Washing the dirty linen

Aruti Nayar

If politics was the flavour of the season, writing on politics stirred the simmering cauldron. The election year saw many bureaucrats turn writers and add spice to the political ferment. The tribe of kiss-and-tell (rather backstab-and-tell) authors grew, grabbing 15 seconds of fame, dishing out sound bytes to over-eager scribes with aplomb. Media adviser Sanjay Baru’s The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh bemoaned former PM Manmohan Singh’s lack of autonomy. Sonia Gandhi confidant Natwar Singh’s One Life is Not Enough was dubbed betrayal and Comptroller and Auditor-General Vinod Rai’s Not Just an Accountant too stirred a hornet’s nest.
The General Election, too, was the hero. Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quarishi’s Undocumented Wonder captured the mammoth exercise of organising the Great Indian Election. Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai’s 2014: The Elections that Changed India tracked the polls that transformed India’s political landscape. Harish Khare’s How Modi Won It: Notes From the 2014 Election, laced with diary notes, analyses where the Congress slipped and Modi succeeded. President Pranab Mukherjee too contributed to the corpus with The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years.
The passing away of Khushwant Singh left a huge vacuum. Eminently reader-friendly, the most well-known Sardar was an entertainer par excellence. Celebrities from the world of sports and Bollywood too added to book shelves. Sachin’s Playing it My Way, jostled with Dilip Kumar’s The Substance and the Shadow: An Autobiography. The versatile Naseeruddin Shah’s And Then One Day: A Memoir was a scene stealer much like the writer. Five Indian writers found mention in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014. Of these, historian and author Ramachandra's Gandhi Before India describes how as a young lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi forged the philosophy and strategies he later put to such effect in India. Delhi-born Akhil Sharma's semi-autobiographical novel Family Life deals with a young man's struggles to grow within a family disoriented by its move from India. Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty traces connections between art and technology. Anand Gopal analyses how we got Afghanistan wrong in No Good Men Among The Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend, grabbed eyeballs as well as profits.
French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature. In a riveting speech, he hoped for literature’s survival despite fast-altering modes of communication. Paulo Coehlo’s Adultery, not quite in league of Alchemist, made waves. Hilary Clinton’s Hard Choices focused on crises and challenges she faced as Secretary of State. Sheryl Sandburg in Leaning In gave commonsense choices to career women to realise their potential and examined how progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled. Richard Flannagan, the Booker Prize winner, in The Narrow Road to The Deep North based on the Burma-Thailand Railway of World War II, describes the tenacity of human endeavour. The Booklist
Challenge by Facebook invited thousands to share a list of Top 10 books that stayed with them. Harry Potter topped the list.
Ironically, it is the freedom of the book that had to be rescued from the book-ban man Dina Nath Batra, heading the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. His irrational suggestions to Indianise textbooks made headlines. Penguin’s decision to withdraw American scholar Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History from India symbolised shrinking liberal space. In protest,  Jyotirmaya Sharma and Siddharth Vardharajan withdrew their books, requesting Penguin to pulp them. Historian Megha Kumar’s book Communalism and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 was the casualty of self-censorship after Orient Blackswan decided to halt its sale and distribution after Batra (again!) served the company legal notice for an earlier title.