IAS: God with feet of clay
Review by G.V.Gupta
Governance and the IAS— In Search of Resilience edited by R.K.Dar. McGraw-Hill, New Delhi. Pages 378. Rs 450.

Create a dream, rake in cash
Review by Chandra Mohan
Selling dreams: How to Make any Product Irresistible by Gian Luigi & Longinotti Buitoni. Simon & Schuster, New York. Pages 335. Rs 666.

Shiv Sena’s authorised biography
Review by Bhupinder Singh
The Sena Story by Vaibhav Purandare. Business Publi-cations, Mumbai.Pages 462. Rs 250.

Can Miss Spirit tame this aggressive suitor?
Review by Rajesh Kathpalia
The Marriage of Sense and Soul — Integrating Science and Religion by Ken Wilber. Broadway Books, New York. Pages 225. $11.

IAS: God with feet of clay
by G.V.Gupta

Governance and the IAS— In Search of Resilience edited by R.K.Dar. McGraw-Hill, New Delhi. Pages 378. Rs 450.

The editor claims that the purpose of comig out with the book is to give the younger civil servants a sense of the past and create an awareness of the present and also to encourage them to think that they are members of an important profession and that the professional norms and standards that they set for themselves and their peers have a social significance. With this in mind he invited his batch-mates of the IAS (1958) to pen down their experiences. These were then circulated for discussion and a workshop was held. The conclusions arrived there were again discussed in a seminar. Among those invited were Professors Andre Beteille and R.L.Kapur; R.K.Trivedi, M.B.Athreya and Sandeep Shastri also contributed papers. The editor has written the Preface and also a paper on the UP situation, apart from summarising the chapters and editing the documents.

The agreed agenda of reforms talks of the primary goal being public service and respect for the citizen’s rights and status. The irony of the services being told of this after 50 years of independence seems to have been lost on the writers. Rajeshwar Prasad talks of a lack of “human values”. Others talk of a code of ethics. It is forgotten that a voluntary code of ethics can be implemented only by a general consensus and strong peer group pressure. This is possible only in a group having a common social, economic and educational background with intra-group cohesion of a high order. This was a problem even when recruitment was at a younger age and in a narrow age group from largely the middle class.

Unable to face structural issues, the editor and his friends have taken recourse to a morality game. The fact is that the bureaucracy brought up in the colonial mode still thinks in the “mai-baap” frame and its letters even now invariably begin with “you are hereby directed to….” The bureaucracy is always deeply conscious of the relative order of status and its feudal symbols.

The agenda talks of decentralisation and liberalisation. Democracy implies power to the people at the lowest possible level. However the Nehru-Ambedkar project of social reforms through the agency of a strong central government working through the bureaucracy led to a massive expansion of the bureaucracy vested with unbridled powers and privileges. Most of the administrative ills can be attributed to this and the penchant for secrecy. This project does not even touch these points.

The problem of the bureaucracy is part of the problem of modernisation being challenged by the forces of tradition. It is also part of the assertion of the under-privileged social groups now aware of the power of the ballot. This calls for a total reorientation. The volume under review shows no analytical awareness of this and hence fails to come up with any worthwhile solution. It ignores the need for administrative leadership requirements of change to small government norms or the need to face the challenges of increasing international interference in national economic, political and social spheres. Strategies for a quick response to the fast changing environment are not debated. Obviously the talk of an effective leadership role of the IAS is a myth.

About experiences, five participants speak of senior level roles. Three of them, all well rewarded bureaucrats, say they reached their level by adhering to the virtues of honesty, hardwork and impartial observance of rules. They had faced no problems. On the other hand, one of them is very bitter about the dog-biting-the-dog attitude in the service and the unequalness of the battle between an honest officer and the corrupt system. For him an honest officer has to pay an impossible price in terms of career prospects and this forced him to leave the service. The fifth blames narrow political considerations sabotaging the evolution of good policies. The problems faced by the last two are not part of the experience of the first three. Obviously there is nothing like a system and it is all a case of individual approach. The smartest takes the best.

