Manju Gupta?
Here is the first complete and independent biography of Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate, a credible and electable leader who can deny President Barack Obama a second term in White House.
This book has been written by the staff of The Boston Globe with inputs from several other Globe staffers who have kept a track of Romney’s life and career over the decades as a Governor; his push for state health care reforms; his years as leveraged buyout specialist; his missionary years and many of his other multifarious activities.
This is the story of a man whose journey to national political fame is at once remarkable and thoroughly unsurprising. Though a few generations ago it would have been unthinkable but today, many people whose lives intersected with his over the past seven decades, feel that the man might just be the President of the USA one day. This is the story of a man guided by his faith and firmly grounded in family. This is the story of a once marginal and feared religion Mormonism, a brand of Christianity homemade in America that he and his forebears helped move to the mainstream. This is the story of the counter-productive movement of the 1960s and the generally square young man, who found it appalling. This is the story of the wildly lucrative world of private equity and leveraged buyouts, a world largely opaque to outsiders in which wealth is built and concentrated in novel ways, sometimes at others’ expense. This is the story of an uneasy relationship between conviction and vaulting ambitions and how political dreams can die when tactics outrun beliefs; and this is the story, of course, of a father and son, that is, George and Mitt Romney and the ways in which their lives aligned and diverged.
Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947 to Lenore and George Romney, the last named having made a presidential bid in 1968 in which he had to bow out of the race that Richard Nixon would go on to win. George Romney had risen from the dusty exile in Mexico to reach the gleaming boardrooms of business and policies in Detroit.
Due to his father’s desire and hard work, Mitt Romney grew up differently from the Romneys before him. He enjoyed a largely privileged childhood studying in private schools and wide suburban streets as a product of a close-knit Mormon family that had gradually found acceptance in the American society. When graduation arrived, Mitt Romney found a girl called Ann Davies who was from a Protestant family and not a Mormon. He had to wait for two-and-a-half years before he could marry her as he had to go to France on missionary work for the Mormon Church. When he returned, he married Ann and they have five sons today.
From early childhood Mitt Romney formed his views through observation and analysis, by hanging back as the world unfolded before him. He watched his three siblings grow up before him. He observed his parents build a life of family and faith that he would endeavour to follow. He saw his father win three elections as Governor of Michigan before losing a bid for presidentship. He gained critical insights from the highs and lows alike that he saw his parents go through.
In a career marked with exceptional intelligence and analytical skills honed in one of the nation’s elite graduate programmes, Mitt Romney grew up to study and dissect companies around the world, eventually trading on his data mining to score incredibly sweet investment returns. When he did make pioneering breakthroughs, whether expanding the boundaries of private equity or enacting a novel universal health care programme as Governor of Massachusetts, he followed a trusty formula: pursue data aggressively, analyse rigorously, test constantly and observe always. Having grown up around engines, Mitt adopted a kind of car hobbyist’s mind-set. Almost anything, he believed, could be taken apart, studied and re-engineered. In his passage through life, he saw millions of dollars that one could make in selling paper clips.
He led an unsuccessful campaign in 2008 but it thrust him to the forefront of national politics, while exposing a tendency to assume whatever political profile he thought would best help him win. To this day he is said to remain an enigmatic presence to people outside his very close circle. Many see in him as a centrist or a conservative, an economic wizard or a rapacious capitalist, an adaptable leader or a calculating politician who will do anything to get elected.
In his political campaigns he uses some of his favourite terms, like strong versus weak, stagnation versus prosperity, leadership versus drift. And as he rails against Democrats and their liberal policies, his core message is desperately simple, “I know how business works. I know why jobs come, why they go.” He valiantly admits, “And it’s a great honour to represent a state or to represent the nation.” The authors say that after a few closing flourishes in his campaigns, “he’s done. He’s made his case.” After a few handshakes and grins, he makes his way through the media crush that surrounds him, forming a bubble of cameras, microphones, tape recorders and notebooks. Mitt Romney is right at the centre, “where he loves to be, with a challenge ahead, a problem to solve, eager to complete one last turnaround and close his biggest deal yet.”
Whether the protagonist becomes the President of USA or not, the book is worth reading.
(HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY-10022; www.harpercollins.com)?
Manju Gupta?
While winds of change are blowing over Myanmar (erstwhile Burma) with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi by the military junta, this biography comes at a very opportune moment when she is expected to play a leading role in the country’s politics as a rising star, who turns 66 this summer in a life in which she has spent 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest. She tells the author of the book, “The military gave me some years of rest, so now I’m full of energy to continue my work.”
