What Should I Do With My Life?

The real meaning of success -- and how to find it.

It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we're still holding on.
We're seduced by the idea that picking up the pieces and simply tweaking the formula will get the party started again. In spite of our best thinking and most searing experience, our ideas about growth and success are mired in a boom-bust mentality. Just as LBOs gave way to IPOs, the market is primed for the next engine of wealth creation. Just as we traded in the pinstripes and monster bonuses of the Wall Street era for T-shirts and a piece of the action during the startup revolution, we're waiting to latch on to the new trappings of success. (I understand the inclination. I've surfed from one boom to the next for most of my working life -- from my early days as a bond trader to my most recent career as a writer tracking the migration of my generation from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.)
There's a way out. Instead of focusing on what's next , let's get back to what's first . The previous era of business was defined by the question, Where's the opportunity? I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations. People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember "horizontal careers"?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are -- and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). Companies don't grow because they represent a particular sector or adopt the latest management approach. They win because they engage the hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering that life question.
This is not a new idea. But it may be the most powerfully pressing one ever to be disrespected by the corporate world. There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don't.
Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity -- if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.

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Irish Blessings And Prayers Of Faith

Blessing is a spiritual act of recognising and affirming. It is a hope, a wish, a prayer, where we acknowledge and remind the ones who are blessed of the connection between them and the Divine. The Celtic tradition of Ireland, Scotland and Wales widely uses this. Many of its ways and beliefs have been incorporated into Celtic Christianity, which perceives eternity and this world as intertwined. Its prayers — so real, so funny even, that they bring a smile to your face — contain an awareness of God’s everyday, all-day presence. An old, still-popular Irish blessing goes: “May there always be work for your hands to do. May your purse always hold a coin or two. May the sun always shine upon your window-pane. May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near to you, and May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.” Often the brevity holds a sweet poetic reality: “May you have warm words on a cold evening, A full moon on a dark night, And the road downhill all the way to your door.” There is also gentle humour: “If God sends you down a stony path, may he give you strong shoes.” John O’Donohue, the Irish Catholic poet and theologian who connected deeply with this tradition, has written some of the most powerful and moving modern blessings. His writing is inspired by “the Celtic imagination”, which “represents a vision of the divine where no one or nothing is excluded”. In his last book — published before he died in January 2008 — To Bless the Space Between Us’, O’Donohue tells us a blessing is “a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen. ...when a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.” His crafted blessings go beyond the usual ones for a new home, marriage or birth, and include blessings for parents of a criminal, for those who have lost a child, for those experiencing exile, solitude and failure, for those faced with a sudden, serious illness. It was his belief that the human heart always longs for a state of wholeness, that place where everything comes together, so to bless someone is to call some of that wholeness upon that person right now. As the ending of his blessing for solitude says: “May you learn to see your self, With the same delight, pride and expectation, with which God sees you in every moment”. From an earlier work, ‘Echoes of Memory’, O’Donohue’s poem ‘Beannacht’ (meaning Blessing), begins: “On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you...” and ends with the words: “And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.” The true beauty of blessing is how it affects everything — by the fact that we live, we are blessed; we have the power to bless others and they reflect love back to us. In the very act of blessing we are blessed. You may confer a blessing with a silent prayer or a spoken or written wish. But there are other ways. When, with awareness, you honour another, express admiration or give a gift, you share a blessing. In a sincere greeting, when encouraging and complimenting someone, through small acts for the environment, you participate in the act of blessing. Like the Celts, learn to bless all of creation with deep awareness, so letting all of creation bless you.

