Emergency: A Personal History by Coomi Kapoor

Emergency: A Personal History by Coomi Kapoor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With shades of 1984 and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this memoir is a must-read for every democracy-loving Indian. There is an onimous sense of déjà vu nowadays when the tables have been turned

In Gujrat the RSS often sent a young pracharak to pick him (a fugitive Subramaniam Swamy) from the station and take him to (Morarji) Desai’s house. This humble pracharak was Narendra Modi…

Indira Gandhi rode roughshod over any kind of dissenting voice while ensconced in her ivory tower

At the start of the Emergency the director general of AIR ventured to suggest to Mrs Gandhi that she would destroy the credibility of AIR if the government did away with AIR’s code of objectivity. She responded angrily, ‘What credibility? We are the government!'

Clever journalists circumvented the draconian censorship rules by this sly obituary notice in the Times of India

the demise of D’Ocracy, DEM beloved husband of T.Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, Justice who expired on 26 June

Sycophancy knew no bounds with the famous quote by D.K. Barooah Indira is India and India is Indira

All India Radio came to be jokingly referred to as All Indira Radio as, following government directions, it played up every speech by Indira and Sanjay

How free speech was throttled

…the electricity on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg kept flickering on and off. By afternoon there was a newsflash from the agencies, declaring that censorship had been imposed and nothing could be printed without prior official clearance. By evening, electricity to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg was disconnected for the whole night so that the Times of India, Indian Express, Navbharat Times, Patriot, National Herald, Daily Pratap, and Veer Arjun could not bring out their editions. The newspapers would not be printed for another two days.

The paranoid dictator-in-the-making silenced the opposition and any dissenting voices

After arresting the top leaders, the police had started cracking down on the lower rungs of the dissidents, including student union activists, trade unionists, municipal corporators and members of Delhi Metropolitan Council affiliated to the opposition parties. On 4 July the government banned twenty-six organizations, including the RSS, the Anand Marg, the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Naxalites…Nobody took the Anand Marg seriously except for Mrs Gandhi

Parliament was throttled and the Constitution made inconsequential

Mrs Gandhi convened and emergency session of Parliament on 21 July to get the official stamp of approval for her proclamation of the Emergency. MPs from the treasury benches dutifully endorsed everything they were told to. There was not a murmur of dissent. To the left of the Speaker there were a large number of empty spaces since the leading lights of the Opposition were mostly behind bars…Even before the Emergency Mrs Gandhi had aired her views that government departments unnecessarily wasted time answering questions raised by MPs during Parliament’s Question Hour… She now decreed that only urgent and important government business should be transacted in a Parliament session. Question Hour, Calling Attention motions and other parliamentary business initiated by private members were dispensed with

Kafkaesque draconian measures were instituted

An arrest under MISA, unlike an arrest under DIR, had an air of finality about it. There was no scope for intervention by the courts, no provision for bail

A very well presented account of those dark days.

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Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love

Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Murakami at his whackiest. This sleek, stylish book is an ideal gift for the die-hard Murakami fan. Printed on silken, creamy-smooth paper with glossy photos, it has no eerie bits but gives a glimpse of the author’s life – dawdling in book stores, browsing for jazz records, delving into T-Shirt stores, lazing around and generally enjoying the fruits of his labours. This is vintage Murakami:

Especially late at night, when I’m alone and listening to music, whiskey seems the perfect accompaniment. Beer’s a little too watery, wine’s a bit too refined, a martini too pretentious, brandy too mellow. The only choice is to bring out a bottle of whiskey

Who can stay calm while reading the weird work of Murakami? Can the reader maintain his/her sanity while traveling in parallel dimensions, dwelling in wells and pits? His ear fetish, obsession with cats and female breasts are the theme running through his yarns.

