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)

Book Review - Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

 

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rollicking example of the steam-punk subgenre of SF. Mieville revels in his favourite milieu – the urban jungle

I eat whatever organic thing I find that will not kill me. I hide like a parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with age

This is how an exiled dewinged garuda excommunicated for the crime of rape hides in this excrescence of a city – a city like Peter F. Hamilton’s semi-organic Makkathran in the Void in an alternate history moulded by GEORGE R. R. MARTIN.
The book is a nauseating olla podrida of bodily excretions, mucus, phlegm, nameless effluvia marinated with sortilege, alien xenomorphs from Neil Asher’s Polity timeline, steeped and fermented in a Tolkienesque alternate world, stewed in a Star Wars alien bar, garnished with Lovecraftian horror and served with a slice of Mary Shelly. Hitchcock Alfred’ suspense and Ian Fleming’s seat-of-the-pants action are side dishes.
Malevolent oneirophagus pan-dimensional moths terrorize New Crobuzon’s residents. Armed with thaumaturgy and weird weapons powered by chymicals an obese physicist (besotted with a chimerical insectoid female), the amputated garuda, water-shaping vodyanoy and robotic constructs of garbage, band up to rid the city of the evil predators, while battling crime-lords and the city militia. Ominous omens and a torrid fulminant climate are no helpto the protagonists.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like particles of filth in water.

A tad overdone, hence the four stars.

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