Pandemic

Title: Pandemic

Author: Robin Cook

Publisher: Macmillan, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9781509892945

Pages: 386

Gene editing is an exciting new technology that is making rapid progress in medicine. Genetic disorders have a sense of inevitability inherent to them in the way that they do not follow a cause-and-effect paradigm which other diseases do to a considerable extent. If you smoke regularly, there is a very high chance to contract lung cancer and if you are used to booze in liberal quantities, damage to the kidney is guaranteed. But genetic diseases like various cancers do not operate like this. The recipe for the disease is in the genome of the patient right from birth but the malignancy gets triggered at a time when we least expect it. No amount of precaution or healthy living can change the outcome. That is why a way to edit malfunctioning genes became necessary. ‘Pandemic’ is the story of a thrilling adventure associated with complications arising out of gene modification and organ transplantation.

Dr. Jack Stapleton, the leading medical examiner of New York city and the protagonist of many of Cook’s novels encounters a unique and dreadful disease that affects the respiratory system and kills the victim within one or two hours. At first, he compares it to the 1918 flu pandemic which showed a few strains of a very virulent pathogen. Jack identifies the death to have been caused by a process called ‘cytokine storm’ in which the body’s immune cells reacts against a relatively harmless external agent in its system. This reaction causes secretions and inflammation in the lungs and the victim literally drowns in his body fluids. Seeing the dead person having a recent heart transplant, Jack wonders why she was not under a regimen of immunosuppressant drugs which would have reduced the severity of the immune reaction. But his consternation is aroused when a genetic examination reveals that the DNA from the victim’s body and the transplanted heart matched exactly. The real action begins at this point.

Cook successfully reflects the level of unease in the US regarding cutting edge research on the frontiers of molecular biology conducted by overseas business corporations, especially the Chinese. The antagonist of the story is a billionaire Chinese scientist who wants to pull out of the stifling capital movement restrictions imposed by the People's Republic, but unwilling to play by the equally strict rules in America regarding clinical trials of new drugs. Wei Zhao, the super-rich Chinese businessman cuts corners whenever it suited his interests under the guise of providing comfort to people in dire need of organ transplants rather than waiting for painstaking licensing procedures that may take weeks or months to complete. Predictably, Dr. Stapleton crosses his path through sheer intelligence which leads to serious consequences. The author also introduces a new generation of Chinese millennials who exhibit a very high level of nationalism born out of the tremendous economic progress made by the country and who are animated by a strong desire to be a part of the Chinese success story in the coming decades. Wei Zhao’s efforts are thwarted by these rebels who enjoy the connivance of the Chinese regime.

Of course, in a thriller everything is solved in the end and the hero revels in the disclosure he had made in the face of grave personal risk. However, his final escape and the nuanced outcome of the story present a bit of an anti-climax. Cook fails to maintain the tight tempo he had built up in the first three quarters of the book to the quick and much too easy denouement that faces the readers in the final quarter. Anyway, the technologies handled in the book such as CRISPR/CAS9 gene editing techniques and growth of customised human organs in other animals such as pigs provide an interesting new field of operations for molecular biologists.

The book is highly recommended

Rating: 3 Star

A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi’is

Title: A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi’is

Author: John McHugo

Publisher: Saqi Books, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9780863561634

Pages: 347

Islam appears deceptively homogeneous to non-Muslims. The many sects and doctrinesthriving in it are not easily discernible to outsiders, yet for their proponents they constitute all that's worth in life. Newspapers trumpet about the Shia-Sunni divide and how it rends the fabric of entire societies in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Both are followers of Prophet Muhammad and essentially believe in the unity of God. How they separated and what drives them to diverge ideologically is a profound question which this book answers to a substantial amount. A simplistic narrative is taking hold in the West which envisages the Sunnis and Shias as engaged in a perpetual state of religious war that has lasted across centuries. Nothing can be further from the truth. The recent spurt in sectarian violence is in fact caused more by political problems that need a contemporary political solution rather than from ideology or dogma. An analysis of the strife clearly shows that violence has grown only since the year 1979 and shifted to top gear after 2003. Both these dates are significant for the impact it made in Middle Eastern politics, and hence to the world as a whole. The first is the establishment of a theocratic state in Iran dominated by the Shia clergy while the second is the American occupation of Iraq in which a Sunni autocrat was unseated and power handed over to Shia politicians who represented their sect which is numerically superior in Iraq. This Shiarevival in the political sphere ruffled the feathers of the Sunni Wahhabi hardliners in Saudi Arabia. The conflicts in the Middle East are spawned by this political tussle between two entrenched conservative ideologies. John McHugo is an international lawyer with a solid background in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Oxford and the American University in Cairo. He is an expert on Syria and the Middle East and has written another book on a similar topic.

