Book Review - Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brilliant! A beautifully crafted, poignant story of down-and-out Parsis in Bombay. It is about the helplessness of old age, family love, family strife, ethics, coming of age, religion both as a savior and as a tool for fundamentalists etc. The lyrical prose describing the city:

Time passed as he stood on the balcony and saw the clouds assume the colour of the evening. The setting sun was painting copper edges around them. He looked at the chaos of television cables and radio antennae and electrical connections and telephone lines spread out against the sky. Fitting, he thought, for a city that was chaos personified. This mad confusion of wires, criss-crossing between buildings, haphazardly spanning the road, looping crazily around trees, climbing drunkenly to rooftops – this mad confusion of wires, criss-crossing between buildings, haphazardly spanning the road, looping crazily around trees, climbing drunkenly to rooftops – this mad confusion seemed to have trapped the neighbourhood in its web.

A moment of beauty in the midst of insurmountable difficulties:

The balcony door framed the scene: nine-year-old happily feeding seventy-nine…She felt she was witnessing something almost sacred, and her eyes refused to relinquish the precious moment, for she knew instinctively that it would become a memory to cherish, to recall in difficult times when she needed strength.

The optimist always see the glass as half-full and not half-empty:

But the sources of pleasure are many. Ditches, potholes, traffic cannot extinguish all the joys of life.

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Book Review - Life on the Death Railway: The memoirs of a British POW

Life on the Death Railway: The Memoirs of a British POW by Stuart Young
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A rather flippant account of POWs held by the Japanese during WW II. The gruesome details are tempered by levity. A diet of rice led to continence

Our urge to urinate rose spectacularly, but the complementary bodily function disappeared completely. Twice a day we would visit the bore-holes by the Changi cinema and squat there for half an hour or more without result. Going through the motions without motions so to speak... In about a couple of weeks, the maladjustment had indeed righted itself, while the 'record' as far as I know was forty-one days. It is one of life's little ironies that the record holder would in less than twelve months succumb to dysentery.

... a denouement that rivals a yarn by Saki. The harsh reality was far from beautiful

The ulcers grew, stretching from ankle to knee, laying the bone open in the centre of the rotting, pus-laden, gangrenous flesh. Cleaning was brutally simple. A dessert spoon was sterilized and, while the poor unfortunate patient bit on a piece of weed, and clung desperately to the head of his bed, the pus and rotted flesh was literally scraped away from the affected part. There was no anaesthetic of any sort and the agony must have been almost unendurable.

Despite such tropical ulcers, intestinal worms, fungal infections, malaria - including cerebral malaria and blackwater fever, dysentery - bacterial, amoebic, cholera, typhoid the author still has a sunny outlook on life

Even at Tonchan South, there were moments of relaxation, and, dare I say, beauty

His fighting spirit braves all adversities

So, with the distant view softening the memory of those terrible days of long ago, it is with the railway. As the years go by it becomes more and more difficult to recapture in mere words, the horror, the filth, the degradation and the saturated stinking misery of interminable day upon day with no end in sight, no time when one could say "This is the last day of my sentence, and I am once again free."

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Book Review - Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century

Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century by John Stratton Hawley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An engrossing and breathless, albeit sanitized, account of the Vrindavan – the basil “forest” – if you will, where Krishna purportedly frolicked with his flock besotted gopis. It is a sad account of an idyllic pastoral village being polluted with crass commerce and greedy land developers. Loudspeakers, garish bill-boards, tacky temple architecture have marred the pristine glory of hoary temples and ‘kunj galis’ of yore. The Yamuna is but a sewer, alas! The rusty bucolic environs have been replaced by cows munching plastic waste on garbage heaps and dying painful deaths.
The book dwells inordinately on a gaudy temple on the fringes of Vrindavan that is yet to get off the ground, a temple with its own interpretation of the Vedas and Krishna’s lore. The other needless bantering is about his host – a self-proclaimed benefactor of Vrindavan. Nouveau riche ‘pilgrims’ meander among the pigs and squalor, menaced by predatory simians who have replaced the iconic peafowls – who’s vibrant feather is a constant adornment of Lord Krishna.
The historical account from the sixteenth century onwards including the Mughal era is well documented but the tone of casteism biased towards brahmins is jarring.

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