New Statesman

18 July 2011/3.
50
www.newstatesman.com
Murdochs shaken empire Dominic Ponsford Fivemediafamilies atwar

Alex Preston Echoes of Enron Alan Rusbridger How we broke the scandal
Peter Wilby Ruperts next move Alice Miles Rebekah Brooks made me cry
India
By 2030, it will
be bigger than
China. Should
we fear this new
superpower?
SPECIAL ISSUE Aravind AdigaArundhati Roy Patrick French

Sachin TendulkarSiddhartha Deb Om Puri Will Self Jon Bernstein
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9/11: TEN YEARS ON
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Gormenghast: the end of a saga 50
Up Front
5
6
Leader
Correspondence
The Intelligence
10
11
12
12
The Week So Far

Commons Confidential Kevin Maguire
The Scientist Angela Saini
The Sceptic Michael Barrett
Columns
9
14
16
17
19
21
22
23
The Diary Alan Rusbridger on the week the smouldering hacking story caught fire
First Thoughts Peter Wilby on bribery, blagging and why Rupert wont sack Rebekah
The Politics Column Rafael Behr asks why Camerons political antennae have failed him
The Perils of Power Gideon Donald hopes Dave can turn his back on his murky past
Out of London Alice Miles remembers the night Rebekah Brooks made her cry
City and Finance Alex Preston on the wider repercussions of News Corps crisis
Lines of Dissent Mehdi Hasan applauds Ed Miliband for breaking ties with the Murdochs
The Guest Column Dominic Ponsford on the five families that control the British media
Articles
24
28
34
36
40
42
Cover Story Mothers of the nation Patrick French charts the rise of Indias female politicians
Every day, one is insulted in India Sophie Elmhirst profiles the writer Arundhati Roy
People of the republic Alice Gribbin collates the facts and figures of a modern superpower
Guru in the marketplace Siddhartha Deb on the troubled religious fight against corruption
The NS Interview Samira Shackle meets Om Puri, the Bollywood actor who prefers art films
Temples to innovation Jon Bernstein reports from Indias hi-tech cities
The Critics
48
50
55
57
58
61
Toreador of the Test match Tim Adams celebrates the cricketing genius of Sachin Tendulkar
The horror in the human soul John Gray on the conclusion of Mervyn Peakes grand saga
Chewing the khat Ziauddin Sardar is not convinced by an account of Muslim extremism
Make it in Mumbai Soumya Bhattacharya enjoys two attempts to capture the new India
Shylock on the Strip Andrew Billen watches The Merchant of Venice transplanted to Vegas
Crack open the Bolly Ryan Gilbey catches up on the latest Indian blockbusters
More reviews: Aravind Adiga in the Books Interview, Kasia Boddy on Karl Miller, Nicholas
Lezard on the sirens of W1 and Antonia Quirke on radios summer lull
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The Fan Jon Bernstein

Crossword, Returning Officer, NS Puzzle, Subscriber of the Week and Competition
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Crisis manager: Rupert Murdoch 14
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Established 1913
Outrage alone cannot clean

up British public life
ne by one, the citadels of power in Britain have

been assailed. First there was the financial crisis. Giant institutions of the City of London,
previously presumed to be immovable features
of the economic landscape, teetered on the
brink of collapse. Then there came the scandal
of MPs expenses. One of the worlds venerated legislative
bodies was found to host endemic theft from the taxpayer.
Now there is phone-hacking. This time, it is giant media
companies and the police who stand accused of moral dereliction the former by tolerating widespread criminality in the
methods it used to get stories, the latter by failing to investigate those methods.
The problem, as neither side can easily admit, is that police
and tabloid journalists have been in collusion for many years.
Cosiness when it comes to sharing information is one thing,
but it now seems undeniable that money was routinely
changing hands. That is corruption, plain and simple. The
public, reasonably preferring the police to enforce the law
rather than pervert it, is appalled. At the same time, the government has been flat-footed in its response: slow to set
up an inquiry with robust powers to compel witnesses to answer questions under
oath, slow to express resistance to News
Internationals bid to take 100 per cent
ownership of BSkyB.
There is a simple explanation for that
queasiness. The same vested interest that
stopped police from investigating shabby
practices at News International prevented
David Cameron from interrogating his
own relationship with that organisation.
For as long as News International delivered political protection or a credible
threat of political annihilation it enjoyed a degree of immunity. Thankfully,
that immunity was not universally recognised. The Guardian and a pair of Labour
MPs, Tom Watson and Chris Bryant,
deserve credit for tenaciously pursuing
phone-hacking.
Ed Miliband deserves recognition for
taking a prompt and irreversible decision
to set himself against Rupert Murdochs
WorldMags
media empire. The House of Commons has generally made

some progress in restoring its authority as the seat of national
sovereignty in opposition to an unaccountable global media
giant. It asserted with near unanimity the only possible
view of News Internationals offer to buy BSkyB given recent
events: that the bid should be abandoned. No wonder Mr
Murdoch withdrew the offer.
But expressions of outrage do not themselves clean up
British public life. Phone-hacking is the third chapter in the
trilogy of scandals. The precedents of the previous two are
hardly encouraging. Bankers were bailed out and promptly
cobbled together a semblance of financial business as usual.
The regime of MPs expenses has been reformed, but parliamentary business remains as opaque and unfathomable to
ordinary voters as ever. There is little sign that the public has
more faith in its MPs now than two years ago. In both cases
the initial spasm of outrage was never effectively translated
into structural reform. With MPs expenses, there has been
meagre recompense in greater accountability and visible justice. In the case of bankers, there has been none.
David Cameron came to office vowing to disinfect public
life with a dose of bright sunlight. The
phone-hacking scandal has given the
Prime Minister the ideal opportunity to
honour that pledge. It is not encouraging
that his instinctive response was to lurk
in the shadows, waiting to see which way
the wind was blowing. l
A new superpower
ndia is a country of contradictions:

it is home to 55 billionaires, with an
economy growing at an enviable 8 per
cent a year, yet more than 800 million
of its people live on less than 30p a day.
It has a thriving hi-tech industry, yet in the
past decade 200,000 farmers have taken
their own lives as they struggled to make
a living. But its power is growing and its
population will overtake Chinas by 2030,
so this special issue of the NS asks: will we
like the worlds newest superpower? l
newstatesman.com/leader
Correspondence
newstatesman.com/letters
At Worlds end
The conduct of News
International over the phonehacking scandal has justified
endless analysis (Leader, 11 July).
However, one important
aspect seems not to have been
explored either in the press or in
parliament. The Public Interest
Disclosure Act 1998 has proved
utterly ineffective. Abuses known
to many people for several years
have led no one to blow the
whistle, because the wealthy and
powerful can defy the intentions
of the law. Government
departments are no less subject to
such behaviour. Will MPs devote
as much attention to holding the
government to account?
Howard Horsley
Much Wenlock, Shropshire
I have immense sympathy
for anyone made redundant.
However, the News of the World,
while propagating a false
perspective on the public sector,
has for many years advocated
making blameless public-sector
staff redundant. We are now
asked to sympathise with
blameless private-sector
employees, many of whom
earned, and will earn, at least
three to five times the salary
of an experienced teacher. I trust
that their situation will cause the
newly redundant journalists to
consider the realities of life in the
harsh Britain of today that they
have helped to create.
Dr Nick Winstone-Cooper
Bridgend, South Wales
Joan of art
It was refreshing to read Joan
Bakewells interview with
Mark Thompson (Media
Interview, 11 July). However, it
left me feeling depressed that her
generation is an ever-diminishing
minority of intelligent and bold
professionals, afraid of nothing
that might get in the way of truth.
It made me think how hard we, as
the next generation, must work to
swim in the sea of spin, glitz and
WorldMags
6 | NEW STATESMAN | 18 JULY 2011
LETTER OF THE WEEK
How Labour failed the elderly

You give a good summary of
the current position relating
to long-term care of the elderly
(Leader, 4 July). However, one
important omission from this
piece is any reference to the royal
commission that the Labour
government set up in 1997.
Long before that years
election, the party had trailed
how, if it won the election, it
would establish a commission.
Indeed, it was true to its word.
The only problem is that when
Lord Sutherland presented his
report some 18 months later
it was, in effect, kicked into the
long grass.
marketing that has engulfed every

aspect of our lives. Great edition.
Pete Jones
Brighton
Poetic justice
I enjoyed Jackie Kays poem for
Aung San Suu Kyi (Critics, 11 July)
but she is not the first to put such
emotions into verse. In the 17th
century, Richard Lovelace wrote
To Althea, from Prison:
Stone walls do not a
prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
At the time, Lovelace was in

Gatehouse Prison for petitioning
to have the Clergy Act 1640
annulled. Plus a change.
Kevin Ireland
Via email
Listen to me
Its not quite right that MPs have
been supine over Afghanistan
(Letters, 11 July). For more
Had the government at that

time grasped the nettle and
acted on at least some of
Sutherlands recommendations,
as was the case in Scotland, the
situation today, some 14 years
later, would not be as immensely
serious as it is.
Too difficult to deal with
is not a reason for government
inaction or fudging. It will be
interesting to see what the
coalition government does with
Andrew Dilnots important and
excellent report.
Leon Smith
Chief executive, Nightingale
London SW12
proposed changes to pensions.

Therefore, all members should
join in trying to fight for the right
to a reasonable pension.
Jeremy Latham
Via email
Sound of silence
Apart from a deepening silence,
has anything changed since the
start of Obamas presidency
(The strange silencing of liberal
America, 11 July)? Free speech
is not an absolute: as John Pilger
implies, it can be curtailed
whenever the establishment feels
threatened. Likewise, the law can
be bent to meet the demands of
the state. Democracy will remain a
myth perpetuated by ruling elites.
David Clarke
Witney, Oxfordshire
Libraries not fine
than a year, I have been making

speeches urging an end to our
soldiers being sent to serve as
target practice for the Taliban, as
have other colleagues, including
a surprising number of Tory MPs.
If MPs were listened to, there
would be no need for another
soldier to die. But David Cameron,
Liam Fox and William Hague are
deaf to parliament.
Denis MacShane MP
London SW1
Eloquence has been everywhere

(The quiet revolution, Critics,
11 July) in the fight to save libraries,
but not once have we heard of
a 21st-century Carnegie or
Warburg putting their own cash
on the table. Why are the likes of
Philip Pullman not giving their
own money to help the
institutions that they value?
William Coupar
Brighton
Class warfare
Speak, memory
Contrary to Alice Miless

assertion (Out of London, 4 July),
smaller class sizes are essential
for good teaching to be effective,
particularly in primary education.
The quality of the process can be
observed, but not measured in
the same way as rote learning and
retention of facts.
William Harris
Via email
Francis Maude (Politics Interview,

11 July) notes that the coalition
government operates seamlessly
and says of his relationship with
Danny Alexander that we
alternate and not in a particularly
planned way.
Even by the confusing standards
of management speak, this does
not seem quite right.
Keith Flett
London N17
Alice Miles does not seem to

understand the function of a trade
union. It is not to attack its own
members, but to unify all teachers
who become members to defend
their profession. All members
will be affected by the terrible
l Send letters for publication to

letters@newstatesman.co.uk,
fax to 020 7305 7304 or to the
address on page 3. We reserve the
right to edit letters and to publish
a further selection on our website.
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Alan Rusbridger | The Diary
THIBAUD HEREM
The week a quietly rumbling story

became a deafening roar
& BBC; how proud you must be of your work.
Some PR genius at Wapping evidently thought
this was not very smart, hence a rapid reverse
ferret on behalf of @sun_politics: Please ignore last tweet from this account re NotW
not authorised, and not the paper or its political
teams opinion. Has been deleted.
From trickle to torrent

The past ten days have been like moving from
a hushed and deserted street into the raucous
uproar of a nightclub in full swing. One moment, silence: the next, pandemonium. A story
that has rumbled along for two years with, lets
face it, many people only too happy to turn a
blind eye, erupted with a kind of demented
fury. For long stretches of time a small coterie of
journalists, MPs and lawyers had kept the affair
ticking over with a steady trickle of incremental
stories, statements and writs. Suddenly it was
a gushing torrent.
There was a moment on Monday evening
when I was discussing the days events with a
colleague, who had, by 6pm, already forgotten
both about the lunchtime revelations concerning the hacking of Prince Charles and the claim
that royal protection officers had been selling
information about their charges. Oh that, he
said distantly. Yeah, seems so long ago.
public. But suppressing an 800k payout over

the man who was likely, within months, to be
No 10 press secretary still seems to me a puzzling judgement for every news editor to have
made on the night.
That was the news that wasnt

But it doesnt seem so very long ago when no
one was very interested in any stories that reflected badly on Andy Coulson particularly as
he edged ever closer to the door of No 10.
I knew (if I didnt know already) we were on
our own in November 2009 when an employment tribunal awarded a former News of the
World journalist almost 800,000 in damages
you read that right: the thick end of a million
pounds after finding that he had suffered
from a culture of bullying under Coulson. Call
me old-fashioned, but that looks very much
like what we call a news story. Not that anyone agreed at the time.
Search any database in vain for a paper, other
than the Guardian, that covered it on the news
pages the following day. Full marks to the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, which did at least
mention it in a column the following week. The
Independent and the Scotsman also caught up
in features terms. But there seemed to be some
omert principle at that time which meant that
not a single other national newspaper thought
it was newsworthy.
Its been much-speculated that the reluctance of some papers to write about the dark
arts was that they might not be 100 per cent
squeaky-clean themselves. Thats sort of understandable, if not very illuminating for the
Wapping lies
The people who didnt want to know included
David Cameron, who ignored attempts (not
just ours) to warn him, and the police, including
officers at the most senior level who robustly
stuck up for the Mets behaviour at all stages and
implied we were all a bit obsessed. It applied to
Peta Buscombe, the doomed chair of the Press
Complaints Commission, who so strenuously
didnt want to believe the story that she landed
herself in deep legal trouble of her own.
One distinguished press commentator (oh,
OK, Donald Trelford) wrote in the Independent
in February that the story was obsessive, hysterical and opportunistic and a case of dog
eats dog gone barking mad.
In each instance, I suspect, people imagined
they knew the motive behind the story (lefty
paper out to get Murdoch/slam the PCC/
knock the police etc) rather than simply looking at the facts that our reporter Nick Davies
had unearthed. If the police and the PCC had
done their job properly back in July 2009 the
NoW would still be alive today.
That was evidently not the view of whoever
it was on the Suns politics team who tweeted
last Saturday night, trying to lay the blame for
killing off a newspaper on . . . well, not Rupert
Murdoch. The tweet read: NotW RIP. A loss
to 1st class journalism. Ed Miliband, Guardian
WorldMags
They can be heroes

There have been heroes, too. Nick Davies, obviously. There was David Puttnam, who years
ago saw the dangers to media plurality in this
country. Include colleagues at the New York
Times, Vanity Fair, Channel 4, Financial Times,
the Independent, the BBC and the Observer
who did keep plugging away. There was Peter
Oborne, whose columns and TV coverage were
important in convincing the open-minded that
perhaps this wasnt purely a pinko conspiracy.
Andrew Neil, back in July 2009, immediately spotted that this was one of the most significant media stories of modern times. And
there was a small clutch of lawyers mainly
from obscure little law firms rather than big
shiny ones and MPs. Tom Watson, Paul Farrelly and Chris Bryant have been rather magnificent in their tenacity. Chris Huhne was one
of the few MPs willing to dare speak out over
the story back in 2009 (much good it did him).
And all the claimant victims some of whom
were on the rough end of some bullying treatment from News International showed guts.
Ping! We have your co-ordinates
Within hours of the Milly Dowler story breaking, News International was briefing that there
might be worse to come. We all strained to
imagine what that could be but, sure enough,
we learned about the targeting of the relatives
of the victims of the London bombings and of
military families. But one of the most shocking
revelations was tucked into a New York Times
story on Tuesday. The paper established that the
NoW was tracking, as well as hacking, phones,
using specialist police technology at 300 a pop.
Think about it the paper was able to locate
any politician, footballer, celebrity or grieving
relative at any time of day or night to within
yards. Its called total surveillance. Not even the
Stasi could do that. l
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian
newstatesman.com/subjects/media
News | Views | Numbers | People
The Intelligence
THE WEEK SO FAR
1. Africa
Aid agencies began to distribute
supplies in Somalia on 12 July,
as north-eastern Africa suffers its
worst drought in 60 years. Ten
million people have been affected
by the crisis so far. An estimated
3,000 people are leaving Somalia
to seek assistance in Kenya and
Ethiopia each day.
2. Europe
More than 110 people, including
50 children, were killed after
a tourist boat sank on the River
Volga in Russia on 10 July. The boat
had a capacity of 120 passengers
but was carrying 208. The
Russian police have launched an
investigation into the tragedy.
3. Asia
The half-brother of the Afghan
president, Hamid Karzai, was
assassinated on 12 July. Ahmad
38
People killed in an alleged US drone

strike in north-western Pakistan
state, claimed that President

Bashar al-Assad had lost
legitimacy. Crowds attacked the
US embassy in Damascus, erecting
Syrian flags on the complex.
5. North America
Human Rights Watch has called
on Barack Obama to investigate
whether the former US president
George W Bush sanctioned the
use of torture. In a 107-page
report on the matter, the
campaign group claims that there
is overwhelming evidence
against the Bush administration.
Middle name of David and Victoria

Beckhams baby girl, Harper
Ahmad Wali Karzais burial, 13 July
Wali Karzai was shot dead at home

by his bodyguard. His death is
a blow to Nato, which fears that
it will create a power vacuum
in Kandahar, where he controlled
the regional council.
4. Middle East
A diplomatic spat broke out
between Syria and the US after
Hillary Clinton, US secretary of
WEBSITE OF THE WEEK
Hasjamesmurdoch
resignedyet.com
a web page with
just a single word
WorldMags
Eurozone finance ministers

acknowledged officially for the
first time on 12 July that a Greek
default may be necessary. The
Dutch finance minister, Jan Kees
de Jager, told reporters that the
option of a default was not
excluded anymore. Bond yields
for Spain and Italy increased
markedly in response due to fears
that the contagion would spread.
7. Media
The final edition of the News of
the World sold 3.8 million copies
on 10 July. News International
announced the newspapers
closure on 7 July, following further
phone-hacking revelations. News
Internationals owner, News
Corporation, also announced
that it will put its plan to take over
BSkyB before the Competition
Commission, no doubt aiming to
avoid letting the recent scandal
jeopardise the takeover bid.
8. Economy
UK inflation fell unexpectedly
during June, according to figures
released on 12 July. The Consumer
Prices Index fell from 4.5 to 4.2
per cent, providing a boon to the
Bank of England, which this
month refused to increase interest

rates to fight inflation. Analysts
said the fall was due to aggressive
discounting by retailers.
9. Technology
Apple has accused the mobilephone maker HTC of infringing
TWEET OF THE WEEK
Yesterday: last ever News of

the World. Today: UK terror
threat reduced. Coincidence?
@chibnall
(Chris Chibnall, TV writer)
REX FEATURES (KARZAI). CATHAL MCNAUGHTON/REUTERS (BALLYMENA)
6. Finance
Power is not alluring

to pure minds
Thomas Jefferson, third US president
COMMONS CONFIDENTIAL
Tommy Gun spurns the spinner

Kevin Maguire
Cheerleader for Murdoch

Labour over nearly two
decades, Alastair Campbell once
advised Ed Miliband to deal
directly with his friend Rebekah
Brooks and bypass the Fortress
Wapping underlings. It was
an understandable, if
misguided, courtesy
by Comical Ali, who
was a guest at her
wedding in 2009.
During Campbells
reign, Labour
guaranteed News
International a
platinum-story
service (the Sun was
informed of the date of the
2001 election before the Queen)
and Murdochs papers offered
seemingly unstinting support
for events such as the Iraq war.
So it may be no surprise that
parliamentary colleagues of
Brookss nemesis Tommy
Gun Watson whisper that
he rejected overtures from
Campbell to hitch the spinners
rickshaw to Watsons horse. I
wonder if the suspicious Watson
also remembers Campbell
dismissing him as a political
pygmy for joining the riot that
forced Tony Blair, leader of
Murdoch Labour, to quit as PM.
IN THE PICTURE
11 July 2011: Youths pose near a bonfire pile in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.
This years loyalist marching season resulted in severe rioting in Belfast
MONTAGE BY DAN MURRELL.
its patents. The accusation is the

latest in an increasingly bitter
battle between major phone
and tablet PC makers. Apple was
involved in a similar spat with
Samsung in June.
10. Science
Neptune celebrated its first
birthday on 12 July. The planet
was discovered one Neptunian
year (164.79 earth years) ago, on
24 September 1846. l
WorldMags
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
I am surprised we
have the monkey
at the despatch
box instead of the
organ grinder
Alan Johnson
mocks Jeremy Hunt
in the Commons
Nick Clegg was left with a bad

taste in his mouth after a trip to
Brazil. Waiting for a flight at 1am
in Rio de Janeiro, the Deputy
PM fancied a bowl of Frosties.
A hack from the Daily Telegraph
helpfully poured the milk. The
Lib Dumb took one mouthful
before spitting out the flakes.
The milk, I hear, was curdled.
Clegg likes Frosties, suggested
a snout, because Tony the Tiger
reminds him of the ginger
rodent Danny Alexander.
The things you hear muttered
in parliament . . . Could News
International really have
subsidised Andy Coulsons
wages while he worked for
David Cameron? Id dismiss it

out of hand but, then again, Id
never have believed that people
would delete Milly Dowlers
voicemail so more messages
could be eavesdropped.
I doubt the multimillionaire
Arianna Huffington
will make as much
money out of hacks
and bloggers in the
UK as she did in
the US. Her pulling
power is weaker.
The parliamentary
drinks to launch
HuffPo UK were
sparsely attended. Expensesstarved MPs preferred to pop
over the road for a sausage
at a crowded barbecue hosted
by Morrisons. The big cheese at
this party was the lump of smelly
blue in a goodie bag.
The Sunday Times could have
saved itself a lot of subterfuge in
discovering how Gordon Brown
bought his London flat. The
apartment had been advertised
in the property pages of a
national newspaper. A Sunday
paper called the Sunday Times.
This column rarely boasts, not
least because it would first need
something to boast about. But
it notes that other public prints
have finally caught up with
Brookss threats to destroy
Tommy Gun Watson. Readers
of this column may recall the
June 2010 disclosure that shed
demanded Brown sack him
as a minister.
Students of Camerons thinning
barnet observe that his barrister
brother, Alex, three years his
senior, appears to have little hair
under his QCs wig. Vain Dave
is turning into Alec DouglasHome, the last baldie and Old
Etonian in No 10. l
Kevin Maguire is associate editor
(politics) of the Daily Mirror
The Intelligence | Science

THE SCIENTIST
Tune in to the voice of India

Angela Saini
developers to set up their own

voice-enabled sites. The pair of
young computer scientists work
out of tiny offices just a couple
of small rooms above a house
yet they have attracted more
than six million users worldwide,
many of whom are in the US.
People say that Silicon Valley
is where its really happening
but Bangalore is happening, too,
Nahata says. People here have
leapfrogged over other countries
in the past ten years.
At IBM, which has had a
presence in India for almost two
decades, scientists are working
on a groundbreaking audio-based
internet project. Its like a parallel
web, says Manish Gupta, who
heads the companys research
laboratories in New Delhi.
His team has developed the
Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol
(HSTP), which links up audio
in the same way as text is linked
on web pages on the normal
internet. On this Spoken Web,
you use an ordinary phone to

navigate to addresses using
numbered options, in the same
way as you would with an
automated helpline when you call
your bank or electricity company.
With just 12 million broadband
connections against over half a
billion mobile-phone connections
in India, it makes sense for IBM to
be driving mobile-based internet
applications. After successful trials
in rural India, the Spoken Web is
one of IBMs most important new
projects; the firm has allocated
$100m to mobile communications
research over five years.
Speak easy
The idea also cashes in on how
most Indians speak languages
and dialects that arent well
represented online (English is
the main language of almost two
out of every five internet users,
followed by Chinese) or how
they may be too poorly educated
to use the text-based internet
after all, adult literacy in India

stands at only 74 per cent.
The need to develop voicebased technologies for the poor,
illiterate and blind is another
reason the Indian government
is getting in on the trend. The
Centre for Development of
Advanced Computing,
headquartered in Pune, recently
announced a project to design
an application that will allow
people to give instructions to an
internet browser in spoken
Bengali, English, Hindi or Urdu
and receive a spoken response
from the machine.
Its a huge challenge in voice
recognition but then, as Gupta
says, Our whole civilisation is
founded on this concept of the
spoken word. l
Angela Sainis Geek Nation is
out now (Hodder, 20). Michael
Brooks returns next week
Letter from Bangalore, page 42
newstatesman.com/
subjects/science
THE CHARTIST
THE SCEPTIC
A small slice of the pie
Stuck on the secrets of life
Rupert Murdochs British newspapers formed a fraction of News Corps income

last year. The News of the World has gone, but will the others survive?
WorldMags
Scientists are not what they were.