The sectarian violence in Islam began immediately after the death of the Prophet. His family and his tribe took opposing positions in the power struggle. While the family was represented by Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, the other was led by Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law and leader of the Quraysh tribe to which all of them belonged. A lack of political judgement and decisiveness was a character flaw in Ali, who reluctantly acquiesced to the elevation of Abu Bakr,Umar and Uthmanas caliphs to follow the path of the Prophet. The first serious violence among Muslims was the killing of caliphUthman by a mob who besieged his home. It was a time when the old rivalries between Mecca and Medina; the Muhajiroun(the people who accompanied the Prophet in his exodus to Medina) and the Ansar(the supporters of the Prophet who were natives of Medina); the early converts to Islam and the newcomers and that between Qurayshis and non-Qurayshis were boiling over. Ali finally succeeded Uthman, but his assassination had eroded the legitimacy of his reign. He was always on a collision course with Mu’awiyabin AbiSufyan, the governor of Greater Syria who stepped into the caliph’s shoes upon the assassination of Ali. Ali's wife Fatimah was the only child of the Prophet who had progeny and bore him two sons - Hasan and Hussein. They entered into a deal with Mu’awiya that the latter would resume the caliphate to the sons of Ali after his death. However, Hasan died before Mu’awiyadid and Hussein was brutally murdered at the end of an unequal battle at Karbala upon the orders of Yazid, the son of Mu’awiya. This event marked the rise of Shiism which literally means the ‘Party of Ali’. The other main group, Sunnis, recognise the legitimacy of the first threecaliphs and forms about 85 per cent of the total Muslim population. The Shias are known for their gruesome accts of self-mortification in the commemorative processions of Hussein's martyrdom.

After setting out the birth and original sources of Shiism, McHugo proceeds to describe how the division consolidated itself and became a scar on the body of Islamic society. Two divergent approaches emerged during the first two centuries of Abbasid rule. A hierarchy of the teachings of the religion became established, in which the sequence followed was the Prophet's companions, then their followers and finally, the followers of the followers. The people of these first three generations of Muslims were called ‘Righteous Ancestors’ (al-Salaf al-Salih). After the text of the Quran, the recollections attributed to them constituted the tradition, or Sunna. The people who followed it are called Sunnis. Shias looked to the other members of the Prophet’s family as the source of guidance to his teachings. They ascribed special knowledge of the true meaning of the religion to them. The Shias themselves split into separate sub sects such as Twelvers, Ismailis, Zaydis and Druzes. The sharp crystallization of the two sects came about in the Buyid period starting from 945 CE when the Abbasid caliphs came to be mere puppets at the hands of the Buyids. The authority of the caliphs to interpret Sharia law declined. It came about that true Islam could be practiced wherever a Muslim ruler kept a court with a staff of religious scholars. There was – and still is – no central teaching authority in Sunni Islam. Shias meanwhile put faith in an imam who is a divinely inspired descendant of the Prophet. Scholars take a lesser position in Shiism.

The book then turns to the nineteenth century in which a Shia-Sunni synthesis was attempted by religious scholars. By this time, the leading Muslim empires of the Ottomans and Safavid/Iranians had run out of steam in the face of shocking defeats at the hands of European powers. The rest of Islamic history hinges on the duel between Western political ideas and Islamism as a way to administer a country. Adherents of the Western system demanded democracy, elections, personal liberty, freedom of expression and rule of law as the fundamentals without which a country cannot stand on its legs. The worshippers of Islamism view Islam not only as a religion but a political philosophy as well, which controls all aspects of a person's life and demands absolute submission from him or her. The organisations are many such as the Jama’at Islami, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or ISIS, but the ultimate goal of all of them are the same – absolute power over the society in which no opposition is tolerated and people of other religions are firmly kept down as second class citizens. The author quotes a social commentator who argues that Islamism has already lost the fight and 9/11 was a desperate act by a side who knew that they have lost the game. The uprising in 2011, called Arab Spring, disseminated its appeal across all sects and we saw the people demanding Western-style rights from their dictatorial overlords.

