Book review: 'The Liberals'

Book: The Liberals
Author: Hindol Sengupta
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 311
Price: Rs350

This is a book about the children of Indian liberalisation — the ones who, like journalist Hindol Sengupta, used to have to run to the neighbours’ to take a girlfriend’s phone call, and who now, like Hindol Sengupta, take choppers with the likes of Naveen Jindal. The ones who have worked their way from the metaphorical culvert in Calcutta, upon which no-gooders fritter away their lives, to dizzyingly posh parties in Lahore, where they chitchat with Pakistani pols about Roberto Cavalli sunglasses. Like Hindol Sengupta.

In fact this is largely a book about Sengupta himself. Nothing wrong with that — he seems to be a perfectly nice journalist who works hard, developed a taste for fashion early, and landed the Holy Grail of media: hosting his own television show. He chronicles the story of how his middle-class, cultured Bengali family moved to Delhi (or what his father called a “bread pakora city” —all show but stuffed with leftovers), invested in their only kid’s education, and allowed him to make good.

Sengupta peppers his tale with some interesting insights, though one of the best —that we have moved from being products of our communities to being products of our time — is not his own. Occasionally he floats a baffling theory, such as that in today’s Delhi, everyone wants to be Kanishka Singh (right hand man to Rahul Gandhi).

It’s not entirely dire, of course. Sengupta has a flair for taking his reader inside the head of a teenager breaking the rules, losing his faith, discovering sex and romance and the need for privacy, and nursing fierce ambition. He’s good at representing the faultlines when young press people “from Mukherjee Nagar and Patel Nagar and Mayur Vihar and Janakpuri” find themselves at a Delhi fashion show But he can also be ham-handed, mimicking the accent of the “vernacs” just that bit too much.

From the generation that saved to the generation that spends should be a story reflecting the trajectory of millions, and when he’s in journalistic mode, describing the anti-Tata protest in Singur or the way that his mother prophesied that the only way to succeed is to dream in English, Sengupta is bright, sharply observant, and occasionally funny. But when he reaches a certain distance into himself, either as a character or as a writer, he’s patchy at best. He’s given to a great many exclamations, and sentences that stab at an idea like senators at Julius Caesar. Sometimes this has a certain something — “[I was] as much in love as any seventeen-year-old. Bus-chasingly, rain-waiting-ly in love. Want-to-run-away-ingly in love. Defy-the-world-and-have-deafening-sex-but-with-no-penetration-before-marriage-ly in love.” Often, it does not. Of Mamata Banerjee, he writes, “The leader of Grand Protests. A new-generation street fighter. The face that launched a thousand hartals. The Rani of Raasta Roko. The Czarina of Chakka Jam.”

Nor does he allow quite as many people into the plot as the title implies. You have to peep around the looming form of Hindol to catch a glimpse of any other liberals (the book should really be titled The Liberal). It is  more autobiography than the sociological study of hope that it sets out to be; and it could be argued that one’s mid-thirties isn’t quite time for an autobiography.

Read The Liberals if you want a reasonably acute sensibility to make explicit what you already know. But if you’re pressed for time, gentle reader, pass it by.