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157 Responses to “Kill/Dil, the rest of the box office”
Happy New Year At 176 Crore Nett After Three Weeks
Friday 14 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Happy New Year grossed around 7.75 crore nett in week three taking its total to a little over 176 crore nett. The film is now the seventh highest grossing film ever beating the figures of last year’s Diwali release Krrish 3 which now goes into eighth place.
The film will go one place higher as it crosses the business of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani in its fourth week to finish in sixth place. The best business for Happy New Year is in Mumbai circuit as it will contribute around 34% of its all India business.
The final business will fall around 27 crore nett short of Shahrukh Khan’s last release Chennai Express with a huge 17 crore nett of this shortfall coming in the South India circuits of Nizam/Andhra, Mysore and Tamil Nadu/Kerala.
Kill Dil Has Fair Start
Friday 14 November 2014 13.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had a fair opening of around 30% with the Delhi NCR belt being best. Normally East Punjab would trend same as Delhi NCR but that circuit has Chaar Sahibzaade going super strong and another Punjabi film Baaz opened pretty well so competition was strong there.
The Govinda factor has not helped much as his films opened better in Maharashtra and UP in his heyday but Kill Dil was so so in UP and low in Maharashtra. Overall its a fair start and it remains to be seen how the film goes from here. Delhi/UP looks likely to be best performing circuit if it trends as it started.
The other release of the week was a horror film by the name of 6-5=2 and it opened to very dull houses wherever released.
The Shaukeens Has 20 Crore Nett First Week
Friday 14 November 2014 11.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The Shaukeens grossed around 20 crore nett in week one and did hold steady collections on the weekdays but they were on the lower side. The film suffered from a slow start and although weekdays were okay, it faces competition from a big films like Kill Dil in week two. The best business came in Mumbai circuit.
The long in the making Rang Rasiya was a poor fare grossing around 3.25 crore nett in week one. The film is out of most theatres in week two
The animation film Chaar Sahibzaade did not do well in Hindi although it did pick up from a very low start. The Punjabi version of the film is a huge hit in East Punjab and Delhi as gained momentum on the weekdays and the film is sure to have super strong week two.
having said that, it did actually have some extremely simple and effective performances. Balraj Sahni especially. Maybe it was very relevant in the times when it was released.
satyamshot.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/the-shaukeens-happy-new-year-ongoing-the-rest-of-the-box-office/#comment-286898
From this comment above
Note how the Krrish3 number of 243 crores domestic net (at number 2 alltime) is not going anywhere –hide it under the carpet–try to dust it off
But it’s coming back to haunt some
And this is being out up now by srk fans like master to further the cause of HNY now
Well, spin is like skimpy bikinis –the more u try to hide the more they reveal …
Kill Dill doesn’t seem to have worked out. Any way I think Shaad Ali’s talent in comedy is jejune. So I will wait for Happy Ending. And dip into offering from two of my favourite directors Linklater and Nolan this weekend , Boyhood and Interstellar in that order.
From the reviews it seems to be a very poor / poorly directed movie. Shaad took such a long break and comes up with this? Where is the homework? Or was it just a quick fix measure to run his kitchen as the money ran out….
Is this the alternative / challenge these young guns offering to the established superstars? Who can blame them for taking things for granted!!
Kill Dil First Day Business
Saturday 15 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had grossed around 6.50-6.75 crore nett on day one as per early estimates. The collections are not so good compared to how Ranveer Singh’s last two films Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela and Gunday opened but its an okay collection going by the costs of the film.
The film performed best in Delhi NCR and CI while collections in Maharashtra were low. In North it was hit by two Punjabi films providing competition. The film did not grow much in the evening at multiplexes and the single screen performance was also on the lower side.
Overall the film has better chances at multiplexes and should show some growth on Saturday though as its an action film its unlikely to be big growth.
6-5=2 had dull collections with first day figures likely to come in at around the 10 lakhs nett range.
every Salman film post-Dabanng has been a remake with the exception of ETT and of course the second Dabanng which was a sequel. Now of course he for have another rare ‘original’ film in the Barjatya one.
It’s not just the fact that most of Salman’s films are “remakes”, but that they are mostly remakes of very mediocre Masala films. I fail to understand why can’t these guy choose better films from the South if they have to go down the remake route (and whenever a better “original” is used as the source material, which is mostly a Tamil one, the resulting remakes have ended up grossing more and trending better- we just saw this with Holiday where the Murugadoss original was easily one of Vijay’s best films, one just has to compare Holiday to Akshay’s own Boss where the original Malayalam film was pretty crappy). Also most of these folks don’t even hire the best Masala directors from the South (Murugadoss is the only exception here who has now made 2 films in Hindi and both are pretty decent films)- Abhishek could have easily taken someone like Rajamouli (though my pick will be Suseenthiran. Both his Naan Mahaan Alla, but especially Pandiyanaadu are the kind of Masala films, if remade properly, could be true-blue superhits apart from turning out to be really good films) for his home production
Incidentally Kaththi was apparently a true-blue superhit. Certainly the biggest Tamil hit of the year and which trended rather strongly- people are calling it Vijay’s biggest career moment yet.
I’m not South Indian/don’t watch their movies but I saw the trailer of Kaththi and the Background music is definitely the best out of any indian movie this year. I’m waiting for a subtitle version before I watch it. Also “I” and of course Lingaa are on my watch list. Hindi films seem so much behind Tamil films in terms of everything.
Hariyali aur Raasta and HGM both had lovely songs, especially the former. SJ at their best. Some of Manoj Kumar’s films used to have highly memorable and melodious songs. Woh Kaun thi was one of them. And also Gumnam.
Hariyali Aur Raasta was actually the film that really pulled me into appreciating old music. I was a teenager and we were driving to a wedding in another city and Allah Jaane Kya Hoga Aage came on the radio and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Later on I asked my mum which film it was from and the next time we went to Leicester I bought the CD. What a soundtrack! All three of the Lata-Mukesh duets are outstanding. And the solos are awesome too. And from then on, I drowned 🙂
Hariyali aur Rasta was SJ at thier best ! In fact if Mukesh owes his career to someone other then Raj Kapoor, then it is Manoj Kumar.Manoj Kumar really looked his best in those days. He was quite a fun to watch when he did not take himself so seriously
Yeah, Manoj in the early sixties wasn’t bad at all, in that he may not have been an acting ‘great’ but he was quite watchable. And yeah, Mukesh sang many great songs for him.
Actually in addition to the lovely songs I liked both the films too. Himalay ki godmein had an overacting yet lovable Mala Sinha and lovely songs and a message.
It doesn’t matter what Aamir says. After a year, he’ll say he was hiding it and he didn’t want to reveal to audience so soon(if anything he has actually signed like that wrestler movie).
Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy have both spoken by now about the election results in India and if you are a Modi voter, you are likely not too happy with their views. I would like to suggest that if you are not a Modi voter, you should also be a bit unhappy at how much attention these particular writers get as “the voice of the Left/Liberal/Secular side of India”. I really think that far too many highly educated South Asian people read Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy and their ilk.
Obviously, I also believe far too many people in the Western elite read them, but at least their admiration is more understandable. They need native informants who can reinforce their preconceived notions and if these native informants helpfully repeat the Western Left’s own pet theories back to them, so much the better. That is not my main concern today.
It would be best to stop this westernized notions of left right centre secular blah blah blah
This labelling makes a puppet of the people who just want to have a decent life.
So if you support business you become a rightist.
Support the right of poor people to improve life you become leftist.
Have respect for every religion and not mind their existence you become a sickular or a secular (meant as a gaali)
And then we say we are free & not colonial slaves of the western thoughts anymore.
After the success of ‘Happy New Year’, actor Abhishek Bachchan says he and the entire cast of the movie are pressurising director Farah Khan to make a sequel of the heist comedy.
The 38-year-old actor said the starcast of the film comprising Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Sonu Sood, Boman Irani, Vivaan Shah and him, want to work together again as they all had a lot of fun while shooting ‘Happy New Year’, which released on October 24.
“I think everybody is pressuring Farah because everybody wants to get back as a team to work again… we had a great time while filming.
Can you all please get together and have a party at Farah’s house if you all miss other so much instead of unleashing another one on us? As a bonus, Shirish Kunder can turn-in his other cheek too for SRK…
Kill Dil Saturday Business
Sunday 16 November 2014 13.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The business of Kill Dil was slightly down its second day as it grossed around 6.25 crore nett. The business was a down a bit in nearly all the circuits
The business for Kill Dil over its first two days is as follows.
Friday – 6.50 crore
Saturday – 6.25 crore
TOTAL – 12.75 crore
The film is heading for a weekend figure of around 20 crore nett as Sunday should show some growth.
Lata’s tweet to Amitabh:
Namaskar. Aaj main Kaun banega Maha crorepati ka Final episode dekh rahi thi,jisme Govinda ji Ranveer Singh,Ali Zafar,Parineeti Chopra aur Ronit Roy the ,karyakram bohot accha hua ,Amit ji ne humesha ki tarha karyakram ko shaandaar banaaya.karyakram ke samarop me Amit ji ne do panktiyaa’n kahi wo thi mohobbat karnewale kam na honge
Teri mehfil mein lekin hum na honge .Amit ji ko ye panktiyaa’n kehete hue sunke meri aankhein bhar aayi.@SrBachchan Amit ji Mere dil me aap ke liye khas jagah hai,main aap ki bohot izzat karti hun,ishwar aap ko humesha khush rakhe,deerghaayu kare aur sehetmand rakhe yehi meri mangal kaamana. Tathastu
One time he wrote this on his blog and I saved it:
“My father had briefed me on a few words of some eloquence when I had sought help from him on what I could possibly speak about The Nightingale. They wandered in and out of my mutilated brain along with the song. The song !! Why did I have to sing it. Look what I have landed into.
‘Lata Mangeshkar’, dad speaking, ‘watching honey pouring out. The flow never breaks. Smooth and honeysweet the tone of her singing. The invisible string that binds you to god, when you hear her voice’.”
Long-awaited sequel Dumb and Dumber To opened to an estimated $38.05 million, which was enough to take first place away from strong holdover Big Hero 6.
The Top 12 earned an estimated $134.6 million this weekend, which is up 13 percent from the same weekend last year.
Dumb and Dumber To’s $38.05 million is the biggest live-action debut for Jim Carrey since 2003’s Bruce Almighty, and is also the best opening ever for the Farrelly Brothers. Among recent comparable titles, it’s on par with the five-day openings for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues ($39.5 million) and We’re the Millers ($37.9 million), and is a step above recent road trip comedies Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa ($32.1 million) and Identity Thief ($32.1 million).
The original Dumb and Dumber was a massive box office hit back in 1994, and developed legions of fans on home video as well. Two decades later, Universal sold the sequel by essentially conveying that the original pair (Carrey and Jeff Daniels) was back, and that their characters were dumber than ever. This fairly straightforward strategy proved to be very effective.
The audience for Dumb and Dumber To was 55 percent male and 57 percent over the age of 25. They weren’t necessarily thrilled with the movie, though, and awarded it a weak “B-” CinemaScore. Add in terrible reviews and tough competition from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Horrible Bosses 2, and this could fall off quickly in the next few weeks. Still, look for Dumb and Dumber To to wind up close to $100 million.
This is the seventh first place debut for Universal Pictures this year, following Lone Survivor, Ride Along, Non-Stop, Neighbors, Lucy and Ouija. Fox is the only other studio with seven first place openings in 2014.
Big Hero 6 eased 36 percent to an estimated $36.05 million. That drop is a bit steeper than Wreck-It Ralph’s 33 percent, and is roughly on par with Megamind’s 37 percent. The Disney Animation hit has now earned $111.7 million; if it holds up decently against the one-two punch of Mockingjay and Penguins of Madagascar, it could eventually get to $200 million.
Interstellar added $29.2 million, which was off 39 percent from last weekend. That hold isn’t quite as good as Inception’s 32 percent drop, though it’s still very strong for a big-budget movie like this. IMAX contributed $7.4 million, or 25 percent of the overall weekend gross. To date, Interstellar has earned $97.8 million, and is on track to close with at least $160 million.
Gone Girl rounded out the Top Five with $4.6 million. It was off a light 26 percent, which makes this the third weekend in a row in which the movie dropped less than 30 percent. To date, Gone Girl has earned a fantastic $152.7 million, and appears on track to close north of $170 million.
Spare yourself from watching it. Jim Carrey who I liked for a long time was desperately poor.
Next film I want to watch is Taken 3. Love the first two films.
yes Neeson in this second stage of his career has become one of the stars I most like to watch. On another note I also checked out equalizer the other day. I know you liked this one and I agree with everything. Denzel really makes this otherwise average film. Besides of course the overall ‘moodiness’ and relatively slower pace which is rather welcome in this action-sequence-a-minute age.
So, Katrina Kaif will topline the cast.Will Ranbir Kapoor and Ajay Devgn also return in the sequel?
Ajay’s character, like Manoj Bajpai’s and Arjun Rampal’s is dead. I don’t know if Ranbir’s character will return. Katrina’s Indu is now the Chief Minister and Raajneeti 2 will start with her. Then we’ll have other family members coming in.
Will it draw references from real political families like the Gandhis?
Well, there will be some parallels. Remember how Rajeev Gandhi reluctantly became the PM, then lost in the next elections? His story is the tragedy of some good people who enter politics.
Your third film, Satsang, is about a godman. Right now there’s one in Haryana, Rampal, defying the police who want to arrest him.
My film is about what happens when spiritualism becomes a business, a means of earning unimaginable wealth playing on the fears of ordinary people. I’ve drawn from Rajneesh and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to the gurus in Gujarat and Haryana–the good, the bad and the ugly. I completed the story three years ago and am waiting for Ajay to finish his film so we can roll with it.
Happy New Year Weekly Business Till Fourth Weeekend
Monday 17 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The business for Happy New Year till its fourth weekend is as follows.
Week One – 1,33,35,00,000
Week Two – 35,38,00,000
Week Three – 7,45,00,000
Weekend Four – 1,00,00,000 apprx
TOTAL – 1,77,18,00,000
The film is looking at finish of around 178.50 crore nett with a 62 crore nett contribution from Mumbai and 32 crore nett from Delhi/UP. The distributor share will be around 97 crore for the film.
this has just matched K3 numbers. If you go by producer numbers it’s at 200 or so but still 25 crores behind CE (going by the same). And if you go by producer numbers on K3 it’s crossed Avatar. Now here’s a sci-fi story to beat Interstellar! But putting it another way both K3 and HNY have done less than YJHD.
Kill Dil Has Low First Weekend
Monday 17 November 2014 12,00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had a low first weekend of around 20 crore nett. It will probably be enough for the makers to cover cost taking all revenues into account as the film has been made on a reasonable budget but a film of this sort should be doing more over the first weekend
The daily business for Kill Dil over its first weekend is as follows.
The trend of the film was also not great as with a so so start it should have grown on Saturday but collections were in the same range as Friday. The jump on Sunday was also not that big. Mumbai grossed around 6.5 crore nett while Delhi/UP was around 4.25 crore nett and East Punjab 2 crore nett for the first weekend.
The official trailer of the much anticipated movie ‘Bhopal A Prayer For Rain’ starring for the first time Mischa Barton, Kal Penn and Martin Sheen in an Indian film. The movie is a social thriller based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.
Happy New Year V Kick – Multiplex Single Screen Divide
Tuesday 18 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Happy New Year is looking at a 179 crore nett finish compared to the 212 crore nett of Kick. The main difference is the business in the single screens. the approx break up of business for both films is as follows.
Multiplexes
Kick – 135 crore
Happy New Year – 125 crore
Single Screens
Kick 77 crore
Happy New Year – 54 crore
Kick grossed just 8% more at multiplexes but was a huge 43% better at single screens. Kick had a 63.5% contribution from multiplexes while single screens gave 36.5%. Happy New Year had a 70% contribution from multiplexes and 30% from single screens. In fact Happy New Year had better collections than Kick in week two and three at the bigger chains like PVR and Inox.
Salman has slowly but surely crossed into multiplex sector and going to get bigger hereon. He seems very much at ease with himself these days and his Bigg Boss shows have assisted him in this huge image makeover by entering people’s living room.
Now with this marriage of his adopted sister Arpita on such a lavish scale gives Salman the person – social preeminence and the éclat of a great achievement.
His ultimate multiplex film is under production which is going to hit the theatres in Diwali 2015. Plans and ambitions for this one seem huge and as per Zoom report, taking a leaf out of Slam tour, Sallu and Barjatya are planning on a world tour with PRDP cast next year.
Salman Khan To Go On A World Tour For ‘Prem Ratan Dhan Payo’ | Bollywood News
he of course has but HNY clearly opened bigger in multiplexes. As with the overall picture it didn’t sustain. BOI are now pretending it’s only 8% behind Kick. But given that it started way ahead (this is again not just about the overall total but the fact that this couldn’t have attracted single screens like Kick or for that matter D3) this shouldn’t have happened. BOI have been fixated on Kick but why not use the YJHD analogy?! A film which released before Kick, was even more of a multiplex-only deal than HNY and yet HNY is going to fall behind it or at best match it. What’s the excuse for this? Specially when the film otherwise beat D3 by a healthy margin on day 1. Again it’s about using one standard at one end when things are going well and another one at the other end.
The collections of CHENNAI EXPRESS from multiplexes and single screens compared with YEH JAWAANI HAI DEEWANI, the other big grosser of 2013, is as follows.
Multiplexes
Chennai Express -128 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 120 crore
Single Screens
Chennai Express -80 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 58 crore
TOTAL
Chennai Express -208 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 178 crore
CE made a little more than KICK in Single Screens which is surprising. But YJHD made more than HNY at Single Screens!
Kill Dil Monday Box Office Collection
Tuesday 18 November 2014 11.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil fell on Monday as it grossed around 3 crore nett as per early estimates. The fall was over 50% from day one. The Delhi/UP circuit showed the best hold but even that was down close to 50%.
The first four day business for Kill Dil is as follows.
The film is looking at a first week of business of around 30 crore nett but will struggle to add after week one as there is a major release every week.
Deepika a fan of Hrithik-Katrina’s “Bang Bang!” title track
Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif-starrer “Bang Bang!” did not just win the audience’s heart but also wooed many B’Town celebrities. And now it’s the title track of the movie doing its magic on Deepika Padukone.
It is perhaps the fate of all great democratic statesmen that in the shadow of their achievement it is also possible to draw an indictment against them. This is true of Lincoln and Roosevelt, as it is of Nehru. Lincoln, for all his manifest greatness, has never stopped being accused of less than noble intentions. Did he compromise a commitment to full equality as a price for abolishing slavery? Was a brutal war that resulted in, on one estimate, a million deaths, a necessary price for his moral objectives? Did he at some point subordinate the moral ambition of equality to a more elusive idea of preserving ‘union in perpetuity’? Roosevelt is similarly indicted. Here is a president who saved both liberal democracy and capitalism at the moment of its greatest historical crisis. Yet it was an achievement founded on sordid compromise: he had to leave the structure of Southern racial discrimination intact. The New Deal was often on the verge of failing; and some have argued Roosevelt’s misjudgement at Yalta gave the Soviets more room than necessary to divide the world in the way it eventually got divided during the Cold War. And yet, despite these judgments, there seems something almost indispensible about these men; as if, despite their imperfections, they and they alone, could gather the tides of history to articulate and preserve something that remained and offer an enduring beacon of hope. The achievement survives more grandly than the imperfections that attend it. In fact, the mistakes make their greatness even more of an achievement; for it makes the achievement all the more human, not mythical or god like.
Interesting blog.
No action can be carried out without collateral damages along with benefits. The safe way is to sit on important decisions. But then they will be accused of inaction at the right time. Lincoln might not have imagined the great resistance by the southern leaders.
