A decade in Toronto - 15

Truly, the better half

Debra Black interviewing me for the Toronto Star was one of the highlights of 2012. Joyce Wayne, who had temporarily moved to a condominium on Queen Street W, introduced me to Debra, the immigration reporter of the Star. Debra and Joyce were neighbours. And all of us were a part of the group that Joyce had started – published, soon-to-be-published and aspiring authors – at Depanneur, a restaurant that specialised in artisan cuisine, in Little Portugal on Dundas Street West.

The original group comprised Joyce, David Panhale, Dawn Promislow, Jasmine D’Costa, David Cozac, and Leslie Shimotakahara. The group moved away from Depanneur into different restaurants along Dundas West when it began to grow, when Sang Kim, Ava Homa and Debra Black joined.  Unfortunately, with all such impromptu writers’ group, it disbanded without a murmur.

Debra interviewed me because I guess she found my experiences as a newcomer to Canada fascinating. The story created some waves – giving me my Warhol-adjudged 15 minutes of fame. I reread the interview while writing this blog, and I think Debra has done a great job getting me to talk in details about things that I'd not have talked about if she hadn't asked; things that a decade later seem sort of significant. 

If you’re interested in reading it, click here: Star write-up.

My association with the MG Vassanji's and Nurjehan Aziz's Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts had widened my circle considerably. By now, I had a growing circle of writer friends and from other creative spheres such as theatre, the arts. These included Jasmine and Nitin Sawant, the husband-wife team that runs the SAWITRI theatre, producing some of the best South Asian theatre in Canada.

I’d met them the previous year at Rang Manch Canada’s multilingual theatre festival, and since then our camaraderie had grown. One of the most memorable performances that I’ve attended which SAWITRI produced in 2012 was Saree Kahaniyaan.  

Meena Chopra, the artist and poet, organised the launch of MG Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song’s Hindi translation called Qatil Ke Geet under the auspice of the Hindi Writers’ Guild. The highlight of this well-attended program was the literary critique of the novel by Shailja Saxena and Sharan Ghai, the stalwarts of the Hindi Writers' Guild.

Munir Parvaiz, who was one of the committee members of the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts, gave me a Hindi translation of  Noor Zaheer's Urdu memoir about her father Sajjad Zaheer, an active member of the Communist movement in India, and one of the founders of Progressive Writers' Movement in India. Munshi Premchand presided over the first convention of the progressive writers in 1936.

Munir's Writers’ Forum organised a phone chat with Noor Zaheer, based in India. It was a fascinating conversation. Listening to Noor Zaheer speak about her father touched my heart – his simple message to his daughter was that there is no hardship or sacrifices in doing something you believe in. Sacrifice is only when you do something you have to, but don’t believe in.

VI Lakshmanan (better known as Lucky Lakshmanan) sent me through S. Kalyan Sundaram, a copy of the Prosperity and Peace for the Twenty-First Century by APJ Abdul Kalam. It is a compilation of the former President of India’s speeches.

I mention this here for two reasons – the first is I now work at the Canada India Foundation (CIF) and of course, the main reason is Kalam. He epitomizes the best of what India stands for and what it offered – a scholastic mixture of the science and culture, heritage and progress, inclusive ethos and forward thinking.

Kalam – the soft-spoken and the unassuming scientist – has given India and Indians a vision for the future – something that the country and its people could aspire to achieve if Indians put their mind to it. Read a passage from the book here: Tolerance.

Humber lecture

Two friends – Murali Murthy and George Abraham launched new ventures. Murali turned into a motivational coach and published several books. Murali supported me immensely during my initial years of struggle with the right sort of motivation.

George, who I’d known since our time together in Bombay as journalists, launched the New Canadian Media, an online news outlet that focused on the news of by for newcomers. It is one of the most significant contributions to Canadian media in recent times. Unfortunately, it's in dire need of funds and George is busy finding ways to keep it afloat.

Humber College invited me to address newcomers and give them career guidance. This was completely surprising. I was being considered an immigrant success story. 

In 2012, I also went to the reading series of the Shoe Project, a collection of memoirs of women immigrants about the shoes they wore (or brought with them) when they came to Canada. Katherine Govier, the novelist and activist, started working on the project in 2011 and produced the first reading series in 2012 at the Bata Shoe Museum. Two friends - Teenaz and Tanaz - were part of the project.

