The book begins well enough, or at any rate not too badly, with an intriguing call from a depressed suicidal youth to the author across an ocean and a smart work of detection by his wife to discover who and where, saving the life of the caller.
It improves for a while with a very real portrayal of poor to middle class youth, on brink of life, with their backgrounds and capabilities and so forth, and the very absorbing description of the city not usually described in works of literature outside the state, given with some love that comes through in spite of the much affected urbane attitude sported by the author.
There is a fascinating description of the scrawny poor youth who is a fantastic talent at the favourite sport of the nation and the commonwealth, but has a difference that makes him a medical curiosity and an object of study.
The enterprising protagonist with his friends and their support of the boy begins to make it a very interesting tale.
Until it degenerates into a usual bundle of titillating assembly of flights and dives, specialty of this writer, only with more far flung stuff this time.
The usual seduction (on an open terrace, in daylight, no locks or latches!!! don't want to know if this is real) and this time a pregnancy scare (so young readers are not encouraged this time????) is by now familiar enough to get one merely raising an eyebrow and saying, mhm.
The free trip to Australia (!!) and the offer of the settling - refused by the boy on grounds of wishing to play only for India, while not impossible, one would like to know if it happened or is this an attempt to evoke national pride. If the latter it ought to have been done better, the crudeness of the storyteller's lack of quality takes away from any possibility of making this into an ideal and risks making this into a borderline ridiculous story.
Then it gets worse, with a portrayal of events in Gujarat that seems like one of those "now you can paint Van Gogh's sunflowers too" sort of fill-in-those-prescribed-colours-by-the-number picture of the events. Someone must have told him, it is ok to mention the burnt train but paint the other side so gory it would be forgotten this was a riot and it would seem a one way massacre. There is no mention of history of communal riots in the state that took place every now and then, at a time there were elections looming - and the fact that this time there was containment, with a comparable number dead in police action on either side. There is of course no mention whatsoever of the ever looming threat to the nation from weapons and so forth being brought in, supplied by no one needs to guess who and who.
I don't know if the idea was to get a pat on the back from some dominating political powers or straightaway aim for a booker or something. It is so much a patchwork of events and description that clash without creating a new harmony or any sort of an understanding of events, one wonders if there was a reason to write this particular story or bunch of stories tied up together in one thread, such as someone told him a story and he decided this was too good to miss an opportunity to tell. It certainly needed to be told better - this one is a bit like telling about history of last century on a tabloid format, to give one extreme example, or a musical of the good old British style, to give another.
Much in the way of horror stories has come through news media that cannot be denied and one cannot but recoil with disgust at those that did perpetrate any of it - that much goes without saying. But how it began on the whole has not been mentioned, except as retaliation or fury about a trainload of people burnt alive, locked in and unable to escape.
Riots in Mumbai, then still called Bombay in English officially (though it was always and equally officially Mumbai in the local language and Bambaee in the national language) began with police station (one or more, don't know at this point in time) being attacked by a mob (or mobs) as retaliation for the events clear across a thousand or so miles away in the ancient temple vs less ancient mosque arguement.
I know of no country, so far, that allows mobs to attack police stations with arms and instead of a police action merely deals with tolerance with a view of not inciting criticism from "others". Then again, one may compare US border patrol and their policies (anyone dare say it is communal? No?) with that in India dealing with illegal migrants with the very porous border that is every day poured through, by not only those in need of work and unable to do well in their homelands and might really be pathetic and harmless, but also those with other, far different and very specific intentions.
Migrants across political boundaries of nationhood go in more than one or two forms, of course. Humans as every other species has always traveled to find means of survival across and around the globe, with one difference - humans are the one species that can be insincere about this, and also are the one species that go about exterminaitng their own, either for the purpose of survival or often for sheer pleasure of it. Migration of humans is often masked as aggression - and other forms. It happens nevertheless for sake of finding means of survival, but some migrate without the sincerity of their purpose clear, and instead of coming to other lands as those in need of survival they arrive as traders - honest enough a purpose - or as marauders, aggressors, would be empire builders, with swords on horseback or cannons and ships, and sometimes even as spies or worse, stealthy hidden ones who would do much damage as and when they can, by being willing to be used for the purpose, often well trained and single minded in the purpose.
I have met people in India, those that belong to India in every way, not political sort of people at all, and in fact not too happy about having to live in India (ancestors having been forced to migrate over half a century ago at partition, and leave much wealth behind, for sake of saving their lives) but resigned to it as something they cannot help, often very nostalgic about the lands they left behind that grow rosier with years in memory, and inevitably they blame the leaders that did not accept the alternative demands of those who demanded partition, or at the very least disdain the land that they came as refugees to, although that epithet has been long forgotten and was always temporary, and the nations is theirs too. They retain familiarity with the lands they left, the culture and the speech, and consequently these are people who can detect the migrants - though it should be said it is clear to anyone from states along borders who is from which side, by various signs obvious and clear. It is only political opportunists that outright deny this phenomena completely, although by this time it is no longer a question of a few thousand here and there.
A book I picked up and skimmed through in a local book shop, comparatively recent publication, about a "foreigner" (the possibly journalist author) meeting various people and writing very verbatim of the encounters (that was the reason I did not buy - it contained much details of the sort one is put off by, dealing with nether areas); this book specifically mentions authentic information, very casually, about what sort of weapons are already in the country. Missiles included.
There is an unacknowledged proxy war, and winking or closing one's eyes wouldn't make it go away. Nor would killing any innocents, goes without saying.
And meanwhile there is another war, that of the sort carried out in media. There is a persistent denouncing of certain parties and factions, and in fact it is as if very faiths or beliefs or the whole wealth of culture and knowldedge of India is condenmned without trial, by the would-be-western (or at the very least approved by the masters on other shores) sort of remote control driven media.
