Riding the Elephant

The picture of an auto-rickshaw – an urban elephant – has been cropped from a larger painting by Feroz Khan, a young artist based in Delhi. _________________________________________________

I’m a British journalist, now London based, having been in New Delhi for more than 25 years till mid-2018 – writing initially in the 1980s for the Financial Times and, from the mid-1990s, mostly for Fortune magazine (till 2009), The Economist (2013), and earlier the New Statesman.

My articles now appear on the Hong Kong-based news website Asia Sentinel and sometimes on India’s Wire.in news website 

Riding the Elephant began in April 2007 as a twice-weekly column on Fortune magazine’s website –  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ . The aim was to expand the coverage of India in the run-up to Fortune’s big Global Forum conference in Delhi in October 2007. After the Forum, I continued the posts till the end of July 2008 when, following budget cuts at Fortune, the blog began its independent existence here. Posts then appeared on the FT.com India web page, and later on The Independent newspaper and Newsweek magazine websites.

I mainly write about India, and sometimes its neighbours, focussing on issues that seem to me to be interesting and important – hoping that they stimulate interest and comment. I also write on the Indian modern art market and, occasionally, on events in the UK.

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The “Modi” paperback edition of my prize-winning book, IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality, was published by Harper Collins India in 2019.

It is available in India’s bookshops, and on http://amzn.to/2gwrfjb along with an e-book.  Elsewhere an e-book is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

When the original hardback edition was published early in 2014, IMPLOSION was recognised as a hard-hitting analysis of how and why India punches below its weight, failing to achieve what it could and should be doing.

A 2015 paperback edition brought the story up to date, looking at the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister, his political past, and his new challenges.

The 2019 edition updates key points throughout the book. and has a new preface and five new chapters that examine Modi’s record and his impact on the country.

The issues raised in IMPLOSION amount to an Agenda for Change that Narendra Modi faced in 2014, and that whoever is elected in May 2019 needs to take forward.

The book looks at why and how India has under-performed, and how it doesn’t work because of the ‘quick fix’ attitude known as jugaad and laissez faire’s chalta hai that together have eaten into the country’s social and political fabric.

Successive chapters examine how corruption has affected all aspects of  life. The decades of rule by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty are questioned and it is suggested that democracy provides a smokescreen for much that is wrong.  The book explores the impact of economic liberalisation, traces the build-up of social unrest over corruption, rape and exploitation of land, and reflects on the limitations of what in the past has been a hesitant foreign policy and depleted defence forces.  Along the way, the book uncovers a secret ‘M document’ written in 1990 that mapped out the 1991 economic reforms, and reveals how I was an unwitting spectator at a Pakistan briefing meeting for the 1991 Kargil war.

There’s much more, including the hopes of a new young generation and growing public demand for changes in the way the country is run.

Other career details:

Financial Times’ first South Asia correspondent (1983-88), following several years in London as labour editor and industrial editor. In 1988 moved to Hong Kong as the FT’s correspondent for the territory, southern China and Taiwan. 

In 1991, left the FT and spent just over three years in the Hong Kong Government as public affairs adviser to the Chief Secretary (Sir David Ford, then Mrs Anson Chan), then returned to India in 1995.

President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia (2007-09) and of the International Association of Press Clubs (2008-09).

Other Publications:

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“Foreign Correspondent – 50 years of Reporting South Asia”, Editor with Bernard Imhasley, Simon Denyer. Penguin India. Original hardback, April 2008. Updated paperback Nov 2009 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6958063-foreign-correspondent   

  “India and China – Asia’s New Giants: Stepping Stones to Prosperity”, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, Delhi 1995. http://www.rgics.org/

“Conflict or Co-operation? – The Growth of Industrial Democracy”, Kogan Page London, hardback 1977, updatedpaperback 1983. http://www.abebooks.com/9780850381061/Conflict-Co-Operation-Growth-Industrial-Democracy-0850381061/plp

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