a hard blow – people were forced to give up all their belongings and move to a land that would be their new home because of the religion they were born into. Some stayed, but at their own risk. Once in an alien city, these brave people stood tall and built their lives from scratch; from nothingness. These stories are a celebration of the human spirit that does not accept defeat; the spirit that makes a person look at ‘fate’ straight in the eye and carry on with life.

 The image of the train that arrives from the other side of the border is filled with dead bodies is revisited through the memories of different individuals as a constant reminder of the consequences of the partition.

Special mention must be made of deeply moving stories. Gifts from a Maharaja: The Pearls of Azra Haq and Stones from my Soil: The Maang –Tikka of Bhag Malhotra.  

 The prose is exquisite and so rich in imagery that the fragile textures of these ageing souvenirs are almost palpable. The photographs retain the softness of age.

In these tense conversations, Aanchal also discovers some  dialects like Samanishahi , which blends the coarseness of Hindi with the poetic softness of Urdu. In a way, this book then becomes a personal journey to an Undivided India for both, author and reader. A homecoming to a place we haven’t been to before.

 The book  is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.

PPR

15/07/2018.

JOHANNES    KEPLER

Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Connor ; Published by Harper ; Pages 402 ;Price Rs 799/-

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Isaac Newton is reported to have famously said, “ If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”.

One of the giants is Johannes Kepler. The book under review is the biography of Kepler by James A. Connor, a former Jesuit and professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey. The "Witch" in  the title is Kepler's mother, who was tried and convicted of heresy in 1621.

A new trend in biography was initiated by Dava Sobel who in her "Galileo's Daughter," analysed the great scientist employing as medium his hardly famous  relative. Sobel used  Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s illegitimate daughter, a cloistered nun. 

Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630, making him a contemporary of William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei. He was one of the giants on whose work the Scientific Revolution was based, and in particular he worked out the laws of planetary motion, later used by Isaac Newton in developing his theory of gravity.

 Kepler was a man of deep abiding faith who lived through a time in religious history when people, especially women, were tortured and burned at the stake for being “witches.” One of those women was his mother, Katharina, a victim of a hateful neighbor and a society caught up in religious hysteria.

Kepler had a tough life, born in stark  poverty in  Weil der Statt, a German town, with an abusive father. An attack of smallpox ,as a small child,  left him with poor eyesight and later compelled  him to depend on the observations of other astronomers for the data he needed. Above all he had to witness his elderly mother go on trial for witchcraft.

 Kepler’s mother was stubborn and self-destructive and she probably caused the ailments that her critics attributed to witchcraft. A dabbler in herbal medicine, she rarely cleaned her mixing bowl. "Who knows what kinds of bacteria were growing in there?" according to Connor .

The  mother  was obnoxious and her accuser in the witchcraft trial, Ursula Reinbold, a former prostitute and vicious gossip, was equally repulsive. The  town magistrate apprehended and tyrannized Kepler’s mother  even when  he was drunk.

Kepler’s discoveries during the dark times of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries changed our understanding of the world around us, especially his three basic laws of planetary motion, which provided proof of the Copernican system, and his often unrecognized contributions to Newton’s gravitational law, the basics of optics, and the foundation for the invention of the calculus.

Kepler is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. The first, the "law of ellipses," says that each planet follows an elliptical orbit with the sun at one focus of the ellipse. The second, the "law of equal areas," says "the radius vector joining a planet and the sun sweeps out an equal area over an equal period of time." The third law addresses the overall solar system: It provides a formula to describe the relationship between the orbital periods of planets and their distances from the sun. Kepler is also known for his breakthrough in optics; he was the first to explain how a telescope works.

During the Counter-Reformation,   theological originality of Kepler was condemned  by the Lutheran Church, to which Kepler belonged, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church, which persecuted Protestants and encouraged him to convert. Kepler stuck to his conscience – resulting in his excommunication by the Lutherans.

