Blowin' In The Wind

The magic of Ian McEwan

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Seldom have I read a better book. It's about a day in a man’s life. Forty-eight-year-old neurosurgeon Henry Perowne wakes up in the middle of the night in his posh London home, sees a plane in the sky and fears it is going down in flames. But there’s nothing he can do.

Morning comes. There’s no news of the plane. Perowne goes for his usual Saturday game of squash, gets caught up in an anti-war demonstration -- it is February 15, 2003, people are protesting against the coming Iraq war -- and, trying to escape the gridlock, has a minor collision with another car. But it has major consequences. The other car’s occupants barge into his home in the middle of a family reunion.

Yes, it’s a domestic drama, and the way I have told it, it doesn’t sound anything much.

Ah, but the language. McEwan’s vivid descriptions of scenes and relationships, his empathy for Perowne and his happy, successful family -- the wife is a newspaper lawyer, the son a talented blues guitarist, the daughter an award-winning poet -- and even for the hooligans who burst into their world, lift the story to another dimension. It’s a touching story of people in the post-9/11 world. Perowne is Everyman. For all his professional success, he is an ordinary man -- a loving husband, a loving father, but helpless when danger threatens his wife and daughter.

McEwan paints a moving portrait of a man vulnerable in his love for his family and his awareness of his physical powers diminishing with age. He is portrayed beautifully:

“His head hair, though thinning, is still reddish brown. Only on his pubes are the first scattered coils of silver.”

McEwan’s command of language and powers of description are extraordinary.  He describes how Perowne met his wife as an intern when she came to the hospital. She had a brain tumour which had to be removed to save her from blindness. McEwan describes the procedure eloquently:

“To go right into the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life, without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity.”

McEwan has a way with words, and it’s only fitting that when danger threatens his wife and daughter, they are saved by a poem: Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. One of the hooligans taunts the daughter when he discovers she is a poet and commands her to read a poem. She reads Dover Beach. “You wrote that,” he says excitedly. Ignorant and ill-educated, he is moved by the poem though he doesn’t know who the author is.

That may seem extraordinary here in prosperous Singapore where young government “scholars” are sent for undergraduate studies to top British and American universities, where ministers earn million-dollar salaries and school students were not encouraged until recently to read English literature for their school-leaving examinations. Bright students were -- and still are -- encouraged to read law or take up medicine or engineering. Perowne himself could be a role for them. A successful surgeon with a loving family who has no time for literature.

But I remember my hometown, Calcutta (Kolkata) in the 1970s and ‘80s, where poetry and literature, music and drama, flourished. It was shabby and genteel with pockets of affluence and sprawling slums. But it had arts and culture. Many students and older people loved quoting writers. Dover Beach is a favourite poem of mine and my wife’s: she teaches English at a college in Calcutta.

Coming from Calcutta, I am not surprised that words can move even a young hooligan. I am not spoiling the story by revealing this: it doesn’t end there. This anyway isn’t a book to be read just for the story’s sake. One may dip into it even after reading the story for the pleasure of words. McEwan gives voice to our innermost feelings which we don’t have the words to express. What could be more beautiful than this scene, where Perowne joins his wife in bed:

“He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There’s always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there’s only this. And, at last, faintly, falling: this day’s over.”

Battle for the classifieds

Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper certainly carries some weight. Just pick up the bulging Saturday edition which sometimes runs to more than 100 broadsheet pages. And one gets this humongous newspaper for less than a Singapore dollar, which is about 65 or 66 cents. Yes, it costs more than the Washington Post but much less than the New York Times, and is considered affordable in Singapore. Or it would not have a circulation of more than 385,000 copies. For an English newspaper in Asia, that’s huge.

I guess the Straits Times owner, Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), can give it at that price because it makes money from the ads. The SPH website says it has a 50 per cent share of the Singapore ad market through its various properties, which include two radio stations and several websites, newspapers and magazines, but the bulk of the ads appear in the Straits Times. It’s the ads which bulk up the Saturday Straits Times. The classifieds alone take up several pages.

Now a website has come up which wants to lure away those classifieds. Singapore now has its own version of Craigslist, launched by the government broadcaster, MediaCorp. It dominates television and radio and is now going after the classified ad market which has so far been the bread and butter of the Straits Times.

