Donna Summer Image: Wikipedia

We were students at Yadavindra Public School, Patiala, and the world was neatly divided into students who clung on to their Punjabi feudal roots, and the ‘Yankees’, as the somewhat Anglicised minority of students who were comfortable listening to Western music were called. Among the Yankees were friends like Gupi, Pat, Winnie, Bertie, and seniors like Mandy and Sam.

We heard about a singer, Donna Summer, who had just come out with a single that had shaken the music world. “Love to Love You, Baby” was the rage in the West, and we just had to hear it. How to do that? We knew of only one way. Patiala’s Africa connection then via the Bhattal family, and our friend Gupi’s father, Uncle Sukhminder, was an indulgent millionaire.

Off went the request. Uncle was to visit India soon and thus this was added to the multiple things he was to get for family, relatives and friends. Uncle travelled around the world, especially between the US, the UK and various African countries. He had thus earned many frequent-flyer points, and could stretch baggage and other rules to his, read our, advantage.

When he arrived in London and asked for the LP, a ‘long-playing’ record for those who belong to the post-vinyl era, he was told that it was simply not available there. It was, however, much in news, because of an informal ban by “Auntie Beeb”, as the British Broadcasting Corporation was un-complementarily called. Now Uncle Sukhminder was someone who wanted to not only say “Love to Love You, Baby,” but also show it. He was known to have showered gifts on Mohinder Kaur, the love of his life who became his wife, and also on his children and friends.

So, “What was I to do?” The query was rhetorically repeated in the later years. Off he went, to the city that celebrates love, Paris, and from there he got the LP, which was delivered with a certain ceremony. “Oh! You rascals, here it is, I had to go all the way to Paris to get it for you.”

Now the record was there, it was quickly whisked out of their house, and taken to Mandy and Tina’s house, which gave more privacy to us young souls. We heard the song. Its seductive, sensuous synthesised sound, interjected with minimal lyrics and many suggestive moans and groans soon had everyone enthralled.

Love to Love You Baby, LP jacket. Image: Wikipedia

Donna Summer, who died after a long battle with cancer on Thursday, became our favourite. Her music was era-defining. She was called Queen of Disco and had many No. 1 hits like “MacArthur Park,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls”. Then there came a period when she said she would sing anything but “Love to Love You,” though eventually she did that too. Her voice rang true, it had a power that allowed her to transcend the genre that she had launched.

As for the man who introduced us to Donna Summer, Uncle Sukhminder could be heard saying: “Oye, Where’s the LP that I got for you? Let me hear it at least once.” Now, that was not something we could afford to let happen, not after we had heard the song!

This middle by Roopinder Singh was published in The Tribune on May 19, 2012.

By Rupa Bajwa
Picador/Pan Macmillan.
Pages 206. Rs 499.

WE listen to stories. We tell tales. Our lives have many stories, some of them tangled. We look at the world of others as a yarn that is unfolding in front of us…. Rupa Bajwa has an uncommon felicity with language and a rarer ability to look into the lives of ordinary people, relate to their world and narrate their story with candour, as readers of The Sari Shop, one of the most- acclaimed first books by an Indian author, are well aware.

Her second book is no sequel to the famous predecessor. It is a multi-layered exploration of the story of Rani and her world, a tale that took a good eight years to get to the readers’ hands. As all those who read The Sari Shop will remember, Bajwa engrosses herself in the world of her characters, and thus here we have the protagonist Rani, who dropped out of school in Class IX and works in Eve’s Beauty Parlour in Amritsar. She lives with her father Dheeraj, who is now old and ailing. Her brother Mahesh, his wife Neelam and their son Bittu are also in the same house. Mahesh works in a power loom factory and the one niggling worry for the family is money.

This constant financial pressure on the family tells on ties, and thus Neelam, much embarrassed by the lack of money in the household she has married into, becomes a penny pincher and a shrew, even as she dotes on Bittu, the apple of her eye.

Rani too loves her nephew and tells him stories, which she spins for him every night. They are gripping, but since he sleeps before the tales end, there is no need for to finish them, a reflection also of the life of Rani and her family, a continuing story of a marginalised existence with nothing much to talk about.

Eve’s Beauty Parlour is where much of the initial action takes place, and you nod your head in empathy with Rani when she feels flummoxed by the posters of women modelling international beauty products. “Their looks, their skinniness, their impractical makeup and clothes — none of this made sense to her. Secretly Rani felt they could not have much common sense.”

Drudgery has many shades, and for Mahesh the air-conditioned environs of Rani’s workplace contrast sharply with the oppressive, noisy and dehumanising power loom factory where he works. This he begins to resent.