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On The Tale _UPA

In the aftermath of the UPA government winning the trust vote, many questions remain unanswered about the charges of bribery raised so dramatically by three BJP MPs in Parliament on Tuesday. The truth behind the allegations must be thoroughly investigated and exposed. However, the shock waves that the incident has justifiably generated should be tempered by the fact such things are not unknown in Indian politics. Fifteen years ago, four Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) MPs, including Shibu Soren — who was once again a key figure in boosting the UPA’s tally in Parliament — were given money to help defeat a no-confidence motion against the Narasimha Rao government. More recently, 11 MPs were expelled for accepting money for raising questions in Parliament. Clearly, MPs on the take — even if they are a minority — are a problem. The investigation of the allegations made by the three BJP members could conceivably be kept out of the hands of investigating agencies on the ground that Article 105(2) of the Indian Constitution gives MPs immunity ‘for anything said or any vote given by him in Parliament’. The Supreme Court reiterated this in a 1998 judgment in the JMM bribery case where it said bribe-takers were immune from prosecution whereas bribe-givers had no such immunity. It is questionable whether the immunity given to MPs was meant to shield them from bribery charges. Indeed, the minority judgment in the JMM bribery case said immunity could not be extended to MPs who had taken a bribe. Several constitutional experts believe that in spite of the charges by the BJP MPs being made inside Parliament, this should be the subject of a criminal investigation. They say an FIR could be lodged under the Prevention of Corruption Act since the Supreme Court has clearly said MPs are “public servants”. But that itself won’t solve the larger issue of MPs being open to corruption and lobbying. There must be a move to document money being given to MPs by interest groups or lobbyists. This is done, for instance, in the US where details of contributions from lobbyists to elected representatives are recorded. This not only legitimises giving funds to legislators but also enables voters to track which interest group is backing whom. In addition, there must be greater transparency in the way parties and MPs raise money for election campaigns. Unlike many other democracies, the source of funds for political parties in India remains murky. Unless this is made more transparent, we could well see a repeat of what happened during Tuesday’s trust vote.

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China- Visiting The Past

Imagine visiting the Taj Mahal by day, and in the evening going to a theatre-cum-restaurant in Agra, where someone dressed like Mian Tansen sings Mian ki Malhar while you tuck into kakori kabab and chicken shahjahani! In Xi’an, in the Shaanxi province of China, you can do something similar. First, visit the beautiful Huaqing hot spring, 30 km away at the foot of the Lishan mountains, the favourite site of kings since the 11th century BC. It acquired fame during the reign of Tang dynasty emperor Xuanzong (685-762). Xuanzong built a lavish palace for his concubine Yang Guifei, reputed to be one of the four most beautiful women in ancient China. Then, come back for dinner at the Tang Dynasty Cultural Theatre and Restaurant in Xi’an. While you eat and drink, artists in Tang period costumes play ancient musical instruments, sing and dance. That China is an ‘old’ civilisation is well known. The exact import of the word old sinks into people like me while visiting the past in archaeological sites around Xi’an. The mausoleum of the First Emperor Qinshihuang (259-210 BC), located 36 km east of Xi’an, has an outer wall covering over 2 sq km. More than 2,000 years ago, it was reportedly built over three decades by more than half a million labourers. It is famous for its approximately 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors and horses, arranged in battle formations to guard the tomb. The main tomb, under a man-made hill for protection against plunder, is still unexcavated. The artistic quality, distinctive style and striking posture of each terracotta soldier, and their sheer strength in numbers fill us with a great sense of awe and curiosity about what lies buried deep in the tomb. One gets this same feeling of being overwhelmed by history at the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an itself, or at the Huaqing hot spring. The Wild Goose Pagoda, built in 652, is famous for its association with the monk, Xuanzang, also known as Hsuan-tsang. He undertook a 17-year overland trip to India and back, and is famous for bringing about interaction between China and India. Inside the Da ci’en temple complex, he built a pagoda to translate the Sanskrit sutras and store them. The seven-storey mud and brick pagoda, tapering at the top, shows distinct signs of Indian temple architectural influence. Looking at the pagoda you marvel at the adventurous spirit of Xuanzang. He travelled across the Himalayas almost 1,400 years ago, without marked-out paths, nice trekking shoes and woollen anoraks, and no interpreter! At the Huaqing hot spring stands a recent statue of the beautiful Yang Guifei. There’s also the Wujian five-room suite, famous for the Xi’an incident. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Chinese Nationalist Party lived in this suite for a while. On December 12, 1936, two of his own generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, staged a coup d’etat. Hearing gun shots at 4 a.m., Chiang Kai-shek escaped through the window and fled barefoot. He was arrested from the adjoining mountain and forced to negotiate with the armies of the Chinese Communist Party to jointly fight the Japanese. Seeing the bullet holes on the wall, and the bed, tables, chairs and other furniture purportedly used by Chiang Kai-shek gives one a palpable sense of visiting the past. In Humayun’s tomb, imagine seeing where the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was hiding after the debacle in the First War of Independence. Among the millions of visitors who have been to Humayun’s tomb, it is doubtful whether more than a few hundred are even aware of the fact that the last Mughal emperor had taken refuge in this mausoleum after the unfortunate and tumultuous developments of September 1857. Apart from the richness of its past, the efficient manner in which the authorities have managed and organised the facilities for visiting the past are very impressive. Travel to the sites is through broad motorways. No tedious hours of navigating through traffic jams. Xi’an, an ancient city like Agra, had its own share of narrow roads, slums, and unauthorised encroachments. They have been cleared and replaced by broad avenues. North of the Wild Goose Pagoda, they have even built a delightful large plaza with a large number of fountains, parks and statues. Many archaeologists have strong opinions against restoration of ruined old monuments. However, for the ordinary tourists, seeing a restored old monument is a much more exciting experience than seeing old, dilapidated ruins and imagining — with the help of old manuscripts, pictures and paintings — what it must have looked like at the height of its glory. Wonder how many visitors to Delhi’s Red Fort can even imagine what the fort complex may have looked like before the British, after the First War of Independence, destroyed many of the pavilions and gardens and started to use it as their headquarters. The Chinese have managed to renovate and maintain the monuments well. Of course, someone has got to pay for all these facilities. Entry fees to the sites are charged to pay for their upkeep. However, foreign tourists pay the same as domestic tourists. India, with its enormous potential for tourism can certainly learn a thing or two about making the country’s rich heritage more accessible to tourists, and profiting from the venture, from its neighbour.