Those who have known me know that I’ve always admired MJ Akbar. I became a journalist reading non-stop Akbar’s Sunday magazine, his reportage, his coverage of the Hindi heartland of India, his books. In more ways than one would care to admit, he shaped journalism in India since the 1970s.

Anurag Chaturvedi, who’d worked with Akbar, had observed when Akbar launched the Asian Age that Aroon Puri (publisher of India Today) and Vineet Jain (publisher of Times of India) had proved that a publication doesn’t need an editor, and Akbar had proved that an editor didn’t need a publisher.

Akbar remained a must-read for me for over three-and-a-half decades, and this was despite the disquiet over his increasingly pro-BJP stance for many years. But my adulation ended abruptly and turned into an embarrassment when he formally joined the BJP as a spokesperson and then as a junior minister.

But before his saffronization, he visited Toronto to launch his book Tinder Box – The Past and Future of Pakistan. He delivered a talk at the Rotman School’s India Innovation Institute. He still came across as an unbiased historian (albeit who narrated history from an Indian perspective). 

I was to meet him again at the Munk Centre and got an opportunity to talk to him after his - expectedly - erudite lecture. I asked him to explain his pro-Modi stance.  He quoted the Qu'ran, and said the holy book of the Muslims identified three types of people - the believers, the non-believers and the hypocrites - the munafiqun, the group that is decried in Qu'ran as outward Muslim but who are secretly unsympathetic to the cause of Muslims and actively seek to undermine the Muslims community. Although he didn't explicate, it was clear to him where I belonged. And I was equally clear that given his newfound affection for the BJP, it was perhaps more applicable to him. 

That year, I also participated in a book discussion and launch of Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different. Rajiv Malhotra is a controversial figure, standing resolutely to the right of the debate on India and all things Indian. His critics have accused him of plagiarism, and his supporters have hailed him as a saviour. I had the opportunity of talking to him briefly at the book launch held at the North York Centre’s city facility. He is a soft-spoken person who is convinced about his scholarship. But I found his book jargonic and unnecessary pedantic. 

With Che at the Malton bus terminal

2012 was also the centenary of Charles Dickens. There is no novelist greater than Dickens. The best novel ever is unquestionably Great Expectations.

And one of the most memorable events in our lives occurred in 2012. 


There are many reasons I'll remember Harpreet Sethi, but the number one reason why I will never forget him is that he invited Mahrukh to a program.

While inviting me to the launch of a fashion show that his entertainment company was organizing, and he insisted that my wife should accompany me. This was for the first time that anyone had invited Mahrukh. Ali took a photo of us together - it's one of the best of the two of us together. 

In September, while celebrating Che's birthday, we went did what we normally do - go on long bus rides. While waiting at the Malton bus terminal, Mahrukh took a photo of me and my son, which is one of my all time favourites. My son looks cool.

India, Empire and the First World War - I

MJ Akbar

A minstrel is a mediaeval bard who sang songs and told tales of distant places, of real or imagined events from the past. When the European courts evolved under the influence of mercantilism, minstrels lost their appeal and began to travel around, becoming wandering minstrels.

I’m often reminded of the wandering minstrels whenever a public intellectual from India visits Toronto. I get to meet them and hear them talk at the Munk Centre which organizes their visit with a reassuring regularity. 

Romila Thapar, Ramchandra Guha, and Rachel Dwyer, among many others have engaged the Indian diaspora in what may be described as a conversation among the believers. And by that I mean that both the speakers and the listeners are all generally speaking liberals.

MJ Akbar was here a couple of weeks ago to talk on India, Empire and the First World War organized by the Bill Graham Centre for International History.

A minor digression: One wonders whether Akbar should continue to be included among the liberals after his new-found love for Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial aspirant of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. I guess many in India and amongst the Indian diaspora who categorize themselves as liberals have found (and are finding) new reasons to support Modi. So, we shall leave the categorization in abeyance for now.

Apart from an utter incapability to understand or appreciate Akbar’s pro-Modi tilt, which sort of tends to cloud my perspective about everything that he writes these days, I must admit listening to his erudition is unquestionably an enriching experience.

Although he was to speak about India, the Empire and the First World War, he deftly encompassed many themes in his talk and focused mainly on the making of the modern Muslim world. For those aware with his works – especially his 2002 book The Shades of Sword – the Conflict between Islam and Christianity, there was a familiar note to a lot that Akbar said that afternoon.

