HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is an extraordinarily honest memoir by politician Mani Shankar Aiyar, a volume that examines the actions of the judiciary and its relationship with the government, and a book of poems that brings to life the struggles and accomplishments of India’s first female physician
A career of great highs and lows
Of India’s civil servants, Mani Shankar Aiyar may have arguably had one of the most colourful careers. Known for his lacerating wit and many indiscretions, with a career that has seen great highs and lows, he has been a true maverick.
In this extraordinarily honest memoir, he tells the story of his first 50 years – from his childhood at Dehradun where he was raised by his feisty widowed mother to nearly becoming the president of the Cambridge Union, to working as a young diplomat who strengthened Indo-Pak ties by brilliantly managing India’s first consulate general in Karachi and then going on to work closely with Rajiv Gandhi in the PMO.
Candid, funny and thoughtful, Aiyar writes sparklingly about his childhood and college days, of his parents’ troubled marriage and his beloved youngest brother’s suicide, and insightfully about the countries he served in – observing that the net level of freedom in both India and Pakistan were about the same because Zia’s dictatorship was as inefficient as India’s democracy, and that Saddam Hussein’s government was unusually feminist with a large number of female public servants. And he draws, too, a revelatory and moving picture of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Above all, he doesn’t spare himself.
This is a rare memoir – rich in detail, full of self-deprecatory humour and, above all, frank. It will be a classic of its genre.*
A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State
In Unsealed Covers, Gautam Bhatia provides a snapshot of the Indian judiciary between 2014 and 2023. The 2014 general election saw the installation of the first majority non-coalition government in many decades (the NDA). The 2019 general election saw its return with a greater majority. It is commonly accepted that the NDA years have generated significant conflict within and around various democratic institutions meant to act as checks and balances against majoritarian power.
One of the most important theatres of conflict has been the judiciary – in particular, the Supreme Court. Unsealed Covers provides a unique terrain where the actions of the judiciary and its relationship with the government are examined in terms of evolution and chronology. It also comments on some of the most important judgments of the past decade.*
A voice that cannot be silenced
Anandibai Joshee (1865-87) was not only India’s first female physician, but also the first Indian woman to travel across the forbidden ‘black waters’ and pursue an education in the United States – with the help of a kind American ally.
The poems in Shikha Malaviya’s Anandibai Joshee; A Life in Poems are a chronological rendering of Anadibai’s life – from her birth and childhood in the bustling town of Kalyan in Maharashtra and her marriage to an eccentric man 16 years older, to early childbirth and the loss of her infant, from which her desire to become a doctor was born.
With elegance and a stark beauty, these poems bring to life the struggles and accomplishments of a woman who travelled across the seas to pursue a medical education before her return to India as a doctor. While her adventures were cut short by tragedy, her story lives on through these poems that thunder from across the decades with a voice that cannot be silenced. *
*All copy from book flap.
