El Jaswant

Here's the Spanish version to that old jungle saying: External Affairs minister Jaswant Singh is like a ‘‘crocodile full of scales.’’ That is, according to a Spanish diplomat in the El Mundo newspaper, Singh is like an ‘‘animal which attacks at the same time that it protects itself well’’ Ah, well. El Mundo’s reporter, who spoke to Singh during his visit to the Spanish capital to meet the European Union troika of foreign ministers some ten days ago, must have been thinking of India’s nuclear flashpoint with Pakistan as well as with New Delhi’s new ties with the US. She didn’t seem too disappointed though with the radically different direction the interview took, and in fact, seemed quite taken with Singh’s eloquent use of the Queen’s English as much with his refusal to loudly denounce Pakistan from Madrid’s rooftops. So when she asked him what his dreams were, Singh replied with practised elan : ‘‘Dreams are like perfumes which disappear when you try to catch them.’’ Nevertheless, it was the hip-swinging, singing-dancing troupe of Manganiyar boys from Singh’s home state of Rajasthan who repeatedly stole the show in the Spanish capital, electrifying the audience and matching those sexy flamenco dancers, alongside whom they sometimes performed, oomph for oomph. Last heard, ambassador Dilip Lahiri had his hands full trying to contain those Spaniards eagerly wanting to make that passage to India.

Omarspotting

Omar Saeed Sheikh was at his first year at the London School of Economics, it is now well-known, when he was so traumatised by the Bosnian war and went off to fight the jehad’ there. (Once there, he was directed to first train with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in Afghanistan.) Less well-known is the fact that Indian intelligence spotted him in an Islamabad bookshop last year — more than a year after the hijacking of IC-814 — perhaps as he sought to catch up with his reading. Now in the wake of Daniel Pearl’s death, a number of nations, apart from India that is, seem interested in Sheikh’s fate. He is a British national (his parents came to England from Lahore), which means the High Commission in New Delhi came to know him quite well when he was in Tihar jail and was therefore, a client of the consular office. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw probably, then, has Sheikh on his mind when he talks to his counterparts in the capital on February 27. There are the Americans too, whose interest in Sheikh has mounted greatly in connection with Pearl’s kidnapping and death. In fact, US ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain had already asked for Sheikh’s extradition — in connection with the kidnapping of US citizen Bela Nuss in India in 1994 — two days before Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi on January 23.

Literary dreams

Himachal Som dared to dream, it has been said, and the ICCR literature festival has already come to a rousing end. What a party it was, not least for Nobel Naipaul and his friends — Gillon (?) Aitken, David Pryce-Jones — each of them gifted men in their own right. What fun the stories that have emerged over the last week, between the lines of their madnesses and their maudlin drinking, their arrogances and their insecurities, their sophistications and their ultra-liberal beliefs...above all, it was the fun they had under that Neemrana sky that should make this festival a regular feature. Back in Delhi, there was the Spectator critic David Pryce-Jones speaking of Naipaul in the same breath as Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago, Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich), and describing them as the only two men to have changed the course of literature this century. But the similarities absolutely end there. There’s a way in the world of difference between Naipaul and Solzhenitsyn, not least the former first went to India as a third-generation refugee, while the latter returned home to Moscow only after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In fact, Solzhenitsyn’s home-coming has been full of the despair that he once so eloquently captured in his novels. He thought he would be a hero, he probably dreamt of being feted across all of mother Russia. The reality, unfortunately, has been very different. The Russians have cold-shouldered both his ultra right-wing beliefs as well as his enormous ego. Hope that’s not what Pryce-Jones had in mind for V S Naipaul.

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