Three Gangester Books - two fiction one factl

The God Father by Mario Puzo, Penguin 1969

The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo, Penguin

Dongri to Dubai by S. Hussain Zaidi, Lotus Collection, 2012

The story of the God Father is too well known to bear a recall.  It was also made into a highly acclaimed and popular film.   Vito Androlini  born in Sicily in Italy, was sent to America by his mother when his father’s killers came home to kill him too.  His rise from a grocer to the fearsome Don Vito Corleone is the story of fate itself.  As the don was to repeat later,  everyone had to have only one destiny and his destiny was to be a gangster in the garb of a businessman.

Through the story, we are introduced to the Italian code of mafia conduct.  The fate that awaits a man who broke omerta, the law of silence, the strong family ties which worked as an excellent support system and at last, the concept of God Father itself.  As one character explains, the world is too big and complex that a child would be ill at east to be guided by only one father; he must have two.  One biological and another, a God Father, a protector and saviour, a man who comes to his aid in  times of need and earns his loyalty in a way his biological father could not.

The story of Don Vito is like any other mafia leader.  A venture into small crime and first murder brings him fame and power.  People in the neighbourhood approach him to settle their little problems, like a small loan to be repaid, a house to be vacated,  an illegal immigrant to be protected from the long arm of law.  Slowly, he graduates to collecting protection money from gambling houses, building contractors and runs trucks smuggling goods and so on.  Owning hotels,  cinema houses and movie making follow.  Forming alliances, friendships and developing moles, taking revenge, silencing an inconvenient citizen and pocketing law-enforcers are all in the game he plays.    The rules of the mafia have not changed a bit.  The plot remains the same, but the actors, scene and the times change.

Real time actors and the setting change to Mumbai in the book Dongri to Dubai by S. Hussain Zaidi, which traces the history of the mafia in that city of dreams.  Two notable scenes which are so close that one fails to understand which one is real and which one  is fiction.  First,  the resemblance between  the killing of Sunny in the God Father and the killing of Sabir, Dawood’s brother in Mumbai.  Second, the conference of dons in Chicago and a similar conference in Mumbai in which truce in their internecine warfare is announced.  The only difference is that the killings in Mumbai are much more blood curling, mostly because this is recent history and we are only too aware of them.

The Fortunate Pilgrim was a different kettle of fish.  If God Father was the story of Don Vito, fortunate pilgrim was to story of his contrast, the God Mother, named Lucia Santa.  A member of a conservative Italian peasant family which is forced to migrate to America by poverty in her home country, Lucia confronts the adversities which visit her inexorably by the only way she knows; by sticking to the values moulded in her old world.  This is also the story of the small Italian community in New York, its conservative values, clash with American value system, the subjugation of women and their subordination as home keepers.

Fortunate Pilgrim is unforgettable for the presence of two women of grit and character, Lucia Santa and her daughter, Octavia.  The mother, up bringer of her family despite all kinds of tragedies – a dead first husband and a second one consigned to a mental asylum are only two of them –  and refusing to give up.  Octavia tries to outgrow the limitation of her mother’s world but without adopting the smart ways of modern life.  As she muses once, getting ahead in the world meant despoiling her fellow human beings.  At the same time, Octavia refuses to goad the familiar ways of the lazy daily lives of her family.  The anger felt by Octavia is also the anger of any thoughtful woman aspiring a better life, both for her and her family.

There are also moments of fun, particularly when Lucia Santa weighs the persona of Norman Berger, the Jew whom Octavia chooses to marry.  His propensity to carry to book all the time angers Lucia as she once reflects, “Those who read books will let their families starve and those people are insensible to the world outside soaked as they are in an unreal world.”  How true!  At another moment, she mocks, “Octavia, my most intelligent child, picked for a husband the only Jew who does not know how to make money!”

With the war in Europe, prosperity for Americans does not remain a dream.  As demands for war material accelerated in Europe, economy grows and fuels the growth story.  The family moves to a house at the prosperous Long Island at last.

If ‘God Father’ was the triumph of a man by the shortest ways to secure power and prosperity, ‘Fortunate Pilgrim’ was the story of a woman who perseveres and with luck,  wins her liberation from poverty.

The Last Mughal – Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857

The Last Mughal – Fall  of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857

William Dalrymple

Penguin Books, 2006

“Zafar”  meaning “Victory” was the pen name of  Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal Emperor.  He was born in 1775.  When he succeeded his father to the throne, Zafar was already in his mid-sixties and Mughal power was in deep decline.  Zafar was a poet of great talent in four languages, Urdu, Persian, Brij Bhasha and Punjabi; he was also a Calligrapher, a patron of painters and an architect.

The sepoy mutiny of 1857 provides William Dalrymple the backdrop to chart the decline of Mughal power.  At the height of the mutiny, the writ of the emperor did not run beyond the city of Delhi.  The chaos resulting from mutiny, especially in Meerut, led to the movement of the mutineers to Delhi.  The mutineers forced Zafar to lead the war against the British, which he did with extreme reluctance and great ambivalence. 