Right lessons are not drawn from individual experience. A former executive director of the IMF admits that the only time when interest is shown by the Indian bureaucracy in an international organisation is when a post carrying sumptuous perks falls vacant. The IAS fraternity does not seem to have any clear national interests to project through international bodies dealing with a host of policy areas ranging from agriculture to atomic energy. This should obviously mean that we require more meaningful research bodies with constant and close interaction with ministries and foreign missions. A bureaucracy attuned to economic autarky and non-interference in political sovereignty is incapable of this effort. This has to change and the leadership has to address itself to this.

Another officer talks of the successful implementation of a slum development programme only after he ensured the political cooperation of the mayor and the participation of a voluntary organisation. The lesson is that the capacity of the bureaucracy to tender policy advice is extremely limited and even procedural advice is not user-friendly, nor based on an intimate knowledge of the functioning of local institutions and their networks. It is normally devoid of any field research and based on the fleeting experience of the field conditions. The IAS should be adequately humble while talking of its right to advise.

The golden days of a commonality of western values and institutions between the bureaucrat and the politician are over. Drafting of clear instructions and rules adequately reflecting the policy and clearly defining a simple user-friendly procedure is the barest requirement of the IAS, in which it is badly failing.

This volume does not touch this problem.The IAS has forfeited the trust of specialist services. This volume does not identify it as a problem.

Another officer talks of the government bowing to the demand to take over educational institutions by teachers who also demanded time-bound promotions. But the IAS fraternity told them that there was only non-merit, seniority-based promotions. Nationalisation merely meant bureaucratisation and the pay being disproportionate to the officer’s effort, privileges without accountability and a right to take a bribe. How is the IAS preparing itself to face the challenges of denationalisation? In one state there are 40 secretary-rank officers not having even 40 minutes of work a day. How should they shrink their own cadre or make themselves useful? This volume does not help.

Prof Athreya fits the facts of experiences in the stakeholders management model of governance. To him the validity of the model is not questionable. One could leave it out as an intellectual exercise to build a halo around experience, except that he consistently treats the people as non-stakeholders. They are not just consumers of a business model, though today even consumers are treated as stakeholders. The basic issue is of making the people the dominant stakeholders. Prof Athreya could have paid more attention to that.

Prof Andre Beteille justifies the need for an elite service on the analogy of France where it played a great stabilising role during periods of rapid political changes. He identifies the major weakness of the IAS in its “patrimonialism”. This is obviously a courteous description of feudal arbitrariness. He emphasises the need for loyalty to the rule. He, however, does not look at the other side of the coin — namely, a strong tendency to bring in an arbitrary rule and the need for structural safeguards against this.

This brings us to judicial intervention. Ms Leila Seth has cited examples of judicial intervention to ensure a more independent administrative machinery. She has cited an Allahabad High Court judgement asking for a new policy to curb arbitrary transfers. This assumes that a more autonomous administration will be automatically a more people-friendly administration. One strongly doubts the validity of this assumption. But more worrying is the tendency to write laws and detailed rules while sitting alone in a chamber. The process of creation of a user-friendly rule requires a great deal of research and wide-ranging consultation. It requires a fault-free understanding of the civil society. A single person or three of them cannot fulfil this purpose.

Increasing variations in the scope of interpretation and the use of strong obiter dicta create their own problems. All this provides one more alibi to postpone a decision. In a country like India law-making should to a large extent be decentralised to strengthen people’s control. The assumption of the law-making powers by courts militates against this even if it is comforting to the non-political elite.

One searches this volume in vain to locate the relevance of the IAS, not to speak of its resilience. This volume is more an exercise in self-defence and peripheral adjustments.

Shiv Sena’s authorised biography
by Bhupinder Singh

The Sena Story by Vaibhav Purandare. Business Publi-cations, Mumbai.Pages 462. Rs 250.

THE Shiv Sena’s emergence is a specific instance of a worldwide trend— the swamping and infringing of the metropolitan core by people from outside and the organised resistance to immigrants. In the case of the Shiv Sena, especially during its formative years, its championing of the Marathi manoos was rooted in the fact that most white-collar and even blue-collar jobs were cornered by outsiders.

