A Very Happy New Year to all my friends!
Hope we remain health, have fun
…and do our bit for the world around us.
There is much to do in the coming year,
…but all depends on God’s will.
Indian writers went places and published books galore. They experimented with themes and forms and took various routes—spirituality, scholarship, scintillating stories, sex— to get to our bookshelves in 2010.
Makers of Modern India
Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography
The clear star is Siddhartha Mukherjee, a doctor who wrote The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, last month and has won critical acclaim while also storming onto the bestseller lists in the US.
William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India took readers along on a journey into spirituality, even as fiction lovers explored the world of the Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, through his The Museum of Innocence.
We must have no Price and Everyone must Know that we have no Price declared Arun Shourie, magisterially. Many empathised with To the Last Bullet in which Vinita Kamte and Vinita Deshmukh wrote about Ashok Kamte, the brave police officer who was gunned down by terrorists during 26/11 attacks.
Shrabani Basu penned down Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queens’ Closest Confidant about trust that transcended race, whereas Krishan Partap Singh’s Delhi Durbar kept readers on the edge of their seats in a contemporary drama. Talking of cutting edge, it took Sarnath Bannerjee’s Corridor, to make most of us realise the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel, its post-modern avatar.
2 States: The Story of My Marriage
The Sunset Club
Chetan Bhagat broke all (his) previous sales records with 2 States: The Story of My Marriage, which was a hit with everyone (a reported 10 lakh copies sold), but his nit-picking critics. On the other hand 100 Poems showed that the beauty of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry transcends the limitations of language.
Taslima Nasreen’s No Country for Women flew off the bookshelves. Many who wanted to find out more about their favourite novelist picked up A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho. Talking about writers, Humra Quraishi teamed up with India’s best-known author for Absolute Khushwant.
So what if the Akalis ousted Capt. Amarinder Singh from the Punjab Legislative Assembly, he found time to come out with The Last Sunset: The Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar, which was well received.
The rising growth rate could not mask economic worries as people picked up
Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy as well as Jim Rogers’ A Gift to my Children: A Father’s Lessons for Life and Investing.
The Australian couple Allan and Barbara Pease brought out another bestseller, Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love. Robin Sharma continued his success story with The Leader Who Had No Title.
The Last Sunset: The Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar
The Masque of Africa
Those fond of nostalgia made a beeline for the re-printed Lepel H. Griffin and Charles Francis Massy’s Chiefs and Families of Note in Punjab which has now been made available to Indian readers. Many others read Shobhaa at Sixty: Secrets of Getting it Right at any Age, yet another book from De who defies strait-jacketed classification.
One of the nation’s top luminaries, Fali S. Nariman, gave us Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography, even as V.S. Naipaul drew flak for failing to deliver in The Masque of Africa. On the other hand, Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life was widely appreciated. Ramachandra Guha brought alive the Makers of Modern India, earning himself an advance that made writing biographies alluring.
As the sun sets on 2010, it is only fitting that Khushwant Singh’s The Sunset Club sounds the Last Post. The man who has written more books than he can remember, reflects on various moods of life, as do we.
Sixty: Secrets of Getting it Right at any Age
This is an expanded version of an article published in The Tribune.
IT was a nice party and we were all enjoying ourselves to celebrate the success of a friend. My friend introduced me to some young foreigners as “Osama’s brother”.
The two couples were from South Africa, globe-trotters and well exposed to international travel and traditions. London figured in our conversation, too. For me it’s the place I visited first when I ventured away from the Indian shores. These couples had found work there, in the recession, mind you, which had a lot to say about their abilities.
“We see these greetings and I wish someone would explain them to us,” said a young lady.
“Which greetings,” I asked.
Maharaja Bhupendra Singh
“You know, the way Muslim men embrace each other, or place their hand on their heart when they meet. What does it really mean?”
Here was I, resplendent in a black overcoat, wearing a nice tie and all, as well as a colour-coordinated turban, and they had decided that I was someone they could query about “Muslim” greetings. I wore a turban, as did their host, also a Sikh, yet somehow; they had made an intuitive (and wrong) leap about my religious denomination.
