JRD Tata and PN Haksar exchange

JRD Tata’s Letter

Dear PN: 

You have asked me whether it is not time for me to reflect creatively and constructively on the state of our country. I have done so, and for a long time … I was a little puzzled by your own puzzlement … I don’t know by what criteria you compared us … with our European and Japanese counterparts, and what you would expect from them, but if it is initiative and creativeness in their field of activity, I would imagine that … men like Jamsetji Tata and his sons fully measured up to their counterparts elsewhere in the world , including America, In a smaller way, men like the Wadias who built men-of war for the British Navy, or the Sarabhais for their contribution to science and culture, also measure up …

The advent of independence brought a dramatic change in the situation which would normally have provided the same vital base as in other countries for great projects, ventures and adventures by Indians. An essential pre-requisite, however, would have been freedom of choice, of investment and of action … Instead of releasing energies and enterprises, the system of licences and all-pervasive controls imposed on the private sector of the country , combined with confiscatory personal taxation, not only discouraged and penalized honest free enterprise but encouraged, and brought success and wealth, to a new breed of bribers, tax evaders and black marketeers … The nationalization, on expropriatory terms, of insurance and banks, conveniently created a state monopoly of investible and lendable funds, while fiscal policies, combined with the use made of the Companies Act, the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act and innumerable other enactments, regulations and administrative decisions effectively concentrated all economic power in the hands of the politicians in power and the bureaucracy.

Under such conditions, efforts at promoting and bringing to fruition large projects, however desirable, became nightmarish and time-consuming one, or ended in outright rejection. I need only cite the example of the great Tata Fertiliser Project of 1967 which would have brought immense benefits to the Indian economy but was rejected outright on the ground that Tatas were already too big … I am sorry to inflict this long tirade on you, for which my excuse is that you, albeit innocently, provoked it yourself by your question: I began my 55-year career as an angry young man because I couldn’t stomach the foreign domination of our country … I end it as an angry old man … because it simply breaks my heart to see the continuing miserable fate of the vast majority of our people, for much of which I blame 35 years of ill-conceived economic policies of our Government. 

PN Haksar’s response

I have your letter of September 26. It moved me deeply. It moved me because you wrote it with such passion, sincerity mixed with compassion for the “continuing miserable fate of the vast majority of our people”. Please do not misunderstand me. It was not part of my intention to enter into polemics. Problems of our country, howsoever one may view them, are much too complex to yield to an attempt to score debating points. Is the essence of what you say is that all these years, following our Independence, the government policies have brought us to the present situation? Apparently, a simple-minded Adam Smithian policy would have done the trick in India. But even this proposition needs to be worked out. It is not so self-evident in India. And even Adam Smith before he set himself out as some sort of an Economist , had a very strong feeling for morality … It is true that Jamshedji Tata along with men like Walchand Hirachand or Ambalal Sarabhai articulated the deeper urges for modernization of our social, economic and political order. No such urge is visible today at the collective level of our industrialists and men and women engaged in trade and commerce. Be that as it may, the sole object of my raising the question which I did was to invite your attention to the fact that the entire process of historical transformation of an ancient society such as ours, where human beings are deeply enmeshed in all kinds of valid or invalid traditions, thought processes, social structures, etc., cannot be subsumed within a category called ‘Economic Policy’, howsoever conceived … Might I conclude this letter by saying that I deeply respect your anger, but from what little experience I have of life, anger has always been a bad counsellor.

Excerpts from Intertwined Lives PN Haksar and Indira Gandhi by Jairam Ramesh

A decade in Toronto - 20

Che

A number of global legends from diverse spheres passed on into history in 2014, among them were Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Richard Attenborough, Robin Williams. 

All of them contributed to deepening our understanding and appreciation of the arts. Marquez is unquestionably one of the best novelists of all times. 

If you’re interested in reading about what I wrote when he passed away, click here: Marquez

Similarly, Attenborough contributed to a better appreciation of Mahatma Gandhi achievements and contributions to making the world a better place. Attenborough’s Gandhi was a cinematic masterpiece and deservedly swept the Oscars in 1982 (unfortunately, Spielberg’s ET lost out). Gandhi the movie introduced the Mahatma to a global audience especially to a younger demographic. 