Bajwa portrays Dheeraj with compassion and empathy. He is a lonely figure, somewhat lost in a world where he has been cast aside from his job as an accountant, fairly content with his state of being, yet yearning to escape from the humdrum existence he is caught in, something that he manages to do briefly. A broken water tank brings about a crisis in the household and tears the family apart. Rani leaves Amritsar for Delhi and starts working as domestic help with Sadhna Memsahib. For most people who grow up in small towns, Delhi comes as a shock. There is so much happening, so many choices to make, relationships to negotiate with people who dance to a different tune.

Rani’s employer Sadhna is a ‘stalled novelist’, nursing a fractured leg. From the shelter of her house Rani sees the arty world of Delhi, journalists, writers and artists, where people want to be seen at the right places and at the right time, even if it is a memorial meet, who think nothing of using others for their own ends, who lack consideration…. Sadhna’s, make that the author’s, observations on the ‘bindied and bearded’ intellectuals, her the not-so-gentle digs at the OMG culture and the pretentiousness of the Fab set are bound to raise some hackles.

The rich and the poor live alongside each other in India. So do they in Rupa Bajwa’s book. She is candid and compassionate. The author who won the XXIV Grinzane Cavour Prize for best first novel in June 2005, the Commonwealth Award in 2005 and Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006, has given her readers another novel, one that has stories that reflect the chaos of life. Readers will squirm and sometimes smile even as they enter a world they seldom connect with. It is a journey that starts as a trip into the unknown, and slowly becomes an excursion into the story of life.

This review by Roopinder  Singh was published in the Spectrum section of The Tribune on May 13, 2012.

You may also like to read an interview with Rupa Bajwa that was published after she won the the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009.

Roopinder Singh

Anywhere, anytime, on any machine. The world’s top technology companies promise you the moon, and all that they expect you to do is to rise up to the clouds to get it. They are giving you services that will keep your data safe and make it accessible, provided you have internet or data connectivity, of course.

Google launched the much-anticipated Google Drive or GDrive as it is popularly known, recently and users can now access it for storing their files. Basically, it is an online locker where you can store files so that you can access them later or share them with others.
All that you have to do is install a small application, and once you have it, you can synchronise the cloud storage with the hard drive on your personal computer, or on another device.

Cloud computing

We know that many computer users have computers at home as well as their offices. They may even have smartphones, which are, in effect, small computers. Often, the files that they sa

ve on one computer are not accessible on another, unless they physically transfer these files, normally using flash or pen drives.

This is where cloud computing comes in. It is basically a service that delivers computing requirements to end-recipients through the internet. These services could be storage or even using software that is not on your computer, but one that you have access to through the Net. We will focus on the storage aspect in this article.

Other alternatives

Long before GDrive came on the scene, the cloud was a crowded place. Box (founded 2005), Dropbox (founded 2007) and Microsoft’s Live Drive, which has now become SkyDrive, all had made a place for themselves, as did many other cloud-storage services.

Dropbox  dominates the cloud-storage market right now. It offers 2GB of online storage for free, as compared with 5 GB for Google Drive and 7 GB for SkyDrive. Dropbox is compatible with practically all popular mobile and desktop platforms, which is a huge advantage, right now. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s answer to GDrive. It preceded GDrive by many years and its recent re-launch has brought the traditional rivalry to the fore.

Online office

Both Google and Microsoft have online office suits that they seek to promote through their cloud storage offerings. SkyDrive favours Microsoft Office file formats and, thus, editing a Word document on the go, is a snap. On the other hand, GDrive is deeply integrated with Google’s own office suit, Google Docs, to an extent that it seems like an extension of Google Docs. The downside to this is that your files have to be converted to the Docs format if you want to edit them. However, you can export these files in a variety of formats, and 450 new fonts and 60 templates have just been added.

Google is already the most-preferred search engine. It has a popular e-mail service, and a dominant smartphone operating system. It is perfectly poised to take advantage of the fact that many Google users simply do not want to leave the Google universe, and appreciate the tight integration that comes by being on one platform.

Dropbox advantage

As we have noted, the big giant on the cloud is an old-timer, Dropbox. It scores with its simple, uncluttered style, and has added new features with which you can upload and share photographs online, even as you take them with your smartphone.

As cloud storage becomes more popular, we will have more features from a variety of companies. We have just discussed the top three, there are many. The online world is getting better, and you have nothing to lose but the shackles of your personal computer that you trade in for the cloud that will put you data at your fingertips, no matter where you are.

