No clunkers
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
May 08, 2005

Here are four volumes that `deserved more attention than they received when they were published'.

EVEN for a reader so avid that he rushes to share his reading with the world, I have to confess that there are some books I have read and enjoyed over the last few years that I have failed to describe in this column.

Sometimes my reticence has been objectively warranted; even the most discriminating of readers occasionally finds himself immersed in a volume that, for all its promise, turns out to be a real clunker. On the other hand, sometimes the only reason for my silence was that something else came up worth ventilating in this space, and by the time I got around to contemplating the book in question it no longer seemed so topical. As a reader, though, I am increasingly convinced that topicality is an exaggerated virtue. How can it be that the only books deemed worth writing about are new ones? Almost by definition, a work that endures has more lasting value than an ephemeral bestseller that everyone speaks about and most people promptly forget.

National security

High on my list of such books are two by a retired Admiral who is amongst India's finest strategic thinkers — Verghese Koithara. I first met Koithara nearly a quarter of a century ago when he was India's military attaché in Singapore, and I was struck by his remarkable mind, unusual for a military man in being both incisive and wide-ranging. This was a man who could converse with equal felicity about intermediate-range ballistic missiles and Shobha Dé's latest column (and have refreshingly new insights to offer on both). In his 1999 masterpiece Society, State and Security (Sage Publishing), Verghese Koithara makes a case for seeing India's national security not only in conventional defence terms but as a function of "human security" — the challenge for our society of ensuring the economic, social, political and environmental well-being of our people through an effective national security strategy. It is a magisterial work, synthesising a vast array of material with remarkable clarity and rigour of analysis. Koithara's book is already considered a classic by experts in the field but remains largely unknown to general readers. This is a pity, because, for all its conceptual ambition, it has the great virtue of being simply and accessibly written.

V.K. Madhavan Kutty PHOTO: S.MAHINSHA

So does his newer work, Crafting Peace in Kashmir, published by Sage in 2004, which makes the case for a peaceful settlement of that vexed dispute in a way that takes account not only of the preferences of the Governments concerned but of the needs of the affected Kashmiri people. Though his subtitle ("Through a Realist Lens") seems to lay claim to the hard-headedness without which no book on Kashmir will be taken seriously by policy-makers, what is striking about the book is Koithara's detailed review of experiences in comparable conflicts elsewhere — Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and Israel-Palestine. Once again the analysis is infused with a humane awareness of the need for "human security" to be a vital component of our thinking about national security

The Iraq conflict

Another former Government official who produced a remarkable book is K.P. Fabian, who retired a few years ago as India's Ambassador in Italy. His The Commonsense on the War on Iraq — a dense, intelligently written, 480-page book — came out in record time from Somaiya Publishers in 2003, within months of the war it sought to criticise. Fabian is a man of wide learning and his extensively-researched volume includes references to the Emperor Theodosius and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as transcripts of Security Council meetings and the full text of the Iraq Liberation Act. Though it failed to attract the attention of reviewers and readers at the time, Fabian's volume remains an impressive source-book on the issues surrounding the war in Iraq, even for those who may not agree with the author's thesis.

Life in a Kerala village

With the news of the demise of that great Palakkad novelist O.V. Vijayan still fresh in my mind, I recalled V.K. Madhavan Kutty's The Village Before Time, a delightful memoir of an eminent journalist's upbringing in a Palakkad village, published by IndiaInk in 2000. Simply written (the book has been ably translated from the original Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty), its episodic structure permits the unfolding of a series of richly evocative vignettes about village life in a Kerala still largely untouched by modernisation, let alone globalisation. Madhavan Kutty is a well-known correspondent for the Mathrubhoomi and Asianet, a man who has rubbed shoulders with the powers-that-be for decades, but here he shows us a different side of himself — the keen observer of the traits and foibles of ordinary human beings, rendered all the more remarkable for their ordinariness.

Verghese Kothiara PHOTO: R.V. MOORTHY

These are four volumes that deserved more attention than they received when they were published. But with good books as with good deeds, it is never too late.