This is the focus of the early part of the book in which the author has relied on two rigorous academic studies done by Mary Katzenstein (1979) and Dipankar Gupta (1982). Besides there are a number of interviews with aging socialist and communist leaders who once strode the city and who provide a number of incisive and critical insights into the early years of the Shiv Sena.

The Shiv Sena filled the vacuum created by the dismantling of the liberal-oriented Samyukta Maharashtra movement after the main demands were met and a separate state of Maharashtra with Mumbai as the capital were accepted and nobody was left to speak for the Marathi manoos. Later, according to the author, the city-centric Sena struck a responsive chord in rural Maharashtra because of Sharad Pawar’s joining the Congress in 1986. Pawar’s cooption into the Congress left the traditionally anti-Congress backward castes with no choice but to support the Sena, which had been trying to make inroads under Chagan Bhujbal.

Mrinal Gore, the veteran socialist leader from Mumbai, however, contends that the Shiv Sena and Bal Thackeray have, despite their aggressive advocacy of jobs for the Maharashtrians, actually restricted their vision and have duped the Marathi working class youth.

She observes: “(Thackeray’s) appeal was to youngsters whose reasoning faculty wasn’t fully developed. He told them that outsiders were taking away their jobs and suggested a quick fix solution...another reason he caught the fancy of youngsters was that he told them not to read and increase their corpus of knowledge. He pooh-poohed all social, political and economic theories and told the youth that these were useless. Thus, he kept the vision of the youngsters confined to the Marathi issue...he stunted the intellectual and cultural growth of the Marathi youth.”

As the book progresses, the author chooses to increasingly rely on newspaper reports and journalistic flamboyance which he possesses in abundance.

The result is a book that, after the first few chapters, reads something between a racy potboiler and an American corporate success story. It could have been a good study of the Shiv Sena. That it is not is indeed regrettable since there have been few studies of the Sena in recent years unlike that of the Sangh parivar. Purandare has missed a chance to step into this void, since at a number of places he is incisive and there are flashes of serious journalism. Instead he has turned it into what is at best a narrative of the rise of the Sena (as the word “story” in the title indicates) and at worst into a hagiographic account of the Sena and its supremo Bal Thackeray.

He asserts: “The Leftwing critics of the Sena always maintained that class exploitation and not ethnic competition deprived the Maharashtrians of economic strength, but the middle class Maharashtrian found the Sena’s position more convincing.” And what was the Sena’ position? Its position was to drive out non- Maharashtrians by advocating reservation for the local Marathi-speaking populace. So far, so good.

But it went beyond that. It resorted to strongarm tactics and street justice. It resorted to intimidation, murder and terror, first against the South Indians, then the Communists, then Muslims and, by way of variety, against liberal individuals like AK Hangal and Dilip Kumar. Purandare recounts a number of such incidents, yet, all this does not diminish his enthusiasm either for the Sena or for Raman Fielding (as Rushdie characterised Bal Thackeray in “The Moor’s Last Sigh”).

The author’s celebration of what should actually have been a lament for the de-cosmopolitanisation of Mumbai is misplaced. That indeed is sad and a cause for concern.

Create a dream, rake in cash
by Chandra Mohan

Selling dreams: How to Make any Product Irresistible by Gian Luigi & Longinotti Buitoni. Simon & Schuster, New York. Pages 335. Rs 666.

TELEVISION has brought about an irreversible change in consumer behaviour across the world. Instant exposure to sensual pleasures and glamour of the best in the world evokes dreams with no barriers of age, pocket or nationality. The mind starts roaming in total freedom to raise passions.

Consumers, therefore, are no longer satisfied with products which meet the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. Products must deliver dreams, whether it is a simple ballpoint pen or a jogging T-shirt. Survival in this age of global competition closely depends on the capability to deliver dreams.

With examples of the likes of Ferrari and Levi’s jeans, this book is an interesting tale of what dreams are made of. How can they be perceived? And then, how can they be delivered to customers? Their delivery demands creativity in every action — understanding the mind of the consumers, product design with altogether a different eye, manufacturing with the same aesthetic sense, and product delivery in a style which excites sensual delight.