My mind went back to the time when we found it impossible to tell foreigners apart, unless the differences were very obvious, like skin colours, basic body structures, etc. “A gora is a gora, they all look alike,” is a refrain all too common.
I took the confusion sportingly and proceeded to explain with more confidence than authority the differences in greetings, and also gently pointed out that they had more to do with culture than religion.
The idea that my turban had made me, in some sense, a target somehow niggled in my mind. Well, I had been there before and it wasn’t all that bad! Joel Baird was friendly towards me from the first time we met in New York.
“You are a Sikh. When I was a child, I was told that if I was in a bind, I should find a Sikh and run to him. He would help me,” said this Columbia University student. Now Joel had studied in the American School, New Delhi, and had spent time in India. He and his charming wife were great hosts, and the New York memory brings a smile on my face, whenever it surfaces.
As does another one, of meeting an elderly person at a gas station while travelling on an American highway in the wee hours of the morning. “Sikhs are good people,” he pronounced after seeing my turban. He had based his observation on his interaction with Sikhs while serving in the US Army.
However, 9/11 changed all that and turbans started being associated in many minds with Osama bin Laden. The finer distinctions of kinds and colours of turbans were lost and even someone like Hardeep Puri, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, recently faced undue attention from US airport security personnel because of his turban. So embarrassing, unfortunate and sad. Generalisations can be treacherously misleading, especially sweeping, negative ones. They can even cast a pall over an apparel of honour.
This “Middle” by Roopinder Singh was published on the Editorial Page of The Tribune on December 29, 2010.
You may also like to visit the following links to the articles I have written about wearing turbans. Please don’t miss the brilliant water-colour paintings illustrating representative styles of turbans made by the artist R M Singh in 2004.
What dominated the gadget scene in 2010 are those devices that begin with a lower case ‘i’
iPad: Most coveted tablet device
USERS define themselves by the gadgets they possess, and those they covet. What dominated the scene in 2010 are those devices that begin with a lower case ‘i’. At the top of the heap was the iPad, Apple’s Tablet PC which has crossed the 75 lakh mark in sales, and emerged on must-have lists the world over. Only a trickle of the product has, however, streamed into India.
iPhone: Greatness enhanced
Gadget-lovers have a way of getting what they want from wherever it is available. The top gizmos of the year are truly international, designed in some country, built somewhere else, and used by aficionados in India too.
Apple talks about its products as if they are people. Steve Jobs, the CEO, always says iPad can do this, iPhone can do that, without using the article ‘the’ as if they were real people. Now, who doesn’t want people at their beck and call? Intelligent ones at that, with a friendly interface. No wonder, the iPhone too is on every top-10 list, in spite of controversies about the smartphone’s antenna. So is the iPod and Apple’s 11-inch MacBook Air.
Smartphones are among the most desirable items for gadget freaks, and in this category, Samsung Galaxy S is also much celebrated, as is the Nexus One. We expect a lot of movement on this front in the coming months.
Kindle: Book-reading redefined
In 2010, e-books have truly begun revolutionising reading and are fast overtaking printed books in certain forms. Will the trend catch up in India? We will have to just wait and see if it does, but we must acknowledge that e-book readers are here to stay. The iPad is also an e-book reader and so is Nook Color, offered by the largest book retailer in the United States, Barnes and Noble.
Nook: B&Ns comeback kid
Amazon’s Kindle led the pack and still has a tremendous following. The product from Sony too, is widely used. When we have so many choices, it comes down to which features appeal to users. This is also dependent on which e-book services are available to users in India, something that we must keep in mind when we pick up the device which is changing the way gadget lovers are reading their books and magazines. Into this crowded field has jumped in Google Books, without any device, but with more books than others.
Youngsters and the young at heart love gaming, indeed much of their lives revolve around the gaming devices. Here too, it’s a matter of where your loyalties lie.
X Box 360 Arcade: Raw power and more
While practically every gadget offers some gaming facilities, gaming gizmos have a special allure. Microsoft’s X Box 360 Arcade Kinect, with its 250GB HD, built-in wi-fi, smaller size, five USB ports, and 45-nanometer chip stole the show. Nintendo Wii also won much acclaim. Armchair sportsmen had much activity to do in their living rooms!