Kepler's professional relationships also were strained by his commitment to the truth. At the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, he worked closely with Tycho Brahe, the Danish optical astronomer. Yet the two disagreed on the structure of the solar system. Kepler believed the sun was at the system's center; Tycho believed the planets circled the sun, but the sun circled the Earth.

  The 17th century was a tortuous era   when   ignorance, corruption and religious hatred   overthrew  knowledge, ethical behavior and religious tolerance.

 Kepler’s  spiritual quest, and his constant search for some kind of harmonious universal order made this amazing man a borderline saint. The scientist’s  acumen resulted in  major discoveries that placed him right next to Galileo as one of the world’s greatest astronomers.

  Kepler struggled with his mother’s torture and trial and fought to keep his place in the changing Lutheran church, and to find work as a man of science with such luminaries as Tycho Brahe. He married several times and watched his first wife and many of his children die from simple diseases that today would have been cured with one round of antibiotics. He watched as the Holy Roman Church sent out waves of violence against heretics and even men of science, and his heart broke as the religious leaders of his time became more monsters than men. For Kepler, scientific discovery was only half of his life. The other half was finding spiritual truth, and he knew it was not present in the witch-burnings of the Catholic Church.

 “Kepler’s Witch” is a fascinating account of this man’s scientific evolvement and intellectual growth. It is a chilling chronicle of the war between religion and nature and the widening rift between the various religious factions that sought dominion during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the following days of social upheaval. This is an extraordinary book that serves as both biography, history and a scathing indictment of the dangers of religious fanaticism as seen through the eyes of a man who lost his mother to the fires of Godly violence.

 Kepler will always be remembered for setting the foundations of planetary motion and literally handing Newton everything he needed for the law of gravity he took credit for.He knew deep in his heart that science and spirituality were on the same page, even as the Church leaders around him were in constant denial.

An extract from Connor’s book will give an idea of the style and content.

“Great people show up now and then in the world. What makes them great is complicated. Some say Kepler was a genius, which he certainly was, but his scientific intelligence was not the source of his greatness. Johannes Kepler was one of the most powerful scientific minds of his century—he was an equal to Galileo in almost every way, a precursor to Newton, a man who had done the spadework for most of the important discoveries that defined science in the seventeenth century. And yet Kepler was also great in the way Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are great. He was a man who fought for peace and reconciliation between the Christian churches, even when it nearly cost him his life. Some people are born to greatness; some are made great by the events of their day. Some, such as King, Gandhi and Kepler became great because they made choices full of moral courage.”

Connor has illuminated the life and work one of the greatest stargazers in human history.

PPR

08/07/2018.

SALMAN    RASHID 

A Time Of Madness by Salman Rashid ; Published

 by  Aleph ; Pages 127 ; Price Rs 299/-

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The Partition of the Sub-Continent in 1947  into “India” and “Pakistan “ gave birth to a genre of literature dealing with the pangs and pain of  death, desolation and distress. One of the most moving works is by Ajit Cour, a Punjabi  writer, who has bagged the Sahitya Akademi Award. Her story  entitled “ Not a City but a Shell”, recalls her  visit to  Lahore after a gap of fifty years. She recalls lost—forgotten events from her younger days. She carries her Lahore home in her heart. She is unable to recognize her ancestral house. It has been cut up into several parts. The dreams of the whole world had been blighted.  Her dream was lying with its throat slit and its body still writing. Her beloved city Lahore had become a shell that had locked within itself.

A similar exercise has been undertaken by a well-known Pakistani travel writer who returns to his roots in India to understand what happened to his family in 1947.

Rashid who has  nine books to his credit,  has written extensively about his own country as well as about Afghanistan. The book under review is  a memoir and  is based on his quest to visit his house in India, about which he had heard from his father, uncles and a surviving aunt. His grandfather, Dr Badaruddin, two aunts and a few other relatives lived in that house when Partition violence engulfed the city. They were never heard of again. He not only found the house and got to see it from the inside, but more remarkably also met people who knew and remembered his grandfather, a well-known doctor in the city. He discovered aspects about his grandfather that his family was either not aware of or did not talk about.

