BOOK REVIEW: A TIME OF TRANSITION By MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

Mani: Nothing Can Stop An Idea!

By Harish Bijoor

Mani Shankar Aiyar must be a very difficult man to manage. His views are strong, his backbone is rigid, and his spirit is passionate. The ex-diplomat and current politician is a writer to boot as well.  A writer with a style all his own. Strong, contentious and loaded with vitriol and thought.

“A Time of Transition”, a near 400-page collection of his columns from the Indian Express, spans a set of writing years from 1996 to 2004, a time–range he prefers to brand as a time of transition, from Rajiv Gandhi to the 21^st century.

Is he a fawning and adoring Rajiv Gandhi Congressman type? Adoring, he is. Fawning, most certainly not. Not really, as he is all ready to discuss his “boss, mentor and friend”(as he describes him), with all his flaws and chinks, as he traces the recent political history of India as it unfolds in the years laid out.

Mani looks at India and its polity centre-stage. He looks at it through the nuggets of his columns as someone who is out there in the play-field of prurient and patient politics. Never mind the position he holds, there is plenty of open-ness and plenty of candor. One really wonders how his party ever let him write on.

Mani comes through stark naked, as a lovable guy who calls a shovel a shovel. There is a process to his columns.

His columns endear him to you first very refreshingly. In a world of politics which typically hides itself behind the whiter-than-white Khadi kurtas, Mani Shankar Aiyar is the bold ‘Tambram’ who is willing to write of jiving(with his wife) on the dance floor in “regulation khadi-kurta pyjama” at The Haystack in Goa with the Suresh Kalmadi couple, just as the Congress party is hearing of its decimation at the hustings (Circa 1996).

Having endeared himself with his candor and open-ness, Mani will then tell you clearly through his writings that he is a wordsmith par excellence. His every word, tone and tenor of narration is carefully chosen.  And that’s a second way he makes for a loyal readership of his columns.

As you then read on, you realize this guy is really the thinker whose time had really come. In hindsight he is really the guy his political bosses should have listened to. Would India and its development oriented politics be of a different color altogether if that were to be?

There is nothing outside the tapestry of comment of this diplomat turned politician.  The book is packed with issues that relate to the Constitutional polity of India, the Congress party at large, Chief Election Commissioners who came and went (the column on TN Seshan is titled,” See you later, alligator”) Panchayati Raj, Enron, and scores of issues that touched India in these years of transition.

The politics of India at times puts you off the politician at large. The khadi-kurta, the regulation white (as if to say that I am whiter than them all), the benign listening façade and the “I am with you” charade at play puts one off the politician mostly. There is little trust and lots of political cynicism about the politician at large. When you however encounter an ‘un-politician politician’ like Mani, one changes track.

Mani Aiyar at the end of reading this book has just added one more fan to his following. I have never ever read his columns. This is my first, thanks to this compilation. I will now continue to read him and look forward to him as a thinker whose time has come.

“Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”.  Mani Shankar Aiyar is one such idea himself. Sadly stopped. More often than not.  

And that’s the loss I will bemoan for now.

Harish Bijoor is a Brand strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com/harishbijoor