3D Camcorders? Panasonic has a great offering for normal consumers. A mini-fridge for your desk that uses a USB connection to chill a standard can of Coke, for those who don’t walk down to their refrigerator! What will they think of next?
The New Year will bring up new gizmos. On the horizon are smarter phones, better e-book readers that double up as multi-propose devices, many, many more things to make our life easier and more fun, or at least, that’s what we gizmo-freaks believe.
This article by Roopinder Singh on Technology was published in a special year-end supplement of The Tribune on December 26, 2010
Mark Zuckerberg is again in the news, in fact, his making it on the cover of Time magazine is news. Zuckerberg has been named the person of the year by the news magazine, despite the WikiLeaks founder Jullian Assange receiving more votes than him.
You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies
Like the most of the connected world, we all know the product that made Zuckerberg famous-Facebook. We have also been exposed to another side of him in the movie The Social Network, which opened to less-than-full halls in Chandigarh recently. For those readers who missed it, the movie paints him in fairly negative terms – socially awkward, insecure and an ego-maniac with a touch of deviousness. Is it true? We really don’t know, but movies tend to pick up historical themes and give them so much colour that they have little resemblance to history.
The Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie is negative, but others who have written on him and researched on him do not paint such a bleak picture. It is generally accepted that Zuckerberg had a girlfriend in the period which the film concentrates on, something that is definitely at odds with the movie that portrays Zuckerberg’s desire to impress his girlfriend with whom he had just broken up, and get social prominence as his prime motivation in developing Facebook.
Other critics fault many details, including the portrayal of the Internet entrepreneur and Napster co-founder Sean Parker as a paranoid hedonist, which is one-sided to say the least. The reason that I have devoted much attention to the movie is that often the celluloid character overtakes the real one. Whenever I think of George Patton, I remember the character I saw in the movie, the low-angle shot of George C. Scott who was addressing his troops with a massive American flag in the background. In the movie he comes as an irascible and egomaniacal character, which are definitely attributes he had, but were far eclipsed by his multi-dimensional personality that allowed him to come out a winner in situations that had overwhelmed lesser men.
For many, Mahatma Gandhi and Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the man who led India to freedom are one and the same. Now, I dare say that practically everybody who reads this column has no danger of being portrayed, and thus misportrayed in the celluloid world. In that, we are safe! On the other hand, we all are leaking out parts of our lives through our online avatars as we interact with others on social networking sites like Facebook and other venues of public forums like blogs, and even through our comments on these blogs.
What we say reflects what we are, but when we do so in the real world, our listeners understand the context, and thus know what we are talking about. The non-verbal communication that takes place, plus the physical proximity of the participants in this social interaction gives it an edge, which is lacking in cyberspace.
On the Internet, we often are casual in our interaction, and this casualness leads to indiscretion. Then we pay dearly for it. There are many organisations that can piece together what you are, based on the bits of bytes that you post of yourself.
I too did something like that recently. I had a friend in New York called Joel. From time to time I had tried his name on Google with not much result, rather with too much results, since there were thousands of them. Recently, I again started thinking about him, and decided to find him, if I could. Well, this time I added bits of information that I knew about him, and was soon rewarded.
We reveal more than we want, and should do. Please be careful when you are online. It’s you life and your face on that Facebook account!
This column of Bits about Bytes by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune.
Rebel or a revolutionary, insane or an insurgent, 39-year-old JULIAN PAUL ASSANGE evokes extreme emotions. Hailed as a visionary, pioneer and path-breaker on the one hand, he is also condemned as an irresponsible anarchist on the other. ROOPINDER SINGH provides a peek into his fascinating, eventful, but often contradictory and controversial life
The Tribune, Centre Stage, December 13, 2010
He uses encrypted cell phones to stay in touch, travels under false names, wears disguises, uses cash instead of credit cards, and stays out of touch for days, has trysts with beautiful women, but instead of being in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, like James Bond, he is lodged in Her Majesty’s Prison, Wandworth, Britain’s largest.
Why is he in prison? Because the judge refused him bail, in spite of support from a raft of celebrities that included Jemima Khan, former wife of Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, well-known journalist John Pilger and filmmaker Ken Loach. They may not have met him, but wanted to show solidarity with the 39-year-old Australian, as do so many the world over.
