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Nalin Mehta- On books, journalism and more
Author and social historian, Nalin Mehta is founding Joint Editor of the international scholarly journal, South Asian History and Culture and Honorary Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University Singapore. His first book India on Television won the Asian Publishing Award. He has written the critically acclaimed Olympics: The India Story, with Boria Majumdar, is a weekly columnist for Mumbai Mirror, and has over ten years of experience as a journalist, working with NDTV, Zee News, and Times Now. He lives and works in Geneva.
We had the privilege of getting in touch with Nalin Mehta who shared his insights on books, his stint as a journalist and social historian, in an exclusive interview with us.
• What inspired you to write this book? Tell us about Sellotape Legacy…
- Delhi is my city and I wanted to know what they are doing to it, why it has all been dug up and what the real story is.
Sometime around the Beijing Olympics, Boria and I were driving in an auto one day and talking about the Games when the auto driver got really angry, shouting how it was all a sham and how all this money was being spent for just 12 days. His passion really jolted us into thinking about the real meaning of these Games.
Delhi became a different place after the Asian Games and it will be a different place now. We wanted to chart this historical moment, with all its successes and failures.
• How was it working with Boria on this book? Share your experience while writing/researching for this book?
- We are great friends and that made this great fun. We trust each other’s instincts, share the same passion, complement each other’s strengths and know our weaknesses. Because we are such close friends, we never had to go through the usual bane of most co-authors: negotiating the tricky terrain of territorialism and personal egos.
We first got together for Olympics: The India Story. It was the first genuine scholarly history of Indian Olympism. After doing that book, it was a natural step to look at India’s greatest sporting event ever and what it means in its entirety.
It was quite a challenge to research this book. There’s no ready archive. We had to create our own archive, read pages of primary material—we have read almost 30 years of the sports pages of Toronto Star for example to understand the origin of the Games, trawled through Parliamentary archives and government reports. There are many wow moments and in particular, I remember getting goose-bumps when I saw in the records that the actual total cost was up to 70, 000 crores, 114 times the original estimate.
• What are the responses by your initial readers?
- It has been fantastic. We have had a lot of people telling us that they are happy to see an account that documents the entire saga of the politics of these Games and give some long-term perspective to the scandal-a-day daily marathon on television that they have now become. Equally, stepping away from the din of Delhi, we treasure the comments by a lot of people who read the later chapters on the origins of the Commonwealth, the genesis of the Games – originally as the British Empire Games -- and said that it really made them think on the larger meaning of the Commonwealth itself, why India joined it, and how it has evolved as a political animal since.
• Why aren’t Delhiites showing any enthusiasm towards CWG?
- They were never involved in any community decision-making. It has always been like something imposed from above. This is why the residents of the Siri Fort area, for example, went to court when trees were felled on a large scale in their area for the basketball and squash complex there. Sure, the Delhi government has always seen the Games as a vehicle to accelerate development in the city and this was an important sub-text in Sheila Dixit’s last election victory but at the ground level, at individual sites, there was very little community consultation and things like the volunteer programme which were meant to enthuse people never really took off, till the very last moment.
• Only 28 days to go! In your view are we ready for CWG & will it be a moderate success atleast?
- That depends on how you define success. As we have argued in the book the Games could surely have played a part in securing for India a place in the list of nations, which have played host to mega events. It is a well established strategy—use sport to uplift a nation’s position in the world, like South Africa just did for the soccer World Cup and China did with the Beijing Games. Given the state of affairs prevalent in Delhi, India will need a miracle to achieve this goal. Right now, the Games have become a symbol of all that is wrong with India, and not the India we wanted to project.
• The focus has shifted from the players & preparations to our organizers, corruption scandals, missing deadlines & unfinished venues. What costs will our sporting fraternity pay for not utilizing this opportunity?
- CWG 2010 could possibly have been the vehicle for creating a truly national sporting culture. That’s almost impossible now. And that’s why we feel the pinch even more. It is time we spare a thought for our athletes. Except for the handful of stars who have made the grade in terms of sponsorship, the majority of India’s athletes have looked at the Commonwealth Games for years now as their moment under the sun. They have prepared under adverse conditions, strived day in and out to stand up for the country and trained with little incentives on offer.
Our sportspeople deserve much more. The Games were India’s final crack at having some kind of a sporting culture, failing which the sordid tale of Indian sport will face the desperate need for an epitaph.
• Why and where are we lacking in comparison to other organizers around the world?
- Delhi got off the starting blocks rather late. Beijing 2008 and London 2012, for instance, followed a seven-year time cycle: two years for planning and approvals, four years for construction and development and the last year for test events and trial runs. In Delhi’s case, the first few years were utterly wasted. The bid document had four phases: 2004-2006 for planning, 2006-2008 for creating, 2008-2010 for delivering and 2010-2011 for concluding. None of this was translated into action until at least late-2006. Part of the problem was the serious lack of expertise within the OC for organising an event of this magnitude. There were at least 21 different government agencies involved and though a Core Group of Ministers coordinated the work, it was a bureaucratic quagmire. One gets the overwhelming impression that the entire impetus lacked a strong centre of the kind that Rajiv Gandhi gave to the 1982 Games.