Fantastically good piece.. thanks for posting.. Gore Vidal once called Lincoln the ‘Central Man’ of US history and in the same sense Nehru is as easily the same for the Indian Republic. In terms of the Independence movement Gandhi was assuredly the Central Man but in the context of the independent nation-state Nehru without a doubt occupies that role. Now one can argue against him in many ways but an ‘event’ which frames the very nation-state one lives in and that one takes for granted in so many ways cannot be reversed. Put differently though I am hardly sanguine about the present for very many reasons the Nehruvian edifice is a colossus which cannot be deconstructed without taking apart the nation-state itself and that I’m confident is not possible. That structure is too soundly in place. Now the Right does of course recognize this. Hence there is so much fury directed at Nehru (and they’re hardly great fans of the Mahatma either). Precisely because he forever thwarted the idea of another sort of India (of course Patel himself was the farthest thing from any such notion). Put differently you can tilt things towards the Right (and again I would never underestimate all of this at any level) but nonetheless the game can only be played on the Nehruvian field.
[Once again I’ll offer my usual caveat to the indisciplined.. I responded to a piece An Jo posted but this should not become a free for all for the non-serious]
To put Lincoln and Roosevelt in the same line as Nehru is sacrilegious! The author obviously has little idea of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lincoln’s contribution!
actually I very much doubt you know anything on the subject of those two or Nehru..! Nehru belongs exactly in that category though blind ideologues are not expected to know this. There are many giants of history where I might be completely opposed to everything they stood for, many I might even find loathsome but where I am not insane enough to question their influence and the event of their political careers. The line coming from folks like yourself is part of the familiar disjunctive logic one sees so often in these matters:
1)Nehru is responsible for everything that’s wrong with India
2)Actually Nehru’s not all that important
It can be one or the other, not both. But this kind of Philistine attitude (though you have good company in contemporary India) where anyone who says anything one doesn’t like is either ignorant or a partisan irrespective of the writing he or she puts up, irrespective of the credentials he or she has to offer, is unfortunately never quite ‘defeated’. It is the structure of fundamentalist belief not to be open to persuasion of any sort.
By the way it is particularly amusing to see you argue for FDR’s achievements. He and Lincoln and Nehru are really on the same side of the right-left political divide! Any one of these would be quite horrified by your side.
Why such hyper-nationalists like yourself are not in India serving the greatest civilization in history beats me! I suppose it must be because you are in this other greatest civilization (US). Both claim to be the greatest at the very same time (like so many others). But I won’t test you too much with more logical puzzles. At least you will send your children to esteemed universities back home devoted to RSS or RSS-like ‘scientific’ ends (where Ganesh according to the PM was the result of surgical practices.. there’s a greatest hits collection of his developing along these lines..). I’m sure you won’t aim for Harvard or any other institution where awful scholars like Wendy Doniger teach. And not IITs I hope (modeled on similar Western lines)!
The openmagazine article is actually quite good.
Nehru is an enigma. He was indeed very charismatic, patriotic and had noble intentions.
His time as PM can be looked at in different ways but I dont think there was ever any question about his intentions or ability. I do believe some of his policies were misdirected, at times ineffective and may have contributed to the stagnation in India’s growth in the years following his demise. History can be cruel and every thing can be second guessed with hind sight. There is no way of knowing if a different leadership with different policies would have yeilded better results. We will never know and never agree. The charge that he was privileged by birth and was flawed may be true to an extent but there was something very endearing about him and his almost romantic world view. And, his leadership was always guided by what he though was good for the country rather than any narrow self interests or desire to stay in power.
completely fair set of points here Rajen.. I don’t have an issue with anyone arguing with Nehru on most matters. I don’t even have an issue with anyone who might have wished for the independent nation-state to have been constructed differently. I might argue with all this but it’s a coherent position. However it’s quite different to say completely foolish things because one doesn’t like Nehru. Much as I am not a fan of Modi at all in any sense but he’s quite likely to become one of the very influential leaders of the Indian nation-state. So arguing on policy and so on is one thing and denying basic facts quite another. Now on the more precise set of issues, it’s quite possible that a different set of economic policies for instance would have led the country in a different direction. But Nehru is also about the larger fabric of the nation-state. If you start with divisive policies or those that are designed to exclude you end up with something very unstable very soon. Indian democracy has been a wondrous experiment and it’s not clear to me that anyone else could have managed all of it better or even as well as Nehru did though this doesn’t mean that one cannot argue about specific decisions or policies. By the way I’d say the same for FDR or Lincoln or anyone else. There are things that are a complete stain on FDR’s record.
His biggest achievement was the abolishing of Zamindari, an act which in one instant rebooted an entire nation. He (and the Congress under Gandhi et al) had argued for this abolition much before independence, and inadvertently caused the split of the subcontinent. It was the prime reason for the folks across the border to have rejected the idea of a secular India, ie, they just did not want to give up their ancestral feudal lands/titles, and latched onto Jinnah. Off course, this has also caused the Right to forever question his brand of secularism which caused the carving out of land to people of one religion, but yet permitted the same people to hang on in the truncated India. So in effect the Fundamentalists of one religion cut their cake and ate it, where as the Fundamentalists of the other religion have forever been relegated to cursing Nehru’s legacy. IMHO, they need to stop whining now, at least after 70 yrs, we can very well see which side of the truncated subcontinent is progressing, and which is regressing. So therefore, his giant legacy is still intact.
However, where he then failed was to followup his socialism with any effective economic policy that could push India into any sort of sustainable economic growth, which basically resulted in the much maligned Hindu rate of growth.
His second biggest mistake was to not control his progeny’s dynastic ambitions, which caused another 20-30 years of stalled growth.
some good points here. the thing with the socialism though was (and I’m not defending it) that it came about in a world where this model was considered a viable alternative just about everywhere and certainly in the West as well. But secondly he saw it as a means to balance out various facts of Indian life. And here the jury is still out. Over the last twenty years the strongest critiques of the free market have emerged within the free market. In other words those who think (picketty is the current star of this move) who felt that the free market (or globalization) introduces its own brand of destitution and immiseration, something which is not accounted for in the same way. In other words a case could be made that if India had adopted this model right from the beginning it might have been a more dynamic economic but also a much more fractured polity in very many ways. Because economic dynamism is not always linked to socio-political progress if it’s not universal and no one believes it’s universal in that naive sense anymore. The irony here is that the most stable capitalisms are precisely those that have accounted for Marxist thought by introducing the welfare state and so on (there is no advanced democracy that does not feature this element). There are theorists who argue that if the West had not made this adjustment a long time ago capitalism in the form we know it would have collapsed because there would have been too much political instability. Put differently still the question of social justice/political justice is not one that can ever be ignored even if a purely economic logic is not always most concerned with it. But the second darker side to all of this is that with time the very same welfare state and all the labor laws and so on that made that sort of ‘third world’ impossible in the West started depending on the continuation of the same elsewhere. In essence Manchester moved to Bangladesh! The great capitalist/globalization myth is that all societies can be ‘first world’. They simply cannot. It’s structurally impossible. There has to be either Bangladesh at the other end or there has to be Bangladesh in the very same nation. Hence in India you get both. This is not a coincidence borne out of one set of economic policies or another. It is an equation enabled by the free market. there has never been a free market without this. Here both sides are hypocritical. Those on the right (economically) pretend that everyone can be liberated while those on the left pretend everyone can be liberated in a more fair way. Both constitute quicksand positions. There is a balance that certainly can be struck and it’s called the ‘West’ or ‘Japan’ or what have you. Here one can argue whether one prefers the Scandinavian model or the US one or whatever. But either way one is in the free market realm. The idea that socialists dominate Europe is yet another fantasy. ALl of this doesn’t mean that Nehru cannot be criticized, just that a low of what he did makes a great deal of sense within the world he inhabited. And again as is always the case with politicians who have a certain reputation for probity and who moreover are idealistic their political skills are often grossly underestimated. You cannot become that kind of political force without being a very shrewd politician.
Agreed, it is the Welfare State that indeed saved Western Capitalism. The amount or degree of Welfare in the West might differ from country to country, but it is the basic framework which has resulted in the advancement of these societies.
So, while Nehru embarked on that path, his progeny just corrupted that entire system, by doing nothing (or even colluding) in large scale skimming of these welfare schemes. You should commend Modi for continuing the Welfare Schemes started by previous govts. At least he is trying to make sure that the delivery of welfare is not corrupted, which precisely was the cause of Congress’ failure. All the MNREGA, Food Acts etc could not endear them to the people, cause all these schemes did was to line pockets of middlemen. At least Modi is trying to make sure the middle man is rooted out.
Any objective political observer should by now conclude that he has very swiftly moved to the Political Center, and basically snatched away the positive talking points of every opposition party.
I think it’s unreasonable to blame the faults of Nehru’s progeny on him. He wasn’t even around! On the rest Modi is currently on course to have as many ministers as the Congress did. Already there’s been a huge enlargement and the BJP spokespeople have been at some pains to explain how this is in line with a leaner government. But judging from historical experience in these matters even in the West I am a bit skeptical about tales of shrinking governments. The Republicans never did it in the US (yes never!) despite all their rhetoric. In politics you can sometimes change the language of a debate without actually changing the debate!
@Rajen: “And, his leadership was always guided by what he though was good for the country rather than any narrow self interests or desire to stay in power”
Really?!?!?! You serious?
At one level, these intellectuals are totally out of touch with contemporary India and its aspirations. For them any deviation from what Nehru imagined for India is like handing over the country to the wolves. From the idea of secularism to the demise of socialist planning, each blow to Nehru’s conception has been has been perceived almost as a personal assault. The more India has changed, the more tightly these intellectuals have clung to Nehru’s ideas. What they have ignored is the fact that every country changes and evolves. Institutions change and citizens move on. If in the process this change is resisted, it will produce bitterness. This is what is happening with respect to Nehru’s memory. All this is unfair to the man. He deserves careful and deeper study, including those aspects of his persona that are taboo subjects. The last scholar who had complete access to his papers—including the personal papers, access to which is effectively barred to Indian scholars—did not even touch these topics. It may seem salacious to try and dig into Nehru’s personal life but it should be remembered that complete historical treatment of a leader does require such understanding. That will not detract from the fact that he remains, until now, India’s greatest prime minister.
One can always count on you for the less serious stuff! Ha! Kidding aside the claims in this piece are quite factually wrong. the problem is that much as there is a huge bit of mythology surrounding Nehru and for that matter most aspects of Indian history (to be brutally honest about Indians have by and large not matured into a nation able to separate history from myth.. though this is a problem in most nations not there are significant differences in degree and even kind..) there is an equal mythology surrounding the scholarship in all these contexts. This is not surprising. If you have no respect for history, if you cannot separate it from mythology, you are not very likely to have any understanding of the scholarship much less exposure to it. But there are also more serious ethical questions here. Because people routinely write such pieces in the media and it’s quite clear they don’t know what they’re talking about. The idea that there haven’t been studies critical of Nehru in India is a rather big joke. Much as the idea that even Nehru strongest academic admirers are so in unthinking ways is another deeply ignorant idea. Because again a certain sophistication and education are required in these matters. A larger-than-life personality has to be taken seriously even when one might not like what he or she did. And of course there is no permanent judgment in these matters. Secondly the idea that ‘India has changed’ is again the sort of meaningless drivel that people who don’t know close to anything about this stuff regularly come up with. So yes America has changed profoundly since Lincoln was president but in certain ways it is still Lincoln’s America. One could make a similar case for FDR. Modi still operates in Nehruvian India. He is trying to change the contours of that compact but to change that state radically he would have to begin anew or bring about a revolution. Neither thing really happens without a seminal historical event. Either an independent state where you in a sense you start from scratch or a seismic cries that allows the state to be reinvented. Neither thing is happening in contemporary India and crises engendered by the Right usually end up rather badly for them before all else! But again it’s a question of how refined an understanding one has in these matters. we speak Shakespeare’s English. That doesn’t mean English has remained the same in the last 400 years! Now as a matter of fact and being completely against Modi in most ways imaginable (which would never prevent me from measuring his impact one way or the other) I do not consider even his ambitions within that larger Nehruvian framework to be something negligible. But the point is that this is very different from making a new India altogether. Here though it is very much like those Karan Johar films from the 90s. It’s a point I’ve often made before. ‘New India’ is also (hypocritically) ‘old’ in very many ways. This ‘New India’ wants everything to be just as it is but just wants the economic dynamism to go with it. The very same ‘New Indians’ loved those Yashraj films. And even today multiplex cinema that caters to the same group is really just about consumerism. Which is then very different from reordering the nation in a deeper sense. Of course there is a certain tension in the ‘Modi’ message here. There is the technocrat for ‘New India’ but then there is also the deeply regressive message and policy goals on all aspects of Indian social, cultural life. In other words you have the Taleban on the Right competing with the globalization fans on the same side. Ultimately one has to give way to the other not least because neither side is interested in the other message. The dark aspect though is that in India you can keep the fundamentalists happy by restricting them (at least trying to do so) to more ‘underdeveloped India’ and then pretending that this is ‘ Old India’ while in the meantime speak in that other seemingly neutral technocratic language to the other side, knowing very well that as long as they are kept happy they will not care about what happens in UP or Bihar or wherever. But again the problem is that often one side overwhelms the other and even if not the constant media attention (also part of the New Indian compact) highlights a lot of issues that then don’t remain purely local. But in any case the idea that India has changed is either a platitude or a grossly incomplete statement.
by the way notice how this piece you’ve posted is a part of the problem. Rather than engage with it you simply find another one that suits your ideological interests. It’s a whole grab bag of criticism (on Nehru). Often it’s not even consistent but as long as it’s attacking Nehru it does the job!
Yes in this world everyone is factually incorrect and only you are factually correct …
And its not my piece but by mint…
“Rather than engage with it you simply find another one that suits your ideological interests”
Doesn’t PBM piece or any piece that comes from nehru slave does same for you which has so much jargon and little facts… PBM is pompous piece
Nehru is most derided and detested pol leader in India right now and so far only Nehru slaves/ worshipers wrote hagiographies, it was only one way now free debate and critical evaluation of the man is happening 1st time and you so called liberals are unable to take it…
Your language and your characterizations reveal unfortunately too much about you! Sample the discussions I had with Rajen and Nykavi earlier. One can have a serious discussion about anything but there has to be an iota of maturity to these things. If one speaks the language of zealotry, if one uses the Hindutva equivalent of Islamist language and logic not to mention fundamentalism and one then also plays victim it’s more than a little laughable.
On the rest actually there are any number of ‘positive’ pieces I could quote on Nehru but I’m usually not interested (for the record even this one didn’t begin with me). Why? Because much more than what is being said I am interested in the quality of the argument being framed. For folks like you on the other hand it’s exactly the opposite. As for Nehru being the most detested leader in India right now that must be so for the 31% of the voting electorate that voted for Modi which of course wasn’t 31% of the entire nation. Hopefully you can work out the math! Where I will agree is that I’ve never seen such hatred directed by so many against one of the pre-eminent founding fathers of a country. Hard to think of a comparable example anywhere. This is to the discredit of India! Because again one can be the strongest critic of Nehru but when one starts sounding like the Taliban that’s another matter.
“On the rest actually there are any number of ‘positive’ pieces I could quote on Nehru”
I am sure Nehru’s heart was in correct place. However he wasn’t visionary and cannot be spoken in the same breath as Lincoln, FDR!! Nehru sent India in 6 decades of dark ages. I wish he had lost his 2nd election and Indian people had voted for someone else. But if wishes grew on trees….
So jo hona tho woh ho gaya. Now finally India has pure bred Indian leader. Good days will come again. 🙂
How do you know what FDR’s or Lincoln’s achievements are? You’re relying on the same ‘Westerners’ and ‘intellectuals’ you otherwise deride! Do you know what the Right used to say about Lincoln or FDR for the longest time? As for the rest people cosily living in the US become hyper-nationalists about India. Talk about being a nationalist on the cheap. But this doesn’t end the hypocrisy. One also ridicules the West, the institutions of the West that one then ends up sending one’s kids to! Yes ‘those’ universities occupied by ‘intellectuals’. Or are you going to send your kids to an RSS camp of some sort? Or a right-wing university in India? This is the worst kind of hypocrisy and cynicism. Yeah ‘good days’ are coming and you can enjoy the same in the US!
I do admit though that the mistake is mine. If I debate with the Taliban the fault is mine not theirs!
You know I’ll make a very honest confession — I’ve been in ‘debates’ with Islamists, American right-wingers and of course Hindutva types where I’ve been called the very same names. And this includes the other side always playing the victim (‘hey he’s calling us names’!). At the end of the day you can’t debate ‘fanaticism’. Why do I even try to do so then? For pragmatic reasons. I never hope to convince the people I’ve actually arguing with but they are not the only readers here! There are plenty of middle of the road types in the right or left who might have strong views about politics but who are also open to reason in some sense. And then of course there are fundamentalists who for more than a century have been very formulaic. Whether it’s religious fundamentalists or those of the nationalist type (which too becomes a different kind of religion) they say exactly the same things. So for instance I could take some of the stuff you or Di say, substitute it with some Islamic references and the formula would hold precisely. Or I could in a more nationalistic sense add some Nazi terminology or the same from many different parts of the globe and it would hold precisely. Of course those in question never agree. They react violently to such analogies. But then it cannot be said that fundamentalism of any sort every operates on the side of verifiable, falsifiable knowledge and/or argumentation.
I am proud of my heritage–> so I must be RSS lover
I don’t like Wendy Doniger–> so I must hate american universities and ALL the professors
I don’t think Nehru had any value add to India—> I must hate Nehru
I like Modi—> so I must be a fanatic and Hindutva-vadi and agree with him 100% on everything!!
I am a proud hindu—> So I must be holding and having same thoughts as beheading folks out there.
Satyam I can go on but I rest my case.
you’re just playing games here.. thankfully these are coming to an end.. by the way don’t get so defensive.. you can still continue living outside India and you can still send your kids to Harvard..! and you can continue to be an ideological warrior ensconced wherever!
“you can still continue living outside India and you can still send your kids to Harvard..! ”
So by your logic living outside india one needs to forget India completely and not even think/talk about her? Sending kids to Harvard is crime? I will make sure they fight with likes of WendyD. Just because someone has Harvard stamp doesn’t make them right. Just because someone is Muslim or Hindu doesn’t make them criminal/Taliban. You the self-proclaimed logical, intelligent person is making such stupid blanket statements when you lose a debate…sore loser 🙂 😛
One more ‘less serious stuff’ as per owner here any pice which doesn’t lick dead A@@ of Nehru is factually incorrect and trash stuff ..
“History is written by the powerful and our intellectuals wanted to be on the right side of power. The result is a fraudulent uniformity in the views of our eminent historians. Only one school of thought mattered and it was the one that was taught and nurtured. If it was questioned or challenged, it was on the margins. Those who today claim to be the greatest guarantors of freedom of thought, never bothered to challenge their own assumptions and belief, cocooned as they were in their own proximity to the Dynasty.
Today, the centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted and not only the Congress party but all its defenders are scrambling. They are worried that the “idea of India” is under threat, without wondering how a single “Idea of India” can prevail in a country of India’s gargantuan diversity. And why can’t the Nehruvianconsensus – the holy grail of Indian intellectuals – be challenged?”
Modi is functioning completely in a Nehruvian India and is the only leader he hasn’t actively taken up unlike Sardar Patel and Gandhiji.
He wants to implement RSS dream of scratching Article 370 (one of the baits to get votes) but is already giving in and having to follow Nehru’s thoughts.
The article 370 was anyway more a Sardar Patel doing, and he happens to be a favourite of Modi at present that a statue costing even more than the Mangalyan has been approved of.
The thought that winning a majority in J&K might make them pass a bill to abolish it seems to be dying because the candidates have clearly declared their thoughts of not supporting it.