Like Ian Fleming’s character, women seem to be Julian Paul Assange’s Achilles’ heel and led to his arrest in London where he is being held, pending extradition to Sweden. Two women he had dated while in Sweden earlier alleged that he sexually assaulted them. According to one version, the women wanted to get in touch with him after the event, but couldn’t, and then finally went to the police. Others dismiss the whole thing as a conspiracy to shut up WikiLeaks and its founder.
Julian Paul Assange
Assange does not deny the encounters, but claims they were consensual, and points out that the two women continued to interact with him. No formal charges have been filed, but he is wanted for questioning by the police in Sweden. According to Swedish law, a sexual encounter can begin as a consensual act but can become “non-consensual” if the woman objects at any point of time. Then, there is the issue of use of force and two charges of unprotected sex without a condom, despite the women’s insistence that he use one. The Swedes are known for having a tough attitude towards sexual crimes and have broader definition of what constitutes such crime.
The world waits, and so do many governments, to see if WikiLeaks will release embarrassing documents in retaliation. He has already significantly undermined the credibility of the American diplomatic efforts by releasing, for the past two weeks, thousands of classified messages from US embassies around the world. Significantly, WikiLeaks has more than two-and-a-half-lakh messages in its kitty, and is leaking out dribbles just yet.
It is entirely appropriate, and in some ways understandable, if the man who founded WikiLeaks has a mysterious past. It’s not clear where the surname Assange comes from, although it is said to have a Chinese origin. However, his maternal ancestors emigrated to Australia from Scotland and Ireland. He did not attend school, although he studied at University of Melbourne later, and his childhood was certainly different from the norm,
Julian Paul Assange had to move home 37 times before he was 14 years old, and he still has no home address, since he keeps on moving frequently. So does his website, WikiLeaks, which has recently been hopping from one server to another, as it is chased and attacked by various “forces of establishment”.
Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia, spent most of his childhood with his mother, Christine, and schooled at home, actually, many homes. In the exhaustive interview with him, published in The New Yorker, he romanticised his early childhood and said it was spent like Tom Sawyer, the character made immortal by Mark Twain. Said he: “I had my own horse, I built my own raft and I was going down mines and shafts….” His parents also led a nomadic life, with his father, who was a theatre director, taking the show from one place to another. His mother re-married when he was only eight, but separated from her abusive husband three years later.
He was bright in maths, and his mother was supportive enough to buy him a Commodore 64 computer in 1987. Since it was the pre-www era, the naturally curious Assange started exploring the networks around him, and thus started a lifelong hide-and-seek in cyber space. He married when he was 18 and has a son Daniel, but his wife and son left him in 1991 when police raided their house and accused him of hacking into the computer system of Nortel, a telecommunication company. He was arrested and convicted, but did no jail time.
He worked as a researcher with Suelette Dreyfus, an academic, and assisted her with her 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. In a published interview, she has described him as a “very skilled researcher” who was “quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn’t do”. Assange also did a course in physics and maths at Melbourne University.
He started WikiLeaks in 2006. In one of the essays on it, he wrote: “To radically shift regime behaviour we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.”
WikiLeaks became a place where anonymous whistleblowers could send in information with the conviction that it would be shared with the world, and the anonymity of the sources would be protected. The organisation is voluntary and it is run with funds provided by donations, and like many others, Asange is an unpaid volunteer.
Asange is a lonely and restless soul. He has lived a crowded life, having motorcycled across Vietnam, camped in Iceland to complete projects for WikiLeaks in secrecy and delivered lectures all over the world.
WikiLeaks has documented extra-judicial killings in Kenya. It published a report on toxic waste dumping on the African coast, and revealing documents like Church of Scientology manuals and Guantanamo Bay procedures.
It exposed a video taken by a US Apache helicopter in 2007 that showed it shooting civilians in Iraq. The video evoked tremendous response and caused much embarrassment to the US establishment. WikiLeaks received more than two lakh dollars in donations after the video was released.
Assange calls himself Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks and an Internet activist. He was given the International Media Award in 2009 by Amnesty International. Ironically, much of his life remains private, as does the functioning of WikiLeaks.
