A New Start

FT, Economist etc: Celebrated Indian field marshal with a razor-sharp wit

Manekshaw himself once remarked on the fine line between being a field marshal and being fired. Yet his approach never wavered. "A yes man is a dangerous man," he once said. "He will be despised by his subordinates and used by his superiors."

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Celebrated Indian field marshal with a razor-sharp wit

By Stephen Fidler

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

It was February 1942 on the Sittang River in Burma. Sam Manekshaw had already lost half his men as they fought to take Pagoda Hill from the Japanese invaders. He rallied what was left of his company, urging them to continue the advance.

Then, just as they captured the hill, a burst of machinegun fire hit Manekshaw in the stomach. As he lay there he was spotted by Major General David Cowan, who had seen the young captain's bravery but feared his wounds might be mortal. Kneeling beside him, Cowan took off his own Military Cross ribbon and pinned it on Manekshaw's chest, saying: "A dead man cannot be awarded the Military Cross."

[from The Economist: Another story has it that a surgeon was going to give up on his bullet-riddled body, until he asked him what had happened and got the reply, "I was kicked by a donkey." A joker at such a time, the surgeon reckoned, had a chance.]

The general was wrong to doubt the officer's powers of survival but right about his valour. The courage of Sam Manekshaw, who has died a field marshal at the age of 94, was to help make him one of India's most successful military leaders. His seminal victory over Pakistan's forces in 1971 led to the creation of Bangladesh and turned Manekshaw into a national hero. One biographer described him as having "charm and persistence, an irreverence towards red tape, an iron determination, an eye for details plus a strategic mind that embraced all". He also had a razor-sharp wit.

A man with an eye for the ladies, his relationship with one lady in particular, Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister during the 1971 war, defined his career. When she asked him before the conflict if he was prepared, he replied: "I'm always ready, sweetie." Unlike politicians and top bureaucrats, he refused to call her madam, saying it was a term "better suited to a brothel keeper".

He was one of those men whose personality leaps out of his photograph. There is one of him sitting at a military parade in 2004. He is 90 and his back is not as straight as it was, but his eyes look directly at the camera and, beneath the military moustache, there is the hint of a smile. His left breast is bedecked with medals, his feet with shiny black brogues and he holds an elaborately carved swagger stick in his right hand. Manekshaw was fastidious about his appearance but his uniform, typically, did not conform to regulation.

For a man to become a myth in his own lifetime, it helps to live for a long time, not least because many of his rivals will not. It helps if he fosters a reputation for straight talking and to have a sense of humour - not least about himself. Yet Manekshaw never seemed to be consciously managing his own image.

Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw was born in 1914 in the age of the Raj. His parents were members of the Parsi community - Zoroastrians who immigrated from Persia 1,000 years ago and who have occupied some of the highest positions in modern India in the military, the law, the arts and business.

The young Sam grew up in Amritsar, capital of the Punjab, and attended the British-style boarding school, Sherwood College. He had wanted to study medicine but instead joined the first ever cohort of officer cadets to attend the new Indian Military College at Dehradun. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1934, he was for a time attached to Britain's Royal Scots regiment. In 1939 he married Siloo Bode, and the couple had two daughters.

During the second world war he served twice in Burma. Having recovered from his wounds at Pagoda Hill - the official citation for his MC said the success of the attack was "largely due to the excellent leadership and bearing of Captain Manekshaw" - he was sent back to Burma and was wounded a second time. At the end of the war, he showed his talent for planning and organisation first in rehabilitating 10,000 prisoners of war and then in the run-up to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

In 1971, it was the crisis between east and west Pakistan, created as two unconnected territories at the time of partition, that was to prove Manekshaw's finest moment. The rout of Pakistan's forces under his leadership was a strategic coup for New Delhi. It split east from west Pakistan and led to the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh. This meant that never again would India have to fight its rival on two fronts at the same time. The rapid victory erased memories of the humiliating defeat in a border conflict with the Chinese in 1962 and the stalemate of the 1965 war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

With millions of refugees pouring over the border, some of the politicians had wanted to go to war in April but the key to victory was to wait until December to engage with the Pakistanis. This ensured the monsoon season had passed and the plains of Bengal were drier. By then, too, snow in the Himalayas blocked off any prospect of Chinese intervention. It was Manekshaw who was credited with standing up to the impatient politicians and his resistance made him a hugely popular figure. Some have subsequently questioned his role. General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, chief of staff for India's eastern command in 1971, became the brunt of fierce criticism last year when he said it was he and not Manekshaw who had refused to attack in April. Moreover, he added that Manekshaw's military plan did not include taking Dhaka, the fall of which was essential to victory. Ramachandra Guha, a leading historian of modern India, has also claimed that the archives suggest that Manekshaw did not play that primary a role.

Whether a revision of Manekshaw's place in history will follow his death is uncertain. But his death is significant perhaps in other respects. It sym-bolises the passing of the generation of officers that served in both the British and Indian armies. Their legacy remains. "Indian generals still feel more comfortable with their British counterparts than with those from the US," says Professor Guha.

Manekshaw himself once remarked on the fine line between being a field marshal and being fired. Yet his approach never wavered. "A yes man is a dangerous man," he once said. "He will be despised by his subordinates and used by his superiors."