TOP THREE

Google Drive

Free storage: 5 GB

Paid storage: Extra storage available in tiers from 25 GB ($30/year) and 100 GB ($60/year) all the way up to 16 TB ($9,600 per year)

Online document editing: Yes, with Google Docs

Operating System: Windows, Mac, Android

Dropbox

Free storage: 2 GB

Paid storage: Free; Pro packages available in tiers of 50/100 GB for $99/$199 per year

Online document editing: No

Operating System: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry

SkyDrive

Free storage: 7 GB

Paid storage: Extra storage available in 20/50/100 GB increments, at $10/$25/$50 per year, respectively

Online document editing: Yes, with Office Web Apps

Operating System: Windows, iOS, Windows Phone, Mac; Android apps via third parties

 This article was published in the Trends pullout of The Tribune on June 12, 2012.

Sikhs in Latin America: Travels among the Sikh Diaspora

By Swarn Singh Kahlon. Manohar. Pages 361. Rs 1,100.

Reviewed by Roopinder Singh

IS it a scholarly work, or is it a travelogue? It’s a bit of both, with historical, ethnographical and geographical strains thrown in for good measure. This is one book that cannot be slotted easily. But then, it is difficult to classify the author too. He is a Punjabi who spent most of his working life in Bombay and Calcutta, studied in the US, and now makes Chandigarh his home. This is his first book, and he has been working on this subject for a long time.

Kahlon is fascinated with early Sikh immigration and he has reached out to an area which has not been the focus of any such study, Latin America. As the author says, “One is unable to fathom how and from where they got the information way back in the end of the 19^th century about the existence of some of the countries they migrated to,” yet off they went, in search of a better life for themselves and their families. These immigrants were largely men and most often they married local women, thus their families spoke local languages, maybe some Punjabi for a generation of two, and little or no English.

It was during the British Raj that the Sikhs spread out all over the world, often as a part of the British Army, or police forces. Often they migrated to various British colonies. But this was not always the case. I remember seeing a picture of a turbaned Sikh supervising building the Panama Canal, in an exhibition in the New York. Apparently many spread out from there and for at least a section of them, all they could do was to walk along the railway track till they found food, shelter and eventually work. Many got employment on the railroad, and often set up small business when they had saved enough money to be able to do so.

The author travelled to these Latin American countries. He did a tour of Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil in 2005. A year later, he did another one in which he covered Belize, Mexico, Cuba, Panama and Ecuador. He met descendants of the original inhabitants in these countries and has examined the Sikh diaspora in each of these nations by giving each a chapter. It is in reaching out to these primary sources that the author strikes his distinctive note. He has got oral accounts, documents, newspaper clippings, passports, etc. which have been appended with the book and which provide fascinating vignettes of pioneer’s lives.

We meet Dan Singh who went from Calcutta, the principal port in India then, to the place he knew as ‘Tina’. An unscrupulous captain took him and his compatriots to Fiji, but they sued him and eventually went to Argentina in 1911, where they faced an adventurous future and a tough life. Then there is George Singh, who became the Chief Justice of Belize in 1998. His father, Bawa Singh Mann had migrated to what was then British Honduras just six decades earlier.

The gurdwara has always been the fulcrum around which the life of Sikhs, especially emigrants, revolves. Often, it becomes a religious centre, a cultural club and an education centre all rolled into one. The story of how a gurdwara was set up in which nation varies from each group to the next, but the importance that it remains constant.

Early emigrants were overwhelmingly male and there were practically no Punjabi girls they could marry. They married local girls, and although they clung to their Sikh identity, their children and grandchildren were gradually assimilated. However, they retain a keen interest in the culture of their ancestors, as we find from the author’s interviews. Kahlon has written a remarkable book that defies easy slotting. There is, no doubt, that he treads a path seldom travelled, and never with the kind of dedication and resources that Kahlon has invested in the book.

We can expect this volume to spark interest in this long-forgotten Sikh diaspora. It has much that later-day researchers will use for their studies.

This review was published in the Spectrum magazine section of The Tribune on Sunday, April 22, 2012.

By Salma Mahmud
Har Anand Publications. Pages 152. Rs 395

Reviewed by Roopinder Singh

IT does not take a long life for someone to be remembered, it is how much impact that a person leaves which makes others reminisce about him even much after he is gone. Accomplishments, associations and the memories that a person leaves- all form the intangible legacy of the memory of a shared life.

The Wings of Time by Salma Mahmud

Of all those who reminisce, for none are those memories as bittersweet as they are for the family members. Salma Mahmud’s biography of her father, Dr Muhammad Din Taseer (1905-1953), started as a journalistic endeavour when The Friday Times asked her to write about her father’s friends. Why? Because they constituted the most important writers, academics and critics ofPakistan. “Writing about them was nothing short of a traumatic experience. I felt I was drowning in a sea of sorrow and regret. Each one of them was an uncle for me, be he Uncle Victor, or Uncle Som, or Uncle Najji or whatever.” She persevered and has presented to the readers an account of the times seldom dwelt upon. The 1930s was the period when a large number of Indians went to the hallowed halls ofOxfordorCambridgeuniversities to study. They came back, generally speaking, equipped with an excellence in English and western education, as well as, often, a keen involvement in their mother tongue. Some, like MD Taseer, returned not only with a PhD in English fromCambridge, but also with a romantic interest in a British lady. In this way, we are introduced to Christabel, the author’s mother, whose sister, Alys was later to marry Faiz Ahmad Faiz, then a lecturer in a college inAmritsarwhere Taseer was the principal. Alys came toIndiaon the same ship as Jewell and Margaret in 1938. They all were to makeIndiatheir home.

In a delightful aside, the author explores the genealogical tree of her mother and thus we find out that Christabel came from a French Huguenot family that had to migrate toBritainafter they were hounded because of their religious beliefs.

As we explore Taseer’s life, we find in it familiar places,Amritsar,Delhi, Simla andSrinagar, along withLahorewhich dominated the later part of Taseer’s life. Amritsar, a vital centre of commerce and education at that time, Delhi, with references to Lodhi Gardens, Simla with its Mall, and Lahore that is now as much a stranger to the readers in India as the first three cities are to readers in Pakistan.

Marked by literary renaissance, poetic rebellions, coupled with political upheavals that changed the course of history, these were indeed interesting times and the Taseer family was in the middle of them. Through the family’s perspective, we have a macro view of the world around them. The structure of the book is unusual. In the first four chapters, we have a unique collection of individuals who dominated the intellectual life of the subcontinent.

A S Bukhari, Sufi Gulam Mustafa Tabassum, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Colonel Majit Malik, Badruddin Badar, Tajbans Khanna, Prof Hamid Ahmed Khan, Dr Aftab Ahmed Khan, Syed Abid Ali Abid, Allama Iqbal, Somnath Chib, Iqbal Singh, Victor Kiernan`85 names that are well known and these individuals contributed in various ways to the literary richness of the sub-continent.

Then we have Taseer himself. A rebel at heart, he was an educationist who was also an Urdu poet of distinction. He was awarded a PhD byCambridgeUniversityin 1935. One of the founders of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, he later fell out with those at the helm. He insisted that his daughter learn Urdu and Persian, even though it was English that was her primary interest. The man that emerges from the pages of Salma Mahmood’s book is the kind of cosmopolitan Pakistani, a much-endangered species inPakistannow. How much so? The answer comes sadly from the assignation of Dr MD Taseer’s son, the Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who was assassinated only last year, for his opposition toPakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.

Salma Mahmud’s account will find resonance on both sides of the border.

This review was published in The Tribune on March 25, 2012

IT looks no different than its predecessor, but it has already set aficionados’ hearts aflutter, and with a fine sense of sophisticated marketing, Apple is calling its latest offering Resolutionary. 

iPad—just that, no prefixes, no suffixes. Apple’s latest product dispensed with the naming conventions with the same elegance that the company has dismissed computing conventions, to give a product that is easy-to-use, one that people find useful and a great addition to their lives. It weighs a little more than its predecessor

On the day Apple released iPad in California, I met Stella, in Chandigarh. The four-year-old uses her parents’ iPad with practised ease to draw and express herself. For this little chatterbox, the iPad is just another device; she is not intimidated by it in any way.

A child can use it! That’s what Apple would be proud of. 

iPad is heralded as the icon of the post-PC world. The device was introduced only in April 2010, and it took just four months to sell over a billion of these devices, and by the time iPad2 was announced on March 2, 2011, almost 15 million iPads were in the hands of people who had downloaded millions of applications for their use.

Retina display

iPad, the latest one, offers some great goodies, and has significant improvements over its predecessors. The most visible change is, of course, the Retina Display with 2048-by-1536 resolution for the 9.7″ screen. This is an eye-popping resolution that is familiar to the users of the iPhone 4 family. 

The first two models of the iPad had a resolution of 1,024-by-768 pixels, and the new one is four times of that. This high resolution, according to Steve Jobs, when he introduced it for the first time for the iPhone, is enough “that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels when (the phone or the tablet is) held at a normal distance.”

Nitpicking purists do point out there is a difference in the pixels-per-inch on the iPhone 4S’ (326 ppi) and the iPad (264 ppi). Thus the iPad has 20 per cent less pixel density, but then you hold the iPad at a different distance from the eye than the iPhone, and thus the debate goes on…

New processor

It is really difficult to pack in so many pixels and thus the need for a powerful processor, the dual-core A5X chip. Apple has, however, boosted the graphics component to four cores. In the tablet’s technical specifications, it calls it “quad-core graphics.” This allows the iPad to handle the increased pixels of the higher-resolution screen with ease and fluidity that you expect an Apple tablet to have.