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The Tatas, Freddie Mercury & Other Bawas: An Intimate History of the Parsis by Coomi Kapoor

The Tatas, Freddie Mercury & Other Bawas: An Intimate History of the Parsis by Coomi Kapoor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is common thread runs through this alliterative list? Butter, Bangladesh, Bombay, Bomb, Beethoven, Bohemian Rhapsody – it is yet another B – the Bawas. The Parsis are a gift to India from Persia. Despite its microscopic size, the community has contributed disproportionately more to this country than any other religious community.
Lucidly written but suffers from an inordinate excess about the corporate spat between the Tatas and Cyrus Mistry.
Answer: Polson, Sam Manekshaw, Parsis, Homi Sethna, Zubin Mehta, Farrokh Bulsara aka Freddie Mercury


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A Matter of Time by Shashi Despande

A Matter of Time by Sashi Deshpande
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is challenging, yet fun, to read Shashi Deshpande’s novels – it’s like solving a crossword puzzle. Characters pop in at random with no explanation as to their status. I ended up drawing a genealogical chart to keep track of the myriad relationships.
This is archetypal Deshpande – a couple of extended dysfunctional families blundering through life with their individual foibles and skeletons from musty old cupboards tumbling out.
She writes with a lyrical beauty

Everything grows wild here, nothing is scaled down to a cultivated prettiness. The bougainvillaea has become a monster parasite clinging passionately to its neighbour, the akash mallige, cutting deep grooves in its trunk, as if intent on strangulating it. But high above, the two flower together amicably, as if the cruelty below is an event of the past, wholly forgotten. The champak seems to have no relation to the graceful tree that grows in other people’s yards. Grown to an enormous height, its flowers can neither be plucked nor seen, but the fragrance comes down each year like a message that it is flowering time again. The branches of the three mango trees are so tangled together it is as if they have closed ranks to protect the walls of the house, which remain damp, months after the rains.

It goes on this way, graphically evoking the ambience of a neglected garden around a hoary old mansion.

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Opium Inc.: How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire

Opium Inc.: How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire by Thomas Manuel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It all boils down to three Greek alphabets – mu, kappa and delta.
At the risk of sounding pedantic: These are G-protein coupled opioid receptors responsible for the various effects of opioids. Mu receptors in distinct brain regions such as the nucleus accumbens and basolateral amygdala trigger euphoria and the incentive properties of rewarding stimuli, playing an important role in goal-directed behaviour. As addictive behaviour develops, poor decision making and cognition impairment shift the goal directed behaviours to habitual behaviours, and lead to compulsive drug use. Kappa opioid receptors can trigger anti-reward effects and produce dysphoric effects. Delta opioid receptors can induce anxiolytic effects. So at the root of addiction behaviour lies the mu opioid receptor. End of pomposity!
The book exposes the hypocrisy of the British, the affluent Parsi community, Singapore and surprisingly, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the fortunes of all these were based on the reprehensible opium trade. Christian missionaries are indicted for their active and indirect roles in the odious trade of opioids. That some of them vehemently opposed the government policies of their governments does not excuse the community of collusion to poison and denude two nations of their self-respect and natural resources.

In fact, the history of missionary activity in China is inextricable from the commercial activities of the colonial powers. The Qing administration expressly prohibited Christian missionaries from entering their lands. But, of course, just as the opium ban didn’t stop merchants, this didn’t stop the missionaries. They simply joined trading companies as employees and entered the empire under that guise…For many missionaries, the opening of trade was integral to the spread of religion…Chinese restrictions on trade went against the will of God who wanted all countries of the world to share their wealth with each other. This acted as a neat justification for him to use the full extent of his powers to aid the colonial project.

Whereas this is an scholarly review of the opium trade, Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy Sea of PoppiesRiver of SmokeFlood of Fire gives a wonderfully graphic and in-depth account of this whole sordid affair. The author pays a glowing tribute to the trilogy. It is chilling to learn of the way tea, chocolate, coffee, sugar, and opium were interlinked with each other and depended on slavery – slaves from Africa, China and India!
The writing style is very engaging and the book is not at all like an academic tome.

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The Garden of Heaven by Madhulika Liddle

The Garden of Heaven by Madhulika Liddle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As far as trans-generational epics as a sub-genre of historical fiction are concerned, there have been more engrossing tales. This was rather jerky, with jumps of up to three decades between successive characters. The frieze called the Garden of Heaven is like a red-herring – maybe it assumes significance in the sequels of the proposed quartet.
Finally, the Dilli I expected centered around Chandni Chowk was missing and the yarn was located in present-day Mehrauli.
However, waiting eagerly for the sequels…