This new India is a MYTH not part of history. Not a day goes with middle age tthoughts and actions being expressed.
It is certainly not a New India where the PM declares plastic surgery (or did he want to say head transplant) was being done thousands of years ago when an elephant’s head was transplanted on to Ganesh’s head. New India?
Actually glad you raised that point. They are indeed caving in on 370 currently and even saying absurd stuff like Sajjad Lone has changed his views and isn’t a separatist anymore. Not just this, there hasn’t been a peep out of them on the uniform civil code since winning the election. This when they have the numbers in the Lok Sabha to do it tomorrow if they wished to. This is a classic example of what I’ve been trying to get at. The Nehruvian state isn’t so easily defeated. The Republicans in the US have learnt a similar lesson the hard way. They forever campaigned against the welfare state but no matter what kinds of numbers they had they couldn’t touch it! They even augmented it in some respects. And here I’ll make a paradoxical statement. Modi’s India might turn out to be yet another moment in the Nehruvian institutional history. Which is to say that of course things change over time, the political discourse changes, and so forth but the question is whether the fundamental contours of the state can be changed. This was of course the BJP promise. But if you even have to dilute your stance on 370 so early, that great white whale of the Right, what does it say about the rest? This is why the extremists have to be allowed to engage in some of their ugly politics elsewhere. In American parlance it’s called throwing red meat. And you have to do this precisely when more institutional changes aren’t forthcoming! The point again is that if with this victory Modi cannot alter the fundamental contours of the Nehruvian state no one else has a shot in hell! And this is not a Modi thing. No one else could either. Barring something short of a total revolution. And you don’t achieve those by staying within the system. The BJP’s response to everything from black money to 370 is to play the process card which sounds suspiciously like the Congress response. One can of course still have a dynamic economy and get re-elected (as a matter of fact I think it will be hard to beat Modi in any situation unless something goes very seriously wrong) but that hardly argues against the Nehruvian state. The Congress itself introduced ‘New India’ twenty years ago (admittedly not entirely voluntarily).
And again before others jump in this isn’t about Modi or anything. It’s about the durability of the Nehruvian state. So yeah wake me up when something substantial happens on this score! In fairness many who are enraged on the Right are so for a reason. They fully understand they can’t do what they want to. Much as many Republicans understand the very same in the US. In a democracy once you give people a right or a privilege (even defining things in this charged way) it’s impossibly hard to take it back. This is why Obama’s healthcare plan continues to cause such hysteria. Good or bad or a 100 court challenges. You can’t take it back!
By the way all of this doesn’t mean I’m sanguine about Modi’s election and a lot that has happened since has confirmed some of my fears. Nonetheless that’s a different debate from the one which would suggest that suddenly this is a different country altogether. And again in fairness no one else could do it either. Which is why one should have greater respect for that achievement (whether one agrees with it or not) not less.
It is not for the statue!!!
Modi:”We are planning a world class knowledge hub in that area. My vision is to develop the place as a source of inspiration for ages to come.”
“Apart from tourist attractions like water sports and a live underwater aquarium, the area around Sardar Patel memorial will have a high-tech museum, chronicling 90 years of the history of India’s freedom fighters (1857-1947). Narendra Modi’s website says, “It will be developed as a research and academic centre for preserving the unity and integrity of India, its rich culture and heritage, for research on agriculture which was dear to the Sardar, for research on tribal life, and so on. Thus, it would be standing high not just in meters and feet but much more in terms of academic, historical, national and spiritual values.”
This project is likely to do for this relatively less developed tribal belt of Gujarat far more than what Rann Utsav has done for the backward Kutch region that brought unprecedented economic and cultural dynamism into the region.”
And education? Health facilities? And other such unimportant things?
Modi is a show off!!
All his schemes scream of ‘hum kisi se kum nahin’ with bullet trains and smart cities and nonsense.
“.Nehru once told Tata that he hated the word profit. “Jawaharlal, I am talking about the need of the public sector making a profit,” Tata shot back. “Never talk to me about the word profit; it is a dirty word,” Nehru retorted. Tata, unsure of the prime minister’s socialist bent of mind, turned down his invitation to join a delegation to the United Nations on the ground that there was so much to do inside the country. Giving the same argument, he declined Nehru’s invitation to head Indian Rare Earths, one of the first public sector units floated after Independence. In turn, Tata’s Air India, Air India International and insurance outfit were nationalised by the government.”
‘Nehru Was The Worst Disaster To Ever Hit India’
Few journalists in the world have had the chance to view India’s birth and growth better than James W. Michaels. After serving in the US Army in the second world war, the veteran set up the New Delhi bureau of the news agency UPI or the United Press International in the last months of the Raj. And, in 1948, beat the competition by several minutes to the biggest story of his life: the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, which is ranked among the 100 greatest news reports of all time.
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Would you elaborate on any of these?
Well, Nehru, though we loved him and admired him at the time, was probably the worst disaster to ever hit India, at least in economic terms. (In India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das), it’s said that Nehru was basically a Brahmin snob, and he did not like business people. Instead of the government getting out of the way and letting the market allocate business resources, the government did it. And the result was an incredible waste of resources. The way to fight poverty is not by chopping the pie in smaller pieces but figuring out how to make a bigger
So you do like ‘left’ magazines and Americans when they agree with you?! Or will you also accept the hundreds of Modi stories in Outlook or the same in the US? Just checking..
I wish I could clip the few sentences Modi spoke on Bachchan and Gujarat tourism. You can watch those segments on Aap ki adalat. Genius of Modi is he knows who to use where and how.
Where as congress used him for bofors!!
“So you do like ‘left’ magazines and Americans when they agree with you?”
I don’t care left or right. I like it straight 😉
On serious note, facts are facts and I like facts. I am wary of “intellectiuals”, media and political correctness.
Tonight Big B will open IFFI festival under ‘Fascist’ regime of Modi where Big B was big No no under Nehruvian ‘liberal’ regime along with RajniKant ….
Not sure what this kind of childish stuff means. The Congress was nasty to him but it was hardly on ideological grounds. Similarly if the BJP is now being nice to him that’s hardly ideological either.
I wish I could clip the few sentences Modi spoke on Bachchan and Gujarat tourism. You can watch those segments on Aap ki adalat. Genius of Modi is he knows who to use where and how.
Where as congress used him for bofors!!
Don’t like to get into politics on this forum, but personally never been a fan of Nehru-Gandhi empire. So happy that an imbecile like Rahul Gandhi was born, and put an end to it.
yes but the family cannot be equated with Nehru who had no part in fostering it. and again I’d say that one must blame the voters for this. No one was forcing them to keep voting for Indira Gandhi (they even forgave her the Emergency over time) or Rajiv Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi. You know I had a lot of problems with Bush 43 but the fact that he was the son of Bush 41 wasn’t one of them. I think, and with all due respect, that there are certain bourgeois fixations in India (and perhaps the subcontinent in general and perhaps elsewhere to an extent) where we tend to focus on the wrong questions. There is more nepotism in American politics than there has ever been in European democratic politics. But this hasn’t prevented the US from being a superpower. Similarly the Indian electorate loves talk of corruption and black money and what not. This is important specially when corruption takes place of the kind of scale that it does in India but there are even more fundamental questions. America is a lot more corrupt than Western European democracies. Japan has had serious issues with politicians often being in bed with gangsters and so on. Corruption reaches the scale that it does in India because there are already institutional problems. Not because everything is just fine and people decide to become more corrupt. The same holds for politics and the legal system and so forth. Put differently the state in India does not have the kind of absolute monopoly in these matters that the state does in most Western examples. but there are deeper historical, societal reasons for this. We continue to avoid looking at these, we continue to be confined to a vision of the Indian polity that is completely cramped. We refuse to recognize those other Indian realties except through the prism of caricature. Not surprisingly then we never come face to face with the actual issues. And this serves the interests of both left and right because they too are not interested in institutional upheavals. They are fine with the way things are. They divide up the voters and both sides get their turn sooner or later. And the voter isn’t blameless either. Everyone loves to blame politicians but they don’t drop in from Mars! We see this in the movies too. we can talk about the sort of movies that are made but ultimately if an audience is going to keep rewarding Ready the filmmaker is going to keep producing it!
All of this isn’t directed at you by the way. Just making a larger set of points.
By nature majority Indians have slave mentality. They kind of look up to rulers and would rather follow established clans than look for new visions (of course exceptions are there). It’s not just limited to politics..its almost everywhere
Looking up to Kapoors and Bachchans and Khans in Bollywood
Gandhis after gandhis in Politics
Multiple cases of Godmen and their lineage exploiting Indians.
Our constitution is a slave of the archaic British chapters with laws outdated like shit.
The good thing is Modi doesn’t have a child otherwise his diehard followers would have started campaigning for him/her already.
The problem with blaming the ‘Brits’ is that one wonders why Britain itself is not suffering from any of these problems. Don’t you think the issue is precisely this kind of talk where we blame the Brits and the voters (presumably we don’t include ourselves within this ‘foolish’ group) and what not.. all a series of crude generalizations that really belong at kindergarten level but we never look at something more significant or important than this.
Yes India has a British system in place. The problem is you can’t just wish away history. Certain traces are permanent. You can have a revolution of course and change everything overnight (though few revolutions succeed even at this level). But otherwise any kind of constitutional system modeled on a Western one (but let’s not be naive here.. there is no contemporary notion of democracy that’s not ‘Western’) and which was forced to confront Indian realities would have to be a rather messy affair. The amazing thing is that the world over Indian democracy (despite the sordid chapter of the emergency) is considered one of the most inspiring ones and sometimes the single most impressive one. You look at the scale of India and the scale of its issues and the plethora of its identity politics and so on and you are amazed at how this is such a successful democratic story. This ‘is’ Nehru’s achievement. this is why even those western writers or thinkers who are great critics of Nehruvian economics nonetheless give him high marks on his overall achievement. It’s unfortunate though that where Indian democracy has been admired for these reasons worldwide, has been looked up to so much in so many emerging countries, that in India we have a large number of people not arguing against Nehru but engaging in this wholesale and truly absurd dismissal of the past. Candidly this too is not surprising.. wherever fascism is in vogue in any sense there is such effacement of the past.
Your whole statement about “Nehru Achievement” is based on the assumption that only Nehru could have achieved a true Democracy for India or just that Nehru’s involvement implied those achievements. I strongly disagree. I think what India achieved is definitely a result of Nehru but that is not an achievement of a high order. I believe Nehru’s politics pushed India back 15 if not 25 years.
again there is often a disjunctive logic used on this score:
1)Nehru destroyed India with his policies
2)Nehru was’t all that significant
3)Even if Nehru did some good things anyone else could have as well
Now on your more precise claim one can keep engaging in these historical counterfactuals all day long. One would be well-placed to trust the Mahatmas’s judgment a bit more than the partisans of contemporary India but that’s another matter (of course those on the Right are not exactly fans of Bapu either! I think again for good reason)! for instance maybe other US presidents could also have dealt with the Great Depression the same way or won the war the same way. It didn’t need to be FDR. Maybe any BJP PM candidate could have won as big this year. It didn’t need to be Modi. One could overturn all of human history using such counterfactuals! It however gets particularly dicey when you use this logic for those who hung around as long as Nehru did, before and after Independence.
Again one can be a critic of many of Nehru’s policies, economic or otherwise (though he died in ’64, there was nothing preventing others from changing those policies right away.. it’s a bit absurd to pretend that Nehru was somehow around till Narasimha Rao changed course! Just because Indira Gandhi or others followed Nehru doesn’t mean that Nehru himself would never have changed course but in any case he wasn’t around) and one can do the same with any great leader. Lots of things FDR did that have been severely criticized by historians and are controversial to this day. When a leader is that seminal and hangs around for that long there are always going to be lots of problem areas. You cannot though take apart the ‘event’ just by focusing on those areas. You especially cannot do so with the smug assumption that the judgment of the present is the last word on Nehru. 50 years from now it is possible to imagine a world where Nehru’s economic policies might not seem problematic but other things might be moreso. Those that we don’t look at today. This happens with every historical figure. It happens in cinema too. Why does every generation rediscover older films in a different way or discover films that have were obscure to that point? Because the concerns of every age are different and all of history is then reinterpreted through that prism. When you are Jawaharlal Nehru or Amitabh Bachchan though your legacy is so seminal that future generations will more likely than not be grappling with it. There are plenty of disastrous or half-decent leaders no one talks about after their day. Why? Because they don’t have enough of a legacy. They simply don’t matter. If we wish to be critics of Nehru we must do so with a sophistication equal to the event that he represents. 20 years from now, 50 years, a 100 we will still be talking about Nehru. As long as there is the Indian nation-state there will be Nehru’s name at its foundation. This doesn’t preclude any kind of criticism but again one has to be sophisticated about it. You can’t assume the political or institutional stability of the Indian nation-state and then perform the thought-experiment of removing Nehru from it. Because we occupy ‘his’ world. if you remove some of the pieces everything collapses. It’s not as we have still have something in place. if for instance another leader had been around for that long we would have had a very different India. It wouldn’t have been Nehru’s India. Whether it would have been a better or worse India is just impossible to know. What we do have is a remarkably successful democratic experiment with remarkably durable institutions. Just about any political scientist or historian will tell you that the Indian experiment is a rather miraculous one. Assuredly an improbable one. Nehru is its author. Whether such improbabilities come about with just any author I am somewhat skeptical. But in any case this is a counterfactual impossible to answer. Whether someone other than Lincoln could have won the Civil War, whether he would have conducted it in the same way, whether a different America would have resulted from it, all these are not questions that can be sanely answered. But once again Lincoln’s America lives on. If Nehru’s didn’t in the same way no one would be debating it. At any level. But great careers, great legacies are complicated things. You can’t reduce them to one debate or the other. If one doesn’t think the Indian nation-state is a great achievement one just has to look across the border and furthermore one just has to look at just about every other example of decolonization around the globe. There is no country remotely comparable to India in scale and/or complexity that has anything like its transition, there are hardly any smaller countries that can match this achievement. Nehru must have done something right! Again you don’t get that dynamic economy is you don’t resolve some of these very deep social and political tensions in the first place. Countries that didn’t manage this were torn apart rather quickly. Or exist in permanent states of decay.
Look at Japan after its devastation or South Korea at where its coming from.. Yes they are smaller nations demographically and geographically but their success beats bigger nations by a distance.
Nehru was basically a armchair pseudo socialist who wanted to enjoy his brandy after becoming the first Prime minister of the biggest democracy in the world (which he got after piggybacking on Gandhi and then nagging him like a little child)
Japan and South Korea were more or less built from scratch. Japan had five years of US occupation after the war. The country was completely decimated. Don’t think that’s the best example. And there is not even a comparison in terms of scale. By the way Japan has been in a state of more or less permanent recession for more than two decades now. Who should we blame for this? South Korea is itself a US client state. It is furthermore the result of another war with a huge unresolved political problem at its doorstep (the perennial N Korean fear). It’s like saying Taiwan did great. Sure! But China is still breathing down its neck, the US has to guarantee things even here. Some day if the tide turns we don’t know what will happen in this region. This proves my point. It’s not just about a set of economic policies. You have to manage a whole series of social and political challenges as well. And you have to be willing to look at longer currents of history as well. And you yourself have made the point. Is there even the remotest comparison between Japan/S Korea and India in any sense whatsoever when it comes to the demographics and so forth?
by the way the other dirty little secret today is that authoritarianism works quite well with capitalism and most don’t mind it either. It’s the Singapore model. By the way check out the kinds of semi-dictatorships S Korea had in the past! I suspect many in India wouldn’t mind this tradeoff either (not a majority of course). The China model if you will. An ‘Emergency’ with a more dynamic economy!
I actually do agree with all the three points that you made regarding the opposing logic on Nehru
“1)Nehru destroyed India with his policies
2)Nehru was’t all that significant
3)Even if Nehru did some good things anyone else could have as well” (I’ll add – in all probability – done it much better)
I don’t blame the brits or their system but I do believe Nehru showed his teenage obsession with the west in the way he adopted their theories without looking at their practical implications.
I won’t discuss it more because it’ll be futile as neither your nor my point of view would alter regarding him. It is what it is.
But you precisely cannot hold all three positions at once. If he wasn’t that significant he couldn’t have destroyed anything nor could India have been shaped by him. Or if he did things that anyone could have it follows that anyone other than Modi could have been elected too and could do exactly what Modi will do over the next five years. But then we’re led to an absurd position where no leader is ever remarkable because anyone else can do just the same. I could offer some further permutations here but this is again disjunctive logic. And to be a bit more theoretical here disjunctive logic is where you offer reasons for something and they all work individually but taken together offer contradictions.
By the way hope you will move beyond Nehru’s Western obsessions and drop the English language.. actually I hope you will drop every single thing about the Indian nation-state that relies on a British model and come back here with what’s left and then show me what systems you’d like to put in place that have nothing to do with the British or the West! I’m not joking. You just mentioned Japan. That’s a country soaked in ‘Americana’!
“By the way hope you will move beyond Nehru’s Western obsessions and drop the English language”
I think you are taking this discussion way too out of context and here’s the reason why– I maybe a lethargic ..couched potato slacker myself but it won’t imply that I like a person with similar attributes as a the captain of my favorite football team.
I use English on this blog because that language is used primarily here , it doesn’t mean I feel inferior while speaking any other Indian language.
By Nehru’s west obsession I did not mean his love for white skin or his labored accent – that was his personal choice and I am no one to object or comment on that- I am not even interested in that.. by his west fascination I meant his political outlook which always lacked a deep rooted Indian perspective.
I also wasn’t trying to be facetious but sometimes the criticism I think gets to an extreme. It is absolutely true that Nehru was a patrician, an upper class upper caste guy. And it’s fair to say that in terms of his personal outlook too there were traces of this. However the discussion doesn’t end here. We always have to allow for the original contexts of a person. I made this point the other day but a planned economy for example wasn’t as strange an idea in his day as it might seem now. It was considered a viable alternative. We cannot look at decisions he made in the 40s or 50s from the vantage point of the present. Or even if we criticize him on this score we have to allow for the contexts of his world (though Nehru never idealized the Soviet Union in any sense.. won’t get into all that here).
In any case getting to the ‘Westernization’ bit that was in Nehru’s world a way of moving forward, a way of being progressive and leaving behind the regressive aspects of Indian society. Ironically India is going through a similar phase right now (even if ideologically at the other end). Fascism too is ‘Western’ much like Communism or democracy. It is precisely a Western idea to have nation-state where people start believing they’re a great culture that has been kept down for all sorts of external (colonization, domination, conquest etc) and internal reasons (Jews, Muslims, Communists, Lefties etc) and that they finally need to release the potential of their national energies in a very militant way. This is a neat formula that can be applied everywhere that there are fascist strains. Quite often the man leading the charge represents a kind of rooted, son-of-the-soil type, someone who in a way ‘becomes’ the imagined authentic nation in person. In a variant of this you have a military dictator representing the same values. It is not very often that one finds fascism outside these personality types. In any case all of this is a very Western model. If you study the roots of Hindu nationalism in India in the 19th century you will find everywhere those Western intellectual roots. There is nothing ‘Indian’ (in the sense of being pre-Western) to any of these debates on the left or the right. So in an ‘intellectual’ sense Modi is no more rooted in India than Nehru (i.e. if one is going to bring that charge to the latter). If anything he is in a rush to follow a technocratic model that is Western through and through.
So the debate doesn’t end with calling Nehru ‘Western’. But even if he were the only such person so what? That hardly ends the debate. You’re not less Indian because you live in Bombay and go to a multiplex than someone who’s a farmer somewhere in the interiors of Bihar. There are different ways of being Indian. There should of course be a political system that accounts for both but ironically even here it is Nehru who was on the side of that ‘deeper’ India than Modi. The latter is precisely about globalization that works really for upwardly mobile urban elites and puts enormous stress on the blue collar worker or the farmer (and so on) everywhere from India to the US. So all this talk of a dynamic economy is itself suspect (though here Modi is only in keeping with a wider global consensus).
