book review of an undocumented wonder

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An Undocumented Wonder - The Making of the Great Indian Election

by S.Y.Quraishi; Rupa Books

About the book

Elections in India Generate Both Wonder and Interest, Globally. Polls have Been Held at Regular Intervals in the Country Since Independence and on an Unprecedented Scale, Surmounting the Massive Challenges Posed by the Geography of the Land and the Mind - Boggling Diversity of the Indian Populace. How Does the Election Commision of India Overcome These Challenges? What is the Secret Behind Its Uninterrupted Success? Which Ideals and Principles Drive the People Who are Involved in Accomplishing this Mammoth Task? And, How Did India Emerge as the 'Global Gold Standard' in Conducting Elections, as Observed by Hillary Clinton? An Undocumented Wonder: the Making of the Great Indian Election Answers These and Many More Questions about What Has Often Been Termed the 'Biggest Management Event of the World'. a Fist - Person Account of the Recent Electoral History of India, this Educative and Perceptive Book Brings to the Reader the Author'S Experiences, Knowledge and Insights from the Time When He Served as an Election Commissioner And, Later, as Chief Election Commissioner of India. an Undocumented Wonder is a Must - Read for Everyone Interested in Understanding How the World'S Largest Democracy Works.

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An Undocumented Wonder: The Great Indian Election

by S.Y. Quraishi

• Category Politics Bestsellers
• Format Hardback
• Imprint Rainlight
• ISBN: 978-81-291-3106-5
• Pages: 416 pages
• Date: April 2014

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The great Indian election continues to generate global interest and wonder, partly on account of its uninterrupted success and partly because of the obvious challenges of demography, geography, and the mind boggling diversities. How are these elections conducted? What were the challenges faced by the Election Commission of India? How did it overcome these challenges? What are the ideals and principles that drive the people involved in completing this mammoth task? An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election answers these and many more questions about what has been termed often as the ‘great dance of democracy’. The book avoids the ‘kiss and tell’ track, nor does it seek to entice readers with any ‘spill the beans’ approach. Instead, the attempt is to serve and satisfy the readers’ genuine curiosity through a first person account of the recent electoral history and the challenges encountered. Along with highly informative and exciting inside stories of Indian elections, the author shares his experiences and knowledge from the time when he served as the Chief Election Commissioner of India.

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK

Dr S.Y. Quraishi served as the 17th Chief Election Commissioner of India from 30 July 2010 to 10 June 2012. He has also served as a Secretary in the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. He completed his Masters degrees from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi before joining the Indian Administrative Service in 1971. He is also the author of the book Social Marketing for Social Change.

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• ISBN 13 : 9789353333003
• year : 2019
• language : English
• binding : Softcover

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From Quiescent Bureaucracy to 'Undocumented Wonder': Explaining the Indian Election Commission's Expanding Mandate

Public institutions in the developing world are often characterized by institutional capture or decay. Yet, India’s Election Commission has become one of its most powerful regulatory bodies. The Election Commission has overseen the completion of 16 national and 350+ state elections since 1952. It is one of the most widely-celebrated and trusted public institutions in India, enjoys substantial powers, and conducts some of the longest elections in the world. We use a process-tracing approach to explain the EC’s surprising expansion of mandate, arguing that in a federal democracy: 1) when institutional constraints are weakened; 2) when state-based actors demand a competent and neutral arbiter; and 3) when entrepreneurial bureaucratic actors take advantage of moments of political opportunity, those aspects of the bureaucracy that can credibly meet these demands are able to successfully expand their powers. Changes in Model Code Implementation and Election Duration attest to the Election Commission’s broader role. The Election Commission’s experience suggests that a weak executive can facilitate the strengthening of state institutions and that, under federalism, state-based electoral forces can produce strong national institutions.

