Oriental Magpie Robin (Copsychus saularis)

 

Scaly-breasted Munia (Lonchura punctulata)

 

Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg

Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This philosophical sub-genre of SF starts off as a chthonic and claustrophobic whimsical story and soars off to abstract levels in the vein of Cordwainer Smith. There are echoes of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid angst and China Miéville’s mystical eeriness; reality is bent into an Eschereque vertiginous topology. Free will is questioned along the lines of The Matrix series of films – a creation of the author’s fellow Poles – the gender-fluid Wachowski siblings. At times reads like the autobiography of a human parasite like a hook worm or Plasmodium – fluids, tubes, mucous, orifices, peristalsis, periods of quiescence/dormancy in form of spores or eggs interspersed with periods of hyperactivity. There is a long tract where it appears like a Lewis Carrollesque Alice discussing existentialism from the point of view of a chicken or a wheat plant.
A must-read for SF aficionados.

View all my reviews

Whose Samosa is it Anyway?

Whose Samosa is it Anyway? by Sonal Ved
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A promising title but the contents were a big disappointment. There is an interminable introduction – a detailed summary (an oxymoron, I know) of the rest of the book. Just a rambling and flippant account of Indian history.

My understanding is that it is safe to assume that, like Bandra West, perhaps the Indus society too was a multi-ethnic society, and the Vedic people were a part of that society, like the foreigners you’ll see savouring moringa smoothies post a yogalates class.

Mainly routine stuff, except for an occasional gem:

…real Balti food is so rare, it can seldom be found outside certain pockets of Ladakh or even on Google fo that matter. Dishes like kisir, buckwheat pancake; tsamik, yoghurt- and herb-based dip; fay mar, roasted barley flour mixed with white butter; ba-leh, local hand-rolled noodles; grangthur, fluffy buckwheat bread; chonmagramgrim, a salad of tomato, apple, walnut, apricots and yak cheese; and phading, a dessert of boiled apricots.

The book could have been more succinct without the numerous repetitions and done with some drastic pruning.

View all my reviews

The Exile by Navtej Sarna

 

The Exile: A Novel Based on Life of Maharaja Duleep Singh by Navtej Sarna
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-crafted informative book with the ideal mix of fact and fiction.
The British could rule the Indian land mass because they were astute and scheming, exploiting the differences between the squabbling rajahs and chieftains – “divide and rule” using caste and religion. But usurping the Punjab empire, depriving the prince Duleep of his throne and looting the vast treasure was classic British perfidy.

Mrs Fagin. That’s what I once called Queen Victoria. The biggest pickpocket of them all. The receiver of stolen goods. Stolen kingdoms, stolen jewels. Smuggled away to her by her loyal viceroys, men like Dalhousie with immaculate records and long panegyrics. The thousands of pearls and emeralds and rubies and diamonds taken from my toshkhana and presented to her by the East India Company after the Great Exhibition of 1851. To be locked away in the Tower of London, stuck in her tiara, sewn on her dresses. That’s how she received the Koh-i-noor. Dalhousie tucked it away into a chamois bag especially made by his wife, which was then sewn into his belt by Login.

But Duleep Singh too was not blameless – he relinquished his religion, led a dissolute life in England and, when abandoned by the British for his profligacy, reconverted to Shikhism and yearned for his kingdom. He conspired with Russians, Afghans, Turks and French to somehow get his throne back and resume slaking his blood lust – shooting pheasants and other wild-life on a gargantuan scale.

View all my reviews

Shikra aka Banded Goshawk (Accipiter badius)

 

Accipiter badius

Ministry For The Future

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite Barak Obama’s endorsement, I was put off by the cheesy title – reminded me of John Cleese’s Ministy of Silly Walks. But once I got over the initial hesitancy, the narrative gripped me. The day after a killer heat wave strikes western UP in India:

He watched sunlight strike the tops of the trees on the other side of the lake; it looked like they were bursting into flame. Balancing his head carefully on his spine, he surveyed the scene. Everyone was dead

The author comes up with some startling statistics

Kaming: Ninety-nine percent of all meat alive is made of humans and their domestic beasts. Cattle, pigs, sheep, goats. Wild creatures are one percent of meat alive. And suffering Many species gone soon.
M: Soon?
K: Like thirty years.
Estevan: Only twenty percent of the fish now in oceans are wild fish.