William Dalrymple oft-repeated thesis about the mutiny was that a jihadist core led the Delhi mutineers and there was an ideological tussle for leadership  between the jihadist and the ‘purbian’ (eastern India) soldiers,  who represented the secular segment. Beyond these conflicts was the churning taking place in the Muslim society of Delhi itself.  The wahabists already had a vocal leader in  Shah Waliullah who represented   the revivalist sections which believed in ridding Muslim society of its corrupt rulers and to strip out non-Islamic  accretions and moving towards core Islamic values.  This section stood opposed to the liberal and tolerant ways of the emperor.

Dalrymple’s elucidation of the conflict between Sufi and Sunni religious views is revealing.  “Orthodox Islam views the object of creation as worship of God, a relationship of subordination between a Master and a slave.  Sufis on the other hand argued that God should be worshiped because he is a lovable being.  Therefore, all traditions of association with God were tolerated among the Sufis.” The Mughal court shared and practiced the Sufi tradition and, therefore, it was an object of antipathy among the jihadist elements. Even though there was no love lost between the Jihadists and the secular elements, in the end, they all gathered under the titular head of Zafar against their common enemy, the British.

But the irony of the war is brought out by William Dalrymple when he says that despite the presence of Jihadist elements, the 1857 mutiny was not a religious war as both sides saw it.  The mutineers were overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys who came on their own free will to accept Zafar’s  leadership.  In fact, Jihadists were a threat to the cohesiveness of the rebellious forces.  On the other hand, the British counter attack consisted largely of Pathan and Punjabi Muslim irregulars, Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from North West Frontier and Punjab.

The British retook the city, not out of any tactical brilliance but by sheer perseverance and because of the inability of the mutineers to present a critical front led by a decisive leader.  The mutineer soldiers were without proper logistics to sustain a rebellion of this size.  There was failure on other fronts as well on the rebel’s side;  their failure to gather intelligence, coordinate effectively with other rebels in Kanpur and Lucknow and link up with the independent Rajas of Central India and Rajputana were a few of them.  The other major shortcoming of the rebels was their failure to establish a territorial base of their rebellion which would sustain their war by providing them with a continuous source of manpower, revenue, food supplies and other logistics.  That would be placing too high a hope on their political consciousness, for the rebels were not led by a revolutionary leader but by a feudal monarch, that too very reluctantly.    Worse, Mao was not even born in 1857 much less his ‘liberated zones’, which was his signal contribution to a successful revolutionary war.

The British did not treat the vanquished with any degree of magnanimity.  The capital was razed down and the citizens of Delhi butchered in a war of extermination.  None better exemplified the conduct of the British than the treatment meted out to Zafar, their prisoner now.  The captive king sat ‘like a beast in a cage’ and parties of Britishers went to have a look at him.  One of the officers wrote home proudly saying how he forced him to stand up and ‘salaam’ him; another boasted of having pulled the king’s beard!

There is this heart-rendering description of Zafar in a report prepared by Henry Layard, a former MP, who visited Zafar in Red Fort where he was held prisoner, “I saw that broken down old man – not in a room, but in a miserable hole in his place – lying on a bedstead, with nothing to cover him but a miserable tattered coverlet.  He showed me his arms which were eaten into by disease and by flies and said in a lamentable voice that he had not enough to eat.”  Even after the passage of 155 years, such a plight of an emperor hovers in the mind’s eye and brings tears to one’s eyes.

At last, what was the place of Zafar in the history of India and his contribution to the political evolution of the country?  Was he to be remembered only as a toothless emperor who presided over the termination of a great dynasty?  The author answers these questions quite clearly, when he  says, “Contrary to the popular perception now, it was a signal contribution of Zafar that he was seen to be a sophisticated liberal, upholding plurality in the tradition of his forefathers Akbar and Dara Shukoh.  Zafar was in this respect an attractive symbol of Islamic Civilization.”   Darlymple also points out that Zafar, throughout the uprising protected his Hindu subjects by refusing to subscribe to the demands of the Jihadists and this was perhaps his greatest legacy.  Alas, that legacy did not find any resonance and could not be upheld when chaos visited the sub-continent again in 1947.

 

Steve Jobs, the man

Steve Jobs by Waltar Isaccson

Published by Simon & Schuster, 2011

Steve Jobs has been acclaimed as an innovator par excellence, who introduced a range of e-products into the world.  This biography is as much about Jobs, the man as it is about the effort he put into the design of his products.  This kind of quick biography has got its share of admirers, but was little taxing to read with all the inanities contained in it.  There was surfeit of information on all aspects of his life, parents, both biological and foster, family, adoption, his experiments with vegetarianism, girl friends, sex, his colleagues at Apple, Mac, Pixer and so on.  

One bit of interesting information was his life-long obsession with vegetarianism.  At the height of his battle with cancer, when the doctors advised him to consume meat to improve his metabolism, Jobs still believed his vegetarian food would come to his rescue.  The personality of Steve Jobs  imitated the  social trend of the times.  As Isaacson puts it, “Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality,  acid and rock, these were the hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking subculture of the era.  In addition to all these, there was an electronic geekiness in his soul which would combine with the rest to form a potent mix.”  But did this mixture establish the power of computer industry, which was such an awe-inspiring feature of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries? The musician Bano had the answer to this question, “The people who invented the twenty first century were pot-smoking, sandal wearing hippies from the west coast like Steve because they saw differently.  The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany and Japan do not encourage this different thinking.  The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imaging a world not yet in existence.”  We have heard this explanation before; about how anarchism inverts the world to invent a new world view.

