Aakar Patel
How Sonia Gandhi is changing India by Aakar Patel
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Aakar Patel
In her silent way, Sonia Gandhi is changing India. Her position in the government, like President Asif Zardari’s, isn’t one of primary execution. That role belongs to Manmohan Singh in India, as it does in Pakistan to Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani.
Sonia is president of Congress, and also leader of Congress’s parliamentary party. Those are the only roles she has. In the Lok Sabha, India’s equivalent of the National Assembly, the leader is finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. That role should have been Manmohan’s, but he isn’t directly elected, unlike Gilani who represents Multan. Manmohan has been brought into cabinet through the Rajya Sabha, our house of indirectly-elected legislators.
So how is Sonia changing India?
She is doing it through her social legislation. This includes laws against poverty, corruption and now against sexual inequality. The first, the law against poverty, was passed in 2005. It is called the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. US$10 billion is spent on it every year, and its details are available on the website nrega.nic.in.
The act guarantees 100 days of work to every adult Indian. The work is manual unskilled labour, and the daily wage is Rs60 (Pakistan Rs111). This might not sound like a lot of money, and it isn’t. But for the farming family which faces drought, it brings dinner for a few days.
Economists did not like this act when it was passed. One reason is that India has a corrupt bureaucracy and a lot of the money meant for the poor is taken away by a village or town middleman. Research has shown that often the money also takes weeks to be paid and that it is made difficult for the poor to collect their wages. So the argument was that the benefit might not match the cost.
The other reason for their opposition was that the transaction is not productive in conventional economic ways. The work that the person gets might well be that of digging the village pond or road. The benefit, if any, of this work is likely to show in time and not immediately. However, after five years of it, most people now agree that the scheme works and it is thought to be the reason the Congress was returned to power last year.
The second act of legislation, the one against corruption, is called the Right to Information Act. This law addresses the secrecy that citizens of poor nations are used to in their relations with the state. The officers of government departments — police, municipality, tax — usually behave like masters. The citizen, especially the one who is not rich or influential, looks to them as dispensers of favours rather than of service. They hold enormous arbitrary power because authority isn’t easily challenged in India. The RTI Act, as it is called, forces them to explain under what law they have taken the decision they did. This makes them more likely to do the right thing, or so the act’s legislators believe.
While some things, such as national security, are exempt, most departments that affect citizens are exposed to this law and the citizen, should he be persistent, is likely to get the bureaucracy to move, which is otherwise difficult in this country.
The full impact of this law hasn’t been felt yet, because people are becoming aware of it only gradually. The government advertises both this law and the NREGA heavily, and perhaps in time it will have the effect its authors intended.
The third law was passed by the Rajya Sabha earlier this week. It seeks to reserve a third of all legislature seats in the Lok Sabha and in the assemblies of India’s 28 states for women. Pakistan already has a law, passed under President Musharraf, that sets aside 60 of its 342 seats for women. Musharraf did this by expanding the assembly. India is taking the more difficult route of introducing the reservation without increasing the seats, because it’s more difficult to change the constitution here.
An interesting report published this week showed that India’s female MPs were half as likely as the male MPs to have criminal cases against them. This is something that will help supporters of the bill, which now has to pass the Lok Sabha, a more difficult task.
The problem we have in our legislatures is quality. Our assemblies are not famous for the speeches made in them and newspapers have stopped reporting speeches entirely. The way in which the Indian legislator communicates his quality is through anger. He does this either through the walkout or by making a nuisance of himself and preventing the functioning of the assembly. This is in the manner of a child who does not want the others to play.
This sort of behaviour gets neutral coverage in the newspapers. Most Indians do not seem to mind this, and the press shows such politicians as having got their way. The entry of more women might not address this problem of quality, but it will help over years in making us see women differently.
The bill was opposed violently by two small parties, run by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Yadav, because they want reservation within the reserved seats for women of backward castes and those who are Muslim.
Sonia Gandhi’s response has been that there is nothing to stop these men from giving their tickets to such sections. If the bill goes through the Lok Sabha, and we shall soon know, it will mean that many male legislators will lose their seats and that is one reason for the obstruction.
These laws reveal the scale of Sonia Gandhi’s ambition, and what she thinks her job as Congress president is. They also show she’s not cynical, which is strange because she has lived in an Indian political house since the age of 24. She is convinced that big change can come to India democratically and through parliament.