Take J B S Haldane (1892-1964).
From an ancient Scottish lineage
and educated at Eton and Oxford,
Haldane became professor of
genetics at University College
London in 1933. More recently,
Steve Jones has held that post.
Like Haldane, Jones is
brilliantly articulate, and both
have been published widely. Jones
has spent time in Spain looking
into the shell patterns of snails.
Haldane went to Spain, too.
In 1937, he raised funds for the
International Brigades and fought
in the civil war. He also fought in
the First World War, wrote books,
engaged publicly in a
Cambridge
(heterosexual)
sex scandal and
fist-fought Oswald
Mosleys thugs. He
conducted important scientific

work during the Second World
War (despite being a member of
the Communist Party).
Haldanes main contributions
to research were his mathematical
descriptions of hereditary
principles and how enzymes
work. We still use his equations
today. For 50 years, we have
been deconstructing biology to
its component parts. Unlike
Haldane, we can read gene
sequences and visualise enzyme
structures. But the strides in
science havent brought us
closer to an understanding of life.
Abstract reasoning is fashionable
again as we try to crack
the secrets that convert
chemical constituents
into living forms. JBS
would be smiling. l
Michael Barrett
GRAPHIC BY HENRY WYER
If you want to know just how

much Indians love to talk, take
a trip due south from the capital,
New Delhi, to the nations
tip, where it meets the Indian
Ocean. On the way, youll
encounter eight languages, not
including English.
A passion for speech may be
one reason why mobile phones
are so popular in India, while
broadband penetration remains
low. It may also be a clue to why
the country seems on its way to
becoming a major global player
in voice-based technologies.
Voice is a huge market and
there are lots of companies here
doing it, says Yusuf Motiwala,
who used to work for Texas
Instruments in the US before
founding TringMe in Bangalore
in 2007. He and his partner
Apul Nahata run a website that
allows people to make calls
between any telephone or
speech application; plus, theyve
created an easy platform for
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WorldMags
Peter Wilby | First Thoughts
Fleet Streets ghost barons, Teflon

Rebekah and a PCC dream team
Blabbing Brooks?
Everybody seems amazed that Murdoch refuses to sack Rebekah Brooks, chief executive
of News International and former editor of the
News of the World and the Sun during the heyday of hacking. Commentators suggest she has
somehow become a family member. I find this
unlikely: after three marriages, Ruperts family
is complicated enough without adding another
WorldMags
daughter. A more plausible explanation is that

she knows too much. Cast adrift, she could do
the Murdochs enormous damage. If properly
questioned by the police, she would sing anyway, but Murdoch prefers not to think of that.
Editor-in-thief
Look back at stories published by Murdochs
papers over the past decade or so and the evidence of hacking, blagging and bribery was
staring us in the face all along. How else did the
journalists acquire such detailed knowledge of
lovers intimate conversations or the chancellors private affairs? The truth is that journalism frequently resorts to practices that are dubious, ethically if not legally. Early in my career,
I received, and published extracts from, stolen
documents, comforting myself that I personally hadnt carried out or instigated the theft.
Two weeks ago, in a different context, I
quoted the late foreign correspondent Nicholas
Tomalin. His words bear repeating: The gathering of newspaper information almost invariably involves guile, subterfuge, humiliation,
lying, cheating and a healthy amount of
straightforward criminality. Tomalin told of
how, when a chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge was rumoured to have become engaged
to Princess Margaret, an Express reporter was
told in the middle of the night to clamber over
the college railings, remove his shoes and climb
GRIZELDA
No, Ive never worked for News International either
the stairs silently to the mans bedroom to put

the matter to him directly. What, the reporter
asked, should he say? May I be the first to congratulate you? suggested the duty editor.
I wonder what the Press Complaints Commissions code of practice would make of that.
The ex-perts
What should replace the doomed commission? The sanctions available to a regulatory
body, its status, procedures and channels of accountability are complex subjects. But I am
fairly confident about what kind of people
should be in charge, drawing up ethical codes,
determining guilt and deciding on punishments. They should have intimate knowledge
of the industry, but be sufficiently detached
from its day-to-day affairs to command public
trust. I would propose ex-editors such as Andreas Whittam Smith, Simon Jenkins, Max
Hastings, Peter Preston, Ian Hargreaves, Rosie
Boycott and Colin Myler (the now ex-editor of
the NoW), plus experienced reporters such as
the Mails Ann Leslie, the Mirrors Paul Routledge and the Independents Robert Fisk. Several already hold public or semi-public appointments; Whittam Smith is a Church
Estates commissioner, while Hargreaves
chaired a committee on intellectual property.
They can surely be persuaded to serve their
own industry in its hour of need.
Artists impression
When will it all end? Murdoch has been in
newspapers long enough to know that even the
biggest stories usually hold public attention for
about ten days at most. However, the News International story, like that on MPs expenses,
has a momentum of its own since there is no
obvious limit to the instances of wrongdoing
that can be unearthed for incredulous public
outrage. Something bigger is needed to distract
attention. Perhaps Murdoch will follow the example of the US newspaper tycoon William
Randolph Hearst who sent an artist, with a reporter, to cover atrocities in Cuba. When the
artist cabled that there were no signs of strife,
Hearst replied: Please remain. You furnish the
pictures and Ill furnish the war. l
Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman
from 1998-2005
newstatesman.com/writers/peter_wilby
WWW.GRIZELDA.NET
Nothing is for ever. When I first worked on

Fleet Street more than 40 years ago, Max
Aitken, son of the recently deceased Lord
Beaverbrook, the greatest newspaper mogul of
his day, was still in charge of the Daily and Sunday Express, which each had circulations of
several million against barely half a million today. Lord Hartwell, a son of the Berry family,
which bought the Daily Telegraph in the 1920s,
still meticulously pored over proofs every
night in his fifth-floor office, appending comments from the lord above, as he was known,
in atrocious handwriting. The Observer,
though under a trust, was in effect owned by its
editor David Astor, who inherited the paper
from his father. Lord Thomson was the coming
man. Owner of the Sunday Times since 1959, he
had recently bought the Times from another
branch of the Astor family. All are gone and
largely forgotten. Only the Rothermeres, owners of the Daily Mail, seem to go on indefinitely.
Now the Murdochs look likely to join Fleet
Streets overcrowded graveyard. Ruperts next
dramatic gesture, I predict, will be to put all his
UK papers on sale. Senior executives in News
Corporation, including his son James, regard
newspapers as an old mans sentimental indulgence: all the companys papers worldwide
contribute less in profits than the BSkyB minority stake. They depress the share price and
just cause trouble. Getting rid of them would
instantly remove the media plurality objections to Murdoch taking over all of BSkyB.
I am reminded of the late columnist Alan
Watkins. Dear boy, he would say at times like
this, editors and proprietors come and go but
they make no difference to me. I just continue
writing my column and, if the new boss doesnt like it, I take it somewhere else. So he did,
working for a variety of publications from 1959
until his death last year, and outlasting nearly
all the great newspaper barons.
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Rafael Behr | The Politics Column
Camerons Murdoch missteps expose

him as a fair-weather leader
Tory-come-lately
The riposte from Camerons aides is that

blunt moralism is a luxury enjoyed by opposition politicians, while governments must take
more nuanced positions. The Prime Ministers
friends point out that he had to be mindful of
the legal complexities surrounding the BSkyB
bid. There is this awkward thing called due process, says one loyal MP. In the eyes of the public, however, Cameron ended up in the same
place as Ed Miliband, only a week late.
WorldMags
party leaders to snatch the moral high ground.

Cameron won that race by sounding resolute at
the key moment. This time, Miliband has pulled
off a similar trick.
Public scorn
Why the delay? Sheer disbelief at the scale of

the allegations is one reason. Downing Street
was visibly shell-shocked, according to a witness inside the operation. Even George Osborne was stunned. Senior Lib Dems have been
surprised by his hesitation. Georges usual
ruthlessness hasnt been on show, one says.
Another problem was the calculated reluctance
to denounce News International prematurely,
when loyalty had proved the safest course of
action in the past. As an aide bluntly puts it,
Youre in government, youre a Conservative
and everything you know about politics is saying dont mess with the Murdoch press.
Cameron was also held back by a long-held
prejudice about how seriously phone-hacking
ought to be taken. Until the latest round of revelations, he was persuaded that the whole thing
was a tedious obsession of Labour MPs and the
Guardian newspaper. When asked about it in
private, he was dismissive. It was never the
subject of angry letters to Downing Street, he
would say. It was not an issue raised in focus
groups; therefore, it was not an issue. That was
when the alleged targets were mostly celebrities.
Once murder victims and soldiers bereaved
families were involved, Cameron recognised
the new public mood of revulsion. Yet he did
not have a ready store of pent-up anger to unleash in a way that could sound authentic.
Meanwhile, he stayed stubbornly loyal to
Coulson. On the day of his former aides arrest,
he told a press conference that cutting a trusted
ex-colleague loose would make him a pretty
unpleasant person. The Tory MPs whom I have
spoken to seem torn over the question of what
this reveals about Camerons character. They
admire it as an act of chivalry, while recognising
that, to the public, it risks coming across as the
sound of a man in a hole still digging. MPs from
all sides have been struck by the contrast with
the expenses scandal. Then, too, there was a
surge of public anger and a competition among
There is another, more instructive comparison

with Camerons and Osbornes handling of the
2008 financial crisis. When Lehman Brothers
collapsed and global finance looked precarious,
the Conservative leadership was similarly
stunned. Everything their party background
had taught them about efficient markets and
deregulated capitalism the intellectual legacy
of Thatcherism suddenly looked uncertain.
They were rattled and it showed.
Formulating a response to the expenses
scandal was easy. MPs were caught with their
fingers in the till, so slam it shut. The unravelling of Rupert Murdochs credibility and the
exposure to public scorn of his relationship
with top politicians is as conceptually challenging for Cameron and Osborne as the revelation of market failure in the banking crisis.
A senior government adviser compares it,
somewhat grandiosely, to the moment in the
Renaissance when people realised that the
earth revolved around the sun. In terms of
recent history, imagining a world without
Murdoch is the equivalent of a Copernican revolution. That casts Cameron as a bewildered
sailor, struggling for a moment to navigate the
high political seas without News International
on board.
He will recover his poise and grab back some
political initiative, just as he did after the financial crisis, but the moment of numb hesitation
was revealing. There is an intellectual rigidity
about this Prime Minister. He governs fluently
and affably when everything is proceeding
as he thinks it ought to, following the ancient
laws of establishment politics. He is quickly
disorientated when those laws are challenged.
Such brittleness will eventually be his undoing. There are only so many times a leader can
be completely wrong about the defining issues
of the times before people decide that he is not
a real leader at all. l
Read David Blanchflowers economics
column this week at: newstatesman.com/blogs/
david-blanchflower
newstatesman.com/writers/rafael_behr
DAVID SHRIGLEY
All prime ministers leave office reviled. That is

because, like inveterate gamblers, they cant step
away from the table until every last penny of
their political capital is spent. So David Cameron will eventually be so disliked as to be unelectable; the only questions for his opponents
are when and why.
The phone-hacking scandal offers some clues.
Cameron has been wounded by the affair but
not grievously. The main villains of the saga
are the journalists who violated the privacy of
traumatised families and the media bosses who
allegedly covered up systemic criminality in
their newsrooms. The Prime Minister has a tangential connection to those allegations through
Andy Coulson, his director of communications
from May 2007 to January 2011, and editor of
the News of the World when hacking was out
of control. On 8 July, Coulson was arrested on
corruption charges. That leaves a whiff of complacency and bad judgement around Cameron
but no politician ever died of a whiff.
Nonetheless, the Prime Ministers political
antennae have malfunctioned. Partly the problem was that he flew into the crisis late, arriving
from Afghanistan when the grim hacking revelations had already dominated a full 24-hour
news cycle. Cameron then seemed to suffer
from jet-lagged judgement. He failed to summon moral outrage to chime with the publics
sense of affronted decency. He meandered towards the announcement of a judge-led inquiry.
He recoiled from explicit demands that Rebekah
Brooks, News Internationals chief executive,
resign. He set the government against News
Corporations bid for 100 per cent ownership
of BSkyB only when it became clear that the Lib
Dems would support an opposition motion
in parliament against the deal. Throughout, he
seemed to be taking his cues from Labour.
DAVID SIMONDSS VIEW
THE PERILS OF POWER
Fish fingers for

Uncle Rupes
Gideon Donald
You need no qualifications to

work in PR, merely an ability to
pass the buck. It was no surprise,
therefore, that my Saturday
night chess soire with the
Lawsons was interrupted by the
PM demanding: The Doc lands
tomorrow, can you deal?
Ive holidayed with Tebbit,
speech-written for Palin, but
nothing quite matches the
strangeness of last weekend.
From the off, I sensed things
were awry when Papa Doc
repeatedly referred to me as
Dave either I have put on
a bundle of weight or his
eyesight isnt what it was.
Things deteriorated, as they
always do, when Rebekah
WorldMags
coquetted her way into the

room. To be ungallant, just for a
moment, Brooks is one of those
ambitious redheads who assumes
everyone wants to tonk her
while every man I have spoken to
would, to evade her supposed
charms, run screaming from the
room into the folded arms of Polly
Toynbee. Papa Doc, however, is
not Everyman, so he carried on
like Hugh Hefner with a preferred
Playmate. Repulsive to behold.
And yet dinner was worse.
First, Baby Doc joined us. He
has the same dead eyes as Andy
Coulson, yet even less going on
behind them. Despite his father
and boss thinking I was the Prime
Minister, James ignored me. His
call. Second, Rebekahs beau,
Charlie Brooks, came to the table
screaming, Wassup!
His wife and Baby Doc replied:
Wassup!
I learned that from Clarkson,
continued Charlie.
Way to go, said Baby Doc.

Papa Doc, like a wheelchairbound grandfather on the edge of
a playground, beamed. Rebekah
asked for a menu, flicked through
it as if it was one of her
newspapers, whistled and said,
Two dozen fish fingers, with a
couple pured for Uncle Rupes.
At which point Id had enough.
I thought: Stuff em. Truly.
And lit a cigar. While blowing
smoke in their faces, a number
of things struck me. One,
Papa Doc is not long for
this world. A year ago he
would have cut Brooks,
and his son, dead. Now
as he nears the end he hugs
them close for what else
can he do?
Two, Baby Doc and his
cronies in the media are
cheap bullies and we must
disassociate ourselves from
them, otherwise the PM will
be tarnished for ever as
a second-rate Flashman. Three,

the Mercutio and Tybalt in this
morality play are the tabloid
scourge Hugh Grant and
Matthew Freud, Ruperts sonin-law and king of celeb PR.
The genesis of the British
Watergate is not a high-level
break-in but how frightfully
English that famous chocolate
cake fight between them in
Annabels. From that point it
has been a battle between
flighty Cavaliers with
exotic lives and envyraddled Puritans who
would profit from
exposing those lives.
We must be truly
liberal and side with the
entertainers rather than the
chiders. We must banish the
PR men and the Baby Docs.
The question is: has Dave the
balls to turn his back on his
own murky past? l
twitter.com/gideondonald
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Alice Miles | Out of London
Rebekah Brooks once made me

cry, but I cant help liking her
The first time I met Rebekah Brooks, she reduced me to tears. It was after a Women in
Journalism party that had lived down to all my
worst expectations. At the centre of the drinks
reception were two men Les Hinton, in charge
of News International at the time, and Tony
Hall, then boss of BSkyB. The women circled
outwards from these two in layers, in order of
importance. Brooks was very close to Hinton.
Behind her were section editors from the national papers; beyond them, columnists; and so
on, in circles of declining power. Right at the
edge of the party, trying to get a look-in, were
freelancers hoping to make connections. It was
a miserable event.
We repaired afterwards to the Groucho Club,
where journalists rub shoulders with celebrities they later stitch up, a corrupt relationship
that somehow seems to serve both sides. I cannot remember now what Rebekah and I argued
about it was late and the wine had been flowing but I do remember that I and another guest
ended up in tears. The next day, when I arrived
at work, I had an email from Rebekah, asking
if I was OK. I realise that this is not an overwhelming weight of evidence but the wicked
witch does have a heart.
I never met Rupert Murdoch. I am probably
the only journalist ever to work for him who
has turned down an invitation to have lunch
with him. So I am not trying to curry favour
when I say that he is (or was, until recently)
a good newspaper proprietor. Not once in a
decade, including a couple of years as comment
editor, was I influenced in what I wrote for the
Times or what I commissioned. I never recognise the organisation that I worked for in the
hysterical coverage about the Murdoch press
in the left-wing media.
AP/GETTY IMAGES
Wapping mess
There wasnt a lot of crossover between Murdoch titles. Although the papers were housed
together in Wapping, we were in different
buildings and rarely saw journalists from the
other papers. Presumably, News of the World
news editors ate in the same canteen as us, but
as I didnt know them I wouldnt have recognised them. Relationships at Westminster between political editors from all the papers and
between political editors and politicians were
far closer than daily relations between Times
WorldMags
the methods used in the newsroom is questionable, as the former News of the World journalist
Paul McMullan has suggested that the features
desk used hacking methods, too.
Rough justice
Police officers outside the News International offices
journalists and staff on the Sun, News of the

World or the Sunday Times.
We were separate entities. The culture and
ethics of the papers were determined by their
editors, not by News International. Having
worked under three different Times editors,
I saw the culture change decisively with each
new arrival. It takes a while: old ways remain
embedded for a time under new editors and often they have to move the people on to change
the paper, which can be hard.
This brings me back to Brooks. I like her. I always found her perfectly straightforward and,
for somebody in her position, surprisingly
forthcoming, even a little naive. I dont find it
unthinkable that she did not know the methods that her journalists were using to get stories. Sometimes, when a culture is embedded
in an organisation, you just dont ask, perhaps
because you dont want to know. And if the
practices were already entrenched by the time
Brooks became editor, there would have been
no reason for senior staff to check them with
her. Payments are often authorised by managing editors and not by editors.
It is very hard, however, to believe that the
editor didnt know about any of it: even the defence that Brooks had come up through the features side of the paper and did not understand
The point is not asking. I have racked my

brains about whether I was aware that journalists at News International or other titles across
Fleet Street used illegal methods such as
phone-hacking or data breaches to get stories.
The answer is that I didnt know but I suspected it (though not at the Times). I think we
all suspected it but assumed that it stopped at
celebrities and politicians. That makes all of
us who worked in journalism in the past two
decades complicit, I suppose, even if it didnt
happen on our own papers.
That, of course, makes Brooks complicit even
if she didnt know exactly what was going on.
Those at the top of News International, swallowed up in this vast, swirling story, are engaged
in a confused defiance, gasping at what they
view as the inaccuracy of many of the stories in
the papers and the lynch-mob mentality focusing on Brooks. It isnt fair, they say and this is
probably true.
Yet that isnt the point. The media are not
fair, and usually newspapers defend this as a
form of rough justice. What is clear is that Brooks
cannot fight the tide of allegations while remaining in post. It is unreasonable of Murdoch
to expect her to. She should be put on gardening leave or moved elsewhere in the organisation while News International takes a cool look
at the wave of allegations and responds.
Gordon and Sarah Brown, for example, have
no evidence that their sons private medical
records were illicitly obtained by the Sun. What
they have been complaining about is press intrusion. Didnt we already know that the press
is intrusive? The public and the public inquiries will need to decide what is acceptable.
The Sunday Times appears to have blagged
information that might genuinely have been in
the public interest.
The response from News International has
been muddled and slow and has apparently
failed to recognise the seriousness of the situation. It is Brooks or his papers: Rupert Murdoch
has to choose. l
newstatesman.com/writers/alice_miles
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Alex Preston | City and Finance
News Corp could go the way of Enron

if the contagion isnt contained
News Corporations key investors are for the
moment standing behind Rupert Murdoch.
Kingdom Holding Company, the largest external shareholder, is owned by the Saudi prince
Alwaleed Bin Talal, who has come out strongly
in support of Murdoch, saying: The crisis does
not make Kingdom Holding blink at all. It makes
our partnership stronger. The investment guru
Donald Yacktman, whose company has a 3.2 per
cent stake in News Corp, also backed Murdoch.
According to one of the portfolio managers at
the Yacktman Funds, the hacking scandal will
be a short-term reputational hit.
Other investors are less sanguine. A group
of US shareholders led by Amalgamated Bank
is suing the firm for its handling of the crisis.
The complaint, filed in a Delaware court, alleges: It is inconceivable that Murdoch and
his fellow board members would not have been
aware of the illicit news-gathering practices
[at the News of the World]. The shareholders
criticise the culture of nepotism at News Corp,
saying: Murdoch has treated News Corp like
a family candy jar, which he raids whenever his
appetite strikes.
BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Domino effect
News Corps share price has consistently traded
with a so-called Murdoch discount a recognition, perhaps, that shareholders in the firm do
not have many of the powers that they would
have if they owned the stock of a rival firm.
Murdoch engineered News Corps equity to
ensure that much of the publicly traded shares
are non-voting, meaning that even if investors
disagree with his decisions, many are virtually
powerless to challenge them.
Any company formed in the image of its
CEO will suffer unless it has a very clear succession plan. James Murdochs fumbling attempts
to manage the crisis in the UK will only heighten
the markets suspicion that the heir apparent
is a lightweight. His fathers dictatorial style
has discouraged activist investors from backing
News Corp, which is one of the reasons for the
shares poor performance, compared to both
the S&P 500 and its US peers: Disney, Time
Warner and Viacom.
News Corp shares fell steeply on 11 July as
the company referred its bid to take over BSkyB
to the Competition Commission, buying time
to push through the purchase of the 61 per
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cent of BSkyB it doesnt already own. More

worrying for Murdoch was the spreading of
the privacy-violation scandal to other News
International titles. Rumours are now circulating that Murdoch is considering disposing of
the entire News International business. News
Corp shares sank by 13 per cent between 5 and
11 July, with daily trading volumes up to ten
times the historical average.
What is at stake here is the issue of corporate
governance. A comparison with Enron may
seem alarmist. Enron was cooking its books
to overstate its profitability; News Corp is
merely suffering reputational damage in one
regional outpost of its global media empire.
Given the steep decline in News Corps share
price, however, and the sense of panic coming
from analysts, investors and the wider media,
Murdoch will have to act quickly to stave off
an Enron-style crisis.
When a company suffers a sudden loss of investor confidence, all former certainties about
the firm are called into question. To cite another recent example, sub-prime exposure was
not enough to bring down Lehman Brothers;
it was what the sub-prime exposure revealed
about the firms management practices, as well
as the suggestion that there might be other
skeletons in the closet. The optimistic platitudes
Lonely at the top: Murdoch faces criticism on all sides
that continue to pour in from some US investors about the relatively minor role of newspapers in the News Corp media portfolio miss
the point entirely. The problems at News International carry a serious message about the way
Murdoch runs his business. Just as the issues at
Enron and Lehman seemed localised and containable at first but gathered momentum as investors lost faith in the management, all other
Murdoch-run organisations have been tainted
by the hacking scandal.
Corporate crisis management is like medieval
surgery: you hack off infected limbs and hope
that the damage will not be terminal. This corporate amputation is usually directed at management responsible for the crisis but it can
include whole business divisions. Shutting the
News of the World may have seemed a bold
move but this kind of decisive statement works
only if the problem is contained. If News International is next to go, and the long-time Murdoch lieutenant Les Hinton is also sacrificed, it
may be that the news cycle will move on. If not,
then companies within the News Corp stable,
from the Wall Street Journal and BSkyB to Fox
Broadcasting, will come under threat.
Family business
Murdochs other big problem is that the scandal
has highlighted previous missteps. One of the
focuses of the US investor lawsuit is Murdochs
purchase of his daughter Elisabeths Shine
Group for 415m in February, a move that the
plaintiffs claim was engineered merely to bring
his daughter back into the News Corp fold.
Meanwhile, MySpace was purchased for $580m
in 2005 and sold recently for $35m. While the
Dow Jones purchase may still bear fruit, it is certain that the $5.6bn price was far too high.
This scandal reminds us that there is something very old-fashioned about Murdoch. His
management style, his obsession with print
news in an era of digital media, the MySpace
fiasco . . . Some have suggested that Chase
Carey, the News Corp chief operating officer
who looks increasingly likely to become Murdochs successor, believes that the company
should shed its print titles. What is certain is
that the News of the World wont be the last corporate victim of a crisis that could still bring
down a media empire. l
newstatesman.com/writers/alex_preston
Mehdi Hasan | Lines of Dissent
This is the making or breaking

of Ed Milibands leadership
His critics had been demanding a Clause Four
moment a big symbolic gesture to show the
British public that the Labour Party has changed
fundamentally. They have it now. Ed Milibands decision to go into battle against Rupert
Murdoch and his minions has helped transform the political and media landscape and renewed his parliamentary colleagues flagging
faith in his ability to lead.
At a shadow cabinet meeting on 12 July,
Labour frontbenchers praised his bold interventions in the debate over phone-hacking.
Only a week earlier, some shadow ministers
had been wary that their leader was planning to
set out on such a belligerent and provocative
path. Yet ever since the parents of Milly Dowler
discovered on 4 July that the News of the World
had hacked into the voicemail of their murdered daughter, Miliband has been ahead of the
curve: demanding the resignation of the News
International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks;
calling for a judge-led inquiry into the misbehaviour of the press, police and political class;
coming out against News Corporations takeover of BSkyB.
The previous week, he was being mocked by
everyone (including me) for a robot-like television interview on the public-sector strikes, in
which he gave a series of near-identical answers
to five different questions. Harold Wilsons
well-used line has seldom been more apt: a
week is indeed a long time in politics.
As he approaches his first anniversary as Labour leader, Miliband has found his voice, adenoids and all, and is speaking for the people,
channelling their anger. In the words of the
Labour blogger Mark Ferguson, reviewing
Prime Ministers Questions on 6 July, Ed spoke
for the readers of the News of the World, David
Cameron for its owners.
Murdoch headlock
Milibands critics have gone to ground. Since
4 July, the Labour leader has got the better of
Cameron at PMQs, performed coolly and confidently in broadcast interviews and made all
the running on the appropriate political response to what is fast becoming the biggest crisis of confidence in the British establishment in
living memory.
For a Labour leader to break free from Murdochs headlock is a historic achievement. Tony
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Blair described his grudging respect and even

liking for the media mogul in his memoir, and
Gordon Brown despite winning plaudits in
recent days for his condemnation of New Internationals disgusting practices is said to
have crafted his tax policies to appeal to the
Murdoch-owned press.
This is about more than hacking. It is about
reclaiming the centre ground from the right,
around critical issues such as financial and media reform. I am absolutely a leader placing my
party firmly in the centre ground, Miliband
told the BBCs Andrew Marr on 10 July, but
theres a new centre ground in our politics.
His allies agree. The centre ground isnt what
Rupert Murdoch or David Cameron says it is,
a shadow cabinet minister tells me. Its what
Progressives should learn

from conservatives to lead
opinion, not follow it
the British public says it is. The crisis in the
Murdoch media empire has emboldened
Miliband in his mission to rewrite the political
agenda. Its what he has always been about,
says a close adviser. Its what his leadership
campaign was centred on.
A friend of Milibands from his Harvard days
in the early 2000s, the academic Archon Fung,
remembers how frustrated he was by the failure of the centre left to set the political agenda.
The phrase that resonated from Ed is that the
Republicans are preference-transforming and
the Democrats are preference-adapting,
Fung recalled when I spoke to him earlier this
year. So the Democrats are tacking to where
they think public opinion lies, while the Republicans are happy to change opinion, on
principle, as Margaret Thatcher did in the UK
and Ronald Reagan did in the US.
Miliband, Fung said, believes that progressives should learn from conservatives to lead
opinion rather than follow it. What I walked
away thinking is that Ed has a sense of leadership, of making a set of arguments and trying to
swing people over to what he views as right and
principled, even if they dont happen to feel
that way when theyre eating their breakfast
cereal at eight o clock that morning.
Milibands BBC1 interview with Marr on 10