Che and Mahrukh

Attenborough was also a consummate actor and admired by the discerning moviegoer for his portrayal of General James Outram in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977).

Robin Williams acted in too many good movies, making it difficult to pinpoint his best. But I believe that he will be remembered for his portrayal of John Keating, the English teacher, who adopts unusual methods to teach his students' poetry and understand life better in Dead Poets Society (1989).

The list also included two individuals who were well known in their spheres and who I could claim to have known personally – Chelva Kanaganayakan and Vasu Chanchlani. Coincidentally, both passed away at a relatively young age of 62 and both were immensely active.

Vasu Chanchlani was among the most prosperous Indo-Canadians and a person deeply committed to philanthropy. His prosperity hadn’t changed his innate decency. He approached me to do a write-up on his nomination for the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award.

Che and Durga

What I found endearing about him was that he never let his wealth determine his relationships, or his identity. He’d happily accompany me to an ordinary Indian restaurant near the Chamber’s office and agreed to take turns to pay.

I got to know Chelva because of my association with the Festival of South Asian Literature and Arts. We were both members of the core group that worked to organize the festival curated by MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz.

Read about him here: Chelva Kanaganayakan

With Mahrukh

Asghar Ali Engineer made a name for himself for his resolute opposition to religious fundamentalism. He passed away in 2013. As a journalist in Bombay, I’d come in close contact with him. On a couple of occasions, I’d gone over to his modest home in Santacruz East near Golibar to discuss current affairs. 

In the mid-1980s, his Centre for Study of Society and Secularism had published a report of the unstated but obvious bias against Muslims in finding jobs in the private sector. I’d taken views of a cross-section of influencers on the report. 

The best reaction had come from Datta Samant, the fiery trade union leader, famous for the textile strike of 1982. Samant looked at me quizzically when I asked him whether employers discriminated against Muslims. “They will exploit everyone. They don’t care about their workers’ religion.”

Engineer continued to be active, but we lost touch when I quit journalism in the late 1990s. 

When I went to Bombay in 2014, I made it a point to visit his Santacruz office. I took Che with me to introduce my son to the significance of a person such as Engineer and his contribution to ensuring that fundamentalism is challenged.

As a matter of principle, I have not told my son what dogma (religious/ideological) he should follow (I'll be happy if he doesn't follow any). I believe every human being has the right to choose, or better still, not choose at all. I believe that every human being has the right to not be indoctrinated, especially by family,  culture, upbringing and rigid family values. 

Where I make an exception is to tell him to be on the side of the oppressed. Engineer and his kind always stood (and stand) with the oppressed.

Unfortunately or fortunately, Che doesn’t remember that we visited Engineer’s office and met his son Irfan Engineer who has continued to do all the good work that his father initiated, and in his efforts, he’s been joined by Ram Puniyani, a former IIT professor, who even during his teaching days, was a resolute activist fighting the good cause of secularism.

Read about Asghar Ali Engineer here: Striving for Peace and Harmony

*******

My journey to discover authors and poets continued and I assisted  Meenakshi Alimchandani in organizing the South Asian component of the first (and last) Inspire Toronto International Book Fair. It was a great event, where the who’s who of Toronto’s literary world congregated to discuss what they know best – reading, writing, and books.

Meenakshi had her favourite South Asian authors for the panel discussion and included friends such as Jasmine D’Costa, Manjushree Thapa, Anirudh Bhattacharya, and the effervescent Pricilla Uppal, who succumbed to cancer earlier this year. 

