Word: peacocke
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...perhaps not surprising that Sujit Saraf chose Chandni Chowk as the main setting for his ambitious 750-page novel of politics, commerce and manners in modern India. The Peacock Throne does for Delhi and democracy what Vikram Chandra's recent 900-page Sacred Games does for Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and organized crime. Or what 19th century European novelists did when economic and intellectual winds howled: produce teeming, sprawling, barn-burning novels that try to describe everything in sight. The surprise is that Saraf is not, strictly speaking, a novelist. He works full-time as a space scientist...
There is nothing offhand about The Peacock Throne, named after the Red Fort seat from which the 17th century Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan held sway over all Hindustan. Saraf casts a scientist's eye on the country of his birth and finds it still preoccupied with holding sway. He starts with Indira Gandhi's 1984 assassination by Sikh bodyguards and the spasm of anti-Sikh violence that ensued. Kartar Singh, a Sikh who runs a Chandni Chowk appliance store, narrowly escapes death in the rioting - and leverages that experience to gain influence in a Hindu nationalist party...
...shouldn't have been invited - and technically, I hadn't been. The invitation had gone out to TIME's publisher, who to his deep regret had been unable to go, leaving me to be drafted in his place. That's how I found myself in the hangar-sized Peacock Room of Tokyo's opulent Imperial Hotel, rubbing shoulders with the cream of Japan's corporate class. These were men - they were almost all men - who control companies worth billions of dollars. I control a checkbook that sometimes has a positive balance, making me something of an impostor at an event...
...soon as they entered the Peacock Room - and maybe posed for a quick photograph with Dentsu CEO Takeo Mataki, who manned his position like a shopping mall Santa - it was straight to the food tables. There was the sushi counter catered by one of the finest restaurants in the capital. There was the grill manned by chefs who wielded steak knives like samurai. And there was the fugu - the poisonous blowfish delicacy that can cost your life if prepared incorrectly, and which can cost you $50 or more when ordered at a restaurant. I braved the fugu sashimi...
...days ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked a hundred or so delegates to tea on the lawn of his residence Sunday evening. Guests were bused to the PM's New Delhi house and escorted along a path beneath trees that teamed with chirping Indian Mynah birds and the occasional peacock to a meeting room where the softly spoken Singh gave a short formal address. India's economy has experienced 8% annual growth for the past few years but it was vital to make that growth "inclusive," said Singh, an economist who began liberalizing India's moribund economy in the early...