July was the first time since becoming leader
that he had been so explicit about his refreshingly Thatcheresque ambitions. However, it
also served as a reminder courtesy of Marrs
questions of his own contentious decision to
hire an ex-News International employee, Tom
Baldwin, to oversee strategy.
Bold defence
The Tory donor Michael Ashcroft has accused
Baldwin of paying a private investigator to
blag his bank details when Baldwin was a reporter on the Times. He denies doing so, but has
Miliband taken an unnecessary risk in hiring
him? It was Alastair Campbell, Blairs former
press chief, who introduced Baldwin to
Miliband. (Baldwin, who has undoubtedly
sharpened up Milibands press operation,
seems to see himself as the new Campbell the
posture, the grimace, the potty mouth.) When
the Times journalist first went to discuss the job
with Miliband at his office in December, the
Labour leader remarked: I spent 15 years trying
to avoid having lunch with you.
Nowadays, however, Miliband is ready to
defend his director of strategy, as he showed in
the Marr interview.
Marr But [Baldwin] used somebody to go
into Michael Ashcrofts bank account.
Miliband Thats untrue, Andrew.
Marr Are you sure about that?
Miliband That is untrue. Yes, it is untrue.
Given this uncritical endorsement of Baldwin,

Miliband had better hope the claims are untrue.
He has put his own judgement and credibility
on the line. It is a real worry for us, concedes a
shadow minister. Another tells me he groaned
as he watched his leaders strident defence and
hopes it wont come back to haunt him.
Despite Camerons gibe over Baldwin at
Prime Ministers Questions on 13 July, Miliband
is still in the ascendancy. Friends say he feels
enlivened and impassioned. A few weeks ago,
James Macintyre and I published the first biography of him. The subtitle includes the phrase
the making of a Labour leader. That is what we
have been witnessing in the past few weeks. l
Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) of the NS
newstatesman.com/writers/mehdi_hasan
Dominic Ponsford | The Guest Column
At last, the five media families

set their sights on each other
National newspapers are not in the habit of
washing their dirty linen in public. You have
only to look at the scant coverage given to the
media tycoon Richard Desmonds divorce last
year to find evidence that dog does not bite dog
on Fleet Street. One of the most extraordinary
results of the News of the World hacking scandal is that the code of omert between the media families has been suspended.
On 12 July, for instance, Metro, the Associated Newspapers free daily, breathlessly announced on its front page: Browns sick babies
targeted by hackers raising the prospect that
the alleged theft of four-month-old Fraser
Browns medical records in 2006 would cause
the same reputational damage to the Sun as the
Milly Dowler phone-hacking did to the News
of the World.
In fact, as Press Gazette has reported, the
source of the story about Frasers cystic fibrosis
was more likely to have been someone close
to the Browns who tipped off the paper. What
this story showed, however, is that in less
than a fortnight newspapers that used to disdain writing about each other, even with rocksolid evidence, have taken off the gloves.
GETTY IMAGES
Butlers and bananas

The five press families have kept pretty quiet
about phone-hacking until now. Apart from
News International, they are Express Newspapers, led by Desmond; Trinity Mirror, publisher
of the Mirror and the People; Telegraph Media
Group, owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers; and Associated Newspapers, whose chairman, Jonathan Harmsworth, inherited the
Mail papers from his father along with the title
of Viscount Rothermere.
Outside this group, the London Evening Standard, Independent and Independent on Sunday
are controlled by Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, still relative newcomers. The Russians,
along with the Guardian, are excluded from
the list of families because they often show a
willingness to break the omert.
Our newspaper owners together wield enormous power, and if they ran any other type of
business or ran for office they would be the
stuff of great headlines.
Rupert Murdoch we all know. Then there are
the self-made billionaire Barclays, David and
Frederick, who own the Telegraph titles (as well
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launched a series of scathing attacks on the

Rothermere family after the Daily Mail reported
that the Labour Party had refused a 100,000
gift from Desmond.
These included recounting Harold Harmsworths support for Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,
as well as retelling stories about the marital
infidelity of the current viscounts father. A
ceasefire was soon declared, however, and
largely holds to this day.
Then, in 2005, the Barclay brothers responded
to a series of articles in the Times which cast
aspersions on the manner in which they had
made their fortune by personally suing both
the then editor, Robert Thomson, and the then
media editor, Dan Sabbagh, in the French
courts for criminal libel. They dropped the case
after the Times printed a clarification of the
original story, and peace reigned again.
Whipping boy
You say goodbye: they say hello to a fight for survival
as the Spectator magazine) and live together

on Brecqhou, their own private island in the
English Channel. Davids son Aidan is the
brothers emissary on earth, managing their
British businesses.
Desmond made his money with a stable of
magazines (including pornographic titles) before he bought the Express, and has a reputation
for being, shall we say, a colourful negotiator.
According to Fleet Street legend, a butler delivers a banana to his office twice a day on a silver
tray, and he once goose-stepped and did Basil
Fawlty-style salutes in front of Daily Telegraph
executives because a German group was bidding for the company. He was simply having a
laugh at their misfortunes, he later said.
The 43-year-old owner of the Mail, Viscount
Rothermere, made his money the old-fashioned
way he inherited it, at the age of 30 and now
controls Daily Mail and General Trust, a media
empire with a turnover of 2bn.
Only the Mirrortitles are publicly listed on the
stock market rather than being privately controlled. But the Mirror remained strangely quiet
as new allegations about phone-hacking and
corruption at News International came to light.
Its true that there have been a few brief
breaches of the uneasy peace between the families over the years. In 2003, the Daily Express
So, have the events of the past fortnight

changed this media landscape for good? The
orgy of press self-flagellation would put Max
Mosley to shame, and it does feel pretty selfdestructive. A ComRes poll carried out for ITN
between 8 and 10 July found that 80 per cent of
Britons do not trust the media.
But newspapers have had ethical crises before in the 1980s, when tabloid excesses led
to the setting up of the Press Complaints Commission, and in 1997 when newspapers vowed
not to use paparazzi pictures following the
death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The biggest casualty from all this is likely to
be the PCC, the industry regulator, which will
have to be transformed to regain public trust.
However, any changes will have to await the
conclusion of the judicial inquiry into press
standards promised by David Cameron
which is likely to be a couple of years away.
As for the omert, we can only hope that it,
too, is swept away by the new mood of
self-criticism and scrutiny but dont hold
your breath.
As we journalists are fond of saying, sunlight
is the best disinfectant. That light is being shone
into some very dark places at present, and long
may it continue. l
Dominic Ponsford is the editor of Press Gazette.
Details: pressgazette.co.uk
newstatesman.com/subjects/media
KAPOOR BALDEV/SYGMA/CORBIS
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COVER STORY
Mothers of
the nation
By Patrick French
Since the rise of the Gandhis, political

influence in India has been hereditary.
But while parliament is packed with the
children of the powerful, outsiders are
emerging. And theyre often women
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Small decisions have a habit of coming back

to bite us years later. When the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, agreed to his
daughter, Indira Gandhi, becoming president
of the ruling Congress party for a year in 1959,
there is no evidence he was seeking to found a
dynasty. He did not see that the move would
embed family politics in the countrys political system for generations.
Nehrus own father, Motilal, had been active
in nationalist politics, but his premiership was
devoted to institutionalising democracy and
undermining hereditary rule by destroying the
power of the maharajas and nawabs, Indias
princely leaders. A half-century later, the NehruGandhi family remains at the centre of the polity.
The principle of nepotism, of politics as a family business, is now more deeply entrenched
than at any point since independence. At the
same time, however, assertive new grass-roots
movements are revolutionising the way governance works at the regional level.
Indira Gandhis ascent to the premiership
was almost accidental. In the months before
Nehrus death in 1964, she had become his gatekeeper, supervising visitors and the government files that were brought to the dying leader.
When he was gone, she was left in a vulnerable
position: a widow with no security and no
home, because the house she had lived in with
her father was being turned into a museum.
When the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur
Shastri, offered her a seat in parliament to
maintain continuity and a position as minister
for information and broadcasting, she accepted,
in part because it would give her a salary and
somewhere to live. She turned out to be more
assertive as a politician than had been anticipated. During a crisis with Pakistan, she flew to
Kashmir to visit troops and was lauded by the
press as being the only man in the cabinet.
Then, in 1966, something unexpected happened: Shastri died. To the Congress party
high command, Indira Gandhi looked like a
suitable stopgap. She would be a malleable figurehead, they thought, drawing the nation together in the spirit of her late father while the
party machine made the important deci-
Setting the tone: Indira

Gandhi, pictured here in
1977 after she and the
Congress party had lost
that years election
COVER STORY
t
sions. It was a grave misjudgement: Gandhi

thrived in power, trouncing both her enemies
and her backers. Apart from a short break in the
late 1970s when she was voted out of office, she
ruled India until her assassination by her bodyguards in 1984.
During her premiership, Indira Gandhi
changed the way in which politics worked. Her
methods were more autocratic than Nehrus
had ever been and she lacked his belief in the
importance of institutions. As the idealism of
Indias freedom movement dissipated down
the years, she relied on regional leaders or contractors who could deliver results or vote
banks from their constituencies. The very
structure of the Congress Party ceased to be
democratic, and when she was replaced after
her death by her son Rajiv a socially popular
Indian Airlines pilot with no ministerial experience it did not seem altogether surprising.
Rajiv was a well-intentioned moderniser
who sought to undo some of the sclerotic apparatus of state socialism that had left India with
a stagnant economy, but he had no overarching
plan. When he, too, was murdered, by a Tamil
Tiger suicide bomber in 1991, it appeared the
days of dynasty were over. His children were
too young for a career in parliament, and several vibrant new parties were bubbling up
across the country. Rajivs shy and reticent
Italian widow, Sonia, retreated and refused absolutely to become involved in the political
squabbling. After all, it had killed her husband
and mother-in-law.
Driving seat
In 1998, with Congress in poor shape and nervous that the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) might become Indias natural party
of government, Sonia Gandhi changed her
mind. Although it was not until 2004 that a
Congress-led administration returned to
power in Delhi, she proved to be an effective
and instinctive politician. Her chosen weapon
was repudiation: she had the opportunity to
become prime minister, but stepped back, saying, Power in itself has never attracted me, nor
has position been my goal. It was a popular response in a land where rejection of material
ambition strikes a strong religious chord.
While she became the silent voice behind the
throne, the technocrat Manmohan Singh was
installed as prime minister and his government
was re-elected in 2009. The economic reforms
that Singh launched in the 1990s when he was
finance minister have transformed India, lifting
millions out of poverty and launching a new,
aspirational middle class.
As Singhs government reaches the middle
of its second term, it is losing popularity even
as the other parties fail to capitalise on its mistakes. Instead, like so many countries, India is
suffused with a populist, media-led loathing
for politicians. Given that one out of every two
people who lives in a democracy is Indian, this
is a worrying shift. A tradition of public protest
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dating back to the colonial period is spreading.

In April, an elderly Gandhian activist named
Anna Hazare led a public fast against corruption in public life (see also page 36). As a method
of exerting pressure, it was certainly effective:
the government agreed to introduce a severe law
against corruption the Jan Lokpal Bill and to
give Hazare and his nominees a hand in drafting it. Politicians who attempted to join his fast
were chased away but movie stars were welcomed. Soon, Bollywood players were joined
by business people such as the industrialist Adi
Godrej, who said: Corporate India does support his cause. We are with him.
With the Middle East convulsed by change,
it was understandable that the Indian media
should draw parallels between Hazares protest and the events in Tahrir Square, Cairo. The
spontaneous support expressed for his cause
has more in common with the Tea Party move-
Its Schrdingers country:

it exists in several forms
simultaneously
ment in the US, however, than the Arab spring:
it grew out of a sense among conservative, middle-class people that the government was
aloof, and that something indefinable but important was being taken away from them. The
protests sprang from pent-up frustration and a
sense that, even as India is growing richer, corruption is deepening and professionals are becoming isolated from the workings of government. The country might have one of the
largest middle classes in the world, but its
members are kept out of the driving seat. Even
business tycoons share the growing feeling that
Indias political leaders are part of an alien tribe,
with which they have little in common.
The structural causes of this are various:
politicians in India tend to be rich but some
also have criminal cases pending against them;
in certain states, entering into politics is the
best and occasionally the only way of securing
protection against prosecution. But the most
fundamental cause is the narrowing of access
to representation in democratic institutions.
If you do not come from an established ruling
family, you have almost no chance of progressing in national politics, unless you join an
ideological organisation such as the BJP or the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), where
lineage is not important and progress is more
often based on ability.
Last year, I made a study of how each MP in
Indias lower house, the Lok Sabha, had reached
parliament. The findings showed that the
younger you were, the more likely you were to
have inherited a place in the chamber. Nearly
half of all MPs aged 50 or under are hereditary,
selected to contest a seat primarily because
they are the children of senior politicians. No
MP over the age of 80 is hereditary; every MP
under the age of 30 is hereditary. The situation

is most serious in the Congress party, where
every MP under the age of 35 is the son or daughter of a politician.
Extending the study across the whole Lok
Sabha, I found that 33 of the youngest 38 MPs
had entered parliament on the grounds of birth.
Out of the other five, three progressed through
the ranks of the BJP, Bahujan Samaj Party
and Communist Party on merit; one was given
a break because he was an established student
leader-cum-mafioso; and the other was handpicked for a parliamentary career by Rahul
Gandhi, the son of Rajiv and Sonia. Rahul is an
MP and heir to the Congress mantle, but has so
far concentrated on structural party reorganisation and low-key, village-level campaigning
and shows no inclination to take a prime ministerial role.
What this arrangement has done is to exclude
an enormous pool of talented people from national politics. Instead of the system working as
a participatory democracy, where merit is the
main determinant of who is picked to contest a
seat, family has become the central factor.
Those on the centre left or centre right of the
political spectrum people who do not wish
to join the BJP or the Communists have little
reason to participate, because they know they
can never progress at a national level. It is a partially articulated frustration, a sense of impotence that politics is being received passively,
which lies behind the recent inchoate rage at
corruption and politicians. This has enabled
Hazare and another campaigner, the multimillionaire yoga instructor and holy man Baba
Ramdev, to achieve considerable popularity by
saying that everything must change.
Rebel alliance
As ever in India, a country with 714 million
voters, no single trend should be seen as definitive. It is Schrdingers country, in that it exists
like Schrdingers cat in several forms simultaneously. Much of the important political
decision-making now happens not in Delhi,
but in the regions. In a large state such as Uttar
Pradesh (where the population nearly equals
that of Brazil) or a prosperous state such as Gujarat (where factories can be set up so fast that
foreign business people say they feel as if they
are in China), the chief minister has the power.
Debates and alliances at state level often have
little to do with machinations in Delhi.
Since the 1980s, caste-based and regional parties have become ever more important, and no
party can hope to come to power at the centre
without a complex web of electoral alliances
spanning more than a dozen of the smaller parties. This extreme form of democracy makes
politics in India potentially highly flexible, and
allows people from less privileged backgrounds,
in some situations, to achieve a level of success
that would certainly elude them in Britain.
A trend in recent years has been the rise of
self-made female politicians with considerable
COVER STORY
clout. Travellers to India a century ago often
noted how difficult it was to meet or even see
women. They were kept in seclusion and rarely
ventured out of doors except in an encompassing veil. Beginning in the 1920s, the independence movement struck against this tradition.
Mahatma Gandhi called purdah a vicious and
brutal custom and the feminist lawmaker
Hansa Mehta said: Any evil practised in the
name of religion cannot be guaranteed by the
constitution. (Mehta also persuaded Eleanor
Roosevelt that Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should read not All
men are born free and equal but All human
beings are born free and equal disagreeing
with her assertion that the word men used in
this sense was generally accepted to include all
human beings.)
Wonder women
After independence, progress towards sexual

equality was linked to the idea of national progress, though it was not until later that upperclass leaders such as Indira Gandhi were joined
by women who had risen from nowhere. But
following recent state elections that changed
the balance of power across the regions and
hence in the ruling coalition in Delhi, this text
message was circulated:
India Now Ruled By
AMMA in the South
DIDI in the East
BEHENJI in the North
AUNTY in the Capital
MADAM at the Centre
& the WIFE at Home.
And they say its a Mans World!
It is worth decoding the message. Madam

is Sonia Gandhi. Aunty is Sheila Dikshit,
the well-heeled chief minister of Delhi. Both
of them attained influence by conventional
means, Madam through her husband's status,
and Aunty by being a long-time Gandhi family
loyalist.
In the worlds largest democracy, it is the
other three Amma, Didi and Behenji who
offer an example of transformation that deserves to be noticed beyond Indias borders.
In each case, they succeeded in building up a
mass movement, trouncing their rivals and
rewriting the script. In May this year, Mamata
Banerjee (known as Didi or elder sister) became the first female chief minister of West
Bengal, ousting the longest-serving elected
communist government in the world. Like
other regional leaders, Banerjee wields huge influence over the almost 100 million citizens of
her state, centred on the former British colonial
capital of India, Kolkata.
Unpretentious, with her hair tied back and
usually wearing flip-flops and a sari, Banerjee
has been a firebrand for most of her life. Back
in 1990 when she was a 35-year-old political
organiser, she was cracked over the head by a
Communist Party thug during a demonstra-
WorldMags
tion and spent months in hospital with a fractured skull.

Behenji, or respected sister, is Mayawati,
who has been chief minister of Uttar Pradesh on
and off since the mid-1990s. Even more than
Mamata Banerjee, she represents a grass-roots,
democratic revolution. One of nine children,
she was raised on the edge of Delhi in a poor
family of Dalits or former untouchables. As
she wrote in her autobiography: From a very
early age, I learned to hate the caste system
with all my might.
When Mayawati entered the Lok Sabha at the
age of 33, she was the first woman from such a
background to achieve this feat and her Bahujan Samaj Party has completely rewritten the
political equation in northern India.
Amma, or mother (whose name is J Jayalalithaa), has done something similar in the big
southern state of Tamil Nadu, though her background was more privileged and she was previously a successful film actor. She has been reelected as chief minister of Tamil Nadu.
In India today, much less emphasis is placed
on the physical appearance of female politicians than in most western democracies. The
obligation to look good (but not too good) and
to be assessed according to your looks and
weight is absent. The pressure goes the other
way in India: an overgroomed female politician
might be distrusted.
Success at a very high level depends on being
detached from the usual wifely duties. None of
the women mentioned here is connected to any
man, except, in several cases, to a dead one.
The nicknames they have been given Mother,
Aunty or Sister are a way of desexualising
them and incorporating them into a larger, national family. Mamata Banerjee has described
herself as a simple man, and Mayawati prac-
tises a curious, asexual public iconography.

Her stone statues and there are many in Uttar
Pradesh usually depict her in a strong, masculine stance: feet apart, hair cut short, looking
straight ahead, holding a long-handled handbag at ankle level. The message appears to be:
Dont think of me as a man or a woman, think
of me as Mayawati.
When India held its first general election in
1951, many commentators, including Winston
Churchill, thought that giving the universal
franchise to a large, uneducated populace with
diverse linguistic, religious and caste ties was a
monumental mistake. They were to be proved
wrong: for all its manifest failings, Indian
democracy has been one of the great political
success stories of the past half-century, and is
a beacon to other Asian nations where people
live under greatly more oppressive regimes.
At this years state assembly elections, voter
turnout was staggeringly high, even in constituencies in West Bengal where Maoist rebels
with their outmoded ideology had ordered a
boycott of the polls. It was not unusual to find
an 85 per cent turnout a much higher figure
than in most other democracies.
Indian electorates have been uncompromising in rejecting state governments that do not
deliver on their promises. The main problem
now is how to extend this instinct for democracy to the national political parties, and how to
make them more open and accountable. It is
not enough to have the right to vote, though
that is a precious thing in a healthy democracy, the people should also have the opportunity to be voted for, regardless of who their
parents were. l
Patrick French is the author of India: a Portrait
(Allen Lane, 25) and editor of theindiasite.com
newstatesman.com/subjects/india
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THE NS PROFILE
After winning the Booker Prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy could have
been a pretty lady who wrote a book. Instead, she took up a host of
political causes . . . and fell out with her countrys elite
Every day, one is

insulted in India
By Sophie Elmhirst
Portrait by Ellen Nolan
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Roys version of India is uncompromising.

The country, she says, is in a genocidal situation, turning upon itself, colonising the lower
sections of society who have to pay the price for
this shining India. Its leaders are such poor
men because they have no idea of history, of
culture, of anything, except growth rates. The
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is a pathetic
figure as a human being. Democracy is thriving for a few people, in the better neighbourhoods of Bombay and Delhi. The Indian elite
are like an extra state in America. The country has a defence budget of $34bn this year. For
whom? she asks. For us. In her account, there
is a war taking place, not with Pakistan or China,
but within Indias borders: the sham democracy has turned on its poorest citizens.
There is something incongruous about listening to Roy talk in her gentle voice about the
Indian states campaign of violence as we drink
tea in a five-star Westminster hotel. She sits in
an upholstered chair, legs delicately folded beneath her, a grey shawl wrapped around her
shoulders. But then incongruity seems to be
one of Roys closer companions. She prefers to
be at odds with convention, to confound expectations. There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people
with natural antagonism to power, she says. I

think its easy to guess where I am in that.
Roy has not limited her antagonism to India:
over the years, she has lambasted US foreign
policy, accused Israel of war crimes and called
for the Sri Lankan government to be investigated for genocide. But her most recent book,
Broken Republic, is a return to the heart of her
country. In the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, she says, the government is waging war
on forest-dwelling tribal people in order to gain
access to the lands mineral wealth (the mountains are full of bauxite, coal and iron ore).
Of the three essays in the book, it is the second Walking With Comrades that has
garnered the most attention. Roy describes her
secretive journey into the Chhattisgarh forests
guided by a militant resistance group of Maoist
rebels who fight the Indian army and police on
behalf of the indigenous population. The piece
opens dramatically the flourish of an accomplished storyteller with a note slipped under
Roys door, inviting her to meet the rebels in
the town of Dantewada at one of four specific
times. She is told she must carry a camera and a
coconut to identify herself.
Over three weeks, Roy follows the Maoists
through the forest, sleeping in their makeshift
Three years after Arundhati Roy published

her first book, The God of Small Things, she cut
off all her hair. The novel won the Booker Prize
in 1997 and Roy had been hailed as a voice of an
emerging nation, a literary heroine with a beautiful face, an Indian writer able to define the
post-colonial imagination. Her own country
revelled in her success here was a photogenic
ambassador for modern India, superpower of
the future.
Knowing Roy as we do now, her reaction to
the adulation seems predictable. She is a natural rebel, disdainful of mainstream popularity.
There could be no way more visible to demonstrate her contempt than shearing off her long,
dark hair. As she told the New York Times in
2001, she didnt want to be known as some
pretty lady who wrote a book.
Roy has not published any fiction since The
God of Small Things, much to the impatience of
the six million people who bought that book
(and, you imagine, her agent David Godwin).
Over the past 14 years, she has instead devoted
her energy to Indias most urgent political challenges: nuclear tests, dams, Kashmir, Hindu
nationalism, terrorism, the emergence of a super-wealthy elite and the 800 million citizens
who still live on less than Rs20 (30p) a day.
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politybooks.com
WorldMags
THE NS PROFILE
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Profits of child labour: Adivasi boys work in quarries
would buy her next work of fiction, and yet he

is committed to publishing her political writing, placing her in the same bracket as Noam
Chomsky and Naomi Klein. These, he says,
are writers who are very different in style, but
belong together in terms of their passion and
their selflessness.
Bugbear of the rich

