by Roopinder Singh

“Ah! That’s one thing in which we are far ahead of the Americans!” I wondered what had brought out this ironically delivered pronouncement from Jaspreet, since yours truly considers himself a bit of an authority on the US of A, having spent a number of youthful years there.

Now for the disclaimer. I did see the inside of cop stations, but purely because of my journalistic pursuits. I was never arrested and nor did I serve any time there. Neither, have I, for that matter, been able to set up anything like a multi-million dollar empire, but then I digress, as has most of the country in the past few weeks.

President Obama was on his pulpit, addressing the world, glancing left and right for the slim electronic teleprompters that provide him with the right words which he delivers with such eloquence. The leader of the Land of the Free asked politicians to “think more about the next generation than the next election”.

Think of the next generation….the penny dropped. We have a strong tradition of thinking of the next generation. Anyone seeking the validation of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “family-resemblance” theory just has to glance at the Indian political pantheon. When a few families control the destiny of a nation, we call it a dictatorship. When they are elected, we call it a democracy…it gives us a moral high ground, you know.

How we take care of the next generation! First we provide for it - at least for the next seven generations is the norm. Then we secure their future by “getting them into a suitable line.” Matrimonial alliances are entered into to secure their future, and religious intervention is sought to leave nothing to chance. In case a prodigal son stumbles, we are there for him, assuring him our full support, and maintaining that he could have done nothing wrong.

The darling was denied a drink and someone was shot? Too bad. A few people were mowed down after a few too many were consumed? Sad. However, witnesses maintained that it was not a BMW but a truck that had done the deed. A foreigner was raped? No way could our dear have done it! Besides, you know how the French are, and she never returned to the city of her trauma to testify. A scuffle and shots fired? Come on, these little things happen when boys are growing up!

Not that the Americans did not have their Chappaquiddick incident, but it was an aberration and ensured that Ted Kennedy could never lay to rest the ghost of his party companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, who died in a car he was driving.

American children learn early that actions have consequences. The privileged in India seldom have to face the consequences of their actions. We can take care of the elections as well as (our) next generations. We beat Americans, but at what cost?

We could better them sometime, but only after we learn to equip our children to take care of themselves, rather than devote our lives to “taking care” of them and crippling their growth potential.

This middle was published in The Tribune on April 29, 2010

History in the Making: The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy

By Aditya Arya and Indivar Kamtekar.
HarperCollins.
Pages 304. Rs 4,999.

Reviewed by Roopinder Singh

History in the Making: The Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy

THE black and white of history, a rare clarity that we get with the perspective of distance in time, a feeling of connection with our past, and the nostalgia that it evokes. This book brings many emotions to the fore as you leaf through pages rich with images of an important moment in India’s history.

Images, à la sauvette or “the decisive moment”, became a modern mantra of photojournalism, in no small measure because it was the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book of 126 photographs, and his long preface that provided the philosophical moorings to his pictures.

I really don’t know if Bresson, widely recognised as the father of photojournalism, met Kulwant Roy during one of his sojourns to India. Roy owned a studio near Delhi’s Mori Gate, and both captured decisive moments in the early history of the Indian nation. Roy was born in Bagli Kalan, near Ludhiana, in 1914. He learnt his craft in Lahore, and later took aerial photographs in the Royal Indian Air Force. The Tribune, then published in Lahore, gave him an early break.

Aditya read History (Hons) at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. He was also a keen photographer, and the secretary of the Photographic Society, of which I was a member too. He lived on the campus, courtesy his father, Dr V. Arya, our Hindi teacher. The lure of being behind the lens was strong enough to make him take up photography as a career, a journey that took him places, professionally and literally.

In a serendipitous moment, Aditya, egged on by his mother, finally opened the trunks left for him by his uncle, Kulwant Roy, a press photographer. Thus, he saw bundles of black and white photographs and negatives that literally made history come alive in front of his eyes.

Here were pictures of Muslim League meetings, INA trials and the signing of the Indian Constitution!

Jawahar Lal Nehru called the Bhakra Nangal Dam a “New Temple of Resurgent India”. Roy took photographs of the construction of this wonder that bring out the human dimension, in the form of thousands of toiling workers, to this infrastructural sculpture in concrete.