Read about it here: Inspire

My friends Yoko Morgenstern and Joyce Wayne published their debut novels in 2014. Yoko’s Double Exile was released in July when I’d left for India. Joyce’s The Cook’s Temptation was launched at our common friend Sang Kim’s restaurant Wind-Up Bird Café (named after Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Joyce’s second novel, Last Night of the World (published in 2018) is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

With Yoko

Read their interviews:

Yoko Morgenstern

Joyce Wayne

For a brief while, Sang’s restaurant became a hotspot for literary dos and attracted an esoteric group of people all of whom shared their love for great food and great books. Sang, an award-winning author, is these days pursuing his passion for creating exquisite cuisines. 

------

Except the last photo with Yoko, the other photos are not connected to the blog. I've just placed them here because they were clicked in 2014, and Che looks smart in them.

A decade in Toronto - 19

2014 turned out to be an unexpectedly tumultuous year.

Outside ICCC's previous office at 45 Sheppard Ave E

Just when you feel you’ve made it, have put your struggle behind you and as you eagerly look forward to building a life that you deserve, things come crashing down.

The year began propitiously, as I entered my fifth year of employment at the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce. The institution, being one of the most democratic organizations in Canada where the Indian diaspora could (and does) fulfil its ambitions and aspirations, has forever been a hotbed of political shenanigans and chicanery. But the political jostling rarely, if at all, affects the employees, who, without exception, service members and directors.

However, the acquisition of a building by the Chamber led to an unseemly controversy that became messier as days passed. As the senior-most employee of the Chamber, I was unwittingly drawn into the ongoing tussle between the two groups.

There was little doubt in my mind that the meagre resources at the disposal of the Chamber hadn’t been utilised judiciously, especially in the way the building’s interiors were designed and renovated. Whether there was malfeasance involved is anyone’s guess.

Recently, after four years of wrangling, the Chamber’s board agreed to close the investigation after being satisfied by the responses it received.

The then leadership of the Chamber was no longer comfortable working with me because of my vocal opposition to the payment of brokerage to a board member who was also the broker for the purchase of the building.

There were enough indications that the situation would turn for the worse for me, because of my, at time vociferous, opposition to many patently objectionable decisions made by the then leadership. But I was unwilling to see what must have been clear to everyone at that time - that my days at the Chamber were numbered, primarily because I considered many members of the then leadership to be my friends,

At the office of ICCC

The mid-year elections led to the consolidation of the existing group that has wrested control of the Chamber a couple of years ago. 

I’d already prepared to go on my once-in-three-years trip to India in the summer and left for India in July 2014 for a month. We returned from India in the third week of August and were excited to take oath as citizens on 27 August 2014.

The next day, 28 August 2014, when I reached the office the then president, the immediate past president and a vice president called me to the president’s office and within 15 minutes terminated my services, citing restructuring of the organisation in view of the acute shortage of finances. There was little consideration for all the work that I’d put in for the Chamber.

My world came crashing down. I had a humongous mortgage which was due every month; I had insubstantial savings that could possibly tide me over for two to three months, but then my family would be on the streets.

Even today, four years later, when I look back, what surprises me is not so much the decision of the then leadership of the Chamber to remove me, but the silence of all those who I’d imagined were my friends and people who I could depend upon. 

I’d like to give them the benefit of doubt that they were blindsided by the act and were not in a position to move fast enough.

Fortunately, working at the Chamber for nearly five years had brought me in contact with innumerable influential and successful Indo-Canadians. And when I was scampering around trying to meet potential employers, realizing that not everyone can be a friend when you’re in need, three individuals stood by me and offered to pull me out of my troubles.

Yudhvir Jaswal, a young media baron, who has a footprint in print and broadcast media, was more than willing to take me. Yudhvir is a sponsor of the Chamber.

With Puneet

Haresh (Mike) Mehta, a highly successful entrepreneur, a veteran community leader and an important functionary of the Sanatan Mandir, offered me the Executive Director’s position at the newly-launched Cultural Centre of the temple. Haresh had been a director of Chamber.

Puneet S Kohli, a young lawyer, who was at that time vacationing in Italy, agreed at once to take me. He’d have to create a special position in the law firm to accommodate me. Puneet had been a corporate secretary of the Chamber.