Stephen Fidler

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Sam Manekshaw

Jul 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

EPA

Sam Manekshaw, soldier, died on June 27th, aged 94

HIS most famous remark was not, strictly speaking, true. On the eve of the war with Pakistan in December 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, asked her army chief, Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, if he was ready for the fight. He replied with the gallantry, flirtatiousness and sheer cheek for which he was famous: "I am always ready, sweetie." (He said he could not bring himself to call Mrs Gandhi "Madame", because it reminded him of a bawdy-house.)

Yet General Manekshaw himself recounted a cabinet meeting in Mrs Gandhi's office in April 1971. To forestall secession, the Pakistani government had already cracked down in what was then East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had crossed the border into India. Mrs Gandhi wanted the army to invade Pakistan. General Manekshaw resisted. The monsoon, he pointed out, would soon start in East Pakistan, turning rivers into oceans. His armoured division and two infantry divisions were deployed elsewhere. To shift them would need the entire railway network, so the grain harvest could not be transported and would rot, bringing famine. And of his armoured division's 189 tanks, only 11 were fit to fight.

He was not, in other words, ready. But, as he put it, "There is a very thin line between being dismissed and becoming a field-marshal." Mrs Gandhi rejected the resignation he offered, and acceded to the delay he wanted. His job, he told her, was to fight to win. In December he did, cutting through the Pakistani army like a knife through butter, and taking Dhaka within two weeks. Quibblers later noted that this was not one of his original war aims. He had the most important attribute of any successful general: good luck.

That was not the only time he threatened to quit. Mrs Gandhi once questioned him about rumours that he was plotting a coup. In response, he asked if she wanted his resignation on grounds of mental instability. Yet if she and other politicians were in awe of him as a professional soldier and grateful for his lack of political ambition, his men loved him for his willingness to take on their civilian bosses and stand up for the army's interests.

He had shown this in the Indian army's darkest hour, the abject defeat in 1962 by China. Already a general, he had the previous year quarrelled with India's defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, about national security. He was vindicated when the Chinese army swatted aside Indian resistance and briefly occupied what is now the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Mr Menon resigned. General Manekshaw was rushed to the front to rally the demoralised troops. His first order was: "There will be no withdrawal without written orders and these orders shall never be issued."

General Manekshaw was able to demand courage from his soldiers because his own was not in doubt. Known as Sam "Bahadur", or Sam the Brave, an honorific given him by the Indian army's Gurkhas, the first of his five wars was for the British in Burma, where he was seriously wounded. Assuming he would die, an English general pinned his own Military Cross on Captain Manekshaw's chest, since the medal could not be awarded posthumously. Another story has it that a surgeon was going to give up on his bullet-riddled body, until he asked him what had happened and got the reply, "I was kicked by a donkey." A joker at such a time, the surgeon reckoned, had a chance.

Stiff but hairy

There was something of British military tradition in his stiff upper lip, the lavish handlebar moustache in which he cloaked it, the dapper little embellishments to his uniform and his partiality for Scotch whisky. Yet he was born into a very particular and tight-knit community: India' s small and dwindling Parsi minority, which has produced a disproportionate number of leading Indians, such as the members of the Tata and Godrej business dynasties. Sam Manekshaw was another Parsi overachiever. He was the first of only two field-marshals ever created in the army.

Yet his retirement since 1973 was not one long bask in glory. Former deputies felt he had monopolised the credit for various victories. Then last year his name was linked to bizarre allegations, by the son of a former Pakistani president, against an unnamed brigadier who had once sold Indian war plans to Pakistan. All nonsense, said those who knew him. Already in hospital, General Manekshaw was in part shielded from controversy.

After his death, anger at the slur, and at the lack of proper honour for one of India's true heroes, rumbled on. The prime minister, along with the army, navy, and air-force chiefs, all missed his funeral—which was a modest one held in Tamil Nadu in the south, not a grand one in the capital. His friends grumbled that even foreigners such as Lord Mountbatten were afforded greater respect in death. Bangladesh, however, paid grateful tribute to his part in the nation's foundation.

He too might well have been disappointed that his obsequies were not grander. His last words were "I'm OK", though he had rehearsed a better line nearly 37 years earlier. For death at least, the brave soldier had indeed shown himself "always ready".

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

http://www.india-today.com/itoday/millennium/100people/sam.html

BUILDERS & BREAKERS Prophet of Hate Sam Manekshaw By A S Kalkat
1914: Born in Amritsar. 1933: Joins the Indian Military Academy. 1934: Commissioned into the army. 1947: Pakistan invades Kashmir. Is colonel in charge of operations. 1962: Sent to NEFA to check further Chinese intrusion. 1965: Commander, Eastern Command during the Indo-Pak war. 1969: Appointed chief of the army staff. 1971: Indo-Pak war. Steers India to victory. and Bangladesh is created. 1973: Given the rank of Field Marshal.

In 1942 at the height of the World War II a fierce battle was raging in Myanmar, then Burma, at the Sittang Bridge. A company of the Indian Army was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the invading Japanese forces for the capture of a position, which was critical for the control of the bridge. The young company commander was exhorting his troops when his stomach was riddled by a machine gun burst. Afraid that his company would be left leaderless if he were evacuated, he continued fighting till he collapsed.