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A Necessary Victory

UPA should build on momentum of winning floor test
Constitutionally the signing of international treaties is a cabinet matter. But the India-US civil nuclear deal generated enormous political heat, with the Left withdrawing support to the government on the issue. A robust debate in Parliament, followed by the holding of a trust vote — where the government won a convincing victory — was the fairest institutional way of resolving it. While the debates went well on Monday, yesterday’s parliamentary proceedings were marred when BJP MPs produced bundles of currency notes just before the trust vote was about to be held, alleging that those were bribes paid by an SP leader for abstaining from the vote. These are serious charges if proven. But the concerned MPs ought to have gone to the Speaker or the police, as a determination of their veracity is hardly likely to be made on the floor of Parliament. Although BSP chief Mayawati called for the resignation of the prime minister on moral grounds, the mode of presentation of the evidence made things still murkier. A high-level inquiry needs to be conducted into the allegations and action taken if the charges can be proved. But once the dust has settled, it’s also time to get on with the business of governance. There are pressing tasks ahead for the government. Tackling inflation has to be the highest priority. The country can’t afford to be rudderless at this time. There are signs of an economic slowdown now, coupled with a sharp rise in inflation rates. Fiscal deficits are going out of whack, leading international rating agency Fitch to revise India’s local currency outlook from stable to negative. Standard and Poor’s is considering lowering India’s rating to below investment grade. If that happens it would lower investor confidence in the economy and further dim India’s growth outlook. That’s at a time when the draft National Employment Policy of the government has projected that the Indian economy must grow at 12.3 per cent a year in order to eliminate joblessness by 2012. Now that the government has passed the floor test and is no longer dependent on the Left for support, it’s imperative that it makes up for time lost and presses ahead with longdelayed reforms. It can open up insurance and retail, pass the pension reforms Bill, list public sector units for disinvestment. Disinvestment of PSUs as well as important Bills in the area of pension and banking reform had been held up because of opposition by the Left. Labour and company bankruptcy laws can also be looked at. Reform measures in these and other areas can give the economy the bounce it sorely needs.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may have described UPA’s victory in the trust vote as ‘‘impressive’’, but the voting pattern shows that the victory really came about thanks to ‘cross-voting’, otherwise known as horse-trading. As many as 14 MPs defied their parties to favour the trust vote, while four went against the whip by abstaining and three simply stayed away. Had all of these MPs voted according to their respective party’s diktats, the MPs in favour of the motion would have been 261, those against 277! Six SP MPs also went against the party whip and voted against the motion, as did Congress’s Kuldeep Bishnoi. Counting the 14 MPs who crossvoted for the government, seven who abstained or stayed away to help the UPA, and the seven SP and Congress MPs who voted against the motion, a total of 28 MPs defied party whips. The biggest victim of cross-voting was NDA, BJP in particular. As many as five BJP MPs — Somabhai Patel from Gujarat, K Manjunath and H T Sangliana (Karnataka), Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh from UP and Chandrabhan Singh from MP — voted for the government. Another BJP MP — Manorama Madhwaraj from Karnataka — abstained, while Babubhai Katara from Gujarat and Harisingh Rathod from Maharashtra simply didn’t turn up for the vote. Another party MP from Chikmagalur in Karnataka, D C Srikantappa, was also absent, but in his case it was because of a genuinely serious illness. The JD(U)’s Ramswaroop Prasad from Bihar was another NDA member who voted for the government, while his party colleague P P Koya of Lakshadweep stayed away. BJD’s Harihar Swain also defied his party whip. Another alliance constituent, NPF, could do little to prevent its lone MP Wangyuh Konyak from supporting the trust vote. The Akali Dal also was unable to prevent Sukhdev Singh Libra from abstaining. TDP saw one MP, M Jagannath voting for the government and another, D K Audikesavulu, abstaining. UPA had already sewn up TRS’s A Narendra who voted for it despite his party whip. That was true also of two MDMK members, L Ganesan and Gingee Ramachandran, as well as NLP’s Baleshwar Yadav.

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Listen to women

We know from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that women and girls make up 60 per cent of the hungry people in the world, and in parallel we know that women produce between 60 and 80 per cent of the food we eat. This situation where women shoulder the burden of hunger at the time of crisis, and yet provide the solutions that could boost production is being almost entirely ignored. There is no specific mention of women in the final declaration for the recent high-level conference on the food crisis held in Rome. The Elders group — which includes Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson and myself —is working with non-governmental organisations this month to highlight the right to food as part of its response to the global food crisis. When it comes to the crux of the matter, food is a women’s issue. So why, with hunger so prevalent, are we not asking our mothers, grandmothers, wives, sisters, daughters — who have put food on our tables for centuries — how to solve the problem? We rely so much on women’s labour but the FAO has estimated that women farmers benefit from less than 15 per cent of agricultural support, including technology, seeds and other inputs, or training. Women are mainly responsible for subsistence farming to feed families and this is considered a domestic or household activity rather than an economic activity. As a result, the majority of public agricultural support goes towards cash crop farming. Surely governments can see that this is one of the contributory factors to the food crisis. Women also farm on the family cash crop plots, even where this means less time for subsistence farming, to help increase the family incomes. However, revenues from that produce might not find their way to women’s purses to buy food for their families. If policymakers were to look more closely at women’s needs and contribution, and take measures to ensure they enjoy all their rights without exception, then many of the world’s poor would not be so poor, the hungry would be fewer and vulnerable groups would be less vulnerable. Rural women regard some level of food self-sufficiency as critical to livelihoods. They would rather grow food and sell the surplus than have to buy food when there are cash requirements for so many other needs. But for this they need to have land and other productive resources and must be able to control these to suit their interests. Governments must ensure that women are empowered to influence how the land in the family or community is used. Of course, there are thousands of communities where rural women and women farmers and producers are organising collectively to claim their land rights and gain greater control over their lives. Fortunately too, there are some examples where governments have undertaken affirmative action to support better access to and control over land by women. These must be held up as best practices in food security and women’s rights. In Namibia, 30 per cent of land redistribution beneficiaries are women, most of them single. But it is time that this became the rule rather than the exception. It is time that the world woke up to the contradictions, hypocrisies and fallacies surrounding women’s land ownership. The truth is that women work hard for little recompense, they are knowledgeable about their environment but are not given control over its resources, they are financially prudent but are not given credit, they are good farmers and entrepreneurs but cannot access markets, they unite communities and build social capital but they suffer the worst violence in their homes and elsewhere, they raise children but are treated as minors. The voices of rural women would tell us all these things and more, giving us stories of hope, struggle and achievement, and more importantly blessing us with their wisdom. If we are really looking for solutions to world hunger, we should start by listening to them.