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A Judge in Madras

A Judge in Madras: Sir Sidney Wadsworth and the Indian Civil Service, 1913-47 by Caroline Keen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A rarely seen aspect of the IAS (the hidebound chthonic behemoth - the much vaunted “steel frame of India” – it’s segueing from the British to the native bureaucrats and inception from the venerable ICS. The book offers a glimpse of the history and geography of present-day Chennai and its surroundings.
However, it is painful to see the convoluted justifications of development put forth by these erstwhile rulers of India. If they constructed a railway network and roads, it was for their travel and transport of goods looted from various parts of the land to enrich their coffers back in Britain. Irrigation canals were not for countering famines due to failure of the monsoon but for increased and disproportionate agricultural levies and irrigation tax.
Except for the patronising tone, the narrative is a fairly balanced account of pre-Independence India – specifically South India.

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Book Review - Delhi: A Soliloquy by M. Mukundan

Delhi: A Soliloquy by M. Mukundan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of those rare, soul-stirring books that jolts the complacency out of the reader. Having studied and trained in Delhi (Ramjas College, UCMS, Safdarjung Hospital), hung around K Nags swilling Campa Cola (long haired, jhola toting, wearing bell-bottoms and shirts with ‘go-go’ collars), scoured Nai Sadak for books, experimented with various manifestations of cannabis in the lanes of Chandni Chowk, wooed my wife-to-be (Rose Garden in Hauz Khas, South Ex, corridors of CP), getting married in Arya Samaj Mandir BKS Marg, cuddling my newly-born daughter in Holy Family Hospital, and eventually working as a Palliative Care Physician, I can claim to be a true Dilliwala . On my first two-wheeler (a Bajaj) and later in a Maruti 800, I watched in dismay as the idyllic roads of Delhi turned into polluted streams of bumper-to-bumper traffic jams. Grand old trees gave way to the concrete jungle of present times. Love it or hate it – it’s my Dilli and having witnessed the turbulent times described in the book, I can closely identify with the defining moments in the Delhi’s history – the Emergency and the ’84 riots. The author has distilled the essence of India’s capital – a recent historical look through the eyes of an immigrant from Kerala – religion, caste, poverty, politics, slums (the so-called JJ Colonies), parochialism, riots, pogroms, socioeconomic disparity, all interlaced with communist undertones. The narrative starts from the early sixties when the present day megapolis was still a growing city

… Andrews Ganj, where the city itself ended. Beyond it were wheat fields, interspersed with cabbage and radish patches…The cauliflower patches on the right side of the narrow road leading to Kalkaji were also in darkness. No one went there after nightfall because it teemed with robbers and thugs…

Today middle-class aspirations include owing a car, flat-screen TV etc but back then

A Murphy radio was the dream of every middle-class family

Before the so-called economic liberalization in the nineties, three decades earlier, life was a struggle

he woke up to the rumble of Delhi Milk Scheme vans filled with milk bottles driving past the house. He had permits for two half-litre bottles since they were a family of four.

The author chiefly on the woes and existential concerns of the poor and down-trodden

For a man with no money, hunger was a real problem. But Vasu was one of those who belied that one doesn’t need money to get food or end hunger. How did birds and animals eat? Did they have money?

These cameos convey the atmosphere of utter poverty and indifference. In the alleys of Old Delhi

A crazed-looking woman limped through the crowd, dark blood clots between her legs. No one noticed her. No one gave her a scrap of cloth to cover her nakedness. A beggar without legs and arms propelled himself forward on his back, wriggling between the wheels of rickshaws and legs of pedestrians, balancing his begging bowl on his chest.

Food for thought

The yellow-tinged mutton-rice inside big copper pots was covered with flies. Mutton-rice or fly-coated rice? A man with a henna-coloured beard stood eating his rice from an aluminium plate, watched hungrily by a beggar. Once he had sucked out all the marrow from the bones, he discarded them into the waiting hands of the beggar, who gnawed hungrily at the bits of flesh still left on them.

More from the walled city of Dilli

A child was caught pick-pocketing someone and was flung to the ground. The crowd began to kick him in his chest and stomach. Blood spurted from his nose. His howls of pain set the hearts of the doves on the minaret of Jama Masjid aflutter with fear…

The birth of Bangladesh and the refugee influx

It was like the overflow of sludge and rocks that follows a landslide. Journeys that began as a flight from death turned into funeral processions of poverty and hunger…Beside the road, and below the trees, they appeared as sores and grew like pustules. Little children with misshapen torsos, pale yellow skin and sunken eyes thrust their arms out at pedestrians and passing cars. Most of them were naked, and the boys were circumcised.