She has picked that as her cause and these three laws will be her legacy. They set her apart from our other leaders, whose great acts have come not in parliament but on the battlefield, like Advani and his Babri Masjid movement or Vajpayee and his atom bomb.
It appears that the division of power between Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan is that Manmohan has been given charge of policy. This means things like finance, which is his speciality, strategic affairs and foreign policy. Being a finance man, he seeks reconciliation with Pakistan through trade, and Sonia has trusted him to execute a very complex policy on India’s nuclear status with America. Governing India is difficult and can only be done by understanding the complicated structure of the bureaucracy. Manmohan understands it because of his work as finance minister 20 years ago.
What Sonia Gandhi has focussed on is two things: reviving the Congress party and social legislation.
From urban renewal to protecting the jungle land of tribals and from digitising rural records to building village roads, what she’s urging government to take up is quite remarkable. And it is consistent. Her interests lie in social causes, in the classical manner of the Congress.
It is difficult to argue against the fact that she has been very good, both for her party and for this country.
Her husband Rajiv Gandhi led Congress in the Lok Sabha with 404 seats.
He was charismatic, but it’s difficult for us to remember the things Rajiv Gandhi actually achieved. Sonia has half that number in MPs but she is armed with the sort of clarity about her agenda that no leader since Nehru has had.
With limited space to manoeuvre in parliament, she has already delivered laws of the sort of quality and direct effectiveness that no government in India ever has. What she has done might only show in 15 years, when it is clear how successful RTI has been at rolling back corruption or how much poverty has actually been obliterated by the NREGA. But the indication is that her impact will be enormous.
This government has four years to go and it will be revealing to see what else she is able to push through.
In the last few weeks there has been a demand that after his one-day double century, Sachin be given the Bharat Ratna, which is India’s highest award. Sachin says he’s quite open to accepting it, for his skill in hitting around a cricket ball. But the really bold strokes are being played by a 64-year-old widow whose passport now says she is Indian.
The columnist is writing a book on the changing world of servants in India, to be published by Random House. Email: aakar.patel@gmail. com
Zia Mohyeddin and Amitabh Bachchan in Bombay by Aakar Patel
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Aakar Patel
Last month, we had the opportunity to listen to Zia Mohyeddin. He had been invited here as part of the Aman ki Asha programme that Jang and the Times of India have organised. It’s an excellent initiative because in the absence of trade, and given that we can hardly agree on anything else, culture is the one thing we can share comfortably.
A few years ago I had read about Mohyeddin’s famous annual recitations in Pakistan. A friend from Lahore then sent three compact discs of his performances recorded at what I think were functions of Pakistani-Americans.
The recordings included an irreverent one about different Pakistani communities and their cultural traits. There was one funny story about Chinioti traders. There was also a smoothly delivered dialogue in English between man and God about the nature of woman. I had read about Mohyeddin’s readings of Ghalib’s letters, but those were not included in the recordings.
These were the sort of things I had wanted to listen to from Mohyeddin. I read that Mohyeddin had revived the more traditional style of reciting Urdu poetry. This had been eclipsed 50 years ago by the hammy style of Z A Bokhari, brother of humorist Patras. I looked forward to understanding what that meant.
The event was at the Bandra fort, built by the Portuguese in 1640, and overlooking the Mahim bay. The fort has been restored partly, from funds provided by actress and legislator Shabana Azmi, and an amphitheatre has been built in it where cultural events are frequently held.
The programme had two items: Mohyeddin reciting Faiz and Amitabh Bachchan reciting the verse of his father, Harivanshrai.
The amphitheatre seats about 500 and it was packed. In the front row were Jaya Bachchan and also a couple of other people from Bollywood. I recognised the actress Vidya Balan, who is beautiful, and the director Imtiaz Ali.
Zia Mohyeddin came out to applause, wearing a dark suit and tie. His jacket was elegantly cut, with his cufflinks showing. He was trim, with a full head of hair and looked senatorial, younger than 77. He has a superb, deep voice and the moment he began, the crowd knew it was in the presence of something superior.
The passes to the event had been free. When this happens in India organisers tend to print more passes than are seats. This is because Indians often pick up free passes and then do not show up. This evening, most people did and that meant that many were left out.
Moments into Mohyeddin’s recitation, the ones left outside began shouting a chorus of “hai hai”, demanding to be let in. Mohyeddin stiffened for one moment and many of us thought it might be the Shiv Sena or some such group trying to oppose Aman ki Asha.