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It’s Messy, But It Works

Plenty has been said over the past few days on television and in drawing rooms about the levels to which Indian politics has sunk. CPI general secretary A B Bardhan’s statement that the going rate for members of Parliament was Rs 25 crore is now folklore. And the bag of cash produced dramatically in the well of the House by the BJP MP from Morena at the fag end of the debate on Tuesday seemed to confirm the public’s dim view of politicians. It was indeed a new low in the history of Indian democracy. Do we then dismiss Parliament as a charade? Let’s not forget that the unprecedented act by the Morena MP, Ashok Argal, came after several hours of passionate debate and possibly at a time when the opposition had realised that they didn’t have the numbers to bring down the government. And the way the television channel, which claimed to have visuals of Argal getting the money, kept mum about it instead of airing them or giving them to the police was fishy to say the least. Over the better part of two days, the best speakers from major political parties held forth with varying degrees of eloquence on the Indo-US nuclear deal and its consequences for the country. Lalu Prasad was his inimitable self, leaving the House in splits with his brand of humour; Mohammed Salim showed why he is so highly regarded as a speaker in Bengal; Rahul Gandhi — not the finest of orators with his tinny voice — gave a statesman-like performance exhorting MPs to rise above party differences; and the Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, did a fine job in extremely stressful circumstances. And the best part was that there was a mad scramble for seats in the visitors’ gallery to hear speeches. That is precisely what Parliament is supposed to do — debate issues of national importance before voters — but often ends up not doing. The figures for business conducted by Parliament speak for themselves. The number of sittings of Lok Sabha has come down from an yearly average of 124 in the first decade of 1952-61 to 81 between 1992 and 2001, a decline of 34 per cent. For the same period, the decline for Rajya Sabha was 20 per cent. The picture in the state assemblies is no different with an average of 20 to 50 sittings a year. This has had a direct impact on the number of Bills passed by Parliament. The annual average of the number of Bills passed has come down from 68 in the first decade to 50 between 1992 and 2001. Last year was particularly bad. In 2007, Parliament worked for the least number of days in non-election years during the last eight years. Though we — the citizens of India — vote our legislators into Parliament, we unfortunately know little about many of them. Undoubtedly, Parliament is a great leveller where farmers, teachers, business tycoons and scions of political dynasties sit next to each other. But a study by the Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore, on the present Lok Sabha throws a good deal of light on the actual composition of Parliament. The interesting bit of the study is an analysis of the wealth of MPs. This has become possible after the Supreme Court in a 2002 ruling made it mandatory for all candidates who contest Lok Sabha polls to declare their assets. The study says that on an average an MP is worth Rs 1.64 crore. If the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe members are taken out, the figure rises to Rs 2 crore. There is, of course, great variation in the wealth of individual MPs. But the average assets of MPs of all major parties are Rs 1 crore and upward. Only the members of the communist parties have assets well under Rs 1 crore. This shows that by and large only rich people are getting elected to Parliament. On top of that, nearly a quarter of the MPs have either criminal charges against them or cases pending in courts. Another finding is that a larger proportion of elected MPs have criminal cases against them compared to those who were defeated in the elections. This is not a pretty picture. But we must not make the mistake of judging Indian democracy and Parliament only by its low points. Except for a brief period during the Emergency, India’s democratic institutions have proved to be far more robust than what most people would have expected in 1947. Indeed, they stand out in comparison to most developing countries. Indian democracy can often be exasperating and messy. The Argal episode and the chaos that followed was one such instance. But we can rest assured that this will only be a temporary blip. After all, Aya Rams and Gaya Rams have been around for several decades. For all its chaos, Indian democracy and its institutions have served us reasonably well. Yes, in spite of the tamasha in Parliament that you all saw last evening.