So I think even at the most fundamental level we have to question some of these labels. We can’t just assume what they mean.
By the way I’d add something else here. English is now also an Indian language. Just as there is a part of Indian history that’s ‘British’. One has to accept these things and move on. I am going to paraphrase a Zizekian point here (one he made in India as a matter of fact). A lot of times it’s colonization that supplies the tools with which to resist colonization! In other words it is precisely a certain notion of democracy and universal rights and so on that allowed Indians of a certain generation to start questioning British rule and eventually to drive them out. The same happened in many other parts of the globe. But that form of resistance was itself Western. This doesn’t mean that there could not have been any other form of resistance. Just that in the world of the 19th century the Western paradigm of politics was the normative one or becoming the normative one. Much as today every time we talk about democracy we depend on similar notions. At different times in history, in different parts of the world those models are also different. But for now we operate within a ‘Western’ orbit and have for a long time. There’s no shame in this because this isn’t the first colonization or influence of world history.
“They kind of look up to rulers and would rather follow established clans than look for new visions”
By that logic likes of modi, kejriwal, shastri, JP wouldn’t have been elected. We the people never had much of a choice in our leaders post independence. Nothing in opposition party that was viable solution. Unfortunate but the truth.
But we do have “slave” mentality or inferiority complex; e.g. our preference for fair skin.
The amusing thing in the ‘new Indian’ dispensation is that many have become rather weak Marxists! There are lots of important leaders in very many democracies who were patricians just like Nehru. That didn’t prevent them from being enormously successful. FDR is a classic example. But beyond this (and this is a point I’ve made in other contexts too) that one can certainly be against nepotism of any sort but then one has to practice some of it in one’s own life. Leaving aside the fact that one can’t be against nepotism selectively (when it comes to politics people forget that whether it’s someone’s son or daughter they are ultimately ‘elected’.. so it’s a nepotism endorsed democratically! If people wish to vote for someone just because they’re someone’s progeny that is their right.. one can’t believe in the ‘wisdom of the people’ only when they agree with one’s views.. much as in a different context fans of the current government love to say that the will of the people must be respected and followed and what not.. but they forget this very same principle when talking about other governments not of their liking! getting back to nepotism we see this in the movies too.. when you have a film with newcomers who do not belong to the industry they get no initial whereas if they do, even if they belong to less important households, the audience shows up.. the argument then shouldn’t be with those who get into politics or the movies this way but those voters either way who endorse such decisions.. ironically the less democratic path there is that of the corporate household.. no one has a problem with Mukesh or Anil Ambani.. far less people voted for them than did for filmstars or politicians!). For instance in our own lives or those of our larger families don’t we see nepotism or influence-peddling or whatever at work everywhere? It isn’t problematic only when it happens at a major level. We conveniently excuse ourselves. We don’t have to be involved personally in it but we are often the beneficiaries and we are certainly not resistant to the idea. We all work with the advantages we have. Secondly this very American lionization of the entrepreneur much like the whole ‘do it yourself’ economy fiction that is so popular in contemporary India (as in many other parts of the world) conceals a great deal of privilege and institutional biases. Even in the US. It is not only about class privilege in the genealogical sense. There have for instance been several pieces in the US over the last 15 years or so about how there is a different sort of class structure operative in America. It does not depend on genealogy, it is based on ‘merit’ but once a certain class is attained using that merit the members of this class create and further institutions to maintain that class. And which ultimately becomes about genealogy all over again. All American universities (the prestigious ones even more) place a certain value on a family member having gone to the same. Why? There are scores of kids who are excellent in very many ways and are often disadvantaged on account of what is called ‘legacy’ (even the terminology is rather direct!). Yes in such a class structure people still have to prove themselves. But the same holds in the industry or in politics. The audience still has to show up for them, the voters still have to vote for them. if the critique is about a larger class structure which gives you certain advantages just because you’re born in it then you will find a lot that’s hugely problematic even in the US, let alone India.
But I’d take it even further. One’s birth is an accident in this sense. One does not choose where or to whom one is born. It’s fine to then pretend to be all democratic about one’s opportunities and so on but depending on the society one lives in one won’t even get certain chances if one isn’t born in the right place. For instance there are lots of inspiring success stories in American entrepreneurship but comparatively few examples of people rising literally from nothing. Why? Because without a certain educational structure in place in terms of one’s family background and so on one would never be able to take those first steps irrespective of one’s economic conditions. If you a tribal in India you are never going to form Infosys. It will simply not be possible. If you grow up in an American inner city and specially if you are black you are not very likely to become Steve Jobs. So it’s not as if one is privileged only if one is born to Ambani or Motilal Nehru! One cannot take one’s own advantages as some sort of baseline when specially in a country like India the vast majority fall below that baseline.
Finally on Nehru being given charge first off he was handpicked by Gandhi. It can hardly be said about the latter that he didn’t know his nation! Plus there were so many important figures at the time. Why did Nehru make it? Gandhi of course felt that of all the existing figures Nehru represented the very combination of talents and abilities to represent and nurture Indian realities. One can argue with him on this score but it’s not as if one of the most important Independence movement figures (Nehru) simply parachuted his way into becoming PM and then somehow remained there for 17 years on sheer prestige! The electoral results belie this.
So my points are really three here (addressed not only to you.. I am making a larger statement against a number of commenters)..
1)The nepotism charge is used selectively and hypocritically
2)Nepotism is democratically sanctioned (by the way including in the US)
3)One can disagree with Nehru all one wants and that’s fine but to deny his seminal stature and his permanent achievement at many levels is not just foolish, it reveals the greatest (and most dangerous) ignorance
Lastly I’d just make this pragmatic point — it’s amusing to see people so imprisoned by the present that they start believing history has somehow ended. Yes there is a very large group of people in India who dislike Nehru (though these numbers are often exaggerated much like so much else..) and the same people try to write off all national history before this most recent election. But a generation or two later others might be as dismissive of Modi or ‘New India’ or what have you. These are historical cycles. What survives though is the ‘event’. We are still debating Nehru for a reason!
“Finally on Nehru being given charge first off he was handpicked by Gandhi. It can hardly be said about the latter that he didn’t know his nation! Plus there were so many important figures at the time. Why did Nehru make it?”
Because of nepotism charges. Gandhi didn’t want people to say that he was partial to a gujarati (Patel)! He bent backwards trying to be impartial which unfortunately cost India lot of heart ache.
BTW, I would like to know what you consider “seminal stature and his permanent achievement”. Can you write and elaborate on it?
LOL, the very state you belong to was constituted in its present state as a Nehruvian idea (linguistic redivision of states)! I don’t care to list more achievements here before someone whose literacy in anything hasn’t been established as far as I’m concerned. And the reason I entertain this doubt is because on this very much has been said scores of times. And your response even otherwise contains more nonsense on the subject of Gandhi and Patel.
I’ll say this honestly — such ignorance is depressing.
DI :
Read moti lal nehru’s letter/s to Gandhi begging him to make JLN as president of Congress adding if not made than he may become radical communist and adopt Islam #Facts
Now Gandhi did impose Nehru on India feeling he may become wreck and create nuisance where Patel will listen to him ( one inference)
Nehru Apologists say – But he was the first Prime Minister, he had no blue print. We have the benefit of hindsight.
To them I say – True. But he did have instances of various countries experimenting with varied models at the time. Many European countries in post-World War II period went for greater role of government in economic affairs and fared poorly. These could easily have been contrasted with the examples of West Germany and Japan which witnessed fast growth. Maybe Nehru was an ostrich who had buried his face in the sand. All he needed was to see what was happening in the world around him – what experiments were successful and what weren’t – and choose the one that was producing results. Instead, he was dogmatic in his approach and continued repeating his mistakes in the hope that somehow the same policies would start producing different (better) results.
“I believe, as a practical proposition, that it is better to have a second rate thing made in our country, than a first rate thing that one has to import.” – Jawaharlal Nehru (From a speech in the 1950s)
Yes, Nehru wanted efficient use of resources!
Nehru’s stated hatred and distrust for capitalism and profits caused businessmen and market’s profit-loss mechanism to be replaced by bureaucrats run public sector enterprises, which were a huge misallocation of scarce resources, whose efficient allocation Nehru set out to achieve.
Today when many celebrate Nehru’s 125th birthday with deep reverence, I can’t keep myself from blaming him for decades of poverty that my grandfather and father had to live through. I don’t have mixed feeling about it either.
That’s not true actually.. I have read a lot on him that’s critical and that I’ve learnt from.. but the point whether on Nehru or bachchan or anyone else is always about whether the debate is going to be conducted insanely or more rationally. Sadly the former is often the case here. It’s not just these topics. It could be about Interstellar! Whatever the topic there is an ethics of discussion and one should know what one is talking about. Simply claiming things and defending those opinions like a zealot doesn’t give greater credibility to one’s claims. But yes there are such folks in every camp who are not exactly persuadable in any sense. But you could change the name of Nehru and put something else in there and I might have a similar argument. This isn’t about my personal views or when it is I say it openly. But my larger interest has always been in defending a certain spirit of discussion and argument, a certain ethics in this regard. So for example with almost a 100% of what you say I don’t just find the claims completely ill-informed or un-informed or totally ignorant ones, I also find the way you argue to be grossly unethical for a variety of reasons. There is one more charge I have leveled in the past that I won’t repeat again today.
yeah I missed the Rs 10,000 HNY made yesterday as opposed to the Rs 7,000 it made the day prior to that and hence proved its fantastic trending in week 205.
I should apologize to everyone here. I didn’t mean to get into as much political discussion as I have these past couple of days. But when it’s about Panditji an exception can be made!
I have been reading the tweets for the past two weeks with some amusement and observations-
1. Commies hate Modi, Hindus and Sanskrit
2.they will not talk about Bukhari, AMU, Azam Khan ( pretend jaisey kuch hua hee nahee)
3.you can NOT question Nehru’s history but of will question the Vedas, The Gita , everything Hindu.
4. Ever since Modi won , the commies ( Ms. Dixit ) are busy trying and separate SC and STs from other Hindus as if they are not Hindus.( Phatee padee hai unkee)
5.Now SBI= GOI per NDTV, Modi’s visits are all tamasha with no substance ( Burnoll laga lo bhai )
6. They are so disappointed that a BJP Govt. arrested with minimum loss of human life a fake Guru ( what will happen to the outrage industry )
here is a great tweet –
@abhijitmajumder To cry ‘saffronisation’ at any mention of Sanskrit takes a special loathing our own past, language, culture, roots. A special brainwash
P.S.- In my view the threemajor missteps so far by BJP have been-
1.Direct telecast of Bhagwat speech
2.Maharashtra Vote
3. Z security to Ramdev
P.S.-1 – the Salmas and Sabrinas,please spare me, have no time or inclination to respond to Aaptards # Mufflarman !!
Also of Interest is the number of Brahmins that are anti Modi- Pragya Tiwari, Neha Dixit, Mihir Sharma, Salil Tripathi etc.
All been brought up on rozi roti of Pandit je…..
Hrithik, Deepika caught smooching at party!
Thursday, November 20, 2014 7:16 PM
Miss Dhinchak has got some shocking news of, now single, Hrithik Roshan. Recently, Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan who is now divorced from Sussane Khan was caught smooching an actress publicly at a party. According to sources, the actress was none other than Deepika Padukone. A person present at the party confirmed, “They kept smooching and refused to let go of each other. They even exited from the party together.” If the news is true, it could spell trouble in Deepika and Ranveer Singh’s relationship.
Here is an entertaining review I read recently, from a 1975 issue of Star and Style. The subject of the piece is a just-released little thing called Sholay, and I herewith attach the full document for your scrutiny (click to enlarge, or right-click and select “View image”):
In the midst of all this, there is the predictably reverential nod to the “understated” performances of Jaya and Sanjeev. But THIS *beat of drums* is far and away the best part of the review, the one that will bring a silly grin to Posterity’s face:
The review in Star and Style reminds me of a small statement I made on my FB page : “When it comes to films, I trust the audience feedback more than any critic, because I have never ever read a critic say, about any film, ‘The film made me cry.’ It’s like if you want to know how beautiful a woman is, you ask a poet who admires her, or man who has made love to her, not a surgeon who has operated upon her.”
Saurabh: Thats’ why Ebert is about the only critic whose ratings I would use as a guide for what to see. And he wrote more as a lover of films than a surgeon dissecting. Also I was speaking a little metaphorically. When a critic sees a film equipped with a mental pencil and pad it kind of precludes full emotional engagement. That is why quite often there is a variance between the critics’ perception and perception of the ordinary viewers no matter how sensitive and cultured they may be.
SATYAMSHOT 
November 14, 2014 at 6:34 AM
Happy New Year At 176 Crore Nett After Three Weeks
Friday 14 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Happy New Year grossed around 7.75 crore nett in week three taking its total to a little over 176 crore nett. The film is now the seventh highest grossing film ever beating the figures of last year’s Diwali release Krrish 3 which now goes into eighth place.
The film will go one place higher as it crosses the business of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani in its fourth week to finish in sixth place. The best business for Happy New Year is in Mumbai circuit as it will contribute around 34% of its all India business.
The final business will fall around 27 crore nett short of Shahrukh Khan’s last release Chennai Express with a huge 17 crore nett of this shortfall coming in the South India circuits of Nizam/Andhra, Mysore and Tamil Nadu/Kerala.
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November 14, 2014 at 6:34 AM
Kill Dil Has Fair Start
Friday 14 November 2014 13.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had a fair opening of around 30% with the Delhi NCR belt being best. Normally East Punjab would trend same as Delhi NCR but that circuit has Chaar Sahibzaade going super strong and another Punjabi film Baaz opened pretty well so competition was strong there.
The Govinda factor has not helped much as his films opened better in Maharashtra and UP in his heyday but Kill Dil was so so in UP and low in Maharashtra. Overall its a fair start and it remains to be seen how the film goes from here. Delhi/UP looks likely to be best performing circuit if it trends as it started.
The other release of the week was a horror film by the name of 6-5=2 and it opened to very dull houses wherever released.
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November 14, 2014 at 6:35 AM
The Shaukeens Has 20 Crore Nett First Week
Friday 14 November 2014 11.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The Shaukeens grossed around 20 crore nett in week one and did hold steady collections on the weekdays but they were on the lower side. The film suffered from a slow start and although weekdays were okay, it faces competition from a big films like Kill Dil in week two. The best business came in Mumbai circuit.
The long in the making Rang Rasiya was a poor fare grossing around 3.25 crore nett in week one. The film is out of most theatres in week two
The animation film Chaar Sahibzaade did not do well in Hindi although it did pick up from a very low start. The Punjabi version of the film is a huge hit in East Punjab and Delhi as gained momentum on the weekdays and the film is sure to have super strong week two.
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November 14, 2014 at 7:23 AM
http://www.rediff.com/movies/interview/deepika-is-a-good-looking-girl-but-no-acting-talent/20141114.htm
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November 14, 2014 at 9:01 AM
Thanks for this. Very nice read.
Although to be honest, I think Garam Hawa is overrated by many, It was a good film but doesn’t leave much of an impact.
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November 14, 2014 at 9:04 AM
having said that, it did actually have some extremely simple and effective performances. Balraj Sahni especially. Maybe it was very relevant in the times when it was released.
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November 14, 2014 at 7:37 AM
satyamshot.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/the-shaukeens-happy-new-year-ongoing-the-rest-of-the-box-office/#comment-286898
From this comment above
Note how the Krrish3 number of 243 crores domestic net (at number 2 alltime) is not going anywhere –hide it under the carpet–try to dust it off
But it’s coming back to haunt some
And this is being out up now by srk fans like master to further the cause of HNY now
Well, spin is like skimpy bikinis –the more u try to hide the more they reveal …
Btw Saw interstellar recently –may opine
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November 14, 2014 at 8:44 AM
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November 14, 2014 at 11:10 AM
Kill Dill doesn’t seem to have worked out. Any way I think Shaad Ali’s talent in comedy is jejune. So I will wait for Happy Ending. And dip into offering from two of my favourite directors Linklater and Nolan this weekend , Boyhood and Interstellar in that order.
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November 14, 2014 at 11:21 AM
From the reviews it seems to be a very poor / poorly directed movie. Shaad took such a long break and comes up with this? Where is the homework? Or was it just a quick fix measure to run his kitchen as the money ran out….
Is this the alternative / challenge these young guns offering to the established superstars? Who can blame them for taking things for granted!!
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November 14, 2014 at 12:34 PM
Kill dil review are bad to worse…
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November 15, 2014 at 12:30 AM
So in all effectiveness it seems YRF has 2 duds to start with i.e. Dawat E Ishq….and Kill Dill….HNY was alrite overseas.
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November 15, 2014 at 12:58 AM
Parineeti is common factor for both the films.
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November 15, 2014 at 1:59 AM
I don’t know but the roles that Parineeti play off late is highly irritating. Alia and Sonakshi are doing lil better.
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November 15, 2014 at 12:21 PM
Alia of all is ahead of the pack. She has got a good fan following among teenagers and pretty much looks the contemporary find.
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November 15, 2014 at 1:09 AM
Kill Dil First Day Business
Saturday 15 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had grossed around 6.50-6.75 crore nett on day one as per early estimates. The collections are not so good compared to how Ranveer Singh’s last two films Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela and Gunday opened but its an okay collection going by the costs of the film.
The film performed best in Delhi NCR and CI while collections in Maharashtra were low. In North it was hit by two Punjabi films providing competition. The film did not grow much in the evening at multiplexes and the single screen performance was also on the lower side.
Overall the film has better chances at multiplexes and should show some growth on Saturday though as its an action film its unlikely to be big growth.
6-5=2 had dull collections with first day figures likely to come in at around the 10 lakhs nett range.
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November 15, 2014 at 1:40 AM
http://www.rediff.com/movies/interview/going-back-in-time-with-master-raju/20141114.htm
An interesting journey of yesteryears famous child star Raju.
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November 15, 2014 at 8:31 AM
Really enjoyed reading that.
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November 15, 2014 at 1:59 AM
dont know how true is this http://www.ibtimes.co.in/shankar-picks-aamir-khan-over-megastar-rajinikanth-his-next-614062#.VGb381fPDw4.twitter
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November 15, 2014 at 2:25 AM
Oh, no.
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November 15, 2014 at 8:10 AM
Heard “Kathi” of murgadoss is being remake in hindi with sakman n govinda…
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November 15, 2014 at 8:30 AM
every Salman film post-Dabanng has been a remake with the exception of ETT and of course the second Dabanng which was a sequel. Now of course he for have another rare ‘original’ film in the Barjatya one.
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November 15, 2014 at 9:16 AM
It’s not just the fact that most of Salman’s films are “remakes”, but that they are mostly remakes of very mediocre Masala films. I fail to understand why can’t these guy choose better films from the South if they have to go down the remake route (and whenever a better “original” is used as the source material, which is mostly a Tamil one, the resulting remakes have ended up grossing more and trending better- we just saw this with Holiday where the Murugadoss original was easily one of Vijay’s best films, one just has to compare Holiday to Akshay’s own Boss where the original Malayalam film was pretty crappy). Also most of these folks don’t even hire the best Masala directors from the South (Murugadoss is the only exception here who has now made 2 films in Hindi and both are pretty decent films)- Abhishek could have easily taken someone like Rajamouli (though my pick will be Suseenthiran. Both his Naan Mahaan Alla, but especially Pandiyanaadu are the kind of Masala films, if remade properly, could be true-blue superhits apart from turning out to be really good films) for his home production
Incidentally Kaththi was apparently a true-blue superhit. Certainly the biggest Tamil hit of the year and which trended rather strongly- people are calling it Vijay’s biggest career moment yet.