Some of his positions are well-known and have hardened over the years. But his approach of examining history as an interplay between empires that rose and fell over the last millennium, rather than looking at it from the narrow prism of nation states remains unique and compelling.

The breadth of the lecture was wide, sweeping across centuries, spread across geographies, and peopled with innumerable figures; and punctured with innumerable diversions.

In the middle of the talk, he stopped and quoted from Matthew Arnold’s poem Stanza from the Grande Chartreuse

 

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born

Wikipedia described Arnold, as an English poet from the Victorian era, who wrote this classic to describe the irreconcilable differences between science and religion while on a brief visit to the Grand Chartreuse, the abode of the Carthusian order. 

Akbar used the lines to describe the present world order where the old world of the 20th century is evidently dead, but a new world order is yet to be born.

Another riveting insight: Tracing the west’s global domination over the last five hundred years, Akbar observed that the simple reason was technology. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Gutenberg press (introduced in the same decade) changed the discourse of dominance. It wasn’t just the battlefield where supremacy mattered. Gutenberg opened up a new front – supremacy of ideas. 

And the Islamic world was kept away from this revolution (especially in South Asia) by the trade unions of the khatibs, the scribes, who prevented the introduction and use of the movable type.

Describing India’s strong roots of syncretic traditions, he quoted Mughal emperor Babur, who said one could either eat beef or rule India, one couldn’t do both.

Continued in the post below

Tinderbox: The Past and the Future of Pakistan - MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is an Indian institution. In my humble opinion, he has no parallels in Indian journalism.

He invented modern Indian journalism in the 1970s with Sunday magazine, and introduced the real India (that is Bharat) to Indians hitherto used to reading newspapers and journals edited by pipe smoking journalists who pontificated about things that had little or no relevance to most of their readers, and wrote in English that was a hangover from the colonial times.

Akbar and his magazine Sunday changed all that.

Carl Sandberg has famously described slang as “a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” 

Akbar did that to English journalism in India. He made it work.

He made the post-Emergency renaissance in Indian journalism relevant and meaningful. 

It was a sort of rediscovery of India for a new generation of readers that was coming of age then. 

Leaving the pontificating to the fast-fading pipe smokers, he went to the heart of India and helped Indians understand India.

Akbar brought us face-to-face with the horrible atrocities the Dalits faced in India.

“The untouchable Jatav is touchable only when a pretty Jatav woman can be raped, or when a whimpering man has to be dragged into the field to do forced, whimsical paid labour.”

(Have Gun, Will Kill, January 1982 – report on the massacre of Dalits in Dehuli and Sarhupur in Uttar Pradesh from Riot After Riot, 1988).

He brought alive the horrors of unending communal violence that erupted in different parts of India.

“Many Muslims who were killed cannot be traced…to give just one example: Salim Mohammad was twenty-five years old, and he had been married to young Naeema just five months earlier. He was a worker who polished brass in one of the factories which have made Moradabad famous all over the world. He went to the Idgah, which is hardly five minutes away from his house, to pray; he never returned. A friend of his who was sitting nearby saw a bullet hit the side of Salim’s face. Salim fell dead. This friend went to the fallen salim, removed the only thing of value he had, a wristwatch, and brought it back to the family. (We saw the watch when we met the family; it was a poor man’s watch, a brand called Siwa; it had been given to Salim as a wedding present by his wife’s family.) Today Salim’s body cannot be traced. His family have asked for it, but the police say they cannot find a Salim among the dead.”

(Massacre in Moradabad, August 1980 from Riot After Riot, 1988)

Akbar has also written often controversial but always readable histories that have helped us understand ourselves better. By analyzing the past, his books have accurately anticipated the future.

India – The Siege Within (1985), Nehru – the Making of India (published in 1989 – Nehru’s centenary), The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the conflict between Islam and Christianity (2002), are among the books he has authored that have received winder acclaim (although his description of the Khilafat Movement as Gandhi’s peaceful jihad is a leap of imagination).

In Nehru’s biography, he quoted Russi Modi to corroborate the Nehru-Edwina relationship. “Russi Mody marched up, opened the door and saw Jawaharlal and Edwina in a clinch. Jawaharlal Nehru looked at Russi Mody and grimaced. Russi quickly shut the door and walked out.”

His latest book Tinderbox: The Past and the Future of Pakistan is again an invaluable addition to understanding the tortured history of India’s neighbour. Again, as in his previous books, he rakes up controversies. 