• Do you think one successful major event can change India’s sporting future & we might see many more Leander Paes, Saina Nehwal, Abhinav Bindra? And if it fails then what else do we need to do?
- No. The Asian Games of 1982 were successful but did not lead to a major sport resurgence. What such events can do is create a buzz, bring sport into the limelight and fire people’s imaginations. They can be catalysts if they are accompanied with a serious plan to inculcate sport at the grassroots, not by themselves alone. The Chinese did not reach the top of the medals table at Beijing just because they hosted the Games. It was the result of decades of planning, money and a brutal hard-nosed national sporting plan.
As we point out in the book, budgets for inculcating sport at the grassroots consistently shrank as money flew like water in Delhi. How can you achieve anything like this? We need a concerted national effort on sport, especially focused on rural India. This must be in tandem with innovative public-private partnerships of the kind that some of the Bhiwani boxers benefitted from. Otherwise, we can keep wringing our hands every four years.
• Why is the Indian Media, especially electronic media portraying so much negative coverage? It might be hampering our country’s image. What is your take on the same?
- The media is only reporting the story. It is doing its job and is a mirror to the larger disappointment felt by the average Indian. The Games effort has turned into a national humiliation and the media is reflecting that. Of course, we can do without some of the over-top sensationalism and the media should also ask itself that why did it wake up to the story only now. The Games effort has been a scandal for years. If we had reporting like this three years ago, then at least something could have been done to fix the problems. Now we are only trying to put sellotape on the cracks.
• What is your personal view on the recent controversy of CWG corruption and the role of Mr. Suresh Kalmadi as chief of CWG?
- There’s no doubt that there was a systemic failure. There is no smoke without a fire and as Chairman Mr. Kalmadi has to take the blame. There are serious problems and I am very glad that some of it is now coming out. If you remember the OC had refused to be accountable under the RTI Act, and was forced to do so by the court. You can`t take public money and then act like a feudal, opaque organization.
• What is your take on recent parlance of the cricket spot fixing scam? Can we still call it a gentleman’s game?
- The worst thing about it is that we are not even surprised any more. At least, last time, when the Hansie Cronje scandal broke, there was genuine shock across the cricket world. No game can survive if people lose faith in it.
Also, the idea of a gentleman’s game was always part of cricket’s self-image but it never really was like that. This is a romanticized notion. The kind of money and greed that we are now seeing is new and is corrupting the very edifice of the game. This scandal calls for some very drastic measures and a reappraisal of the priorities that are shaping the structure of the global game.
• Do you think all the sports federations in India should follow the path followed by cricket boards to market themselves?
- The boxers did well at Beijing without following the cricket example. Indian hockey did well till the 70s, without any corporate structure. There are many other ways to do things. What we need is innovative ideas and passion.
• Name few of your favorite books? Closest book to your heart?
- It has to be William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. He finds a forgotten love story from the depths of the archives and then beautifully uses it to portray the epochal societal changes going on in an entire society at a special moment in the British culture encounter with India, before the prejudices of a ruling class began to assert themselves. It is a beautiful and evocative work of history, but it is written like a thrilling novel.
• Who is your favorite author?
- Difficult to say. Dalrymple, of course. I like the early Naipaul, with his razor sharp observations and caustic comments though his later writings put me off because of his views on Islam; at some point in his life, Sir Vidya “had an intellectual accident”, as Edward Said put it so well.
I like authors who try to understand a society, genuinely try to get inside them and use the stories they find to talk of bigger ideas.
• Infibeam is promoting your book at the national and international level. What are your thoughts on online retailers taking up such initiatives?
- I am delighted and grateful. The internet has changed the face of publishing and it a different ballgame now. It’s all about innovating and hope it’s worthwhile for Infibeam.
• Why did you become a journalist?
- Because it allowed me to ask any question of anybody. It is one of the best jobs in the world. I have since moved into academia, which allows me to explore the questions I am interested in more deeply, and international public policy, which allows me to contribute to big issues in a tangible way. I still write a weekly column for Mumbai Mirror though, which keeps me on my toes and in touch with my journalistic roots.
• What is your next project?
- I have just finished editing a book on fifty years of the politics and cultural change in Gujarat, which is coming out later this year. I have also been working for the past two years on a new book on society and politics in ancient India – this is completely new territory for me and I am absolutely riveted. But we have just had a son two weeks ago and everything is on standby for the moment because he is absolutely my first priority.
• Any message for the upcoming journalists/readers?