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November 15, 2014 at 12:15 PM
I’m not South Indian/don’t watch their movies but I saw the trailer of Kaththi and the Background music is definitely the best out of any indian movie this year. I’m waiting for a subtitle version before I watch it. Also “I” and of course Lingaa are on my watch list. Hindi films seem so much behind Tamil films in terms of everything.
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November 15, 2014 at 8:30 AM
http://m.timesofindia.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/IN-FOCUS-Manoj-Kumars-silver-jubilee-run-that-took-him-from-Darjeeling-to-Kullu-Manali/articleshow/45106197.cms
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November 15, 2014 at 9:08 AM
Hariyali aur Raasta and HGM both had lovely songs, especially the former. SJ at their best. Some of Manoj Kumar’s films used to have highly memorable and melodious songs. Woh Kaun thi was one of them. And also Gumnam.
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November 15, 2014 at 9:23 AM
Hariyali Aur Raasta was actually the film that really pulled me into appreciating old music. I was a teenager and we were driving to a wedding in another city and Allah Jaane Kya Hoga Aage came on the radio and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Later on I asked my mum which film it was from and the next time we went to Leicester I bought the CD. What a soundtrack! All three of the Lata-Mukesh duets are outstanding. And the solos are awesome too. And from then on, I drowned 🙂
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November 15, 2014 at 11:04 AM
Hariyali aur Rasta was SJ at thier best ! In fact if Mukesh owes his career to someone other then Raj Kapoor, then it is Manoj Kumar.Manoj Kumar really looked his best in those days. He was quite a fun to watch when he did not take himself so seriously
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November 15, 2014 at 1:21 PM
Yeah, Manoj in the early sixties wasn’t bad at all, in that he may not have been an acting ‘great’ but he was quite watchable. And yeah, Mukesh sang many great songs for him.
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November 15, 2014 at 6:18 PM
Actually in addition to the lovely songs I liked both the films too. Himalay ki godmein had an overacting yet lovable Mala Sinha and lovely songs and a message.
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November 15, 2014 at 8:31 AM
“I have not signed any films yet. all are rumours” – aamir khan
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November 15, 2014 at 10:29 AM
It doesn’t matter what Aamir says. After a year, he’ll say he was hiding it and he didn’t want to reveal to audience so soon(if anything he has actually signed like that wrestler movie).
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November 15, 2014 at 10:28 AM
http://www.ndtv.com/article/south/sachin-tendulkar-chooses-village-to-adopt-in-andhra-pradesh-621439?pfrom=home-topstories
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November 15, 2014 at 11:53 AM
Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy have both spoken by now about the election results in India and if you are a Modi voter, you are likely not too happy with their views. I would like to suggest that if you are not a Modi voter, you should also be a bit unhappy at how much attention these particular writers get as “the voice of the Left/Liberal/Secular side of India”. I really think that far too many highly educated South Asian people read Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy and their ilk.
Obviously, I also believe far too many people in the Western elite read them, but at least their admiration is more understandable. They need native informants who can reinforce their preconceived notions and if these native informants helpfully repeat the Western Left’s own pet theories back to them, so much the better. That is not my main concern today.
http://www.outlookindia.com/blogs/post/The-Problem-With-Ms-Mishra–Roy/3276/38
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November 15, 2014 at 6:26 PM
It would be best to stop this westernized notions of left right centre secular blah blah blah
This labelling makes a puppet of the people who just want to have a decent life.
So if you support business you become a rightist.
Support the right of poor people to improve life you become leftist.
Have respect for every religion and not mind their existence you become a sickular or a secular (meant as a gaali)
And then we say we are free & not colonial slaves of the western thoughts anymore.
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November 15, 2014 at 6:59 PM
Right told Oldgild. Labels only deflect the truth.
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November 15, 2014 at 11:00 PM
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/I-Close-My-Eyes-Wish-Someone-Could-Take-That-Shot-Away/292581
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November 16, 2014 at 3:09 AM
After the success of ‘Happy New Year’, actor Abhishek Bachchan says he and the entire cast of the movie are pressurising director Farah Khan to make a sequel of the heist comedy.
The 38-year-old actor said the starcast of the film comprising Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Sonu Sood, Boman Irani, Vivaan Shah and him, want to work together again as they all had a lot of fun while shooting ‘Happy New Year’, which released on October 24.
“I think everybody is pressuring Farah because everybody wants to get back as a team to work again… we had a great time while filming.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/abhishek-bachchan-everybody-is-pressurising-farah-khan-for-a-happy-new-year-sequel-we-all-had-a-blast-working-together/513002-8-66.html
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November 16, 2014 at 9:09 AM
Can you all please get together and have a party at Farah’s house if you all miss other so much instead of unleashing another one on us? As a bonus, Shirish Kunder can turn-in his other cheek too for SRK…
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November 16, 2014 at 7:14 AM
Kill Dil Saturday Business
Sunday 16 November 2014 13.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The business of Kill Dil was slightly down its second day as it grossed around 6.25 crore nett. The business was a down a bit in nearly all the circuits
The business for Kill Dil over its first two days is as follows.
Friday – 6.50 crore
Saturday – 6.25 crore
TOTAL – 12.75 crore
The film is heading for a weekend figure of around 20 crore nett as Sunday should show some growth.
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November 16, 2014 at 8:28 AM
Saw Devil and its a timepass and somewhat thrilling film.
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November 16, 2014 at 5:10 PM
Lata’s tweet to Amitabh:
Namaskar. Aaj main Kaun banega Maha crorepati ka Final episode dekh rahi thi,jisme Govinda ji Ranveer Singh,Ali Zafar,Parineeti Chopra aur Ronit Roy the ,karyakram bohot accha hua ,Amit ji ne humesha ki tarha karyakram ko shaandaar banaaya.karyakram ke samarop me Amit ji ne do panktiyaa’n kahi wo thi mohobbat karnewale kam na honge
Teri mehfil mein lekin hum na honge .Amit ji ko ye panktiyaa’n kehete hue sunke meri aankhein bhar aayi.@SrBachchan Amit ji Mere dil me aap ke liye khas jagah hai,main aap ki bohot izzat karti hun,ishwar aap ko humesha khush rakhe,deerghaayu kare aur sehetmand rakhe yehi meri mangal kaamana. Tathastu
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November 16, 2014 at 5:17 PM
His reply:
T 1677 – Lata ji .. mere paas shabd nahin hain ki kis tarah aapko dhanyavaad doon .. aapka aashirwaad hamare liye dhanya ho gaya .. !!!
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November 16, 2014 at 5:28 PM
wonderful note..
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November 16, 2014 at 7:40 PM
One time he wrote this on his blog and I saved it:
“My father had briefed me on a few words of some eloquence when I had sought help from him on what I could possibly speak about The Nightingale. They wandered in and out of my mutilated brain along with the song. The song !! Why did I have to sing it. Look what I have landed into.
‘Lata Mangeshkar’, dad speaking, ‘watching honey pouring out. The flow never breaks. Smooth and honeysweet the tone of her singing. The invisible string that binds you to god, when you hear her voice’.”
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November 16, 2014 at 5:36 PM
Long-awaited sequel Dumb and Dumber To opened to an estimated $38.05 million, which was enough to take first place away from strong holdover Big Hero 6.
The Top 12 earned an estimated $134.6 million this weekend, which is up 13 percent from the same weekend last year.
Dumb and Dumber To’s $38.05 million is the biggest live-action debut for Jim Carrey since 2003’s Bruce Almighty, and is also the best opening ever for the Farrelly Brothers. Among recent comparable titles, it’s on par with the five-day openings for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues ($39.5 million) and We’re the Millers ($37.9 million), and is a step above recent road trip comedies Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa ($32.1 million) and Identity Thief ($32.1 million).
The original Dumb and Dumber was a massive box office hit back in 1994, and developed legions of fans on home video as well. Two decades later, Universal sold the sequel by essentially conveying that the original pair (Carrey and Jeff Daniels) was back, and that their characters were dumber than ever. This fairly straightforward strategy proved to be very effective.
The audience for Dumb and Dumber To was 55 percent male and 57 percent over the age of 25. They weren’t necessarily thrilled with the movie, though, and awarded it a weak “B-” CinemaScore. Add in terrible reviews and tough competition from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Horrible Bosses 2, and this could fall off quickly in the next few weeks. Still, look for Dumb and Dumber To to wind up close to $100 million.
This is the seventh first place debut for Universal Pictures this year, following Lone Survivor, Ride Along, Non-Stop, Neighbors, Lucy and Ouija. Fox is the only other studio with seven first place openings in 2014.
Big Hero 6 eased 36 percent to an estimated $36.05 million. That drop is a bit steeper than Wreck-It Ralph’s 33 percent, and is roughly on par with Megamind’s 37 percent. The Disney Animation hit has now earned $111.7 million; if it holds up decently against the one-two punch of Mockingjay and Penguins of Madagascar, it could eventually get to $200 million.
Interstellar added $29.2 million, which was off 39 percent from last weekend. That hold isn’t quite as good as Inception’s 32 percent drop, though it’s still very strong for a big-budget movie like this. IMAX contributed $7.4 million, or 25 percent of the overall weekend gross. To date, Interstellar has earned $97.8 million, and is on track to close with at least $160 million.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3961&p=.htm
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November 16, 2014 at 5:37 PM
Gone Girl rounded out the Top Five with $4.6 million. It was off a light 26 percent, which makes this the third weekend in a row in which the movie dropped less than 30 percent. To date, Gone Girl has earned a fantastic $152.7 million, and appears on track to close north of $170 million.
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January 4, 2015 at 12:49 PM
Dumb and Dumber To such a horrendous film. Ranks amongst the worst I’ve ever seen!
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January 4, 2015 at 2:14 PM
Haven’t seen a single one in the franchise but yeah I heard this one was terrible.
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January 5, 2015 at 1:23 PM
Spare yourself from watching it. Jim Carrey who I liked for a long time was desperately poor.
Next film I want to watch is Taken 3. Love the first two films.
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January 5, 2015 at 2:51 PM
yes Neeson in this second stage of his career has become one of the stars I most like to watch. On another note I also checked out equalizer the other day. I know you liked this one and I agree with everything. Denzel really makes this otherwise average film. Besides of course the overall ‘moodiness’ and relatively slower pace which is rather welcome in this action-sequence-a-minute age.
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November 17, 2014 at 12:35 AM
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/May-date-for-Ranbir-Kapoor-starrer-Bombay-Velvet/articleshow/45172821.cms
May date for Ranbir Kapoor starrer Bombay Velvet
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November 17, 2014 at 12:40 AM
So, Katrina Kaif will topline the cast.Will Ranbir Kapoor and Ajay Devgn also return in the sequel?
Ajay’s character, like Manoj Bajpai’s and Arjun Rampal’s is dead. I don’t know if Ranbir’s character will return. Katrina’s Indu is now the Chief Minister and Raajneeti 2 will start with her. Then we’ll have other family members coming in.
Will it draw references from real political families like the Gandhis?
Well, there will be some parallels. Remember how Rajeev Gandhi reluctantly became the PM, then lost in the next elections? His story is the tragedy of some good people who enter politics.
Your third film, Satsang, is about a godman. Right now there’s one in Haryana, Rampal, defying the police who want to arrest him.
My film is about what happens when spiritualism becomes a business, a means of earning unimaginable wealth playing on the fears of ordinary people. I’ve drawn from Rajneesh and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to the gurus in Gujarat and Haryana–the good, the bad and the ugly. I completed the story three years ago and am waiting for Ajay to finish his film so we can roll with it.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Katrina-Kaif-in-Rajneeti-2/articleshow/45173392.cms
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November 17, 2014 at 9:01 AM
Happy New Year Weekly Business Till Fourth Weeekend
Monday 17 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
The business for Happy New Year till its fourth weekend is as follows.
Week One – 1,33,35,00,000
Week Two – 35,38,00,000
Week Three – 7,45,00,000
Weekend Four – 1,00,00,000 apprx
TOTAL – 1,77,18,00,000
The film is looking at finish of around 178.50 crore nett with a 62 crore nett contribution from Mumbai and 32 crore nett from Delhi/UP. The distributor share will be around 97 crore for the film.
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November 17, 2014 at 9:03 AM
this has just matched K3 numbers. If you go by producer numbers it’s at 200 or so but still 25 crores behind CE (going by the same). And if you go by producer numbers on K3 it’s crossed Avatar. Now here’s a sci-fi story to beat Interstellar! But putting it another way both K3 and HNY have done less than YJHD.
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November 17, 2014 at 9:03 AM
Kill Dil Has Low First Weekend
Monday 17 November 2014 12,00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil had a low first weekend of around 20 crore nett. It will probably be enough for the makers to cover cost taking all revenues into account as the film has been made on a reasonable budget but a film of this sort should be doing more over the first weekend
The daily business for Kill Dil over its first weekend is as follows.
Friday – 6.50 crore
Saturday – 6.25 crore
Sunday – 7.25 crore
TOTAL – 20 crore
The trend of the film was also not great as with a so so start it should have grown on Saturday but collections were in the same range as Friday. The jump on Sunday was also not that big. Mumbai grossed around 6.5 crore nett while Delhi/UP was around 4.25 crore nett and East Punjab 2 crore nett for the first weekend.
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November 18, 2014 at 3:42 AM
http://movies.ndtv.com/bollywood/arpita-ki-shaadi-everything-you-need-to-know-about-salmans-sisters-wedding-699189?pfrom=home-topstories
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November 18, 2014 at 3:47 AM
http://www.koimoi.com/bollywood-popular/jacqueline-fernandez-in-her-dual-avatar-for-roy-revealed/
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November 18, 2014 at 6:29 AM
Xhobdo:
“I’m here as a product of my work and nobody can take that away from me” Abhishek Bachchan
http://chotusdiary.blogspot.in/2014/11/abhishek-bachchan.html
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November 18, 2014 at 6:57 AM
Xhodbo:
BHOPAL A PRAYER FOR RAIN | Official Trailer
The official trailer of the much anticipated movie ‘Bhopal A Prayer For Rain’ starring for the first time Mischa Barton, Kal Penn and Martin Sheen in an Indian film. The movie is a social thriller based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.
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November 18, 2014 at 9:01 AM
Happy New Year V Kick – Multiplex Single Screen Divide
Tuesday 18 November 2014 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Happy New Year is looking at a 179 crore nett finish compared to the 212 crore nett of Kick. The main difference is the business in the single screens. the approx break up of business for both films is as follows.
Multiplexes
Kick – 135 crore
Happy New Year – 125 crore
Single Screens
Kick 77 crore
Happy New Year – 54 crore
Kick grossed just 8% more at multiplexes but was a huge 43% better at single screens. Kick had a 63.5% contribution from multiplexes while single screens gave 36.5%. Happy New Year had a 70% contribution from multiplexes and 30% from single screens. In fact Happy New Year had better collections than Kick in week two and three at the bigger chains like PVR and Inox.
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November 18, 2014 at 9:02 AM
but in a much more multiplex-friendly film and with SRK how did that happen?! Kick ought not to be ahead at all!
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November 18, 2014 at 9:39 AM
Salman has slowly but surely crossed into multiplex sector and going to get bigger hereon. He seems very much at ease with himself these days and his Bigg Boss shows have assisted him in this huge image makeover by entering people’s living room.
Now with this marriage of his adopted sister Arpita on such a lavish scale gives Salman the person – social preeminence and the éclat of a great achievement.
His ultimate multiplex film is under production which is going to hit the theatres in Diwali 2015. Plans and ambitions for this one seem huge and as per Zoom report, taking a leaf out of Slam tour, Sallu and Barjatya are planning on a world tour with PRDP cast next year.
Salman Khan To Go On A World Tour For ‘Prem Ratan Dhan Payo’ | Bollywood News
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November 18, 2014 at 11:08 AM
he of course has but HNY clearly opened bigger in multiplexes. As with the overall picture it didn’t sustain. BOI are now pretending it’s only 8% behind Kick. But given that it started way ahead (this is again not just about the overall total but the fact that this couldn’t have attracted single screens like Kick or for that matter D3) this shouldn’t have happened. BOI have been fixated on Kick but why not use the YJHD analogy?! A film which released before Kick, was even more of a multiplex-only deal than HNY and yet HNY is going to fall behind it or at best match it. What’s the excuse for this? Specially when the film otherwise beat D3 by a healthy margin on day 1. Again it’s about using one standard at one end when things are going well and another one at the other end.
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November 18, 2014 at 11:18 AM
If they started to compare it to YJHD, they would start to sing about how it did better business than YJHD in single screens!
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November 18, 2014 at 11:33 AM
LOL, true!
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November 19, 2014 at 1:16 AM
Old BOI article:
The collections of CHENNAI EXPRESS from multiplexes and single screens compared with YEH JAWAANI HAI DEEWANI, the other big grosser of 2013, is as follows.
Multiplexes
Chennai Express -128 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 120 crore
Single Screens
Chennai Express -80 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 58 crore
TOTAL
Chennai Express -208 crore
Yeh Hai Jawaani Hai Deewani – 178 crore
CE made a little more than KICK in Single Screens which is surprising. But YJHD made more than HNY at Single Screens!
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November 18, 2014 at 9:03 AM
Kill Dil Monday Box Office Collection
Tuesday 18 November 2014 11.00 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
Kill Dil fell on Monday as it grossed around 3 crore nett as per early estimates. The fall was over 50% from day one. The Delhi/UP circuit showed the best hold but even that was down close to 50%.
The first four day business for Kill Dil is as follows.
Friday – 6.50 crore
Saturday – 6.25 crore
Sunday – 7.25 crore
Monday – 3 crore apprx
TOTAL – 23 crore
The film is looking at a first week of business of around 30 crore nett but will struggle to add after week one as there is a major release every week.
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November 18, 2014 at 6:44 PM
Cocktail sequel contd
Xxx
Deepika a fan of Hrithik-Katrina’s “Bang Bang!” title track
Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif-starrer “Bang Bang!” did not just win the audience’s heart but also wooed many B’Town celebrities. And now it’s the title track of the movie doing its magic on Deepika Padukone.
http://www.pinkvilla.com/entertainmenttags/katrina-kaif/deepika-fan-hrithik-katrinas-bang-bang-title-track
The actress took to microblogging website Twitter and said that the title track is the song of the year for her.
“This title song from #bangbang is the song of the year for me!!! #partyanthemoftheyear #playingonrepeat,” read Deepika’s tweet.
Hmmm– agree wid deepika –both hrithik & katrina kapoor scorched the dance floor there …
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November 18, 2014 at 11:41 PM
It is perhaps the fate of all great democratic statesmen that in the shadow of their achievement it is also possible to draw an indictment against them. This is true of Lincoln and Roosevelt, as it is of Nehru. Lincoln, for all his manifest greatness, has never stopped being accused of less than noble intentions. Did he compromise a commitment to full equality as a price for abolishing slavery? Was a brutal war that resulted in, on one estimate, a million deaths, a necessary price for his moral objectives? Did he at some point subordinate the moral ambition of equality to a more elusive idea of preserving ‘union in perpetuity’? Roosevelt is similarly indicted. Here is a president who saved both liberal democracy and capitalism at the moment of its greatest historical crisis. Yet it was an achievement founded on sordid compromise: he had to leave the structure of Southern racial discrimination intact. The New Deal was often on the verge of failing; and some have argued Roosevelt’s misjudgement at Yalta gave the Soviets more room than necessary to divide the world in the way it eventually got divided during the Cold War. And yet, despite these judgments, there seems something almost indispensible about these men; as if, despite their imperfections, they and they alone, could gather the tides of history to articulate and preserve something that remained and offer an enduring beacon of hope. The achievement survives more grandly than the imperfections that attend it. In fact, the mistakes make their greatness even more of an achievement; for it makes the achievement all the more human, not mythical or god like.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/bigger-than-the-sum-of-his-imperfections
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November 19, 2014 at 12:22 AM
Interesting blog.