His company won the day and the general commanding the Indian forces arrived at the scene to congratulate the soldiers. On seeing the critically wounded commander, he announced the immediate award of the Military Cross -- the young officer was not expected to survive much longer and the Military Cross is not awarded posthumously. Thus began a historic military career that spanned the Indo-Pak wars and the Sino-Indian conflict, the wounded captain surviving to become India's first field marshal.

In 1947 when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, Sam Manekshaw was the colonel in charge of operations at the Army Headquarters. His incisive grasp of the situation and his acumen for planning instantly drew the attention of his superiors and Manekshaw's rise was spectacular, though not without controversy. He was outspoken and stood by his convictions. This, coupled with his sense of humour, often got him into trouble with politicians.

In 1961, for instance, he refused to toe the line of the then defence minister V.K. Krishna Menon and was sidelined. He was vindicated soon after when the Indian army suffered a humiliating defeat in nefa the next year, at the hands of the Chinese, resulting in Menon's resignation. Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru rushed Manekshaw to nefa to command the retreating Indian forces. This had an electrifying effect on the demoralised officers. In no time, Manekshaw convinced the troops that the Chinese soldier was not "10 ft tall". His first order of the day characteristically said, "There will be no withdrawal without written orders and these orders shall never be issued." The soldiers showed faith in their new commander and successfully checked further ingress by the Chinese.

The Indo-Pak war of 1965 saw Manekshaw as army commander, Eastern Command. When India was forced to launch operations in the west, Manekshaw was against attacking in the east since the main sufferers would be the people of East Pakistan. The wisdom of his advice dawned when the Indian forces fought the Pakistan army in East Pakistan in 1971.

This was Manekshaw's finest hour. As army chief and chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, he planned the operation meticulously refusing to be coerced by politicians to act prematurely. His strategic and operational finesse was evident when Indian pincers cut through Pakistani forces like knife through butter, quickly checkmating them.

When the prime minister asked him to go to Dhaka and accept the surrender of the Pakistani forces, he declined, magnanimously saying the honour should go to his army commander in the east. He would only go if it were to accept the surrender of the entire Pakistan Army.

Manekshaw's competence, professional standing and public stature was such that the politician and the bureaucrat alike crossed his path only at their peril. On one occasion, he found that the defence secretary had penned his own observations on a note he had written to the prime minister and defence minister. Infuriated, Manekshaw took the file and walked straight into Mrs Gandhi's office. He told her that if she found the defence secretary more competent than him to advise her on military matters she did not have a need for him. The defence secretary was found a new job.

As a commander, he was a hard taskmaster. He encouraged his officers in the face of adversity but did not tolerate incompetence. That is perhaps Manekshaw's greatest contribution, to instil a sense of duty, efficiency, professionalism in a modern Indian army and to stand up to political masters and bureaucratic interference.

In a way, he was following the path of other army chiefs, K.S. Thimayya K.M. Cariappa. A holy terror, there are many tales of the power of his whiplash. Following Pakistan's surrender in the east, Manekshaw flew into Calcutta to compliment his officers. The ceremonial reception over at Dum Dum airport, he was escorted to a car -- a Mercedes captured from the enemy. Manekshaw refused to sit in it, leaving the officers red-faced.

On another occasion, a general accused of misusing funds was marched up to him. "Sir, do you know what you are saying?" asked the general. "You are accusing a general of being dishonest." Replied Manekshaw: "Your chief is not only accusing you of being dishonest but also calling you a thief. If I were you I would go home and either shoot myself or resign. I am waiting to see what you will do." The general submitted his resignation that evening.

Lt-General A.K. Kalkat is a former army commander and belongs to Manekshaw's regiment, 8 Gorkha Rifles.

FT: It's watershed time for rivers

It's watershed time for rivers

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

Not long ago, the passing-bell tolled for the Yangtze River dolphin. In August last year, scientists announced that the baiji , or Goddess of the Yangtze, a species venerated for thousands of years in China until Mao's Great Leap Forward turned it into bushmeat, was probably extinct as a result of overfishing and pollution.

It will not be the last Yangtze species to go the way of the Great Auk and the Hawaii O'o. The giant Chinese sturgeon, which migrates from the Pacific to the Yangtze to spawn, may not last out this decade. According to Wei Qiwei of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Insitute in Jingzhou, "there may be only 1,000 of the creatures left in the river". The valiant Mr Wei has not given up hope: "The Chinese sturgeon is very precious to us," he says: "I don't want it to disappear on my watch." The Yangtze is the fourth or fifth-longest river in the world, perhaps the greatest in terms of its impact on civilisation. But now its reputation is clouded by another statistic: the Great River is reckoned to be the largest single source of pollution entering the Pacific Ocean. Since the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, environmental degradation has increased dramatically: there is a risk of "an environmental catastrophe", according to a Chinese forum of scientists - the same forum, ironically, that recommended building the dam in the first place.

If all this makes me melancholic, that is partly because I have always had a thing about rivers. As quite a young child, I pored over encyclopedias and geography books, gobbling up statistics like jam doughnuts: was the Mississippi-Missouri really the longest river, or was it the Nile or the Amazon? Which was bigger, the Ob or the Yenisei, the Amur or the Lena? Since English rivers are little more than trickles, the first river that really impressed me was the broad and beautiful though shallow Loire. Three hundred yards across was an impressive breadth, a good drive and a pitch.