Explaining the ever-widening divergence between the paths that India and Pakistan have taken since 1947, Akbar says, “The idea of India is stronger than the Indian; the idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani.”

Akbar was in Toronto earlier this week to talk about `Terrorism and Geopolitics: The Coming Decade’ as part of promotion of his book at the University of Toronto’s India Innovation Institute. 

In an hour, Akbar gave a glimpse of his erudition, scholarship, vision, philosophy and also a bit of prejudice. A virtuoso performance enjoyed by the who’s who of the Indo-Canadian community.

I wonder how my Toronto friends of Pakistani origin would have reacted to the lecture, and to the book.

Rummaging my book shelf

Homecoming means different things to different people and different things at different times to the same person.  To me, homecoming is to return to the sights, smells, sounds of my city – soaking in the particular and the peculiar.

Transformation is inherent to a city and this is especially true for Bombay.

When I was here, I seldom noticed the changes in my city. It had changed every day – stealthy, imperceptibly, and when the change was obtrusive, as it can be quite often, I adjusted uncomplaining.  It continued to change after I left.

Upon my return three years later, it’s only the change that I notice. And it's overwhelming. The sights, smells and the sounds are quite unbearable.

Bombay is in throes of a physical transformation, and its infrastructural monuments are certainly impressive – the new skyscrapers that dot the skyline and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link are – well, quite frankly – awesome.

But it is all at soul-searing cost – millions are deprived of a dignified life and millions eschew dignity and decency to get just a few steps ahead.

I’m sure it’s not as bad as I’m making it sound, and it couldn’t have been much different when I was here.  What is undeniable is that the cost of living is exorbitant, and commuting a chaotic nightmare. 

The only redemption is rains – sometimes torrential, incessant, often scanty - a mere “passing shower,” but always unpredictable, always exhilarating.

I’ve preferred to stay at home, re-working my novel. My body clock has refused to adjust – I lay awake in the middle of the night, and want to sleep during the day. It’s my body’s revenge on my mind.

And my mind finds solace in books.

My books are a good reason to return home. I couldn’t take them when I moved to Canada because I couldn’t afford to – my family’s needs were a priority.

I take a few out – the unread ones. I have a large collection of unread books that I bought with the noble intention of reading, but never did get around to doing so.

Rajni Kothari’s Memoirs Uneasy is the Life of the Mind, for instance.  I read about a dozen pages and marvel at the complexities of his ideas and the lucidity of his style.

I also take out a few books that I’ve loved and re-read several times, not in full, but a few key passages. These books, those passages have stayed with me.

I read A Tale of Two Villages from M. J. Akbar’s RiotAfter Riot. The report that was first published in Sunday magazine and combines reporting on a riot in Sarhupur with passages of Munshi Premchand’s Sadgati, made into a memorable film by Satyajit Ray.

The riots in Sarhupur and the film’s release happened almost simultaneously.

Akbar observes, “Both the villages belong to that world which Mahatma Gandhi described to his dead countrymen as the ‘real India’; in both the stories, the object of torture and death were the people the Mahatma had christened ‘The Children of God’: Harijan. Premchand, Satyajit Ray, Sarhupur: art and life were a mirror to each other; time and pious resolutions had changed nothing; the real India still lived out its awful realities.”

These days the term “taking it to a new level,” is used rather recklessly. A Tale of Two Villages took Indian journalism to an altogether new level.  

A new dawn is trying to pierce the sky. But the overcast sky doesn’t let the sun look at the earth. Suddenly, the birds come alive – it’s nature’s munificence to the tropics.

For me, it’s time to go to sleep.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Rajiv, Jawaharlal & Indira

Jawaharlal Nehru divides Indians. 

Many Indians believe that India is on a path of enlightened progress because it has stayed steadfast in adhering to Nehru’s political ideals.

On the other hand, an equal number believe that he is responsible for all that is wrong with India – right from the gangrenous Kashmir problem to the long years of fettered economic  growth.

Those who would prefer India to be a Hindu theocracy hold him responsible for being the founder of pseudo secularism – Muslim appeasement in the name of secularism.

Most political ideas and ideologies don’t last beyond half-a-century, and Nehru’s haven’t either. His economic vision was largely statist and a product of his times. It couldn’t have envisaged the steady trot of the Indian economy since 1991 enabled by economic liberalisation.

