The Descent of Air India by Jitender Bhargava; Bloomsbury India; Price: Rs.499; 243 pp

Right until the mid-1980s, Air India was universally acknowledged as one of the world’s top 10 airlines and unquestionably the best national carrier of the developing nations of the post-colonial order. Today it is a byword for unreliability, unpunctuality, indifferent if not rude ground and in-flight service, and disregard of elementary safety norms with very few to do it reverence. By penning The Descent of Air India which exposes the reckless neglect and downright plunder of this once prized national asset, instead of quietly fading into the sunset as is normative among public sector enterprise (PSE) managers, Jitender Bhargava, former director of public relations and communications of Air India, has rendered a valuable public service. Perhaps unwittingly, he has revealed all that’s wrong with India’s PSEs which as per the official policy of the disgraced Congress party, “dominate the commanding heights of the Indian economy”.

It is pertinent to recall that Air India International was promoted in 1948 by JRD Tata (1904-1993), chairman of the business house of Tata, then as now, the country’s most respected business conglomerate. But newly independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — a muddled Fabian socialist who ignored the subcontinent’s 5,000- years-old mercantile history and led the nation down the socialist state trading road — nationalised the airline. However, it must be said to his credit that Nehru and his daughter prime minister Indira Gandhi retained JRD Tata as chairman of Air India and substantially respected the autonomy of the airline.

Ironically, the rot began under the Janata government headed by pro-business prime minister Morarji Desai, after it spectacularly ousted Mrs. Gandhi from power in the post-Emergency election of 1977. The following year Desai sacked Tata and appointed Air Marshal P.C. Lal as chairman of Air India. At the time your reviewer was editor of Business India and wrote the first in-depth civil aviation feature on Air India.

Bhargava’s insider account of the descent of Air India into nepotism, debt, institutional corruption and unaccountability begins in 1989 when after serving with Crompton Greaves, Good Year India, and the public sector Coal India Ltd, he responded to an Air India ad for a chief public relations manager, and was selected for the “job that inspired such awe”. Although he expected to step into an organisation which “represented the future of India and was regarded as one of the best companies in the country,” Bhargava was soon disabused of his great expectations. At the time, the managing director and chief executive of the airline was Rajan Jetley, who was mysteriously given plenipotentiary powers by prime minister Rajiv Gandhi notwithstanding his disastrous decision in his previous posting as CEO of the public sector India Tourism Development Corporation, to paint Delhi’s iconic sandstone Ashoka Hotel a pedestrian white.

True to form, jetley unilaterally undertook “a massive corporate identity change exercise for the airline” to reinvent “the logo, aircraft ambience, design of the aircraft exterior, offices and sales outlets” for which purpose he engaged a San Francisco-based brand consulting firm, Landor Associates. The entire exercise which cost an unspecified fortune, was “an unmitigated disaster”. Jetley quit Air India and relocated to Singapore where he has reportedly prospered and the entire makeover had to be rolled back.

For the author, it was a baptism by fire into the realities of the national airline. With the passage of time, Bhargava noted that far from serving the national interest, Air India was a seething inferno of discontent with every operational department — engineering, ground staff, in-flight attendants, pilots and middle and higher management intent upon serving their sectional rather than the organisational interest.

Curiously, although one of the major objectives of nationalising Air India was to improve and safeguard employees’ wages and working conditions, it hosts over a dozen workers’ unions and Bhargava who served a stint in personnel, cites numerous instances of how selfish, myopic union leaders representing pilots, engineers and in-flight crew repeatedly held the management to ransom, often grounding flights until their demands were met, thus contributing heavily to ruining the reputation of the airline.

The general belief of the airline’s employees from top to bottom is that Air India will be bailed out by the Union government no matter how badly it performs, for reasons of national prestige. This assumption has evidently permeated the Union ministry of civil aviation as well. How else can one explain that in 2005 the airline’s board which had averaged the induction of two new aircraft per year for half a century decided to induct 50 wide-bodied aircraft valued at Rs.33,197 crore, when the company had already started making heavy losses because of increased competition, and suspiciously liberal grants of bilateral air traffic rights to foreign airlines?

In a departure from usual practice, Bhargava doesn’t stop short of dropping names. For the descent of Air India into the sorry mess it is in today, Bhargava especially blames Praful Patel, Union civil aviation minister from 2004-2010, and his handpicked chairman V. Thulasidas — an obscure bureaucrat with no previous aviation expertise. Together they controlled the airline and recklessly took the patently contradictory decisions to augment the fleet and liberalise the grant of air traffic rights without drawing up any worthwhile revival plan for Air India.

