CSI Dwarka: What WAS Rahul Gandhi reading?
Sidin Vadukut -
Monday, May 11, 2009 4:30 PM
Merely moments ago my dear friend and colleague Samanth Subramaniam blogged about the reading habits of politicians, Indian and otherwise. His post is plenty fun to read. So please do. (You must understand that more web traffic to the livemint blogs leads to happier bosses, leads to pleasanter top-level meetings, leads to bonuses. I am just saying.)
At the end of that post Samanth threw open a web search challenge which I decided to enthusiastically pick up.
He posted a picture of Rahul Gandhi and wondered what book the young Congressman was reading.
(Photo courtesy: AP)
Later, in an update, Samanth announced that a perusal of the photo in high magnification yielded two fragments of prose from the page:
I received a hugely enlarged version of the Rahul Gandhi image a couple of minutes ago, detailed enough to spot a few phrases on the right-hand page of the book he is reading. It seems to be about the origins of the kibbutz culture in Israel, and the text -- "Jews from Caesarea" and "a kibbutz was set up in 1942" -- proves unGoogleable. Guesses, anyone?
This, of course, is exactly the sort of challenge readers of Play Things relish. First we didn't Google just like that. Oh no. We searched within Google Books for matches. A search for the phrase "Jew from Caesarea" yielded 26 results. This was a little surprising. I had expected that, of the two phrases, this one to be obscure. No matter. Next we searched Google Books for "a kibbutz was set up in 1942".
Et voila!. We got exactly one result. Martin Gilbert's 1998 book: "Israel: A history".
But wait. Did the book have the other phrase as well. We searched again but this time with the keywords chosen carefully: "Jews from Caesarea" and "Martin Gilbert".
Ka-boom!. We got exactly one result again. MARTIN GILBERT'S 1998 BOOK: "ISRAEL: A HISTORY"!
But wait again. We needed to check exactly one more thing. Samanth clearly indicates that both phrases appear on the same side of the book. Only one way to prove that. Search books with both phrases in quotes. And KA-POW we discover that both phrases appear on page 113 of Martin Gilbert's book. Thus Play Things, using just a few sessions on Book Search, had cracked the secret of Rahul Gandhi's mysterious book.
(Photo courtesy: Amazon)
From Wikipedia:
Martin Gilbert, (born 1936)[1] is a British historian and the author of over eighty books, including works on the Holocaust and Jewish history. He has been a pioneer of historical atlases, and is best known as the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill.
Also can we point out that Mr. Gandhi is probably using a Blackberry Curve by the looks of things? (On the sill to his left.) Most probably a 8310 Curve with GPS. Going by the silver casing and the little rectangular power button.
Now comes the key question. Why is Mr. Gandhi reading a book on Israel? Leave your conspiracy theories in the comments below.
Note to right-wing hawks: This blog is impartial. We will try to figure what any leader from any party is reading. Just you email me the pictures on sidin.v@livemint.com.