It is unfortunate that dreams are short-lived and fleeting. That in fact, is their very beauty. The capture and delivery of dreams, therefore, entails organisations with quick response in every respect. And there lies the catch: such responses do not come cheap. It demands spare capacity lying in wait. It calls for information systems linking the chain for instantaneous response. The dream aura of angels floating on magic carpets needs spare cash to create and sustain and it takes time to enshrine halos. Gucci for travel goods, Dom Perignon for champagne, and Cartier for fashion have taken decades to rise to those pedestals. All this not only requires pots of cash, but creavity day in and day out, creativity which begins in the seed itself.

Business risk in today’s competitive world has naturally multiplied. But then, without such risks, going down the tube is a certainty. The new world requires sensitivity, guts and financial muscle, all in equal measure.

The book holds useful lessons for sellers of products in the clan of Mercedes and Tanishq.

Why do We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill. Simon & Schuster, New York. Pages 248.

MANUFACTURING in today’s world is easy. The bazaar is chockful of competing products, each trying to edge out the other with a new Ajanta hair style, a new lipstick, a fancier mascara. With every product turning into a commodity, selling, and at profit, has become today’s toughest game. That is the power of today’s competition: discount sales for every festival and folding up of businesses. Product design which invites customers, strategies to entice customers to the shop, and then serenade them are the total focus of business today. The marketing game has now shifted to merchandising.

For merchandising, Underhill has the master’s eye. If visibility of red and blue is the highest, shouldn’t these colours find extensive use in packaging? In a calorie and cholesterol-conscious world, shouldn’t these constituents figure prominently? If people buy bedsheets for their feel, shouldn’t packaging be so designed that buyers can feel the texture of what lies inside the wrapping?

He has used video-filming as a tool for an analysis of customer patterns and behaviour in supermarkets. His insights into shopping behaviour and patterns garnered through a sensitive analysis of his video-films are fascinating and awaken the reader to differences between men and women, women when accompanied by husbands and those accompanied by friends of the same sex, single women and those accompanied by young and old couples on their own. Each of these can be tapped to advantage.

To a retailer keen to maximise his sales from a limited shop area, Underhill’s observations on aisle and shelf layouts, on shelf displays and merchandise packaging hold great meaning. He stresses on quick access and get away for routine needs, the natural tendency of using the right side and hence importance of right hand aisles and right hand placement of products. Why do products displayed on shelves involving bending and uncomfortable stretching have zero sales? Place products for children at their eye-level.

Have plenty of well-appointed try-out rooms near women’s clothes and lingerie sections and mirrors galore. They love to try fit and see how they look in their new outfits before they decide. Place impulse purchase items and gift-wrappers near cash counters where some waiting is inevitable and loose change is always available.

The book contains great tips for those in the business of retail and those who design display and show-rooms for retail.

Can Miss Spirit tame this aggressive suitor?
by Rajesh Kathpalia

The Marriage of Sense and Soul — Integrating Science and Religion by Ken Wilber. Broadway Books, New York. Pages 225. $11.

Science (alone) cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.

— Max Planck

Some prejudiced ones would read the title as marriage of sense and nonsense! Undeterred by this likely cynical reaction, the author, nay the match-maker, Ken Wilber proposes a golden rule for the marriage of science and religion. For this marriage to be genuine, it must have the free consent of both would-be spouses.

Any history of romance and intimate relationship between them? Yes, the first meeting of science and religion on a noticeable plane took place in the trial of Galileo when the scientist agreed to keep his mouth shut and the Church agreed not to burn him!

Our match-maker starts the seduction process by proxy by trying to introduce science and religion to each other afresh, by bringing their respective likes, dislikes and passions in sharp relief — for them to know each other more intimately and truthfully.

He says, probably for the ears of religion, that science with its passion for truth and human welfare is one of the noblest pursuits of man. He almost grants it to the proponents of science who argue that science has made discoveries which have relieved pain, saved lives, and advanced knowledge more than any religion and pie-in-the-sky God.

There is a strange and curious thing about science though — science (in its narrow meaning) is basically value free. An electron is not good or bad, it just is! Science might offer us truth, but how to use the truth wisely? On this science is, and has always been, eerily silent. Truth, not wisdom or value, is the province of science.