The reign of terror that was unleashed by Sanjay Gandhi and his cohort of semen-thirsty minions was an echo of Nazi pogroms against Jews in the Fourties

‘Nasbandiwale aaye hain. Bhaag jao, bhaag jao’, the naliwala shouted…After running for some time, the pigs stopped. They swished their curly tails and stood panting. Though the pigs littered more than human beings, Sanjayji’s forced vasectomy programme did not include them. No municipal vehicles drove up with a roar to round them up and take them away by force… ‘The lives of the shit-eating pigs are safer than ours,’ Sahadevan (the protagonist) said…Until now, there was only hunger, poverty, and communal and caste conflict. Nowadays it was vasectomies, arrests and incarcerations. People disappearing had become a daily occurrence.

Blooming of the lotus and the burgeoning Hindutva wave

There are people in Delhi who feed cows when humans are starving. For them, cows are more important. You know that. They don’t know the value of human beings. It’s such men who turn into fascists. I despise them.

The housing shortage

Most Malayalis, after coming to Delhi, gave up on their dream of owning an independent house. A DDA flat was all they could hope for. Matchbox-like flats built one on top of the other. Within months of moving in, there would be seepages and leaks. The corroded water pipes would break in one’s hands

The socialist symbol of existence

A ration card was not merely for buying wheat, rice and sugar at subsidised prices, and candles and firecrackers during Diwali. It was also an identity card. An authoritative and credible testimony that he was alive on the face of this earth. Without a ration card, it would be impossible to prove that he was a resident of the city.

In short, an EPIC!

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Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan

Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Back in the hirsute Seventies as a callow youth, when I first read about this hippie Robin Hood, I considered him to be a hero – the archetypal rebel without a cause, cocking a snook at the ‘Establishment.’ Those were the Mary-Jane-suffused days of Hair and Woodstock, Lucy ruled the Skies (skies that were kissed by Jimi Hendrix) with Diamonds, deaf, dumb and blind Tommy played Who’s Pin Ball and we ‘freaked out.’ Now weary with years of cynicism behind me, I find the author to be a mere on-and-off junkie, compulsive thief and regular jailbird

Kenny Wisdom spent seven months without bail in that cramped moss-ridden-rat-infested-syphilitic-conjunctivitic-tuberculous-marasmic-anaemic-choreal-cancerous-scabied-ringwormed-rotten-crippling-languishing-ulcerated-septic dungeon of bronchopneumonia…

The hippie ethos was embodied in the nihilistic manifesto of The Hun

Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property

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Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Exhalation by Ted Chiang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some startlingly original ideas like the title story:

Everyday we consume two lungs heavy with air; everyday we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with full ones.

and

I have journeyed all the way to the edge of the world, and seen the solid chromium wall that extends from the ground up into the infinite sky

I found this the best story in the SF sub-genre of steam punk – in this case, argon punk.
The story about the automatic nanny could qualify as steam punk. There are hints of flat-earther philosophy, alternate realities, sentient robots (more accurately, software packages), time-travel, young-earth creationism etc. The stories are all dark and the narrative style, unfortunately, is rather dull and dry, hence the three star rating.

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Embassytown by China Mieville

Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An allegorical, if convoluted, account of Humans interfering with the natural order of things, as usual, messing up, and then vainly struggling to undo their mistakes – never really achieving status quo ante.
Although Mieville excels at fantasy and bizarre tales if he is grounded in his favourite milieu of London, however, he fails to inspire with this attempt at extra-terrestrial SF/“weird fiction.” There are flashes of his brilliance

where the airs mixed – past what was not quite a hard border but was still remarkably abrupt, a gaseous transition, breezes sculpted with nanotech particle-machines and consummate atmosphere artistry

while describing the interface between oxygen-rich breathable air and the toxic alien atmosphere.
The author brings in many fascinating concepts like an extradimensional travelling subspace, alien biotech and xenocs to whom the notions of mendacity are incomprehensible and who consider humans to be figures of speech

“Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic… You’re a simile.”