Can take dictation

The 5-megapixel iSight camera is a bit of a disappointment, since it is akin to its counterpart in iPhone 4, rather than the one on iPhone 4S, which has an 8 megapixel camera. The iPad offers HD video capture at 1080 p, which is similar to what iPhone 4S has. Video capture and a FaceTime camera for video chat are the standard offerings with the high-speed LTE wireless broadband as optional. 

The iPad also features speech-to-text dictation, which can be a boon for those who find it difficult to type on a virtual keyboard. You touch a microphone icon next to the space bar on the on-screen keyboard, and viola! You can dictate and see the words you speak typed—that too in English, French, German and even in Japanese! The full-featured voice assistant Siri, is, however, not yet available. 

Now, we all know that the hardware improvements mean more to nerds than to ordinary users. Others can give similar or even better hardware, and notably Samsung and Sony have done so. 

Apple’s strength has also been been its application (app) store through which customers can download apps that they want for the activities that they would like to do. 

Apple provides more apps than anyone else, and more people make apps for Apple than they do for any competitor. Thus you have apps for every kind of thing—the most popular categories include games, books, entertainment, education and lifestyle. 

App my world

How popular are these apps? Shortly before the latest iPad was unveiled, a customer in China download the 25 billionth app from the App Store, which offers 5,85,000 apps!

Its closest competitor, the recently re-named Google Play, can’t match it in numbers, although it has been seen that most of the popular apps are available on practically all platforms, including Android, Windows Phone 7, RIM BlackBerry, and even Symbian, Nokia’s practically defunct smart phone operating system, which recently made waves for being the OS platform on which Nokia demonstrated its latest 41 mega pixel camera phone.

Apps contribute in great measure to the experience of using the iPad. No wonder Apple used its strength in music and showed off its GarageBand, app, which has many features to make music, and allows as many as four musically inclined individuals to collaborate, over wi-fi and make a recording that can be edited and posted online. Then there is the Apple iPhoto, with rather advanced features that make optimal use of the touch screen as well as the new display. 

Faster connectivity

As the world moves on to 4G, so has Apple. The new iPad supports 4G or Long-Term Evolution network (LTE), as it is known in the US. It holds the promise of blazingly fast 72Mbps (megabits-per-second) connectivity. It also downshifts its performance to support 3G standards. 

Of course, we know that in India 4G support is still awaited, and even 3G is patchy, at best. So, Indians will probably get the best connectivity when they take their iPads along with them on holidays abroad, but still, the promise is great and in metros at least, there is hope that this feature will be useful for us. 

Availability

Right now, iPad is available in Apple’s retail stores in the US, and also through the online Apple store. The best part is that it costs the same, as its predecessor did. (see box). Apple has also retained the 16 GB version of its earlier iPad2, and has announced that it is dropping its price by Rs 5,000 in India. 

The new iPad will be available in India by the end of the month, but then there is often a lag as supply tries to fulfil demand. Soon many people will purchase the latest tablet, even as others wait eagerly to get one for themselves.

The post-PC world is here. We will either have it in our hands, or look over the shoulders of others to see its rich display and the fantastic graphics.

 

 

This article was published in the Trends supplement of The Tribune on March 17, 2012.

The all new iPad

THE morning papers came in a bit late, and thus I checked up on the day’s news on my smartphone. What I read made me reach out to a bookshelf; draw out a volume that had seen much use over the years, and thumb through the pages of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A curious child in the pre-Internet era was bound to have a relationship with encyclopaedias. It started in Yadavindra Public School, Patiala, where the library had a good set of a children’s encyclopaedia. Richly illustrated, it was fascinating to see, and instructive to read. Pears Cyclopaedia was often consulted at home, courtesy my mother’s library.

In Amritsar, subsequently, one day I got a call from my father, ever on the quest for rare books at various second-hand stores. He had stumbled upon the seven-volume “Peoples of all Nations: Their Life to-day (sic) and the Story of Their Past.” I cycled up the uccha pul, and negotiated the narrow lanes near the Golden Temple to arrive at the bookstore and take possession of the volumes, which were thereafter precariously perched on the carrier of my bicycle. These occupy a place of pride on my bookshelves till date, and it is fascinating how much of the information in this set, published in 1922, is still valid, and how much of it is not!

Encyclopaedia Britannica was the Holy Grail that still eluded me. One day, just after I passed out of school, I was told to make a choice, between a Bajaj scooter and the Britannica. I found it interesting that the two things that I coveted so much were similarly priced, but for a youngster who prized physical mobility over mental agility, it was a no-brainer, the scooter won. ‘Hamara Bajaj’ came home and the Britannica stayed away.