The Islamic world is now boiling over with violence, but this book lays the blame squarely at the doors of the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. The unexpected rise of the Shia crescent in Iran, post-2003 Iraq, Syria and Yemen stung the Wahhabi hardliners in Saudi Arabia to take action. If we follow this logic, it must be assumed that the last word is yet to be pronounced. The current sanctions imposed on Iran by the US are just another move on the chequered board. The book makes a special note on ibn Abd al-Wahhab who founded the theological creed Wahhabism and comments on the eerie similarity of his teachings with that of Luther and Calvin, who were the reformist leaders of catholic Christianity. He then warns that in light of the fierce wars fought in Europe in the stride of the reformers, those who wants reformation in Islam should be careful what they wish for.

The book is impressive to read, but two huge factual errors seen in it discount its credibility to a great extent. It seems that the author is unacquainted with Indian history, but it does not hold him back from putting up grand schemes of Shia-Sunni interactions in the subcontinent. He claims that the Delhi sultanate was overthrown by Babur in 1398 (p.171). This is wrong. It was Timur who invaded in that year and the Delhi sultanate could weather over the storm. Babur came to India precisely 128 years later. Then again, the author states that Jahangir constructed Taj Mahal as the mausoleum for his beloved Shia wife Noor Jahan (p.173). Noor Jahan was a Shia, but isn't it common knowledge that it was Shah Jahan who built the Taj in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal who died in childbirth? What accuracy can you hope to observe from a scholar of Islamic history who can't even get the story of the Taj right?

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

A Strange Kind of Paradise

Title: A Strange Kind of Paradise – India through Foreign Eyes

Author: Sam Miller

Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2014)

ISBN: 9780143424024

Pages: 425

Indians have been particularly complacent in recording history or putting down their observations to paper, or palm leaves, or whatever. India boasts of early mathematicians and philosophers who were at par with Greek scholars, but the position of Herodotus remains uncontested. Whatever history the modern historians compiled was from the accounts of visitors and invaders who came here. Early Buddhist texts and a rational analysis of the Puranas supported their findings and the modern Indian historiography was born. This book is the tale of a 2500 year-old engagement between foreigners and India that begins with the ancient Greeks. This book is an excellent survey of the writing from Megasthenes onwards to the twenty-first century movies and cultural interactions. Sam Miller is a journalist who worked with the BBC in Delhi for many years. He has married from India and stays here as an adopted son-in-law of the country.

Miller notes a crucial difference of focus on the accounts of ancient and modern visitors to India. The ancient ones were almost universally of the view that it was a land of untold wealth, rich in resources and jewels. Some accounts talk about gold-digging ants and places where diamonds can simply be picked from the ground. In the modern period, a U-turn is seen in the crux of the narrative where almost all of them present horrific tales of grinding, dehumanizing poverty. Did the rich country gradually fall into misery as a result of countless raids of loot and plunder let loose by the invaders? The author tactfully stops short of asking this pertinent question but instead presents the reasons behind the modern perspective. In between the two eras, there appeared a period in which India remained a misty eminence for most mediaeval Europeans while China surged ahead out of the shadows. This happened as a corollary to the Mongol invasions to Europe in which the glimmer of their sword blades reflected off streams of blood as far away as Hungary and Bulgaria. The stamp of poverty was affixed on India's visage in the early eighteenth century when the first sustained identification of it as a land of great poverty, rather than of great wealth came to pass. This image was largely transmitted through the writings of missionaries, who won most of their converts from the poorest of the poor, upon the supply of food and other items of material support. Some of the converts were in fact derisively called ‘Rice Christians’. Missionaries would send letters back home, begging for money to support the new converts. This picture got etched into the European mind during the colonial days.

Of all the visitors mentioned in this book, that of Tripitaka, variously known as Hiuen Tsang or Xuansang is worthy of remark. He was a Chinese monk who made the long and arduous overland journey from his homeland to India in the seventh century CE. The aim of his visit was to call on the holy sites of Buddhism and to find ancient Buddhist texts. He was the source of the greatest contact between the two countries from the third to the seventh centuries CE. Tripitaka made the first description of the giant rock-cut Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan which were blasted away in 2001 in a mad rush of religious bigotry by the Taleban. For some reason, Miller continues to refer to the Chinese pilgrim by his Indian name, Tripitaka. A part of his skull was gifted to India in 1956 as a piece of goodwill measure by the nascent People's Republic of China and personally handed over by the Dalai Lama, who accompanied the official delegation led by the premier, Zhou Enlai. It still remains under lock and key in the Patna Museum. His narrative contains a detailed description of the theological university at Nalanda which housed 10,000 monks in multi-storeyed chambers. This seat of learning was vandalised and burnt down by a Muslim warlord in the twelfth century when he discovered that there was no copy of the Quran in its library (p.69). A Tibetan pilgrim visited the site soon after in 1235 and what he saw was heart-breaking. He found one aged monk teaching pupils among the charred remains of the once magnificent buildings. It soon went into oblivion and was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century with the help of an English translation of Tripitaka’s work.

