In the Fall of 2001, I discovered David Halberstam at the CSDS library in Delhi. I read his fascinating biography of Ho Chi Minh and then his brilliant account of America’s misadventure in Vietnam, The Making of a Quagmire, a book that added more than a term to our political vocabulary.

This evening, as I heard the news of David Halberstam’s death in a car crash (WAPO and NYT obituaries) in the Bay area, I began to wish we had more of his ilk in Baghdad and Washington. Journalists who raised questions and remained skeptical of facile explanations offered by those in power. Perhaps, David Halberstam did more to bring the American misadventure in Vietnam to light than any other reporter. Surely, his early reporting for the New York Times from Saigon, which fetched him a Pulitzer in 1964, raised more questions about the policies Kennedy-Johnson administrations pursued in Vietnam.

Halberstam didn’t remain a reporter. Instead, he became a chronicler of the biggest stories of the second half of the 20th century. He is rightly praised for his ‘Best and the Brightest‘, but I loved his two books on the fifties: The fifties and The Children. More on these two books soon. I also liked his two other massive works, The Powers that be, on the emergence of NYT, Washington Post, Time and LA Times as media gaints and The Reckoning, a history of automobile industry as told through the stories of Ford and Nissan.

Frankly, I just enjoyed reading everything he wrote.

In between his serious books, Halberstam wrote on sports. His books on Michael Jordan (Playing for Keeps) and Bill Belichick (The Education of a Coach) are among my favorite sports books of all time.

David Halberstam will be missed.

Gideon Haigh asks in the Guardian an interesting question in light of India’s miserable performance at the World Cup:

India is cricket’s financial hub, providing 70% of the game’s global income; India’s most lucrative franchise is the rivalry with Pakistan. Over the past five to seven years, under Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, India have achieved on-field success to complement their off-field stature: it has been worth playing India in a cricket sense as well as a financial one. But what are the implications if the world’s richest cricket nation and its opposing team of choice rank among its poorer teams in performance?

Haigh doesn’t have any good answers, other pointing out the rot that has set in all cricket organizations, including the ICC. Indeed, there are no good answers. For a long time cricket enthusiast, I haven’t watched any cricket nor do I know who is playing whom. And when. I didn’t learn about Bangladesh beating South Africa until a couple of days ago. It’s a pity because in spite of the presence of (indeed, deserving) minnows in the Super 8, there is some good cricket being played. True, it has taken an eternity to get the Semifinal stage and it has been very difficult to muster any enthusiasm until now.
Is this the charamagite (funeral song) for World Cricket, at least for the time being? I don’t know.

Haigh’s piece has a couple of good lines on BCCI.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), with its unruly blend of hypercapitalism and feudalism, exhibits the entrepreneurial ebullience of Don King.

and

And if the jet-propelled bullock cart that is the BCCI remains incapable of producing a team worth the country’s cumulative talent, what then?

Indeed. Jet-propelled bullock cart, heh!

Here is what I always found impressive about K. P. Poornachandra Tejaswi.

Being Kuvempu’s son wasn’t a burden. He was that rare famous son, who forged his own personality and strode the Kannada literary and cultural world as a giant in his own right. He could and did easily say no to worldly positions - from professorships to MLA/MP ticket offers from all the political parties and MLC nominations until very recently - from a very early age.

Much will be written in the coming days about Tejaswi’s accomplishments as a novelist as well as that rare and gifted Kannada writer of popular non-fiction works. Tejaswi’s friends and admirers will praise his wide ranging interests, forward looking nature and more significantly, his curiosity to explore the world both in his literary works and in life. His critics will point out that his later novels weren’t as impressive as his early works and strongly criticize his formulations on globalization. I certainly found his turn away from radical politics quite troubling. More on all that later.

But in my mind, there is no doubt that his ethical self was an equally compelling aspect of his personality.

Tejaswi was my role model when I was growing up. I saw him frequently in Mysore, read everything he wrote and hung on to each word he uttered. He was that mysterious figure who would periodically show up in Mysore, only to disappear quickly. Return he did regularly, whenever he could take a break from his other preoccupation, his coffee estate. In recent times, I saw him infrequently and to my regret, didn’t engage him as much as I should have.

K. P. Poornachandra Tejaswi is no more. I wish I had gone to see him in December, as he had asked me to.

We will all miss him. It’s a sad day in the Land of Lime.

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is a song that I like.

While reading a blog posting yesterday morning, I came across a link to one of my favorite clips from The West Wing, where it was used for the final episode of the third season. Sorkin used the Jeff Buckley version, which I prefer slightly over Leonard Cohen’s. I have been playing various versions all day, partly to escape from writing a conference paper for this weekend. YouTube is awesome. Ain’t it? Especially if you want to not work.

I thought some of you might like to watch it.

Here is the Leonard Cohen version. Then two more versions by Jeff Buckley, live in Chicago and NPA Live ‘95. Both are good. Here is a link to the lyric and some interesting factoids.

See how easy it is to pick the YouTube reality over American Idol (although on occasions they don’t seem to be much different) and the TV West Wing over the real one that George W Bush presides over.

Hallelujah.