In some ways, George Fernandes in Countdown (which I recently finished) serves as a microcosm for everything that is right and wrong with the book.
Things had changed drastically in the recent past for Mr Fernandes, resulting in a set of perplexing paradoxes: his party had won a grand total of two seats in the Lok Sabha polls, yet he had landed a cabinet position. Even two years previously, when he was languishing in the farthest outposts of political wilderness, that would have seemed laughable; he was now a minister in Vajpayee's saffron-tinged cabinet-- Fernandes was a left-winger ideologically, a fiery communist in his earlier days; he once openly supported disarmament, was for years vocally critical of the Nuclear Bomb and yet, now, the blasts at Pokhran had been carried out with Mr Fernandes at the helm of Defence.
When we encounter him in the book, he is a busy man, traveling from South Block (Delhi's power-centre) to Kashmir to Siachen, drafting policy, addressing crowds, dining with army-men in nondescript canteens. A political veteran, he is still energetic, still a workaholic, still dreaming of a better India and still, strangely, very pessimistic: 'India has hit a nadir' (in 1998!), he says, curiously echoing sentiments of several others in the book. He is disillusioned with India's politicians, questions whether we would ever be taken seriously by the Big Players in the World Political Arena. He is clearly a thinking man and, much like the book, is articulate, even brilliant, but also terribly wrong about what was to come.
*****
15 years later, George Fernandes has sadly gone senile. Alzheimer's. Vajpayee, according to most accounts, is worse off. Pakistan has collapsed too, succumbing to a host of self-bred diseases; Walmart features more than the Bomb in our discussions on foreign policy; the fears about India remaining a shaky player in international affairs, always looking westwards for approval, seem severely misplaced.
Peculiar are the ways of history, of chronicles of contemporary events. Countdown talks of fears and hopes, people and places, debates and counterpoints whose ghosts have long since vanished.
And the funny bit is, it's been only a decade-and-a-half.
Things had changed drastically in the recent past for Mr Fernandes, resulting in a set of perplexing paradoxes: his party had won a grand total of two seats in the Lok Sabha polls, yet he had landed a cabinet position. Even two years previously, when he was languishing in the farthest outposts of political wilderness, that would have seemed laughable; he was now a minister in Vajpayee's saffron-tinged cabinet-- Fernandes was a left-winger ideologically, a fiery communist in his earlier days; he once openly supported disarmament, was for years vocally critical of the Nuclear Bomb and yet, now, the blasts at Pokhran had been carried out with Mr Fernandes at the helm of Defence.
When we encounter him in the book, he is a busy man, traveling from South Block (Delhi's power-centre) to Kashmir to Siachen, drafting policy, addressing crowds, dining with army-men in nondescript canteens. A political veteran, he is still energetic, still a workaholic, still dreaming of a better India and still, strangely, very pessimistic: 'India has hit a nadir' (in 1998!), he says, curiously echoing sentiments of several others in the book. He is disillusioned with India's politicians, questions whether we would ever be taken seriously by the Big Players in the World Political Arena. He is clearly a thinking man and, much like the book, is articulate, even brilliant, but also terribly wrong about what was to come.
*****
15 years later, George Fernandes has sadly gone senile. Alzheimer's. Vajpayee, according to most accounts, is worse off. Pakistan has collapsed too, succumbing to a host of self-bred diseases; Walmart features more than the Bomb in our discussions on foreign policy; the fears about India remaining a shaky player in international affairs, always looking westwards for approval, seem severely misplaced.
Peculiar are the ways of history, of chronicles of contemporary events. Countdown talks of fears and hopes, people and places, debates and counterpoints whose ghosts have long since vanished.
And the funny bit is, it's been only a decade-and-a-half.
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