Where does rebellion begin? Not just teenage
rebellion the casual flouting of parental authority but lifelong dedication to resistance,
to wrangling with power wherever and whenever you encounter it. Roy says she spent her
early years terrified of being stuck. She was
born in Shillong, Meghalaya, in north-eastern
India, in 1961 and grew up in Aymanam in Kerala (where The God of Small Things is partly
set), but was horrified at the thought of a future
spent in a traditional rural community. So she
escaped, moving to Delhi when she was 16 to
study architecture.
She has an unconventional family history:
her mother, Mary, who set up a school in Kerala,
was to some degree an outcast in their Christian community after marrying a Hindu (Roys
father) and then quickly divorcing him. In old
age, her mother has not lost her defiance. In
Walking With Comrades Roy describes her
mother calling her the day before she travelled
to the forest: Ive been thinking, she said, with
a mothers weird instinct, what this country
needs is a revolution.
Roys own revolutionary spirit is only fired
by the enmity she encounters at home. Every
day, she says, almost proudly, one is insulted
in India. Last October, she was charged with
sedition for a speech she made about the disputed territory of Kashmir at a seminar in New
Delhi. The complaint was lodged by an advertising executive, Sushil Pandit, an associate of
the leadership of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A month later, the womens wing of the BJP

attacked and vandalised Roys house, filmed
by a crew from the cable channel Times Now
(which Roy has described as Fox News on
acid). The crew had mysteriously arrived before the party activists. Such ties threaded
between business, politics and media are
common among the Indian elite, and Roy has
become a primary target.
The novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra
the first to champion The God of Small Things
after Roy sent him the manuscript worries for
his friend. He describes over email a culture of
intimidation in India: the open threats from
right-wing television anchors, the crazies
who launch court cases. They all seek to drive
Roy out, just as they pushed the veteran artist
M F Husain into self-imposed exile in 2006
(Husain died in a London hospital in June).
Their hostility is so feverish, he says, because
they feel betrayed. The woman the elite of India
once declared their literary icon turned rogue
and, more to the point, turned on them.
But, he insists, their opposition is not representative. Her enemies, Mishra says, are the
Facebooking and Twittering elites, who naturally dislike her and who manage to amplify
their dislike more loudly than the many more
Indians from much less visible and influential
classes who find her a valuable, even indispensable, critical voice. He believes you need to see
Roy in a village, a small town, somewhere far
from the television studios and affluent neighbourhoods of Mumbai and Delhi, in one of the
thousands of places where they have no access
to a computer, let alone the internet, to understand how beloved she is among the wider Indian population.
It would be simple to leave it at that: Roy
as a woman of the people, loathed by the rich
and powerful whose hypocrisy and cruelty she
exposes. But fellow writers and activists have
also struggled with her polemical stance, even
when they have supported her cause. In 2000,
Ramachandra Guha, a leading academic and
author, wrote an essay in the Hindu newspaper
criticising her campaign against the construction of the Narmada Dam in Gujarat (which,
Roy said, was going to displace half a million
local people). Guha suggested that Roy was
careless and lacked judgement, and that her advocacy had undermined the fight against the
dam, serving only as a distraction. She accused
him in turn of being out of touch, a creature
that didnt make it into the Ark.
When I contacted Guha, he was reluctant to
speak about Roy, saying he had nothing further
to add. But his argument has been taken up
by other Indian academics, such as Jyotirmaya
Sharma, a political scientist at the University
of Hyderabad and former senior editor of the
Times of India. Sharma agrees with Roy in principle: the issues she raises, he tells me on the
phone, are first-rate. Like Roy, he believes that
large parts of the Indian state are essentially
criminal in their behaviour. Yet he cannot
ROBERT WALLIS/PANOS PICTURES
open-air camps under the stars. The rebels

become her friends and, at times, the object of
her awe (there is a sea of people, the most wild,
beautiful people). She ends the piece with her
departure: When I looked back, they were still
there. Waving. A little knot, she writes. People who live with their dreams, while the rest
of the world lives with its nightmares. Every
night I think of this journey.
It is a typical passage in Roys non-fiction
heightened emotion, the sense of a life experienced at extremes, populated by a cast of heroes
and villains. She is beguiled by the Maoists,
whom the Indian media and politicians vilify
for their brutal resistance (the group has abducted and murdered villagers, including children, as well as frequently killing policemen
and members of the security forces). Roy acknowledges their violence in her book, saying
of the wider Maoist movement that its impossible to defend much of what theyve
done. But her sympathies rest with the individual activists she meets in Chhattisgarh and
she has no problem, in principle, with their
methods. Even though Roy identifies with Mahatma Gandhis vision of self-reliance, she sees
his advocacy of non-violent resistance as little
more than pious humbug.
The book, she says now, was accidental.
Roy does not work to commission; she has
no interest in following anyone elses agenda.
She writes according to instinct. Its not some
project-driven life, you know, where youre
like: Oh, let me go to England and promote my
new book, she tells me. All my books are accidental books they come from reacting to
things and thinking about things and engaging
in a real way. They are not about, Oh, did it get
a good review in the Guardian? I dont care.
Instead she wants her work to mean something to the disenfranchised constituency to
which she attempts to give a voice. All these
essays, theyve been translated into every Indian language and sold, made into pamphlets.
Ive had people in villages telling me that they
sleep with Walking With Comrades.
After Roy left the forest, she received a note
from one of the rebels. She has memorised it,
and recites the message in Hindi before translating it for my benefit: After you wrote [your
article], there was a wave of happiness that
went through the forest. That simple line, she
says, meant more than any book or prize or
good review anything.
The prize counts, though. Roy would not
find a publisher, let alone an audience, for her
non-fiction if she had not won a prestigious
literary award for her novel. Shes well aware
her profile comes from the Booker, Simon
Prosser, her editor at Penguin, tells me. She
often says that prizes and money dont really
matter to her, but I think what does matter to
her is using that position to get her message
across. Prosser acknowledges that there are
far fewer people who would want to read
her analysis of the state of modern India than
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THE NS PROFILE
t
abide the way she chooses to frame her argument, or the tone sanctimonious, pompous,
holier than thou in which she expresses it.
She contributes nothing, he says, to proper
public debate other than cooking up a controversy in which she is the central player, people
saying we love her, we hate her. You cannot
talk to the woman, he says, so overbearing is
her self-righteousness.
As for the substance of her recent book, he
thinks she is simply wrong in the romantic picture she paints of the Maoists, who in his view
are as criminal in their actions as the government. In conclusion, he argues that shes the
Tony Benn of India. I suggest that in Britain
this might well be taken as a compliment.
Sharma pauses amid his rising fury and mutters, Relics have their uses.
Sharmas bluster is typical of Roys intellectual critics. Some put it down to professional
jealousy she is one of the few anti-establishment figures from India heard and read intently
by a large international audience. This means,
crucially, that she is paid well for work that
would normally be found languishing in undersubscribed journals in her home country.
Sharma would dismiss the notion that he
craves her celebrity and success, but you cant
help but wonder as he scorns her choice to live
in an upmarket neighbourhood of Delhi if he
might not like to live there, too.
ROBERT WALLIS/PANOS PICTURES
Insider on the outside
Roys commitment to prolonged protest has

not made her life easy. There are the threats,
attacks and legal actions, but there is also personal sacrifice. Although she mocks Gandhi,
she seems to share elements of his self-denial.
Her first marriage, to the architect Gerard da
Cunha, broke down and her second (in 1984),
to the film-maker Pradip Krishen, is complicated: the couple live separately. She tells me
the pressure she feels, both from herself and externally, is exhausting and affects everything
in my life, everything! including her most
personal relationships.
To live her life, immersed in activism at the
most local level and in subjects that are difficult
and unpopular, is in part to cut yourself off.
It is also to renounce the comfortable lot of a
successful novelist. That is what Prosser means
when he speaks of her selflessness. She spends
her time travelling across India, talking and
meeting with activists, not frittering her evenings away at literary parties.
Yet in some ways that kind of dedication is as
selfish as it is selfless: it is pursued in a singular
way, perhaps at the expense of those close to
her. Roy is puzzled by her predicament. How
do you draw the line, she asks, between how
much you can give and be effective? Because
you dont want to become some exhausted, pathetic martyr to something and you dont want
to bore yourself, either.
For Roy, to be a writer is by definition to offer
yourself up to the cause. You are not somebody
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Polluted parallel lives: tribal people squat with their livestock in the shadow of industrial plants
on the outside, commenting, she says dismissively. She can read a piece of work and know
within three paragraphs if the writer is serious or if it is merely a project, the labour of
someone who wants to be seen to be engaged.
She knows instantly whether they are outside
or inside their subject.
Being on the inside is fundamental to Roy, but
it is not always straightforward. To what extent
can a wealthy, Delhi-living author inhabit the
condition of an indigenous rural population?
Shes the Tony Benn

of India, says a political
scientist in Hyderabad
I know that my comrades are glad that I have
some resources . . . that I can politically deploy,
she says. It doesnt help them if I stay in the
forest, you know.
In her view, writers should be part of the
struggle. Roy deplores what she describes as a
terrible shift that has occurred in the perception of both the purpose of writing and the position of a writer in society how the writer is
presumed to be a fringe player, a mere observer.
Mishra says that, in India, the line between literature and politics is anyway more blurred. In
the west, he mocks, people go silent for years
while working on a novel and then emerge to
sign a petition or two.
In India, you cannot escape politics it
shapes your daily life and intrudes into your
private world. And no one embraces that intrusion more avidly than Roy. I see Arundhati
writing on the run, Mishra says, while deeply
and consistently engaged with her world.
Roy, I think, would like that image the way

it reflects her dedication to the causes she espouses but is coloured by a flash of daring.
When she lies in a forest, gazing at the stars and
hearing the stories of her Maoist companions,
she is as enraged by their plight as she is entranced by the wonder and mystery of her adventure. It is this romanticism that so irritates
those critics who might otherwise share her
politics. Yet it also displays the gift of a storyteller. She happily sacrifices her credibility
among the intellectual elite in order to win respect among the people she wants to help.
There is no doubt about her fervour: it is not
cynical and not just for show, but that does not
mean it isnt riddled with contradictions. Roy
has one foot in a five-star London hotel and the
other in an Indian forest (where the night sky,
she says, is like a thousand-star hotel); she
lives in luxurious isolation in Delhi but comes
alive in public meetings in small Indian towns.
And she recognises, poignantly, that she is too
complicated for the Maoists to belong fully to
their cause.
The whole skill, she tells me earnestly, is
deploying your voice from the heart of the
crowd and yet insisting on independence, not
as some individualist who wants to be a star but
as an individualist who has a particular way of
living, or thinking, or loving. As a statement,
it seems to capture a conflict at her core: she is
the insider on the outside, part of a movement
and yet, as a writer, inevitably alone the individual at the heart of a crowd. l
Arundhati Roys Broken Republic is newly
published by Hamish Hamilton (17.99)
Sophie Elmhirst is an assistant editor of the
New Statesman
newstatesman.com/writers/sophie_elmhirst
FACTS AND FIGURES
Sixty years of turbulent democracy have kept India united
People of the republic

Research by Alice Gribbin
Graphics by Henrik Pettersson
Population
2011
1.2bn
66.8
7.1m
17.5%
years
life expectancy
1941
2050 estimate
319m
1.7bn
Will overtake China by 2030
of the worlds population
fewer girls than boys

under the age of six
By language
By religion
Hinduism Islam
Christianity Sikhism Buddhism Jainism
History
1947
1947-48
1951-52
1971
Independence from Britain
First Kashmir war
First general election
Indo-Pakistan war
British India is split along religious

lines, creating the short-lived
Dominion of Pakistan and
Dominion of India. More than
ten million people are uprooted
during Partition, and as many
as a million are killed during
the upheaval. India becomes a
republic in 1950.
A year-long conflict between

India and Pakistan over the
disputed Kashmir region results
in a stalemate. A UN ceasefire
grants India three-fifths of the
area but sows the seeds for further
wars in the territory, including
those of 1965 and 1999. The region
remains a source of tension.
Jawaharlal Nehru wins Indias

first general election. Nehru rules
until his death in 1964, making
him the countrys longest-serving
prime minister. Both his only
daughter, Indira Gandhi, and
his grandson Rajiv Gandhi later
serve in the same role. India is the
worlds largest democracy.
India defeats Pakistan in a 13-day

clash after widespread atrocities
and attacks on East Pakistans
Hindu minority spur India to act.
Pakistan launches an ineffective
pre-emptive attack on Indian
airbases. After the war, Pakistan
splits and East Pakistan becomes
Bangladesh.
WorldMags
The map
Big numbers
AFGHANISTAN
Jammu
and Kashmir
CHINA
55
Himachal
Pradesh
PAKISTAN
TIBET
Punjab
Haryana
NEPAL
BHUTAN
Sikkim
Lucknow
New Delhi
Assam Nagaland
l
Rajasthan
Uttar Pradesh
Kanpur
Meghalaya
Bihar
Tripura Mizoram
West
Bengal
811m
Madhya Pradesh
Kolkata
Chhattisgarh
MYANMAR
Gujarat
Number of mobile-phone subscribers

(there are 100m internet users)
Orissa
Maharashtra
Manipur
BANGLADESH
Jharkhand
Ahmedabad
Number of billionaires
(fourth-highest in the world)
Arunachal
Pradesh
Uttarakhand
Mumbai
l
Pune
Hyderabad
BAY OF BENGAL
Andhra Pradesh
Goa
3.7bn
Andaman and
Nicobar Islands
Karnataka
Chennai
l
Cinema tickets sold each year
Bangalore
ARABIAN SEA
Tamil Nadu
Kerala
INDIAN OCEAN
74%
Literacy rate
(Male: 82% Female: 65%)
1.3m
Number of active troops, the third

largest in the world
1974
1984
2004
2008
Nuclear power
Indira Gandhi murdered
Manmohan Singh elected
Mumbai terror attacks
India completes its first nuclear

explosion in an operation
code-named Smiling Buddha.
Five further tests are carried
out in May 1998, just weeks
before Pakistans successful
detonations. Estimates of the size
of Indias arsenal range between
80 and 100 warheads.
In June, Prime Minister Gandhi

orders the military to attack
Sikh separatists in an attempt to
remove them from the Golden
Temple in Amritsar. About a
thousand people die in the
operation, sparking mass civil
unrest. On 31 October, two Sikh
bodyguards assassinate Gandhi.
Singh becomes Indias first Sikh

prime minister. He accepts the
position after it has been turned
down by Sonia Gandhi, leader
of the ruling United Progressive
Alliance. Both her husband,
Rajiv, and her mother-in-law,
Indira, were murdered after
taking up the post.
Islamist terrorists launch a

series of attacks in Mumbai on
26 November, killing 164 people
and wounding 308. The killers,
many of whom are of Pakistani
origin, allegedly have links to the
Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence, which strains
relations between the countries.
WorldMags
SOURCES: CIA, CENSUS OF INDIA 2001, 2011, FORBES, UNICEF
SRI LANKA
TSERING TOPGYAL/AP
WorldMags
COVER STORY
A new religiosity has given voice to the

fight against cronyism, led by a preacher
with his own Scottish island. But dont
assume that self-interest and materialism
are limited to the political classes
Guru in the
marketplace
By Siddhartha Deb
WorldMags
1
In September 2009, an Indian guru popularly
known as Baba Ramdev acquired a small Scottish island. His followers had bought it for 2m
from the previous owner, whose investments
had reportedly suffered in the global financial
turmoil. Soon afterwards, Ramdev spoke to
the Indian press. The island base is not about
property as much as it is about spreading Indian values, he said, although it seems safe to
assume that this spread of Indian values would
not have been possible without the boom-andbust syncopation of global finance: in the west,
the credit crunch in Iceland, Greece, the United
Kingdom and the United States; in the east, the
apparently inexorable rise of China and India.
Ramdevs rise in India from everyday Hindu
preacher to celebrity took place within the past
decade, against a backdrop of expanding markets and frenzied consumerism among Indias
upper and middle classes. Id seen him often on
television in those years a lithe, bearded figure,
demonstrating yoga poses but his presence
didnt seem particularly remarkable. There was
a new religiosity in India, evident in the multiplicity of programmes offering the word of God
in accents ranging from Hindu to evangelical
Christian, as well as in the ostentatious displays
of New Age religiousness among the crowds
thronging the shopping malls. Ramdev deftly
combined spirituality with the marketplace.
His show was likely at any moment to veer

away from deep breathing to a tour of his premises at Haridwar, northern India, where herbal
medicines are produced.
Yet there was more to Ramdev than this juxtaposition of money and spirituality. This year,
he began to make ever more strident pronouncements about corruption, including the way
money was allegedly being siphoned out of the
country into Swiss bank accounts. By June, his
statements had grown into plans to hold a public gathering in New Delhi that would be part
yoga camp and part protest rally.
The Indian National Congress (INC) government made a conciliatory gesture by despatching some of its senior ministers to meet
Ramdev as he arrived in the city, but the guru
went on with his plans, beginning a hunger
strike on 4 June at the Ramlila Maidan grounds.
Tens of thousands of Ramdevs followers gathered at the venue. Shortly after midnight, the
government sent in a team of riot police. Teargas shells were fired, sticks were swung and, after a futile effort by members of the crowd to
shield Ramdev, the guru was arrested. The authorities sent him back to Haridwar, from where
he threatened to continue his campaign even as
the government began an investigation into his
business affairs, including his acquisition of the
island of Little Cumbrae.
The colour of truth:

devotees of Baba
Ramdev gather to
support him during
his hunger strike last
month in New Delhi
COVER STORY
WorldMags
Big-stick politics: activists march through Banda, Uttar Pradesh, protesting against discrimination by men
All of this has been going on at the same time

as the close nexus between corporate interests
and a heavily militarised state with an arms
imports budget of $30bn has led to conditions
of virtual civil war in the mineral-rich area of
Chhattisgarh, central India. Here, the army,
paramilitary forces and vigilante squads are engaged in an operation referred to by the Indian
media as Green Hunt and whose target is an
alliance of ultra-left guerrillas and indigenous
people resisting displacement. Further north,
After over a decade

of growth there seems
little to show for it
in the disputed region of Kashmir, a brutal military occupation continues even as local resistance turns away from violence towards largescale civil disobedience. In the north-eastern
state of Manipur, which a US diplomat described
as less a state and more a colony of India in
one of the WikiLeaks cables, the poverty of the
local population combines with an overwhelming military presence the consequence of a
martial law called the Armed Forces (Special
Powers) Act, which has been in effect in the
state for over half a century.
In all these cases, great sections of the upper
and middle classes have positioned themselves
against the marginalised majorities, using a
finely calibrated sense of aggrieved virtue to
justify the presence of vast inequalities in the
new India. The recent turn in elite sentiments,
with the sense of unease and anger that fuelled
support for the Jan Lokpal movement as well
as for Ramdev, followed a series of public scandals. First, there was the controversy around
the Commonwealth Games in Delhi last September. The event was meant to be Indias answer to Chinas 2008 Olympics but, just as the
Games opened, it became clear that the buildings and venues had been shoddily constructed.
Police have since arrested officials who were allegedly involved in large-scale fraud and raided
the offices of contractors.
This was followed by allegations that the
public might have lost as much as $40bn when
2G bandwidth licences were allocated to companies in 2008. Prosecutors claimed that the
auction of the licences had been manipulated to
ensure winning bids for a number of companies close to the telecommunications minister,
with prices set far lower than the market rate.
Then, at the end of last year, a series of leaked
conversations originating from wire taps carried
out by the Indian income tax department on a
British corporate lobbyist, Niira Radia, raised
serious questions about how commonplace
back-room deals between corporations, politicians and journalists had become.
Such scandals would not, by themselves, have
led to widespread discontent among the upper
and middle classes. But they appeared within the
context of doubts about the Indian economy
and the suspicion that it might not be insulated,
after all, from the crisis of global capitalism.
There has been a tapering-off of Indias vaunted
8 per cent growth rate, with a slowdown in real
estate and car sales, as well as high inflation and
rising food prices.
Most of all, after longer than a decade of
growth, there seems little to show at the
public level except for more shopping malls,
SANJIT DAS/PANOS PICTURES
2
Ramdevs failed agitation was only one feature
in a larger landscape of social unrest in India. In
April this year, he supported efforts to introduce a parliamentary bill that would allow the
creation of a body called the Jan Lokpal. Led by
a social activist called Anna Hazare, whose
white-clad figure projected a Gandhi-like image just as self-consciously as Ramdevs saffron
signalled the guru, the movement called for the
Jan Lokpal to be granted powers to investigate
corruption charges against the highest officials
in the country, including any member of the
judiciary, executive or legislature.
Although it isnt clear who would be called
on to serve in the Jan Lokpal, drafts of the bill
suggest that at least four members would have
a legal background. Other members might
include those who have received international
honours such as the Ramon Magsaysay Award
or the Nobel Prize. While it is worth noting
that some of those supporting the bill are former Magsaysay winners, what is most obvious
is the bills rather bourgeois understanding of
public integrity (Nobel laureates and former
judges) and of public malaise, evident in its insistence on excluding politicians from membership of the Jan Lokpal.
There are reasons for this discontentment.
India has suffered much heartbreak in recent
times as it has embraced a particularly crude
form of crony capitalism. In the past five years,
while travelling across the country to gather
material for a book, I have frequently seen the
vulgar exuberance of the upper classes give way
to destitution and despair among the majority.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, I
spent some time in a little agricultural town
called Armoor. It had been torn apart by rioting
farmers, who had set fire to government jeeps
and the imposing mansions of the two wealthiest businessmen in the area. The businessmen
were seed dealers who purchased produce from
the farmers, and when I met the main dealer
whose ambitions had sparked off some of the
events leading to the riots, he turned out to be
caught up in a speculative frenzy that had become characteristic of the marketplace.
Yet it was the farmers in the area who were
most deeply in trouble, caught between market
forces and environmental limits as the level
of groundwater in their fields sank ever lower.
They were a fairly accurate reflection of the
larger picture. About 450 million people in
India earn a livelihood from farming, a profession of such diminishing returns that nearly
200,000 farmers have killed themselves in just
over a decade.
Rural and urban poor join hands when it
comes to other figures, such as the astonishing
statistic that 43 per cent of children under the
age of five are malnourished, or that, while the
rhetoric in India and the west has largely been
about 8 per cent growth and the nations 50plus billionaires, more than 800 million of its
citizens live on 30 pence a day.
COVER STORY
business parks and condos, with no solutions
in terms of what might be done with the majority, who can be found everywhere outside the
spheres of affluence built by the corporatestate alliance. For Indian elites, this uncertainty
about the present state of affairs manifests itself
most easily in complaints about corruption and
in a deep yearning for authoritarianism, both of
which find form in grievances about the power
of elected politicians.
This turn towards authoritarianism by the
middle and upper classes is not new in postindependence India. It was manifest when the
INC prime minister Indira Gandhi declared a
nationwide state of emergency between 1975
and 1977. There were protests against Gandhis
display of unilateral power but, among the
elite, memories of the emergency tend to be
less about its suspension of civil liberties than
that it made the trains run on time.
Another phase of discontent was inaugurated
in the late 1980s, when unhappiness with an
INC government plagued with accusations of
corruption some of it centred around an arms
deal with the Swedish company Bofors led to
populist posturing from a man called T N Seshan. Seshan was made chief election commissioner in 1990; although he became something
of a national hero among the elite, his suggestions for getting rid of corruption involved little
more than threats to arrest politicians committing electoral fraud and demands for a national
identity card.
For all of Seshans pronouncements, made
while surrounded by Black Cat security
guards (whose presence was the surest indicator of high status in India), the main beneficiaries of elite resentment turned out to be the
right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which
went from holding two seats in parliament in
1984 to 119 seats in 1991. In an alliance with several other parties, the BJP was in power from
1998 to 2004, energetically overseeing the new
capitalism that enriched the upper classes
while eviscerating the rest. Along with its stirring rhetoric about the marketplace and capitalism what it termed India Shining the BJP
offered more nationalistic forms of selfhood to
the Hindu elite, such as the nuclear tests that it
carried out in 1998.
demands naturally have little to say about corporations or big business.

Ramdev, too, represents a middle class but
his followers tend to come from the lower
reaches of the middle stratum. They are more
provincial, less polished, perhaps less economically secure, and yet also somewhat socially
privileged in being middle- and upper-caste
Hindus. They are people whose desire for authority finds a more natural channel in the figure of a religious guru than in the quasi-secular
image of Hazare.
What Hazare, Ramdev and their constituencies have in common, however, is the idea that
the main problem facing India is corruption.
The opposite of that corruption is purity,
Its easy to side with those

who hope that things might
be set right by a tribune
typically the kind of purity that can only be
delivered by authoritarianism which explains
the seeming obsession of both Hazare and
Ramdev for capital punishment and the way
the draft bill insists that the Jan Lokpal should
have policing powers, as if neither capital punishment nor policing had been much in evidence in India over the past few decades.
Voices in the INC have suggested that Ramdevs saffron robes are on loan from the BJP.
Hazare, too, for all his pretensions to being a
Gandhi-like leader, has expressed admiration
for Narendra Modi, a future prime ministerial
candidate and BJP chief minister of Gujarat
whom many have criticised for his failure to stop
the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002. The INC
may well be right in its suspicions, just as the
movements ranged against it might be in theirs.

It is hard to deny that much of Indian politics
is distorted by corruption and power. One can
argue, however, that the self-interest and petty
materialism of politicians are different from
similar traits displayed by the Indian elite.
Its easy to have sympathy for those who
want a change for the better those who hope
that things might be set right by a tribune, a
Jan Lokpal, a Ram or a Ramdev. I recently
watched a clip of Ramdev speaking, just before
his stalled protest in New Delhi, about how
he planned to take on corruption. Most of his
ideas were confused they ranged from withdrawing large-denomination banknotes from
circulation to insisting that homosexuality
was a western import but what made me feel
a flicker of sympathy for him was the way his
eyes were mismatched, the left one smaller
than the right.
It made him human. It told me that he had
not come from the carefully bred, perfectly
telegenic, elite classes who talk about the glorious path towards free-market modernity taken
by their India. Then I remembered that this
guru, too, had been made, at least in part, by the
market and television, and that not too long
ago he had posed in his robes in front of his
Scottish castle. He embodied perfectly the conflicted identities of the new Indian elite, who
are mostly heedless of the majority, quite enamoured of their own purity, and angry every
now and then at the corruption that could be
eliminated, if only they could find a policeman
with a big stick. l
Siddhartha Debs latest book, The Beautiful
and the Damned: Life in the New India, is
newly published by Viking (14.99)
Books, page 57
newstatesman.com/writers/siddhartha_deb
3
The INC, which came back to power in 2004,
has continued many of the same policies, but
it also gives off the smug sense of being the
party of the established elite, used to the complications of governing a country such as India.
The Jan Lokpal agitation led by Hazare was a
challenge to this establishment, which is why
the bills supporters included sections of the
electronic media and Bollywood stars, as well
as swaths of the upper and middle classes.
Given that many of those supporting the bill
are part of corporate India, whether part of the
information technology industry or as managers of their own brands, their anti-corruption
WorldMags
The NS Interview
Om Puri, actor
Art films give me status, but

Bollywood films give me a living
Do you prefer to make art films?