Today Air India which was finally merged with Indian Airlines in 2007 — an alliance which has “caused irreparable harm to Air India”, according to Bhargava — is Rs.78,000 crore in the red and commands less than 20 percent of the domestic and outbound traffic. With its 30,000 restive employees constituting the highest employees-fleet strength ratio worldwide, Air India cannot be kept aloft without massive capital infusion and periodic loans from the national exchequer.

Despite its one major flaw — the omission of a back-of-the-book subject index which makes the job of scholars and reviewers very difficult — this memoir is a must-read morality tale about all that’s wrong with India’s PSEs in which citizens’ savings valued at over Rs.1,000 million crore are being recklessly squandered by corrupt politicians and incompetent clerks masquerading as business managers.

Dilip Thakore

Hasty compilation

Agnostic Khushwant: There is no God by Khushwant Singh with Ashok Chopra; Hay House India; Price: Rs.299; 246 pp

Now 98 years of age and in the deep winter of his eventful life, Khushwant Singh (KS) is popularly acclaimed as one of India’s most successful columnists/writers. But you might be tempted to alter your opinion of him on reading this book — that he ought to stick to subjects he is reputed to know best: wine, women and ribald jokes.

Agnostic Khushwant is a collection of random essays on religious issues written over the years and hurriedly put together under a single cover. Contrary to the impression the book’s title conveys, this compilation isn’t a well-argued case for agnosticism. In fact, at times it’s difficult to discern Khushwant’s core argument because some of the essays — indeed the title — contradict each other. Surprisingly, Khushwant doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference between agnosticism and atheism, which he uses interchangeably. Then again, while effectively consigning religious scriptures to history, he devotes more than half of this book to discussing what he perceives to be the literary merits of scriptural texts. As a result, the reader is likely to discover that the book doesn’t quite do justice to its provocative title.

Never short on scepticism, KS passionately exposes the hypocrisy, fear, and corruption associated with religiosity — widespread belief in the power of rituals; sacrifices and pilgrimages undertaken as penitence for sins; and the ugly cult of god men claiming miraculous powers. Pained by horrors commonly associated with lived religion, Singh insists that humanity has two choices: to give a “totally modern reorientation to religion or scrap it altogether”.

The essay titled ‘The need for a new religion — without a God’ reveals Khushwant at his best. Here KS reflects upon his long association with, and ambivalent feelings towards religion, which he says, led him to evolve a “personal religion” shorn of what he regards as the problematic assumptions and dogma of conventional religions. In keeping with the tradition of atheism, Singh doesn’t believe in God or other such unseen beings or forces, but concedes that most people need a spiritual anchor to keep them alive and sane. Traditional religions, he contends, have utterly failed humankind, and hence the need for a new religion, which he proceeds to invent.

What KS describes as his personal religion avoids the “pitfalls of outworn creeds”, and is imperative for “those who have the courage to think for themselves”. Singh’s ideal religion would radically alter the place and role of scriptures in popular religion. The scriptures are unscientific, repetitious, and boring, he argues. He also claims that they lack literary merit. If so, why does he devote more than half this book to an appreciation of what he considers their artistic merit and positive ethical concerns? Moreover, he contends that moral exhortations in religious texts may serve the useful purpose of ensuring social stability. He suggests that in future the scriptures be treated simply as history texts and cease to be the subject matter of prayer and rituals. Even if you take your scriptures seriously, you won’t deny there is merit in Singh’s contention that they needed to be understood rather than simply recited in parrot-like fashion as is often the case.

True to irreverent form, in Khushwant’s scheme of things, there’s no room for the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation. Even criminals engage in all sorts of elaborate rituals and prayers, he says, claiming they are not necessary for moral improvement or ethical advancement. While there is some substance in this assertion, his impatience with religion (other than the one he has invented) blinds him to alternate possibilities and meaning of devotional practice, other than importuning and flattering supernatural beings. Of worship as a means to express gratitude, love, compassion and concern for the whole cosmos and adoration of the mystery behind existence, Singh seems to know or understand nothing. His self-development outlook seems firmly grounded in crass materialism. In a desperately poor country like India, working to improve the condition of the socio-economically deprived is true worship, argues KS.

Shorn of all beliefs that cannot be confirmed by reason and justified by universally acceptable morality, religion, contends KS, must be refashioned simply into a sensible and ethical way of living. “A good life is the only religion,” he intones, a conclusion with which even his bitter critics are unlikely to disagree.

The problem however, is how a “good life” is defined. Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of it. Singh’s isn’t the only one, and nor is it anywhere near the best.

Yoginder Sikand