Book Review - The Nine Lives of Pakistan

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation by Declan Walsh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This engrossing account, written in a chatty style, deals with the existential dilemma of Pakistan.

More concept than country, Pakistan strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith. Could it hold?

As the British retreated to lick their wounds after WW II, the two J’s – Jinnah and Jawahar – in their vanity, eviscerated the sub-continent, Jinnah having a dubious triple honour, according to his biographer Stanley Wolpert

Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did all three

The author loves the country – warts and all – yet offers a fairly unbiased narrative of the conundrum of what could have been a great country

Most knew Pakistan as a stage for lurid dramas on a grand scale, characterized by spectacular violence, villainous leaders and deluded messiahs with feverish dreams of global domination.

Here is a very first-hand and perspicacious view of the 'concept' of this country

It was certainly true that the trauma of partition, and the confusions of faith and identity it created, lurked behind the most enduring pathologies I encountered in the land of broken maps. Although Pakistan was built on faith, Islam offered an incomplete identity. Negation of India filled the void. Viewed through this lens, so much of what Pakistan did – the coddling of jihadis, the scheming in Afghanistan – seemed to stem from a gnawing insecurity. Pakistan had to be everything India was, and was not.

Immensely readable – at times providing a sense of schadenfreude to the Indian reader

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Book Review - Jugalbandi by Viany Sitapati

Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi by Vinay Sitapati
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lucidly written political history of India from the BJP perspective, in an easy to swallow capsule. The book traces the evolution of the present ruling dispensation from the first unfurling of the saffron flag of the RSS during pre-independence times. The tentative guttering flame of the Jan Sangh tries to flourish but, as the “Buddha smiled”, mutates into the blooming lotus.
A factual error: bhang is not opium – bhang pakodaswere a favourite of Vajpayee, as the author mentions.
I read about the mosque demolition in the book on 6 Dec. A coincidence??


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Book Review - Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

 

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Utopia Avenue cements David Mitchel’s sterling reputation as a master story-teller.
After dabbling in the occult (The Bone Clocks), paying a tribute to John Lennon (Number 9 Dream), historical fiction (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), classical music and SF (Cloud Atlas), the author writes about the psychadelic rock-music genre. Marc Bolan, Al Ginsberg, Steve Winwood, a pre-psychotic Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, The Beatles make an appearance in the narrative. Here the gorgeous, heterochromic David Robert Jones, epitomizing Ziggy Stardust waltzes by

a figure striding up, his trench coat flapping like a super-hero’s cape… The figure pushes back his fringe to reveal a thin white face, with one blue eye and one jet-black.
…Jasper mines a shrug. ‘Who are you?’
‘David Bowie, artiste-at-large.’

The Cloud Atlas sextet makes a cameo appearance and fiction segues into reality when the band members discuss the newly released Sergeant Pepper’s

‘I asked,’ said Dean, ‘what yer thought of the album.’
‘Why stick labels on the moon? It’s Art.’

Hendrix exchanging guitar techniques, Keith Moon (the drummer from The Who), the artist Francis Bacon and the syrupy Herman’s Hermits drift in and out of the narrative.
An encounter with a stoned rock-artist/poet.

Another under-table shuffler. Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, five … The two inspect each other.
‘You are you aren’t you? Asks Jasper.
‘I think so,’ says John Lennon.
‘I have been looking for you since I got here.’
‘Congratulations. I am looking for …’ He needs a prompt.
‘Looking for what, John?’
‘Something I lost,’ says the Beatle.’
‘What have you lost, John?’
‘My fuckin’ mind, pal.’

The following encounter occurs at Leonard Cohen’s marijuana soaked roof-top party.

A woman turns around. She wears a pink boa woven through her hair, the gown of a damsel in distress, enough bracelets and chains to open a stall, and is one of America’s most famous singers.
‘Janis fookin’ Joplin? This time it’s Griff who blurts.

Soon Janis belts out a rock classic accompanied by Jackson Browne.
What seems to be the meteoric (such a cliched term) career of a rock-group, soon acquires ominous undertones. Without adding spoilers, there is a connection to another of the authors books towards the end. It is not (Cloud Atlas) although it deals with trans-generational migration of souls…

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