It is my first preference to do films with social
significance. Art cinema has given me credibility and status as an actor, but commercial cinema
has given me a comfortable living.
Which is better Hollywood or Bollywood?
I prefer working in good cinema, wherever it is.
I like subjects that have a universal appeal.
How has Bollywood changed?
Bollywood lacked discipline stars showing up
late on set, sometimes not appearing at all, but
for the past ten years there has been a positive
change. My experience here in the UK has been
very good the work culture is much better.
What about the role of black money there?
There used to be a lot of black money, as film financers were either estate builders or from the
underworld. The underworld used smuggling as
a source of money. That has cleared up because
the market is now open in India. Earlier you didnt get Scotch; you didnt get fancy cigarettes or
perfume. Now what are you going to smuggle?
How has the perception of Bollywood changed?
It is now gaining respectability because some
of the films are being made to an international
standard. What Bollywood lacks is scripts. A lot
of the films are copies of western films.
You said recently that you were not happy with
the roles coming your way. Is that still true?
Bollywood cinema is full of stereotypes. It is
mainly love stories, which only cast youngsters.
You will have character [parts for] actors, like
Girls Father, but they are totally one-dimensional. Its pretty sad. Very few of the films have
interesting characters. I always look forward to
the films I make in the west.
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Did you always want to be an actor?

When I was at school I wanted to join the army.
At college, I started acting in college plays and
it became a kind of addiction. I was very shy
when I was at school, but the plays seemed to
give voice to my feelings.
Do you think India is a rising power?
It is, but we still have problems because it is a
huge population. There is a lot of pressure on
the big cities because people from villages keep
pouring in. We need to improve rural areas and
create jobs in small towns. Our major problem
is not food now, it is electricity and water.
What is the biggest political problem in India?
We have a lot of politicians who are not educated. I have seen BBC Parliament; people listen to each other in a civilised manner. But in
India they keep throwing chairs and pulling the
mike and jumping on the tables. It is ridiculous.
The corruption is too much and big politicians
are never punished they get away.
Do you see relations with Pakistan improving?
It is very sad whats happening in Pakistan. Pakistan is to be blamed, yes, because it has been
playing a double game, but the people are suffering. They have no control of the fundamentalists, and India is angry about it.
What about relations with the US?

The Americans foreign policy is very defective.
They are not sorting out the Palestine problem,
which has been there for years. They would have
interfered in Kashmir but India is not allowing
them, because India is a much stronger country.
Americans cannot bully Indians.
Have you ever experienced racism in the west?
I did feel it when I came here for the first time
in 1984, but now I dont. One used to get worried going into the Tube station because of the
skinheads around. They had a very terrifying
look on their faces.
Is religion a part of your life?
Im not terribly religious but Im not an atheist,
either. I respect every religion. The day my father passed away was 7 May, and on one anniversary I was staying with a friend and went
to a church and lit a candle. But Im not into rituals that are not meaningful.
Was there a plan?
I planned to go to drama school, I planned to go
to film school, I planned to go to Bombay but
for about 15 years I didnt have any definite plans
for earning money. My basic needs were looked
after, so I was happy doing good work. When
I was about 45, I realised I was getting older and
needed something for my old age. Then I started
paying attention to material needs.
DEFINING MOMENTS
1950 Born in Ambala, Haryana, India
1973 Graduates from the National School
of Drama, New Delhi
1976 Makes big-screen debut in Ghashiram
Kotwal, based on a Marathi play
1982 Takes cameo role of Nahari in Richard
Attenboroughs Gandhi
1999 Stars as George in the film East Is East
2004 Is awarded OBE for services to the
British film industry
2010 Reprises role of George in West Is West
Is there anything you would rather forget?

Even if I have made certain mistakes, I want to
remember them so that I do not repeat them.
Do you vote?
I vote, yes.
Are we all doomed?
Yes, we are living in a world that is not at its best.
Human values are at their lowest, I feel. Religion
is not being interpreted well. l
Interview by Samira Shackle
newstatesman.com/subjects/interviews
SCOTT MCDERMOTT/CORBIS OUTLINE
Do you think that western cinema

stereotypes Asia?
I dont think British cinema does that, but American cinema does have stereotypes.
WorldMags
FERNANDO MOLERES/PANOS PICTURES
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LETTER FROM BANGALORE
Part Las Vegas and part 1990s Silicon

Valley, hi-tech hubs are fuelling Indias
growth. But is the countrys most
impressive industry improving the lives
of people outside its gilded gates?
Temples to
innovation
By Jon Bernstein
WorldMags
To step on to one of the 11 Infosys campuses

across India, through the X-ray machines and
past the security guards brandishing forms in
triplicate, is to enter another world. Gilded and
gated, these vast monuments to modernity
dont look like India, sound like India or smell
like India. This is not the India that most of the
nations 1.2 billion people inhabit.
Part mid-1990s Silicon Valley, part Las Vegas
and part Dubai, the campus in Electronics City,
Bangalore one of Indias main information
technology hubs; the other is Hyderabad is
all glass and steel, pristine tarmac, manicured
lawns and landscaped gardens where fountains
spew out recycled water almost good enough
to drink. Among the nondescript office blocks
there is a pastiche of I M Peis pyramid at the
Louvre, which houses a media centre that only
the BBC wouldnt envy, and another of Sydney
Opera House, reinvented as a food hall.
This is all surpassed in scale and ambition by
the companys 350-acre site in Mysore, about a

four-hour drive south-east of Bangalore, in the
same southern state of Karnataka. Ostensibly a
training centre for recruits, the self-contained
community boasts accommodation for 15,000
newly graduated engineers, shops, restaurants,
a walk-in clinic, a full-sized athletics track,
football pitch and cricket ground, a cinema that
shows the latest films from Bollywood and
Hollywood and seats more than a thousand
people, and luxury two-storey villas for passing executives and potential clients.
Outside the faux Capitol building near the
entrance to the campus, with its Romanesque
columns and domed atrium, a worker squats
in the sun, using what looks like a scalpel to
remove a line of yellow paint. Nearby, two
women brush leaves from perfectly symmetrical hedges. There is something both impressive
and unsettling about this ersatz India.
These gated communities and others like
Island paradise:
a cleaner tends
the swimming pool in
front of the food
hall (in the style of
Sydney Opera House)
at Electronics City,
Bangalore

t
them owned by western as well as Indian

hi-tech firms are, to echo the words of the former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru speaking
about another era of innovation, the temples
of modern India. The country has recently
been hit by terrorism, which might be why
security is so tight. The fear of intellectual
property leaking is the reason the security pass
you are obliged to wear while on campus carries not only your name and photograph, but
also the make, model and serial number of your
laptop computer.
Not everyone is in awe of this new India,
however. Some fear that it does nothing to
promote social mobility and that it may even
entrench class and caste inequality. Others
have likened todays call-centre workers, and
those responsible for managing and maintaining the personal computers of large western
companies based thousands of miles away, to
the lowly labourers from the age of empire. For
coolies, read cybercoolies.
More of that later. First, marvel at the numbers. Information technology and business
process outsourcing an umbrella term that
includes the much-maligned call centre accounts for a quarter of all Indian exports. IT employs two million people and creates jobs for
another ten million around the edges; the technology services sector is expected to grow by 23
per cent this year. In a country disappointed by
growth that dipped below 8 per cent for the
fourth quarter of 2010-2011 at a time when
western nations were desperate to avoid falling
back into recession the IT industry remains
one of the most powerful engines of the thriving Indian economy.
Today, Infosys produces annual revenues in
excess of $6bn, and it is not Indias only IT success story. Last financial year, Tata Consultancy
Services achieved revenues of $8.2bn and HCL
Technologies $3.3bn. The Indian arms of major
US firms such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM
continue to prosper. And more than 180 Indian
IT companies have invested in the UK.
Flat-earthers
It was no surprise that last July, when David
Cameron made his first major trip abroad as
Prime Minister, he chose India as his destination. No surprise, either, that he chose to visit
Bangalore, home to a third of Indias IT workers.
It was on the Infosys campus that Cameron
made his set-piece speech. If Bangalore is the
city that symbolises Indias reawakening, then
Infosys has a good claim to be the company
that does the same thing, he said, shamelessly
playing to his hosts. (The occasion is now best
remembered in Britain for his undiplomatic response during a question-and-answer session
when he warned that Pakistan must not be allowed to look both ways on terrorism.)
Like other success stories, the tale of Indian
IT has many fathers. The market liberalisation
of 1991 onwards is one. Faced with a balance-ofpayments crisis that left the country with less
WorldMags
than two weeks before the money ran out, the

Indian government agreed to relax trade and
export controls. It at once became easier to do
business at home and made Indian firms a more
attractive proposition to the west. The days of
the licence-and-permit Raj were over. At least
that is how the story is commonly told.
And yet, to focus on this landmark in liberal
economics is to ignore the role played by Indias
statist past. In 1950, the first Indian Institute
of Technology (IIT) was founded in Kharagpur,
with the support of Prime Minister Nehru,
and began teaching sessions in 1951. Six more
IITs followed, producing, in the words of the
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
a phenomenal knowledge meritocracy. In
A job as a software
engineer or developer is
still off-limits to most
his 2005 book The World is Flat: a Brief History
of the 21st Century, Friedman describes India as
a factory, churning out and exporting some of
the most gifted engineering, computer science
and software talent on the globe. As of 2008,
IIT alumni numbered 170,000 and the private
sector has aped the institutes success.
Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, India
got lucky three times over. The first occasion
was the millennium bug, which was expected
to hit computer systems across the world the
moment clocks struck midnight on 1 January
2000. To fix the Y2K bug by replacing a
two-digit representation of the year with a
four-digit version knowledge of ageing mainframe programming languages such as Cobol
was required, as were thousands of man-hours
of cheap labour. Second, the rise of the internet
and the desire to exploit an emerging medium
once again led to huge demand for inexpensive
and effective programming skills. In both
cases, thanks in no small part to the IITs bequeathed by Nehru, India was the place to go.
The third piece of good luck was the carpeting of the worlds ocean beds with fibre-optic
cable, paid for by US firms hoping to benefit
from the internet boom. This offered the possibility of high-speed network access from anywhere to anywhere and connected Indian expertise and labour to the world for the first time.
Friedmans eureka moment about the earth
being flat came after a conversation with
Nandan Nilekani, then chief executive of Infosys. Nilekani insisted that the world had
been flattened by technology, and the more
Friedman heard, the more convinced he became. Clearly Nandan was right, he wrote.
It is now possible for more people than ever
to collaborate and compete in real time with
more other people on more different kinds of
work from more different corners of the planet
and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world using
computers, email, fibre-optic networks, teleconferencing and dynamic new software.

For now, India is enjoying the fruits of the
outsourcing boom, but others have a less rosy
view of what is happening. One recurring criticism is that its IT industry lacks innovation:
that the next big thing, a Google, a Facebook or
a YouTube, is unlikely to come out of Bangalore,
the critics say. That is certainly the conclusion
of Angela Saini, author of Geek Nation: How
Indian Science Is Taking Over the World. Saini
toured the country researching her book, and
although her overall assessment is positive, she
believes technological innovation is not one of
Indias strengths. She concludes that the big Indian IT firms capitalised on Indias cheap and
educated labour force to do workaday maintenance for western customers. Even now, thousands of software engineers are stuck in dronelike jobs, and this has made the industry slow at
inventing products.
Measuring innovation is not easy, but how
much a company spends on research and development and the number of patents it files are
relatively good indicators. On both counts, Indian companies compare badly with their US
counterparts. Infosys has filed 300 patents for
new technologies and products over the past
four and a half years; IBM files more than 4,000
in a single year.
The new typists

Ruth Kattumuri, a software engineering graduate and former computer science professor,
says that many Indian information technology
workers of today are the equivalent of the
workforce who trained as typists in the 1970s
to secure secretarial jobs. Now co-director of
the India Observatory at the London School
of Economics, she asks: Do I think a majority
of IT professionals are involved in brilliant software engineering? The answer is no. Theyre
doing very mechanical work.
Kattumuri graduated in 1985, a rarity then
in a male-dominated field, and recalls that historically school and university teaching involved a process of rote and reproduction.
She says: While people are very good at
churning stuff out, the type of training, the
type of skills development, the type of teaching and curriculum has not been very good at
encouraging creativity, freedom of thought,
critiquing and innovation. Only now is India,
producer of entrepreneurs, introducing the
culture of questioning that is essential to produce great innovators.
There is a countervailing view, however. It
was Chandigarh-born Sabeer Bhatia who cocreated the email service Hotmail and then sold
it to Microsoft for $400m in 1997. And according to the IIT alumni association, one in every
five start-ups in Silicon Valley, California, was
founded by IIT graduates. Back home, Indian
firms are moving to more knowledge-intensive
specialisms, such as consulting and systems
integration and, in a quirk of globalisation, are

setting up their own outsourcing divisions in
China and elsewhere.
A further criticism is that where some see
meritocracy, others see social advantage and
privilege being perpetuated. A 2007 study by
the social anthropologist Carol Upadhya suggested that the composition of the IT workforce
is more homogeneous than is often supposed,
and that it is largely urban, middle-class and
high/middle-caste. Her paper Employment,
Exclusion and Merit in the Indian IT Industry
comes with a health warning the sample size
of 132 Bangalore-based software engineers is
relatively small but its results are striking
nonetheless. Upadhya found that 80 per cent
of those questioned had fathers with graduate
degrees or higher, and 56 per cent had mothers
with similar levels of education. Both these
findings reinforced earlier research.
Great divides
Furthermore, the study found that 84 per cent

of fathers were engaged in occupations that are
usually identified as middle-class. That 88
per cent of the sample group were Hindus is not
especially surprising in a country where eight
in every ten people adhere to that religion; but
that 48 per cent were from the Brahmin caste
does stand out.
I decide to put the findings to the test in an
excessively air-conditioned classroom on the
Infosys Mysore campus. Around the table are
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six articulate, self-possessed students in their

early twenties four women and two men. I request a show of hands, asking: How many
have parents who went to college? Six hands
shoot up. I am prompted to ask how many had
grandparents who went to college, perhaps to
prove that this is a recent, generational change.
This time five hands are raised, rather undermining the supposition. Later, someone suggests to me that the only reason five hands
went up was that the trainees did not want to
lose face. That is possible, but the straw poll at
least appeared to confirm Upadhyas findings.
I put this point to S D Shibulal, one of the
seven founders of Infosys and the man who will
become the companys chief executive next
month. In India, especially in the south, education is very common, he tells me. I come
from a state where every man, woman and
child has gone to college.
This does not seem to chime with official
government statistics, which put school dropout rates by class 8 around the age of 13 at
43 per cent. Among the lower castes, the Dalits,
the figure is 53 per cent and in tribal communities it is 63 per cent. A report last month in the
Times of India noted that the education system continues to suffer from four great divides.
These are rural-urban, men-women, richpoor and between castes.
All of which signals that a highly desirable job
as a software engineer or developer is off-limits
for most. Consider that less than 2 per cent of

students in India get a technical education, or
that, in a country where the per-capita income
is $1,265 a year (790), the annual cost of enrolling a son or daughter in a government-run
technology institute is typically Rs19,989
(280). To do the same at a private institution
costs Rs38,675 (540).
Shibulal, who is now in his mid-fifties, offers
a robust defence of the system. Referring to the
trainees I met the previous day, he says: Out
of those six people, [their families] would not
have been middle-class when I was growing
up. So their parents have benefited from the
growth. And I gather that 40 per cent of Infosys employees have at least one parent who
dropped out of school after class 10 between
the ages 15 and 16.
So, does he think his industry is helping to
create a more socially mobile country? The 30million-strong middle class of the mid-1980s
cant have become 300 million just by multiplication, he insists. But some people, I counter,
will always be excluded.
Shibulal looks up, his back to his office window, which looks across the huge site that is
home to 20,000 workers and some of Indian
technologys finest minds. That, he says, is
a universal problem. l
Jon Bernstein is deputy editor of the
New Statesman
newstatesman.com/writers/jon_bernstein
Agenda | This weeks best talks and lectures

JULY
Monday 18th
l Enlightenment Lecture
by Amartya Sen
The Nobel laureate speaks in the
Edinburgh series on the legacy of
the philosopher David Hume.
Assembly Hall, New College,
University of Edinburgh,
1 Mound Place, Edinburgh.
6pm. Free. 0131 650 9547.
ed.ac.uk
l From Tunis to Benghazi: the
Maghreb and the Arab Spring

Adam Shatz, senior editor at the
London Review of Books, talks to
Hugh Roberts, specialist in North
African politics, and Larbi Sadiki
of the University of Exeter.
BP Lecture Theatre, British
Museum, Great Russell Street,
London WC1.
6.30pm. 5/3. 020 7323 8299.
britishmuseum.org
Tuesday 19th
l Public Engagement Practice in
Contemporary Chinese Arts

Ying Kwok, curator at the Chinese
Arts Centre, looks at how Chinese

artists engage with the public.
A Confucius Institute talk.
12.30pm. Free. 0161 275 2648.
Manchester Museum, Oxford
Road, Manchester.
events.manchester.ac.uk
l War of Terror: Documentation
from North-West Frontier

Province An Introduction
The civil-rights lawyer Clive
Stafford Smith opens the
exhibition War of Terror.
Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street,
London SE11.
6pm. Free. 020 7582 6465.
beaconsfield.ltd.uk/projects
l In Conversation With
Sir Nicholas Serota and Dr

Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Serota, director of Tate,
talks to Nicholas Cullinan, curator
of international modern art at Tate
Modern and of Dulwich Picture
Gallerys exhibition Twombly
and Poussin: Arcadian Painters,
about his long involvement with
Cy Twomblys work.
HOT TICKET
Writing Science Into Fiction

20 July, with Philip Sington
Whats the talk about?

Scientists get a raw
deal when it comes to
fiction. Theyre usually
portrayed as cranks or villains.
Invariably they have bad hair. Is
this inevitable? Does it matter?
Why are you involved?
I wrote a novel called The Einstein
Girl, about the daughter that
Albert Einstein had in secret.
Why should we come?
At the very least, youll discover
whether or not Einstein was a
sex maniac.
6.30pm. Free. 020 8299 8750.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery
Road, London SE21.
dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
l Feminists and SlutWalk:
Can Reclaiming Words

Empower Women?
A Manchester Salon debate about
the rise of SlutWalks with the
journalist Louise Bolotin and Nina
Powell, social psychologist.
Blackwell University Bookshop,
The Precinct, Oxford Road,
Manchester.
6.45pm. 5/3. 0161 274 3331.
manchestersalon.org.uk
l A Portrait of Franz Liszt
Robert Blackburn, former

principal lecturer in music at
Bath Spa University, talks about
the distinguished pianist on the
bicentenary of his birth.
Bath Royal Literary and
Scientific Institution,
16-18 Queen Square, Bath.
7.30pm. 4/2. 01225 312 084.
brlsi.org
Wednesday 20th
l Imagination and Interpretation:
Writing Science Into Fiction

The novelists Pat Barker and
Philip Sington discuss the
representation of scientists and
science in contemporary fiction.
Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House
Terrace, London SW1.
6pm. Free. 020 7451 2500.
royalsociety.org
WorldMags
What homework should we do?

Consult Google Maps on your
computer. Alternatively you
could consult an astrologer or a
mystic, but that might not work.
What questions should we ask?
The ones that occur to you
on the night. If you previously
consulted an astrologer or a
mystic (see above), you can
phone in your questions from
whichever part of Hackney
Marshes youre lost in. l
For more details of the event
see our listings
l Im Feeling Lucky:
the Confessions of Google

Employee Number 59
Douglas Edwards, Googles first
director of marketing and brand
management, takes the audience
inside the internet giant.
Hong Kong Theatre, London
School of Economics, 99 Aldwych,
London WC2.
6.30pm. Free. 020 7955 6043.
lse.ac.uk
l James Robertson
The local author on his bestselling

novel And the Land Lay Still.
Waterstones, 35 Commercial
Street, Dundee.
7pm. Free. 0843 290 8287.
waterstones.co.uk
Thursday 21st
l Dance City: Dundee and
Dancing 1940-69
Rod Gordon, historian, talks
about the centrality of dance in
Dundees history during the
middle of the 20th century, with
special reference to learning to
dance using a kitchen chair.
McManus: Dundees Art Gallery
and Museum, Albert Square,
Meadowside, Dundee.
1pm. Free. 01382 307 200.
mcmanus.co.uk
For more of this weeks
talks and lectures go to
newstatesman.com/events
To list your event, email
agenda@newstatesman.co.uk
Art | Books | Music | Film | TV | Radio
KUNI TAKAHASHI/NEW YORK TIMES. REDUX/EYEVINE (SUSANNAH FIELDING)
The Critics
Mumbai mash-ups: Ryan Gilbey on Bollywood. 61

SPORT
THEATRE
BOOKS
Tim
Adams
Andrew
Billen
John
Gray
A cricketer who carries

the weight of a nation
on his shoulders. 48
WorldMags
My night in Vegas
with Portia and
Shylock. 58
The Gormenghast saga

reaches a Peake with
this lost novel. 50
The Critics
CRITIC AT LARGE
Toreador of the
Test match
After his last tour to England, Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest batsman of the modern game,
bought himself a house near Lords cricket
ground in London. Ever since he purchased
that property, one date has no doubt been
etched on his mind: 21 July 2011. That is when
the greatest ever Test match (as it is already
known on the subcontinent) will begin.
It will be the 100th meeting between England and India. It will be the 2,000th Test in
the history of the game. And it will be the
occasion, if the fates and the prayers of half a
billion cricket fans are doing their job, on
which Tendulkar, the Little Master, becomes
the first man to score 100 centuries in international cricket.
Tendulkar, who has broken more records than
he might care to remember, claims not to obsess over such statistics. But you can be certain
he has dwelt on this one. He rested himself
for Indias tour of the West Indies this spring,
stuck on 99 centuries 51 in Test matches, 48 in
one-day internationals ostensibly because he
was exhausted. An equally plausible explanation is that he wanted to give himself the opportunity of reaching his historic milestone at
the headquarters of cricket on a day when all
the world will be watching. An honorary life
member of the MCC, Tendulkar has always
said of his batting that the match starts much,
much earlier than the actual match. Preparation and readiness are everything.
While most of his opponents and team-mates
have been engaged in the non-stop global grind
of modern cricket, Tendulkar has been in St
WorldMags
Johns Wood with his family for the past

month, getting his head ready for what may be
the most auspicious match of his 22-year career.
He has been seen frequently at Lords in those
weeks, coaching his 11-year-old son, Arjun, in
the nets. The man himself has not been seen to
pick up a bat.
Tendulkars secret has always lain in his ability to treat each ball as a discrete event. Walking
out to bat, for him, seems to carry the connotations of a spiritual journey: out in the middle,
he is always perfectly centred. He learned this
quality early in his childhood. Tendulkar was
the third son of a Marathi poet and academic;
he grew up in a literary community in Mumbai. He was never a bookish child, however; he
World Cup win: Tendulkar and team-mates in April
reserved his lyricism for his batting. His early

years make a powerful argument in favour of
Malcolm Gladwells bestselling thesis that genius is born through 10,000 hours of practice
in a given discipline at an early age. Tendulkar
made himself an outlier, in Gladwells terms
a statistical anomaly by devoting every possible minute of his childhood to the pursuit of
batting perfection.
By the time he was 12, Tendulkar was attached
to a dozen different teams in his local area.
Every Sunday he played in several matches in
Shivaji Park, Mumbai. When caught in the deep
in one game, he would scoot off to a neighbouring match and get ready to take guard there.
Contemporaries suggest that he would practise
for 11 hours a day: a net from seven to nine in
the morning, then maybe a match from 9.30am
to 4.30pm, and back to work on his technique
from 5.30pm to 7.30pm.
When Tendulkar was a schoolboy, his coach
devised a way of motivating him that would
have appealed to Geoffrey Boycott. He would
place a rupee on top of the stumps and promise
the team: Anyone who gets him out will take
this coin. If no one gets him out, Sachin is going
to take it. Tendulkar reportedly still has all the
coins he claimed.
I lost a couple of times, he has recalled, but
I still have 13 coins that I won.
The great Indian batsman of his childhood,
the equally diminutive Sunil Gavaskar, concentrated on technique and application, and was a
master of defence and studied attack. Tendulkar matched all of that technique but added to it
GETTY IMAGES
Sachin Tendulkar, Indias Little Master, carries

the hopes of a nation on his shoulders each time he
walks out to bat. By Tim Adams
GETTY IMAGES
The Critics
a sense of overwhelming instinctive aggression.

His hero as a young boy was John McEnroe; he
watched those mesmerising Wimbledon finals
against Bjrn Borg with a sense of wonder. He
subsequently affected a headband and a scowl
in imitation.
Tendulkars fascination with the rival summer sport has persisted. He was a guest in the
royal box at the All England Club this year.
Seated behind him was Martina Navratilova,
who, no stranger to dedication, once spoke in
awed terms of the cricketer after watching him
play in a Test match in Sydney: Sachin was
so focused. He never looked like getting out.
He was batting with single-minded devotion.
It was truly remarkable. At Wimbledon, Tendulkar spent an hour on the players balcony
swapping stories with Roger Federer, one of
the few men on earth who might be considered
his match for hand-eye genius.
If he started out like McEnroe, intent on
transforming the way his sport was played,
Tendulkar has become much more Federer-like
as his career has developed, maintaining his
number-one status for two decades, impossible
to perturb. Within a team sport, he retains the
ability to take on anyone on his own terms. His
greatest Tests came against the all-conquering
Australian teams of the Steve Waugh era in the
1990s. He almost single-handedly dismantled
that Australian side in the 1998 series. Shane
WorldMags
Warne, who confessed to seeing Tendulkar in

his dreams, once described the pecking order
of modern batsmen in the following terms:
Sachin Tendulkar is, in my time, the best
player without doubt daylight second, Brian
Lara third.
Cricket history has an epic flavour, and in
most Test match Mahabharatas Tendulkar sits
at the right hand of the Australian Don Bradman, the only player who could challenge his
statistical dominance. The first time he saw
Tendulkar play on television, Bradman called
his wife in from the kitchen to watch: the Indian was the closest thing to himself that he
had ever seen, he said. At Bradmans 90th
birthday, a split video screen played images of
the pair in all their brilliance. Tendulkar, a guest
of honour, seemed to shadow the older batsmans every stroke.
Like Bradman, Tendulkar has an almost preternatural clarity of mind under pressure.
Hemingway would have relished that toreador
tranquillity. If you were making the argument
in Tendulkars favour, you might point to one
thing: to achieve that concentration, to keep
your head when all about you are losing theirs,
has lately become an even more singular battle.
Tendulkar came of age with the advent of satellite transmission of cricket; he remains the
brightest star in Rupert Murdochs cricket-led
colonisation of Asian broadcasting. It was once
The coming man: Tendulkar (centre) in the second

England v India Test at Old Trafford, 1990
estimated that he featured in one in four television adverts on the subcontinent.