And the public reaction so far? I just checked Google News and Google Blogs and found nothing on it except a brief story in Channel NewsAsia, which is owned by MediaCorp. The news seems to have been greeted with a yawn of indifference. I will not speculate on the reason, but a nursery rhyme comes to mind:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
    Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
    Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
    As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
    They quite forgot their quarrel.

Both MediaCorp and the Straits Times report the same news. There was talk of competition when MediaCorp started a freesheet and the Straits Times owner, SPH, launched an English and a Chinese television channel in the early 2000s. But Singapore was found too small to support so many channels and after bleeding red ink SPH turned over its channels to MediaCorp in exchange for a 20 percent share of MediaCorp TV Holdings, which operates four free-to-air channels, and a 40 per cent share of the MediaCorp freesheet, Today. In effect, both companies became virtual monopolies again, MediaCorp in broadcasting and SPH in publishing.

The freesheet, Today, with a limited distribution, has not tried very hard to compete with the Straits Times. Today claims a readership of 584,000 as opposed to the Straits Times circulation of 385,000. But readership is not the same thing as circulation, according to Britain’s National Readership Survey which says:

Circulation is a known: the average number of copies of a publication sold over a period of time, independently audited and verified by ABC, the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Readership can never be known, it has to be estimated.

But now the comfortable arrangement between SPH and MediaCorp seems to be showing some wear and tear with the growing importance of the Internet. SPH has a job site. Now MediaCorp has one for classifieds. I had a look at the latter. The site, mocca.com, looks pretty basic at the moment. But it’s early days.

The Straits Times, on the other hand, has beaten off challengers in the past. Who knows what the future holds. Another deal?    

What bothers the Economist

I wonder what Singapore will say to this. Ostensibly the story is about China. “China takes the bank”, says the Economist in a story about the state-owned China Development Bank buying a stake in the British Barclays bank. But Singapore’s government-owned Temasek Holdings also bought Barclays shares at the same time, as the Economist duly notes.

And, very politely, it says "little is known" about these "state-run investment pools". That seems surprising to me in Singapore. But that's what the Economist says.The Barclays deal "marks a new adventurousness on the part of China’s government,” it says and adds:

 

Although CDB is a state-owned bank, most governments buy their foreign assets through state-run investment pools, known as sovereign-wealth funds. These funds are getting bigger and bolder. They have some $1.5-2.5 trillion to play with, according to America’s Treasury, a sum expected to grow fast... Yet little is known about these funds…

The Chinese fund is likely to be modelled on Singapore’s two funds, GIC and Temasek. These entities are used to taking big stakes in companies. The Singaporean funds also try to import expertise through their investments—hence a focus on telecoms and banking. It would be surprising if China’s fund did not make investment decisions for similar reasons.

And here comes the rub:

(The) funds’ lack of transparency is worth worrying about. If one made a bad bet and had to unwind it fast, nobody would know what was happening. No one knows how they manage risk. And although funds have tried hard to avoid buying assets that might attract the attention of politicians and voters, nobody knows how politically motivated they might become.

Here the Economist is referring to not only the Chinese or Singaporean funds but also those of oil-exporting nations. “Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nigeria and Angola have all either set up funds recently or are looking at doing so,” it says.

Still, Singapore may not like the Economist’s comments. I wonder if the government will respond with a letter to the editor.

Although not required to disclose financial information, Temasek Holdings has been releasing annual financial reviews since 2004. The latest, available on its website, gives figures up to March last year. It has a stake in almost every major Singapore company from Singapore Airlines to the local broadcaster MediaCorp.

It also has a stake in several foreign companies including Indian blue chips like ICICI Bank, Mahindra and Mahindra and the Apollo Hospital Group and Thai telco Shin Corp while its subsidiary, Singapore Telecom, gets a considerable part of its revenue from the Indian telco Bharti and the Australian telco Optus. That can raise nationalist feelings. Former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was deposed in a coup after he sold Shin Corp to Temasek.

Now the Economist has expressed other concerns about similar “state-run investment pools”. They could provide economic stability by being long-term investors, it says, but they have to be more open.

 

Bloggers cautioned

Watching the well-dressed commuters on my way home this evening reminded me how well-off Singapore is. I stopped for dinner at a food centre where a group of students sitting next to me were chatting in English. Then I visited the local library, which has floor-to-ceiling glass windows and broadband access, and borrowed books published in the West only this year and the year before.