This protest carried on for a few minutes and disturbed the atmosphere irrevocably. It drew attention away from the recitation, and attention was needed because Mohyeddin was reading Faiz, a difficult poet.
It isn’t clear whether he chose Faiz or the organisers asked him to read Faiz. I think the latter is more likely, though Mohyeddin often reads him and one of my discs is called Faiz Sahab Ki Mohabbat Mein.
Perhaps 20, and my guess is fewer, people in the audience could appreciate the poetry. Faiz’s poems often have many Persian words and phrases. I imagine he is also a difficult poet for most Pakistanis. In this case his quality was wasted because Aman ki Asha is about peace through familiarity of culture. What Mohyeddin recited actually accentuated difference.
Faiz is thought to be a poet of protest and I’m not sure why his writing wasn’t simpler, like the verse of Jalib. Mohyeddin said that Faiz was not only a political poet (“siyasi sha’ir”) and that some of his poems were also purely on romance.
There are easy Faiz poems, and those are his apolitical ones, like Gulon mein rang bharay. Mohyeddin was witty and a couple of times interrupted his recitation to introduce a particular poem. Though he did not recite Gulon, he said of it that at mushairas Faiz would refuse to recite it saying “Woh to Mehdi Hasan ki ho gayi”. Similarly, he would say of Subh-e-Azadi that “Woh to Zia ki ho gayi”.
This was the one Faiz poem many in the audience were familiar with, and its opening lines (“Yeh daagh daagh ujaalaa, yeh shab-gazida sahar…”) were applauded. I think Indians have misread the poem. We assume this is a rejection of Partition, but it’s not. It’s actually a pining for another form of government. He is referring to what happened after 1947 and what should have been. This is in line with his communist principles. Faiz’s famous translator is Victor Kiernan, also a communist.
Is the problem of South Asians that we don’t have the right sort of government? Faiz thought so as did the other poets of the Progressive Movement. It is difficult to understand why they thought this when the problems of India, for instance, are so clearly the result of our culture and self-inflicted.
Mohyeddin recited for about 40 minutes, in which time mobile phones went off only three times which is quite good by our standards. After this, the organisers asked Jaya Bachchan to speak, introducing her so fawningly and acting so familiarly with her that it was embarrassing. She was surprised to be asked to speak and came on stage to call out her husband, muffing her lines.
Amitabh Bachchan came on with a large band. He wore a theatrical costume, a bright red kurta with a black design.
His father was famous for one particular poem called Madhushala (maikhana/tavern). I bought a copy of it last year and after reading it I couldn’t understand why it was famous. It is a mediocre poem, and the poet was 27 when he wrote it. The poem is introduced in the edition I have by a former professor of Benaras Hindu University. This man was present at one of the poem’s first readings in the 1930s at the university. His introduction is quite revealing, and it’s disturbing that someone of such mediocrity should have been in the position of influencing students.
He says that he wrote a parody of the poem to entertain his students while Bachchan rested between verses (it is a long poem). The verse he offers as a sample is: “Lakh piyein, do lakh piyein, par kabhi nahin thaknewala: Agar pilanay ka dum hai tau jari rakh yeh Madhushala”.
Harivanshrai’s verse is in similar vein, with forced rhyme and lines of no particular merit. So dull is the thing that when the singer Manna De set it to song he had to reach out to verse 66 for a decent line because what goes before it is unrelentingly banal.
Bachchan, like Mohyeddin, is an orator of quality. However, he does not recite his father’s poem. Instead he insists on singing it, and he cannot sing well. He has picked the wrong key, and it’s too high for him. His modulation is poor and he surrenders the control that he otherwise has when he talks.
The singing was to a weak melody, and the band’s interventions were dreadful. The performance took on the mindless quality of a satsang, a religious gathering, and many around me were waving their arms about as Indians are wont to do.
Bachchan had the grave persona that he wears so well but what he produced was not of comparative quality. He says he is becoming increasingly contemplative of the writings of his father, who passed away a few years ago. This came through quite clearly.
I think the event was a good thing and we should have more exchange of this fashion. But the programme should have been thought through a little. Faiz was chosen because he is thought to be a unifying poet; what was the point to picking Harivanshrai’s poetry? That is not clear.
Zia Mohyeddin could have entertained the same audience with something simpler in Urdu and also in English. I hope we have another chance to listen to him, more relaxed and offering us something similar to what he offers Lahore every year.