What had not yet occurred to me was that rivers might be de-rivered. Already in the 1952 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the one I have on my shelves) there is an ominous sign: the article on rivers is entitled "River and River Engineering". Here is an illustration of the point Heidegger makes in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology". "The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power plant." Heidegger is saying that the river, Father Rhine, central thread of German culture, hymned by the poet Hölderlin, beginning and ending of Wagner's Ring cycle, is no longer a river. Technology has supplanted nature.

Is that the end of the story? Must we sit back and watch while river after river loses its immemorial "riverness" and becomes merely a drain and a water supply, for irrigation or power generation? Or is there another, more hopeful scenario: can rivers be re-rivered?

London is the city which did in its rivers first. Not only was Edmund Spenser's "sweet Thames" declared biologically dead in the 1950s, but nearly all the other London rivers were forgotten, built over or running underground like sewers. Now there is a scheme, proposed by an adviser to the Mayor of London, to revive several of London's lost streams.

"When these rivers are opened up," says Peter Bishop, director of Design for London, "I think Londoners will be absolutely amazed. [The rivers] have been there all the time but you never see them." He is talking about such rivers as the Fleet (which runs under Fleet Street, of journalistic renown); the Bourne, part of which still forms the beautiful lake in Hyde Park called the Serpentine, which includes London's first swimming lido; the Wandle, which runs from Wandsworth to Croydon; and the splendidly named River Quaggy in south-east London.

The scheme is intended not just to beautify the capital city, but to cool it: London, increasingly covered by tarmac and concrete, can get uncomfortably warm in heatwaves. Perhaps these rivers will even be clean enough to swim in, as the Thames now is quite far downstream.

Last month's devastating Mississippi floods remind us that rivers have not lost their power. The St Louis-born poet TS Eliot's lines in "The Dry Salvages" remain relevant: "I think that the river/Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable." For all our attempts to control them, rivers have a habit of striking back. Entirely understandable are the Chinese authorities' attempts to tame the Yangtze and the Yellow River, whose floods have cost millions of lives. But it seems we need a new way of living with and not denaturing our rivers, so we can say once again with the great Chinese poet Li Bai, "all I see is the long river flowing to the edge of the sky".

harry.eyres@ft.com

ST: Marriage - an unsettling experience

Home > Our Columnists > Column
June 29, 2008
Life Lines - Anthony Yeo Marriage - an unsettling experience
In this fortnightly column on life issues, veteran psychotherapist Anthony Yeo talks about the pros and cons of saying 'I do'
People believe that June is a good month for marriage. Somehow this is the month for weddings, and with the recent series of activities in conjunction with enhancing family life in Singapore, marriage is certainly in the air. Weddings are usually much celebrated events often attended by enthusiastic guests, including single or unattached adults. Along with the carnival spirit infused into the celebration are those well-meaning married guests who inevitably accost singles with the inevitable 'So, when is your turn?' query. Single adults know all too well what this means and often respond with polite responses such as 'You'll know when it comes' or 'I guess it's not time yet'. Somehow we tend to believe that marriage is for everyone and, all too often, unattached adults are singled out as targets for prospective coupling in marriage. There is also a commonly held notion that to get married is to 'settle down', in contrast to being unmarried suggesting that the latter is to be saddled with an 'unsettled' state of life. Somehow there is a prevailing idea that this 'unsettled' state is synonymous with being uncertain, fickle-minded, frustrated or incomplete. With all the earnest drive to promote marriage in Singapore, singles tend to be unsettled by the idea that fulfilment and happiness in life is to be experienced primarily in 'marital bliss'. This prevailing idea seems to defy my observation of the many couples who have sought help for marital conflict. Each time I encounter married people afflicted with marital woes, I am reminded of how marriage tends to be an unsettling experience. I have also been left with the unsettled feeling, wondering why so many had chosen to be married when they could have had a less stressful life if they had stayed single. Of course, the other unsettling feeling is the painful journey I traverse with those who have the courage to go their separate ways. As I ponder over this issue, I sometimes wish that marriage was not held in such high regard, with less focus on the romantic ideals of a peak experience that marriage seems to promise. Those who contemplate marriage would do well to confront the reality that marriage can be an unsettling experience rather than one where couples live happily ever after. The way I see it, marriage promises to be unsettling as couples need to be prepared for a lot of adjustment to living with someone quite unfamiliar to oneself, learning to adapt to each other's idiosyncrasies, growing together as partners in life and coping with all the demands that marriage and family life brings. It is also prudent to be aware that romance, if it is ever experienced, is not everlasting and may in fact fade months after the honeymoon is over. Conflicts are inevitable and there will be many issues to be negotiated, such as relationships with the in-laws, work-home relationships and friendships with those outside of marriage. The more I work with couples with marital conflict, the more I am concerned that marriage should not be entered into lightly. It is also fallacious to believe that life will be incomplete and unfulfilling if a person is not married. There is more to life than marriage and no one should be made to feel deprived of what life offers if the choice is to be single . GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED If you have any questions about marriage, write to suntimes@sph.com.sg, with 'Life Lines' in the subject line. Anthony Yeo, a consultant therapist at the Counselling And Care Centre, will answer selected questions. ... more

FT: Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

By Alan Cane

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Amore incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster's name was Leo. It was the world's first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.

