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The lively adventures of an Indian diplomat Book: 'Words, Words, Words - Adventures in Diplomacy' These days, when the Indian government is in the midst of exacting negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to draft a new safeguards agreement with the country, it is worthwhile to recall that an eminent Indian played a major role in shaping the nuclear watchdog at the time of its establishment. Homi Bhabha, who laid the foundations of India's nuclear journey, was closely involved with the IAEA at the time of its inception and a bust of Bhabha adorns the entrance to the IAEA boardroom. Bhabha was also instrumental in having the IAEA situated in Vienna. New York and Vienna were the leading candidates for locating the atomic energy agency, but Bhabha's love for Western music clinched the case for Austria, according to the book by T.P. Sreenivasan, a former diplomat who was India's governor on the board of the IAEA at the turn of the century. The IAEA was founded in 1956 to 'accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world'. India became a permanent member of the IAEA board as one of the 10 'most advanced in the technology of atomic energy, including the production of source materials'. India continues to play a useful role at the IAEA whose boardroom has two wooden panels depicting scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This is one of the nuggets of information embedded in Sreenivasan's memoirs titled 'Words, Words, Words - Adventures in Diplomacy'. Sreenivasan had a varied career with postings in Washington, Kenya, Austria and Fiji - a country he left just a day before the host government could expel him. In an immensely readable account, he writes about the difficult days in Washington after the nuclear tests in 1998, trying to thaw the frozen India-US ties. One of the reasons for the change in the US position on the Kargil intrusion, he writes, was a revealing tape record of a conversation between then chief of staff Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his deputy Lt Gen Mohammad Aziz that was made available to Americans by the Indian side. The conversation between Musharraf in Beijing and Aziz in Pakistan, intercepted by the Indian intelligence agencies, was a masterstroke because it showed that the army had masterminded the whole operation involving Pakistani soldiers. President Bill Clinton had wanted then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to attend the Blair House meeting with Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif on July 4, 1999, which was arranged at Pakistan's initiative. But India was not in favour of Tashkent being re-enacted on the Potomac, the author writes, recalling the meeting between the Indian and Pakistani leaders at Tashkent after the 1965 war. President Clinton, however, called up Vajpayee twice to apprise him of the developments. According to the author, Vajpayee either said nothing or asked president Clinton in his characteristic style, 'What do you want me to say?' In another instance, Sreenivasan relates how while serving in Fiji, he learnt one fine morning that his golf partner Lt Col Sitiveni Rabuka had walked into the Fiji Parliament and staged an armed coup. India took a tough stance as Fiji citizens of Indian descent were targeted and victimised after the coup. Some months later on the golf course on a Sunday morning Sreenivasan heard the rumour that the Fiji government had decided expel him for a speech that he had made at a gurdwara some days ago. As the next day was a government holiday, it allowed the Indian government to take pre-emptive action and announce his appointment to a post in New Delhi. Angry about the leak, Rabuka insisted that the Indian envoy leave the country within 72 hours. Peppered with such anecdotes, 'Words, Words, Words' is a book written in a lively style about an adventurous diplomatic life. Love and longing in Sri Lanka
This is a gripping story of love and murder, raw passion and brutal violence, an extraordinary portrayal of what has gone wrong with Sri Lanka, otherwise an island nation of picture postcard beauty. Using as the backdrop a second blood-soaked insurrection that the Sinhalese Marxist group JVP launched and the state's brutal response in 1989-90, a period when Indian troops took on the Tamil Tigers elsewhere in Sri Lanka, veteran war reporter Julian West unveils a captivating and racy saga in her first work of fiction. The story revolves around Eva, a photojournalist who returns to Sri Lanka, the country of her birth, against the wishes of her mother who clearly has secrets to hide. Eva sees the decaying house where she grew up, and soon falls in love with a young Sinhalese man, Navahiru. 'She thought of him as a dark-skinned angel; as comforting as opium, offering forgetfulness in place of turmoil. He was like the island. The one she loved.' They make plenty of love. 'That night, they f----d in the shower, their bodies rippling together like seals, and then again in bed.' The times are bad though. The JVP, whose earlier insurrection in 1971 failed with the loss of thousands of young lives, is again on the offensive, targeting and killing members of the security forces and others it sees as class enemies. The government is singularly merciless, and the bodies of young radicals show up everywhere. Innocents too get killed aplenty. For Eva, there is plenty to shoot. But she is appalled. Eva blames the savagery of the rebels, the police and the soldiers on 'the erosion of older, gentler village values'. And then comes Carl, an American journalist based in Colombo who falls for Eva head over heels. He strikes a friendship with her but finds Navahiru a stumbling block. Casually, he shares his predicament with Captain, a young Sinhalese officer of the Special Forces - 'a good source of girls...stories and information'. Even as Eva reciprocates Carl's feelings, armed gunmen seize Navahiru who gets mixed up with JVP radicals - and Eva is shattered. Terror then takes over. Carl feels guilty. Like thousands in Sri Lanka driven to despair, Eva frantically hunts for Navahiru, using all her contacts, going to the extent of faking an interview to ask the powerful interior minister ('Close up, he had the pasty skin and open pores of a sensualist and a drinker'), the man who presides over the government death squads. Finally, Navahiru's fate is what many suffered at that time. Eva is shattered, but by then her affair with Carl is intense - although questions do crop up in her mind about the American's military friends. Carl takes a relief ship to the Tamil north, ignoring Eva's requests to take her along, and almost gets killed in a killer cyclone. By and by Eva also realises why her mother, Vivien, did not want her to fly to Sri Lanka: she discovers her real father. 'Serpent in Paradise' does not touch upon the LTTE war except in passing: 'The north was only 250 miles away, but it could have been another country, another century...Now it was in the hands of the rebels, with their Disneyland iconography and pastry-cutter ideology. They were childish, but like any child with power (and many were children), they were deadly.' But Sri Lanka comes alive in the book. The portrayal of Colombo, of the towns, of the streets, of the rural landscape, of the military press officer ('a rat-faced colonel with red eyes, who offered tea and lies'), of the terror, everything is as real as it can get. Is this work of fiction based on a real life story?
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I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold