35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
old parts every time he serviced the thing, the Ambassador was
actually a very durable and oddly charming car. It was tough as a
tank, unscathed after collisions that would leave Padminis, and
certainly Marutis – along with their occupants – crumpled
irreparably.
Terming such measures ‘infant industries,’ Gurcharan Das was
not in the least sentimental. ‘The infant has to grow up sooner or
later. There’s no respite. Either it can survive out there in the real
world alone, or it can’t. If it can’t, it can’t.’
I was forced to admit that he might have a point. It could well
take the threat of extinction to force Indians to build cars that actually
work when you buy them without having to be repaired or
overhauled before you ever drive them.
‘You’ll see,’ he predicted. ‘This country will start to work as soon
as people realise they only have themselves to blame for it not
working. Infantilism extends to the individual psyche, too, you
know. So many centuries of foreign rule have the same effect as
never letting a child leave home. The moment the child realises it
has to take care of itself, it does. There isn’t any choice, is there? You
see it in families: Mummy and Daddy do everything, so why should
the child even try? Where thinking is unnecessary, or even
discouraged, why think? But those days are over. It will be make or
break – and I am sure we’ll make it.’
He was off soon, he said, for a sabbatical year at Harvard – to
work on a new novel, do some research, think.
‘You get sabbaticals in business?’
‘Why not?’ He sounded surprised.
I doubted that P & G executives back in the US got sabbaticals,
but then again, I don’t think any of them write novels, either.
Much later that night, I curled up with Gurcharan Das’ novel, A
Fine Family. Utterly different from the headlong plunge into a
damaged world that Shobha Dé had burned into her pages, here
was still that new voice of Indian English.
An epic spanning the bloody birth of independent India, and
moving through a troubled childhood into a difficult and confused
adolescence, ending in the hopeful period after Indira Gandhi’s