Sixty years ago, nobody would have seen anything like Leo. Official secrecy meant that the public knew nothing of the spectacular progress made by British scientists in developing the code-breaking digital computer, Colossus, which helped win the second world war. Civilian computers did not exist and nor did the software to run commercial applications. Caminer was the intrepid, determined person who invented the first business programmes.

What made his achievements as the world's first commercial systems analyst so extraordi-nary was that he started from scratch. At the time he was the systems manager for J. Lyons and Company, then Britain's biggest caterer. The Lyons board had heard about the development of "electronic brains" in the US but those were all being used for scientific or military purposes. Lyons, which prided itself on its efficiency, took the remarkable decision to develop its own digital computer to automate the running of its catering business.

Caminer was the key member of a team of bright young technologists responsible for bringing to life the vision of the Lyons board. Leo - Lyons Electronic Office - ran a programme for the first time in September 1951. Under Caminer's tutelage, the Lyons team developed systems and ways of working that were groundbreaking for the time and are still relevant today. Indeed, if the rules for systems development laid down by Caminer had been taken to heart by succeeding generations, fewer computing disasters would have tarnished the image of the industry.

Caminer programmed Leo to take over routine office tasks and do them in a fraction of the time taken by clerks. Where it had taken eight minutes to calculate an employee's pay - Lyons had 30,000 workers - Leo could do it in 1.5 seconds. Leo was programmed to handle the daily deliveries from Lyons bakery to 200 retail outlets, to organise restocking, to calculate the overnight production requirements, such as how many miles of Swiss roll had to be made, and even to work out delivery routes for vans. Later, Caminer ran programmes that could detect patterns in the till receipts and pinpoint when the company's restaurants were busiest and which of its chocolate cakes and iced fancies were selling best. Today, businesses analyse such information as a matter of course but in the 1950s this marked a retail revolution.

Soon other major companies such as Dunlop, Ford and Imperial Tobacco were coming to look at Leo and learn from it. Lyons set up a subsidiary to make computers and 80 Leos were sold all over the world.

Caminer, a charming individual with exquisite manners and a delightful sense of humour, had a short fuse where programming standards were concerned. More than one of his colleagues had work literally thrown back for failing to meet his expectations. Yet Caminer himself had had no training in computing - hardly surprising because the subject was so new that everybody involved in Leo learned on the job. What was unusual was that Caminer was not even a mathematician and had no formal academic qualifications.

Born David Tresman in 1915, he was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant. His father died fighting on the Marne when he was three. When his mother married again, he adopted his stepfather's name. Raised initially in London's East End, he later went to the Sloane School in Chelsea but by his own admission he was not a natural student. He was more engaged by unemployment and the rise of rightwing dic-tatorships in mainland Europe. He spent his youth pamphleteering and, as he put it, "generally fostering the revolution". He marched against Oswald Mosley, the anti-Semitic British fascist leader.

Having failed to get into Cambridge - he said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches" - he became a management trainee at Lyons through a contact of his mother's. The catering group, which served millions of meals every year, was known for its tea shops and Corner House restaurants with waitresses known as "nippies".

On the outbreak of the second world war, Caminer joined up and served at El Alamein, where he recalled the "wondrous sight of a desert fox crossing the shimmering sands at first light on the morning of the battle". After being wounded in the western desert and losing a leg, he returned to Lyons, becoming manager of the company's systems research office. It was then that he became involved in its computer project - on a salary of £5.05 a week.

Leo eventually became part of what was then the British computer champion, International Computers - ICL - and Caminer was appointed head of market development. He was asked to take charge of software for ICL's New Range 2900 series, its flagship through the latter part of the last century. He specified the ICL operating system VME/B, a brilliant concept that was in some ways too advanced for the machines on which it was expected to run.

Caminer completed his career by implementing the European Union's computer and communications network in Luxembourg. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

He always believed that small, close-knit teams of the sort that worked on Leo were the ideal: "These days the spirit has changed," he complained just before his death. "Computer staff have become nine to five workers. Teams are so large I'm surprised they ever get anything done."

He is survived by his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1945, and by their three sons and two daughters.

Alan Cane

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The dangers of banality

Excerpt
The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

==

The dangers of banality

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil". Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly "normal" - "more normal at any rate than I am", as one of them said with black humour, "after having examined him".

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply "obeying orders".

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today's politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners. We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother ).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt's formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: "Oh, he's intelligent too - that wasn't what we used to read, was it Lloydy?" The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be "one of the lads".

Test Match Special , one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. "There's really nothing to say," opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently - not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate - and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics , as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so "we need to be able to 'bite off' and 'chew' experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment . . . to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own."

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

harry.eyres@ft.com

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Economist: Circumcision - Cutting the competition

Circumcision

Cutting the competition

Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Mutilating male members may mar men’s mischievous matings

CIRCUMCISION and other forms of male-genital mutilation are commonplace in many societies around the world. The origin of these practices, however, puzzles anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. They wonder what benefit they could bring, especially given the obvious risks of infection and reduced fertility.