Even more remarkably, he came face to face with the son of the man who led the mob that killed five members of his family, and seven members of their servant Eidu’s family. Eidu’s two-year-old son was tossed to death from the terrace to the courtyard below. Amazingly enough, the result of this meeting wasn’t a feeling of acrimony and revenge, but apology on the part of the rioter’s son and forgiveness on part of the writer. It is a deeply moving experience to read those pages.

 Salman Rashid’s  family were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes in the greatest transmigration in history. Besides those who fled, other members of the family became part of a grimmer statistic: They featured among the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their lives for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. After living in the shadow of his family’s tragedy for decades, in 2008, Rashid made the journey back to his ancestral village to uncover the truth. A time of madness tells the story of what he discovered with great poignancy and grace. It is a tale of unspeakable brutality but it is also a testament to the uniquely human traits of forgiveness, redemption and the resilience of the human spirit.

The book is  “Dedicated to all those Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who lost their worldly possessions and sometime their lives for the creation of Pakistan.”

 Rashid writes of his desire to come to India not merely to see the ‘enemy’ country but also to attempt to unravel the mystery about his family, the circumstances in which they left their ancestral lands in Ughi and their home in Jalandhar, and why they always maintained a stoic silence about the events that transpired ‘out there’ during the horrific humid days of August 1947.

Rashid arrives with a grainy photograph of a house on Railway Road in Jalandhar .He writes thus: “On the twentieth day of March 2008, I headed home for the first time in my life. I was fifty-six years and a month old. Walking east across the border at Wagah, I was on my way to the fulfillment of a family pietas of very long standing. I was going to a home I had never known; a home in a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted me to believe was enemy territory. But I knew it as a country where my ancestors had lived and died over countless generations. That was the home where the hearth kept the warmth of a fire first kindled by a matriarch many hundred years ago, nay, a few thousand years ago and which all of a sudden had been extinguished in a cataclysm in 1947.”

In the end he finds nothing in his heart but understanding and compassion. A tragedy that encompassed millions.

 The book  tells us that it is up to us to find our way back to light. Only genuine remorse and real forgiveness can show us the way.

  The moment he crosses the border he is interacting with a living land and with living people. The spontaneity and acuteness of his observations and responses are fresh, animated, often humorous and highly imaginative.

A remarkable feature of A Time of Madness, all 126 pages, is the amount of diverse – though relevantly related – matter that has been packed into it. Rashid simply states: ‘I had not let memory turn grief into hatred for them across the border. Instead, it taught me to forgive and move on’

 The climax of Rashid’s personal odyssey and where the narrative wheel comes full circle takes place not in Habib Manzil on Railway Road, but at a house lying just off Krishna Street. It was in a room here that his family had sought shelter from a murderous, ‘baying mob’ and from where ‘no living body left’. He names each one of them in a grim roll-call of the dead: his great grandfather, Mian Qutbuddin, about 90; his grandfather, Dr. Badaruddin, aged 60; his grandmother Fatima, probably 55; his aunt Jamila in her late twenties and Tahira, only 22. In limpid  prose Rashid describes the room, with ‘its green washed walls, badly in want of repainting’ and ‘lined with bags of refined flour’. He writes ‘in the silence I gazed at the walls that were once spattered with the same blood as mine. Where would have they huddled hoping to be dissolved into the brick and mortar behind them? Where my grandfather would have lain in a pool of blood? What were their final thoughts?’ The mind’s eye then closes. There is no melodrama or sentimentality, not even an anticlimax, just the eloquent simplicity of plain speech: ‘I felt nothing. If I had thought such a discovery would flood me with grief and I would weep uncontrollably, it did not happen.’

The tenor and style of the book is laudable. The sensitivity and honesty with which he responds to that which he learns and experiences lends the book its dignity and poise.

A deeply moving document that proves suffering has no caste or creed and compassion and forgiveness are human traits that still remain with humanity.

P.P.Ramachandran.

24/06/2018