No action can be carried out without collateral damages along with benefits. The safe way is to sit on important decisions. But then they will be accused of inaction at the right time. Lincoln might not have imagined the great resistance by the southern leaders.
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November 19, 2014 at 6:35 AM
Fantastically good piece.. thanks for posting.. Gore Vidal once called Lincoln the ‘Central Man’ of US history and in the same sense Nehru is as easily the same for the Indian Republic. In terms of the Independence movement Gandhi was assuredly the Central Man but in the context of the independent nation-state Nehru without a doubt occupies that role. Now one can argue against him in many ways but an ‘event’ which frames the very nation-state one lives in and that one takes for granted in so many ways cannot be reversed. Put differently though I am hardly sanguine about the present for very many reasons the Nehruvian edifice is a colossus which cannot be deconstructed without taking apart the nation-state itself and that I’m confident is not possible. That structure is too soundly in place. Now the Right does of course recognize this. Hence there is so much fury directed at Nehru (and they’re hardly great fans of the Mahatma either). Precisely because he forever thwarted the idea of another sort of India (of course Patel himself was the farthest thing from any such notion). Put differently you can tilt things towards the Right (and again I would never underestimate all of this at any level) but nonetheless the game can only be played on the Nehruvian field.
[Once again I’ll offer my usual caveat to the indisciplined.. I responded to a piece An Jo posted but this should not become a free for all for the non-serious]
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November 19, 2014 at 9:54 AM
To put Lincoln and Roosevelt in the same line as Nehru is sacrilegious! The author obviously has little idea of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lincoln’s contribution!
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November 19, 2014 at 10:25 AM
actually I very much doubt you know anything on the subject of those two or Nehru..! Nehru belongs exactly in that category though blind ideologues are not expected to know this. There are many giants of history where I might be completely opposed to everything they stood for, many I might even find loathsome but where I am not insane enough to question their influence and the event of their political careers. The line coming from folks like yourself is part of the familiar disjunctive logic one sees so often in these matters:
1)Nehru is responsible for everything that’s wrong with India
2)Actually Nehru’s not all that important
It can be one or the other, not both. But this kind of Philistine attitude (though you have good company in contemporary India) where anyone who says anything one doesn’t like is either ignorant or a partisan irrespective of the writing he or she puts up, irrespective of the credentials he or she has to offer, is unfortunately never quite ‘defeated’. It is the structure of fundamentalist belief not to be open to persuasion of any sort.
By the way it is particularly amusing to see you argue for FDR’s achievements. He and Lincoln and Nehru are really on the same side of the right-left political divide! Any one of these would be quite horrified by your side.
Why such hyper-nationalists like yourself are not in India serving the greatest civilization in history beats me! I suppose it must be because you are in this other greatest civilization (US). Both claim to be the greatest at the very same time (like so many others). But I won’t test you too much with more logical puzzles. At least you will send your children to esteemed universities back home devoted to RSS or RSS-like ‘scientific’ ends (where Ganesh according to the PM was the result of surgical practices.. there’s a greatest hits collection of his developing along these lines..). I’m sure you won’t aim for Harvard or any other institution where awful scholars like Wendy Doniger teach. And not IITs I hope (modeled on similar Western lines)!
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November 19, 2014 at 10:48 AM
The openmagazine article is actually quite good.
Nehru is an enigma. He was indeed very charismatic, patriotic and had noble intentions.
His time as PM can be looked at in different ways but I dont think there was ever any question about his intentions or ability. I do believe some of his policies were misdirected, at times ineffective and may have contributed to the stagnation in India’s growth in the years following his demise. History can be cruel and every thing can be second guessed with hind sight. There is no way of knowing if a different leadership with different policies would have yeilded better results. We will never know and never agree. The charge that he was privileged by birth and was flawed may be true to an extent but there was something very endearing about him and his almost romantic world view. And, his leadership was always guided by what he though was good for the country rather than any narrow self interests or desire to stay in power.
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November 19, 2014 at 12:17 PM
completely fair set of points here Rajen.. I don’t have an issue with anyone arguing with Nehru on most matters. I don’t even have an issue with anyone who might have wished for the independent nation-state to have been constructed differently. I might argue with all this but it’s a coherent position. However it’s quite different to say completely foolish things because one doesn’t like Nehru. Much as I am not a fan of Modi at all in any sense but he’s quite likely to become one of the very influential leaders of the Indian nation-state. So arguing on policy and so on is one thing and denying basic facts quite another. Now on the more precise set of issues, it’s quite possible that a different set of economic policies for instance would have led the country in a different direction. But Nehru is also about the larger fabric of the nation-state. If you start with divisive policies or those that are designed to exclude you end up with something very unstable very soon. Indian democracy has been a wondrous experiment and it’s not clear to me that anyone else could have managed all of it better or even as well as Nehru did though this doesn’t mean that one cannot argue about specific decisions or policies. By the way I’d say the same for FDR or Lincoln or anyone else. There are things that are a complete stain on FDR’s record.
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November 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM
His biggest achievement was the abolishing of Zamindari, an act which in one instant rebooted an entire nation. He (and the Congress under Gandhi et al) had argued for this abolition much before independence, and inadvertently caused the split of the subcontinent. It was the prime reason for the folks across the border to have rejected the idea of a secular India, ie, they just did not want to give up their ancestral feudal lands/titles, and latched onto Jinnah. Off course, this has also caused the Right to forever question his brand of secularism which caused the carving out of land to people of one religion, but yet permitted the same people to hang on in the truncated India. So in effect the Fundamentalists of one religion cut their cake and ate it, where as the Fundamentalists of the other religion have forever been relegated to cursing Nehru’s legacy. IMHO, they need to stop whining now, at least after 70 yrs, we can very well see which side of the truncated subcontinent is progressing, and which is regressing. So therefore, his giant legacy is still intact.
However, where he then failed was to followup his socialism with any effective economic policy that could push India into any sort of sustainable economic growth, which basically resulted in the much maligned Hindu rate of growth.
His second biggest mistake was to not control his progeny’s dynastic ambitions, which caused another 20-30 years of stalled growth.
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November 19, 2014 at 1:05 PM
some good points here. the thing with the socialism though was (and I’m not defending it) that it came about in a world where this model was considered a viable alternative just about everywhere and certainly in the West as well. But secondly he saw it as a means to balance out various facts of Indian life. And here the jury is still out. Over the last twenty years the strongest critiques of the free market have emerged within the free market. In other words those who think (picketty is the current star of this move) who felt that the free market (or globalization) introduces its own brand of destitution and immiseration, something which is not accounted for in the same way. In other words a case could be made that if India had adopted this model right from the beginning it might have been a more dynamic economic but also a much more fractured polity in very many ways. Because economic dynamism is not always linked to socio-political progress if it’s not universal and no one believes it’s universal in that naive sense anymore. The irony here is that the most stable capitalisms are precisely those that have accounted for Marxist thought by introducing the welfare state and so on (there is no advanced democracy that does not feature this element). There are theorists who argue that if the West had not made this adjustment a long time ago capitalism in the form we know it would have collapsed because there would have been too much political instability. Put differently still the question of social justice/political justice is not one that can ever be ignored even if a purely economic logic is not always most concerned with it. But the second darker side to all of this is that with time the very same welfare state and all the labor laws and so on that made that sort of ‘third world’ impossible in the West started depending on the continuation of the same elsewhere. In essence Manchester moved to Bangladesh! The great capitalist/globalization myth is that all societies can be ‘first world’. They simply cannot. It’s structurally impossible. There has to be either Bangladesh at the other end or there has to be Bangladesh in the very same nation. Hence in India you get both. This is not a coincidence borne out of one set of economic policies or another. It is an equation enabled by the free market. there has never been a free market without this. Here both sides are hypocritical. Those on the right (economically) pretend that everyone can be liberated while those on the left pretend everyone can be liberated in a more fair way. Both constitute quicksand positions. There is a balance that certainly can be struck and it’s called the ‘West’ or ‘Japan’ or what have you. Here one can argue whether one prefers the Scandinavian model or the US one or whatever. But either way one is in the free market realm. The idea that socialists dominate Europe is yet another fantasy. ALl of this doesn’t mean that Nehru cannot be criticized, just that a low of what he did makes a great deal of sense within the world he inhabited. And again as is always the case with politicians who have a certain reputation for probity and who moreover are idealistic their political skills are often grossly underestimated. You cannot become that kind of political force without being a very shrewd politician.
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November 19, 2014 at 1:24 PM
Agreed, it is the Welfare State that indeed saved Western Capitalism. The amount or degree of Welfare in the West might differ from country to country, but it is the basic framework which has resulted in the advancement of these societies.
So, while Nehru embarked on that path, his progeny just corrupted that entire system, by doing nothing (or even colluding) in large scale skimming of these welfare schemes. You should commend Modi for continuing the Welfare Schemes started by previous govts. At least he is trying to make sure that the delivery of welfare is not corrupted, which precisely was the cause of Congress’ failure. All the MNREGA, Food Acts etc could not endear them to the people, cause all these schemes did was to line pockets of middlemen. At least Modi is trying to make sure the middle man is rooted out.
Any objective political observer should by now conclude that he has very swiftly moved to the Political Center, and basically snatched away the positive talking points of every opposition party.
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November 19, 2014 at 2:54 PM
I think it’s unreasonable to blame the faults of Nehru’s progeny on him. He wasn’t even around! On the rest Modi is currently on course to have as many ministers as the Congress did. Already there’s been a huge enlargement and the BJP spokespeople have been at some pains to explain how this is in line with a leaner government. But judging from historical experience in these matters even in the West I am a bit skeptical about tales of shrinking governments. The Republicans never did it in the US (yes never!) despite all their rhetoric. In politics you can sometimes change the language of a debate without actually changing the debate!
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November 19, 2014 at 1:50 PM
@Rajen: “And, his leadership was always guided by what he though was good for the country rather than any narrow self interests or desire to stay in power”
Really?!?!?! You serious?
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November 19, 2014 at 1:51 PM
@Satyam: “where awful scholars like Wendy Doniger teach”
Totally agree with you. She is awful. She hates her job intensely. I pity her!!
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November 19, 2014 at 1:29 PM
At one level, these intellectuals are totally out of touch with contemporary India and its aspirations. For them any deviation from what Nehru imagined for India is like handing over the country to the wolves. From the idea of secularism to the demise of socialist planning, each blow to Nehru’s conception has been has been perceived almost as a personal assault. The more India has changed, the more tightly these intellectuals have clung to Nehru’s ideas. What they have ignored is the fact that every country changes and evolves. Institutions change and citizens move on. If in the process this change is resisted, it will produce bitterness. This is what is happening with respect to Nehru’s memory. All this is unfair to the man. He deserves careful and deeper study, including those aspects of his persona that are taboo subjects. The last scholar who had complete access to his papers—including the personal papers, access to which is effectively barred to Indian scholars—did not even touch these topics. It may seem salacious to try and dig into Nehru’s personal life but it should be remembered that complete historical treatment of a leader does require such understanding. That will not detract from the fact that he remains, until now, India’s greatest prime minister.
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/p9ROhOcg9JvcTy0lmesmDO/Jawaharlal-Nehrufrom-leader-to-totem-pole.html?utm_source=copy
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November 19, 2014 at 2:48 PM
One can always count on you for the less serious stuff! Ha! Kidding aside the claims in this piece are quite factually wrong. the problem is that much as there is a huge bit of mythology surrounding Nehru and for that matter most aspects of Indian history (to be brutally honest about Indians have by and large not matured into a nation able to separate history from myth.. though this is a problem in most nations not there are significant differences in degree and even kind..) there is an equal mythology surrounding the scholarship in all these contexts. This is not surprising. If you have no respect for history, if you cannot separate it from mythology, you are not very likely to have any understanding of the scholarship much less exposure to it. But there are also more serious ethical questions here. Because people routinely write such pieces in the media and it’s quite clear they don’t know what they’re talking about. The idea that there haven’t been studies critical of Nehru in India is a rather big joke. Much as the idea that even Nehru strongest academic admirers are so in unthinking ways is another deeply ignorant idea. Because again a certain sophistication and education are required in these matters. A larger-than-life personality has to be taken seriously even when one might not like what he or she did. And of course there is no permanent judgment in these matters. Secondly the idea that ‘India has changed’ is again the sort of meaningless drivel that people who don’t know close to anything about this stuff regularly come up with. So yes America has changed profoundly since Lincoln was president but in certain ways it is still Lincoln’s America. One could make a similar case for FDR. Modi still operates in Nehruvian India. He is trying to change the contours of that compact but to change that state radically he would have to begin anew or bring about a revolution. Neither thing really happens without a seminal historical event. Either an independent state where you in a sense you start from scratch or a seismic cries that allows the state to be reinvented. Neither thing is happening in contemporary India and crises engendered by the Right usually end up rather badly for them before all else! But again it’s a question of how refined an understanding one has in these matters. we speak Shakespeare’s English. That doesn’t mean English has remained the same in the last 400 years! Now as a matter of fact and being completely against Modi in most ways imaginable (which would never prevent me from measuring his impact one way or the other) I do not consider even his ambitions within that larger Nehruvian framework to be something negligible. But the point is that this is very different from making a new India altogether. Here though it is very much like those Karan Johar films from the 90s. It’s a point I’ve often made before. ‘New India’ is also (hypocritically) ‘old’ in very many ways. This ‘New India’ wants everything to be just as it is but just wants the economic dynamism to go with it. The very same ‘New Indians’ loved those Yashraj films. And even today multiplex cinema that caters to the same group is really just about consumerism. Which is then very different from reordering the nation in a deeper sense. Of course there is a certain tension in the ‘Modi’ message here. There is the technocrat for ‘New India’ but then there is also the deeply regressive message and policy goals on all aspects of Indian social, cultural life. In other words you have the Taleban on the Right competing with the globalization fans on the same side. Ultimately one has to give way to the other not least because neither side is interested in the other message. The dark aspect though is that in India you can keep the fundamentalists happy by restricting them (at least trying to do so) to more ‘underdeveloped India’ and then pretending that this is ‘ Old India’ while in the meantime speak in that other seemingly neutral technocratic language to the other side, knowing very well that as long as they are kept happy they will not care about what happens in UP or Bihar or wherever. But again the problem is that often one side overwhelms the other and even if not the constant media attention (also part of the New Indian compact) highlights a lot of issues that then don’t remain purely local. But in any case the idea that India has changed is either a platitude or a grossly incomplete statement.
by the way notice how this piece you’ve posted is a part of the problem. Rather than engage with it you simply find another one that suits your ideological interests. It’s a whole grab bag of criticism (on Nehru). Often it’s not even consistent but as long as it’s attacking Nehru it does the job!
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November 19, 2014 at 3:17 PM
‘Satyam You self-contradict so much….can’t take you seriously!
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November 20, 2014 at 12:30 AM
Yes in this world everyone is factually incorrect and only you are factually correct …
And its not my piece but by mint…
“Rather than engage with it you simply find another one that suits your ideological interests”
Doesn’t PBM piece or any piece that comes from nehru slave does same for you which has so much jargon and little facts… PBM is pompous piece
Nehru is most derided and detested pol leader in India right now and so far only Nehru slaves/ worshipers wrote hagiographies, it was only one way now free debate and critical evaluation of the man is happening 1st time and you so called liberals are unable to take it…
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November 20, 2014 at 6:40 AM
Your language and your characterizations reveal unfortunately too much about you! Sample the discussions I had with Rajen and Nykavi earlier. One can have a serious discussion about anything but there has to be an iota of maturity to these things. If one speaks the language of zealotry, if one uses the Hindutva equivalent of Islamist language and logic not to mention fundamentalism and one then also plays victim it’s more than a little laughable.
On the rest actually there are any number of ‘positive’ pieces I could quote on Nehru but I’m usually not interested (for the record even this one didn’t begin with me). Why? Because much more than what is being said I am interested in the quality of the argument being framed. For folks like you on the other hand it’s exactly the opposite. As for Nehru being the most detested leader in India right now that must be so for the 31% of the voting electorate that voted for Modi which of course wasn’t 31% of the entire nation. Hopefully you can work out the math! Where I will agree is that I’ve never seen such hatred directed by so many against one of the pre-eminent founding fathers of a country. Hard to think of a comparable example anywhere. This is to the discredit of India! Because again one can be the strongest critic of Nehru but when one starts sounding like the Taliban that’s another matter.
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November 20, 2014 at 8:27 AM
“On the rest actually there are any number of ‘positive’ pieces I could quote on Nehru”
I am sure Nehru’s heart was in correct place. However he wasn’t visionary and cannot be spoken in the same breath as Lincoln, FDR!! Nehru sent India in 6 decades of dark ages. I wish he had lost his 2nd election and Indian people had voted for someone else. But if wishes grew on trees….
So jo hona tho woh ho gaya. Now finally India has pure bred Indian leader. Good days will come again. 🙂
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November 20, 2014 at 8:33 AM
How do you know what FDR’s or Lincoln’s achievements are? You’re relying on the same ‘Westerners’ and ‘intellectuals’ you otherwise deride! Do you know what the Right used to say about Lincoln or FDR for the longest time? As for the rest people cosily living in the US become hyper-nationalists about India. Talk about being a nationalist on the cheap. But this doesn’t end the hypocrisy. One also ridicules the West, the institutions of the West that one then ends up sending one’s kids to! Yes ‘those’ universities occupied by ‘intellectuals’. Or are you going to send your kids to an RSS camp of some sort? Or a right-wing university in India? This is the worst kind of hypocrisy and cynicism. Yeah ‘good days’ are coming and you can enjoy the same in the US!
I do admit though that the mistake is mine. If I debate with the Taliban the fault is mine not theirs!
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November 20, 2014 at 8:49 AM
“Your language and your characterizations reveal unfortunately too much about you! ”
Trust me, I have same words for you…
You 1st make personal comment and thn play victim …
You don’t refute facts but love writing prose without head and tail…
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November 20, 2014 at 9:02 AM
You know I’ll make a very honest confession — I’ve been in ‘debates’ with Islamists, American right-wingers and of course Hindutva types where I’ve been called the very same names. And this includes the other side always playing the victim (‘hey he’s calling us names’!). At the end of the day you can’t debate ‘fanaticism’. Why do I even try to do so then? For pragmatic reasons. I never hope to convince the people I’ve actually arguing with but they are not the only readers here! There are plenty of middle of the road types in the right or left who might have strong views about politics but who are also open to reason in some sense. And then of course there are fundamentalists who for more than a century have been very formulaic. Whether it’s religious fundamentalists or those of the nationalist type (which too becomes a different kind of religion) they say exactly the same things. So for instance I could take some of the stuff you or Di say, substitute it with some Islamic references and the formula would hold precisely. Or I could in a more nationalistic sense add some Nazi terminology or the same from many different parts of the globe and it would hold precisely. Of course those in question never agree. They react violently to such analogies. But then it cannot be said that fundamentalism of any sort every operates on the side of verifiable, falsifiable knowledge and/or argumentation.
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November 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM
I am proud of my heritage–> so I must be RSS lover
I don’t like Wendy Doniger–> so I must hate american universities and ALL the professors
I don’t think Nehru had any value add to India—> I must hate Nehru
I like Modi—> so I must be a fanatic and Hindutva-vadi and agree with him 100% on everything!!
I am a proud hindu—> So I must be holding and having same thoughts as beheading folks out there.
Satyam I can go on but I rest my case.
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November 20, 2014 at 9:38 AM
you’re just playing games here.. thankfully these are coming to an end.. by the way don’t get so defensive.. you can still continue living outside India and you can still send your kids to Harvard..! and you can continue to be an ideological warrior ensconced wherever!