Explanations have ranged from the pragmatic (a ritual that marks the beginning of adulthood and bonds men together) to the Freudian (having something to do with the pain of the separation from the mother). However Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, has a different idea. In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior he suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives.

Dr Wilson takes his cue from sperm-competition theory, which suggests that males of promiscuous primate species have evolved features that maximise their own sperm’s chances of fertilising an egg they might have to compete for. These features include large testicles which produce more sperm, and morphologically complex penises. Males of monogamous primate species, on the other hand, have smaller testicles and simpler penises. Human genitals are somewhere in between, perhaps reflecting the fact that people generally form pair bonds, but are susceptible to occasional bouts of promiscuity.

Some forms of genital mutilation have obvious effects on fertility. For instance, several African and Micronesian societies practice testicular ablation—the crushing or cutting off of one testicle. Some Australian aborigines engage in subincision, which exposes part of the urethra and thus causes sperm to leak out of the base of the penis. Circumcision does not have quite such clear-cut effects. But there are several ways it may affect fertility: most obviously, the lack of a foreskin could make insertion, ejaculation or both take longer. Perhaps long enough that an illicit quickie will not always reach fruition.

Older men are in a position to form alliances with younger men—passing on knowledge, lending them political support and giving them access to weapons. By insisting that the young undergo genital mutilation of some form as a quid pro quo, an older married man can seek to ensure that even if he is cuckolded, he will still be the father of his wives’ children. Of course, the older man has probably undergone genital mutilation too, and seen his own fertility reduced. But that, if anything, increases his incentive to make certain that the young bucks are similarly handicapped. And if all the older men in a society conclude this is a good thing, it will rapidly become a socially enforced norm.

To test this theory, Dr Wilson made several predictions. Among them, he suggested that mutilation is more likely to be practised in polygynous societies (since a man with several wives is more vulnerable to cuckoldry), and is especially likely in those polygynous societies where a man’s co-wives live in separate households from their husband. It should also take place in a public ceremony watched by other men, to avoid cheating or free-riding. And there should be a strong stigma against men who refuse it.

To test his predictions, Dr Wilson looked at a database of 186 pre-industrial societies. Some 48% of the highly polygynous ones practised a form of male-genital mutilation, and the number rose to 63% when co-wives kept separate households. By contrast, only 14% of monogamous societies practised mutilation. Moreover, and also as predicted, the mutilations were almost always carried out in public, often as part of a coming-of-age ceremony at puberty, with strong stigma attached to unmutilated men.

Dr Wilson’s paper does not definitely prove that sexual competition is at the root of male-genital mutilation. But it does provide a plausible explanation for a puzzling practice. It is not likely, however, to have much effect on attitudes toward circumcision. The men who enforce and undergo the rituals are no more aware of the underlying evolutionary motivations than of why their testicles are the size they are. Those who engage in the practice for religious reasons will surely continue to do so. Otherwise, most of the Western world has already largely abandoned routine neonatal circumcision, which is seen as an outdated and unfortunate medical fad.

The exceptions are America, where more than half of newborn boys are still circumcised, and Africa, where circumcision helps to stop the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. There, infection really is a far greater threat to the number of children a man might have than the loss of his foreskin.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Figure of speech

But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

==

Figure of speech

By Michael Fullilove

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

I once attended a talk given by President John F Kennedy's speechwriter, adviser and "intellectual blood bank", Ted Sorensen. He was asked who had written the most famous line in Kennedy's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Was it JFK's work, or his speechwriter's? Sorensen's answer was magnificent: "Ask not!"

The speechwriter's code of silence requires that a discreet veil be drawn over the drafting process. Adherence to this code is rare these days, however. Speechwriters routinely brief friends and journalists about their authorship of some golden phrase or other. Occasionally they even scrap publicly for credit.

Sorensen is different. For more than four decades, he minimised his role in the drafting of the speeches delivered on the New Frontier. Only now, in this new memoir, with the other parties dead and the archives open, does Sorensen pull back the veil - a little.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History throws new light on Sorensen's central role in both the speechwriting and policy processes in the Kennedy White House ("I was too busy ever [?] to smell the flowers in the White House Rose Garden," he notes). But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Sorensen admits JFK's flaws: his faint-heartedness in ducking a 1954 vote to censure Senator Joe McCarthy, his "blind spot on Cuba" and his "deaf ear on China". And he acknowledges the president's philandering: "He should have known that ultimately the inevitable disclosure of his misconduct could diminish the moral force and credibility of all the good he was doing," Sorensen writes. On the other hand, Sorensen refuses to provide succour to Kennedy's enemies, stating, "I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties."

In other words, Sorensen keeps faith with Kennedy. Though a conscientious obj-ector in his youth, Sorensen is a good soldier. Here, too, there is a stark contemporary comparison in the former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan would not, I suspect, have even become an intern in Sorensen's day. But the real difference between the two men lies in the measure of their loyalty. Within two years of leaving the Bush administration, McClellan has a book in the stores dumping on the man who made him. Nearly half a century after JFK's assassination, on the other hand, Sorensen still feels what he calls "the obligations of loyalty, which for me outweigh all pressures to cast prudence, privacy, discretion, and the secrets of others aside".