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Fair and free elections are the backbone of representative democracy which not only determines its success rate but also the parameter to measure its level of development. Therefore, the quality of electoral process is a precondition for the quality of governance prevailing there in. India is the largest democracy in the world (over 85 crore voters) having maximum youth population. It is more stable and successful than the government of any other developing country. India adopted Parliamentary democracy to secure its unity and stability as well as nation building and socioeconomic reconstruction. Even after more than six decades of independence, the country is facing threat from factors like castism, communalism, criminalisation of politics, corruption, poverty, unemployment, decay in government institutions, decline of moral values in politics and the mal-practices prevailing in our electrol system. The expectations and aspiration of the masses are shattered by their own elected representatives. Indian constitution has provided the country, a highpowered unified authority, Election Commission (EC), autonomous in character and free from executive and political interferencce, for organising fair and free elections to the President and the the Vice-President of India and of the Parliament and the State legislatures. But, with the passage of time many distortions and evil practices such as use of money, and muscle power in elections, booth capturing; misuse of official machinery; poll violence; participation of non-serious and independent candidates; and regionalism etc. have crept in our electoral process which have not only led to the crisis of governance but have also posed threat to democratic system.

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What one gets after reading the book is different shades of individual charisma and tactfulness with which campaigns are organised and elections won. It also offers us insights into challenges of contesting elections and running the government; and it gives us an example of how one can be a political leader without holding any constitutional post and yet receive a state funeral. Throughout the book, one keeps encountering a range of names of significant leaders in national and regional politics offering insights into the way governments or parties function. Weaved around elections, the book offers narratives of victories and defeats sparking further curiosity into forays of leaderships and their failures.

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Elections are the basic essentials of a Democracy. They empower the people to choose their leaders and thus, see how the government operates. India being the largest democracy in the world enjoys a systematic procedure of election. However, corrupt practices are still a hindrance in ensuring free and fair elections in the country. The Election Commission, an independent body supervising all the election procedure, has tried and still strives to eradicate the malpractices and challenges faced in elections. It has successfully introduced various reforms but still faces various challenges. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse the procedure and reforms along with some of the major issues involved in elections in India. Keywords- Election procedure, Democracy, Candidates, Parties, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, Election Commission of India, Corruption, Malpractices, Challenges, EVM, VVPAT, EPIC, cVIGIL.

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Development narratives have often hinged on the idea of regulatory governance, particularly in developing countries where the regulatory agencies are generally dysfunctional. The paper argues that inefficient performance of regulatory agencies of poor countries can be explained, inter alia, by the existence of informal institutions that are embedded in these ‘formal’ organizations. Presence of informal networks in a regulatory governance structures may often erode the independence of the agency while benefiting the network. As an important factor overlooked in literature, informality in regulatory bodies breaks the mainstream narrative of regulatory bodies. I use the example of India and examine the institutional endowments of informality and its stickiness through time in regulatory frames. I show how the informal network of civil servants permeates every regulatory agency in the country and undermines an independent functioning. Policy conclusions follow.

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An undocumented wonder

The great indian election, by s. y. quraishi.

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Published in, edition notes.

Includes bibliographical references (page 419) and index.

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Imagining a U.S. in which every Latin American has been deported

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “American Abductions” is one of the most affecting and inventive novels in recent memory.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas hates trauma. Or at least, as the Ecuadorian novelist said in a 2021 interview , he hates “the automatisms of trauma,” those unconscious recitations and reenactments of the ordeals that, it is often alleged, shape everything about us as people.

Yet his third novel, “ American Abductions ,” is quite literally organized around trauma: In the near future, America’s “Racist in Chief,” supported by an overwhelming number of “Pale Americans,” has deported all Latin Americans from the country. Citizens are denaturalized, families separated, children disappeared into the adoption system. So how to write about the subject without reducing it to the banal via the repetition of rote narratives? How to depict these atrocities and also to say, as one adoptee does late in the novel, “I am not your victim”?

