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Annie Besant: Pre-India days
"And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries... " This is how Annie Besant — president of The Theosophical Society for 16 years — justifies her decision to pen her autobiography at 46.
Having battled the odds to stand up for what she believed — risking her married life and the future of her little children by rejecting Christianity, going on to write about women's rights and advocating birth control — Besant's early years were eventful enough to be written about. But, since her autobiography was first published the very year she moved to India, Annie Besant: An Autobiography does not throw much light on the country that was home to her in the twilight years.
In that, Besant's autobiography fails to live up to her stated purpose for writing it in the first place. For the most part, it dwells on her formative years, her doubts in Christian liturgy and ultimate rejection of it, and her introduction to Theosophy. Written with wry humour — often directed at herself — it still makes an easy read.
As far as India is concerned, there is very little reference to the country; except for a passing mention of her work with The Theosophical Society at Adyar in the "Preface to Third Impression" and the publisher's note which marks out the milestones of her life in India — prominent of which is the support she gave to the freedom struggle that earned her the position of president of the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in August 1917.
Annie Besant: An Autobiography, Penguin, Rs. 375.
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Corporate family battles
TILL a few months ago, who would have thought the Ambani brothers would be battling for control of the business empire built by their father within years of his death. Or for that matter, the Rs. 50 million M.P. Birla Group would pass into the hands of a Chartered Accountant of the business enterprise unrelated by blood or marriage to any of the Birla families.
So when a book titled Don't Leave it to the Children: Starting, Building & Sustaining A Family Business hits the stands at a time when India is witness to an all-out war between the hitherto seemingly inseparable Ambani brothers, it is bound to draw attention to itself. Not many may be inclined to buy it, but Alan Crosbie — who himself hails from a well-known business family of Ireland — provides some interesting asides.
Crosbie's contention is that fairytale stories of family businesses run sour because of "infinitely predictable and preventable reasons". Most heads of family businesses know the possible pitfalls ahead but few act in anticipation. His study of the subject has made him arrive at the conclusion that while 70 per cent of companies in the world are family businesses, most of them do not survive past the first generation and only six per cent make it to the third generation.
Drawing from his own experience of turning around the fortunes of Examiner Publications over the past decade, Crosbie dwells into history to look at other family businesses and comes up with a narrative that is part-personal and part-academic. Among the big names mentioned in his book are Ford, McDonald's, Gucci — the last being a classic rags-to-riches story that went awry over succession.
Don't Leave it to the Children: Starting, Building & Sustaining a Family Business, Alan Crosbie, Corpus Collosum, Rs. 195.
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India: to each his own
UNIFORMITY is a concept alien to India. No doubt, globalisation has ushered in an era when the upwardly mobile in cities are wearing, eating and talking the globalised way, but still uniformity is not something one identifies with India. No two experiences in India are ever the same. There may be similarities, but each experience will have its own distinct quality. That is probably what makes A.L. Basham's The Wonder that Was India a befitting description of this country even today and draws people here in droves despite all its warts.
In India in Mind, Pankaj Mishra essentially puts together some such experiences penned by writers over the past century and a half. Like the story of the blind men describing the elephant depending on their individual experiences, each of the 25 stories in this collection offers a different perspective of the common thread called India.
A majority of the stories included in this anthology are portions extracted from major works by the authors featured — V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, E.M. Forster's Abinger Harvest, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, W. Somerset Maugham's A Writer's Notebook, Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, Mark Twain's Following the Equator... Prominent among the five short stories included are George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's "Two More Under the Indian Sun".
Besides a general introduction by Mishra wherein he seeks to trace the first appearance of India in Western narrative — historical and otherwise — each author and story is introduced separately; setting the individual experience into perspective in a bid to "light up a thousand forgotten details" about a country that celebrates diversity.
India in Mind, edited by Pankaj Mishra, Picador India, Rs. 275.
ANITA JOSHUA
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