'Make in England' is need of hour

Those of us who live in England have a slightly more nuanced view of the legacy of Empire than perhaps Shashi Tharoor. His Oxford Union speech last May sought not reparations but an insulting "symbolic pound a year for the next two hundred years, as a token of apology" plus the return of the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

No doubt he stirred up nationalistic passions but a new book by entrepreneur Kartar Lalvani, The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise (Bloomsbury; £25), offers the other side of the picture and argues that India's infrastructural development owes a great deal to the British.

It has received an unexpected endorsement from Ram Jethmalani, the MP and former chairman of the Bar Council of India: "I fully concur with Dr Lalvani that Indians should be grateful for some of the permanent blessings of colonial rule, which only the unique attributes of the British could have conferred on us."

In Britain, the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has welcomed the book as "absolutely excellent: informative, well argued and passionate", while Anil Seal, the Cambridge historian, has called it "extremely well judged, factually accurate, with a wealth of fascinating material".

Kartar, a Sikh who was born in Karachi on December 14, 1931, and came to Britain in 1956, founded what is now "Britain's No. 1 vitamins company", Vitabiotics, with a global turnover of $400 million (including $100m in India) and sales in some 110 countries.

As its president, Kartar runs Vitabiotics with the help of sons, Tej, 41, the company's vice-president of global operations, and former Oxford don, Ajit, 52, a non-executive director who has a day job as professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London.

Tharoor would probably argue that the British developed India so as to loot the country's riches more efficiently but the point is that the British-built bridges, canals, telegraph, universities, public utilities, sewers and grand buildings have all endured.

Manmohan Singh broadly supports Kartar's thesis.

"Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too," he said in an Oxford University speech in 2005.

Perhaps what is required is a "Make in England" campaign by David Cameron, for England, sadly, can no longer make what it once made for India.

Cameron told a 2013 press briefing: "There is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did... there were bad events as well as good events and the bad events we should learn from and the good events we should celebrate."

Surely, Tharoor can agree with that.

Sachin trail

Anjali Doshi has taken quite a scholarly approach in digging up the best material that has appeared in Wisden over a 25 year period for her book, Tendulkar in Wisden: An Anthology (Bloomsbury; £20).

Anjali, who worked for New Delhi Television and was NDTV's cricket editor, moved to London in April 2014.

It has helped that her husband, Lawrence Booth, is editor of Wisden and a Daily Mail writer.

"We got married in 2014," says Anjali. "He's just put to bed his fifth Wisden - I said in my acknowledgement that it's great to have a resident cricket expert and editor because he was always on hand to check something. He was my sounding board; he was very helpful."

Lawrence and I had chatted after he put Sachin on the cover of Wisden in 2014 (Sachin's first appearance in the "Bible of cricket" was in 1989 after he and Vinod Kambli got 664 in a schools' match in 1987).

The idea for the Sachin anthology came from Bloomsbury, which owns Wisden. It had done anthologies on W.G. Grace, Donald Bradman and Richie Benaud but never on a living cricketer. It felt the time was right "now that the dust has settled on Sachin's retirement".

Anjali, who has been editing The Nightwatchman, a Wisden quarterly, for two years, tells me: "I do a bit of freelance writing but I am currently a student doing a masters in cultural and social anthropology at UCL (University College London) so I am immersed full-time in that."

She will be visiting India in May for field work on her dissertation.

Incidentally, the one Sachin innings she remembers above all is his 154 not out in January 2008 in Sydney and the positive "response it generated (even) in an Australian audience".

In Anjali's opinion, "foreign writers are able to write very beautifully about his talent but what he means to India, what he means to a nation, comes best from Indian writers".

Marking Modi

We had two contrasting views of Narendra Modi last week.

At India House, Navtej Sarna, the enterprising high commissioner, convened an expert panel to discuss the Indian budget with the support of the CII.

When the chairman, Ibukun Adebayo, co-head, emerging markets, London Stock Exchange group, asked everyone to mark the budget out of 10, Deepak Lalwani, chairman, Lalcap, gave it 7.5.

Philip Bouverat, director of JCB, gave it "7 to 8"; Anuj Chande, partner and head of South Asia group, Grant Thornton, awarded 8; John Copley, senior vice-president, strategy and future programmes (aerospace), Rolls-Royce, "an A, not an A star"; while Prashant Jhawar, chairman, CII Business Forum UK, and chairman, Usha Martin, was more loyal than the king and awarded "A plus".

Productive past

At King's College London, meanwhile, Sunil Khilnani, director, India Institute, launched his big book, Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (Allen Lane; £30).

He hoped his BBC radio series and book would "add dimension and depth to our understanding of Indian thinkers and doers from the Buddha all the way to Bombay billionaires. I also hope that at a moment when it seems India's speciality is silencing dissent and criticism that the essays in Incarnations might serve as a reminder that dissent itself is one of the richest and most productive aspects of the Indian past."

Sex change

A memo to past and present alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge: to John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose (who are upstairs); and to Bikash Sinha and Yusuf Hamied (who have most probably been called to the nearest bar): your old alma mater has elected Jane Stapleton, who "specialises in the law of torts", to be the first woman Master of the college in over 500 years. She takes over from Frank Kelly, the 37th Master, on September 1, 2016.

My understanding is that she will still be called Master and not Mistress of Christ's.

Tittle tattle

At the Oscars last Sunday, Priyanka Chopra presented the Best Editing award; director Asif Kapadia received a statuette for Best Documentary from Dev Patel; and Saeed Jaffrey, who died last November, aged 86, got a mention in the "memoriam" segment.

Saeed's delighted wife Jennifer Jaffrey quipped: "Saeed always wanted an Oscar - this is the next best thing."

She remembered her husband by visiting the local vineyard in her Cotswold village where the vine named after him is called "Saeed's tipple".