The Nobel Prize laureate and democratic icon has survived all these years of isolation by embracing it as revealed by her words, “I have always felt free. When my lawyers came to see me during the house arrest, I was perfectly free to talk about anything I wanted.” She describes her freedom now as having two aspects: “The first is your own state of mind. If you feel free, you are free. I think sometimes if you are alone, your time is your own and therefore you are more free. The other one is the environmental aspect. Is your environment free? And mine is certainly not because I don’t think Burma is really a free country.”
The last time she was set free for almost two years was in 2002-03 to continue her political work, when her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) organised a number of tours in the country where she gave speeches. On the streets of Rangoon, she is called ‘The Lady’. Her symbolic, almost iconic, significance stretches far beyond the borders of Myanmar.
She was imprisoned for the first time in 1989, a few months after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Soviet communism. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her struggle for democracy and human rights. She married an Englishman named Michael Aris and her two sons Alexander and Kim, 16 ad 12 years of age when she was under arrest, were allowed to visit her intermittently for brief periods but during her house arrest of seven years, not at all. Her husband Michael died of cancer in 1999 without being able to meet her that one last time.
Aung San Suu Kyi was several times offered the opportunity to leave her country but she steadfastly refused considering the fact that she would not be allowed to return ever by the junta in power. A life in exile would have meant abandonment of her people.
A considerable part of the book is devoted to her father Aung San’s life and his political ambitions. He is murdered and his wife Khin Kyi faces the loss stoically and also the death of her eight-year old son, whom Aung San Suu Kyi also loved a lot and played with him during her life as a child. She is sent to study in Convent of Jesus and Mary in 1960 in Delhi and after 18 months, she joins Lady Sri Ram College before proceeding to Oxford University where she meets her future husband, Michael Aris. She even goes to USA and works in the UN, before returning to Burma with her husband Michael in January 1972. She plunges into politics to voice her protests against the highhandedness of the military rulers, as a result of which she is put under house arrest and it is only in November 2010 that she is released.
She meets her younger son Kim after more than 10 years and her words touch a sensitive chord when she tells a journalist, “The greatest sacrifice as a mother was to do without my sons, but I knew that there were those who had to make even greater sacrifices.” She speaks of her sorrow at not being able to spend “those years in my children’s lives. I would much rather have shared a life with them.”
(Amaryllis, J-39, Ground Floor, Jor Bagh Lane, New Delhi-110 003; www.amaryllis.co.in)
Manju Gupta?
Vijaya Bharatham Pathippagam tries to show that Swami Vivekananda’s thought and vision unfolded and manifested in the ideology and mission of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Divided into two sections, the first section presents short life-sketches of Swami Vivekananda, Dr Hedgewar, Guru Golwalkar and Swami Chidbhavananda along their statements regarding national regeneration while providing a glimpse of the activities of the RSS. The second section is a collection of extracts from their speeches, expounding their thoughts on India, the Hindu nation and its regeneration.
Suryanarayana Rao quotes profusely from the book titled Swami Vivekananda: Patriot Prophet written by the latter’s brother wherein he describes Vivekananda not only as an ideal sanyasin but also as a revolutionary patriot who undertook a tour of the country and even meditated on the mid-sea rock at Kanyakumari to gauge how keen his countrymen were in working towards seeking liberation from the British imperialists and came to the conclusion that they were wanting in it.
Dr Hedgewar, a product of the national renaissance movement, initiated and guided by Swami Vivekananda, worked towards organising the Hindu society as one unit to play its role as the bedrock of nationalism. He built the RSS, keeping himself away from day to day political activities. He later selected Guru Golwalkar to fulfil the task he had laid the foundation of. Initially Guruji’s spiritual quest leads him to the abode of Swami Akhandananda who is the president of the Ramakrishna Mission and later with the latter’s blessings, Guruji joins Dr Hedgewar and comes to be anointed as Sarsanghachalak of the RSS. Guruji relentlessly endeavours, guides and inspires the Swayamsevaks of the RSS to carry out the ideology of the organisation as enunciated by Dr Hedgewar. He is said to have admitted to the editor of a newspaper in Nagpur, “After experience, I have realised that what I am doing in the Sangh is in consonance with Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy, guidance and method of work…I believe by doing the Sangh work, I shall be carrying out only Swamiji’s work.”
The attempt of the compilation is to bring out the convergence of views between Swami Vivekananda who unfolds the vision of man-making and character-building and Dr Hedgewar, founder of the RSS who chooses Guru Golwalkar to carry on the work of the RSS after him. A brilliant effort, a must read for all nationalist social activists. Also a must on your bookshelves.
(Vijaya Bharatham Bharatham Pathippagam, 12 MV Naidu Street, Chetpet, Chennai 600 031)
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