As we turn the pages, we see the leaders age in front of our eyes. We notice how they actually mingled with the people … and some incongruities, like the immaculately-clad delegates to the 1945 Simla Conference, being ferried by liveried but barefoot rickshaw pullers. Other feet, however, are clad in contrasting wingtip-brogues, Peshawari chappals, jutti’s and pump shoes worn by various persons in the book.

Different readers will gain various perspectives as they flip through the volume to which has a Foreword by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

As one browses through it, the feel one gets is of loving and meticulous care that has gone into this book, a design conspicuous by its minimalist approach and elegant touches, like showing the yellowed caption strips in the true yellowed paper they were typed on, Roy’s cameras and so on. Obviously, expenses have not been spared in producing this high-priced book.

Indivar Kamtekar and Aditya have provided the text that showcases this collection. Captioning such pictures would have taken a lot of effort. One wishes for more details, for example, the “Sikh colleague” with Jawaharlal Nehru on page 175 is Partap Singh Kairon, who has figured prominently on other pages of the book too. Some of the princes in the Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) pictures, loosely titled as “Phulkian Union”, are misidentified, but these are minor quibbles.

Mention must also be made of the Aditya Arya Archive, which seeks to “digitise, document, annotate and preserve photographic archives in India.” As Aditya says: “Tales of marriage, births, deaths, mourning and celebration captured on film. Photographic archives are an invaluable source of knowledge and interest, our gateway to understanding the past and acquiring a perspective on the present, through diverse visual narratives.”

There were many Roys and each provided his own perspective and eye to recording events as they unfolded in front of his eyes. Of them, only Kulwant, who died in 1984, had an Aditya to turn his sepia bromides into a book that will grace many shelves, and keep alive the memory of the photographer and his work.

The review was published in The Tribune on April 18, 2010

THE LAST WORD:

This Singh is not king, as yet

Roopinder Singh and Ajay Banerjee

He loves the good life, yet is equally at home in the rough and tumble of politics. The Akali Dal engineers his expulsion from the House, he makes headlines outside it. The Congress has not made him chief of the state party, people take him to be one anyway. Reams are written about his extra-curricular activities, yet he shrugs them off and they don’t seem to affect his political fortunes.

In his crisp white kurta pajama, equally in his blue blazers, he fills the room with his presence, and floors the audience - there is always one - with his span of information and the felicity with which he cites facts and figures, switching between English and Punjabi as the occasion demands.

Whether he is on the political throne of the state or not, he is called “Maharaj”, even by his detractors - a reflection of both his lineage, as well as his personal style. Yet, right now, there is no throne (read official position) for this king, who is seen as the tallest leader that the Congress can field in the political arena of Punjab.

Leadership, and the lack of it, has been preoccupying his mind. He finds it in Maharaja Ranjit Singh, on whom he has just written a book, and the lack of it among the present rulers of Punjab, especially his arch rival Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, who he says, “can’t govern” and is only good at “campaigning and distributing largesse”. “Punjab can’t be in a worse state than it is today,” he adds, citing the lack of a dynamic industrial policy, budget deficit, lack of progress and other issues.

When Akalis hit back, they attack his personal lifestyle, not his administration. His “culture of leisure and pleasure,” provides much fuel for the rumour mill, and figured prominently in the election meetings during the last polls, when the Akali refrain was: “He is not a man of the people, he has a raja-like style. By the time he gets up Badal Sahib has already visited half a dozen villages!” Amarinder Singh is also facing various corruption cases in courts, filed after the Akali Dal government came into power.

The 68-year-old scion of the erstwhile royal House of Patiala is a man of many parts. He is proud of the rank Captain that replaces ‘Maharaja’ in politically correct environments, earned as an officer commissioned in 1963. His stint as Chief Minister from 2002-2007, punctuated Badal’s reign, and he is a powerful speaker of the state’s interest at national-level meets.

There is an element of noblesse oblige in Amarinder Singh, the politician. His unflinching stand on riparian rights of Punjab surprised many, especially his seniors in the party who took him to task, but he stuck to his guns. A bureaucrat cites the clarity of his orders and how meetings then were result-oriented. Another who worked with him closely describes him as “decisive” and “forward looking”. And yet he opposed the proposed Patran nuclear plant in an energy-deficient state. “I am not against nuclear power, but I am concerned about the fallout in a densely populated zone,” he asserts.

