Books: Eagle Eye

CONTEMPORARY INDIA
EDITED BY V.A. PAI PANANDIKER AND ASHIS NANDY
TATA McGRAW HILL
PAGES: 394

This long short story of young India's growth is actually a series of papers presented at the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli in Italy in 1997. Pran Chopra writes how the stability of the Congress in the first 15 years or so of freedom rested on a coalition it had diligently mustered between the high castes, Dalits, Muslims and a number of urban upper middle classes which saw the party as a moderniser.

Later on, the traditionalists, the feudalists and the princes fell out with the Congress because they opposed "Nehru's support for an egalitarian economy, secular polity and modernised society". Indira Gandhi led the downslide by "decimating all credible leaders of the party, whether at the state or the Union level".

V.A. Pai Panandiker paints a more worrying picture: "India is adding over 26 million children per year. At the present death rate of about 8.6 million per year, India adds over 18 million persons per year to her population." Discussing family planning, he tellingly points to one hurdle, "The backward classes ... have seen the political power of numbers and are suspicious of proposals for controlling population growth."

Air Commodore Jasjit Singh, in taking a hard look at the future perspectives of India's geostrategies and geopolitics, singles out his country as the sixth power centre of the world, alongside the US, Japan, the European Union -- with Germany as one of its cores -- China and Russia.

There is more in this book. Thinkers, theorists, political psychologists, futurists and social scientists -- Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Peter Ronald de Souza, B.G. Verghese, Ashis Nandy and Suma Chitnis, to name just a few -- have teamed together. This is the kind of book that makes even an otherwise statistic-ridden and heavy subject interesting.

AUTHORSPEAK
NIMRET HANDA

Flower Power
A fertile mind's guide to good gardening

There is this easy familiarity about Nimret Handa that extends even to her little garden. No manicured lawns or dainty flower beds. It's just a cosy, rugged garden where a pomegranate tree or a morning glory creeper happily shares space with pots of salvias, ferns, crotons placed randomly around. It's precisely this easy familiarity that makes her book, Gardening in the City: A Beginner's Guide (Penguin), highly readable. Illustrated with her own pretty watercolours, the book gives the city dweller basic information on gardening.

Having written extensively on gardening and nature-related topics in various newspapers, a book on gardening was the natural thing to do. It took Handa a couple of years to compile data but for someone born with green fingers it wasn't too difficult. Tending to her own little garden patches and experimenting with seeds and saplings were all part of a childhood spent in close proximity with nature. An army background that took her to the best hill stations -- Srinagar, Shimla, Ooty, the Kangra hills -- helped. "I didn't have to be told how a tree grows," she says, "I've always known."

Writing, however, has long been Handa's first love: "I always knew I wanted to write." Which explains that course in journalism from Panjab University. Then followed marriage, two children and hardly any time to pursue a journalistic career. But there was enough time to read books and "store ideas like an encyclopaedia in my mind". In time she began to write -- on plants, birds, butterflies, places. "I'm no activist," she insists, "it's just that I love nature, travelling and writing and they got together." Bitten by the travel bug, she's been all over the globe and has observed gardening techniques everywhere: "We're not as passionate as the Japanese are about gardening." Yet she has seen that over the past 10 years there's been much more information and raw material available to the Indian garden freak.

Handa stresses she's a learner herself: "Gardening is an experiment. Several mishaps happen. But when people go to a garden, you see their faces light up, don't you?" Hard to disagree. Meanwhile the lady has other plans budding in her mind -- a book on wild flowers is next and perhaps something on birds and butterflies later. And how does she manage not to look her 50 years? "Must be the gardens," she laughs. Naturally.

--Bindu Menon