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November 20, 2014 at 10:20 AM
“you can still continue living outside India and you can still send your kids to Harvard..! ”
So by your logic living outside india one needs to forget India completely and not even think/talk about her? Sending kids to Harvard is crime? I will make sure they fight with likes of WendyD. Just because someone has Harvard stamp doesn’t make them right. Just because someone is Muslim or Hindu doesn’t make them criminal/Taliban. You the self-proclaimed logical, intelligent person is making such stupid blanket statements when you lose a debate…sore loser 🙂 😛
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November 20, 2014 at 10:41 AM
I think you’re not as confused here as you’re pretending to be..
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November 20, 2014 at 1:21 AM
“One can always count on you for being so ignorant!!! Ha “
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November 20, 2014 at 1:32 AM
One more ‘less serious stuff’ as per owner here any pice which doesn’t lick dead A@@ of Nehru is factually incorrect and trash stuff ..
“History is written by the powerful and our intellectuals wanted to be on the right side of power. The result is a fraudulent uniformity in the views of our eminent historians. Only one school of thought mattered and it was the one that was taught and nurtured. If it was questioned or challenged, it was on the margins. Those who today claim to be the greatest guarantors of freedom of thought, never bothered to challenge their own assumptions and belief, cocooned as they were in their own proximity to the Dynasty.
Today, the centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted and not only the Congress party but all its defenders are scrambling. They are worried that the “idea of India” is under threat, without wondering how a single “Idea of India” can prevail in a country of India’s gargantuan diversity. And why can’t the Nehruvianconsensus – the holy grail of Indian intellectuals – be challenged?”
http://www.ndtv.com/article/opinion/modi-s-election-is-allowing-indians-an-honest-debate-619645
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November 20, 2014 at 1:38 PM
Modi is functioning completely in a Nehruvian India and is the only leader he hasn’t actively taken up unlike Sardar Patel and Gandhiji.
He wants to implement RSS dream of scratching Article 370 (one of the baits to get votes) but is already giving in and having to follow Nehru’s thoughts.
The article 370 was anyway more a Sardar Patel doing, and he happens to be a favourite of Modi at present that a statue costing even more than the Mangalyan has been approved of.
The thought that winning a majority in J&K might make them pass a bill to abolish it seems to be dying because the candidates have clearly declared their thoughts of not supporting it.
This new India is a MYTH not part of history. Not a day goes with middle age tthoughts and actions being expressed.
It is certainly not a New India where the PM declares plastic surgery (or did he want to say head transplant) was being done thousands of years ago when an elephant’s head was transplanted on to Ganesh’s head. New India?
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November 20, 2014 at 1:50 PM
Actually glad you raised that point. They are indeed caving in on 370 currently and even saying absurd stuff like Sajjad Lone has changed his views and isn’t a separatist anymore. Not just this, there hasn’t been a peep out of them on the uniform civil code since winning the election. This when they have the numbers in the Lok Sabha to do it tomorrow if they wished to. This is a classic example of what I’ve been trying to get at. The Nehruvian state isn’t so easily defeated. The Republicans in the US have learnt a similar lesson the hard way. They forever campaigned against the welfare state but no matter what kinds of numbers they had they couldn’t touch it! They even augmented it in some respects. And here I’ll make a paradoxical statement. Modi’s India might turn out to be yet another moment in the Nehruvian institutional history. Which is to say that of course things change over time, the political discourse changes, and so forth but the question is whether the fundamental contours of the state can be changed. This was of course the BJP promise. But if you even have to dilute your stance on 370 so early, that great white whale of the Right, what does it say about the rest? This is why the extremists have to be allowed to engage in some of their ugly politics elsewhere. In American parlance it’s called throwing red meat. And you have to do this precisely when more institutional changes aren’t forthcoming! The point again is that if with this victory Modi cannot alter the fundamental contours of the Nehruvian state no one else has a shot in hell! And this is not a Modi thing. No one else could either. Barring something short of a total revolution. And you don’t achieve those by staying within the system. The BJP’s response to everything from black money to 370 is to play the process card which sounds suspiciously like the Congress response. One can of course still have a dynamic economy and get re-elected (as a matter of fact I think it will be hard to beat Modi in any situation unless something goes very seriously wrong) but that hardly argues against the Nehruvian state. The Congress itself introduced ‘New India’ twenty years ago (admittedly not entirely voluntarily).
And again before others jump in this isn’t about Modi or anything. It’s about the durability of the Nehruvian state. So yeah wake me up when something substantial happens on this score! In fairness many who are enraged on the Right are so for a reason. They fully understand they can’t do what they want to. Much as many Republicans understand the very same in the US. In a democracy once you give people a right or a privilege (even defining things in this charged way) it’s impossibly hard to take it back. This is why Obama’s healthcare plan continues to cause such hysteria. Good or bad or a 100 court challenges. You can’t take it back!
By the way all of this doesn’t mean I’m sanguine about Modi’s election and a lot that has happened since has confirmed some of my fears. Nonetheless that’s a different debate from the one which would suggest that suddenly this is a different country altogether. And again in fairness no one else could do it either. Which is why one should have greater respect for that achievement (whether one agrees with it or not) not less.
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November 20, 2014 at 3:57 PM
It is not for the statue!!!
Modi:”We are planning a world class knowledge hub in that area. My vision is to develop the place as a source of inspiration for ages to come.”
“Apart from tourist attractions like water sports and a live underwater aquarium, the area around Sardar Patel memorial will have a high-tech museum, chronicling 90 years of the history of India’s freedom fighters (1857-1947). Narendra Modi’s website says, “It will be developed as a research and academic centre for preserving the unity and integrity of India, its rich culture and heritage, for research on agriculture which was dear to the Sardar, for research on tribal life, and so on. Thus, it would be standing high not just in meters and feet but much more in terms of academic, historical, national and spiritual values.”
This project is likely to do for this relatively less developed tribal belt of Gujarat far more than what Rann Utsav has done for the backward Kutch region that brought unprecedented economic and cultural dynamism into the region.”
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November 21, 2014 at 2:48 AM
And education? Health facilities? And other such unimportant things?
Modi is a show off!!
All his schemes scream of ‘hum kisi se kum nahin’ with bullet trains and smart cities and nonsense.
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November 19, 2014 at 2:40 PM
“.Nehru once told Tata that he hated the word profit. “Jawaharlal, I am talking about the need of the public sector making a profit,” Tata shot back. “Never talk to me about the word profit; it is a dirty word,” Nehru retorted. Tata, unsure of the prime minister’s socialist bent of mind, turned down his invitation to join a delegation to the United Nations on the ground that there was so much to do inside the country. Giving the same argument, he declined Nehru’s invitation to head Indian Rare Earths, one of the first public sector units floated after Independence. In turn, Tata’s Air India, Air India International and insurance outfit were nationalised by the government.”
http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/-profit-is-a-dirty-word-110081400017_1.html
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November 19, 2014 at 4:25 PM
‘Nehru Was The Worst Disaster To Ever Hit India’
Few journalists in the world have had the chance to view India’s birth and growth better than James W. Michaels. After serving in the US Army in the second world war, the veteran set up the New Delhi bureau of the news agency UPI or the United Press International in the last months of the Raj. And, in 1948, beat the competition by several minutes to the biggest story of his life: the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, which is ranked among the 100 greatest news reports of all time.
=====
Would you elaborate on any of these?
Well, Nehru, though we loved him and admired him at the time, was probably the worst disaster to ever hit India, at least in economic terms. (In India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das), it’s said that Nehru was basically a Brahmin snob, and he did not like business people. Instead of the government getting out of the way and letting the market allocate business resources, the government did it. And the result was an incredible waste of resources. The way to fight poverty is not by chopping the pie in smaller pieces but figuring out how to make a bigger
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Nehru-Was-The-Worst-Disaster-To-Ever-Hit-India/212948
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November 19, 2014 at 4:43 PM
So you do like ‘left’ magazines and Americans when they agree with you?! Or will you also accept the hundreds of Modi stories in Outlook or the same in the US? Just checking..
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November 20, 2014 at 8:22 AM
I wish I could clip the few sentences Modi spoke on Bachchan and Gujarat tourism. You can watch those segments on Aap ki adalat. Genius of Modi is he knows who to use where and how.
Where as congress used him for bofors!!
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November 20, 2014 at 8:24 AM
“So you do like ‘left’ magazines and Americans when they agree with you?”
I don’t care left or right. I like it straight 😉
On serious note, facts are facts and I like facts. I am wary of “intellectiuals”, media and political correctness.
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November 20, 2014 at 1:19 AM
Tonight Big B will open IFFI festival under ‘Fascist’ regime of Modi where Big B was big No no under Nehruvian ‘liberal’ regime along with RajniKant ….
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November 20, 2014 at 6:41 AM
Not sure what this kind of childish stuff means. The Congress was nasty to him but it was hardly on ideological grounds. Similarly if the BJP is now being nice to him that’s hardly ideological either.
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November 20, 2014 at 8:28 AM
I wish I could clip the few sentences Modi spoke on Bachchan and Gujarat tourism. You can watch those segments on Aap ki adalat. Genius of Modi is he knows who to use where and how.
Where as congress used him for bofors!!
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November 20, 2014 at 4:20 AM
Wow! Didnt know Shaad Ali is such a great film maker that his films’ box office prompts discussions on politics and history. 😛
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November 20, 2014 at 8:19 AM
ROFLOL.
Good one Sameer!!
Kum say kum kisi K pass toh sense of humor hai 🙂
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November 20, 2014 at 9:25 AM
Nehru was very significant for India. Only a person like him,could have managed to exploit India the same way as the British.
Rich Spoilt brats are definitely the ones who should be given charge of a new independent country.
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November 20, 2014 at 10:27 AM
LOL
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November 20, 2014 at 10:40 AM
Don’t like to get into politics on this forum, but personally never been a fan of Nehru-Gandhi empire. So happy that an imbecile like Rahul Gandhi was born, and put an end to it.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:21 AM
yes but the family cannot be equated with Nehru who had no part in fostering it. and again I’d say that one must blame the voters for this. No one was forcing them to keep voting for Indira Gandhi (they even forgave her the Emergency over time) or Rajiv Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi. You know I had a lot of problems with Bush 43 but the fact that he was the son of Bush 41 wasn’t one of them. I think, and with all due respect, that there are certain bourgeois fixations in India (and perhaps the subcontinent in general and perhaps elsewhere to an extent) where we tend to focus on the wrong questions. There is more nepotism in American politics than there has ever been in European democratic politics. But this hasn’t prevented the US from being a superpower. Similarly the Indian electorate loves talk of corruption and black money and what not. This is important specially when corruption takes place of the kind of scale that it does in India but there are even more fundamental questions. America is a lot more corrupt than Western European democracies. Japan has had serious issues with politicians often being in bed with gangsters and so on. Corruption reaches the scale that it does in India because there are already institutional problems. Not because everything is just fine and people decide to become more corrupt. The same holds for politics and the legal system and so forth. Put differently the state in India does not have the kind of absolute monopoly in these matters that the state does in most Western examples. but there are deeper historical, societal reasons for this. We continue to avoid looking at these, we continue to be confined to a vision of the Indian polity that is completely cramped. We refuse to recognize those other Indian realties except through the prism of caricature. Not surprisingly then we never come face to face with the actual issues. And this serves the interests of both left and right because they too are not interested in institutional upheavals. They are fine with the way things are. They divide up the voters and both sides get their turn sooner or later. And the voter isn’t blameless either. Everyone loves to blame politicians but they don’t drop in from Mars! We see this in the movies too. we can talk about the sort of movies that are made but ultimately if an audience is going to keep rewarding Ready the filmmaker is going to keep producing it!
All of this isn’t directed at you by the way. Just making a larger set of points.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:21 AM
By nature majority Indians have slave mentality. They kind of look up to rulers and would rather follow established clans than look for new visions (of course exceptions are there). It’s not just limited to politics..its almost everywhere
Looking up to Kapoors and Bachchans and Khans in Bollywood
Gandhis after gandhis in Politics
Multiple cases of Godmen and their lineage exploiting Indians.
Our constitution is a slave of the archaic British chapters with laws outdated like shit.
The good thing is Modi doesn’t have a child otherwise his diehard followers would have started campaigning for him/her already.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:29 AM
The problem with blaming the ‘Brits’ is that one wonders why Britain itself is not suffering from any of these problems. Don’t you think the issue is precisely this kind of talk where we blame the Brits and the voters (presumably we don’t include ourselves within this ‘foolish’ group) and what not.. all a series of crude generalizations that really belong at kindergarten level but we never look at something more significant or important than this.
Yes India has a British system in place. The problem is you can’t just wish away history. Certain traces are permanent. You can have a revolution of course and change everything overnight (though few revolutions succeed even at this level). But otherwise any kind of constitutional system modeled on a Western one (but let’s not be naive here.. there is no contemporary notion of democracy that’s not ‘Western’) and which was forced to confront Indian realities would have to be a rather messy affair. The amazing thing is that the world over Indian democracy (despite the sordid chapter of the emergency) is considered one of the most inspiring ones and sometimes the single most impressive one. You look at the scale of India and the scale of its issues and the plethora of its identity politics and so on and you are amazed at how this is such a successful democratic story. This ‘is’ Nehru’s achievement. this is why even those western writers or thinkers who are great critics of Nehruvian economics nonetheless give him high marks on his overall achievement. It’s unfortunate though that where Indian democracy has been admired for these reasons worldwide, has been looked up to so much in so many emerging countries, that in India we have a large number of people not arguing against Nehru but engaging in this wholesale and truly absurd dismissal of the past. Candidly this too is not surprising.. wherever fascism is in vogue in any sense there is such effacement of the past.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:36 AM
Your whole statement about “Nehru Achievement” is based on the assumption that only Nehru could have achieved a true Democracy for India or just that Nehru’s involvement implied those achievements. I strongly disagree. I think what India achieved is definitely a result of Nehru but that is not an achievement of a high order. I believe Nehru’s politics pushed India back 15 if not 25 years.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:59 AM
again there is often a disjunctive logic used on this score:
1)Nehru destroyed India with his policies
2)Nehru was’t all that significant
3)Even if Nehru did some good things anyone else could have as well
Now on your more precise claim one can keep engaging in these historical counterfactuals all day long. One would be well-placed to trust the Mahatmas’s judgment a bit more than the partisans of contemporary India but that’s another matter (of course those on the Right are not exactly fans of Bapu either! I think again for good reason)! for instance maybe other US presidents could also have dealt with the Great Depression the same way or won the war the same way. It didn’t need to be FDR. Maybe any BJP PM candidate could have won as big this year. It didn’t need to be Modi. One could overturn all of human history using such counterfactuals! It however gets particularly dicey when you use this logic for those who hung around as long as Nehru did, before and after Independence.
Again one can be a critic of many of Nehru’s policies, economic or otherwise (though he died in ’64, there was nothing preventing others from changing those policies right away.. it’s a bit absurd to pretend that Nehru was somehow around till Narasimha Rao changed course! Just because Indira Gandhi or others followed Nehru doesn’t mean that Nehru himself would never have changed course but in any case he wasn’t around) and one can do the same with any great leader. Lots of things FDR did that have been severely criticized by historians and are controversial to this day. When a leader is that seminal and hangs around for that long there are always going to be lots of problem areas. You cannot though take apart the ‘event’ just by focusing on those areas. You especially cannot do so with the smug assumption that the judgment of the present is the last word on Nehru. 50 years from now it is possible to imagine a world where Nehru’s economic policies might not seem problematic but other things might be moreso. Those that we don’t look at today. This happens with every historical figure. It happens in cinema too. Why does every generation rediscover older films in a different way or discover films that have were obscure to that point? Because the concerns of every age are different and all of history is then reinterpreted through that prism. When you are Jawaharlal Nehru or Amitabh Bachchan though your legacy is so seminal that future generations will more likely than not be grappling with it. There are plenty of disastrous or half-decent leaders no one talks about after their day. Why? Because they don’t have enough of a legacy. They simply don’t matter. If we wish to be critics of Nehru we must do so with a sophistication equal to the event that he represents. 20 years from now, 50 years, a 100 we will still be talking about Nehru. As long as there is the Indian nation-state there will be Nehru’s name at its foundation. This doesn’t preclude any kind of criticism but again one has to be sophisticated about it. You can’t assume the political or institutional stability of the Indian nation-state and then perform the thought-experiment of removing Nehru from it. Because we occupy ‘his’ world. if you remove some of the pieces everything collapses. It’s not as we have still have something in place. if for instance another leader had been around for that long we would have had a very different India. It wouldn’t have been Nehru’s India. Whether it would have been a better or worse India is just impossible to know. What we do have is a remarkably successful democratic experiment with remarkably durable institutions. Just about any political scientist or historian will tell you that the Indian experiment is a rather miraculous one. Assuredly an improbable one. Nehru is its author. Whether such improbabilities come about with just any author I am somewhat skeptical. But in any case this is a counterfactual impossible to answer. Whether someone other than Lincoln could have won the Civil War, whether he would have conducted it in the same way, whether a different America would have resulted from it, all these are not questions that can be sanely answered. But once again Lincoln’s America lives on. If Nehru’s didn’t in the same way no one would be debating it. At any level. But great careers, great legacies are complicated things. You can’t reduce them to one debate or the other. If one doesn’t think the Indian nation-state is a great achievement one just has to look across the border and furthermore one just has to look at just about every other example of decolonization around the globe. There is no country remotely comparable to India in scale and/or complexity that has anything like its transition, there are hardly any smaller countries that can match this achievement. Nehru must have done something right! Again you don’t get that dynamic economy is you don’t resolve some of these very deep social and political tensions in the first place. Countries that didn’t manage this were torn apart rather quickly. Or exist in permanent states of decay.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:38 AM
Look at Japan after its devastation or South Korea at where its coming from.. Yes they are smaller nations demographically and geographically but their success beats bigger nations by a distance.
Nehru was basically a armchair pseudo socialist who wanted to enjoy his brandy after becoming the first Prime minister of the biggest democracy in the world (which he got after piggybacking on Gandhi and then nagging him like a little child)
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November 20, 2014 at 12:04 PM
Japan and South Korea were more or less built from scratch. Japan had five years of US occupation after the war. The country was completely decimated. Don’t think that’s the best example. And there is not even a comparison in terms of scale. By the way Japan has been in a state of more or less permanent recession for more than two decades now. Who should we blame for this? South Korea is itself a US client state. It is furthermore the result of another war with a huge unresolved political problem at its doorstep (the perennial N Korean fear). It’s like saying Taiwan did great. Sure! But China is still breathing down its neck, the US has to guarantee things even here. Some day if the tide turns we don’t know what will happen in this region. This proves my point. It’s not just about a set of economic policies. You have to manage a whole series of social and political challenges as well. And you have to be willing to look at longer currents of history as well. And you yourself have made the point. Is there even the remotest comparison between Japan/S Korea and India in any sense whatsoever when it comes to the demographics and so forth?
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November 20, 2014 at 12:06 PM
by the way the other dirty little secret today is that authoritarianism works quite well with capitalism and most don’t mind it either. It’s the Singapore model. By the way check out the kinds of semi-dictatorships S Korea had in the past! I suspect many in India wouldn’t mind this tradeoff either (not a majority of course). The China model if you will. An ‘Emergency’ with a more dynamic economy!
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November 20, 2014 at 12:42 PM
I actually do agree with all the three points that you made regarding the opposing logic on Nehru
“1)Nehru destroyed India with his policies
2)Nehru was’t all that significant
3)Even if Nehru did some good things anyone else could have as well” (I’ll add – in all probability – done it much better)
I don’t blame the brits or their system but I do believe Nehru showed his teenage obsession with the west in the way he adopted their theories without looking at their practical implications.
I won’t discuss it more because it’ll be futile as neither your nor my point of view would alter regarding him. It is what it is.