At 38, he remains the poster boy of the Indian
Premier League and is unable to leave his home
in Mumbai except in heavy disguise. He channels more than the excitement of his nation,
though; at the height of his powers he could
seem a kind of saviour. Once, in a birthday
tribute, the Times of India observed: Every
time he walks in to bat he carries . . . a billion
people who look to him as the sole provider of
hope in a nation surrounded by gloom, despair
and corruption.
Or, as the cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle
noted: If Sachin plays well, India sleeps well.
Most Indians will no doubt be wide awake
when Tendulkar walks out to bat at Lords.
Money will be riding on him to get not only
his century in the match, but also whisper it
the 308 runs he needs to reach 15,000 in his
Test career.
The noise around him of expectation and
possibility may be the loudest it has ever
been. Yet Tendulkar will be calm. And he will
be ready. l
Tim Adams is the author of On Being John
McEnroe (Yellow Jersey Press, 6.99)
newstatesman.com/culture
Moving image: Mervyn Peake surrounded by a selection of his framed paintings. From Picture Post, 1946
BOOKS
The horror in the

human soul
A moving conclusion to a grand saga.
By John Gray
Titus Awakes: the Lost Book of Gormenghast
Maeve Gilmore, based on a fragment by Mervyn Peake
Vintage, 288pp, 7.99
Writing soon after the publication of Titus
Groan in 1946, Quentin Crisp attempted to define what made Mervyn Peake unique:
Perhaps the truest measure of Peakes
originality is that there is something oldworld about his work . . . Only with one
artist can he be compared with any degree
of elaboration, and that is William Blake,
who was both an artist and a writer. Of
the two, Peake is infinitely the greater
draughtsman, infinitely the less a mystic.
Blake revelled in the fantastic; Peake dwells
on the dreadful. Surrealism in its glibbest
sense is concerned with dreams rather
than with fancy; the horror of the scenes it
depicts is symbolic. Peake, on the other
hand, seems to me more concerned with
fancy than with dream, and he is not
WorldMags
exegetical. In this work he succeeds in

building a whole new world, but he was also
asked to govern it. This he could not do.
Reprinted in the US in the Overlook Press paperback edition of the three main Gormenghast novels (1995), Crisps evaluation captures
the qualities of Peakes work better than any
later critical assessment. The most distinctive
feature of the Gormenghast books is the playful exuberance with which they recount scenes
of horror and madness. Peake was appalled
when he learned that the American publisher of
Titus Groan had given it the subtitle A Gothic
Novel, and with good reason. While the book
contains obvious Gothic tropes the plot is set
in a castle and has to do with ritual, rebellion
and transgression there is nothing medieval
or supernatural in it. The horror that fascinated
Peake was not lurking in the shadows of ancient buildings but alive in the human soul,
and if he has a predecessor as a writer it is Edgar
Allan Poe, rather than William Beckford or
Mary Shelley.
The grotesque characters and ghastly scenes
that fill the Gormenghast books do not emerge,
half-formed and darkly menacing, from the
depths of the unconscious mind. They are creations of wit; whats more and here I disagree
with Crisp, who goes astray at this point
nothing is more characteristic of Peakes genius
than the perfect command he exercises over
the world that he invented.
This is what separates him from Blake and
from the Romantics and the surrealists. He
does not look for creativity in delirium, or find
freedom in the destruction of restraint. The
jaunty mastery of horror that Peake displays
in his work is reminiscent of what Nietzsche
called the pessimism of strength. Contrary to
some interpretations, the Gormenghast novels
are not an extended Romantic-liberal fairy tale,
one more tranquillising fable of personal redemption, but a vehicle for something much
rarer and altogether more spirited a condition
of superabundant vitality that affirms life even
as it refuses to shrink from the most terrible
aspects of life.
The peculiar horror of Peakes own life is that
he was struck by an illness that destroyed this
freedom of spirit. Never properly diagnosed
in his lifetime, it seems to have been a variant
of Parkinsons disease, which robbed him of the
capacity to write and draw. Titus Awakes is a
treasure salvaged from the ruins. It is based on
a few fragmentary pages, abandoned by Peake
in July 1960, which his devoted wife, Maeve
Gilmore, began turning into a book entitled
Search Without End two years after Peakes
death in 1968.
Gilmore, a gifted artist in her own right, produced a manuscript that was discovered in an
attic by her granddaughter Christian more than
a quarter of a century later and more than a
decade after Gilmore died in 1983. Given the
obstacles she faced, it is a remarkable achievement. Never meant to be a trilogy, the Gormenghast books would in other circumstances
have been a continuing expression of Peakes
vision. That prospect was cut off by his illness,
but there were also features inherent in the
books that made continuing the series difficult.
The relations between Gormenghast the
decaying castle in which the first two volumes
of the series are set and the world outside
have always been problematic. In keeping with
much of the astonishing imagery, the picture
of a vast tenement studded with limpet-like
inhabitants was undoubtedly a transmuted
version of the landscape of Peakes childhood,
which was spent in China, where his father
was a medical missionary. But Gormenghast
is more isolated than even pre-invasion Tibet,
GETTY IMAGES
The Critics
MARK PRINGLE
The Critics
so much so that the location seems entirely
self-enclosed. Peake solved that problem in
Titus Alone, where the castles rebellious heir
escapes to a world that must have seemed fantastically futuristic when the book was first
published in 1959.
Today, Peakes vision seems presciently accurate: the world in which Titus wanders,
where wealth is ghostly and fear of poverty
lurks on every corner, where the human detritus of war moulders in camps and life mutates
daily under the impact of new technologies,
is our own. The radical discontinuity between
this world and that of the castle is obvious,
and in Titus Alone Peake repeatedly underscores the contrast.
The two worlds have something in common,
however there is no exit from either of them.
At the end of the second novel in the sequence,
Gormenghast, when Titus is about to leave
home, his mother, the Countess Groan, warns
him: There is nowhere else, you will only
tread in a circle, Titus Groan. Theres not a
road, not a track, but it will lead you home. For
everything comes to Gormenghast. She is
both right and wrong. Titus discovers that
there is another world out there, but it is a
labyrinth, no less impenetrable than the castle
he has left behind.
Gilmores solution is quite different. Here,
too, Titus wanders through a world that resembles our own, but there is some continuity
with the absent world of the castle, signalled
by references to his beloved sister Fuchsia and
semi-wild foster-sister. Some of the places are
suggested by episodes in Peakes life an institution where Titus works for a time as an
orderly recalls a hospital where Peake was
confined for part of his illness. Some of the
people Titus encounters are also drawn from
life, including an artist who can only be an
avatar of Peake.
Above all, the protagonists search has an
end. Recounting Titus travelling through sites
recalling those of Peake in real life, but in reverse order, Gilmore has Titus reach an island
that is unnamed but is plainly Sark, where
Peake spent two years before the war and
where he returned with Gilmore and his sons,
Sebastian and Fabian, after Titus Groan was
published. In Gilmores account, Titus follows
Peake in a counterclockwise journey, returning
at last to a place of healing and happiness. The
story ends with those words of the countess:
Theres not a road, not a track, but it will lead
him home. It is a moving conclusion to a grand
modern saga, which fate denied Peake the
chance to complete. l
John Gray is the New Statesmans lead reviewer.
His most recent book is The Immortalization
Commission: the Strange Quest to Cheat
Death (Allen Lane, 18.99)
Read more by him for the New Statesman at:
newstatesman.com/writers/john_gray
WorldMags
THE BOOKS INTERVIEW
Aravind Adiga
In both your Bookerwinning debut, The
White Tiger, and new
book, Last Man in
Tower, you analyse the
depredations of Indias
dash for growth. Is
that how you see it?
I dont see myself as
criticising what is
happening in India. India and China, both
ancient civilisations, are becoming new
kinds of nation state. This is happening
through processes that a columnist might
write about global trade, civil society, law
and order. And its also happening through
the release of tremendous amounts of amoral
energy, that of new kinds of entrepreneurial
figure. My position is chronicling this as a
writer, and its perhaps different from the
kinds of fiction in English weve had from
India before. I find some of that a bit
sentimental.
Does it frustrate you when your novels
are treated as artefacts of social criticism
rather than as fiction?
To some extent, yes. I didnt intend with this
new book for there to be an obvious message,
or any obvious resolution to the problems.
Im in two minds about whats happening.
I grew up in a very different India. My life
then was very much structured around
shame and guilt; it was a very conservative
society. But that India has gone.
You said theres no obvious hero in this book.
Doesnt Masterji count as one?
This figure of the man who says no I
never meant for him to be the hero. I hope
Ive written it well enough for the reader
to wonder if hes saying no out of idealism,
or even a kind of nihilism. The hero, if there
is one, is the city of Mumbai.
How long have you lived in Mumbai now?
I came here in late 2006. But Ive spent some
time away, in Bangalore. Ive never had a job
in this city, so Im free all day. If you have a
job, you tend to see less and less of the city.
You say it has changed even in the relatively
short period youve been there.
The interesting thing is that Mumbai is
growing more slowly than many other cities
in India. Theres a very palpable anxiety that
Mumbai has been misgoverned for many,
many years. It takes for ever here to build
roads and bridges. The city is not the centre

of Indias technology industry thats
Bangalore. And New Delhi has much better
infrastructure and people see it as the great
Indian city of the future. So while Mumbai
has changed, it perhaps hasnt changed fast
enough. And thats the kind of anxiety thats
present in the book that it will take people
like Mr Shah to get things done.
Another anxiety concerns China.
Its a dangerous comparison, because you
cant go about crushing individual rights in
a quest to grow faster than China.
I would like things to get done faster,
but I worry what price some people in this
country will have to pay. Theres a danger
that the process of industrialisation and
growth can ignore the rights of many weaker
sections of society.
Have English writers like Martin Amis
had any influence on you?
I wish I could write like Amis. He strikes
me as the most Dickensian writer around,
in terms of style. Hes astonishingly
good [in his] native command of sentence
structure. On the other hand, he often
forgets that he has to tell a story.
You suggested earlier that much Indian
fiction written in English strikes you as
sentimental. What did you mean by that?
Theres a new dynamism and energy in
this country and I think the novel should
reflect that . . . The idea of Indians being
victims doesnt strike me as being
true on any level now there are very rich
Indians, and a very large and self-confident
Indian middle class.
What will your next book be like?
I would like to stay in contemporary India,
because theres so much happening here.
It would be simpler to step back into the
past. The past the 1970s, for example
is a land of no debate; you wont upset
anyone if you write about it. Id like to tell
other stories set here and in the present,
but in a different kind of way. I think one
of the things I need to do if Im to survive as
a writer is to become smaller: I have to write
books that are more difficult, that wont
reach such a large audience. l
Interview by Jonathan Derbyshire
Aravind Adigas Last Man in Tower is
published by Atlantic Books (17.99)
See review, page 57
The Critics
Toby Litt
No Off Switch: an Autobiography

Andy Kershaw
Serpents Tail, 432pp, 18.99
Ali Farka Tour if you were a Radio 1 listener
in the Eighties, a voice will have started up in
your head as you were reading the name. Not
a voice from Mali, birthplace of that African
bluesman, but one from Rochdale a disarmingly direct voice that rumbles and tumbles
along as it attempts to convey how great music
is, when its great. And how great life is, too.
Its his ability to convey a sense of momentby-moment aliveness that makes Andy Kershaw, in my opinion, the greatest living broadcaster in the English language. No Off Switch, his
autobiography of rise and fall and (you hope)
rise again, paints a very consistent self-portrait.
You could say that he has had, from his earliest
years, an aesthetic. Its a pretty simple one, and
all the better for it. To anything thats on the
side of life, anything that puts electricity in the
blood, anything that truly surprises: Yes! Give
me more. To anything boring, routine, corporate or predictable: Ignore it.
This explains Kershaws apparently diverse
enthusiasms for very fast motorbikes and in
particular for the Isle of Man TT; for raw (as opposed to overcooked) music, from the Clash to
Zimbabwean guitar pop; for privately financed
visits to bonkers countries such as Equatorial
Guinea, Haiti and North Korea to make awardwinning documentaries. He has had to suffer
from the stigma of being seen as neither a
proper Radio 1 DJ (you wouldnt catch Bruno
Brookes reporting on the Rwandan genocide)
nor a proper foreign correspondent (you
wouldnt catch Kate Adie OBE arriving with a
Frisbee so as to make friends with the local children). Yet he has done both jobs better than
anyone else.
All along, instinct has been Kershaws best
friend and worst enemy. It was instinct that
made Billy Bragg call up the former ents sec of
Leeds University and nab him for a roadie. It
was instinct that led the BBC producer Trevor
Dann to ask Andy to present The Old Grey
Whistle Test in 1984 on the basis of a couple of
hours of conversation while Bragg set up for an
appearance on the show. In telling these anecdotes, Kershaw modestly suggests that he has
been the luckiest person I know. What he
misses out are the waves of energy that the Boy
Kershaw (as even he refers to himself) must
have been zapping out at that point. Encountering this rare kind of life force makes people
want to trust their instinct.
WorldMags
The Boy Kershaw: I am the luckiest person I know
No author
travels alone
Kasia Boddy
Tretower to Clyro: Essays

Karl Miller
Quercus, 232pp, 20
The American novelist Ralph Ellison once declared: While one can do nothing about choosing ones relatives, one can, as artist, choose
ones ancestors. Karl Millers new collection
of critical essays is mainly about such choices.
For Miller, the chosen family one that
doesnt have to consist of blood relations
is a kind of benign alternative to nations, clans
and phobic tribalism. Literary families are
capacious and flexible groupings. Their members dont even need to live in the same place:
just, perhaps, the same kind of place.
Many of the authors discussed in Tretower to
Clyro write about unremarkable lives in small
towns and villages to which they feel attachment, rather than pride. Descendants of the
rural working class, they understand manual
labour and know that, whether in Clyro, Cape
Breton or County Derry, the weather is never
incidental or decorative. Mostly they write
with an awareness of a prevailing metropolitan culture.
It is an opposition that means a lot to Miller.
Founding editor of the London Review of Books,
he spent his childhood in Gilmerton, a Midlothian mining village not far from the outskirts of Edinburgh, but nonetheless a source
of native vigour. He says he grew up amphibian, as befits the author of Doubles (1985), a
study of literary duality.
The essays here have previously appeared in
journals such as the Times Literary Supplement
or Raritan. Each is about a single author, and
most have a starting point in a particular book.
While writing these reviews, Miller says, their
common subject emerged and its elucidation is the purpose of a long introduction, in
which he expresses his sympathy with John
Kerrigans work on archipelagic English and
the new ruralism of Richard Mabey and
Robert Macfarlane.
The first essay is about the Nova Scotian Alistair MacLeod, who writes works in which one
story gives rise to another. This is also Millers
aesthetic and it works on almost every level
from paragraph to book. The piece on MacLeod
is followed by one about his great admirer John
McGahern. And so on, usually with greater
indirection. Books and authors all converse,
though some less successfully than others.
For example, Ian McEwans On Chesil Beach
(which Miller considers a masterpiece) doesnt
quite fit, even though it is true that McEwan
TRINITY MIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY
Lust
for life
Conversely, within the managerial-minded

BBC of the late Eighties, instinct was a no-no.
Pretty soon, Kershaw had been infuriated into
leaving. He was welcomed across to Radio 3 by
the then controller, Roger Wright. But over the
years his radio appearances have become rare.
Hes not always there, at a regular time, something to look forward to. Hes an intermittent
eruption, making everything before and after
sound as if it were made by zombies.
In July 2007, Kershaws radio career stopped
dead. From the outside, his descent to the
position of fugitive from justice (Isle of Manstyle), on the grounds that he was harassing
his ex-partner and the mother of his two children, seemed to be judicial harassment of a
man who showed his passion too easily. Like
Hamlet, he was a distracted lover, turning up
dishevelled and distraught to protest his bona
fides. But in tabloid-speak he was the troubled
DJ back behind bars again after breaking a curfew order.
No Off Switch gives Kershaw a chance to tell
his heavily lawyer-vetted side of this story and
to bring it to a close. As of Christmas 2010,
he was sober, back working on an ambitious
documentary series for Radio 3, Music Planet,
and reunited with his two children. The only
other thing I could wish him, apart from continued health and sobriety, would be his own
show on 6 Music. How about a straight swap
for Craig Charles?
Kershaws voice doesnt transfer to the
printed page without loss. On his studio-based
radio shows, it is always this great new record
he has discovered that achieves lift-off into the
sublime; in his documentaries, it is some
round-the-campfire jamming that makes you
envy him the chances life has offered him, and
that he has grabbed, and that somehow, miraculously hes managed to get on tape for us.
More power to your microphone, Andy. l
Toby Litts latest novel is King Death
(Penguin, 7 ebook)
newstatesman.com/writers/toby_litt
The Critics
WorldMags
PICTURE BOOK OF THE WEEK

This panorama of Mumbais
waterfront, taken during a
religious festival, appears in
Living in the Endless City, edited
by Ricky Burdett and Deyan
Sudjic (Phaidon, 39.95). Cities
have grown to cover 2 per cent

of the earths surface but they are
inhabited by 53 per cent of the
worlds population. This book
explores the physical and social
realities of the urbanisation of our
Doc be
nimble
Leo Robson
All the Time in the World

E L Doctorow
Little, Brown, 304pp, 12.99
The 12 stories, some old, some new, collected in
this volume have no common mark, or tracer,
writes E L Doctorow in a brief, elusive preface.
They take in various countries and centuries;
some of them are voiced as testimonies, others are given to authorial omniscience, and
the rest are more deviously sounded in what
is known as the free indirect style. If anything
unifies them, it is not, as Doctorow appears to
think, the thematic segregation of their protagonists, but that they were all written by
this remarkably nimble historical novelist, who
appears no less adept here than in his longer
works at pulling off a lyric leap or a sensual sigh.
Even in a duff story, Doctorow will revive the
flagging reader with an idiosyncratic image or
a startling effect.
He believes that it is the short storys scale
that causes him to home in on . . . people in
some sort of contest with the prevailing world,
but it isnt true. In novels such as The Book of
species, taking cities such as

Mumbai, So Paulo and Istanbul
as case studies. As the photograph
above shows, the sheer density
of population in Mumbai is
an assault on ones senses
Daniel, Loon Lake and City of God, he has described just such a struggle. And when he says
that a novel begins in his mind as something
that proposes a meaningful world, whereas a
story usually comes to you as a situation . . .
and more or less whole, this doesnt stand up,
either. The incident portrayed in Doctorows
story The Water Works (not collected here)
later became the crucial narrative event in his
superb Gothic thriller The Waterworks; one
of the stories that make this selection, Heist,
was incorporated into City of God. The novel is
the form to which he is both more attracted
and attuned.
Yet All the Time in the World shows that Doctorow, who was born in 1931, has improved as
a story writer. Edgemont Drive, a tale about
trust, intimacy and compromise told entirely
in quick-fire dialogue, and Assimilation, a
tender green-card love story, were both printed
in the New Yorker last year. The thrilling opening story, Wakefield, about a mans sudden
retreat from his family, appeared in the same
publication two years earlier. It is astonishing
that a writer who has shown so little interest in
the short story over the years should achieve
even belated and intermittent mastery of the
form. The book also shows that the short story
has served Doctorow as more than just an incubator for potential future novels. It has enabled him to make visits to the present day, to
dip his toe in waters into which he wouldnt
shares with Alice Munro, his predecessor in

this collection, an interest in the liberations of
the Sixties.
Some of the most interesting pieces are those
that make a case for less well-known writers
such as MacLeod or John McNeillie, born on
Clydeside and raised in Galloway, or Henry
Cockburn (the subject of Millers Cockburns
Millennium and the author of a very funny letter, included here, about a woman who refuses
to marry a one-legged man). There are no essays specifically on Robert Burns or James
Hogg, but their presence figures in a pre-industrial landscape is felt throughout. Hogg
has only one relative in the book Munro is descended from Hoggs cousin but the Ettrick
Shepherd (the subject of another book by Miller)
is certainly its ancestral father. Alasdair Gray
shares Hoggs view of epic, McNeillie his storied past, Irvine Welsh his talent for vernacular and carnival writing.
In 1989 Miller published Authors, which argued that a writers personal life is continuous
with his or her work, and he is drawn to writers such as McGahern, who return obsessively
to the facts of their lives. He says of Munro
that the whole corpus of her stories is a memoir and more generally praises writers Anne
Tyler, for instance whose individual works
add up to something bigger than the sum of
their parts.
Writing, for Miller, is not about fleeing the
self, but about finding within yourself a someone else. Its an idea that dramatises uncertainty, but it can also be rather friendly. No anxiety of influence here. Doubling is the first step
towards family-building. No author, Miller
once said, is ever alone.
Miller is certainly intimate with those he
writes about. He tells us that he was born
within weeks of Munro, that Welsh once lived
near Gilmerton, that Professor Ettrick in The
Line of Beauty is a tribute to him from Alan
Hollinghurst, and that a MacLeod story reminds him of a dream he once had about
his aunt.
Tretower to Clyro opens with a long foreword
by Andrew OHagan, who shares Millers interest in the grounds of literature and in the
ground itself. Over a period of about five
years, the two men joined their mutual friend
Seamus Heaney for a series of literary jaunts
around parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales,
visiting graves, hills, libraries and monuments
and reciting poems to each other. Memoir and
literary criticism feed into each other, as do
town and country, but at its heart this is a book
about the parti-coloured forms of travelling
friendship. l
Kasia Boddy is a senior lecturer in English at
University College London. Her most recent
book is The American Short Story Since 1950
(Edinburgh University Press, 19.99)
newstatesman.com/writers/kasia_boddy
2011 Postgraduate Season

Acting
Musical Theatre
Trojan
Barbie
This amateur production is presented by

arrangement with Josef Weinberger Limited on
behalf of R&H Theatricals of New York.
%(51$5'$ $/%$
Words and Music by
FRIDAY 15 TO SATURDAY 23 JULY
MICHAEL JOHN LACHIUSA
Evenings at 7.30pm
Saturday and Thursday matinees at 3.00pm
By Christine Evans
This amateur production is presented by

arrangement with Samuel French Ltd
Friday 22 to Saturday 30 July

Evenings at 7.00pm Matinees: Thu 28 and Sat 30 July at 2.30pm
Based on the play

The House of Bernarda Alba by
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Scenes from
the
heroic life
of
the
middle
classes
The Fossil
(Das Fossil)
By
Carl Sternheim
English language adaptation
by J.M. Ritchie
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with

Josef Weinberger Limited on behalf of Music Theatre
International of New York.
chippel
Paul SEs
q
hippel)
(Brger Sc
By
nheim
Carl Ster
ion
age adaptat
gu
English lan
own
by M.A.L Br
Friday 5 to
Saturday 13
August
Evenings at 7.00pm
Matinees:
Thu 11 & Sat 13 Aug at 2.30pm
FRIDAY 29 JULY to
SATURDAY 6 AUGUST
Music and lyrics by

Stephen Sondheim
Book by
Hugh Wheeler
;]OOM[\ML Ja I TU Ja
Originally produced &

Evenings at 7.30pm
directed on Broadway by Sat & Thu matinees at 3.00pm
Ingmar Bergman
The Fossil (Das

Fossil) and Paul
Schippel Esq.
(Brger Schippel)
are presented
under the license
of Felix Bloch
Erben Agency,
Berlin, Germany
Harold Prince
Bernie Grant Arts Centre

BOX OFFICE 020 8365 5450
Charing Cross Theatre

BOX OFFICE 020 8829 0035
15th & 16th July

> Like a Fishbone by Anthony Weigh
Directed by ZOE SHARP
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with United Agents
> Dying City by Christopher Shinn

Directed by EMMA BUTLER
28th & 29th July

>Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Adapted & Directed by PAMELA SCHERMANN
> Tiny Dynamite by Abi Morgan

Directed by CHARLIE WARD
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Independent Talent Group Ltd
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Creative Artists Inc
at The Cockpit Theatre

4 Great Double Bills
BOX OFFICE 020 8829 0035
WorldMags
21st & 22nd July

> It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at
First but it is Alright Now by Lucy Kirkwood
Directed by HANNAH JOSS
4th & 5th August

> Boston Marriage by David Mamet
Directed by JANE MORIARTY
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Josef Weinberger Ltd
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Nick Hern Books Ltd
> The Maids by Neil Bartlett
> Miss Julie by August Strindberg
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Rosica Colin Ltd & The Agency
Adapted & Directed by JENNIFER MCGREGOR
Directed by KATE MURPHY
The Critics
Times Square is unnaturally brilliant in

a light brighter than daylight with gigantic
signs of sulking models, and cantilevered
broadcast studios with flashing call signs,
and modern glass tower office buildings
reflecting the rainbow colours of the
flashing signs and videos it is all enough
to make me want to forget my troubles
here with the enormous swaying crowd,
of which I am a part, basking as if it were
in the radiant sunshine of the Great White
Way, outshining the sun and turning the
blue sky white. l
DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES
Leo Robson is lead fiction reviewer of the NS
In the crowd: Times Square is recalled by Doctorow
WorldMags
Chewing
the khat
THE NS RECOMMENDS
India non-fiction
Ziauddin Sardar
The Discovery of India

(1946)
Jawaharlal Nehru
Later the first prime minister
of independent India, Nehru
wrote his history of the
nation while imprisoned by the British.
Undercover Muslim: a Journey