- Don’t compete with anyone, just with yourself. Put in your best and things will happen. If you love what you do, it never feels like work.
We at Infibeam.com thank Nalin Mehta, for this very insightful interview and wish him the very best in all his future endeavors.
We had the privilege of getting in touch with Nalin Mehta who shared his insights on books, his stint as a journalist and social historian, in an exclusive interview with us.
• What inspired you to write this book? Tell us about Sellotape Legacy…
- Delhi is my city and I wanted to know what they are doing to it, why it has all been dug up and what the real story is.
Sometime around the Beijing Olympics, Boria and I were driving in an auto one day and talking about the Games when the auto driver got really angry, shouting how it was all a sham and how all this money was being spent for just 12 days. His passion really jolted us into thinking about the real meaning of these Games.
Delhi became a different place after the Asian Games and it will be a different place now. We wanted to chart this historical moment, with all its successes and failures.
• How was it working with Boria on this book? Share your experience while writing/researching for this book?
- We are great friends and that made this great fun. We trust each other’s instincts, share the same passion, complement each other’s strengths and know our weaknesses. Because we are such close friends, we never had to go through the usual bane of most co-authors: negotiating the tricky terrain of territorialism and personal egos.
We first got together for Olympics: The India Story. It was the first genuine scholarly history of Indian Olympism. After doing that book, it was a natural step to look at India’s greatest sporting event ever and what it means in its entirety.
It was quite a challenge to research this book. There’s no ready archive. We had to create our own archive, read pages of primary material—we have read almost 30 years of the sports pages of Toronto Star for example to understand the origin of the Games, trawled through Parliamentary archives and government reports. There are many wow moments and in particular, I remember getting goose-bumps when I saw in the records that the actual total cost was up to 70, 000 crores, 114 times the original estimate.
• What are the responses by your initial readers?
- It has been fantastic. We have had a lot of people telling us that they are happy to see an account that documents the entire saga of the politics of these Games and give some long-term perspective to the scandal-a-day daily marathon on television that they have now become. Equally, stepping away from the din of Delhi, we treasure the comments by a lot of people who read the later chapters on the origins of the Commonwealth, the genesis of the Games – originally as the British Empire Games -- and said that it really made them think on the larger meaning of the Commonwealth itself, why India joined it, and how it has evolved as a political animal since.
• Why aren’t Delhiites showing any enthusiasm towards CWG?
- They were never involved in any community decision-making. It has always been like something imposed from above. This is why the residents of the Siri Fort area, for example, went to court when trees were felled on a large scale in their area for the basketball and squash complex there. Sure, the Delhi government has always seen the Games as a vehicle to accelerate development in the city and this was an important sub-text in Sheila Dixit’s last election victory but at the ground level, at individual sites, there was very little community consultation and things like the volunteer programme which were meant to enthuse people never really took off, till the very last moment.
• Only 28 days to go! In your view are we ready for CWG & will it be a moderate success atleast?
- That depends on how you define success. As we have argued in the book the Games could surely have played a part in securing for India a place in the list of nations, which have played host to mega events. It is a well established strategy—use sport to uplift a nation’s position in the world, like South Africa just did for the soccer World Cup and China did with the Beijing Games. Given the state of affairs prevalent in Delhi, India will need a miracle to achieve this goal. Right now, the Games have become a symbol of all that is wrong with India, and not the India we wanted to project.
• The focus has shifted from the players & preparations to our organizers, corruption scandals, missing deadlines & unfinished venues. What costs will our sporting fraternity pay for not utilizing this opportunity?
- CWG 2010 could possibly have been the vehicle for creating a truly national sporting culture. That’s almost impossible now. And that’s why we feel the pinch even more. It is time we spare a thought for our athletes. Except for the handful of stars who have made the grade in terms of sponsorship, the majority of India’s athletes have looked at the Commonwealth Games for years now as their moment under the sun. They have prepared under adverse conditions, strived day in and out to stand up for the country and trained with little incentives on offer.
Our sportspeople deserve much more. The Games were India’s final crack at having some kind of a sporting culture, failing which the sordid tale of Indian sport will face the desperate need for an epitaph.
• Why and where are we lacking in comparison to other organizers around the world?
- Delhi got off the starting blocks rather late. Beijing 2008 and London 2012, for instance, followed a seven-year time cycle: two years for planning and approvals, four years for construction and development and the last year for test events and trial runs. In Delhi’s case, the first few years were utterly wasted. The bid document had four phases: 2004-2006 for planning, 2006-2008 for creating, 2008-2010 for delivering and 2010-2011 for concluding. None of this was translated into action until at least late-2006. Part of the problem was the serious lack of expertise within the OC for organising an event of this magnitude. There were at least 21 different government agencies involved and though a Core Group of Ministers coordinated the work, it was a bureaucratic quagmire. One gets the overwhelming impression that the entire impetus lacked a strong centre of the kind that Rajiv Gandhi gave to the 1982 Games.