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Continuing quest for life on Mars

For well over a century, the prospect of life on Mars has been the subject of feverish speculation among scientists. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing “canali” on Mars through his telescope and thought that the dark areas he noticed on the planet were the result of vegetation. By 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy American astronomer, who established the observatory that now bears his name, was asserting that in the Martian canals “we are looking upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings.” What those Martian beings might look like and how they would behave towards neighbours on planet Earth have been the subject of much science fiction writing and films. It is no wonder that humans began sending probes to study the Red Planet almost as soon as the space age began. Just three years after Sputnik went into space in 1957, the Soviet Union attempted to send the Korabl-4 but the probe did not even reach the orbit around the earth. Since then, close to 40 spacecraft have been despatched to Mars, but over 60 per cent of those missions also ended in failure. It was Mariner-4 launched by the United States that sent back the first close-up images of another planet as it flew past Mars in July 1965. Finally, the Viking-1 lander, again from the U.S., touched down safely on its surface in July 1976, and it was followed by the Viking-2 lander a few months later. Both Viking landers were sent to look for signs of life. When the planet appeared to be barren, so great was the disappointment that it eroded political support in the U.S. for further Mars missions.
But interest in Martian life has revived. If such life exists — or existed in the past — it is likely to take the form of tiny microbes, not little green men travelling in flying saucers. There was an uproar in 1996 when a team of U.S. scientists reported in the journal Science that a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica carried telltale traces of primitive microbial life. Although that interpretation of the traces found on the rock is now not generally accepted, the possibility of life on Mars is not discounted. Space probes have discovered signs that liquid water was present on the planet in the past and that water in the form of ice is still plentiful below the surface. Where there is water, there may well be microscopic life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which has landed safely in the far north of the planet, joins three other spacecraft and two robotic rovers that are currently examining Mars in unprecedented detail. The objective is not to look for life, but to determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life. Let us wait and see what it finds.

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Significant move on political chessboard

There was an inevitability to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s official embrace of Lal Krishna Advani as its prime ministerial candidate that only superficial and politically blind-sided analysis could have missed. Hindutva strongman and ideologue, charioteer of the motorised rath yatra, five-term-party-president, and Deputy Prime Minister under the redoubtable Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mr. Advani unexpectedly stepped off the beaten track in mid-2005 and set Mohammed Ali Jin nah, and his indisputably ‘secular vision’ of August 1947, among the parivar. When the resultant furore gave him no choice but to resign his party presidentship in December 2005, pundits were quick to proclaim the end of the Vajpayee-Advani (‘Ram-Lakshman’) era. The reading could not have been more off-target. In 2006 Mr. Advani, facing political adversity, dug in his heels. The man who joined the RSS in Karachi 65 years ago not only stood by what he had said about the Quaid-e-Azam in Pakistan but also sent out this interesting message to the RSS: “Lately things have happened which give the impression that the BJP cannot take a decision unless it is endorsed by the RSS...this perception…will do no good either to the party or to the RSS.” The pundits missed a vital subtext, which he put out, more or less simultaneously, in a magazine interview: yes, he was Prime-Minister-in-waiting by virtue of his position as Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Advani was already looking beyond the contradictions and tensions within the parivar to the 15th general election.
2007 has been the year of caution and political correctness for the Prime-Minister-in-waiting. He might be all of 80 years old — five years older than the Congress incumbent — but he is a fit octogenarian with plenty of fight in him. Scenting a 2008 general election and much of disaffection and confusion in the polity, Mr. Advani has taken charge of strategy and tactics, incrementally raising the Hindutva pitch as the fissures in the UPA-Left relationship have widened on the nuclear deal and the strategic partnership with the United States. Fifty-six-year-old Rajnath Singh as challenger? The question can only be taken as a joke. Nor will Mr. Advani be losing any sleep over breathless journalistic chatter about the prospect of Narendra Modi stepping on to the national stage as some kind of rival — if he were to triumph in Gujarat again. But what lies ahead for the BJP? After all, as Prakash Karat, now the CPI(M)’s general secretary, pointed out in a 1992 journal article, the BJP’s journey from an amorphous right of Centre platform, constructed during the Vajpayee presidency of 1980-86, to the aggressive platform of Hindutva — ‘Hindu nationalism’ targeting an internal enemy, India’s 150-million-plus Muslims, and all key issues revolving round this theme — was accomplished between 1986 and 1989, during the first Advani presidency. It will be costly, if not fatal, for the BJP’s political opponents to underestimate the strategy, tactics, and mobilisational capabilities of the shadow Prime Minister.

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