Simmons da Silva LLP

Finally, in mid-September, I decided that I’d join Simmons da Silva LLP. It was a decision that changed my life for the better. I was there for the next three-and-a-half years, before returning to what I believe I do best – working in a bilateral relations promotion organisation – the Canada India Foundation in 2018.

I will never forget the kindness and the generosity of Yudhir and Haresh, and especially Puneet. All relations change over the years, especially when friends become colleagues or when colleagues become friends. But I will always remember Puneet’s support at a time when almost nobody else did.

'When you write about the past, there’s plenty to invent and discover': Loren Edizel

Loren Edizel 

You have written three novels, one collection of short stories – all in about five-six years. How do you choose the stories that you want to tell, and how do you ensure an evenness of texture and tone in your work?

Actually, it’s been about a decade, I think. The Ghosts of Smyrna was published in Turkey, in Turkish translation, in 2008.  Adrift was published in Canada in 2011, Ghosts of Smyrna in its original English version 2013, the collection of stories in 2014 and Days of Moonlight in the spring of 2018. In between I wrote some short stories which are sitting in a file and will hopefully become part of another collection once I am done with the novel I am currently working on.

I don’t know to what extent I choose the stories, I believe perhaps they choose me, through some sort of unconscious process. A rudimentary form of the story appears, and this could be a character, an idea that doesn’t go away.  It sits there, a bit like indigestion, demanding attention. I take notes, do research, think about the character’s traits. With Days of Moonlight, I knew I wanted to tell a story that had to do with the population exchange between Turkey and Greece after the Lausanne Treaty in 1924, and about Cretan immigrants in Izmir, specifically. I find that part of the history of the Aegean region fascinating, and not much discussed.  I did some research on the epoch, the events. This coincided with a personal story.  My mother had been trying to reach her friend in Izmir by phone, for months, unsuccessfully. Then her phone got disconnected.  Mom got worried. She started asking around and finally got word that her friend had passed away months before.  I remember the day she found this out. We sat in her darkening room as the sun was setting, quietly, both of us feeling so sad. This lady had always lived alone, had never married. She had never told mom she was sick, when they spoke. It’s as if she wanted to leave this world without a fuss, the way she had lived in it.

I didn’t know much about her life at all. But it got me wondering how a single woman’s life would have been in those times, in Izmir. I knew I wanted it to feel intimate, deeply emotional, the story of a strong woman with a richly-textured secret life. It seemed that the best way to do that was to have her as the narrator, penning a journal, writing bits of an autobiography, letters and her account of her parents’ migration from Crete, whatever she remembered from the stories she was told as a child.  Once I felt I knew her and the other characters well enough to tell their stories and had a strong sense of the larger overarching story of her entire life, it all unravelled. The myth of the Minotaur, a Cretan and particularly, an Aegean story, was there from the beginning. It is a powerful myth, and held me captive as I imagined the story of Mehtap’s life.

Maybe the texture and tone tend to evolve with the characters. As I write, I want to see through their eyes, know what they like to wear, the music they listen to, movies they watch, their random thoughts as they sit on their balcony, annoying habits, all those details. I want to live in their world with them, become them.  I know I am in that universe, when I can describe it effortlessly. The songs, the view, the smells and sounds are there. I’m there.

Your latest novel, Days of Moonlight is a broad sweep encompassing several decades, and Ghost of Smyrna was a historical novel. Do you prefer historical genre rather than narrating stories of the present? A corollary to this question is whether immigrant authors prefer to write about their past than their present?

I don’t feel that I have a preference for the historical genre but maybe I unconsciously do, I don’t know.   I’ve wanted to write a futuristic story for a long time. I haven’t gotten around to it yet. My husband laughs and shakes his head at me, because as soon as I finish one novel, I announce to him that I have this idea for a futuristic type of story for my next one. Then I go and write something else. Maybe the time is not right for it yet.

In a way, when you write about the past, there’s plenty to invent and discover, and you have the clear framework of historical facts to guide you. I like to invent, go elsewhere, get out of myself, when I write. Writing about the past also requires some research, which I enjoy.  The Ghosts of Smyrna is about a city which burned down long before I was born. I reconstructed it in my mind, through research, photos, maps etc.  So, in a way, even though I was writing about a real place, there was an imaginary dimension to it.  