The columnist is writing a book on the changing world of servants in India, to be published by Random House.
Email: aakar.patel@gmail. com
The joy of being in the kitchen by Aakar Patel
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Aakar Patel
There are two kinds of cook, and I am the second kind. The first puts together dinner from whatever is in the fridge. For such a person, the recipe follows from the ingredients available. There is understanding about what the consequences of frying ingredient A with spice B will be. This is real cooking. The second kind uses the experience of the first and follows instructions. This is also cooking, but only in the sense that the child in the toy car is driving. For such a cook the instruction book is all. If the recipe calls for two teaspoons of molten wax, it is added without thought about what this would do to the chicken. This is because there is no imagination about the alchemy, about how ingredients are transformed into meals.
Because this cooking is purely by following instructions, if one ingredient out of 10 is unavailable, I am in despair because I am convinced it will not turn out right — and it won’t. So I usually turn the page and look for something else. I soldier on, because cooking makes me feel civilised.
Few things are more satisfying than having made a meal that people liked and, importantly, finished. My mother spent a couple of hours at lunch and perhaps three at dinner in the kitchen, and I do not remember her grudge that work. But of course we think of our mothers as belonging in the kitchen. One day, many years ago, I bought her a cookbook for her birthday and she said to me: ‘I thought the present was for me, not you.’
Perhaps some of us like cooking because we have the option of not doing it on most days. And there is great pleasure to be got from shopping for ingredients.
I live in a part of Bombay called Bandra, the Catholic heart of the city. Bandra has neighbourhoods with tradition, and shopping in them is excellent. It is also one of the few places in India where you can buy both pork and beef.
In the last few years, Indians have begun cooking European food and it’s now easier for us to get the right ingredients. Rocket leaf, avocado, red and yellow peppers, and herbs like basil, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, oregano and thyme.
The European thing I cook most often is steak. In Bandra you can get a very good and tender undercut of beef, which I marinate in olive oil, pepper corns, garlic slivers and mustard. This sits in the fridge for a day if possible and then is grilled.
I have two beautiful vessels, a casserole and a grill, made by Le Creuset. These are very heavy and made of cast iron. I use the casserole only when I cook European food. This is because it has an enamel bottom and is not meant to be scraped clean regularly but lightly washed. There is some logic to this that I do not understand. But this isn’t possible for Indian food, which is strongly spiced and transfers its flavours to the pan.
The grill is what I cook the steaks on, because its ridges leave those lined marks on the meat that makes it look more appealing. The steaks are had with a side salad of avocado, rocket and red and yellow peppers, and perhaps a load of bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar splashed over it. Often also with a bottle of wine, even when I’m alone. Putting a half-open bottle back in the fridge is, according to the TV chef Keith Floyd who died recently, “a disgusting habit”, a sentiment I agree with.
Bandra has many fish markets and though I’m not entirely comfortable in them, or in a butcher’s shop, I go when I can because the sights are quite good. Last month I bought some lobsters. They were about 10 inches long with their shell but containing only about four inches of flesh. I have never figured out how to cook them right and it’s difficult to find recipes for lobsters. Easier to cook (and clean) are the large prawns, which these days are farmed and rather tasteless. These I steam lightly, losing as little flavour as possible, and serve with a sauce of soya and shredded ginger. If I have it, I also add a dollop of Wasabi, the stinging Japanese paste made of horse-radish.
I like eating with chopsticks, though I’m not particularly skilled at using them.
Of the places I do my shopping in, one is expensive, a delicatessen called Sante. It is where a lot of Bollywood people buy their food and one evening I saw Jaya Bachchan in it. Sante is where I occasionally buy my cheese: clumps of smelly cheese like Rocquefort and Gorgonzola, crumbly ones like Feta and thin sliced ones spiced with cumin or chilly. Cheese is great because it can just be unwrapped and put on a platter and served with wine. There are some cheeses that can be cooked, and of those I like Haloumi, the Lebanese goat’s cheese that is served grilled.
Cheeses are about Rs200 for 100 grams, and the deli slices off little bits from the large wheels for you to taste.
The cheese I eat most often is Boursin. This is a soft, pasty cheese that comes in one of three flavours, garlic, pepper or chives. A box costs Rs375 and I serve it with bhakri, which is a baked, biscuit-like hard roti that Gujaratis make. The other thing to eat cheese with is lavash, the flat bread from the middle-east. The area produces many varieties of yeast-less bread, possibly because of the commandment to Jews in Exodus when God told them to mark their flight from Egypt by not using yeast for one week in the year.