“In the midst of this silence, religion speaks.” Human beings are condemned to meaning, to values, to care and concern. If science cannot provide any of this, religion will. For millions around the world, religion has taken over the vast empty spaces left by science (itself). Religion provides basic meaning of life to these people. And, science and religion have been distrustful of each other. The trial of Galileo is repeated countless times, tearing the humanity into two halves. But is this narrow “division of labour” between science and religion justified? And how did it come about?

In pre-modern culture, art, morals and science were relatively undifferentiated. Even in the Middle Ages, Galileo could not freely look through his telescope and report the results because art, morals and science were all fused under the Church and the morals of the Church defined what science could or could not do.

Then came the dignity of modernity — what a Max Weber or a Jurgen Habermas would say “the differentiation of the cultural value spheres” — which means the differentiation of art, morals and science. Each then proceeded at its own pace, with its own dignity, using its own tools, following its own discoveries, unhindered by intrusion from other spheres.

These differentiations led to unprecedented advance of science and art because they were now free from the tyrannical yoke of the feudal religion. Rise of liberal democracy, growth of feminism and great advances in medical sciences were some of the achievements of this era.

Then it happened. Differentiation turned into dissociation. The value spheres just did not peacefully separate, they often flew apart. “Dignity of modernity became disaster of modernity.” It was an embarrassment of riches for science: it was so solidly successful that art and morals looked pale and anaemic by comparison. The powerful and aggressive science began to invade and dominate the other spheres, colonising and crowding art and morals out of any serious consideration in approaching reality.

Science became scientism — a kind of scientific imperialism which along with rampant modes of industrial production became the dominant official world view of modernity. Thus the “I” of aesthetics and the “we” of ethics were colonised by the “it” of science. The good and the beautiful were overtaken by a growth in monological truth, that otherwise was admirable was grandiose in its own conceit.

“All interiors were reduced to exteriors. All subjects were reduced to objects; all depth was reduced to surfaces; all quality was reduced to quantity.”

If science could not measure joy, it tried to measure dopamine! Joy was considered as a poorly understood dopamine. There was no “within” because “within” disturbed the truth, the reality. It polluted! A “myth of the given” was promoted by science: a myth that the sensory motor world is simply given to us in direct experience and that only science carefully and systematically reports what it finds there. And to pass muster, everything had to have that empirical passport.

Consciousness, the mind and soul of humankind could not be seen with a microscope, a telescope, and a photographic plate and so all were pronounced epiphenomenal at best, illusory at worst. God had failed to answer the call of the laboratory!

“The disenchanted world” as famously put by Weber or “the disqualified universe” as called by Mumford was born! A world with no quality or meaning at all.

Kant apart, the Romantics like Rousseau, Schiller, Keats, Words- worth and Whitman were the first to react to this state of violent fragmentation with “authentic horror” and a kind of “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Many of them faltered though. In their zeal for unity and wholeness they often ended up glorifying the prerational period of undifferentiated cultural spheres and recommending anything nonrational.

Idealists like Hegel and Schelling tried to carve out a third path which apparently looked toward the future instead of the past, but the author says the idealists lacked a genuine “yoga” in support of their arguments and were thus dismissed as “mere metaphysicists”.

Then came post-modernists. In fact a virtual post-modern pandemonium was let loose. Taking their cue from the concept of “paradigm” in Thomas Kohn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, these post-modernists attempted to undermine science in its own foundations. “Science is not a privileged conception of the world but merely one among many equivalent interpretations. Science does not offer ‘truth’ but simply its own favourite prejudice (its own paradigm...),” they said.

The concept of paradigm was a major plus point of post-modernists, and their glory lay in the argument that the world is not an innocent perception. The world is in part a construction; an interpretation more true than that of others? Either exempt yourself from your own claims, or what you say about others is true of yourself also, in which case, what you say is not true either. “So, if true, it is false; so it is false,” Gellner put it. “Paradigm of paradigm”, one can say!

In all previous attempts for a marriage between science and religion, their respective egos were the main hindrance. Science never at any time doubted its own competence to reveal all kinds of truth. Its “ego” was much bigger than itself. This was the myth of science. Spirituality, in its own place, shied away from standing up to scientific authority; and as Enlightenment pointed out, religious claims hiding from evidence are not the voice of God or goddess, but merely the voice of men or women who usually come with big guns and bigger egos....

