Samanth Subramanian

In Caravan, a short essay on ancient and modern hatreds, and on Buddhist violence in Sri Lanka:

Like a show pony, the “ancient hatreds” argument is trotted out of its stable and walked around the paddock during every ethnic conflict. The warring parties themselves are happy to shoehorn their stances into this model, buffing their credentials by claiming to be part of some grander historical purpose. So it was during the civil war in Sri Lanka. Sinhalese nationalists and Buddhist extremists—and these two groups overlapped more often than not—pointed accusing fingers to the past, when armies from Tamil kingdoms in India invaded this peaceful island, their haven of Buddhism. On the other side of the divide, Tamil nationalists contended that many of their ancestors had arrived as merchants and fishermen—perhaps even before Buddhism reached Sri Lanka—and that Sinhalese kings had repeatedly slaughtered Tamil communities and grabbed their land. Living in Sri Lanka, I frequently got the impression that the Sinhalese and the Tamils had fought two wars: the terrestrial one, which began nominally in 1983 and ended in 2009; and an abstract one, which began centuries ago and is not quite finished yet.

More here.

In the New York Times, my op-ed on the UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka, and on how it may well do more harm than good:

While they carry symbolic weight, such resolutions may, in fact, be impeding progress rather than facilitating it.

The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa greeted last year’s vote with complaints that it was being persecuted by the international community — and used that as a pretext to obstruct even more thoroughly the work of journalists, lawyers and activists. As Mohan Peiris, a former attorney general who is now Sri Lanka’s chief justice, said last March: “It won’t change anything. We will just forge ahead as planned.”

More here.

In Caravan, my profile of Samir Jain, the Times of India‘s Supreme Being and the creator of the modern Indian newspaper industry:

Samir Jain evokes, from those who have known him, a bewildering assortment of reactions. Some cannot be critical enough, either of him as or of his stewardship of his newspapers. One former editor started out talking about Jain civilly enough, but he rediscovered so many buried grievances over the next 90 minutes that he became, by the end of our conversation, a spluttering Roman candle of invective. (Not surprisingly, he too asked to remain anonymous: “I don’t want all the legal weight of the fucking Times of India jumping on me.”) Others swear affection to him, saying that Jain is unfairly maligned; they recount stories of his generosity and his razor-keen intelligence. Still others stud their narratives with caveats and assertions and counter-assertions and sentences that begin: “He’s a very difficult man to know, but…” The complexity of these responses is to be expected, because it matches the complexity of the turmoil he has sown, single-handed, in Indian journalism. “The entire newspaper industry in this country since the 1990s,” Chandan Mitra, editor of The Pioneer, told me, “is essentially the creation of Samir Jain.”

All 16,000 words of the profile here.

In Bookforum‘s fall issue, I review Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, a remarkably close look at the life of Mohammad Ashraf, a day labourer in Delhi:

For a year in Patna, Ashraf studied biology in college—an unusual level of education for a resident of a sidewalk. But after he fired a shotgun above a crowd of men who were harassing his employer, he skipped town and abandoned his degree. Instead, as he rolled from city to city, he gathered other skills: building and whitewashing walls, butchering chickens, selling lemons and eggs and lottery tickets and lengths of suit material, repairing televisions. “The ideal job,” he tells Sethi, “has the perfect balance of kamai and azaadi”—of income and liberty—and Sethi reckons that Ashraf may have attained that particular bliss. But it is difficult to escape the sense that Ashraf knows only too well how circumstances have thwarted him—that he is reluctant to discuss the arc of his life because even he is not sure of how and why he got to where he is, stoned and near broke on a sidewalk in Sadar Bazaar.

More here.

In the New York Times’ India Ink, a two-part Long View written for the 80th anniversary of the flight that became the airline that became Air India. The first part, on the flight itself:

Poor mid-September weather forced Mr. Tata to push his inaugural flight to Oct. 15, when he took off, with more than 100 pounds of mail, in a single-engine De Havilland Puss Moth, from the Drigh Road aerodrome in Karachi. (Mr. Vintcent would fly the second leg, from Bombay via Bellary to Madras.) By train, the Karachi-Bombay route needed 45 hours to complete; Mr. Tata touched down on the mud flats of Juhu in less than eight hours, having stopped off in Ahmedabad to refuel his plane from four-gallon Burmah-Shell petrol cans transported to the runway on a bullock cart. The postmaster of Bombay himself ceremonially collected the mail from Mr. Tata in Juhu; indeed, such an acute sense of occasion marked the entire enterprise that the envelopes – like the one addressed to “A. Achutten, Esqr., General Merchant, Bramagiri, Udipi” – were franked “Karachi-Madras, First Airmail.”