In July this year, it published 90,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan.
In October, WikiLeaks exposed the Iraq War, as seen through classified documents, and then came the 2.5 lakh diplomatic cables.
The US has declared war on WikiLeaks, and US politicians say that WikiLeaks should be designated a terrorist organisation and its founder be charged under the Espionage Act. There are hardly any takers internationally for such an extreme position, but WikiLeaks is being examined with a microscope and powerful forces are creating hurdles in its functioning.
As yet, it has emerged triumphant in the cat-and-mouse game it is playing with authorities worldwide, in spite of persistent attacks, both technical and financial.
Assange is a complex man, brilliant and unconventional, according to everyone who has met him. His arrest in London is just one chapter in the life of a man who has the world at the edge of its seat, wondering what he can unleash, which secrets he can expose and who he is going to embarrass next. The world waits for further revelations even as Wikileaks threatens to change the way governments, media and diplomats function.
The article was published in The Tribune on December 13, 2010.
We are all proud because of the charitable act of one — Wipro chairman, Azim Premji, who is said to be India’s third-richest man, has committed $2 billion to charity, to education specifically. Premji has long and fairly silently been involved in various initiatives to help education of children. Now, he has upped the ante and given what is estimated to be about nine per cent of his personal wealth to the cause. The point to note is that he has given his personal wealth, not funds generated out of his company profits.
Is he alone? Not at all. Let’s look at the following instances that have been in the news recently:
Azim Premji
You have, of course, realised that the examples given above are of people who earn their living from computers, either by using them or by making them in the last case. While IT has, by no means, a monopoly on large-scale charitable donations, it has been in the news recently, and certainly in the public eye, nothing can match what Bill Gates has done in donating billions and billions of dollars for a number of charitable causes.
By no means are the IT barons alone in this, India has a long history of businessmen giving back to society, mostly for religious, educational and medical charities. Prominent among them have been the Tatas and the Birlas, but others like the Bajaj family, and near home the Modis and the Thapars have set up various educational institutions for the public. Earlier, the Mahrajas gave liberally to educational institutions far away from their own kingdoms. Patiala was a big contributor to Aligarh Muslim University; Khalsa College, Amritsar, had various wings dedicated to the states that had contributed liberally to its construction, and so on. Even now, various alumni organisations, notably the Patiala Health Foundation, set up by Patiala Medical College alumni, contribute materially and otherwise, to their alma mater.
There is, however, a significant difference. The IT entrepreneurs are basically first generation, and they did not come from wealth. They have made money, and have demonstrated social responsibility by dipping into their personal fortunes and giving out of them.
Narayana Murthy
IT has turned out to be one field where ethical, enterprising, bright and hard-working people can realise their dreams and more. Since setting up an IT enterprise is not as capital intensive as other industries, IT has also helped many bright people with ordinary middle-class economic backgrounds achieve success. A culture of giving back to society has been nurtured in the industry and although as compared to Western standards Indians do not contribute much to charity, the IT industry as a whole has made a great positive contribution in giving back to society.
IT is slowly transforming the way things are done. Just go to an e-sampark kendra in Chandigarh and you will see how easy it has become for time-strapped people to take care of their chores, like paying bills and requesting various government departments for services, including passports. Every time a result is announced, everyone makes a beeline for the Internet, because all results are today, as a matter of course, posted online. A decade ago, this was revolutionary, and a decade before that it was unheard of. The digitisation of land records may finally help us get rid of the notorious patwaris who have a stronghold on all property matters.
However, in matters of donating personal wealth, there is still a degree of reluctance, perhaps because of a feeling that there is overall corruption and no one wants to give money unless he or she knows that it will be used well. However, here too, the change is welcome, especially when one sees it among the rank and file of IT companies.
During a visit to the Chandigarh IT Park, we saw a group of young employees teaching older people. We were told that they had taken it upon themselves to teach the security guards, employed by a contractor, to brush up their reading and writing skills. It was heartening to see the mutual respect with which people from different socio-economic backgrounds and age were treating one another.
As one sees IT transforming life, the extent of intangible differences that are coming about in our life because of IT are becoming even more obvious. And the best part is that the people at the top are leading the way, as they should.