Into Yemen
Theo Padnos
Bodley Head, 304pp, 12.99
Its a well-trodden path. White man pretends
to convert to Islam and goes off to the Orient
in search of knowledge. He returns with tales
of the quaint customs and outlandish ways of
the Muslims. The white man in this case is an
American named Theo Padnos, who travels to
Yemen to study Islam. Yet it is difficult to imagine that Padnos studied anything at all, given
that most of his time in the country appears to
have been spent chewing khat, the local substitute for amphetamine. He was probably manic
and hyperactive most of the time, not to mention constipated.
He says he was following in the footsteps of
the demented Yemeni-American preacher and
internet imam Anwar al-Awlaki. But Awlaki,
who does not shake hands with women but
likes to fraternise with prostitutes, did not acquire notoriety until 2009. Padnos went to
Yemen in 2005. So the explanation we are being
offered for the journey turns out to be a rather
weak post-facto rationalisation.
After a stint as a copy editor at the Yemen
Observer, our man enters the Mahad Medina
school in Sanaa, where the students are required to be Salafis. The Salafis renounce politics, idealise family order and love the Prophet
in all things, we are told. However, they do not
hesitate to impose their will on others, by violent means if necessary.
The curriculum at the madrasa is rather basic. The first requirement is reading and writing
Arabic the language of heaven. But the Arabic
the students learn is a tongue that no one speaks.
Having mastered this classical Arabic, they
move on to jurisprudence, Islamic law and the
traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. In between, they have to memorise the Quran.
They are taught that the only thing which
matters is correct belief. There are true Muslims, who believe in God, and the kuffar, the
unbelievers who deny Him. The aim of the
teaching is to prepare the students to fight for
the restoration of a pure, untrammelled Islam.
This requires destroying the Arab plutocracies,
killing all those who are considered to be deviants, such as the Shias, and establishing a purified Arabia as the abode of the true believers.
What kind of individual would swallow such
toxic rhetoric? The students Padnos encounters are mostly black men from Virginia and
pale-skinned converts from good schools
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950)

Louis Fischer
Fischer interviewed Gandhi several times
and published this biography shortly after
his assassination in 1948.
An Area of Darkness: a Discovery
of India (1964)
V S Naipaul
An account of Naipauls first visit to India
at the age of 29, An Area of Darkness is the
first volume in his Indian trilogy.
Calcutta (1971)
Geoffrey Moorhouse
The story of how and why empire was
created and what happened when it ended.
Princely India (1980)
Raja Lala Deen Dayal
A collection of photographs of temples,
palaces and hunting parties, it shows India
between 1884 and 1910.
Maximum City: Bombay Lost
and Found (2004)
Suketu Mehta
After living in New York for 21 years, Mehta
returns to the place of his childhood.
Kipling Sahib: India and the Making
of Rudyard Kipling (2007)
Charles Allen
This biography of the first 35 years of
Kiplings life (1865 onwards) describes
the young writers nocturnal wanderings
through the countrys cities.
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred
in Modern India (2009)
William Dalrymple
Dalrymples book is part travelogue
and part analysis of contemporary
Indian religion.
Listening to Grasshoppers (2009)
Arundhati Roy
An anthology of essays by the Booker
Prize-winning author that enumerates the
shortcomings of Indian democracy. l
want to plunge, to improvise and experiment

to discover different Doctorows.
Occasionally the results are folksy or forcedly
demotic, but it seems that when Doctorow
happens on an appropriate subject and structure, the voice comes with them, in a kind of
three-for-two. In the best stories, he hits his
stride straight away, without run-up or preamble: People will say that I left my wife and I
suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where
was the intentionality? (Wakefield); Mama
said I was thenceforth to be her nephew, and to
call her Aunt Dora (A House on the Plains);
In 1955 my father died with his ancient
mother still alive in a nursing home (The
Writer in the Family). The difference between
these sentences and the enraptured but unpropulsive opening of, say, Willi is that they
introduce a situation that requires development or explanation.
Yet even when Doctorow sets his feet on uneven ground he can still find the target. Willi
is a slight and uninvolving tale, a reminiscence
of youth that doesnt reveal its setting until
the penultimate sentence, but along the way
it sounds the Doctorovian note of wonder
(Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life). And the title story, which also
takes the form of musings (What Ive noticed:
how fast they put up these buildings), never
gets started, but still we get this:
The Critics
t
and pretty suburbs in the west. There are also

French Algerians from Lyons, British Muslims
from Birmingham, Moroccan Dutchmen from
Amsterdam and Yemeni Americans from New
York. All of them are socially inadequate and
most of them have sexual hang-ups, but they
believe that the umma, the global family of
Muslim believers, will provide them with a
community and sort out their sexual problems.
One could add that, like Padnos, they are not
very intelligent, either.
Padnos tells us that these wretches go to
Yemen to seek happiness. They have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, he writes, a desire
to learn about true Islam. Unfortunately, the
knowledge they acquire turns them into extremists. As social analysis, this is on a par with
the graffiti Give piss a chance one finds
in the urinals of Muslim seminaries. The converts and their fellow western-born Muslim
seekers do not turn into extremists. They
start off as extremists. They go to Yemen to
pour Islam into their preconceived ideas. They
wish to turn their violent and deranged fantasies into certainty.
These men imagine the land of pure Islam
as a heaven of doe-eyed, submissive women,
a place where drugs are plentiful and life is
shaped by unambiguous rules. But they are
seeking not so much knowledge as attention.
They know that, in places such as Yemen, western Muslims, particularly white converts, enjoy a special status. Not only do other people
look up to them, but they are regarded as figures with a special destiny.
Padnos does not tell us whether he acquired
a submissive wife. He does, however, find
confirmation of what he is looking for. If you
learn to pray in a proper Salafi way, memorise
the sacred texts, and turn your back on reality
and regard the world as a passing shadow, he
tells us, you will have found real Islam. In other
words, the madness of the Salafis is not really
such a remarkable departure from standard Islam. Thats all there is to this great religion.
It is not just Islam that Padnos reduces to
cheap orientalist clichs. The Yemenis are subject to their fair share, too. By and large, they are
fools, have no sense of irony and live in a wide
rocky bin of zaniness. They like to wallow in
poverty, degradation and turmoil. The national
currency is third-world Monopoly money. All
of which makes Yemenis quite incapable of
fighting for democracy and standing up to dictators backed by the west.
Padnoss infantile orientalism adds nothing
to our understanding of Muslim extremism.
Perhaps it is time for the white man to forget
the Orient? He can find all the knowledge he
seeks in his own neighbourhoods. l
Ziauddin Sardars latest book is Reading the
Quran (C Hurst & Co, 20)
newstatesman.com/writers/
ziauddin_sardar
WorldMags
The Critics
Make it in
Mumbai
Soumya Bhattacharya
Last Man in Tower
Aravind Adiga
Atlantic Books, 421pp, 17.99
The Beautiful and the Damned:
Life in the New India
Siddhartha Deb
Viking, 272pp, 14.99
When I moved to Mumbai in the summer of
2005, I discovered that my life had acquired a
new soundtrack: the thud of the wrecking ball
and the clang of the hammer as old apartment
buildings were demolished and new tower
blocks put up in their place. Mumbai, I discovered, is always expanding, creating itself afresh.
In his superb new novel, Aravind Adiga, who
won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 with his debut, The White Tiger, offers a homage to a city
that never stops growing.
Nor is it the city alone that is constantly
changing. Mumbai is full of people busy remaking themselves, dreamers, schemers and restless aspirers. It is full of men such as Dharmen
Shah in Last Man in Tower, a small-town boy
who came to Mumbai with no money and big
dreams. He has made his fortune as a developer,
buying off the residents of blocks of flats, razing
the buildings and constructing gleaming, futuristic towers instead. Shah is a memorable
and instantly recognisable creation.
He offers each of the inhabitants of Vishram
Society a down-at-heel building in a downat-heel suburb a staggering sum of money to
leave their homes. One by one, the residents capitulate. Only Masterji, a retired schoolteacher,
idealistic, old-fashioned and incorruptible, holds
out. What this stubbornness unleashes is, to
simplify, the story of the novel.
Adigas handling of his material is too nuanced to allow Shah and Masterji to become
stereotypes. He withholds judgement on both
men, preferring to let us see them through
the eyes of the huge cast of characters that he
steers through the book. The most prominent
character of all is the metropolis in which the
action takes place. Last Man in Tower offers a
sharp portrait of the subcontinents most cosmopolitan city, and holds a mirror up to the
complexities and dualities of the many Indias
that it exemplifies.
Dualities and dichotomies fascinate Siddhartha Deb, too. In the introduction to his study
of contemporary India, Deb, who is also the
author of two novels to date, writes that he
found himself drawn to the opposites (visibility and invisibility, past and present, wealth
WorldMags
and poverty, quietism and activism) that are

so pronounced in this contradiction-riddled
country. I wanted to write about the lives of
individuals, he declares. [T]he urban and the
rural; the rich, the middle class and the poor;
men and women; the technology-driven work
that is seen as symptomatic of the new India,
as well as the exhausting manual labour that is
considered irrelevant.
Deb has set himself a daunting task, but one
of the reasons he succeeds is that he writes
about individuals, using their specific stories to
uncover general truths about a subject as vast
and apparently unmanageable as India. You
cant write other peoples lives unless you listen; Deb is an astute listener and has a great
eye for detail. Dividing the book into five
chapters, and using each chapter to narrate the
story of a single life (one that turns out to be
emblematic of a social, political or economic
issue), he takes us into the worlds and often
the minds of management gurus, software engineers, subsistence farmers, arms dealers, insurgents and waitresses. Deb shows how the
lives of these seemingly disparate individuals
connect and overlap.
Renewal and the remaking of the self are
motifs that run right through The Beautiful and
the Damned (theres a deliberate nod to F Scott
Fitzgerald in the title of the book as well as that
of the first chapter The Great Gatsby). They
are a good way of examining an India in flux
and of beginning to comprehend the enormous
changes it is undergoing.
Deb is especially persuasive when writing
about people on the margins the underprivileged or not-so-privileged. He has considerable sympathy for those who, like Adigas
Shah, are on a journey from small-town origins
and are fighting to make something of themselves in urban India, with its apparently limitless opportunities.
The last chapter of The Beautiful and the
Damned is the best. It tells the story of Esther,
a young woman from Indias neglected northeast who moves to Delhi and ekes out a living as
a waitress, first in a five-star hotel, and then in
an outrageously lavish and exclusive restaurant. Towards the end, worn down and disappointed but not entirely without hope, she cannot decide if she should return home or stay in
the big city.
It is that conflict between the security of the
familiar and the perils of reinvention the tension between the known and the unknown
that animates both these books. It is also the
story of one of the worlds most fascinating yet
enigmatic countries. l
Soumya Bhattacharya is the editor of the
Hindustan Times. His most recent book is
Why India Can Never Do Without Cricket
(Peakpublish, 9.99)
soumya_bhattacharya
THE NS RECOMMENDS
India fiction
Kim (1901)
Rudyard Kipling
The tale of an orphaned
Irish boy who grows up on
the streets of Lahore.
Train to Pakistan (1956)
Khushwant Singh
Singhs semi-autobiographical novel
chronicles the violent partition of India
and Pakistan in August 1947.
The Guide (1958)
R K Narayan
Set in the fictional town of Malgudi, this is
the story of a dissolute local tour guide who
is mistaken for a spiritual leader.
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Salman Rushdie
The authors most controversial work
arcs through time and dreams to deliver a
critique of migration and alienation.
The Thousand Faces of Night (1992)
Githa Hariharan
Hariharans debut novel looks at changing
roles of women in Indian culture.
A Suitable Boy (1993)
Vikram Seth
A 1,400-page account of a mothers quest
to find a husband for her daughter.
The God of Small Things (1997)
Arundhati Roy
Set in the Sixties, Roys Booker-winning
novel considers class and caste prejudices,
politics, love and betrayal.
The Everest Hotel: a Calendar (1998)
Allan Sealy
In the foothills of the Himalayas,
the decaying shell of a hotel shelters
four nuns struggling to nurse a group of
bizarre patients.
The Death of Vishnu (2001)
Manil Suri
Portrait of domestic politics and precarious
living in Mumbai.
The White Tiger (2008)
Aravind Adiga
The story of Balram Halwai, a boy from
a backwater village, depicting the clash
between lavishly wealthy people and the
immiserated poor in modern India. l
The Critics
Shylock on
the Strip
Shakespeare, transposed
to a glitzy Las Vegas.
Andrew Billen is impressed
The Merchant of Venice
RSC Stratford
There are broadly two approaches to directing
the classics. One is to strive for the definitive, to
burrow studiously into the text to discover a
core meaning and emerge with a determination
to illuminate it. The other is to jazz things up.
There will be meanings for the audience to take
away, but, caveat emptor, as many will be the
directors as the plays. For almost 50 years the
two paradigms were exemplified by the careers
of Peter Hall (definitive) and Jonathan Miller
(jazzy). Their successors today are, respectively, Michael Grandage, who did the recent
Donmar Lear, and Rupert Goold (Macbeth,
Lear), who at Stratford has now fashioned an
exciting, unauthorised Merchant of Venice.
Enter the Royal Shakespeare Companys revamped theatre and you enter the casino of a
Las Vegas hotel. On the stage are crapshooters,
showgirls and a jumpsuited Elvis impersonator, who, it transpires, is the money lender
Shylocks servant Launcelot Gobbo. His first
number, Viva Las Vegas, precedes any
Shakespearean verse. Amid the throng is Antonio, the merchant of the title, wistfully chatting
to his croupier in preparation for his opening
line, In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
The gimmicks continue once the play proper
opens. The cast speak American. Ducats become dollars. The open-the-box game that
Portia uses to divine the qualities of her suitors
becomes a television game show, Destiny. It is
presented by Portia, dressed as a blonde bimbo,
and aided by her maid, Nerissa, ditto but
brunette. The trial scene in which Shylock attempts to extract his pound of flesh from his
debtor Antonio is set in a meat packers warehouse. The Duke, who arrives for the trial
wearing a trench coat loosely hanging from his
padded shoulders, is take your pick a mafia
boss or police commissioner. If Shakespeares
Venice considered value synonymous with
money, Vegas serves well as its modern translation. Its Venice in neon.
Goolds adornments are all less meretricious
than they first look. They provide, for instance,
answers not only to why Antonio is so sad but
to why he is willing to lend Bassanio 3,000
ducats (three million dollars) to finance his
pursuit of Portia. Antonio, played with wondrous languor by Scott Handy, is gay and in love
WorldMags
with Bassanio. His generosity is a gesture of

love but also of despair. His life will end, he believes, if he fails to repay the debt and Shylock
gets his pound of flesh, and it will end too if
Bassanio gets his girl. Bassanio is, admittedly,
played rather dully by Richard Riddell, but he
has a good moment in Shylocks trial when he
realises all this.
Goold also imposes sense on the character
of Portia, played as the thinking mans Paris
Hilton by the spry Susannah Fielding. The play
makes us wonder how this giddy chancer
emerges in court as an advocate who can better
Shylock, not only in logic but in rhetoric. Goold
opts to keep her feckless. She pulls off her legal
coup almost by chance. She is a great gameplayer but, with a mans life at risk, a reckless
one. And the more she calls Shylock Jew, the
more we come to realise she is a nasty piece of
work. In this version, Bassanio turns away
from her. Our final image is of her dejected and
rejected missing one stiletto shoe, a good-time
girl whose good times are over.
The production, then, is not only glamorous,
it is also very clever. But can it get over the
plays central problem for post-Holocaust audiences: what to do with the anti-Semitic victimisation of the unpleasant Shylock? Goold
does not have to impose anything here, beyond
Patrick Stewart, whose triumph this night is as
great as his directors. Stewart in his scenes as
Shylock slows the plays pace down just as it
needs to be slowed. He allows us to examine
Shylock not as the caricature to which all the
other characters aspire, but as a man and father,
wronged, friendless, stuck on his dignity and
seduced by his doctrine of revenge.
Stewart, whether drily impersonating a cats
meow or fussily marking up Antonios chest
for his incision, gives us a Shylock who, almost
in a Langian way, has been driven mad by the
society he is in. The Venice-Vegas conceit
makes the point obvious, but I readily concede
it was probably Shakespeares point, too. l
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
Merchant of Vegas: Rupert Goolds showbiz production
Well read: Helen (Claire Foy) in The Night Watch
TELEVISION
Troubled
Waters
Rachel Cooke is
underwhelmed by a
long-awaited adaptation
The Night Watch
BBC2
Im not sure that I understand the BBCs recent
preference for the single film over the series.
Is it to do with money? Or is it increasingly
scared of audiences falling away over a period
of weeks? Either way, I think its a folly. The
BBCs long-awaited adaptation of Sarah Waterss The Night Watch (12 July, 9pm) a story
of love and loss, set in and after the London
Blitz was a case in point. It could have worked
brilliantly, if only the person who commissioned it had been brave enough to insist on
three hour-long episodes, one for each year that
the novel covers (1941, 1944, 1947).
Instead, they wimped out and plumped for
a single 90-minute film, with predictably underwhelming results. Paula Milne, its writer,
must have felt as if she had been asked to cram
a fur coat into a clutch bag.
It wasnt all bad. The atmosphere was superb:
paste sandwiches, antimacassars, knitted tea
cosies, horrible little moustaches, drawn on as
if by a mascara brush. Not to mention illegal
abortions, illicit sex and German bombs, all
beautifully done.
Period authenticity is still the province of the
BBC, as anyone who endured Downton Abbey
on ITV1 will know. I also relished the way that
excitement and a certain kind of camp poked
through all the dreariness and hardship.
Waters is slowly inserting lesbians into all
the times and places in which they were not
RSC (MERCHANT OF VENICE). BBC (NIGHT WATCH)
THEATRE
The Critics
previously allowed to exist. Its a joyous thing,
well caught by the cast and director, Richard
Laxton. I loved Julia Standing (Anna WilsonJones), the gay mystery writer, in her leather
overcoat and wide-legged trousers, and her exlover Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin), suddenly
coming alive as the Blitz licensed her to wear a
tin helmet and drive an ambulance.
It would be hard to knock any of the acting.
Jodie Whittaker was superb as Viv, a woman
whose love affair had failed to whither, as it
rightfully should have done, with the end of
the war. So, too, was Harry Treadaway as her
brother, Duncan, fresh out of the Scrubs. J J
Feild gave Robert Fraser, Duncans old cellmate, a delightfully smooth veneer. His face
shone like freshly mopped lino.
No, the problems were with structure, not
surface. The Night Watch, like Harold Pinters
Betrayal, works backwards the reader only
fully understands events and even characters
as he turns the final pages. However, unlike Betrayal, so short and snappy, The Night Watch is
a slow burn.
Milnes many concisions squeezed out motivation and character, with the result that the
story had a strangely soapy feel. I kept wondering why we were supposed to be interested
in this interconnected group and their painful
partner-swapping.
Was their sexual orientation alone supposed
to hold our interest? Its possible. If everyone
in the film had been straight, I doubt the film
would have been made.
The biggest problem was Duncans story.
Even in the novel, his crime it turns out that
he was sent to prison for his part in a bizarre,
failed suicide pact with a young man with
whom he was in love seems a little melodramatic (given the age, Waters could have successfully despatched him to the nick for a far
less grave offence).
Here, with so little to explain it and so little
in the way of build-up, it seemed baffling. A
young man barged into the kitchen of the
house Duncan shared with his father and Viv,
muttering something hysterical about his callup papers and how he wouldnt fight. Two
minutes later, or so it seemed, he had cheerily
slit his own throat. It was almost comical.
Nor was Duncans relationship with Horace
Mundy (a cameo from Kenneth Cranham), the
prison officer with whom he went to live after
his release, explored or even explained. How
had this come to pass? Was Mundy secretly
gay, too? Oh dear. It seems that we fans still
await the perfect Waters adaptation (of her five
novels, only The Little Stranger has yet to make
it to the small screen).
Im not holding my breath. It could be that
shes just too good for the telly: too subtle and
too clever by half. l
rachel_cooke
WorldMags
MUSIC
Dont wait till

the last night
Alexandra Coghlan talks
to Roger Wright,
director of the Proms
The BBC Proms
Royal Albert Hall, London SW7
You make changes to the Proms heritage at
your peril, Roger Wright observes, only halfjoking. With their 117-year history and cumulative live audience of over 300,000, the Proms
are a weighty legacy for Wright, who has been
director since 2007. His respect for tradition
has shaped his success as much as his innovation, and a sequence of record-breaking seasons
has reached ever-larger audiences. The things
that were true about the Proms when they were
founded in 1895 are true now, he says. The
context in which people listen might have
changed dramatically, but the core principles of
presenting the highest-quality music to the
largest possible audience, of giving listeners not
only what they know but also new and unfamiliar works, have remained consistent.
Among this years less familiar works is
Havergal Brians Symphony No 1, The Gothic,
which makes its Proms debut on the opening
weekend. Demanding around 1,000 performers, it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as
largest symphony. Programming such a work
is a bold, if risky, gesture. Brian is a composer
whom a lot of people might dismiss, Wright
tells me, but when you talk to them, you discover its all based on second-hand opinion.
I think its important to give audiences the opportunity to experience such pieces directly.
What of those who are intimidated by obscure, 20th-century repertoire? A lot of people who like the sound of classical music but
dont know their way around it find their way
in through soundtracks, so the film music Prom
might appeal. Tchaikovskys Swan Lake with
the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and [Valery]
Gergiev could also be good for a first-timer.
For many, including Wright as a child, the
first encounter with the Proms is its last night.
Wright is keen for this national celebration to
remain an integrated part of the festival. Its
important that the last night is the last night of
something, not just an isolated event. This year,
we have works by Bartk, Wagner and Liszt all
reflections of music heard earlier in the season.
The twist of having Lang Lang performing over
at Proms in the Park as well as in the Royal Albert Hall is a way of recognising the broad
church that the Proms have become. l
From 15 July to 10 September
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
In concert
With around 90 concerts

on offer over the
eight-week season, the
2011 Proms arent short
on highlights. Outdoing
last years Symphony of
a Thousand for sheer bulk is the 20thcentury British composer Havergal Brians
Symphony No 1, The Gothic (Prom 4).
This will be the best, if not the only,
opportunity in a lifetime to hear the
choral behemoth, which was abandoned
in the archives for years.
A more mainstream highlight comes
courtesy of the Gabrieli Consort and
Players (Prom 58), whose performance
of the Mendelssohn favourite Elijah with
five other choral groups features a starry
line-up of home-grown soloists.
King among this years visiting
orchestras is the Israel Philharmonic
(Prom 62). The chance to hear its
unparalleled string section accompanying
Gil Shaham on Bruchs Violin Concerto
No 1 should not be missed. Unusual
orchestral programming from Oliver
Knussen and the BBC Symphony
Orchestra (Prom 19) pairs 20th-century
classics with rarities from Castiglioni and
Honegger, and the lighter side of things
will be showcased by John Wilson and his
orchestra (Prom 59), whose celebration of
Hollywoods golden age has become a
yearly fixture.
For those who prefer the intimacy of
chamber music, Nigel Kennedys late-night
Prom (Prom 31) offers a chance to hear this
provocative musician performing the most
stripped-back of repertoire Bachs music
for solo violin.
Less risky but no less stylish, a
programme of French baroque works from
Les Talens Lyriques, masters of the genre
(Proms Chamber Music 3), promises the
perfect lunchtime concert.
Reinstating a Proms tradition, the
popular composer concerts return this
year with two evenings of Brahms from
Bernard Haitink and the Chamber
Orchestra of Europe (Proms 47 and 49).
Tradition also gets a contemporary twist in
the last night (Prom 74), which opens with
a new commission from Peter Maxwell
Davies and will be directed by the youngest
conductor of the event since Henry Wood
English National Operas musical director,
Edward Gardner. l
Alexandra Coghlan
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The Critics
FILM
Crack open
the Bolly
Ryan Gilbey reviews

the latest crop of
Indian blockbusters
Murder 2 (15)
dir: Mohit Suri
Bbuddah . . . Hoga Tera Baap (15)
dir: Puri Jagannadh
Anglocentric audiences may be surprised to
learn that not everyone considers the final
Harry Potter to be the big sequel of the month.
Sitting down to watch the Bollywood thriller
Murder 2, I was concerned that I hadnt seen the
2004 original, Murder, but then theres no evidence that the film-makers have either. Despite sharing a producer and a star, Murder 2 is
not strictly a sequel at all. While Murder was inspired by the US romantic drama Unfaithful
(2002), the follow-up is a serial-killer movie
with erotic pretensions. Theres every chance
that Murder 3, should it arrive, will be a police
procedural set on Mars, or a western on ice.
The one returning actor from Murder, Emraan Hashmi, doesnt even play the same character. This time, hes Arjun, an ex-cop who
tracks down missing prostitutes in Goa while
somehow managing to keep his stubble exactly
the same length over a period of several weeks.
Arjun is a troubled sort. He renounced God
following a run of suicides in his family and
now drives around in a convertible scowling
indiscriminately. He thinks hes stumbled on
a human trafficking case but the kidnapped
women are in fact being butchered by Dheeraj
(Prashant Narayanan), who has clearly been
studying The Silence of the Lambs for a serial
killing/transvestism masterclass. Not that this
diminishes his clammy menace. Sometimes he
even sings to his victims, crooning: It will be
such fun when I sever you. As a lyricist, hes
no Jimmy Webb.
Its less engrossing watching the baby-faced
Hashmi trying to appear vexed or tormented;
in what should be his darkest hour, he suggests
Janette Krankie weathering a migraine. But
then Arjun is a character of unplayable contradictions. Were his interests to be listed in Whos
Who, they would include having meaningless
sex, smashing beer bottles in peoples faces and
giving wads of money to nuns and orphans. If
only he could commit to Priya (Jacqueline Fernandez), a model whose hair and clothes billow
seductively at all times, even when shes in a
room with no visible ventilation. I strongly suspect she is being stalked by a fan.
WorldMags
Jacqueline Fernandez and Emraan Hashmi in Murder 2
Such customary Bollywood daftness notwithstanding, Murder 2 is a glossy, confident