I went off to college and lived in residence. The library was exceedingly well stocked and I would consult the Britannica often. My class-fellow, Bikram Kirti Singh De’s father Sudhendra Narayan Singh Deo featured in the edition that we had in college at that time, not because of his royal connection with Seraikella, but because of his contribution to Chau Dance for which was honoured by the Government of India with the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1962 and also with the Padmashri.

As time went by, my scooter became old and I felt that it needed an upgrade. My mother, ever mindful of my edification, still felt that I needed the Britannica. This time, I agreed to continue with the old ‘Hamara Bajaj’ and opted for the encyclopaedia. I would refer to it; sometimes check out the brief entries in the Micropædia, and at times, the longer ones in the Macropædia…. Simply browsing through random pages was fun. Year-Books kept the set updated, and the affair continued. Encyclopaedia Britannica remained in my life long after the scooter scooted out of it.

I bought a CD with the encyclopaedia in it, but it remained largely unused. However, the same could not be said for the edition I downloaded for my smartphone. The feature of showing random entries was the first allurement; the quick reference it provided was a life-saving feature, and the immediacy of having it everywhere, all the time, a major convenience. The print edition now took a backseat… till I read the news that Britannica was being discontinued 244 years after it was first published in 1768. It was almost a physical blow. What! No Encyclopaedia Britannica!

The digital move had been inevitable ever since 1981, when the company published what could have been the world’s first digital encyclopaedia, even though it was only a text version, without illustrations and graphics, which came in later. Well, the content will still be there, in a different form. Encyclopaedia Britannica is dead. Long live Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A slightly shorter middle on this topic was published in The Tribune on March 16, 2012

‘Hamara Bajaj’ and ‘Meri Britannica’

The editors have drawn on over 2,000 scholars for contributions. The encyclopaedia does not confine itself to religion alone, and has in it entries on art, history, language, literature, philosophy, polity, sciences, and even women studies

Hinduism has a hoary past, and countless attempts have been made to understand the faith, its precepts and practices. Indeed, the list of scholars who have worked on Hinduism is as long as it is impressive. It is an ocean into which many have taken a dip and explored what they found, yet they were always acutely aware that what they had grasped was merely a microcosm.

The sheer span of this set of volumes is enough to make you exclaim. Handsomely produced, they bear more than a little resemblance to the most famous of all encyclopaedias, the one that, unlike this set, still spells its name with an ‘a’. Like Encyclopaedia Britannica, this encyclopaedia too has a US connection, but more on that later.

Encyclopedia of Hinduism

The Foreword by the redoubtable Dr Karan Singh neatly sets the stage for the reader, and is in itself an illuminating essay on the ethos of Hinduism. As he points out, “Hinduism calls itself the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal faith, because it is not based upon the teachings of a single preceptor, but on the collective wisdom and inspiration of great seers and sages from the very dawn of Indian civilisation.”

Increasingly, we have seen that Indian scholars abroad contribute significantly to scholarly studies of religion and history. Brij Vilash Lal, Professor of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University, edited The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora. Produced in Singapore, it gives a fascinating account of Indians abroad. Much of the recent work on Sikh scholarship has been done by scholars abroad, especially in California.

Here too, it is the US-based India Heritage Research Foundation, which became the enabler of this project. The University of South Carolina provided the academic infrastructure for the compilation of this encyclopaedia.

The ‘foreign hand’ enabled scholars, connected with India, to work together for years and along with several other offices in India and abroad, they produced the 7,064 entries. The submissions by contributors were edited by a team of 24 editors at Rupa, led by Dr Kapil Kapoor, who was a Professor at the Centre for Linguistics and English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He also helped set up the Centre for Sanskrit Studies at the university, and held important positions there.

The editors have drawn on over 2,000 scholars for contributions. The encyclopaedia does not confine itself to religion alone and has in it entries on art, history, language, literature, philosophy, polity, sciences, and even women studies.

The inclusive nature of the selection of topics makes for an interesting mix, and a perusal of some of the entries shows that the contributors have taken considerable pain in ensuring lucidity and depth. The language used is non-intimidating. Once you get past the diacritical mark, so essential for universal understanding, makes familiar terms appear esoteric even to a common Indian reader’s eye.

The English-reading younger generation, too, will have a ready source of knowledge, and will thus be helped along in the wish to learn more about an ethos that we take for granted, simply because we are born into it, but know precious little about.

In these volumes, you will find concise entries as well as good bibliographical references. These will lead them to other sources where they can study the subject in greater depth, especially since the entries encompass a fairly wide canvas that include major Indic traditions, including Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.