Days of Moonlight, as you say, sweeps numerous decades, starting in the 1920s and ending in 2010. It covers Mehtap’s entire life. The focus of her journals is the 60s and 70s in Turkey. Aside from research, I went deep into my childhood memories to bring up how things smelled and looked and felt to me; the look of the city, how people behaved.

To write a story that takes place in the present is possible as long as it’s something I can dig into, something that excites my imagination and somehow leads me to say whatever it is I want to say. The challenge with the present is that we are all immersed in it and there is no perspective. Unless I’m certain of my signposts, I fear the present could be a little tedious to write about because of that lack of distance. 

You were an immigrant in Turkey and you are an immigrant in Canada. Does the status of an outsider give you a better perspective, a more nuanced understanding of cultures and more because you can observe with detachment?

I was not an immigrant in Turkey. My ancestry in Izmir goes back four centuries. I was part of a very small cultural minority. My father was an artist who felt like an outsider all his life. To a certain extent I’ve always carried that outsider/insider feeling, I suppose. Migration is not the only requirement for feeling this way, although if you’ve never felt like an outsider in your life, you would, as soon as you migrated. There is no question. I came to Canada as a teenager, and that did change my life and my perspective. Opened it. Made me see things differently. I always wanted to feel like a citizen of the world and I think this move set me in that direction.

When I was a small child, maybe four years old, I was convinced I was dropped into my family by aliens from another planet. I would wrap myself in the curtains of the living room and wait for them to come and get me, or give me a sign, explain why I was here and for how long.  They never did, as you can imagine and I eventually got bored of waiting and had to accept I wasn’t going anywhere except to bed, for a nap. Plus, mom didn’t like me playing with the curtains. I still don’t know why I’m here.  But I am reconciled to the fact that I will always feel somehow outside of the larger context, looking in, sideways.  I don’t believe this is strictly my experience; as individuals we all have circumstances that lead us to feel somewhat on the outside. Being part of a group is a necessity for feeling safe and good. But our ties to the  group are defined by a few things only – we may suppress our differences for the safety or expediency of belonging. Often individuals are made to suppress their “otherness” by the state, by society, religion, ideologies etc.  I wanted to touch upon that in Days of Moonlight - the existential dissonance of feeling pressured to fit into acceptable molds.

How much of your life is reflected in your work?

Not much really. When I write, I want to be exploring, learning something new, discovering other possibilities than my own world and life. At the same time, I excavate whatever I can from my own life experience, thoughts and emotions to understand lives that are not mine. I think actors probably do something similar when they get into a character. They jump into the unknown using everything they’ve ever learned, felt or thought about as tools to find their way, I suppose.

Excerpt from Days of Moonlight- p 121

Neither Mehmet nor Maria ever returned to Crete for

a visit. They were afraid of travelling and remained profoundly suspicious of Greek and Turkish border officials. In the late fifties, when trips to Greece became possible for Turkish citizens, the couple categorically rejected the notion from fear that something would go awry between the countries during their visit

and prevent their return to Turkey. Disputes between the two neighbours always seemed one island away. They imagined being stuck in Crete with nothing but a suitcase, having no friends, no acquaintances to take care of them, strangers to their birthplace or adrift in the Mediterranean, unclaimed by either country. “Worse

than strangers,” Mehmet would insist, with that particular shade of bitterness that infects the memories of those who have suffered profound injustices in their youth. He never spoke of enemies; he seemed to have none. Although he knew himself to be Greek and Turkish, he could acknowledge neither fully in his mind and he felt like a mongrel that had been groomed to pass for an acceptable breed, thus living his days with an omnipresent sense of dread which, like a gas leak, permeated his universe, emanating a deep suspicion of ideas, governments, convictions, and neighbours. Obsessed by the thought of toeing the line at all times, Mehmet would become taciturn, self-effaced among friends.