Yet, Nehru understood India’s place in the comity of nations better than his contemporaries did. His emphasis on economic self-reliance, science and technology, higher education, and a unique interpretation of secularism where the state treated all religions equally, has given India the social capital that will enable it to grow into a major power in the near future.

A prolific writer himself, Nehru remains a subject of innumerable biographies. One of the best is MJ Akbar’s Nehru The Making of India. When the world is beginning to recognise India’s inherent strengths and its inevitable rise, an honest, non-partisan assessment of India’s first prime minister is necessary. 

Image: Kulwant Roy (http://gconnect.in/gc/lifestyle/amazing-photos-and-videos/historic-pictures-of-india-by-kulwant-roy.html)

Snippets

People will change: Earlier this month, I attended a breakfast meeting organised by Business Without Borders where Jeff Rubin was the keynote speaker.

Rubin’s Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is an authoritative treatise on how the skyrocketing fuel costs will grind to halt the furious pace of globalisation.

Rubin has linked the continuing recession in North America to the high oil prices. Read about the event at the Business without Borders website. 

Beneath the hardboiled economist, Rubin is a dreamer, philosopher. The message that I took away from the lecture was that people will soon be forced to seriously look at sustainable lifestyles and reduce their dependence on carbon-based energy sources.

“We’ll change, our economic behaviour will change. A small world will be more liveable and sustainable.”

Chasing a Mirage - The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State-I

It’s taken me quite a while to finish reading Tarek Fatah’s book Chasing a Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. It’s a controversial book. I’d even say that it’s an incendiary book; but equally it’s refreshing, bold, frank and incisive.

Post 9/11, as the world has tried to understand the phenomenon of radical Islam, and the fanaticism and intolerance of its votaries.

M. J. Akbar’s Shades of Sword: Jihad and the conflict between Islam & Christianity and Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalism (both published in 2002) deal with these issues and give an expansive and inclusive interpretation of Islam.

Tarek Fatah’s book belongs to the same genre and gives a valuable insight into a religion that is usually misrepresented. Fatah’s book, while giving a plethora of arguments that prove that the pursuit of an Islamic state is chimerical, also underlines the innate appeal of the religion to its adherents.

My knowledge of Islamic history and theology is non-existent and it would be improper for me to comment on the efficacy of the arguments that Fatah makes in his book. 

I found them convincing; there are many who will find his arguments provocative.

We can’t be dismissive of such scholarship. 

A debate I’d like to see in Toronto is between Sheema Khan (Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman) and Tarek Fatah. While I’ve no doubt that such a debate would be polite and civil, it would still bristle with cutting edge erudition and sharp arguments.

It is necessary to have such debates.

The next blog entry (see below) is an excerpt from the book. I must hasten to add that like most secular Hindus, I felt personally wounded when the Babri Masjid was brought down by Hindu fanatics in 1992. 

Gandhi High

Meghnad, my father, would’ve been 75 yesterday. It’s been 12 years since he died.

Yes, he died young.

Two good things happened yesterday. One planned, other delayed.

The planned one was going to see the play Gandhi High. The delayed one was Prabodh Parikh accepting my invitation to be a ‘friend’ on Facebook.

Both made me smile.

I had decided to take Mahrukh and Che to see the play on Meghnad's birth anniversary after I got to know of the play through Janice Goveas (Diaspora Dialogues).

Jehan, a Muslim adolescent

Gandhi High is a play about Jehan, a Muslim adolescent fighting his inner demons. Jehan has had a troubled childhood. He is unfairly compared to his over-achiever elder brother who’s a decade older than him.

A laggard at school in Vancouver, Jehan constantly got into trouble, the last one being involved in a car theft. His exasperated parents move to Toronto, hoping that Jehan would somehow stabilize.

Jehan finds solace among a group of young people. Like him, they're as angry with the world as they are with themselves.

He falls in love with Carly, starts drinking with his friends and becomes a cat burglar.

Jehan and his father are constantly bickering, neither wanting to hear the other’s point of view.

His father is fascinated by the teachings of the Mahatma and wants Jehan to study his life. Jehan feels that the likes of the Mahatma have no place in today’s world.

Transformation

When he’s robbing a home that belongs to a South Asian family, Jehan has a sudden transformation.

While working on a school project he discovers that in the late 1980s, a move to name a school after the Mahatma in Toronto was blocked by those opposed to the ideals of religious tolerance.