Some terms are not clarified e.g., yawl, immer, aeoli, altoysterman, immer, sopor, encomia, manchmal, floaking, to mention a few; although miab turns out to be nothing more prosaic than “Message In A Bottle!”

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Book Review: Funeral Nights by Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih

Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Morose to reach the end of the book – feels like a vacuum inside. I will miss the cantankerous characters of the book, Raji, the irascible Bah Kynsai, Bah Su, Bah Kit, the sceptical Donald (spoiler alert: who finds love with the only female of the group), the nay-saying Evening and Ap the omniscient narrator – the alter ego of the author. Their squabbles, and occasional fisticuffs aside, the narration is immensely readable without becoming dry and scholarly.

Five-star rating for the colossal effort of compiling this magnum opus. It smartly encapsulates the Khasi (known colloquially as Ri Hynniew Trep) ethos – if a tome of 1000+ pages can be called encapsulation. This includes various facets of culture, religion, social set-up (matrilineal amongst the tribals but fading away amongst the converts to Christianity), politics, folk-lore, history, culinary practices (pork, beef, mutton – all is kosher only dogs are taboo) geography of Meghalaya, conflicts. Almost encyclopaedic in scope, it details their linguistic quirks in naming, their foibles, the effects of British invasion, Christianity and non-tribal immigration leading to a loss of their cultural heritage, including their extant grassroots political system with the king as a titular head without executive powers being replaced by the corrupt Indian Panchayati Raj.

Indigenous people feel strongly about the name of their state imposed on them

What has this stupid name - Meghalaya, Abode of the Clouds, given by some academic thug from nowhere - got to do with us? Are you a cloud, Hamkom? Does the name connect you with the land, as Nagaland or Mizoram does? Are we a people with no roots in the land? Were they so dim-witted, your heroes, that they couldn't think of a name for their state?

I learnt about Extispicy (also Splanchomancy, Haruspicy, Aruspicy, Hieroscopia, and Hieroscopy) - the practice of using anomalies in animal entrails to predict or divine future events; the difference between Matriarchy - a postulated gynocentric form of society, in which power is with the women and especially with the mothers of a community and Matrilineality - a system in which one belongs to one's mother's lineage, where children are identified in terms of their mother rather than their father, and extended families and tribal alliances form along female blood-lines; cromlechs, ossuaries and other funeral practices. Various aspects of their traditional sport of archery was covered comprehensively.

I really loved the description of the Khasi religion - a beautiful message of spirituality for living in harmony with nature and fellow humans with the blessings of God - U Blei Nong-thaw. No prophet, no jihad, no prosetylization, no caste, no exploitative priests. Who knows? This form of worship may have existed during the Vedic times in our hoary past before it was hijacked by Hindutva votaries and turned into a combative religion.

Khublei! Bah Kynpham!! Following the quaint practice of naming offspring after celestial objects, you could name your child FiveStar. Just joking…

A question: Where can one see the film Ka Phor Sorat by Raphael Warjri?

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Book Review: How to be a Literary Sensation by Krishna Shastri Devulapillai

How to Be a Literary Sensation: A Quick Guide to Exploiting Friends, Family and Facebook for Artistic Gain by Krishna Shastri Devulapalli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A laugh riot of flippant self-deprecating humour, to begin with. But tends to get monotonous and stale towards the end of the book. Here is an example of his wit

The Town That Wouldn’t Change by Arunima Kurkure
The year is 1979, the place Kakinada. The year is 1989, the place is still Kakinada. The year is 1999, the place is somehow still Kakinada. The poignant tale of a village idiot who finds out that it will remain Kakinada even in 2029. This is an allegorical tale of epic proportions about the ever-changing nature of the mind, the unchanging nature of life and the loose change in your pocket. A Groundhog Day meets Fountainhead. In an advance review, The Kakinada Times has called the book ‘at once sensuous, hilarious and digestive.’

This is a preview of one of the imaginary books supposedly to be released that year.