The column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune.
Granta: Pakistan
Ed. John Freeman.
Granta. Pages 288. Rs 599.
THE world seeks to understand Pakistan, even as that nation seeks to define itself, and who better to guide us than a collection of celebrated contemporary writers from the country that has gripped the imagination of the world for all the wrong reasons.
Granta The Magazine of New Writing, Issue 112: Pakistan
We often forget that it is this land that gave such legends like Heer-Ranjha and Sassi-Panu, two of the most powerful love stories that form a part of our folklore; that the poets of the region have a centuries-old tradition of stringing together soul-stirring verses; the biting humour that expresses serious political critique-there is much more to Pakistan than terror, which it is experiencing as well as exporting.
Is it a magazine or a book? It is the former-the tag line says The Magazine of New Writing, Issue 112-but so well-knit together that it reads like the latter. Through this special issue of Granta, we are introduced to Pakistan that seems familiar, yet different. The feudalistic mindset, chauvinism, intolerance and intense competition between well-placed peers, along with female foeticide are brought out well by Nadeem Aslam in Leila in the Wilderness, with which the volume opens. The quest for a boy, who will take forward the family line, blaming the mother for not producing one, eating special foods to produce a male, inordinate faith in oracles and talisman, all are so familiar, yet served in a distinctive, somewhat exotic flavour.
Portrait of Jinnah is Jane Perlez’s perceptive reportage of the life and impact of the founder of Pakistan on his country, and in the same genre, Basharat Peer’s Kashmir’s Forever War gives a different, if one-sided view of how and why Kashmir continues to burn and bleed.
Uzma Aslam Khan’s Ice, Mating is good, erotic and intelligent. This San Francisco-based author’s first book, The Story of Noble Rot, was reviewed in these columns.
In The House by the Gallows, Intizar Hussain’s memoir of censorship, and the ham-handedness of the censors, will draw a chuckle or two from those who suffered briefly when Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed it in India during the period of Emergency in 1976. The swashbuckling character Anwar Kanwal in Arithmetic on the Frontier by Declan Walsh, took one back to Aatish Tasweer’s account in Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, of another person, sophisticated in urban setting, and a feudal lord in his ancestral, pastoral setting. We see them in India, too, though mostly in the past sense, since it is obvious that feudalism has a far greater hold in Pakistan, which never renounced it.
Mohammed Hanif is familiar to many in India because of his best-selling novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and its black humour. His latest work, the soon-to-be published Butt & Bhatti, starts off as a romantic story, in a hospital, but then comes in terror triggered by events that would have been innocent, had they been in a less terror-ridden environment.
Three pages of sheer shock grip you in A Beheading, where the protagonist is the victim. Mohsin Hamid the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a work of fiction-the stuff nightmares are made of-that sometimes spills into reality, as it did for Daniel Pearl.
In Pop Idols, Kamila Shamsie starts with Nazia and her brother Zoheb Hassan of the “Disco Deewane” fame. Deftly weaving pop culture and political observations, she reminds us of how Zia-ul-Haq sucked Pakistan’s soul with his Islamisation drive, and how betrayed people felt when Benazir Bhutto did not reverse the trend. Had not Pakistani teens gyrated to “Jeay Jeay Jeay Bhutto Benazir“, expostulates this Karachi-bred expat who now lives in London.
Fatima Bhutto’s political account in Mangho Pir, Lorraine Adams and Ayesha Nasir’s reportage in The Trials of Faisal Shahzad, Sarfraz Manzoor’s quest for a matrimonial match in White Girls, and certainly not to be missed High Noon, which showcases the work of 14 Pakistani contemporary artists; many gems are waiting to be explored in this volume.
You should never judge a book by its cover. In this case, however, the cover of the Granta edition gives an interesting insight about its contents. It is based on vehicle art, seen on trucks in India and on both trucks and buses in Pakistan-a shiny, stylised, raw mosaic of many vignettes united by a common vision of the artist, or, in this case, the editor. As the Granta bus trundles along various highways and pot-holed byroads of Pakistan, it takes us on paths that strike a note of familiarity, even as some exotic notes tease our sensibilities.