Just when Jehan seems to be coming to grips with the realities of life, his father suddenly dies, leaving him emotionally stranded.

His world is crashing all around him. His friends are spiralling down in the dungeons of youth crime that is seemingly all pervasive in most of greater Toronto’s schools.

Jehan launches a hunger fast to focus attention on the safety of his young friends and to name his school after the Mahatma.

Inner demons:

But his inner demons get the better of him. Jehan he tries to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and jumping off his apartment window.

The lesson that Jehan learns reading about the Mahatma’s life and times is that it is virtually impossible to get together people who don’t wish to be together; or to teach tolerance to intolerant people.

However, that doesn’t mean one gives up.

On the contrary, one keeps trying. Jehan’s friends are annoyed with him, but mend their ways so that their friend ends his fast. The community begins to support his demand to name the school after the Mahatma – hence the name of the play - Gandhi High.

Gandhi's teachings

MJ Akbar recently wrote – half in jest – that the Mahatma is a lesser of a draw than Jinnah. The exigencies of Indian politics may make it seem so.

On a larger canvas, Gandhi’s teachings of tolerance continue to inspire millions – right from President Obama, who tells an audience of 9th graders that he’d want to have lunch with the Mahatma, to a Jamaican-Canadian middle school teacher in Toronto, who says that the Mahatma’s views helps him tolerate other people’s prejudice against the colour of his skin.

Prabodh Parikh

Now, for the second occurrence that made me smile – Prabodh Parikh.

Prabodh is a writer, poet, litterateur, filmologist, teacher and more than anything else, a splendid human being. He is a true renaissance man, the likes of whom aren’t made any more.

When Meghnad died, Prabodh got together a few poets and writers and organised an impromptu tribute.

For me, that singular gesture really made Prabodh stand apart from the legion of friends that Meghnad had when he was alive.

Sathyu's Garam Hawa

Just before I immigrated, I had the occasion to go and see Garam Hawa (1973), the MS Sathyu film on the wounds of the subcontinent’s partition.

Prabodh organised the screening of this classic. I met him at the screening quite by chance and he was as ever effusive and warm.

I want you to listen to a qawwali (Maula Salim Chishti) from the film.

It was Meghnad’s favourite.

Street Fighting Years -- An Autobiography of the Sixties

Mobashar Jawad Akbar's Sunday and Pritish Nandy’s Illustrated Weekly of India defined much of Indian journalism in English in the 1980s. The post-Emergency (1975-1977) renaissance in Indian journalism in English that ushered in the in-your-face journalism is really the gift of these two Bengali journalists.

It’s really unfortunate that Sunday and the Weekly did not survive in the marketplace of ideas.

This was because both the editors were larger-than-life, and become bigger than their magazines. If Bennett Coleman & Company (publishers of the Times of India) redefined the media by turning newspapers into brands, these two editors turned themselves into brands.

One of the regulars at both these magazines was Tariq Ali, the firebrand Leftist. Ali had a refreshing style, and a controversial point of view, on every subject that he never hesitated to express.

Moreover, his views were relevant then because the world hadn’t yet heard of perestroika and glasnost. Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to take centre stage in Kremlin and sweep away the cobwebs of communist shibboleths.

Ali’s Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties was published in the mid-1980s, and became an instant success in India. Around the same time Akbar’s India: The Siege Within was also published.

Street Fighting Years was (and remains) a fantastic glimpse of the 1960s – the decade that changed the course of social (and political?) history in the West.

For me, it was a one-volume introduction to the turmoil and the excitement that rocked the world and changed it forever.

It was in this book that I read – in great details – the heroism of Che Guvevara.

The story of the brave revolutionary who did not rest after the regime change in Cuba, but wanted to bring about revolutions in other parts of the world.

I can think of only two leaders in 20th century history -- Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guvevara -- who were not satisfied with comprehensive victories in achieving their mission, but were more interested in contunuing the struggle.

The book was pure nostalgia. But it provided a deeper political and social understanding to the era that is even now viewed merely from the Woodstock and Vietnam perspective.

Tariq Ali is an industry today, and much of what he says and does really seems quite quaint. For instance, not too many people will share Ali’s enthusiasm for Hugo Chavez, even if most would agree with his contention that the West has replaced Islam with Communism.

For understanding the 1960s, there's no better book than Street Fighting Years.