ESSAYS
Collected thoughts
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`Byline is a collection of pieces written over the last few years, encompassing travel, politics and history, sidelines, memories and personal notes.'
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M.J.AKBAR may have lost a lot of his hair over the years (I, for one, remember him when he had a full head of hair), but it is clear that he hasn't lost his flair for writing, as is evident from the pieces in the book under review. Before someone accuses the reviewer of facetiousness, let me point out that one of the pieces in Byline — a short two pages long — is titled "The Where-Hair Syndrome". It asks the weighty question, "Why do men, as they age, discover that their hair begins to disappear from all the places where they want it to grow and sprouts up wherever they don't want it to emerge? Ears, for instance." It goes on to a quick discussion of why men cultivate moustaches — Akbar's take is that they do it to improve their self-esteem — and makes the point that no moustache is more important than the face. As he says, "Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler had the same moustache. Could two faces have been more different?"
Humour helps
Some readers might look askance at the whole thing. They might well ask, is this the right subject for a column, especially in a quality newspaper? The short answer is that columnists, especially big names, can get away with most things in their columns. This doesn't answer the question really, but then it could be argued that a little bit of humour does much to leaven the blandness of what passes for reporting and analysis in the Indian press.
Akbar is a big name in Indian journalism: the man who made Sunday magazine a household name in the 1970s while he was in his early twenties; the editor behind the highly successful The Telegraph of Kolkata; and now eminence grise — and editor-in-chief — of The Asian Age. In between, he's also found time for an avatar as a Member of Parliament and write nearly half a dozen books on insurgency, Kashmir, Nehru, communalism and that most fashionable of subjects post-9/11, jihad.
Byline is a collection of pieces written over the last few years, encompassing travel, politics and history, sidelines, memories and "on a personal note". The categories are Akbar's own or, if not, then his editor's (books have editors too, even when they are written by editors).
The "Travel" pieces take up over half the book, and tend to be longish (compared to the other pieces). There is much of interest here: the piece "Stop Press — A Lahore Diary" is funny and wonderful (it appears first, even before the book credits). The pieces written from the U.S. soon after 9/11 are also good, with Akbar capturing the paranoia and the suspicion of foreigners, especially Muslims, in his usual droll fashion. But they tend to pall after a while; his pieces on Turkey, for instance, plunge into obscure trivia which really don't hold the reader's interest.
"Politics and History" is definitely an improvement of Travel. Here Akbar is not only highly readable, he makes some deft points about politics and politicians. Take his essay "Is Atal Behari Vajpayee a Hindu?" It begins, "... Vajpayee is not a Hindu, says the self-appointed guardian of Hinduism, Acharya Giriraj Kishore, vice president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad... The statement says nothing about Vajpayee. It does, however, say a great deal about Acharya Giriraj Kishore." Brief, and devastating. He is also insightful when he points out that, "India is a secular nation not because of India's Muslims and Christians want it to remain so, but because by far the greater percentage of India's Hindus want the nation to remain secular." Or content to keep things that way, perhaps.
But he misses the point in his piece on Jawaharlal Nehru, whose humanism appears to blind Akbar to the overweening vanity and arrogance, and dare we say, the hypocrisy as well?
Personal pieces
"Memories" has some good pieces, especially those written from the heart. But some of them jar: the one on Phoolan resorts to clichés, a common journalistic failing; Akbar has a tendency to be too clever by half, and ends up too often with shallow generalisations.
"On a Personal Note" reflects his own experiences and opinions; you can't quibble with those really, and these three pieces are excellent. His last piece, a lament really, asks, "Why can't Bond find an Indian villain?" Akbar writes, "As an Indian I feel hard done by. Hollywood refuses to take India seriously despite the fact that we have been a nuclear power for twenty years, and one really wonders what more we have to do to enter the script... I mean, I want to be invaded by Halle Berry too. India's diamonds are not bad either: they would glitter beautifully in that navel."
Byline, M.J. Akbar, Lotus Collection/Roli Books, 2004, Rs. 295.
SHIV S. KUMAR
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