This review, by Roopinder Singh was published in the Sunday Reading section of The Tribune.
It has been a long journey for Chandigarh-based realistic artist Rahi Mohinder Singh. RM started by drawing on a slate. Today his works hang in Parliament, writes Roopinder Singh
Painting a legend: The artist paints a portrait of Nek Chand, the creator of the Rock Garden, on location, in his office. — Photo by Roopinder Singh
He calls himself a rahi or a traveller, and his journey into the world of art took him to Andretta, where he was inspired by the legendary artist Sobha Singh. It has been a long journey for Rahi Mohinder Singh, the Chandigarh-based realistic artist, who started by drawing on a slate with chalk.
The journey from slate to canvas is an interesting one. It took him through painting the bodies of trucks on which he was a “child-specialist” who painted the likenesses of Guru Gobind Singh, and freedom fighters like Chander Shekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh. He drew extensively and had started making pen-portraits of other older passengers in the train back home.
Self-portrait --painting by R M Singh
How did he get on the train? Well, his village, Bharoli Kalan, in Gurdaspur district, had only a primary school, and after Class V, he was sent off to Pathankot, about 3 km away. Like other children, he hitched a ride on a train to go to and fro to school.
“I was drawing a sketch one day when a passenger asked me, ‘Will you draw my portrait?’ I agreed and quickly drew a pencil sketch. As my home came near, I tore off the sheet from my copy and he gave me Rs 1!” This started a wave and soon everyone, co-passengers as well as guards, TTs etc, all had their portraits made.
Today his works hang in Parliament, and are in the collections of the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and many private institutions. He has illustrated books for the Singapore Sikh Education Board with the support of Ministry of Education, Singapore, and also for state textbook boards of both Punjab and Haryana. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiled his portrait of Giani Gurmukh Singh Musafir which hangs in Parliament. His portrait of Nek Chand, the creator of the Rock Garden, Chandigarh, earned him much appreciation.
“I had adopted Sobha Singh as my guru even before I met him,” says the artist, who was born in 1965. While my father, Mehar Singh, encouraged the artist in me, he was looking for a guru who could take me under his wings. I was painting and earning money, but he wanted me to be a shagird of an artist. One day, I saw a full-page feature in Dharamyug, Hindi magazine, on Sobha Singh and his works. I framed the page and told my father that I had found my guru.
It was much later, in 1983, that RM was introduced to the great artist at Andretta. “Do your parents know what you are doing,” asked the artist, whose parents had discouraged him from purusing art as a vocation.
Grace of Punjab, a sculpture by R M Singh
“On the contrary, my father, and my grandfather, Pritam Singh, had both encouraged me. My grandfather was a great craftsman. He also made mirrors, and once he had fashioned a plate camera under the guidance of a British officer. They made two cameras and from him my grandfather learnt the art of photography. Both he and later, my father, had a portable studio with which they would go to fairs held in different parts of Himachal Pradesh and take photographs on glass plates. Later, they shifted to photographic paper,” recalls RM. Inexpensive Soviet-era books brought by vans operated by Punjab Book Centre, Chandigarh, exposed the young mind to Russian artists.
Andretta became a transit home for the young RM. He would stay with Sobha Singh for a few days, and then go back to Palampur. It was the great artist who encouraged him to join Government College of Art, Chandigarh, from where he earned his bachelor’s degree in applied art in 1989. Even as a student, he was much in demand. He started working for the weekend edition of the Indian Express while still in college. Readers of The Tribune became familiar with his work after 1990, when his illustrations appeared regularly in weekend supplements and special pages of the paper.
At Art College, he was exposed to works of European artists like Ruben, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and US artists like John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell, whom he admires greatly.
“RM Singh has a great understanding of the Punjabi way of life, which is why we commissioned him to illustrate the series on teaching Punjabi. He has illustrated books and they are being used not only in schools in Singapore, but also neighbouring nations,” says Bhajan Singh, a retired official of the Singapore Education Service.
The artist from Bharoli Kalan has travelled far on his artistic journey, and it is with interest that we will follow the journey of this Rahi.
The article was published in the Saturday Extra section of The Tribune on December 4, 2010.