A possible side-effect of global warming?

Have you heard that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that these fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power? That would explain a lot.

A book with flashes of brilliance interspersed with dull bits where the author propounds his theories on economics. Nonetheless, an important book for the present day – hence the five stars. I found the unconventional geo-engineering processes to reverse the effects of climate change the most fascinating part of the book.

There are about 60 billion birds alive on Earth. They’ve been quicker than anyone to inhabit the re-wilded land and thrive. Recall they are all descended from theropods. They are dinosaurs, still alive among us. Sixty billion is good number, a healthy number.

SF is speculative fiction with a strong dose of possible scenarios on future scientific breakthroughs. It is also a form of wishful thinking – possible future utopia or dystopia. Here, though the author tries hard to delve into the Indian milieu, his take on the socio-political scene is not just puerile, but also rather patronizing – I guess the colonial hangover still lingers. He conjectures that the BJP and Congress are wiped out by a Coalition government, castes no longer exist, industries are nationalized and farmers regress to bullock-carts.

… with land reform comes a return to local knowledge and local ownership and thus political power. The new agriculture is also labour intensive, as to a certain extent people must replace the power of fossil fuels and pay close attention to small biomes, and of course we have that labour power and that close attention.

Such naïve thinking that the centuries old caste system so embedded in the Indian sociocultural psyche will just disappear after a cataclysmic event – it may even become more rigid.

Especially as the caste system is once again acknowledged to be a bad remnant of our past, a remnant also very associated with BJP, who along with selling our country to global financial predators also demonized so many ethnicities…

The author seems to unaware that most Indian political parties are caste based and all exploit the caste and religious divide. Moreover, it is Indian companies like Tata, Reliance, TCS, Wipro that have become multinationals and foreign companies that did not adhere to local rules were sent packing. Here is another simplistic analysis

… the national Coalition government has completed the nationalization of all the country’s energy companies, and set to work decommissioning all coal-fired plants. Completing the clean electrification of the country is being accomplished by construction of massive solar power arrays, and then electricity-storing facilities, and a refurbished national grid. This again has been labour intensive, but India has lots of people. And lots of sunlight. And lots of land.

The author conjures up a utopian Earth – somewhat like John Lennon’s Imagine. How did he get recalcitrant nations like North Korea to cooperate? How could Islamic countries reconcile to not eating meat? How could they stop their sanguineous festivals with animal slaughter on an industrial scale? Terrorism is justified by the author to reverse climate change – industries, ultra-rich individuals, aircraft, container ships are bombed or attacked by drones. Hindu fundamentalists use bio-terrorism to infect all cows with the BSE virus, thus stopping beef-consumption!

View all my reviews

Things to Leave Behind by Namita Gokhale

Things to leave behind by Namita Gokhale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A tad disappointing: the book had all the ingredients for a multi-generational epic – eccentric characters, some strong-willed and some wimpy; a time of historical changes, insurrection, gallows; the seething cauldron of caste and religion and the seminal reforms in hidebound cultural practices; sylvan hills; pristine lakes; mysticism; unbridled passion, illicit affairs; palace intrigues; domestic squabbles, individual heroism, clan rivalries etc. But the book just meanders along and concludes in a most unsatisfactory manner.
The stylized Himalayan Magpie pair with their iridescent plumage on the cover turns out to be a red-herring. However, I was glad to see mention of my alma mater’s boathouse in phansi ghadera; we spent many afternoons pumping the oars and working off our pent-up teenager energy.

View all my reviews