Miller dwells at some length on the Orientalist and Anglicist dichotomy in the Western viewpoint on India. We come across some westerners who are starry-eyed on Indian ideals and artefacts while another group treats it with disdain and contempt. The Orientalists is of the persuasion that the West has much to learn from India. Their images of the country was born of its pre-colonial past, an ancient civilization waiting to be discovered, its artefacts collected and categorised. The Anglicists’ image of India was adapted from the colonial period with all its attendant ills. The land they were conquering became a testbed where they could experiment with their ideas on Christianity, progress and education. William Jones, who founded the Asiatic Society, belongs to the former and Wilberforce who preached against slavery, the historian James Mill and Thomas Macaulay belong to the latter group. Macaulay went a step further, jeeringly remarking that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. He also wanted to play with the new education system the British was implementing in India that sought to create a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect. Indeed, it was successful in churning out a group of Anglophone people who have lost touch with the country’s mores and were often disparagingly remarked upon as Macaulay's children.

The constant refrain of all modern visitors to India had been its dirtiness - not of the land, but of the actions of its inhabitants for which poverty is one of the reasons. The wide practice of open defecation made it a foul place even for those who are impressed by its otherwise impeccable attributes. V S Naipaul notes with disgust in An Area of Darkness that ‘Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover’ (p.361). In fact, the euphemistic term for defecation in the Malayalam language is ‘going outside’! However, open defecation is in its final laps with the countrywide coverage of the Swachh Bharat initiative. We hope that future visitors won't have a bone of contention at least on this point.

The chapter titles are a pastiche of old travel books in which the author's exploits are displayed in a brief way. The exceeding number of footnotes somewhat repels the readers from the main narrative. Miller has been very open in handling delicate points that offend puritanical readers. There are some ribald quotes from travel lore on which discretion on the part of faint-hearted readers is advised. He also provides a taste of the imperial erotica in a matter-of-fact way. Miller’s vocabulary is amazingly comprehensive and hints of his rich credentials to his career in journalism. The author’s own biography is also presented through a string of intermissions at the end of each chapter. That way, Miller becomes a part of his own narrative stream by which his experiences enrich the abundant material compiled by foreign eyes.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

When Coal Turned Gold

Title: When Coal Turned Gold – The Making of a Maharatna Company

Author: Partha Sarathi Bhattacharyya

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090761

Pages: 181

Public sector is where everybody, including the CEO, blames the management for their own mistakes. Unfortunately for India, the irrational fix up with socialism in the early stages and partisan politics in the two decades from 1960 had forced the government to go for public sector enterprises in every sphere of the command economy. Wherever the private sector had a sizeable presence like banking, insurance, coal mining and aviation, the leading private enterprises were either forcibly taken over by the government or the sector made a state monopoly. The oil shock of the early 1970s stung the state into making a quick decision to adopt coal, which is abundantly available in India, as the primary energy source of the nation. The coal sector was nationalized in the 1970s and a behemoth called Coal India Limited (CIL) was established in 1975. This company now owns 80 per cent of the country’s coal production and over 40 per cent of its commercial energy – more than the aggregate contribution of all oil and gas companies put together. Despite mining the same in huge quantities, CIL was able to see black in its balance sheet only in the 2000s as a result of the economic reforms ushered in the country. From the sorry plight of being dependent on budgetary support for its capital expenditure requirements, a slew of measures have made the company self-reliant and profitable. It is now a Maharatna company in India and as a prerequisite to attaining that status, had to list its shares in the bourses. The IPO was immensely successful with the issue oversubscribed more than fifteen times. It became the fourth largest company in market capitalization on the very first day of listing. Partha Sarathi Bhattacharyya was the CEO of CIL for five years and had a career spanning 34 years in its executive cadre. This book is a brief history of the company making a turnaround and the heroic effort that had gone into the successful listing. He has also introduced a few management concepts that can be beneficially applied in any public sector company in India.