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

Michael Fullilove is director of the global issues program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Historian who debunked the second world war's myths

Historian who debunked the second world war's myths

By Sue Cameron

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

It was a damp basement in 1960s London, piled with closely written sheets of thin, crumbling wartime paper. Most people would have found it a forlorn place. Yet for the young Angus Calder, wandering round the room randomly picking out documents, it was an Aladdin's cave of history. Here was a first-hand account of the London blitz. There were descriptions of what people really felt about rationing, about evacuees, about "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

That dank room contained the hundreds of reports written during the second world war by ordinary men and women for the Mass Observation research group. They had been lying neglected for years. Calder, who has died at 66, was to use them as the basis for his groundbreaking books The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 , published in 1969, and later, in 1991, The Myth of the Blitz . His work challenged the cherished view of a plucky Britain that came smiling through the blitz with people of all classes united by humour, tolerance and the volunteer spirit.

True, Calder found fortitude and courage at all levels of society. Yet as he showed in his vividly written and meticulously researched books, wartime Britain also saw industrial unrest, anti-Semitism, rising crime - the blackout was ideal for thieving - and a growing divide between rich and poor. "The forces of wealth, bureaucracy and privilege," wrote Calder, who was a passionate socialist, "survived with little inconvenience." He details, for example, the outrage of middle-class households when asked to take in vermin-infested evacuees from the slums. One rural council even turned away evacuees on the grounds that large houses could not be used because "the servant problem is acute and it would be unfair to billet children on them".

As well as being a historian, Calder was a poet, critic, essayist and teacher who made a big contribution to literature. Yet The People's War , written when he was still in his 20s, was the first to give the views of ordinary people and the first to question established myths about the war. It influenced people from Sir David Hare, the playwright, to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who knew Calder when both were historians and Labour party supporters in Edinburgh.

"Angus was an inspirational writer and teacher, an intellectual who engaged with and enriched public life," said Mr Brown this week. "He was a challenger of orthodoxies and a wonderful stimulator of ideas. His People's War broke new ground and influenced countless students of history. But his writing covered a huge range of other topics - from culture and nationalism to the intellectual currents within the British empire. He was a towering figure in the Scottish literary world. His passion, insight and lifelong commitment to both academia and politics inspired me and many others."

It was another Edinburgh historian, Paul Addison, who first rediscovered the Mass Observation reports and Calder always acknowledged this debt. "His books have never been surpassed and they are crammed with vivid detail about people and places," said Mr Addison, author of The Road to 1945 . "Angus put in the awkward squad. His was not the Max Bygraves version of history. He thought of himself as a writer rather than an academic and he was something of a bohemian. A man with a well-stocked mind, he was always wonderful company."

Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was born in London in 1942 and educated at Cambridge, where he read English literature. He was much influenced by his father, the Scots-born Ritchie Calder, journalist, diplomat, science writer, founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and ultimately a member of the House of Lords. In Gods, Mongrels and Demons , a collection of dark humour published in 2003, Calder wrote: "My father's exuberant non-career left me unconvinced by the notion that worthwhile people must follow persistent, steady paths (though some have done so). Committed careerists may in fact be very dangerous."

His own unconventional path started with a doctorate at Sussex University, where his supervisor was Asa Briggs and where the Mass Observation reports are now properly housed. His thesis was a study - still unpublished - of the Common Wealth party, a mainly middle-class, idealistic, socialist group that emerged during the second world war.

Calder married Jenni Daiches in 1963 - they had two daughters and a son - and in 1971 they moved to Edinburgh. Despite his English background and accent, he became passionately Scottish and a believer in the particularly Scottish idea of the democratic intellect where a ploughman could become a vice-chancellor.

An engaging, gregarious man, his career took him round the world literally and intellectually. He taught English at the University of Nairobi and held posts at the universities of Malawi and Zimbabwe as well as working in New Zealand - his first published volume of poems was called Waking in Waikato . In 1981 he produced, Revolutionary Empire , a study of Britain's empire up to the American War of Independence, which considered the views of the conquered as much as the conquerors. It had rave reviews but the subsequent, planned volumes never appeared.

One reason was he was spending more time in Edinburgh's pubs. His fondness for drink destroyed his first marriage and his second to Kate Kyle, which produced a son, was brief. Yet he continued to teach, spending 14 years with the Open University, and writing essays of Orwellian standard as well as introductions to writers including Dickens, Scott and T.E. Lawrence. He completed a book on 19th-century Russian writers and wrote, with Paul Addison, A Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of the War in the West 1939-45 .

"He had a long, slow decline," said Mr Addison. "Yet he wrote more than most people who live to be 80." Another friend, academic and now Scottish parliament member Christopher Harvie, who went to see him only weeks before he died, said: "He told me: 'This has been a helter- skelter existence - much of it my own fault.' Yet he was remarkable man, an outstanding teacher who could make himself a specialist in anything and who wrote brilliantly."

