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HARVESTING
OUR SOULS Faith Stealers Shourie's missionaries represent the spiritual regiment of the West's conquering armies. By Sultan Shahin HARVESTING OUR SOULS Christian expansionism was a two-track affair. A secular empire capturing colonies, turning humans into slaves; and missionaries harvesting them for intellectual and soul slavery. Both used deceit to achieve their objectives: denying expansionism, saying they were merely trying to help out, creating and encouraging our internal rivalries, claiming to be separate from each other while helping each other; in short both lying through their teeth. We ran a powerful independence movement trying to get rid of the former; but despite an occasional fulmination by leaders like Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi, we basically left the latter alone. Arun Shourie's Harvesting Our Souls, a sequel to his Missionaries in India, may mark the beginning of a movement for the independence of our intellect and our souls. Coming as it does after Pope John Paul II's call to Christian missionaries to intensify their mission of harvesting our souls, it has arrived just in time. It fulfils a widely felt need, particularly after Missionaries in India, which detailed how missionaries had been casting aspersions on our culture and religions through the centuries. As India came to realise what names missionaries have been calling us, how callously they have been interpreting our scriptures, one did want to seek the truth of their claims. Unfortunately, Christian missionary schools have been able to brainwash our elite so well that while our intelligentsia was already aware of what Shourie has put together in his book, it was not able to see through their claims and their design. Rising communal tension between locals and Christian missionaries has focused our mind on the threat to social harmony the activities of missionaries pose. The way Christian converts in East Timor were helped by powerful Christian governments to gain independence from Indonesia has also awakened many of us. Let's summarise Shourie's points. One, regardless of what claims missionaries may make, each of them is basically seeking to convert poor, illiterate tribals and Dalits by deceiving them in various ways. Even Graham Staines, the unfortunate victim of tribal anger at the cultural disruption caused by conversions, was engaged in conversion-related activities. Two, the law of the land does not permit deliberate conversion activities, even though it allows the religious to preach and propagate their religion. Three, if conversion activities are allowed unhampered, this will ignite a mighty reaction from Hindus. Shourie characterises this as a forecast, "not a warning, not a threat". Four, Christian scholars have concluded that the Bible could not have been authored by God, as claimed by missionaries. It had been collected through four centuries after Christ with the intention of helping conversion. The basic kernel of Jesus' teachings has so disappeared from the Bible, even the Gospels, that trying to find them is a hopeless task. But this fact is hidden from the targets of conversion. INDIAN SHORT STORIES II Carrying Local Tales A collection that features among the best Indian writers but doesn't quite satisfy. By Rajni George INDIAN SHORT STORIES II This book reinforces the conception of an India confined within a purely nativistic cultural orientation. The anthology spans works from all over the country attempting what publications like Katha and Vox have cast into fruition with much more literary sophistication. It fails to satisfy the reader's anticipation of work "culled from the rich and diverse tradition of fiction writing in India", as the editors put it. Tagore's much-anthologised Kabuliwalla and stories by renowned authors such as Saadat Hasan Manto, Premchand and Masti Venkateshwar Iyengar are relied upon heavily to cement a largely feeble volume. However, they offer little relief to a collection of staid, formulaic prose. Manik Bandopadhyay's Prehistoric is the distinctive story, offering a grim, clinical aspect of an extreme poverty that equalises humans and animals. Together with Premchand's "The Shroud" and Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's "In the Flood", this story touches upon existentialist thinking. The book is permeated with perspectives that are indisputably rural, burdened by the accented, slightly stilted cadences of writing in translation. Even so, the voices of individual characters emerge potently, especially in female protagonists such as Manikyamma, who negotiates societal propriety with her personal convictions; and the familiar figure of the ever-suffering Indian woman in Tai Esree. Female perspectives, however, are decidedly subverted, depicted most offensively in Basheer's portrayal of the cliched "taming of the shrew", Poovan Banana. The editors argue the author transforms a "potentially offensive episode into a delightful vignette", a phenomenon one fails to observe in a sado-masochistic tale of a man subjugating his wife with the even more politically incorrect symbol of a banana! POWER PLAY Tripped Policy A behind-the-scene account of controversies that dogged India's first private power project By Rohit Saran POWER PLAY It's not a book you would pick up instinctively. But once you do, you wouldn't put it down soon. For seven years now the saga surrounding Enron Development Corp's Dabhol Power Project has drawn enough media space and attention to have left any appetite for information unwhetted. Yet there hasn't been a single source of information on intricacies that the negotiation, cancellation and renegotiation of India's first foreign-funded power project went through. Abhay Mehta -- an independent energy analyst and freelance journalist -- has attempted to provide that source. The book documents in detail the sequence of events starting from October 1991 to March 1999, each backed with relevant quotes, dates and data. Mehta's painstaking research is both revealing and enlightening. Sample his discovery of a note from the government of Maharashtra that attempts to counter the World Bank's objection to the Dabhol project by stating: "The Bank does not support the project. But it points out very clearly that the project would be good if it was not coming up in India." Throughout the narration, Mehta doesn't miss opportunities to drive home points such as the fact that India has gone without a power policy all these years. He also dispels myths. For instance, till 1993 less than 1 per cent of Enron's total revenues came from power ventures. Clearly, the company was not a leading private power producer -- as many would have thought. Mehta's work would have been more credible if he hadn't dabbled with sweeping generalisations. His disdain for foreign investment makes one wonder if there is a larger agenda behind his criticism of Enron. Also, while Mehta admits that the problem is not with Enron per se but with the process and people behind policy making, he goes on to criticise the World Bank for advocating privatisation and restructuring of state electricity boards.The book could have been better edited and simplified, especially since it seeks the layman's attention. The real worth of Mehta's work , though, is in highlighting the consequences of India's ad hoc policy making. The recent pull out of Cogentrix from a proposed power project in Karnataka only underscores that lesson. |
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