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November 20, 2014 at 1:26 PM
But you precisely cannot hold all three positions at once. If he wasn’t that significant he couldn’t have destroyed anything nor could India have been shaped by him. Or if he did things that anyone could have it follows that anyone other than Modi could have been elected too and could do exactly what Modi will do over the next five years. But then we’re led to an absurd position where no leader is ever remarkable because anyone else can do just the same. I could offer some further permutations here but this is again disjunctive logic. And to be a bit more theoretical here disjunctive logic is where you offer reasons for something and they all work individually but taken together offer contradictions.
By the way hope you will move beyond Nehru’s Western obsessions and drop the English language.. actually I hope you will drop every single thing about the Indian nation-state that relies on a British model and come back here with what’s left and then show me what systems you’d like to put in place that have nothing to do with the British or the West! I’m not joking. You just mentioned Japan. That’s a country soaked in ‘Americana’!
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November 20, 2014 at 2:12 PM
“By the way hope you will move beyond Nehru’s Western obsessions and drop the English language”
I think you are taking this discussion way too out of context and here’s the reason why– I maybe a lethargic ..couched potato slacker myself but it won’t imply that I like a person with similar attributes as a the captain of my favorite football team.
I use English on this blog because that language is used primarily here , it doesn’t mean I feel inferior while speaking any other Indian language.
By Nehru’s west obsession I did not mean his love for white skin or his labored accent – that was his personal choice and I am no one to object or comment on that- I am not even interested in that.. by his west fascination I meant his political outlook which always lacked a deep rooted Indian perspective.
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November 20, 2014 at 3:51 PM
I also wasn’t trying to be facetious but sometimes the criticism I think gets to an extreme. It is absolutely true that Nehru was a patrician, an upper class upper caste guy. And it’s fair to say that in terms of his personal outlook too there were traces of this. However the discussion doesn’t end here. We always have to allow for the original contexts of a person. I made this point the other day but a planned economy for example wasn’t as strange an idea in his day as it might seem now. It was considered a viable alternative. We cannot look at decisions he made in the 40s or 50s from the vantage point of the present. Or even if we criticize him on this score we have to allow for the contexts of his world (though Nehru never idealized the Soviet Union in any sense.. won’t get into all that here).
In any case getting to the ‘Westernization’ bit that was in Nehru’s world a way of moving forward, a way of being progressive and leaving behind the regressive aspects of Indian society. Ironically India is going through a similar phase right now (even if ideologically at the other end). Fascism too is ‘Western’ much like Communism or democracy. It is precisely a Western idea to have nation-state where people start believing they’re a great culture that has been kept down for all sorts of external (colonization, domination, conquest etc) and internal reasons (Jews, Muslims, Communists, Lefties etc) and that they finally need to release the potential of their national energies in a very militant way. This is a neat formula that can be applied everywhere that there are fascist strains. Quite often the man leading the charge represents a kind of rooted, son-of-the-soil type, someone who in a way ‘becomes’ the imagined authentic nation in person. In a variant of this you have a military dictator representing the same values. It is not very often that one finds fascism outside these personality types. In any case all of this is a very Western model. If you study the roots of Hindu nationalism in India in the 19th century you will find everywhere those Western intellectual roots. There is nothing ‘Indian’ (in the sense of being pre-Western) to any of these debates on the left or the right. So in an ‘intellectual’ sense Modi is no more rooted in India than Nehru (i.e. if one is going to bring that charge to the latter). If anything he is in a rush to follow a technocratic model that is Western through and through.
So the debate doesn’t end with calling Nehru ‘Western’. But even if he were the only such person so what? That hardly ends the debate. You’re not less Indian because you live in Bombay and go to a multiplex than someone who’s a farmer somewhere in the interiors of Bihar. There are different ways of being Indian. There should of course be a political system that accounts for both but ironically even here it is Nehru who was on the side of that ‘deeper’ India than Modi. The latter is precisely about globalization that works really for upwardly mobile urban elites and puts enormous stress on the blue collar worker or the farmer (and so on) everywhere from India to the US. So all this talk of a dynamic economy is itself suspect (though here Modi is only in keeping with a wider global consensus).
So I think even at the most fundamental level we have to question some of these labels. We can’t just assume what they mean.
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November 20, 2014 at 4:57 PM
By the way I’d add something else here. English is now also an Indian language. Just as there is a part of Indian history that’s ‘British’. One has to accept these things and move on. I am going to paraphrase a Zizekian point here (one he made in India as a matter of fact). A lot of times it’s colonization that supplies the tools with which to resist colonization! In other words it is precisely a certain notion of democracy and universal rights and so on that allowed Indians of a certain generation to start questioning British rule and eventually to drive them out. The same happened in many other parts of the globe. But that form of resistance was itself Western. This doesn’t mean that there could not have been any other form of resistance. Just that in the world of the 19th century the Western paradigm of politics was the normative one or becoming the normative one. Much as today every time we talk about democracy we depend on similar notions. At different times in history, in different parts of the world those models are also different. But for now we operate within a ‘Western’ orbit and have for a long time. There’s no shame in this because this isn’t the first colonization or influence of world history.
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November 20, 2014 at 12:57 PM
“They kind of look up to rulers and would rather follow established clans than look for new visions”
By that logic likes of modi, kejriwal, shastri, JP wouldn’t have been elected. We the people never had much of a choice in our leaders post independence. Nothing in opposition party that was viable solution. Unfortunate but the truth.
But we do have “slave” mentality or inferiority complex; e.g. our preference for fair skin.
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November 20, 2014 at 1:33 PM
“But we do have “slave” mentality or inferiority complex”
stop using English slave..
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November 20, 2014 at 11:11 AM
The amusing thing in the ‘new Indian’ dispensation is that many have become rather weak Marxists! There are lots of important leaders in very many democracies who were patricians just like Nehru. That didn’t prevent them from being enormously successful. FDR is a classic example. But beyond this (and this is a point I’ve made in other contexts too) that one can certainly be against nepotism of any sort but then one has to practice some of it in one’s own life. Leaving aside the fact that one can’t be against nepotism selectively (when it comes to politics people forget that whether it’s someone’s son or daughter they are ultimately ‘elected’.. so it’s a nepotism endorsed democratically! If people wish to vote for someone just because they’re someone’s progeny that is their right.. one can’t believe in the ‘wisdom of the people’ only when they agree with one’s views.. much as in a different context fans of the current government love to say that the will of the people must be respected and followed and what not.. but they forget this very same principle when talking about other governments not of their liking! getting back to nepotism we see this in the movies too.. when you have a film with newcomers who do not belong to the industry they get no initial whereas if they do, even if they belong to less important households, the audience shows up.. the argument then shouldn’t be with those who get into politics or the movies this way but those voters either way who endorse such decisions.. ironically the less democratic path there is that of the corporate household.. no one has a problem with Mukesh or Anil Ambani.. far less people voted for them than did for filmstars or politicians!). For instance in our own lives or those of our larger families don’t we see nepotism or influence-peddling or whatever at work everywhere? It isn’t problematic only when it happens at a major level. We conveniently excuse ourselves. We don’t have to be involved personally in it but we are often the beneficiaries and we are certainly not resistant to the idea. We all work with the advantages we have. Secondly this very American lionization of the entrepreneur much like the whole ‘do it yourself’ economy fiction that is so popular in contemporary India (as in many other parts of the world) conceals a great deal of privilege and institutional biases. Even in the US. It is not only about class privilege in the genealogical sense. There have for instance been several pieces in the US over the last 15 years or so about how there is a different sort of class structure operative in America. It does not depend on genealogy, it is based on ‘merit’ but once a certain class is attained using that merit the members of this class create and further institutions to maintain that class. And which ultimately becomes about genealogy all over again. All American universities (the prestigious ones even more) place a certain value on a family member having gone to the same. Why? There are scores of kids who are excellent in very many ways and are often disadvantaged on account of what is called ‘legacy’ (even the terminology is rather direct!). Yes in such a class structure people still have to prove themselves. But the same holds in the industry or in politics. The audience still has to show up for them, the voters still have to vote for them. if the critique is about a larger class structure which gives you certain advantages just because you’re born in it then you will find a lot that’s hugely problematic even in the US, let alone India.
But I’d take it even further. One’s birth is an accident in this sense. One does not choose where or to whom one is born. It’s fine to then pretend to be all democratic about one’s opportunities and so on but depending on the society one lives in one won’t even get certain chances if one isn’t born in the right place. For instance there are lots of inspiring success stories in American entrepreneurship but comparatively few examples of people rising literally from nothing. Why? Because without a certain educational structure in place in terms of one’s family background and so on one would never be able to take those first steps irrespective of one’s economic conditions. If you a tribal in India you are never going to form Infosys. It will simply not be possible. If you grow up in an American inner city and specially if you are black you are not very likely to become Steve Jobs. So it’s not as if one is privileged only if one is born to Ambani or Motilal Nehru! One cannot take one’s own advantages as some sort of baseline when specially in a country like India the vast majority fall below that baseline.
Finally on Nehru being given charge first off he was handpicked by Gandhi. It can hardly be said about the latter that he didn’t know his nation! Plus there were so many important figures at the time. Why did Nehru make it? Gandhi of course felt that of all the existing figures Nehru represented the very combination of talents and abilities to represent and nurture Indian realities. One can argue with him on this score but it’s not as if one of the most important Independence movement figures (Nehru) simply parachuted his way into becoming PM and then somehow remained there for 17 years on sheer prestige! The electoral results belie this.
So my points are really three here (addressed not only to you.. I am making a larger statement against a number of commenters)..
1)The nepotism charge is used selectively and hypocritically
2)Nepotism is democratically sanctioned (by the way including in the US)
3)One can disagree with Nehru all one wants and that’s fine but to deny his seminal stature and his permanent achievement at many levels is not just foolish, it reveals the greatest (and most dangerous) ignorance
Lastly I’d just make this pragmatic point — it’s amusing to see people so imprisoned by the present that they start believing history has somehow ended. Yes there is a very large group of people in India who dislike Nehru (though these numbers are often exaggerated much like so much else..) and the same people try to write off all national history before this most recent election. But a generation or two later others might be as dismissive of Modi or ‘New India’ or what have you. These are historical cycles. What survives though is the ‘event’. We are still debating Nehru for a reason!
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November 20, 2014 at 12:47 PM
“Finally on Nehru being given charge first off he was handpicked by Gandhi. It can hardly be said about the latter that he didn’t know his nation! Plus there were so many important figures at the time. Why did Nehru make it?”
Because of nepotism charges. Gandhi didn’t want people to say that he was partial to a gujarati (Patel)! He bent backwards trying to be impartial which unfortunately cost India lot of heart ache.
BTW, I would like to know what you consider “seminal stature and his permanent achievement”. Can you write and elaborate on it?
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November 20, 2014 at 1:31 PM
“Can you write and elaborate on it?”
LOL, the very state you belong to was constituted in its present state as a Nehruvian idea (linguistic redivision of states)! I don’t care to list more achievements here before someone whose literacy in anything hasn’t been established as far as I’m concerned. And the reason I entertain this doubt is because on this very much has been said scores of times. And your response even otherwise contains more nonsense on the subject of Gandhi and Patel.
I’ll say this honestly — such ignorance is depressing.
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November 21, 2014 at 5:59 AM
DI :
Read moti lal nehru’s letter/s to Gandhi begging him to make JLN as president of Congress adding if not made than he may become radical communist and adopt Islam #Facts
Now Gandhi did impose Nehru on India feeling he may become wreck and create nuisance where Patel will listen to him ( one inference)
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November 21, 2014 at 5:55 AM
Nehru Apologists say – But he was the first Prime Minister, he had no blue print. We have the benefit of hindsight.
To them I say – True. But he did have instances of various countries experimenting with varied models at the time. Many European countries in post-World War II period went for greater role of government in economic affairs and fared poorly. These could easily have been contrasted with the examples of West Germany and Japan which witnessed fast growth. Maybe Nehru was an ostrich who had buried his face in the sand. All he needed was to see what was happening in the world around him – what experiments were successful and what weren’t – and choose the one that was producing results. Instead, he was dogmatic in his approach and continued repeating his mistakes in the hope that somehow the same policies would start producing different (better) results.
“I believe, as a practical proposition, that it is better to have a second rate thing made in our country, than a first rate thing that one has to import.” – Jawaharlal Nehru (From a speech in the 1950s)
Yes, Nehru wanted efficient use of resources!
Nehru’s stated hatred and distrust for capitalism and profits caused businessmen and market’s profit-loss mechanism to be replaced by bureaucrats run public sector enterprises, which were a huge misallocation of scarce resources, whose efficient allocation Nehru set out to achieve.
Today when many celebrate Nehru’s 125th birthday with deep reverence, I can’t keep myself from blaming him for decades of poverty that my grandfather and father had to live through. I don’t have mixed feeling about it either.
http://spontaneousorder.in/judging-jawaharlal-nehru-on-his-125th-birth-anniversary/
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November 20, 2014 at 10:27 AM
yaar every time u guys hijack the box-office post……Satyam! et tu aussi???
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November 20, 2014 at 10:30 AM
Saying anything Negative about Nehru is showing red flag to Sattu’s bull. 🙂
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November 20, 2014 at 11:37 AM
That’s not true actually.. I have read a lot on him that’s critical and that I’ve learnt from.. but the point whether on Nehru or bachchan or anyone else is always about whether the debate is going to be conducted insanely or more rationally. Sadly the former is often the case here. It’s not just these topics. It could be about Interstellar! Whatever the topic there is an ethics of discussion and one should know what one is talking about. Simply claiming things and defending those opinions like a zealot doesn’t give greater credibility to one’s claims. But yes there are such folks in every camp who are not exactly persuadable in any sense. But you could change the name of Nehru and put something else in there and I might have a similar argument. This isn’t about my personal views or when it is I say it openly. But my larger interest has always been in defending a certain spirit of discussion and argument, a certain ethics in this regard. So for example with almost a 100% of what you say I don’t just find the claims completely ill-informed or un-informed or totally ignorant ones, I also find the way you argue to be grossly unethical for a variety of reasons. There is one more charge I have leveled in the past that I won’t repeat again today.
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November 20, 2014 at 11:22 AM
yeah I missed the Rs 10,000 HNY made yesterday as opposed to the Rs 7,000 it made the day prior to that and hence proved its fantastic trending in week 205.
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November 20, 2014 at 1:54 PM
I should apologize to everyone here. I didn’t mean to get into as much political discussion as I have these past couple of days. But when it’s about Panditji an exception can be made!
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November 20, 2014 at 3:40 PM
I have been reading the tweets for the past two weeks with some amusement and observations-
1. Commies hate Modi, Hindus and Sanskrit
2.they will not talk about Bukhari, AMU, Azam Khan ( pretend jaisey kuch hua hee nahee)
3.you can NOT question Nehru’s history but of will question the Vedas, The Gita , everything Hindu.
4. Ever since Modi won , the commies ( Ms. Dixit ) are busy trying and separate SC and STs from other Hindus as if they are not Hindus.( Phatee padee hai unkee)
5.Now SBI= GOI per NDTV, Modi’s visits are all tamasha with no substance ( Burnoll laga lo bhai )
6. They are so disappointed that a BJP Govt. arrested with minimum loss of human life a fake Guru ( what will happen to the outrage industry )
here is a great tweet –
@abhijitmajumder To cry ‘saffronisation’ at any mention of Sanskrit takes a special loathing our own past, language, culture, roots. A special brainwash
P.S.- In my view the threemajor missteps so far by BJP have been-
1.Direct telecast of Bhagwat speech
2.Maharashtra Vote
3. Z security to Ramdev
P.S.-1 – the Salmas and Sabrinas,please spare me, have no time or inclination to respond to Aaptards # Mufflarman !!
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November 20, 2014 at 3:55 PM
Also of Interest is the number of Brahmins that are anti Modi- Pragya Tiwari, Neha Dixit, Mihir Sharma, Salil Tripathi etc.
All been brought up on rozi roti of Pandit je…..
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November 20, 2014 at 4:53 PM
LOL, since I’m not doing any of this nor are the people I respect I can safely not respond to this!
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November 20, 2014 at 4:24 PM
Actually I share Satyams admiration for Nehru…
On a related note—
Hrithik, Deepika caught smooching at party!
Thursday, November 20, 2014 7:16 PM
Miss Dhinchak has got some shocking news of, now single, Hrithik Roshan. Recently, Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan who is now divorced from Sussane Khan was caught smooching an actress publicly at a party. According to sources, the actress was none other than Deepika Padukone. A person present at the party confirmed, “They kept smooching and refused to let go of each other. They even exited from the party together.” If the news is true, it could spell trouble in Deepika and Ranveer Singh’s relationship.
– See more at: http://www.eni.network24.co/controversy/hrithik-deepika-caught-smooching-at-party-23737_11#sthash.qnHg0kT1.dpuf
http://www.eni.network24.co/controversy/hrithik-deepika-caught-smooching-at-party-23737_11
Ps: after PC, katrina Kapoor, nargis fakhri … It’s Dpad now…
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November 20, 2014 at 4:52 PM
LOL, the admiration shows in your follow up!
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November 20, 2014 at 5:08 PM
Eventually he’ll get to me!
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November 20, 2014 at 5:29 PM
LOL, true!
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November 20, 2014 at 5:24 PM
Here is an entertaining review I read recently, from a 1975 issue of Star and Style. The subject of the piece is a just-released little thing called Sholay, and I herewith attach the full document for your scrutiny (click to enlarge, or right-click and select “View image”):
In the midst of all this, there is the predictably reverential nod to the “understated” performances of Jaya and Sanjeev. But THIS *beat of drums* is far and away the best part of the review, the one that will bring a silly grin to Posterity’s face:
Amjad, looking a short fat lout, is a far cry from the much-feared dacoit. The man cannot even run or fight and only keeps ordering or grimacing.
http://jaiarjun.blogspot.in/2014/11/gabbar-fat-lazy-lout-sholay-reassessed.html
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November 20, 2014 at 5:32 PM
thanks Rocky…. this was great fun to read (some of it is cut off though).. how times change!
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November 20, 2014 at 6:38 PM
A fun read. Notice this was during Amitabh’s press boycott days and his war with major film mags. Hence he gets referred to only as Dharam’s friend.
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November 20, 2014 at 8:33 PM
good point, I forgot about that!
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November 20, 2014 at 5:58 PM
lol..Looks like Rajeev Masand time traveled to write this one.
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November 20, 2014 at 5:50 PM
Superb Advertisement and the back story to it !!!
http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2014/11/sainsbury_s_christmas_ad_did_wwi_soldiers_really_carol_on_christmas_eve.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top
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November 20, 2014 at 10:56 PM
Master class of Amitabh bachchan on Indian film..a rare treat. It starts around 1:22:23. Don’t miss it Satyam.
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November 20, 2014 at 10:58 PM
This should deserve a separate thread.
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November 21, 2014 at 12:51 AM
The review in Star and Style reminds me of a small statement I made on my FB page : “When it comes to films, I trust the audience feedback more than any critic, because I have never ever read a critic say, about any film, ‘The film made me cry.’ It’s like if you want to know how beautiful a woman is, you ask a poet who admires her, or man who has made love to her, not a surgeon who has operated upon her.”
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November 21, 2014 at 1:37 AM
“because I have never ever read a critic say, about any film, ‘The film made me cry.’ “-
Actually Ebert used to say that all the time in his reviews.
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November 21, 2014 at 3:30 AM
Saurabh: Thats’ why Ebert is about the only critic whose ratings I would use as a guide for what to see. And he wrote more as a lover of films than a surgeon dissecting. Also I was speaking a little metaphorically. When a critic sees a film equipped with a mental pencil and pad it kind of precludes full emotional engagement. That is why quite often there is a variance between the critics’ perception and perception of the ordinary viewers no matter how sensitive and cultured they may be.
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