Sue Cameron

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

AsiaOne: Debunking the myth of the Chinese-educated

Debunking the myth of the Chinese-educated

Teo Han Wue Sun, May 18, 2008 The Straits Times

For many of us in Singapore, the Shanghai Book Company store is living history. It's so entrenched in our memories that recent media reports of it being under threat of closure came as a shock in Chinese-speaking circles. Whether the 83-year-old shop will conclude its final chapter and fade into oblivion will be decided on Thursday, when the two main shareholders - Mr Chen Mong Tse, the son of its founder, and a China book export company - meet to settle their disputes. Whatever the outcome, those of us who went to Chinese schools in the 1950s and 1960s will remember it fondly. <p> &amp;lt;A HREF=&quot;http://ads.asia1.com.sg/event.ng/Type=click&amp;amp;FlightID=16520&amp;amp;AdID=19898&amp;amp;TargetID=2065&amp;amp;Segments=1,81,238,564,1000,1543,1779,1780,2000,2355,2404,2410,2428,2431,2433,2472&amp;amp;Targets=2065,1720,2838,2847&amp;amp;Values=30,50,60,80,93,101,110,130,150,186,196,209,266,942,990,1480,1487,2253,2446,2807,2865,2908,2920,4074,4103,4118,4120,4334,4337,4342,5599,5611&amp;amp;RawValues=&amp;amp;Redirect=http:%2f%2fclk.atdmt.com/SJK/go/snxxesia0820000001sjk/direct/01/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;IMG SRC=&quot;http://view.atdmt.com/SJK/view/snxxesia0820000001sjk/direct/01/&quot; WIDTH=300 HEIGHT=250 BORDER=0&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/A&amp;gt; </p> Ask any 50-something person literate in Chinese - especially graduates of the former Nanyang University - where they went at the weekend when they were students or young working adults, and most will readily say: 'Shanghai Shuju.' The more romantic ones will recall how they dated and met friends for long afternoon chats in the coffee shop on North Bridge Road at the junction with Cashin Street, called Yuelan Ting (Moon Orchid Pavilion), after browsing in the Shanghai Book Company store next door and upstairs. Yuelan Ting was a salon of sorts where many an intellectual issue was debated, ideas of a new book born and even matrimonial matches made over a cup of coffee. Apart from the works of authors like Lu Xun, Ba Jin and Guo Moruo, on the shelves of the bookshop were Chinese translations of the works of Shakespeare (complete plays), Goethe, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Balzac, Cervantes, Whitman, Twain, Tagore and so on. There were also Chinese books and magazines on local subjects, including Malay language and literature. Way back in 1925, two young men - Mr Chen Yoh Shoo and Mr Wang Shu Yang - started the bookshop. They had arrived in Singapore from Shanghai two years earlier, and noted that the exciting new books and magazines they had seen in the Chinese city, a trading port and a hotbed of modern ideas, were not available here. It was the era of the May Fourth Movement (1919), and students in the many Chinese schools in Singapore and other parts of South-east Asia were inspired by the new cultural trends taking place in China. The movement called for intellectual revolution and socio-political reform to rebuild society and culture, after China became a republic in 1911. As the young were thirsting for new literature by writers from China, the bookshop's business grew rapidly. Its founders found their new venture so successful that they quickly opened branches in Kuala Lumpur (1926), Surabaya (1928), and Jakarta (1935). The shop sign Shanghai Shuju, designed with characters in the art deco style fashionable then in Shanghai, bears the evocative logo with the shop's name propping up an open book from which grows a tall coconut tree. It expressed the aspiration to nurture the intellectual growth of the community in the Nanyang (South-east Asia). True to its mission, Shanghai Book Company started its publishing business after World War II because supplies of books from China for the Chinese schools had been disrupted. Besides, with emerging nationalism in the region, the Chinese community began to identify more with their adopted homeland by publishing books and textbooks relevant to local conditions. It was during this time that Shanghai Book Company made even greater contributions to educational and cultural development in South-east Asia. The textbooks it produced were distributed to countries such as Malaya, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos and Cambodia. From 1957, in line with the growing importance of Malay as the national language of Malaya, the bookshop also published a significant number of books, dictionaries and magazines on the Malay language, literature and culture. Malay language expert Lim Huan Boon wrote Singapore's first Malay-Chinese dictionary and had it published by the bookshop. He also helped edit some of its other Malay books. Those books were a great help when I myself was learning Malay as a student in a Chinese school in the early 1960s. I remember reading about modern Malay writers such as Masuri S.N. and Usman Awang in a magazine published by the Shanghai Book Company. Such efforts showed a distinct awareness of the multicultural reality of Singapore and Malaya on the part of the bookshop. They also reflected the Chinese-educated's enthusiasm for learning about a language and culture other than their own. That explains why, almost without exception, all the non-Malay Malay scholars in Singapore are Chinese-educated. Today, Shanghai Book Company is only a bookshop, just like many others in Bras Basah Complex where it is located now, and no longer what it was in its heyday when it published books not only in Chinese but also in English, Malay and Tamil. It ceased its publishing function due to changes in education policies and the phasing out of Chinese schools in Singapore. If it closes, I will not be sad, as long as its history as a Singapore cultural institution is not forgotten. Its history eloquently debunks the popular myth that the Chinese educated are inclined to be conservative, less open and less cosmopolitan, or worse, chauvinistic. Shanghai Book Company has fulfilled its mission in history. Like the coconut tree it aspired to be, Shanghai Book Company has borne many fruits that have grown into trees in various places. The writer is the executive director of Art Retreat, a private museum.