Leaders and readers: A sign of the tomes

WASHINGTON: India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was an acclaimed writer-historian in his own right (or write). His daughter Indira Gandhi, India’s third prime minister (not counting interims), was known to be a voracious reader too; if nothing else her dad’s frequent letters must have keep her informed. The country’s ninth Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, was not only an avid bibliophile and scholar, but also a polymath who could read original literature in languages ranging from his native Telugu to Marathi to Spanish.Little is known about Prime Ministerial reading habits in between and after these three.
No such gaps or opacity exists in the United States, where Presidential reading habits is extensively chronicled and periodically re-examined to determine its influence on policy and governance. On Saturday, as President Obama visited an independent book store named Politics and Prose in Washington DC for his holiday-reading and gifts shopping (ostensibly also to support small businesses), political and literary trolls weighed in with their take on the subject executive erudition, an area that receives little attention in India.
Like Nehru, Obama himself is an author of repute, selling and earning in millions from Dream of My Father and Audacity of Hope, the two best-selling books he wrote before coming to the White House. In the nearly five years since he became President, his reading has been scrutinized extensively to understand the policy tea leaves. For instance, even during his campaign, he was once seen getting off a plane holding Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World (leading some conspiracy theorists to question why he was reading “a book by a Muslim writer about America’s decline.”) But the book, as Zakaria writes, is not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else, particularly China and India, a theme that has underpinned Obama’s speeches and his drive to keep the United States ahead of the curve.
No policy moves can be divined yet from the books Obama bought on Saturday (see accompanying list) although it is striking that two of the books are by American writers of Asian origin, including The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Of course, wingnuts might see some pattern in the story about two brothers and political rebellion in 1960s Naxalite India, but others will check if the Red Sparrow, an espionage thriller in the le Carre genre about tensions between the US and Russia will underline Obama’s approach to Moscow. Similarly, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena centers on the brutal war in Chechnya.
In the past, US Presidents have known to be profoundly influenced by books they read. Obama’s selection as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who he defeated for the Democratic nomination - was widely attributed to his reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin's ''Team of Rivals,'' about Lincoln's Cabinet formation. During the healthcare debate earlier this year, Obama referred to his reading of a Roosevelt biography, invoking government mobilization and energy needed for it in the face of an economic crisis.
Obama’s predecessor George Bush, notwithstanding the jibes about his lack of intelligence, was actually a voracious reader, a habit probably inculcated in him by his librarian wife. According to Washington cognoscenti, Bush favored prescriptive books such as Natan Sharansky's ''The Case for Democracy'' and Eliot Cohen's ''Supreme Command,'' which argued that politicians should drive military strategy. President Clinton’s reading of Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts was said to have influenced his approach to the Balkan crisis in the early 1990s.
Little is known about what Manmohan Singh and Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s most recent prime ministers, read. According to some Delhi observers, they read little beyond their files, briefs, and papers. But Sanjaya Baru, who served in PMO as Singh’s Media Advisor, says the Prime Minister is a voracious and avid reader of biography, global issues, history, economics and contemporary politics, and his weekends are all spent reading books.
Baru’s own gifts to the Prime Minister included Machiavelli's Prince, from which he quoted during a speech in parliament defending the nuclear deal, and Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng XiaoPing.
List of books Obama bought on Saturday
The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri
Red Sparrow – Jason Matthews
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena – Anthony Marra
The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance – David Epstein
Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football – Nicholas Dawidoff
Ballad of the Sad Cafe: And Other Stories – Carson McCullers
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Ragtime – E.L.Doctorow
The Kite Runner – Khalid Hosseini
Buddha in the Attic – Julie Otsuka
All That Is – James Salter
Wild: From Lost to Found On the Pacific Crest Trail – Cheryl Strayed
List of Books bought by Obama’s school-going daughters
Lulu and the Brontosaurus - Ciorst/Smith
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat – Riddell
Harold and the Purple Crayon
Half Brother – Kenneth Oppel
Heart of A Samurai – Margi Preus
Flora and Ulysses – Kate DiCamillo
Jinx – Sage Blackwood
Moonday – Adam Rex
Journey – Aaron Becker