Bhattacharyya is basically a finance professional. He left his job in the United Bank of India and joined Coal India as a management trainee in 1977. By hard work and application of innovative ideas, he rose to the top level rather quickly and became a member of the board after just 24 years of service. Believe me; this is quite an achievement in India's public sector where the only thing demanded from a person to be paid more is to get older. He designed the financial models that were examined and approved by the World Bank for granting a bridge loan that changed the fate of CIL. He was made the finance director of Bharat Coking Coal Limited, the largest subsidiary of CIL, and elevated as the chairman of CIL in 2006 at which post he served for five years. Even after superannuation, he closely watches the coal sector and provides valuable insights on the way forward.

The book provides an in-depth survey of the pathetic state of affairs prevailing in state-owned companies in the Indira Gandhi era. Financial viability was not a factor in selecting projects. In the case of coal, this extended to ridiculous extremes. A project closely situated to an upcoming power plant was more likely to be developed even if it projected losses to the company. The motto was ‘more coal, whatever is the cost’. Though the company enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the product, the pricing formula adopted in the late-1980s was based on norms disadvantageous to CIL. It reeled under losses since the capacity utilization hovered well under the targeted 85 per cent. However, the firm didn't feel any financial strain. The cash flow was assured with liberal doses of budgetary support and generous loans from banks which are also owned by the state. The unwritten rule for government loans was payable when able. In short, there was no incentive for good performance and the company plunged deeper into the red. As time went on, even very essential payments were defaulted. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked on socialism, the problem was that you eventually run out of other people's money. The turnaround came in early 1990s when the new Prime Minister Narasimha Rao scrapped the laughably restrictive practices put in place by Nehru and his daughter. CIL focused its investment on high return projects with gradual reduction in debt, fast track attrition of the workforce through VRS and improvement of operational parameters converging to normative levels.

Bhattacharyya's heroic effort in winning the Maharatna status for CIL is praiseworthy. The status is a coveted one for government-owned companies. Only eight undertakings – ONGC, GAIL, IOC, BHEL, NTPC, BHEL, SAIL and CIL – are the holders as on end-2018. Entry into this elite club requires an average annual turnover of more than 20,000 Cr, net worth more than 10,000 Cr and net profit more than 2,500 Cr for the last three years; significant global presence and listing in stock exchanges. CIL was not a listed company till 2010. The government wanted to sell 10 per cent of its stake through an IPO and then list it. Dipstick surveys on company valuation returned a figure of only 50,000 Cr, while the government expected to rope in at least double that amount so as to get Rs. 10,000 Cr from the IPO. The investors’ perception was boosted with road shows in major cities of India and the world. The author had a good rapport with the government and publishing houses which ensured favourable attention in the media. His clout was so strong that he could get over the veto of even the ministry for environment and forests on clearing of thick forests in one day after pulling the right strings. This good relationship is witnessed by the foreword to the book written by Pranab Kumar Mukherjee, who was the former President of India and the union finance minister during Bhattacharyya's tenure.

It is often said that Indians go for a job, rather than a career so that at superannuation, most of them look for rest if the finances can assure it. However, the author continues to serve in the boards of some companies and maintains a watchful eye on movements in the coal sector. He has included two entire chapters on the way forward of the industry. As coal is wedded to power generation, upsets in loading of plants due to widespread adoption of solar and wind power stations are of utmost concern. To make the incremental cost of coal-based stations down, such plants should be installed close to the pit head. Indian coal should also explore the feasibility of diversifying into conversion to oil and manufacturing ammonia for fertilizer production. In a parting of ways with public sector ideology, he advocates the entry of mining giants with core competence into commercial coal mining in the country. This act would undo the disastrous diversion made during the license-quota-permit raj.

The book is written with the perspective of a finance professional with minimum technical discussion. This strains the readability at some points, but the diction, coming from a business executive, is impressive. A separate chapter titled ‘All about Coal’ is included as an appendix to handle the technical aspects, but it too goes the way of Finance. The author provides some very excellent tips regarding procurement in public sector undertakings which are bound by arcane rules and guidelines. A little bit of understandable self-pride is clearly evident between the lines, as seen in the verbatim reproduction of five different newspaper clips on the successful listing of CIL. Bhattacharyya carefully avoids all contentious issues, especially the evacuation of tribals which has raised much hue and cry in Odisha a few years ago. It seems that CIL didn’t have had to deal with such issues.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star