In Singapore it’s easy to think one is living in a global village where life is getting better and English is the common language.

But more than an ocean separates us from the West, I was reminded when I went online some time ago. 

"Malaysia cracks down on bloggers", reported the BBC website.  Just across the Causeway from Singapore, bloggers have been warned by the Malaysian government that they could be prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws if they insult the king or Islam. The BBC added:

Raja Petra Kamarudin, the editor of one of Malaysia's most popular political websites, Malaysia Today, turned himself in to police on Wednesday, to answer allegations that he had mocked Islam and threatened racial harmony.

He was released after eight hours of questioning, he later wrote on his website.

I clicked on the link next to the BBC report to visit Malaysia Today for the first time just to find out why he got into trouble. Yes, the home page contained posts critical of the government. The tabloid-style headlines sniped at the prime minister and the authorities. But outspoken as they seemed by local standards, worse things have been said about George Bush and Tony Blair.

I am not saying there should be open season on politicians. One reason I seldom read warbloggers is they are so partisan. But there should be freedom of speech.

It could be argued, of course, if one sticks one’s neck out, one should be prepared for the consequences. That argument is commonly heard in this region. The International Herald Tribume quoted a Malaysian minister as saying the warning to the bloggers was “not aimed at eliminating the freedom of speech but to wipe out the freedom to cheat, defame and hurt people so that blogs can be really a source of correct information… and not a platform to hurl abuses at people”.

True, but isn’t it in the government’s own interest to let the people speak out; how else would it know what the people really think?

I recall the time when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and muzzled the press in India in June 1975. Indian newspapers with the exception of The Statesman and the Indian Express became Indira Gandhi’s mouthpieces, not publishing a word of criticism against her. Opposition leaders were jailed; dissent was not tolerated. In March 1977 she called a general election -- and the rug was pulled from under her feet. She was swept out of power by a landslide.

She wouldn’t have been so out of touch with public opinion if she hadn’t gagged the press and surrounded herself with sycophants.   

Prayers answered, India saved

Thank goodness the rain came down and stopped play at Lords, or India would have lost the cricket Test to England.

My son was sounding desperate when we were chatting online on Monday. "Come on, let it rain, man," he was beseeching the weather god while watching the game in America.

He had hooked up his laptop to the television to watch the game on a bigger screen.

India were down to the last two wickets and facing certain defeat when I logged on to chat with him from Singapore. But he was in no mood for small talk while India's fate hung in the balance.

The sky was dark with clouds which seemed in no hurry to rain, he complained. Then he started cussing the umpires. "Ask for the damn light, man!" Or did he say, "Offer the damn light, man!"

Sorry if I got the lingo wrong. I was speaking to my wife in Calcutta (Kolkata) at the same time on the phone. I usually call her when I chat with him so she can join the conversation, but it ended up more as a tete-a-tete between me and her. He was worked up over the game. 

Well, the gods answered his prayers and the umpires obliged. Rain and poor light stopped play: India were saved.

And my son did chat with me and my wife last night. He has already read the latest Harry Potter. He finished it in one sitting after the game.That's crazy. But I had to stop him from telling me the story. Guess why. 

Singapore buys Brit

Two weeks ago the Economist ran a story about the world’s biggest banks -- and two of the top 10 happened to be Chinese: ICBC and Bank of China. Now another Chinese bank is buying into one of Europe’s biggest banks: Barclays. Will Barclays loan officers now take instructions from Beijing?

Just kidding. China Development Bank -- which is controlled by Beijing -- is buying just a 3.1 percent stake, according to Forbes, though it will take a bigger share – 7.7 per cent -- if Barclays snaps up ABN Amro. With $1.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, the Chinese have to put their money somewhere. Why not in a British bank? Britons anyway are used to selling their assets. The media business is dominated by an Australian turned American. The last British carmaker was swallowed by a Chinese upstart. And now comes a Chinese bank…

And the government of Singapore. Oh yes, Singapore is taking a piece of Barclays too. Temasek Holdings, owned by Singapore’s finance ministry, is buying a 2.1 percent stake, which will go up to 3 percent if Barclays lands ABN Amro. It seems Singapore and China are more interested in the Dutch bank than in the British bank. Well, Britain is used to playing second fiddle. And, anyway, Barclays wants the Dutch bank too. Which is why… oops, they are already inside the gates.