And the second part, on how the airline was wrested away from J. R. D. Tata and nationalised:

The pain of having his airline snatched away in this manner never entirely dissipated. In a letter to a colleague, Mr. Tata wrote:

“Even more than the decision itself, I was upset by the manner in which nationalisation was introduced through the back door without any prior consultation of any kind with the industry… However, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are living in a political and bureaucratic age in which people like ourselves no longer count for much in the scheme of things.”

The first part is here, and the second part is here. The full index of Long View pieces is here.

A most beautiful new cover for the UK paperback of “Following Fish,” courtesy Atlantic Books. In stores soon, I’m told.

For Caravan, I watch the wheels turn (churn?) in the creation of an Amul advertising campaign:

All day long, Rahul daCunha has been fretting over Oscar Pistorius and the Higgs Boson. He was fretting over them at home in the morning; he fretted over them on the way to his office, in a Colaba bylane near the Taj Mahal hotel; he is fretting over them now, in his compact cabin at daCunha Communications, with its The Subject Was Roses poster and its iPad hooked up to a keyboard and mid-afternoon light filtering through the window blinds in a shade that can only be called butter yellow.

But the Higgs Boson, discovered just yesterday, has particularly flummoxed daCunha. “It stuns me. It has become such a big deal! It’s all over Twitter, all over Facebook,” he says. “It’s even in Bombay Times. Even the idiot brigade wants to read about the God particle!” This satisfies daCunha no end. “We long for this kind of thing. Otherwise, we run so much with Bollywood or sports or politics. It’s nice to have this as a change of pace.”

DaCunha is a square man—not in the sense of being uncool, but in the sense of having a square head and square shoulders, set atop a solid square torso. As the creative head of daCunha Communications, it does not frequently fall upon him to pay attention to cutting-edge particle physics. But what India pays attention to, daCunha pays attention to. Along with Manish Jhaveri and Jayant Rane—copywriter and artist respectively—daCunha creates and runs the advertising campaign for Amul butter, now in its 46th year of punning upon the daily news, of siphoning the piss right out of the Indian zeitgeist. During this week in early July, that zeitgeist happens to revolve around a mass-imparting elementary particle and a disabled South African athlete who qualified to run in the Olympics.

More here.

On the New York Times’ India Ink blog, I take the Long View on Satyendra Nath Bose, Albert Einstein, and a scientist’s fleeting but luminous moment of fame:

Mr. Einstein did indeed think the paper worth publication. Within a month, he had translated and submitted it to Zeitschrift für Physik, appending a note at the end of its four concise, equation-filled pages: “In my opinion Bose’s derivation signifies an important advance.” Mr. Einstein would take Mr. Bose’s work further still, applying his statistical techniques to “count” atoms in an ordinary gas, and to discover the low-energy states of particles in the supercooled gases known now as Bose-Einstein Condensates.

The publication of this paper – and Mr. Einstein’s championing of it – earned Mr. Bose a two-year leave of absence to conduct research in Europe. His university had been reluctant to grant him this leave, but when Mr. Einstein sent him a hand-written postcard acknowledging the importance of his contribution, “it solved all problems,” Mr. Bose told Mr. Mehra, who wrote a short biography of him for the Royal Society in 1975. “That little thing gave me a sort of passport to the study leave. They gave me leave for two years and rather generous terms. I received a good stipend. They also gave a separation allowance for the family, otherwise I would not have been able to go abroad at all. … Then I also got a visa from the German Consulate just by showing them Einstein’s card. They did not require me to pay the fee for the visa!”

More here.

In his review, Tabish Khair calls Following Fish “the kind of book that literate tourists to India should get hooked on”:

For once, we cannot blame Europeans for this lopsided perception. Even when it comes to ancient Buddhist Chinese travel narratives, going back a couple of millennia, the travellers who have “survived” in records are the ones who came by land, though we know that much of this travel also took place by sea. Visible accounts of the later Muslim phase show a similar bias in favour of land, even though sea routes were vital to Arab trade and migration. That Subramanian’s book runs against the grain of writing about India is to be welcomed.

It also presents fascinating encounters, such as those with the Hyderabad family that has, for generations, offered a popular cure for asthma that involves swallowing a live murrel fish. And perhaps my favourite chapter is Subramanian’s account of toddy shops (and their volcanic fish cuisine) in Kerala.

More here.

In the Literary Review, John Keay calls Following Fish “a bonne bouche of a book” — and does it the honour of reviewing it alongside Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  Here’s the review, in PDF form.