Why this book should be read by all IFS officers

Pakistan is little understood by Indians; indeed, more often than not misunderstood, it yet manages to remain ubiquitous in their lives.

Veteran journalist Kesava Menon offers a unique and personal perspective on a terminally hostile neighbour that lurches from one crisis to another. A nation that beats the odds despite unremitting doomsday pundits. And not just in cricket! Obviously they do something right and much as India may wish this intractable enemy away, Pakistan is apparently here to stay. And, even if, by a miracle, there is a regime change and liberals prevail there, the relationship is likely to continue to be complicated.

Menon’s style is lucid, flowing, and laced with humour, the tone self-deprecating. The narrative seldom stutters. This slim book Never Tell Them We Are The Same People: Notes on Pakistan, replete with interesting facts and rich in anecdotes, engages with ordinary folks as well as high ranking individuals. The author’s disarming style of interaction with a wide swathe of people, teases out for us, insights that a diplomat or a Pakistan-watcher sitting in a TV studio cannot. The very first chapter, A Boar for Breakfast sets the pace and one cannot but be drawn in, from then on. Indeed, some parts of the book reads like a thriller, almost in the mould of John le Carre’ genre of spy fiction. Menon’s providential escape from the precincts of Mohenjo-Daro in rural Sindh has more than a touch of ‘Smiley’s people’. His understandable apprehensions about ‘watchers’ on his tail are palpable as he wings his way out of trouble.

Some of Menon's unique usages like the ‘wardrobe of identities’ and play on that old classic ‘Que sera sera’ reveal the deft touch of a writer who can delight, inform and offer insights that only a beat reporter can (thanks to his early training of field reporting, searching out for primary sources when chasing stories). His imaginary musings as he stands in a bathhouse of antiquity in Mohenjo-Daro (literally, the Mount of the Dead) are evocative and then when he suddenly breaks that reverie by castigating the old gardener-cum-guide who goes anal in his description of sanitation and fecal disposal in the dead city read like passages out a Henry Miller book. That Mohenjo-Daro and with its mysterious end, the relics of Indus Valley civilization, the oldest in the subcontinent, should lie in Pakistan, is an irony of many parts. Therein lies the conflicted and combative relationship between the two nation states which was once British India.

Ravi Menon is a Dubai based writer working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks