Gaurav's Blog

A review of a review

 

A comment on Mihir Sharma's review of Suhel Seth's book- 'Get to the top'

 

There is an old Panchatantra classic that I have read to my toddler several times:

 

An old Brahmin performs a puja (a prayer) for a king and gets a cow's calf as dakshina (alms). As the night falls, The Brahmin proceeds to carry it home on his shoulders. The path to his home passes through a forest. 5 thieves spot him coming from afar and decide to employ an unusual plan to grab the calf. As soon as the Brahmin enters the forest, the first thief, dressed as a common villager, presents himself and in mock surprise, asks the Brahmin:

 

First Thief - Why for god's sake are you carrying a pig on your shoulders?

 

Brahmin (lets out a cry) - You are mistaken oh kind man, it is a calf!

 

No sooner has the Brahmin traversed another 100 meters, the second thief confronts the Brahmin and says:

 

Second Thief- Where do you, a Brahmin, of all the people, go with a pig on your shoulders?

Brahmin (now angry) - Are you totally blind? Can you not see it is a calf?  

 

This continues with the third and the fourth and even the fifth thief repeating the same question to the Brahmin throughout the forest, until the Brahmin , mired in self doubt, and troubled with the thought how his calf could have changed into a pig, finally decides to abandon the calf in the jungle and continues his journey home without it. The thieves of course pick the calf up and celebrate.

 

There is moral to the story, just as every Panchatantra tale has one, but certainly some people got it wrong- they thought the story told them how, if a lie was told enough times, it could magically turn into a truth or at least a half truth; if enough mud was thrown, some would definitely stick. And voila, the first practitioners of the PR industry were born.

 

Seth's influence or stranglehold, should I say, on the Indian media is such that at first I wasn't even going to read Mihir Sharma's (a writer at Caravan magazine) review of his book. In this age of crass commerce, when even seasoned authors resort to cheap gimmickry, can you really be faulted for becoming prejudiced? But should I say, of all book reviews that get published, very rarely are there any that come even close to offering such profound insights- not so much on Seth's book or on him personally though he is chosen as a medium, a symbol- but on the death of merit, on shallowness, even irrevalance of TV debates, on ubiquitous armchair subject experts enshrined by public appearances on TV, on the blindness of ambition.

 

Seth doesn't get this, judging from his twitter reactions to the review. No surprises there- people in love with themselves usually don't.

 

So, the book is of course not worth a dime, but the review- Mihir Sharma's review that is, all of India's gold can't get you what it can, if you were looking to understand the psyche of today's upwardly mobile India.

 

There is just one drawback- you have to have watched Seth in 'action' on NDTV or you won't understand "….Intemperance is intellect and fervidity is profundity in the India of today…"

 

A poor alternative, if you are not an NDTV audience, could be to have a colleague or a boss who comes from a similar background as Seth's but a clearer, more distinctive identifier of such a person would be his proclamations of "passion" towards his work more than 2-3 times in the same sentence when asked to explain something of intellect. If you mistook him to be a salesman for a condom brand called, well, Passion, by god, you are, in the esteemed company of  a person whom Sharma's refers to as belonging to the 'age of Seth'. Judging from the thousands of MBA graduates that India is churning out at breakneck speed, all instilled with the sense that they are the next Jack Welch, finding such people shouldn't be too difficult either. Just visit the gali next to my house at Bangalore, (infact, any bylane in India) and you will come across the esteemed Sri-Devi (global) MBA Institute where such specimens are groomed. And why not? As the 'Suhelian era', dawns & every man an advertisement for himself, humility, far from being virtuous, is a terrible drawback in your personality, that must require you to see a career counselor or indeed a psychiatrist, if you have to reach anywhere.

 

Consider the following delights of Sharma's essay:

 

………..It doesn't matter, he (Seth) argues, if you are a blithering idiot when asked for your opinion: "It is not important what your opinion is. What is important is that you do not come across as someone who has nothing to say." Seth, the master people-brander, does not address the peril of having an opinion and expressing it vociferously, and yet still coming across as someone who has nothing to say. The possibility appears to never have occurred to him….

It reminds me of myriad competitive college entrance exams Group Discussions that were to judge your intellect merely from your ability to interject & aggressively elbow into the 15 minute discussion attended by a dozen contestants, where each of the other 11 were as eager to showcase their verbal prowess as our politicians are. No matter than many of our youngsters believe that stopping to breathe while talking may be a competitive disadvantage,  a dangerous gap that could lead to the demise of a promising career. It is an ode to the age of commerce then that an entire empire has been built in teaching people how to remember to breathe.

 

Or of colleagues in large office meetings, who offer an opinion with no more conviction than as a statement of existence.   

 

Sharma's 4000 words essay, then, is a master piece- if the details on Seth's journey to the top, do sometimes get a trifle tedious, they are only there to explain larger points about malice's in our society.  Go on and read it now, I exhort you- because this is a good time of the year to get some perspective.   

 

Mihir Sharma's review available on this link:

 

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?StoryID=1189&Page=1