For some reason, the cheeses don’t taste good the next day and I must be refrigerating them wrongly. Someone once gifted me a wooden box of Camembert, which I would look at longingly every time I opened the fridge and when finally I decided to have it one evening it had gone bad.
My favourite is a plain one called Old Amsterdam. The other favourite is to be got in only one place: Calcutta’s New Market. There you can buy a superb cheese called Bandel, which is smoked with cow pats. It was first made by the Dutch in their colony in Bengal. Someone told me that other than paneer it is the only cheese local to India. It is golf-ball sized discs and is had after soaking it for a few hours, and then slicing it.
The other thing I like in New Market is a brownie made in Nahoum, a bakery run by Armenian Jews. Sante also stocks caviar, which I love, but it’s too expensive to eat regularly. A tin of 50 grams costs Rs3,000. Some people have it on a cracker with cream cheese but I just spoon it straight from the tin. I understand it used to be available quite freely and cheaply in Indian cities when Russia was communist, but no longer, alas.
I like cooking Indian food too and do this mainly from books written by Madhur Jaffrey, the TV chef who used to be married to the actor Saeed Jaffrey. I also use chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipe for Mirchi ka Salan, which is made with a peanut sauce. This is too teekha to serve foreigners, but I love really hot food.
The thing about Indian food is that there is no recipe which cannot be improved considerably by adding extra Ghee, the food of Gods.
Some people cook because it gives them joy. My business partner is a Sindhi married to a Catholic, one of Bandra’s old families. Her name is Genesia, and she has five siblings: Grenald, Gynelle, Glenard and twins Glynn and Glynda.
Glenard and Gynelle run a service called love lunch. They cook and pack lunch for dozens of executives and it’s delivered to them at 12:45 by Bombay’s superb dabba service. This dabba service is a network of 4,500 men which picks up the tiffins prepared at home and delivers them to offices every weekday for Rs 200 a month.
Love lunch is so good that they have been featured in the New York Times and the Financial Times.
They are real chefs of course, and practitioners of this great art that separates us from animals.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay.
Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com
Herodotus, and the Parsis at Thermopylae-Aakar Patel
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Sunday, January 31, 2010
Aakar Patel
In 480 BC, Persia’s emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.
Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.
We know all this because it was recorded by a Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born a few years before the invasion. It’s a simple and conclusive story. But over the centuries, one part of the invasion, that skirmish with the Spartans, has been used by Europeans to tell a different story. This is the story of freedom-loving individuals (Europeans) defending themselves against slavish barbarians (Asians). And this brave stand of the Spartans, according to the movie ‘300′ and a recent BBC Radio 4 programme called ‘In Our Time’, “saved civilisation”.
It is a bold claim to make, because it assumes that civilisation is entirely European and there was no civilisation on the Persian side. It is also a factually untrue claim on two counts. The first that the skirmish, the battle of Thermopylae, was fought between 300 Spartans and 5.2 million Persians. The second that Xerxes lost the war.
Xerxes is Greek for the emperor’s Old Persian name, which was Kshayarsa, from the same root as Sanskrit Kshatriya and the modern caste name Khatri.
Herodotus says Xerxes had 2.6 million fighting men with that number again in support. A total, according to him, of 5,283,220 men (more than the modern armies of China, America, India and Pakistan put together). Even if it were possible to transport such an army 2,500 years ago, there would have been no food in the surrounding countryside to feed so many and so this number is difficult to believe. It is taken as true by a lot of Europeans, including scholars.
The first inaccuracy that we are referring to, however, is not the number of Persians; it is the number of Greeks. Popular history, as can be seen from the title of the famous Hollywood movie, says the Greeks numbered 300.
Herodotus says the Greek force at Thermopylae was made up of 5,200 men, whom he lists by state including 300 from Sparta, plus “all the men that the Locrians of Opus could send”. We do not know how many those were. And there are more. Herodotus says each Spartan had Helots assigned to him, who also fought and were killed. These were Greeks from Helos enslaved by Sparta. We are not told how many Helots there were at Thermopylae, but Herodotus tells us that at a later battle, at Plataea, there were seven Helots to a Spartan, which would correspond to 2,100 Helots at Thermopylae. So the Greeks numbered 7,300 men plus the Locrians. This is not an insubstantial force to defend the Thermopylae pass which was, according to Herodotus, one wagon wide at its narrowest and 50 feet at its widest, with a stone wall behind which defenders could stand.