But there’s no reason to be politically correct.

Temasek’s CEO, Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching, is genuinely admired. “Madam Ho is galvanising Temasek,” former Barclays chief executive Andrew Buxton told the International Herald Tribune (IHT) two years ago. By then he had left Barclays and was a director of CapitaLand, a Temasek subsidiary. But she is admired by others as well and ranks among Time magazine’s 100 most influential men and women in the world.

The IHT report read like a rave review. It said:

As a young electrical engineering graduate in 1976, Ho Ching was recruited into the Singapore government's top secret research unit that was developing weapons systems for her country's military. These days, Ho, has a less covert mission: revamping the company that is synonymous with Singapore, Temasek Holdings.

Ho ended years of financial secrecy by publishing the government-owned company’s first ever financial review in 2005, it added.

I saw the latest review on the Temasek website. Giving figures up to March last year, it showed Temasek had a majority share in PT Bank Danamon Indonesia, 35 per cent of PT Bank Internasional  Indonesia, 28 per cent of the Singapore bank DBS Group, 10 percent of South Korea’s Hana Financial Group, 8 per cent of India’s ICICI Bank, 6 percent of China Construction Bank, 6 percent of Taiwan’s E Sun Financial Company and 5 per cent of Bank of China.

Temasek last year also became the largest shareholder of the British bank, Standard Chartered, which is a major player in Asia. About 35 percent of Temasek’s $85 billion portfolio is made up of financial services firms, reported Reuters. Now it’s getting into a High Street bank in Britain. Yes, we have come a long way, baby.

Keeping the communists happy

Pratibha Patil was elected India’s first woman president by the legislators (ordinary citizens don't get to vote). But she wasn’t the first choice of the ruling Congress party. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi chose the 72-year-old political veteran only after the leftists (read: communists) objected to other candidates, said the BBC.

The Congress government can’t ignore the communists.

It’s somewhat like the US relationship with China. Their economies have become so interdependent neither can ignore the other. From Apple to Boeing, almost every US multinational uses components made in China. And both countries gain. China is booming, using some of the dollars earned to buy US Treasury bonds, while US consumers benefit from the low prices of Chinese goods.

A similar relationship has sprung up between the Congress party and the communists. They may jockey for power in some of the Indian states, just as the US and China have their differences, notably over Taiwan. But they have common interests. The Congress party has a socialist heritage and under Indira Gandhi was close to the Soviets.

Now Congress heads a coalition government in Delhi. It could not form a government on its own, having won only 145 seats in the last general election in 2004. The Lok Sabha, or the Indian House of Representatives, has 545 seats. The traditionally pro-Beijing Marxists, who won 43 seats, and the pro-Russian Communist Party of India, which won 10, did not join the coalition government but support the Congress. They can’t support the nationalist right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which won 138 seats.

Congress naturally has to keep its allies happy. And that includes the communists, who have gained influence disproportionate to their power.

The communists are strong in only three of the 28 Indian states: Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal. Yet they have their say on every major issue from education to the choice of a president.

Congress, of course, has to consult even smaller fry -- regional parties and the like. And it did not lose anything by choosing Patil as president. After all, she is a Congress party member and a friend of the Gandhis. Still, if she got the job because the communists objected to other Congress candidates, then it was no different from the tail wagging the dog.

A free online Wall Street Journal?

Can we now expect to read the online Wall Street Journal for free? I am jumping the gun, but it’s a fair question to ask now that the Dow Jones board has voted to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch. His $5 billion takeover bid still has to be approved by the Bancroft family, which controls 64 percent of the voting stock. But if they do accept the offer, will the Journal continue to be a subscription-only site? The Murdoch websites tend to be free.

Yes, there was a time when one had to pay to read The Times online. But that was years ago: it’s free now. Murdoch may not give his editors a free hand, but he knows free sites get more traffic -- and he has always wanted the biggest share of the pie.

The Journal no doubt makes money by charging subscription fees. But I won’t be surprised if Murdoch finds other ways of making money. In any case, he will be less dependent on revenue from the Journal because he has lots of other assets.

A Murdoch takeover of the Wall Street Journal may be bad news for my favourite newspaper, the New York Times. He will be a more formidable competitor than Dow Jones.