The book has an ample measure of the qualities of Steve Jobs.  His industry   steadfastness, commitment, eye for excellence and intolerance of mediocrity come through.  Also on display are his machination, even treachery, his manipulation and what the author frequently calls, ‘Reality distortion’ which comes to his aid in promoting the new products he has created.  Given all his innovation, Steve Jobs still stood on the wrong side of the digital divide.   His attempt to integrate hardware and software may have produced great product design, but was a business failure, in a world which functions on cohabitation.  This book has a mine of  information  about Jobs which would surely be grasped by his fans.

MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI

Gandhi’s Truth – on the origins of militant non-violence by Erik H. Erikson

Published in 1970 by Faber and Faber Limited, London

Mahatma Gandhi had often called ‘non violence’, a weapon of the brave rather than the weak.  Militant non-violence would sound a misnomer, especially in these times with its overtones of coercion and intolerance.  In this book, Erikson looks at the little known textile strike of 1918 in Ahmedabad and Gandhi’s assumption of leadership of it to trace the origins and contours of ‘militant non-violence’, of how Gandhi’s evolved and perfected the techniques of non-violence.  What is more interesting is that the author dwells into the childhood of Gandhi to reveal how non-violence was embedded in the daily life of Gandhi’s family and the community to which he belonged.

Erikson, the psychoanalyst provides the theoretical basis for dwelling into the childhood of Gandhi.  He says in the introductory chapter that the images and ideas are absorbed early in life as a kind of space-time which gives coherent reassurance against the abysmal estrangements emerging in each successive stage and plaguing man throughout life; against early mistrust as well as against a shame and doubt, against a sense of guilt as well as against a sense of futility of effort and finally against a confusion of identity as well as against a sense of isolation, stagnation or senile despair.   It is to the credit of Erikson that he seamlessly stitches the early experiences of Gandhi into the wider canvas which Gandhi’s life became, especially after 1918.

The effort of Erikson to chart the future course of Gandhi’s political behavior to his childhood experiences might sound close to ‘predestination’ or ‘determinism’, but he declares  that child training does no more than underscore what is given to the child by his environment.  The future ideology is, in his opinion, a projection on these experiences.  In a significant commentary, Erikson says that deep down, nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter and the religious world views of old only endowed this psychological given with images and ideas which could be shared, transmitted and ritualized.  This is an integration of childhood, religion and eastern-western world views.

The agitation against the mill owners of Ahmedabad is the least of the interesting aspects of the episode, but the insights brought into the affair by the author certainly are.  One of the major Gandhian techniques of non-violence was his insistence on negotiations, even with his adversaries.  The other aspects are his organizational skills and his ability to attract women into his movement to mention only two more.  It is not known whether Gandhian techniques are studied and taught to the students of IIMs at a time when Lalu Prasad’s leadership skills seem to attract them more!

There is the often repeated theory which postulates that Gandhi’s ‘non-violence’ not just defeated the imperial power but also saved it from total humiliation.  What was the psycho analytical insight into such a claim?  We  know that Gandhi nursed his father when he was sick.  One day he asked his uncle to look after his father and went to be with his pregnant wife.  That was the day his father breathed his last.  Gandhi felt very bad about his absence at the moment his father died.  After a few days, his wife also aborted.  He felt that his wife’s abortion was a curse incurred because of his negligence to perform a son’s duty.    The lengthy explanation offered by Erikson needs to be quoted in full, thus: “This curse is what is called ‘cover memory’ which projects one pervasive childhood conflict on one dramatized scene. In individual cases this may seem to be the cause in childhood of a set of dangerous and pathogenic developments in later life; but we may do well to ask what the propensity for such dramatization may mean in phylogenetic development.  A dark preoccupation with the death of the old seems unavoidable in a species which must live through a period of infantile dependence unequaled in length elsewhere in nature, which develops a sensitive self-awareness in the very years of immaturity, and which becomes aware of the inexorable succession of generations at a stage of childhood when it also develops the propensity for intense and irrational guilt.  To better the parent thus means to replace him; to survive him means to kill him, to usurp his domain means to appropriate the mother, the ‘house,’ the ‘throne.’  If such guilt is, as religions claim, of the very essence of revelation, it is still a fateful fact that mankind’s Maker is necessarily first experienced in the infantile image of each man’s maker.  In Gandhi’s case the ‘feminine’ service to his father would have served to deny the boyish wish to replace the father in the possession of the mother and the youthful intention to outdo him as a leader in later life.  Thus, the pattern would be set for a style of leadership which can defeat a superior adversary only non-violently and with the express intent of saving him as well as those whom he oppressed.” 

To the commoners like us, this is a tortured explanation for a behavior trait, nevertheless an explanation worth pursuing and understanding!