India : From Midnight To The Millennium And Beyond - Shashi Tharoor

A heavily objective and lengthy account of India's first 50 years of independent being. The major part concentrates on India's divided pluralism and the rest is about caste, politics, economics, religion  and the future. The book mainly points out what ails and prevents India from all over development. Quite an engaging read. Here and there Tharoor has tried hard to charm the readers with his witty anecdotes and humorous tales from his childhood and youth. Though the background is urban middle class, those accounts light up and distract him from his games with words temporarily. Comic reliefs?

The book is indeed very informative. One learns a lot about the personal life of many of India's great leaders. Tharoor idolizes Gandhiji, Nehru and even Sonia Gandhi but devotes pages and pages to tarnish Mrs.Indira Gandhi. I learned the following from this book which perhaps should be listed in gossip columns but it's news for me. Let me quote:-

• The British ordered the thumps of whole communities of Indian weavers chopped off so that they could not compete with the products of Lancashire.
• Gandhiji had quixotically called the capital to be shifted to the hot and dusty town of Nagpur, which had the sole merit of being located in the geographical center of the country.
• Gandhi rejected the phrase - Father of the Nation and he detested the term - Mahatma.
• Gandhi had announced his intention to spurn the country he had failed to keep united and to spend the rest of his years in Pakistan, a prospect that had made the government of Pakistan collectively choke.
• Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated at the home of business tycoon G.D.Birla, a major financier of the Congress Party.
• Imprisoned for the first time in 1921, Jawaharlal spent 18 years in British jails.
• On his desk, Nehru kept two totems - a gold statuette of Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort.
• M.F.Husain, 'India's Picasso', painted a triptych depicting Mrs.Indira Gandhi as the Hindu warrior goddess Durga.
• Rajiv Gandhi remains to this day the only Indian prime minister ever to have been photographed in jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt.
• The great 2000 year old epic Mahabharata was supposedly dictated by the sage Vedavyasa to Ganesh.
• The first Indian film star to become the chief minister of a state was a Malayali, Marudur G.Ramachandran.
• Dr.B.R.Ambedkar led his followers in a mass conversion to Buddhism to escape the stigma of Untouchability within Hinduism.
• India maintains the world's third-largest standing army.
• Only 7 people died in the 1996 elections.
• Orthodox do not use porcelain plates who note that animal bones go into its making.
• Arcticle 356 of the Indian Constitution, used just 8 times in the first 14 years of India's independence, was applied on nearly 70 occasions between 1965 and 1987.

Well, written in 1997 this work displays lots of intellectual and political maturity. Where has it gone ? What happened ? Where are you, Mr.Tharoor?