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Book Review: Magister Ludi - The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

 

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Heard about this book from Robert De Nero’s character Dragma in The Bagman. Magister Ludi means Master of the Games so I had high expectations about some esoteric game of intellect – somewhat akin to Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games but without the action and the world-wide conflagration. Was quite disappointed; there was no edge-of-the-seat excitement of an actual game. No strategies or tactics about the game, not even like the sedate pace of a game of chess.
And certainly not any genre of SF!
A very wordy book – pages and pages of declamations and no real inkling about the so-called Glass Bead Game. It is about an exclusive men-only club on a provincial scale – a quasi-religious cabal of snooty self-proclaimed intellectuals. A misogynistic Masonic Lodge with an antipathy to all things feminine, the book has strong undercurrents of homosexual love pervading various ranks of the hierarchy of the sect.
Knowledge of Latin and German and European musical composers like Purcell would have made the book easier to read. May have been relevant in a past age

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The Last Queen

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a fairy tale fictional account – albeit based on historical facts – of a strong-willed village belle who rises to become the Queen Regent (and not the Queen, mind you) of the remnants of the Sikh empire. This daughter of the royal dog-trainer, besotted by an aged king, strives against palace intrigues, schemes of the wily British, treachery, betrayals and bad decisions on her part to try and protect her son and kingdom. Whether she succeeds or fails makes for gripping reading. I plan to read diplomat/author Navtej Sarna's The Exile: A Novel Based On The Life Of Maharaja Duleep Singh next.

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Baby Bullet - The Enfield 200

 

The Automobile - An Indian Love Affair

Automobile by Gautam Sen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frankly this is not an Indian love affair with automobiles but more of an account of the hobby of rich aficionados’ collecting vintage cars.
It was the arrival of the Maruti 800 that really started the true love affair of Indians with the automobile – once quality, reasonably priced cars were easily available and the monopoly of “The Small Three” ended. The author goes on interminably in excruciating details about rare European vintage cars – that is his prerogative as it is his passion. For the hoi polloi this ‘love affair’ was cemented with the watered-down Indian version of the SUV.
There should have been a bit about the parsimony of Indians and their obsession with CNG and the phrase Kitna deti hai? Without the spreading network of Expressways (and the inevitable rise in accidents) driving for leisure rather than work has increased.

Finally, there was no mention of the iconic Enfield 200 aka Mini Bullet – the bike that was adorned with a dash of colour after the all-black Bullet, Yezdi and Rajdoot. It was this bike with the registration number DEW 717 that I used during College while courting my future wife!!

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Book Review: My Story by Kamala Das

My Story by Kamala Suraiyya Das
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author seems to have spent an inordinately long time in hospitals and has captured the sense of alienation and depersonalization of hospitals

You have become a mere number. Along with your clothes, which the nurse took off, was removed your personality traits. Then the pathologist’s henchmen rush at you for specimens of your blood, sputum, urine and bowel movement. With all those little jam-jars filled and sealed, every vestige of your false dignity is thus removed. In the X-ray room, another nurse unwraps your body while the ward-boy who wheeled you in watches furtively from the dark. The display of breasts is the legitimate reward for his labour.

Feel rather ambivalent being part of a sandwich filling

I have always regarded the hospital as a planet situated like a sandwich filling between the familiar earth and the strange domain of death.

Her biography is rather underwhelming, nothing approaching her alleged notoriety.

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Book Review: Early Indians by Tony Joseph

Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So humanity’s progenitors Adam and Eve did exist – in a manner of speaking – only they are labelled CT and L3; this is based on the Y chromosome in males and the maternal mitochondrial DNA respectively of all present-day humans. However, there was no moment of epiphany as in Kubrick’s interpretation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when, to the strains of Strauss’s uplifting Also sprach Zarathustra, a hirsute pre-hominid picks up a femur and crashes it down on the ossified remains of a pig – thus creating a weapon to a reclaim a waterhole for his tribe.
With compelling evidence based on archaeology, language and, most crucially, genomic studies, the author builds up his case for the mass migration of early humans into the Indian sub-continent 65000 years ago. Subsequent to-and-fro migrations made up the seething cauldron of present-day India.
The book raises more questions than it answers. For example, the animal seen in the Harappan seals is called a unicorn, but the author says there were no horses in that region during that era but were brought in by the 'Aryans’ from the steppes of Central Asia. To me it appears as a stylized bull in profile, especially seeing the position of the urethra. It could very well be a rhino, with a bit of imagination.
The origin of South-Indian languages from distant Iran is fascinating. The preachy bit criticizing the ‘right wing’ was really not necessary.