When Amarinder Singh entered public life 30 years ago and was elected Congress MP from Patiala in 1980, he owed it to his friend Rajiv Gandhi, a fellow Dosco. He, however, parted ways with the Congress in 1984 in protest against Operation Bluestar.

Consistent about the issue, even though he joined the Akali Dal, and was a Minister in the Surjit Singh Barnala government, he quit when, in May 1986, there was an armed action and NSG commandoes stormed the Golden Temple.

Yet, later, along with Badal and Barnala, he signed the 1994 “Amritsar Declaration” that endorsed the controversial 1978 Anandpur Sahib Resolution which demanded greater autonomy for Punjab.

Amarinder Singh wore the Akali Dal blue for 12 years before returning to the Congress white in 1996. His direct access to Sonia Gandhi has helped him weather many a storm, even as his detractors protested his inaccessibility to them.

The Akalis, with whom he had a cosy relationship till he filed corruption cases against the Badals, view him as a major threat even though his party has not yet asked him to spearhead its campaign in Punjab. But many see it as inevitable, given the TINA factor- there is no alternative.

When not otherwise engaged, he is still politically active. He has challenged his September 2008 expulsion from the state Assembly. “We are waiting for the Supreme Court’s judgement on the issue,” he says, sounding positive about its outcome.

He vociferously opposed the withdrawal of the so-called vendetta cases. He presented himself in a court for a hearing on the Ludhiana City Centre case on Saturday. At a press conference later, it was evident that state Congress leaders have begun rallying around him. Yet the polls are due in Punjab in February 2012 and the Captain and his team are waiting for a direction from the Congress chief regarding his role in the party. “… Madam (Sonia Gandhi) will decide,” Amarinder says, playing safe.

Congress rival Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, however, does not miss an opportunity to brief the media on how “Amarinder is promoting an un-Congress like culture and is inaccessible”. The former Chief Minister, however, is quick to defend himself. “How can I be inaccessible, I visit every block in Punjab…. These are stories planted by my detractors.”

Has the time out of power changed the Maharaja who is known as an epicure and an aesthete? In some regards, perhaps. For one, he has stopped taking his evening drink on medical advice. (His grandfather, Maharaja Bhupindra Singh, made Patiala a name saluted by whoever pours a large peg.) “I am an experienced man … things are different today,” he maintains.

How different, only time will tell. Controversies have cropped up around him from time to time, and many are about those with whom he associates himself - his friend of long-standing, IAS officer S. K. Sinha; media adviser B.I.S. Chahal, Patiala’s pilot Manpreet Kaur Sekhon, and Lahore’s journalist Aroosa Alam … all earned him miles of newsprint, yet the Teflon coating stayed intact, since he is “expected to be different from the common man”.

‘Maharani’ Preneet Kaur, his wife, is Minister of State for External Affairs in the UPA government. For decades, she was the person who interacted extensively with common people and nurtured his constituency assiduously. Well, she is said to be “peeved” at her husband, though she has maintained a stoic silence, which has earned her brownie points in the general public for “showing grace”. His son, Raninder Singh, lost the Bathinda seat to the Badal bahu, Harsimrat Kaur.

Proud to have served as ADC to the celebrated Lt-General Harbaksh Singh during the 1965 War, Amarinder Singh has been studying military history and has written well-received books like “Lest We Forget” that speaks about the battles fought in the 1965 War, and “A Ridge Too Far” on the Kargil conflict.

What has he learnt from his study of history? “People respond to leadership. A leader must have the courage to stand against the current if he is convinced that he is right.”

His vision for Punjab includes agricultural diversification and it becoming a commercial hub. Leadership. He wants to provide it, and has studied it in his latest book, “The Last Sunset: Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar”, which is already a best-seller and has received positive reviews.

The launch of “Rise and Fall…” was much talked about because of those who attended it, especially a glamorous Pakistani journalist and her entourage. The launch at Chandigarh, a week or so later, was talked about because of who did not attend it - Praneet Kaur, the ‘Maharani’ of Patiala. Sometimes substantial achievements are eclipsed by the flashes of controversy, but that’s an old story for Captain Amarinder Singh.

The article was published in The Tribune on March 30, 2010