The result is one of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject. “Abductions” centers on Ada and Eva, sisters whose Colombian father, Antonio, was “kidnapped” while driving them to school in San Francisco. Such kidnappings — Cárdenas purposefully deploys the word — are carried out by “Abductors,” members of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement-like agency who wear “fake police vests” and carry out their duties seemingly at random.

In America, Antonio worked as a senior data analyst to support his Czech wife and their two daughters. But after his denaturalization and deportation, he remakes himself as “a so-called novelist,” traveling the world to interview victims of the abduction program. Among them is Elsi, whose nephew died in American custody; Auxilio, whose daughter Aura was kidnapped and adopted into an American family; and a young man in a Colombian mental hospital who has dissociated from his identity in an attempt to suppress the fact that his father killed himself (or was killed by the Abductors) after they crossed the border. He asks Antonio to call him “the replica of the replica of Roberto Bolaño.”

This should give you a sense of Cárdenas’s literary ambitions. Most of the novel’s 39 chapters are told from one of these perspectives, and each is presented as a single, pages-long sentence, touching on biography, literature, popular music, programing languages, social media and science fiction along the way. Don’t let it intimidate you; Cárdenas’s protracted sentences are like rivers, not mountains. They meander easily from reference to reference (the Steve Miller Band, W.G. Sebald, “The Five Obstructions” and Lionel Richie all make appearances) and cut plainly across different time frames, and they allow for the natural, halting, even jokey flow of thought and conversation, dropping the reader deep into each well of pain.

These narratives all circle around the injury of separation — of parent from child, nephew from aunt — but by presenting them in this fashion, Cárdenas strives to break free from traumatic clichés. “What will happen to my memories of Aura,” asks Auxilio, “if they become part of a ritual of confession?” They become all too familiar, easy for a reader to gloss over and forget. But each injury is done to a particular person and must be lived within its specificity.

Yet these narratives exist in a wider context, a history that unites victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Ada’s video of Antonio’s abduction goes viral, turning their family into a target of online sympathy and harassment, and giving their story an afterlife that survives even their father. Antonio’s project aims to record the experiences of as many deportees as will meet with him. The abduction program is enabled by a vast surveillance system, a set of algorithms, data centers and legally compliant technology companies that hoover up the images, videos and phone calls of Latin Americans, both in the United States and beyond its borders.

Cárdenas is especially at home in this computational mode. “The only truly experimental literature of the 21st century,” he has observed, “is that which plays with algorithms,” and “Abductions” explores both the terrors and promises of technology like few other recent novels. The same programs that passively decide which Americans are to be deported also surveil their workplace productivity, preventing one character from watching a video of herself as a 17-month-old, separated from and reunited with her mother, while at work. Antonio often thinks in the if/then/therefore logic of computers, and he codes for his daughters a program that spits out quotes from the surrealist writer Leonora Carrington, a means of speaking with them, even after his death. And in one bravura passage, Auxilio considers calling the United States. If her voice is captured by the American surveillance algorithm, she reasons, it will be stored in a data center alongside any recordings of her lost daughter’s voice, and they will be reunited, if only in the cloud.

After he has a heart attack, Antonio’s files fall to his daughters, who continue on with his project, and the novel’s form is revealed. No simple narrative of injury and restoration, “American Abductions” threads together a vast psychic web — a shared imaginary, shaped by both grand policy and petty malice, a pain that seeps into our collective unconscious, haunting even our dreams. If you want to use the word, it goes beyond trauma and into something deeper, a connection uniting the stories of a vast collective, like the surveillance centers full of ambiently collected data, or the message boards on which the survivors of the abduction program meet, and commiserate, and attempt to live on.

Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.

American Abductions

By Mauro Javier Cárdenas

Dalkey Archive. 229 pp. $17.95

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The Great Read Paris Dispatch

Dancing Past the Venus de Milo

The Louvre is joining in the celebration for the Olympics by opening up for dance and exercise classes early in the morning. Tickets sold out in a flash.