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Book Review - Padmavati the Harlot by Kamala Das

Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories by Kamala Suraiyya Das
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mainly about women on the “fringes of society”, suffering iniquities at the hands of a paternalistic and misogynistic community. The longest story, A Doll for the Child Prostitute is a heart-rending account about children forced into prostitution

But they hardly knew the significance of the sexual act. For them, it came as occasional punishment meted out for some obscure reason. Perhaps the mistake they committed was that they were born as girls in a society that regarded the female as a burden, a liability. The two girls resented the frequent interruptions during their game of squares and even while the coarse men, old enough to be their grandfathers, took pleasure off their young bodies, the children’s minds were away, hopping in the large squares of the chalked diagram on the floor on the porch.

Many are poignant vignettes of the daily drudge

He would sit among them steeped in loneliness. He was like a Ravi Varma model propped against Picasso’s Guernica. There was disharmony

Distressing but immensely readable stories.

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Book Review: Women, Dreaming

 

Women Dreaming by Salma
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Women,Wailing is a more apt title of the book. The unceasing weeping, crying, caterwauling of a girl and her mother, aunt and grandmothers is the consequence of her father discovering the Wahabism brand of radical Islam after his sojourn in Saudi Arabia. Using sharia as his tool, he sets out to terrorize his immediate family, neighbours and his village.
Maybe the essence is lost in translation but it is a bit tedious reading at times. Yet the narrative does throw up some devastating insights. Most poignant was the conceptualizing of colours and shapes by an old woman blind from birth. The hypocrisy of muslim men justifying polygamy for themselves while covering up their women, denying proper education for girls, labelling TV, films, cosmetics etc evil is gut-wrenching.
Women do not dream in this book – they are just buffeted about by societal pressures.

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Nephele subvaria

 

Book Review: Twilight in a Knotted World

 

Twilight in a Knotted World by Siddhartha Sarma
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A different perspective of the villainous cult of Thuggee as compared to Confessions of a Thug. Whereas Philip Meadows Taylor gives a gruesome picture of the heinous exploits of Firangee, here the author has elevated this cruel looter to an enigmatic, messiah-like heroic figure who is the “spiritual” head of a cult of murderous thieves. The colonising British are depicted as wise, just and paternalistic entities tolerating the foibles of the squabbling masses of natives. Sati, its justification, archaeology, feral children brought up by wolves are pointless digressions. Giving four star rating for the glossary and detailed superstitions of the Phansigars.

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Spirama retorta or Erebus ephesperis?

 

Book Review - Bhairavi by Shivani (Translation)

 

Bhairavi: The Runaway by Shivani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A gripping yarn about beautiful women trying to survive in a patriachal Hindu India, specifically the Kumaon hills and more specifically within the chthonic Brahmin community. Although the male characters – whether an ascetic, a king, or a playboy husband – are flat and wimpy individuals, but as a community exert inordinate power over their women – daughters, sisters, wives or even mothers. However, the females have been powerfully presented. It says a lot for the insecurity of a community that ‘family honour’ is dependent on the purported ‘purity’ of the womenfolk. A premarital dalliance will besmirch the character of a girl and ruin her prospects of getting a ‘good’ groom; however, for the male partner of this romance, there is no penalty.
The translation could have better - some metaphors have been literal in their translation leading to hilarious results!

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Squirrel

 

Book Review - The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene

 

The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The languid Wodhousian pace of the Agent’s quixotic journey speeds up in the second chapter. The Agent blunders from one Kafkaesque fiasco to another and just gets buffeted around by situations beyond his control. The use of initials instead of names is very irritating; one cannot put a face on a person called D. or L. or K. However, poignant gems like this keep the narrative going

He felt homesick for the dust after the explosion. The noise of engines in the sky. You have to love your home for something – if only for its pain and violence.

There is an improbable love story, quite unlike the amorous exploits of Ian Fleming's 007. The Agent is a tortured soul trying to reconcile to his personal losses and to his country torn apart by civil-war

his territory was death: he could love the dead and the dying better than the living.

A sarcastic take on the fad of Esperanto was a needless diversion.

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Indian Chat or Brown Rock Chat (Oenanthe fusca) - II

 

Indian Chat or Brown Rock Chat (Oenanthe fusca)

 (Oenanthe fusca)