launching his first book, set in a post Pol Pot Cambodia, MP Joseph, a banker turned IPS turned UN delegate, reveals how the people touched him to the core. Team Viva reports
The first day he landed in Cambodia on a UN assignment, MP Joseph was pre-conditioned to think about locals as an alien entity. A few conversations later, he was converted. For he was drawn by their innocence, ancient anchorage and a sense of Indianness. And their innate ability to negotiate any challenges, inevitably thrown up by the transit from a communist system to a liberal, open market regime. So much so that by the end of his stint, he thought about writing a book, My Driver Tulong and other Tall Tales.
“I was posted in Cambodia on the United Nation’s official business at a time when the internet was not so prevalent. It was only after I spent some time in Cambodia that I started realising the beauty of its simplicity, the culture, the colonial air, the Hindu and Buddhist shared heritage and the unputdownable will of a people to survive the odds. That’s when I told myself that I had to write a book about these people who are so like us and with whom we have been historically connected. India, along with Vietnam, were the first two countries to engage with Cambodia. We could have built a bridge as the base was already set by our cultural and religious linkages. Now it is swamped by everything Chinese, who are aggressively pushing economic and cultural diplomacy in the region. We should have reclaimed our ties much earlier,” he told us.
According to him, writing a book about a place is like leaving behind your legacy, encoding your genes in it. “What is funny about this business is that for the time period when you are writing, one can act like God and kill or resurrect any character. One can show through those characters what Cambodia really is, make readers understand its essence. In order to achieve such a feat though, I have used the simplest of language with tools of humour and fiction,” Joseph said.
My Driver Tulong... was a product of ten years of hard work and effort. The biggest challenge that the author faced during its conception was to create the characters who would explain Cambodia in its innateness. Each character is a personification of 20-30 people and requires a high level of creativity. “A bureaucrat is hardly ever creative,” he countered but he tried.
The key concept of this book, which sets it apart from other travel narratives, is that the author has focussed on the beauty of Cambodia in its utter nakedness and rawness instead of focussing on the historical excesses of politics, be it the holocaust or the killings. Joseph hopes this book will cater to the 19-30 English-speaking young Indians and enrich the roots of our culture.
He feels budding writers should not give up on writing even if it seems to be tedious. “Writing requires patience, an ample amount of time and devotion. The biggest challenge is to negotiate the thousand other thoughts that come into play when you are writing. You have to train yourself to not get easily diverted from your ultimate goal,” said Joseph.
He drew a big lesson from the Cambodians’ will to excel in their land. “What we need to understand is that the place where Indians are needed the most is India itself. We can learn from the Cambodian example that even after so much hardship, how beautifully they have preserved their tradition and are at the same time marching forward with a modern outlook.”
With India taking great pride in its soft power, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said this alone can only go so far, and the real art lies in combining both the powers hard and soft effectively, something that the “Chinese are doing better.”
Speaking at the launch, Tharoor said, “Hard power without soft power is bullying but then soft power alone at the end of the day is a weak force. However, if you can combine both the powers effectively then you have that self vigour, and this is where the Chinese are doing a better job at the moment.”
Referring to Cambodia, Sri lanka and neighbouring countries, Tharoor argued that India should think of offering something different to these nations, because if it is about pumping in resources then “Indian investment cannot quite compare to the large investible surplus of China.” Tharoor said India faces “serious challenges” in the country as unfortunately some of the well-intentioned acts also didn’t go according to the plan.
“We contributed a team to Cambodia for restoring parts of the Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world, but were subsequently accused of having done such a bad job that we ended up damaging it. There is the Archaeological Survey of India doing one area and then year after French Archaeological Survey is there to do another area and they disparagingly say the Indians messed up the first one. Now, we do not know whether it is real or racism. But, the fact is that some of that is still lingering.” Joseph’s book on everyday life may just better mutual understanding somewhat.