Exercising in the Louvre before the crowds arrive this month. Credit...

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By Catherine Porter

Photographs and Video by Dmitry Kostyukov

Reporting from Paris and dancing through the Louvre

• May 16, 2024

I fell in love with the Louvre one morning while doing disco moves to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” in the Salle des Cariatides .

The museum, a former medieval fortress and then royal palace, had not yet opened, and I was following instructions to catwalk and hip bump and point in the grand room where Louis XIV once held plays and balls.

The sun cast warm light through long windows, striping the pink-and-white checkered floor and bathing the marble arms, heads and wings of the ancient Grecian statues around me.

“Point, and point, and point,” shouted Salim Bagayoko, a dance instructor. So I struck my best John Travolta poses and pointed around the room, my eyes landing on the delicate sandaled foot of Artemus, the wings of a Niobid and the stone penis of Apollo.

The woman beside me caught my eye. We giggled.

Over the years, I have felt many things in the world’s most-visited, and arguably most-famous, museum — irritation, exhaustion and some wonder, too.

This time, I felt joy.

With the Summer Olympics coming to Paris in a few months, museums and galleries across the country have been competing to put on Olympics-themed shows. One of the Louvre’s offerings is an hourlong dance-and-exercise circuit through the building, which museum officials call “Courez au Louvre” — meaning both run to and run in the Louvre.

The museum seemed a natural training gym, explained its performing arts director, Luc Bouniol-Laffont. It is so big that the staff wear running shoes to cover its 400 rooms, which, when stretched together, extend more than nine miles. And exercise would offer a different connection to some of the 33,000 works.

“It’s not the spirit looking,” he explained. “It’s the body.”

He offered Mehdi Kerkouche , a local choreographer, a tour with curators and gave him carte blanche to design the sessions — with one small request.

“Forget the Mona Lisa, for once,” Mr. Bouniol-Laffont said. “There are so many other things to see.”

The classes, priced at 38 euros, about $41, for adults, sold out within an hour of going live online. They last through the end of this month.

The biggest draw is the timing. The dancing begins an hour before the museum opens. Each morning, some 60 lucky people — divided into two groups of 30 — get to experience a private viewing normally enjoyed only by the likes of Beyoncé and Jay-Z .

No giant lines, no pressing crowds, no selfie-sticks: We had the Louvre to ourselves.

Here’s a secret: While the French are passionate gallery-goers, they aren’t huge into the Louvre. Some nine million people crowd its halls each year, but the vast majority aren’t French. The place is just too big and crowded. The experience of viewing the Mona Lisa is similar to squeezing into the subway at rush hour ; some 30,000 people press before it each day. Why suffer through that when there are more than 100 less-packed museums, full of marvelous things, scattered around the city?

Even Mr. Kerkouche admitted he hadn’t been inside the building since he was a child. “All the Parisians are the same,” he said. “I bike every day in front of it to go from one place to another in the city. But I just don’t look at it anymore.”

Arriving at the Louvre alone, before the crowds, gave me the space to really look at it. And boy, is it breathtaking.

In the center of the outer courtyard, I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid glowed purple-blue in the morning light. I stepped inside it and floated down the escalator into the museum’s modern foyer, the reflection of the building’s ornate stone facades, with its columns and statues, scattered around me.

I felt like a character in a Disney cartoon. It was magical.

Mr. Kerkouche’s idea was to have a four-part session, in four different rooms, tucked close to one another in two of the Louvre’s three wings. Otherwise, he said, the hour would be eaten up by commuting.

He asked four collaborators — three dancers and his gym coach — to help design a 15-minute class for each space. Each one was inspired, energetically, by the room.

Disco in the Salle des Cariatides, which once had held royal balls, was obvious — to him, disco was the modern version of ballroom dancing. “We have to give back the first purpose of this room,” he said.