• Do you think one successful major event can change India’s sporting future & we might see many more Leander Paes, Saina Nehwal, Abhinav Bindra? And if it fails then what else do we need to do?
- No. The Asian Games of 1982 were successful but did not lead to a major sport resurgence. What such events can do is create a buzz, bring sport into the limelight and fire people’s imaginations. They can be catalysts if they are accompanied with a serious plan to inculcate sport at the grassroots, not by themselves alone. The Chinese did not reach the top of the medals table at Beijing just because they hosted the Games. It was the result of decades of planning, money and a brutal hard-nosed national sporting plan.
As we point out in the book, budgets for inculcating sport at the grassroots consistently shrank as money flew like water in Delhi. How can you achieve anything like this? We need a concerted national effort on sport, especially focused on rural India. This must be in tandem with innovative public-private partnerships of the kind that some of the Bhiwani boxers benefitted from. Otherwise, we can keep wringing our hands every four years.
• Why is the Indian Media, especially electronic media portraying so much negative coverage? It might be hampering our country’s image. What is your take on the same?
- The media is only reporting the story. It is doing its job and is a mirror to the larger disappointment felt by the average Indian. The Games effort has turned into a national humiliation and the media is reflecting that. Of course, we can do without some of the over-top sensationalism and the media should also ask itself that why did it wake up to the story only now. The Games effort has been a scandal for years. If we had reporting like this three years ago, then at least something could have been done to fix the problems. Now we are only trying to put sellotape on the cracks.
• What is your personal view on the recent controversy of CWG corruption and the role of Mr. Suresh Kalmadi as chief of CWG?
- There’s no doubt that there was a systemic failure. There is no smoke without a fire and as Chairman Mr. Kalmadi has to take the blame. There are serious problems and I am very glad that some of it is now coming out. If you remember the OC had refused to be accountable under the RTI Act, and was forced to do so by the court. You can`t take public money and then act like a feudal, opaque organization.
• What is your take on recent parlance of the cricket spot fixing scam? Can we still call it a gentleman’s game?
- The worst thing about it is that we are not even surprised any more. At least, last time, when the Hansie Cronje scandal broke, there was genuine shock across the cricket world. No game can survive if people lose faith in it.
Also, the idea of a gentleman’s game was always part of cricket’s self-image but it never really was like that. This is a romanticized notion. The kind of money and greed that we are now seeing is new and is corrupting the very edifice of the game. This scandal calls for some very drastic measures and a reappraisal of the priorities that are shaping the structure of the global game.
• Do you think all the sports federations in India should follow the path followed by cricket boards to market themselves?
- The boxers did well at Beijing without following the cricket example. Indian hockey did well till the 70s, without any corporate structure. There are many other ways to do things. What we need is innovative ideas and passion.
• Name few of your favorite books? Closest book to your heart?
- It has to be William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. He finds a forgotten love story from the depths of the archives and then beautifully uses it to portray the epochal societal changes going on in an entire society at a special moment in the British culture encounter with India, before the prejudices of a ruling class began to assert themselves. It is a beautiful and evocative work of history, but it is written like a thrilling novel.
• Who is your favorite author?
- Difficult to say. Dalrymple, of course. I like the early Naipaul, with his razor sharp observations and caustic comments though his later writings put me off because of his views on Islam; at some point in his life, Sir Vidya “had an intellectual accident”, as Edward Said put it so well.
I like authors who try to understand a society, genuinely try to get inside them and use the stories they find to talk of bigger ideas.
• Infibeam is promoting your book at the national and international level. What are your thoughts on online retailers taking up such initiatives?
- I am delighted and grateful. The internet has changed the face of publishing and it a different ballgame now. It’s all about innovating and hope it’s worthwhile for Infibeam.
• Why did you become a journalist?
- Because it allowed me to ask any question of anybody. It is one of the best jobs in the world. I have since moved into academia, which allows me to explore the questions I am interested in more deeply, and international public policy, which allows me to contribute to big issues in a tangible way. I still write a weekly column for Mumbai Mirror though, which keeps me on my toes and in touch with my journalistic roots.
• What is your next project?
- I have just finished editing a book on fifty years of the politics and cultural change in Gujarat, which is coming out later this year. I have also been working for the past two years on a new book on society and politics in ancient India – this is completely new territory for me and I am absolutely riveted. But we have just had a son two weeks ago and everything is on standby for the moment because he is absolutely my first priority.
• Any message for the upcoming journalists/readers?
- Don’t compete with anyone, just with yourself. Put in your best and things will happen. If you love what you do, it never feels like work.
We at Infibeam.com thank Nalin Mehta, for this very insightful interview and wish him the very best in all his future endeavors.
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