The volumes are richly produced. The publishers have eschewed the matt finish of Encyclopaedia Britannica, for a modern one with glossy paper and full-colour printing.

Obviously, the publishers have pulled out all stops in printing and production, and the result is obvious for anyone who goes through the volumes.

There have been a number of encyclopaedias of Hinduism over the years, and many even have the same title. It remains to be seen exactly where this particular set finds its place and how it stands the test of time. There is, no doubt, however, that many libraries abroad and in India will be interested in the set. The publishers have been conservative in pricing the set, and thus it is easy to imagine it in many homes, as well.

This review by Roopinder Singh was published in the Spectrum section of The Tribune on February 19, 2012

Dr R K Gupta (1932-2012)

We had just enrolled as students in 1976 and he was talking about Dr Rajender Kumar Gupta (1932-2012), the then Head of the Department of Philosophy. A Kantian, he was rigorous in the application of reason in all his endeavours, and expected his students to do the same.

He brought alive the history of Western philosophy to our minds. It was like listening to a story that we wanted to know more about. He was exacting in expecting us to work on our tutorials, which we had to take very seriously, but they became the foundation of the training which enabled us to think on our own. In his endeavours, he was aided by his colleagues, Dr Ashok Vohra and Dr Vijay Tankha, who explored other aspects of the subject while Dr Harsh Kumar taught Indian philosophy.

Mrs Urmila Gupta

“What is the meaning of this?” he would ask, circling a word I had written in a tutorial I submitted to him. When I explained it, he would retort: “If you know the meaning then why use jargon? People hide behind jargon if they aren’t clear,” he would say. A degree of irreverence was encouraged in the department, and Dr Gupta would often use subtle humour to drive his point home.

From Left: Nitya, Roopinder and Dr R K Gupta

Soon the department had become the fulcrum of our life. Soon the department had become the fulcrum of our life. One day, some Ritu and Sangeeta, tired of the coffee that we would have with at the college café or the Indian Coffee House (ICH) in the university, decided that Dr Gupta must visit the Taj Mahal hotel and have coffee there. He agreed, and together with Madhu off we went. Dr Gupta, after empirical examination of Machan offering, said he still preferred the ICH coffee! He insisted in paying, and left a tip more similar to what he would have at ICH, that an inflated one expected of Machaan’s patrons. We were dumbstruck, but you should have seen the waiter’s simile after Dr Gupta thanked him warmly for taking care of us.

Every Friday we would meet at Dr Gupta’s house for Philosophy Society (Philo Soc) meetings. They dated back to his illustrious teacher Dr S K Bose, who would sometimes drop in as would Ramu Gandhi (read Remembering Ramu and Philosopher’s soul), Jeet Oberoi, Shekhar Singh, and others, teachers, former students, people interested in the subject, knowing that there would be food for thought; chai and samosas ( as well as gulab jamuns, which Madhu has reminded me) from Rohtas (read Nimbu Pani), every week, at exactly the same time. Students like Nitya, Raghu, Aditya, Radhey, Pankaj, Madhu, Thomas, Ranu, Ritu, Amitabh, Bharat… we would all be there.

Rohtas' Dhaba which provided the samosas and gulab jamuns

As Philo Soc secretary, the chai samosas were my contribution, along with an occasional paper. It was after an unusually acrimonious exchange at one of these meetings that Dr Gupta explained to me the difference between winning an argument and persuading someone to see one’s point of view.

We all knew about how Dr Gupta had spent his entire life at St Stephens because earlier, as a student, he had told Bose Sahib that he would teach at the college. He had studied in Germany and was a much-respected scholar of Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher. His stature would have opened up many avenues, which he did not explore.

Dr and Mrs Urmila Gupta were tremendous hosts. Love had brought these two rather distinctive individuals together. She taught at the nearby Miranda House, and was the host of the annual Symposium held at their house.

Now, the Symposium, in its Platonic sense, is a drinking party where wine is served and discourse follows. Delicious meals and stimulating company would make it an evening to remember.

Many minds, over many years, were shaped by Philo Soc meetings, and Dr Gupta’s influence is acknowledged by generations of Stephanians. He did not believe in religion and it was after meeting him that I realised that morality could exist without religion. Many of his students saw in him the ideal combination of rationality and humanism.

We left college. I went to New York, but still remained in touch with him. We wrote letters to each other. I wrote a middle (What about your handwriting) about his comments on my handwriting.  Later, he retired but we still remained in touch.

Once, he came to Chandigarh. He was all admiration for the genius of Nek Chand and his Rock Garden. I hosted a tea, in which Stephanians of Chandigarh came to pay their respects to him.

Rajbirinder Chahal, H Kishie Singh, Mrs Urmila Gupta and Dr R K Gupta, Roopinder Singh and Daldeep Singh at Roopinder Singh's house in Chandigarh.