From there, my group stepped into the next room for some quick stretching beside the Venus de Milo and then ran down to the basement to the oldest part of the building. There, we did warrior training — lunges, squats and jumping jacks to the beats of the AC/DC song “Highway to Hell.”

The activity befit the Louvre’s origins as a fortress built around 1200 to protect the medieval city from the Normans while King Philippe Auguste was on a crusade. Over the centuries, it was converted into a royal palace and greatly expanded. In 1984, while doing a huge renovation of the building, archaeologists unearthed the base of the original rough limestone walls.

We did running races up and down the steps toward the Great Sphynx of Tanis , which guards the entrance to the Egyptian antiquities collection. I imagined its pouting lips smiling just slightly, and its huge stone tail flicking in mild feline amusement.

We whooped and hollered as we ran up the stairwell to the next class, the echoes washing over my body. The instructors played hide-and-seek during their first walk-through together, I was told. They maintained that sense of playfulness.

It was all so otherworldly and silly. I felt the sense of exhilaration and freedom I remember from summer camp when I was a kid.

We were instructed to dance into our next class, through a tunnel made of the massive bodies of two stone bulls with eagle wings and the heads of bearded men. Inside, we were greeted by a reconstructed 2,700-year-old courtyard of Khorsabad, a palace of King Sargon II, leader of the Assyrian empire. Abandoned soon after his death, the palace was unearthed in 1843 in modern-day Iraq by the French vice consul to Mosul. Parts were sent to the Louvre soon after for display.

The giant statues inspired Mr. Kerkouche to offer a class in dancehall, the Jamaican urban dance in which moves are rooted, powerful and sensual.

“We are living statues,” said Queensy Blazin’, the dance instructor who led us through rounds of twerking, stomping while scooping our arms and bouncing forward into squats while barking “ha” to the deep beats of Sean Paul’s “Get Busy.”

The joy was infectious and irresistible.

Even the security guard was dancing at her post. She had never seen anything like it in her 34 years working here, she confided.

Beauty shouldn’t just be stared at, I realized. It should be enjoyed and celebrated.

Our last stop was in the part of the Louvre that was once a parking lot for the Ministry of Finance, which, for more than a century, had its offices in one wing of the building. As part of the 1984 renovation, the museum directors converted the space into a peaceful courtyard with potted trees, benches and Carrara marble statues from the royal gardens of the Marly palace. That was a former getaway spot for Louis XIV, where he’d come to relax in the stunning gardens, resplendent with waterfalls, groves and pools.

And so there we did yoga. The teacher led us through downward dogs and pigeon poses before giant statues of rearing horses and hunters — a homage to the king’s favorite pastimes.

I noticed sea gulls wheeling above the giant glass roof.

“Normally, yoga is very introspective,” Laure Dary, the instructor, explained to me later. “But this is a setting like no other. I have to tell them to open their eyes.”

She directed us to focus on one statue, and take it as a mental memento. I gazed into the stone eye of a marble boar being speared by a hunter in a tunic.

At the end, my fellow rosy-cheeked participants crowded around the teachers to thank them profusely. We were all high on endorphins.

“This was a life highlight,” beamed Benny Nemer, 50, a Canadian artist who has lived in Paris for four years.

My only criticism: 15 minutes was not enough time in each room. I need to go back and examine them all intimately, plus see some other ones I glimpsed while running by. Which was exactly the point, according to Mr. Bouniol-Laffont of the Louvre — to lure Parisians back into the building, and remind them of the place’s majesty.

Because once you fall in love with a place, you don’t want to be parted from it.

Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris. More about Catherine Porter

2024 Paris Summer Olympics

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An Undocumented Wonder The Making Of The Great Indian Election Kindle Edition

• Print length 457 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Rupa Publications India
• Publication date September 1, 2014
• File size 4095 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B016APQJ9E
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rupa Publications India (September 1, 2014)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2014
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 4095 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
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• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 457 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 8129131064
• #407 in Campaigns & Elections
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