Business rules his life. First he became an American citizen to own US television stations. Then he pulled BBC News from his Star TV satellite channel in China to placate Beijing and get more business. And he knows what sells. One may or may not like the Sun and Fox News, but they are popular.

He also owns The Times. There can be no question about its quality. I read it for the writing. For the writing and the views, I turn to the Guardian.

A president to be proud of

India had two leaders to be proud of. Now we will be left with only one: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. President APJ Abdul Kalam will be stepping down this month. It’s sad we will be losing a person of his stature. An eminent scientist comfortable on the Internet, he represented modern India and its technological progress more than any professional politician.

Unfortunately, he is no longer wanted by the politicians who alone elect the president.

A politician will once again occupy the presidential palace, Rashtrapati Bhawan. The ruling Congress party’s nominee, Pratibha Patil, who is widely expected to be elected, will have the distinction of being the first woman president. But what’s even more remarkable about her is her facelessness: despite 45 years in politics, she is hardly a household name.

She has enjoyed her rewards though as a friend of the Gandhis and served as governor of Rajasthan and deputy chairman of the Upper House of the Indian parliament. It’s no mean feat -- enjoying power and privilege in relative privacy in an open democracy.

She can’t be enjoying all the attention now as some of the remarks are distinctly unkind. I won’t repeat the allegations against her, which appeared even in the New York Times yesterday.

She has opened herself to ridicule too by saying on live television that a dead guru had spoken to her through a living disciple about her impending rise to power. Ah well, we had a prime minister (Morarji Desai) who drank his own urine for health reasons. What’s wrong with a president who chats with the dead?

If that sounds loony, ask evolutionists what they think of creationists. Yet there are creationists who are quite sensible people.

I am sure Pratibha Patil will make a decent president or she would have not been considered for the job. But she will never be an Abdul Kalam. It’s unfortunate that politicians didn’t give him a second term.

Why is it all right for politicians to seek re-election but not for the president? Only the first Indian president, Rajendra Prasad, was re-elected, but that was because he was a powerful politician. Not so his successors who included illustrious scholars like Radhakrishnan and Indira Gandhi’s yes-men.

There is no law that says a president can’t be re-elected. A television opinion poll showed Kalam would have been the popular choice. But the politicians decided otherwise. The Hindustan Times ran an article headlined “Why political parties do not want Kalam”. He lacks political understanding, claimed several worthies.

Even the communists and the Hindu communalist, right-wing Shiv Sena were united on this. Kalam had to go, they said. Their bizarre agreement on this reminded me of the Hitler-Stalin pact -- and raised Kalam even higher in my opinion.

News alone can't sell papers

I can’t quite agree with Michael Connelly, the creator of the Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. He writes:

People who read books also read newspapers… If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers.

People who read newspapers don’t necessarily read books. Nor are all book lovers compulsive newspaper readers. With all the news media now available, one can do without printed newspapers, thank you.

I personally love newspapers and browse the Guardian and the New York Times and several other publications online. But I don’t read the local newspapers here in Singapore every day and I don’t think I am missing a lot. I check the local news channel Channel NewsAsia’s website, which usually gives me all the information I need.

It may be because I am an Indian and not terribly interested in crime stories or what’s happening in the region or the long local opinion pieces printed in the papers. The big news in Singapore anyway is what the government is thinking and planning to do next -- and that and the business news are covered adequately by Channel NewsAsia (and Reuters and Bloomberg when it comes to business news.)

I would rather read the local news in a nutshell and spend the time saved reading books and checking foreign websites.

I am sure there are Singaporeans, too, who get most of their information online.

But I can understand why Connelly as a writer feels the way he does. He is lamenting the downsizing of book reviews in American newspapers. As he freely admits in his article in the Los Angeles Times, it was favourable book reviews that established him as a writer. He adds:

I can't help but wonder how long Harry (Bosch) would have lasted had he been born in today's newspaper environment.

He may have a point there. And it’s not only the writer’s loss. Newspapers that cut back on book coverage may be cutting their own throats, he argues. Yes, indeed. I read the Guardian and the New York Times not just for the news but also for the book reviews, commentaries and articles on technology.

One can always get the news from one source or another. What gives a newspaper or a magazine distinction is the quality of writing, the analysis and reviews.