thriller executed with panache. While it borrows liberally from every serial killer movie
from Tightrope to Seven, its mood of hell-forleather excess quickly becomes intoxicating.
Viewers accustomed to Hollywoods formulaic take on the same sort of material are in for
a treat, even if they are thrown by the presence
of an interval (a Bollywood convention), or by
the dubious music-video coda featuring Arjun
and Priya cavorting in the killers boudoir.
Genre mash-ups, a staple of Bollywood,
dont come much brasher than Bbuddah. . . Hoga
Tera Baap. It begins as a gritty action movie,
with a bomb blast in a Mumbai thoroughfare.
The gang lord responsible takes umbrage at being described as a disease by the young assistant police commissioner, Karan (Sonu Sood),
and swears to bring him down. Enter stage left,

in a white safari suit and frosted goatee, the ageing assassin Vijju (Amitabh Bachchan).
For a legendary hit man, Vijju isnt in much
of a hurry to kill Karan, but then perhaps his job
description refers to his habit of hitting on
every woman he sees. Other pastimes include
intimidating anyone who mentions his age and
indulging in dandyish costume changes so frequent they make Lady Gaga look like a sweatpants slob. Vijju can leave the house in floral
shirt, purple scarf, riding boots and jeans with a
tiger motif, only to arrive at a coffee shop in an
entirely different ensemble. He can be summed
up as Steven Seagal wrestling Warren Beatty in
the body of Donald Sinden.
The movie mirrors that DNA. No sooner
have the bomb victims been stretchered away
than we are in the realm of Austin Powers-style
comedy, with women young and old hurling
themselves at this unlikely swinger. A Sophoclean tinge is introduced when one potential
conquest discovers that Vijju courted her
mother, leading to concerns that her new love
may also be her long-lost father. This foreshadows a final change of genres, leading Vijju to repent his caddish ways, if not his wardrobe.
Some of the films resonances must be lost on
those of us unfamiliar with the work and reputation of Bachchan, but Bbuddah . . . Hoga Terra
Baap remains pleasingly nutty. Its also blessed
with one stand-out sequence in which a curmudgeonly registrar, averse to sanctioning any
marriage that has not been arranged, is presented with the evidence of all the love unions
he has waved through: a busload of chirruping
children, each one named in his honour. l
newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital
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WorldMags
The Critics
RADIO
Summer
waves
Its July, so all the usual
presenters are taking it
easy, writes Antonia Quirke
Various programmes
Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 4 Extra, 6 Music
Its July and the most commonly used phrase
on the radio (In Our Time, Start the Week, All in
the Mind) is well be back in September!, conjuring an image of the presenter quitting the
studio and following the smell of garlic and
herbs to a trestle table where waiters with Shelley-length hair immediately rush up and remove a waiting bottle of Pouilly-Fuiss from an
ice bucket. The rest of us are left with Cheap
Summer Radio, ie a higher-than-usual quotient of contributors talking about themselves.
On Sunday, for example, the airwaves were
given over completely to various personalities
examining minutely their likes and dislikes
in effect going through their iPods and jottings
without the excuse of having an obvious mental breakdown (hard to discern in London,
granted) or being someone to whom we are
making love behind closed shutters. Steve
Davis, for example, was simply handed his
own programme (Sunday Service, 10 July,
4pm, 6 Music) to share his massive northern
soul and progressive rock collection live with
the nation. Michael Heseltine ruminated on
his life in sound through the BBC archives,
reliving old speeches and moments of pain
(Meeting Myself Coming Back, 8pm, 9 July,
Radio 4).
On Private Passions (12pm, 10 July, Radio 3),
Andrew Graham-Dixon intoned about his
youth and Keith Jarrett, while George Michael
turned up on Desert Island Discs Revisited (11
July, 1am, Radio 4 Extra): I genuinely believe
the purpose of what I do is a positive one.
(Bravo, George! Let them have it!) On 6 Music
Sam Taylor-Wood shared her musical tastes
and anecdotes on A Month of Sundays (10 July,
12pm), while on 6 Mix DJ and cultural icon
Boy George shared again his music tips with
Dave Pearce (10 July, 8pm).
At such times particularly as one imagines
Marr and Melvyn ordering grilled sole as their
bikinied companions suck pencils and flick
lazily through a Sothebys catalogue only two
things are cheering. Inhaling Freon from a baggie, and God. Sunday Worship. Sermons about
crops and the Rev Gillean Maclean (so simpatico) standing on a cliff in Arran looking quietly out to sea. Now this, one feels the medium
of radio cry, this I am cut out for. l
WorldMags
DOWN AND OUT IN LONDON
I can hear the sirens calling me from W1

Nicholas Lezard
I wake early in the summer: the curtain does

not fully go across the bedroom window
and the traffic in W1, which I get to hear a
lot of because I like to sleep with the window
open, starts by around 6am. There are also
the seagulls, who have wearied of the sea
and now wheel and caw miles inland where
I thought they had no business. They seem
alien and more invasive when in London
and I wish I hadnt shown the children The
Birds the other week. Not for their sake; for
mine. (The films slow build-up was
beginning to oppress the youngest one and
then he saw the man in his pyjamas with his
eyes pecked out. Cool, he said, and now
lists it as one of his favourites.)
But thats not the main gripe. The
worst part about living in W1 is the sirens. I
remember, many years ago, when I first went
to New York: the police cars really did make
that sound! They didnt go nee-nar neenar like our own tinpot, unarmed police.
(New Yorkers also had push-button phones
and air-conditioning, the novelty of each of
which makes it possible to date me to mid20th-century vintage.) Nowadays, though, I
wonder whether it might not be a good idea
to return to a simpler, gentler age when, if
you wanted to let the Lavender Hill Mob
know you were after them, you blew your
whistles and rang a little bell on the roof. As
I lie awake one morning at about 6.30,
trembling slightly at the thought of another
day, already a bit of a nervous wreck, a siren
goes off right beneath my window. I am
two floors up, but this feels really loud,
as if I have a police car in bed with me.
Ambulance attack
It might not have been a police car.
I have come to notice the subtle
differences between the various
sirens of the emergency services,
and have been surprised to note
that whereas a police car tends to
start off ever so slightly more
gradually, with a waa sound,
those new ambulances, which
look as though they are carrying
bullion rather than people, have a
much more aggressive blast,
beginning with a consonantal
BWAA, which the other morning
made me jump out of my skin and is
probably going to kill me one day. I
wonder if the ambulance drivers know
that on their dashboards they have the
power to leave a trail of heart-attack victims

in their wake. You know what? I suspect they
do and they consider it great sport.
I am beginning to ask myself if this living
in the middle of town is all its cracked up to
be. Its all very well having a W1 address on
the cheap. But the thing about W1 is that if
you go bleating to the Old Bill about them
firing up their blues and twos right next to
you at sparrow-fart, they will almost
certainly tell you, even if you are standing in
front of them in your nightdress, clutching
your teddy bear and sleepily rubbing your
eyes, that this is not a residential district.
I dearly would love to remove myself to the
countryside for a bit a couple of weeks, just
long enough to get bored of it but you cant
go to the countryside on your own because
people only go to the countryside on their
own to kill themselves, and the temptation
is strong enough in London as it is. (Not that
I need make any effort in that direction, if
the strange sensation coming from the righthand parietal lobe is what I think it is.)
Wake-up call
This is just part of the larger malaise:
profound dissatisfaction with my own
condition. Living like this is crazy, I say to
myself, and things arent improved when
I read an article by Zoe Williams which says,
among other things, that communal living
in mature adulthood is incredibly eccentric,
somewhere between keeping llamas and
being polyamorous. I could qualify this:
I am the only mature adult in the Hovel
Im certainly the only one who knows how
to empty the bin but then living with two
women whose ages dont even add up to
mine and who arent related to me isnt the
most normal thing in the world. I have
always taken a quiet pleasure in living at
right-angles to the rest of society, but I am
beginning to think that now is the time
to embrace conventionality.
Too late though for that, and I resign
myself to turning into a slimmer, more
heterosexual but just as unfulfilled Uncle
Monty, cursing his native land: we live in
a country of rains, where royalty comes in
gangs. And do you know how old Richard
Griffiths was when Withnail and I was
released? Forty. Eight years younger than
me. Theres a wake-up call for you. l
Next week: Mark Watson
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Cricket has devoted followers, but dont call it a religion

Jon Bernstein
In Why India Can Never

Do Without Cricket, a love
letter to both the game and
his national team, Soumya
Bhattacharya writes: We have
invested our emotions, our
passions, our frenzy, our whole
lives in following this side. It is,
he says, like a giant corporation:
How its stocks rise and fall has
a bearing on our lives.
Bhattacharya, the
fortysomething editor of the
Hindustan Times, is speaking
not just for fans of the Indian
cricket team, nor simply fans of
cricket, but for the fan. Full stop.
And for a column which bears
that name, this is surely a
moment for reflection. But not
too long a pause, because India is
coming the team and its fans.
After the briefest of warm-ups
(in Taunton), the squad heads
for Lords on 21 July for the first
of four Tests, with five one-day
internationals and a Twenty20
bash-a-thon thrown in for good
measure in the weeks following.
This India team is at the
top of the International Cricket
Council Test rankings and has
just won the 50-overs World
Cup. Its star players Sachin
Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag,
Mahendra Singh Dhoni
(the captain) and Zaheer Khan

all ducked out of the recent tour to
the Caribbean in order to be fit
and ready for the English summer.
England, meanwhile, are a
single point below South Africa
who are in second place in those
Test rankings after a winter tour
in which they thrashed Australia
(now in fifth place, which I
mention only to be petty). Not for
nothing has Cricinfo, the website
for the statistically obsessed,
declared this the biggest summer
since Ashes 2005.
Saffron army
England v India has not always
been about first team against
second(-ish) but it has always
been a big occasion. This is
down to the away fans. They
come in great numbers,
with families often
occupying an entire row
of seats. Their cool bags
tend to be packed with
something more enticing
than a Ginsters and a
six-pack of mini Melton
Mowbrays and a most
welcome quirk, this
they also come armed
with marker pens
and scrap paper for an
impromptu banner or three.
Certainly, the quality of this

makeshift signage is variable:
Shane be Warned, scrawled
on a large piece of cardboard
during Indias Super Six clash
with Warnes Australia during
the 1999 World Cup, sticks in the
memory as an example of the
weak punning that characterises
many of these messages. But in
an age of corporatised cricket (for
which the Indian rupee is more
responsible than the British
pound or the Australian dollar),
its a welcome nod to amateurism.
This is not a Barmy Army (the
saffron army?), a touring troupe
with a newly minted songbook
that showers largesse on the local
economy. Rather, this is, in the
main, a resident diaspora failing
the Tebbit test and caring not one
jot. (Only with the emergence of
an enlarged, wealthy middle class
on the subcontinent has
Indian cricket tourism
become a possibility.)
Expect large crowds at
Lords, Trent Bridge,
Edgbaston and the Oval,
each of which is in easy
reach of sizeable
immigrant communities.
That there are only four
Tests this summer will
offer more evidence, for
those seeking it, that the fiveday game is in deep decline.

Limited-overs cricket is the only
commercially viable form of the
game. Or so they say.
It is true that Test matches
in India rarely sell out, but
that doesnt equate with a lack
of interest, nor with a lack of
commercial viability. Test
matches continue to pull in
television viewing figures in
India that compare favourably
with that other cultural
phenomenon, the soap opera.
And consider this: on the final
day of the Nagpur Test between
India and Australia in 2008,
Cricinfo recorded 1.8 million
unique users of the site, almost
all checking on the progress
of the match. In England, the
grounds will be packed.
So expect plenty of passion
over the next two and a half
months. Just dont call cricket
Indias new religion. As
Bhattacharya notes: Religion
has scarred India more deeply
than anything else. Cricket is
the balm that heals. Cricket
is our anti-religion, our most
precious, deeply secular
institution. Amen to that. l
jon_bernstein
GETTY IMAGES (MAHENDRA SINGH DHONI)
J and B by HAM
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No 4184
CAPTION OF THE WEEK
Set by Imogen Forster

A judge threw out a case of assault
by a sausage during a food fight
as compromising the dignity of
his court even though chucking the
item caused retinal bleeding and
eye damage. We asked for attacks
by other unusual weapons that
would invite a similar response.
This weeks winners
Not bad. A somewhat desultory
trickle of entries presumably
Wimbledon and holidays in the
Caribbean were just too diverting
and time-consuming to leave
much time over for the Weekend
Competition. An hon mensh goes
to Peter Regan for his malicious
infliction of E coli infection from
mushy peas masquerading as
guacamole. The winners can have
25 each, with the Tesco vouchers
for extra merit going, in addition,
to Ian Birchall.
New Statesman
Oswald Hawes left court a free
man today, having been cleared
of assaulting Sir Jasper Toryman
with a copy of the New Statesman.
It was claimed Sir Jasper sustained
injuries to the brain, causing him
to lurch precariously to the left, to
the dismay of his loyal supporters.
The magazine was open at the
competitions page, said his wife,
and the impact affected his sleep
patterns. At night, obsessively
intoning 4183, 4184, it appeared
he was counting sheep, but when
he murmured Leonora . . .
I was surprised because the
name hadnt emerged in his
superinjunction application.
The Judge suggested that since
the assault, with or without
additional Tesco coupons, Sir
Jasper and his politics were in
perfect health, and urged the
CPS to drop the case.
Sylvia Fairley
BBC contract
Following discovery of Beckers
unconscious body, police
interviewed 15 million suspects
before finding their man. Among
many possible motives, it was
thought Beckers profoundly
WorldMags
Was it an unholy row when a vicar had a run-in with an anti-Murdoch protester?
WINNER 04/07
David Cameron to Liam Fox:
Im not sure who he is. Just
smile and ignore him hes
clearly very drunk.
(Jacqui Weatherburn)
Runner-up
Cameron to Fox: I think its all
those deep-fried Mars Bars.
(Barry Baldwin)
Max 20 words by 22 July on a postcard, please, or email to:
comp@newstatesman.co.uk
controversial TV analysis (The

crowd watches!; Murray
serves!, Two games all, it cant
get much closer than that!,
Nadals girlfriend!) may have
annoyed some purists. The note
beside the body: Becker has
a microphone shoved down his
throat! Becker has a tennis racket
lodged in his cerebellum: it cant
get much closer than that . . . !
leant credence to this hypothesis.
The primary cause of his losing
consciousness, however, was due
to loss of blood from a paper cut
to the jugular vein, the paper in
question being an extension to
Beckers contract until 2015.
The defendant, a BBC employee,
was found not guilty, on the
grounds that he acted in the
national interest.
David Silverman
iPad
Judge Knott today threw out
the case against the Premiership
footballer Dean Fick, who was
alleged to have wounded a
persistent photographer by
ramming an iPad down his gullet.
Since my dictionary does not
define an iPad and no one has
been able satisfactorily to explain
its nature to me, I am forced to
conclude that it does not exist
and can therefore hardly have
been used as a weapon, Judge
Knott ruled.
Knott is known for earlier,
similar rulings, denying the
existence of eBay, Lady Gaga and
Clackmannanshires Muslims,
and the Lord Chancellor has
demanded a list of things he does
not recognise. Knott has merely
cited the Rumsfeld defence,
In association with
I dont know what I dont

know. At the post-trial press
conference, a smirking Dean Fick
declared: Result!
Adrian Fry
Labours plans
A serious incident took place
during yesterdays strikes. Mr
E Miliband, who described
himself as a hard-working
parent, attempted to force his
way through a picket line outside
a local school. When a striking
teacher commented, Oh dear!
Thats not very nice, Mr
Miliband declared such language
was totally unacceptable. It is
alleged that he then struck the
picket with a rolled-up copy of
Labours plans for fighting
government spending cuts,
causing severe bruising. He was
arrested and accused of assault.
However, after several senior
members of the Labour Party had
testified that the assault could not
have taken place since no such
document existed, all charges
were dropped.
Ian Birchall
Spectator
A man who gashed anothers face
with a rolled-up copy of the
Spectator was cleared of common
assault charges on the grounds
that his action constituted
legitimate political debate. The
plaintiff was openly reading a
copy of the New Statesman at
the time. This was a clear case of
provocation of a right-thinking
citizen. Had the accused simply
thrown up, instead of discharging
his own magazine with what
witnesses describe as a good
bowling action, there might
have been a case of fouling the
public highway.
Barry Baldwin
The next challenge
No 4187 Set by Leonora Casement
You have been invited to a party,
an event to which you have been
looking forward for weeks. But
on entering the house/room, you
overhear a sentence that makes
you wish profoundly that you had
never come. What is it? The date
is some time in 2010 or 2011.
Max ten attempts by 28 July
comp@newstatesman.co.uk
GETTY IMAGES
NS COMPETITION
Back Pages
THE NS CROSSWORD BY OTTERDEN
Eleven solutions marked * form
part of a sequence (the two in the
same series only having an indirect
definition). The appropriate grid
entry is either the previous or the next
item in the progression. Remaining
clues are normal.
Across
1 *Premier was awfully annoyed
then (7,4)
9 Fish cake (7)
10 Forecasts gloomy over centre part
of bridge (3-4)
11 Novel beginnings (5)
12 South Essex man is a nature
eccentric (9)
14 *Enough defamatory rubbish after
the opera (3, 6, 2, 3, 5)
16 Quantity of herring from Manx
capital to get less (5)
17 *Labour to set aside ideological
limitations (4)
18 *Rugby player has surreptitious
swift beer (3, 4)
19 *Film left rude bit out with socalled fat lady (11 plus a numeral)
23 Two-directional locator (5)
25 *Daisy-like flower without centre
element (6)
26 *Presidents office takes issue (7)
27 *Album showing crossover from
bad boy era (5,4)
Down
1 Excessive reviewer friend acted
over censoriously (15)
2 *Heard to visit Ireland for the
mountains (6)
3 Judges test place cutbacks (9)
4 Joint family tree otherwise not
leafy (5)
5 *Crosspatch goes to earth (5)
6 *Paris Hilton for example is
allowed back after half an hour (5)
7 High School performers need a
plain zip redesigned (9)
8 Fence or inner net foreign policy
not applied in Libya (3-12)
13 Conifer with top removed is much
neater (7)
15 Laid-back European short story as
related locally (9)
16 Setters ex-bird holds currency
notes (9)
20 Im entertained by expert in the
leading role (5)
21 Past experiences of filling in
overtime sheets (5)
22 Freely available drink introduced
at party (2,3)
24 Policeman getting very warm in
Indian garment (5)
10
9
11
11
12
13
13
14
15
16
16
17
17
18
21
19
18
23
20
21
22
23
24
26
25
26
27
Answers to crossword of 11 July 2011
Across 7) Charlotte 8) Benny 10) Kathleen 11) Adrian 12) Eric 13) Ebenezer 15) Barbara
17) Estelle 20) Jennifer 22) Mary 25) Stuart 26) Winifred 27) Annie 28) Nathaniel
Down 1) Wheat 2) Arthur 3) Model car 4) Stanley 5) Retrieve 6) Annabelle 9) Jane
14) Valentine 16) Benjamin 18) Samantha 19) Crow-bar 21) Fate 23) Refine 24) Peter
l This weeks solutions will be published

in the next issue of the NS
SUBSCRIBER OF THE WEEK
THE RETURNING OFFICER
Ashley Hassell
Brothers III
What do you do?

Leasehold
management
officer, housing
association.
Where do
you live?
Romford, Essex.
Do you vote?
Yes.
How long have you been
a subscriber?
Eighteen months.
What made you start?
A pay increase that made
it affordable.
What pages do you flick to first?
Will Self, then Rafael Behr.
How do you read yours?
Struggling to concentrate in
NS Puzzle answers
Billericay Library during endless

mother and toddler singalongs.
What would you like to see
more of in the NS?
More contemporary music
comment. Though not the xx.
Whos your favourite
NS blogger?
David Blanchflower.
Who would you put on the
cover of the NS?
Andrew Rosindell and Buster,
his silly little dog.
Which political figure
would you least like to be
stuck in a lift with?
Andrew Rosindell. For
obvious reasons.
The New Statesman is . . .
A smashing little mag! l
What does it mean? BOSCAGE b) ERINACEOUS a) Whats the connection a) All wrote books
with fruit in the title (A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, The Pumpkin Eater, James and
the Giant Peach)
WorldMags
In the mid-18th century,

Woodstock was a pocket borough
of the Duke of Marlborough. The
5th Duke fell out with his son, the
Marquess of Blandford, and in the
1738 election stood the marquesss
brother Sir John Churchill against
him. The Tory marquess beat his
Whig brother by 160 votes to 155.
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed was
the most famous philologist of his
day, being the first to identify the
connections between Sanskrit,
Latin and modern languages. He
THE NS PUZZLE
What does it mean?
BOSCAGE is a) the practice
of transferring footballers freely
within the EU; b) a densely
foliaged area; c) the residue
left after fermenting stone fruit;
d) a condition where one eye is
out of true
served as MP for Lymington

(1790-95) but this career was cut
short by his enthusiasm for the
self-proclaimed messiah Richard
Brothers, whom he declared the
nephew of the Almighty.
Frank Tilsleys 1954 novel
Brother Nap concerns two
brothers, Nap and Ted Ellis, both
Labour MPs. Nap beats Ted for
vice-chairman of the Society of
Industrial Democracy, at their
big society conference, and
though they are reconciled, their
attempts to help each other in
politics and life end in political
defeat and personal tragedy. l
Stephen Brasher
ERINACEOUS is a) hedgehoglike; b) plants requiring an acid
soil; c) having a love for Irish
history and culture; d) one
who teaches strictly
Whats the connection?
Anthony Burgess, John
Steinbeck, Penelope Mortimer,
Roald Dahl
Otterden
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Will Self | Real Meals
Can you stomach the

all-you-can-eat buffet?
I was meeting up with someone I worked with,
ooh, getting on for 20 years ago and whom I
hadnt seen for pushing 15. I was coming from
Manchester; she from Soho, London. We compromised on Drummond Street, that row of
ethnic eateries parallel to Euston Road. Time
was when you could eat a vegetarian thali here,
then limp-fart along to the end of the road and
buy an ex-Red Army greatcoat at Laurence Corner, a truly legendary army surplus store so
legendary that, when I ran into Paul McCartney
at a party once and the subject of Laurence Corner came up, he told me that hed bought his first
double bass there back in the 1960s.
Veg out
I suggested that we eat at the Diwana BhelPoori House for sentimental reasons but
this was pretty much a lie, my associations
with this south Indian vegetarian restaurant
being largely negative. I once ate there before
boarding the Deerstalker Express to Inverness,
and during the night developed septicaemia
of such virulence that, when I got to the hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney, the following day,
my infected hand was the size of a nan bread
and chilli-hot streaks of sepsis were shooting up my arm. Im not saying that this
had anything to do with the Diwana,
which has always struck me as perfectly
hygienic and has decor not dissimilar to that of a sauna in a
Swedish health spa, but you
know how the mind is,
always associating
ideas willy-nilly
for day after
day; frankly, I
sometimes think that it might be a relief if the

sun didnt rise tomorrow.
No, I wanted to eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori
House because I happened to know that, at
lunchtime, it puts on one of the most curious
culinary spectacles known to humankind: the
all-you-can-eat buffet. Whoever first hit on
the idea of offering unlimited food for a fixed
price was some kind of crazed genius, because
while you might think that this would be an incitement to gluttony, Im pretty damn certain
the opposite is the case.
A fixed amount of food for a predetermined
sum introduces a creeping barrage of anxiety
from menu choice through portion size and on
inexorably to laddition that can only be assuaged by stuffing your face (or, in modern
parlance, comfort eating). The all-you-caneat concept, on the other hand, relieves the
diner of her cares, allowing her appetite to
shrink to its natural size.
Yes, Id bet the farm or, at least, a Birds Eye
Traditional Chicken Dinner that all-you-caneat buffets put out markedly less food per
diner than the menu-mongers. Granted, my
empirical sample is only, um, me and Im
not so much a lady-who-lunches as a girl
who favours a Ryvita smeared with
cottage cheese come noon. Indeed,
apart from strategic meetings such
as encountering someone I
havent broken bread with
since the Major premiership Ive long since
dispensed with
the meal altogether.
So, there
I was, standing in the Diwana Bhel-Poori

House, waiting for my quondam colleague and
watching while happy office grafters piled
their aluminium salvers high with rice, chapattis, assorted vegetable curries, fruit, chutneys
and so on, but absolutely appalled. A sign
tacked above the buffet read: Please use one
plate per person, eat as much as U like. When
it comes to being non-U, substituting U for
you is enough to put anyone off their shoots
and leaves. Not that I needed any putting off:
the sight of all that tasty nosh, mine for a mere
eight smackers, utterly nauseated me.
What would happen if I were to eat all I
could? In Marco Ferreris 1973 masterpiece, La
Grande Bouffe, four dyspeptic gourmands
gather in a country villa with the express intention of doing just that, their ultimate aim being
death by buffet. The film won the critics award
at that years Cannes festival fitting when you
consider that, taken as a whole, film critics have
to be the professional group whose eyes are
manifestly bigger than their intellects.
Memory full
When my lunch partner finally pitched up, I
mentioned none of this to her and went about
the business of eating lunch as if it were second
nature to me indeed, so relaxed was I that I
ended up consuming a normal-sized meal. After
we parted, I limp-farted to the end of the road
and stood there staring melancholically at the
corner where Laurences used to be.
I suppose the moral of this tale is that, in the
all-you-can-eat buffet of life, petites madeleines
are always for dessert. l
Next week: Madness of Crowds
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Lancashire, 9 September 1931
Friends in the north
Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian nationalist movement, is given a tour of cotton mills in Lancashire while visiting England to attend a conference called by the
British government to discuss home rule for India. The country declared independence on 15 August 1947; Gandhi was assassinated the following year.
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was exposed when a police officer called the

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Hoodwinked
A man who falsely claimed that a mugger
wearing a hooded top, with a scarf around
his face, had stolen his mobile phone and
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No stone unturned
Officers are linking three crimes that took
place between the evening of Monday 9 May
and the morning of Tuesday 10 May. A concrete
sundial was stolen from a front garden in
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taken from a front garden at another address
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North safer neighbourhood team.
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