Science takes pride in its methodology which essentially consists of injunction, then apprehension and finally confirmation. It can also be put as paradigm, data and falsifiability. There is a catch here. Science in its narrow meaning is not following this methodology in its true spirit. It is limiting itself to sensory experience as if “sensory” and the “scientific” are the same thing. Science rejects contemplation or meditation almost completely and mental experiences partially. Science in a way thus rejects man’s interior space.

For science “sensory” facts are more pure and unpolluted. They are just given. For example, a traditional empiricist attempts to ground all knowledge in these sensory “givens”.

But is this right? For understanding something per se, science approaches the empirical world with a “massive conceptual apparatus” containing everything from inter-subjective linguistic signs to imaginary numbers, from calculus to differential equations — all non-empirical structures found only in interior spaces. And not just given. Definitely not just lying out there!

Why not then science include a science of mental experience and a science of spiritual experience alongwith science of sensory experience? In fact, we implicitly use a science of mental experience, but without being recognised by science as such. When “doing mathematics” we perceive, with the mind’s eye, a whole series of symbolic and imaginative events!

Scientists definitely know it although science may not or at least it pretends not to. That is a dichotomy. Science at least should better understand its own scientists!

Coming to a possible science of spiritual experience, a valid question can be: what is there in contemplation or meditation which is not there in reason. Well, if you give an intellectual answer to it, you haven’t moved away from reason! Let us try to understand it this way: seeing what it is not. Science when it looks at the world divides the world into two — one which is seen and the one which sees; one is object and the other is subject. In this severed, mutilated condition what the world sees is partially itself, it is fragmented. It is not the truth. Contemplation or mediation gets over this by being non-dualistic; it is the process of “seeing” when no- body is seeing.

Perception or contemplation cannot be understood by the mind because it is about becoming aware of the mind itself, as they say. It is an incredibly subtle phenomenon and science would have to be very, very sensitive and free from ego to understand this.

The author says that the method of science in its broad sense can be used in the sphere of spiritual experience; only the scientists would have to apply it on themselves and check their interior proofs with others who have completed the injunctions themselves; and thus confirm or reject their results after repeating the same injunctions. A science of spirit would truly be in the spirit of science, he might have said.

Pray, a question arises here: why an event or an experience should be repeatable to pass the test of self-conceited science? If an event or experience is not repeatable, does it become unauthentic or false?

You cannot find fault with life that it is not repeatable. Probably that is why it is life; it cannot be explained away in formulae or with a set of complex equations. Is it why science is not very comfortable with (explaining) life? The author hardly addresses this question.

In any case, one can wish the author or the match-maker all success in arriving at a prenuptial agreement between science and religion. And if the marriage between them could really take place, curiosity of science and wonder of religion would fill our being and take us out of ourselves into the staggering mystery that is the existence of world, a mystery that facts alone can never begin to fill!

But as yet, on a distant, silent horizon, gentle as fog, quiet as tears, voices are calling — of two forlorn lovers!

A Veda student from the West
by Randeep Wadehra

Vision into Infinity by Barbara A Briggs. Sterling, New Delhi. Pages ix+113. Rs 150.

INDIAN philosophy and thought is difficult to recapitulate in any number of volumes. It is impossible to even enumerate the various schools of thought that, like countless streams, have merged to create an ocean so vast and deep that it at once awes and inspires the soul to go on a voyage on uncharted yet exhilarating routes. The Vedas, Brahmanas, the Upanishads, the Kapila and Patanjala Sankhya Yoga, the Nyaya-Vaiseshika, Mimamsa, the Sankara school of Vedanta, Yoga Vashishtha... one can go on and on about the different texts that form part of Indian philosophy.

Two types of traditions exist in the Hindu systems of philosophy — namely, shruti or what has been heard and smriti or what has been remembered. Shruti comprises the four vedas — the Rig Veda, the Sama Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda. Each Veda has three sections: samhitas, brahmanas and the aranyakas.