I remember the time he came to the launch of my book Marshal of the Indian Air Force, Arjan Singh DFC on August 14, 2002. The launch was at the FICCI auditorium in Delhi and it was quite far from his house. George Fernandes, the then Defence Minister, was to come and Dr Gupta was quite firm that he would not attend the function if he was subjected to “all the search nonsense.”

He came, as did Dr Vijay Tanhka, Upinder and many friends. I received Dr Gupta at the gate and will never forget the proud look on his face as the book of one of his students was released. He, did, however, chide me gently for having been “over generous” in the way I acknowledged the contribution of the teachers of the Philosophy Department in shaping my mind. For once, I disagreed with him.

In Dr Gupta's Drawing Room at his residence. From Left, Kokila, Nitya, Dr R K Gupta and Mrs Urmila Gupta

A few years ago, Nitya, Kokila and I went to Dr Gupta’s residence. After meeting him and Mrs Gupta, I exclaimed: “Where are all the books?” His library had been looked at with many a covetous eye.

“Oh! I gave them all to my students and some libraries. They will be used there,” he replied. I spoke to him over the phone after that, but did not visit his house.

It was on the phone that I spoke to Mrs Gupta, after Nitya informed me that Dr Gupta had passed away at the age of 80 on February 15, 2012. As I offered my condolences to her, she replied: “We have just come back from the AIIMS, after completing the formalities. He donated his body to science.” I choked as she said it. Ever the rationalist, ever-ready to use whatever he had — his brilliant mind, and even his body — to further the cause of knowledge, I thought. He was the exemplar for many of us who were fortunate enough to have been in his orbit.

A shorter version of this article by Roopinder Singh was published as a middle in The Tribune on February 18, 2012.

Books and Beyond: Desi, with a ‘phoren’ touch

THE story of the man who contributed the most towards moving us from words printed on paper to those on electronic screens became a runaway bestseller of 2011. Steve Jobs gave us the devices that changed our reading habits, and here he was, being celebrated not only in his preferred media, but also in the conventional pulp book format. Reports of the ‘death of the book’ have been greatly exaggerated. Readership expanded, and both traditional publishers and e-book publishers gained.

Internationally, authors too gained, since they were now being courted by both kinds of publishers. Of course, those who wrote really good books, like the Delhi-born Siddhartha Mukherjee, added new feathers to their cap. This doctor-author got fresh recognition for his last year’s much-acclaimed book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. While on his side of the pond, he won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category, on the other side; he also bagged the Guardian First Book Award just before the year ended.

The writer of tomes Arun Shourie’s Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? touched the heart of everyone who read the story of his family’s battle with disabilities. We had yet another book, and another controversy, on Mahatma Gandhi, with Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India.

Arundhati Roy, the great cerebral controversy queen, published a book without writing one, and thus we had Broken Republic: Three Essays. Talking of writers who published books without writing them, the king of the bestseller charts continued his winning streak with Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust, which was compiled and edited by Ashok Chopra, as was Agnostic Khushwant: There is No God! which came out near the end of the year.

The man who has changed what the word ‘bestseller’ means for Indian publishing, Chetan Bhagat, built on his reputation by selling lakhs of books within days of releasing Revolution 2020: Love. Corruption. Ambition. Often books that critics love don’t make that much of an impact on bestseller lists. Among the top-10 list we consistently have two other Bhagat titles — 2 States: The Story of My Marriage and The Three Mistakes of My Life. Talking of numbers, we now have Nielsen BookScan which is gathering data from book stores and publishers nationwide.

We seek new understanding of the new world order and this has brought new books like Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within by Shishir Gupta and The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam.

On the fiction front, Amitav Ghosh won much acclaim with his detailed and multi-layered work River of Smoke, Aravind Adiga gave us Last Man in Tower, Aatish Taseer Noon, and Tarun J. Tejpal The Valley of Masks.

Memoirs formed a significant part of our reading appetite, be they those of the veteran journalist S. Nihal Singh who wrote Ink in my Veins, or No Higher Honour by the former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Chandigarh’s own Abhinav Bindra teamed up with sports writer Rohit Brijnath and gave an interesting account in A Shot at History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold.‘Business tycoons gave their accounts of their lives, be it Vinay Bharat Ram whose From the Brink of Bankruptcy: The DCM Story made it to the bestseller list, or real estate magnates Ansals and DLF.

Yes, while international publishers sold many books to Indian readers, including some through various kinds of electronic devices and e-book readers, it was the traditional book that ruled the roost, and largely Indian authors found resonance among avid readers.

This article by Roopinder Singh was published in a special yearend issue of The Tribune titled 2011: The Year of Uprisings