It did not really matter how many men the Persians had: the Greeks had a man opposite each attacker. Herodotus says the Greeks were better armed. They were armoured in bronze with helmets, and their spears were longer than those of the Persians. The Greeks had bronze-faced shields, the Spartan ones being three feet across. The Persians had wicker shields. The battle lasted two days, at the end of which the Persians found a way around the pass and obliterated the Greeks. However, many of the Greeks had fled by then, according to Herodotus, and the deserters included Spartans, so all 300 did not sacrifice themselves. Herodotus says in the end there were 4,000 Greek dead meaning there were at least 3,300 deserters. There were 1,000 Persian dead, but Herodotus says these were only the ones displayed by Xerxes and the rest were buried so that his army would not lose heart at the sight. This might not be true given that it would have been in violation of the Persian manner of disposing the dead in the open, fed to vultures.
The Persians of course were Zarathushtrians, and their descendants are the Parsis of Bombay, Surat, Navsari and Karachi.
It is strange to think that one of our communities fought and defeated Europe, but it is true and the Parsis went on to become the greatest community of India.
After this defeat, the Spartans refused to fight Xerxes, and the Athenians fled. Herodotus says there was a naval battle off Salamis that the Persians lost, but the Persians were not a naval power and the spearhead of the Parsi army, the Zhayedan or the Immortals, were infantry not marines.
At the time, 2,400 years ago, naval battles would not have been conclusive because there was no firepower. Ships, called triremes, were slow and powered by oarsmen on three decks. Fighting was carried out by ramming a ship on its side, immobilising it and, if the ship sank, drowning those soldiers who could not swim. This is not an efficient way to do battle and the Greek naval victory would have meant little. Incidentally, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus fought at Salamis and later wrote the play, The Persians.
Having spent his anger, Xerxes returned to Asia, where he would rule successfully before dying 15 years later, in 465 BC.
He left behind a force headed, according to Herodotus, by his step-brother, which lost a battle against 115,000 Greeks at Plataea the following year. In this battle, 1,300 Indians fought on the Persian side. Herodotus says the Indians, who might have been from Punjab, were dressed in cotton and carried cane bows and cane arrows tipped with iron.
After this defeat, the second Persian force also left for Asia. European history says this sequence “saved civilisation”, because in the coming decades Athens would produce the great Plato and Aristotle and the rest of Greek’s classical culture that all Europeans now claim. But there is nothing to say that Plato and Aristotle would not have flowered even under Persian occupation.
The war of 480 was not fought between democrats and despots: the Spartans were also led by a king, Leonidas, and they were hardly democratic. They enslaved their own people, the Helots. They killed two Persian ambassadors sent by Xerxes’s father Darius, throwing them into a well when they asked for a fistful of earth and water as a sign of submission. The Athenians also misbehaved with Darius’s ambassadors, locking them up. Herodotus disapproves of such Greek behaviour and he is himself never prejudiced against the foreigner. He says much of Greek civilisation, including their gods, came from Egypt and he could be right. He thinks the best looking people in the world are Ethiopians. Not once does he refer to people with dark skin as being different. His book is the first work of history ever written. It comprises of nine chapters, each between 50 and 70 pages long and it is over 600 modern pages, beautifully written and very entertaining.
The Persians are shown by him often as merciful. Their rule is never to execute a man for one mistake, and whenever apportioning punishment, to remember the good he did along with the crime. Emperor Darius is shown by Herodotus as grieving after a man who betrays him, a Greek, is beheaded without his knowledge. This is not the behaviour of barbarians. Herodotus uses the word to represent those who, according to Greeks, speak a language that goes ‘bar-bar’, instead of polished Greek. Hindi also uses ‘barh-barh’ to indicate gibberish.
Today, all that remains of the Persians who fought at Thermopylae are the Parsis, who still name their sons Xerxes, Darius and Cyrus. Uniquely among Indian corporates, of Tata Sons’s stock, 65.8 per cent is held by charities. Ratan Tata only holds 0.84 per cent. Last year Tata Sons, which owns Indian’s biggest software firm, one of the world’s biggest steel firms and the automobile manufacturer Jaguar-Land Rover, made a profit of Rs3,780 crore ($800 million), giving much away to India’s poor.
Herodotus would not have thought them uncivilised.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@ hillroadmedia.com
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