Smriti is actually the Dharma Shastra which lays down the do’s and don’ts for every individual. Though numerous in number, the most prominent are Manu Smriti, Yajnavalkya Smriti, Shankha Likhita Smriti and the Parashara Smriti.

Itihasa comprising the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Puranas consisting of allegories, historical episodes, etc too form part of Hindu thought.

One hardly expects an urbanite and that too from the materialistic West to read, much less understand, the rudiments of the various philosophic expositions. Yet Briggs has in this slim volume given a glimpse of her spiritual quest for eventual enlightenment. The short evocative texts about art, consciousness and creativity should be read again and again.

She affirms that Sankara was one of the most revered teachers in the long line of custodians of Vedic wisdom. “When the vision of the inherent wholeness of life had been lost, he inspired a spiritual awakening throughout India by propagating the great philosophical truths contained in the Upanishads,” she writes.

The volume is divided into three sections. In the first she quotes from the different texts. In the second she narrates the experiences of an artist awakening to the harmonies and symmetries of nature. In her words, “When one has lived in God-cons- ciousness for some time, the final realisation naturally occurs. The highest stage of human evolution, according to the Vedic tradition of knowledge, is unity consciousness... one appreciates every object in terms of its infinite eternal value which is the value of the self....”

In the third and last section she provides insights into the source of creativity by famous artists, poets, musicians and philosophers.

Food and Drinks in Mughal India by Satya Prakash Sangar. Reliance Publishing House, New Delhi. Pages vi +237. Rs 295.

Some people eat to live, some live to eat while others prefer to savour the various cusine to pamper their taste buds, to feel good or just be part of the charmed circle. Whatever the motive, food has always been a vital part of social activity. Thus on different occasions the house-proud wife loves to serve a varied fare. Similarly a chef’s worth rises in proportion to his culinary expertise.

Naturally, such a fine art is bound to have its exclusive history. The volume under review details the various menus in the royal dastarkhana. Most of the dishes were nonvegetarian. There is also a mention of soft drinks, intoxicants, the betel leaf, tabacco, etc. What would interest you, perhaps, is that coffee, called quahava in Arabia, reached the Indian shores from Abbysinia via Yemen and Persia. Since then it has been part of our beverage. Similarly, histories and uses of tea, sherbet, etc are given.

Pickles, sauces and sweets too find mention in this slim and interesting volume. There is a separate section on the food habits of Englishmen living in India. Well, here is some food for, not thought, but your body.

Life an Art by Gurtej. Raman Publications, Dhabwali. Pages 143. Rs 195.

This volume is an emotional out- pouring of a sensitive soul who is trying to come to terms with an avoidable accident which killed his wife and two children. I had read and reviewed the earlier edition in this column. It stirs your soul and forces you to ask certain pertinent questions about social attitudes towards the misery of fellow human beings. Readers will find it not merely thought provoking, but as having a cathartic effect on their soul.

I read the book review by Mr P.D. Shastri with the headline “In search of the cradle of civilisation” (Sept 26). If it is claimed that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of this land, we have to have answers for the following questions:Who were the people the Aryans called, and we still do, the Adivasis? Who were those Aryans called “Anarya?” Can all the tribals inhabiting India be said to be of Aryan origin? Who were the people the Aryans termed “Dasas” and “Dasyus”, whom they described as “dark, ill-favoured, bull-lipped, snub-nosed worshippers of phallus and of hostile speech”?

These people were “rich in cattle and dwelt in fortified places which the Aryan war-god had destroyed in hundreds”? The other enemies of the Aryans were “panis”, the wealthy people who refused to patronise Vedic priests and “stole the cattle of the Aryans”. We don’t find any mention of the people of Mohenjo-Daro and Harrapa, and their culture and way of life which were quite different from that of the Aryans?

Regarding “perfect” knowledge of the Vedas and these containing all the “miracles” of modern science, etc, does it behove us to make such tall claims? Did our ancestors explode an atom bomb or fly an aeroplane? If so, did they leave any formulae for doing the same? Did they know that malaria was caused by mosquito bite? We don’t find any mention. We can take legitimate pride in things past but, pray, let them be based on concrete facts and not on wild imagination.

A.S. KANDOLA
Auckland (New Zealand)