Narendra Modi in The Atlantic

Narendra Modi in The Atlantic

In this month's issue of The Atlantic, we find Robert Kaplan's profile of Narendra Modi -- or rather, what purports to be a profile. Really, from reading the article, it looks like Modi gave Kaplan approximately 30 minutes of his time, and Kaplan doesn't go through the usual grind of talking to people around Modi, trying to build up a fresh portrait of him. Given a couple of days, nearly all of this piece could have been written with Wikipedia, online newspaper archives, and a few telephone calls.

Profiles are interesting exercises, because they can work in a number of ways. They can tell a reader about people who operate -- discreetly but momentously -- behind the scenes and are therefore not quite as well known as they should be. They can tell a reader about how a public personality is viewed and interacts with the people who constitute his / her immediate world. (The most-cited example is Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a Cold, in which Talese doesn't even need to talk to Sinatra to tell us about him.) They can tell a reader new things about even the most public of personalities, taking us deeper into their lives and revealing facets and angles that have remained hidden thus far. They can tell a reader about how a person is the product of the circumstances and the times that s/he lived through -- seeing an individual not so much as an individual but as an intersection of multiple streams of history. But in each case, the profile gives us something new about a person we should know about -- new information or new perspectives.

When I read the Modi piece, I wondered for a minute if it was unfair to expect anything new out of it. After all, the piece was a Modi primer for an American reader, who doubtless needs the dry slabs of the potted history of Gujarat that Kaplan includes. There is nothing in there that we, as Indian readers, don't know, but perhaps that shouldn't be the standard of judgement, I thought to myself.

But then I remembered this piece: Graeme Wood's profile of Laloo Prasad Yadav in The American. Its objective is similar to Kaplan's: To introduce an important Indian politician to an American readership. But it manages to do so much more. It finds fresh ways of recapping old information, it builds a stronger narrative, and most importantly, it tells us many new things. For all the journalism about Laloo, for instance, I read for the first time in Wood's piece the anecdote about his visit to the railway stop in Danapur, Bihar, and his consequent decision to increase axle loads in the Indian Railways' freight trains. I read for the first time in Wood's piece about Sudhir Kumar, the civil servant whom Wood reveals to be behind much of Laloo's success at the head of the Railways ministry -- and a classic case of a momentous behind-the-scenes operator. (This is, in a way, a profile as much of Kumar as of Laloo.) And despite repeated media reports about the turnaround of the Railways and Laloo's lectures at various management institutes, this is the first comprehensive, accessible piece I've read about how exactly Laloo manufactured this turnaround, about what his management was really about.