One wonders why the denounciations lack mentions of a history, of not only riots of those places but of many, many others across the country, and in facts the whole scale and well planned one way massacres that took place in some places since '46 - for, those that would persistently demand an outcry against the two states where it was riots and not massacres never ever mention, or even admit when questioned, the horrors of "action day" in Calcutta in '46 when thousands were butchered with knives, Lahore in '47 when it was repeated with escalation, Delhi in '84 and so forth. The much self congratulatory tabloids that have successfully used hidden cameras to get small fry or really questionable "evidence" against people known for honesty and sincere self dedication in politics have not - ever - stepped across this unmarked boundary and found out about any of these happenings, got any admissions or even dared to question the known perpetrators, or even go after the missing millions in funds that were spoken of in whispers a few decades ago in coffers of known party and people. In fact when those in authority in Soviet Russia recently admitted to giving those bribes for non legitimate purposes the counterparts, those that received the funds on this end stoutly called them liars - and the media let them be, just like that. And as to the generous funds streaming in from elsewhere for whatever purposes (of ultimately wiping out the nation and culture, one way or another - or both) it is as if it is not to be mentioned on par with morning pre bathing rituals.
One wonders why the two said states and the indigenous parties are marked out for denouncing - is it because unlike the other events ('46 Calcutta, '47 Lahore, '84 Delhi) they were not one way massacres begun and finished by perpetrators but instead were riots where those that began them got whipped instead? Would these clamouring for the condemnation rather have seen the two prosperous states wiped out like the World Trade Centre of New York - as indeed the three were symbols of the respective people doing well, and this was intolerable to those that attacked in the first place? WTC was a one way massacre too, of innocents. Was that destiny preferred for the two states for riots, by those that do not mention other far worse happenings of one way massacres by those in power, forget investigative journalism of any sort?
It begins to sound like the few of the many Germans we met (not all) that went on about the allied bombing and destruction of beautiful German cities with old architecture and culture, not to mention the thousands of people that died. They admitted, when we did not respond, that of course their own side had done some bad things too. Then another, a young woman - not so young she would not understand what is what - complained about some Jewish people she met who stopped talking to her when they found out she was German, "even though she was young and was not guilty personally".
The culture of forgiving the guilty and condemning those that fight back or resist being wiped out and massacred - now it is at the level of not only mainstream media but even supposedly personal - whether between complete strangers or supposedly friends - conversations, and it always goes with an insistence on a hurry to condemn (or else one stands to be denounced as "right wing", the words having lost the real meaning) one particular set of people, parties, culture, with no context of similar or worse events or anything else taken into account at all. One wonders if those massacred in holocaust were denounced in the same way, with propaganda carried out for centuries against them relentlessly, for the crime of having produced one man that was worth worship. Certainly the fact that such propaganda was carried out in places of worship came as a shock to us when we heard it - but it was information casually given by another German - a pious one - who was apologetic about the people and the nation and as such mentioned the larger context of how it had gone on across much of central and eastern Europe at the very least, so that the people looked less gullible to criminal behaviour induced by a handful of goons. No, it had been far deeper, inculcated long, and in places of worship too, so the people had received the poison for long before they acted in such stupor and frenzy to commit genocide or condone it.
One wonders if the next target is this nation, this culture, this ancient wealth of a tradition. Any resistance to this wiping out is much cried out against, and any one way massacres are dismissed with talks of forgiveness or an accusatory "why recall that" or worse, a complete rewriting of those as either valid (it was for demand of another nation) or non happenings. So was information about concentration camps dismissed by those that could have saved a few million with a "these people are always wailing" casually while the trains to the the death camps continued. Perhaps the real crime of the present would be indicted is not being wiped out as intended by powers on other shores.
One nation lost wars two millenia ago, and wandered through the world finding refuge temporarily here and there, but with no rights even of buying land much less settling or citizenship - and there are others across the globe, nations and cultures and people, that are slaves in all but official word in their own land occupied by those that call it by other names.
Gandhi won without bloodshed (though the refugees silently angered at this much expressed sentiment, wondering if the blood of their kith and kin was not counted as blood, shed at the time) but even he recognised, openly, that if he were opposed to another sort of regime, the sort British had to fight no matter how much they tried to avoid it, he would certainly not have succeeded with his ways. And it was independence of India that was the goal.
British and French tried to avoid need of war, by making treaties the other had no intention of keeping, and even browbeating Czechoslovakia into submitting to a walkover without a fight. That was a worthy attempt but of course not any sort of rightness about the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, and yet it did not avoid the horrendous war, since those they were placating had no intention of being placated.
French gave up too soon, and made it difficult for the British, then sole remaining hope for the world and civilisation. US would not have come in except for Japan making a mistake, and the same is true of the other side of the world. One admires the nation that did not give up in face of the huge threat, the possibility of extinction, and fought on with quiet resolve and much suffered in ways of deprivations. Light would be extinguished, perhaps forever, if they had not fought and made treaty at that point instead.
Wars have changed since then and some nations including India, as other nations too lately, know this.
Spare the innocent their lives and peace - and remember the "innocent until proven guilty", which does not mean proven with media propaganda or labeling.
It might be difficult, when it comes to it, to avoid the temptation of making easy sacrifices for one's own safety, which is like offering a lamb, then the dog and then the neighbour's child, to the wolf, hoping that your own would be safe and the wolf might love you by being fed. But the wolf will return for the food you get it used to and your own are only a step away from being eaten with the policy of feeding others' to the wolf.
Sophie's Choice was not easy - but she missed the one option she needed to take, that of not choosing which child she would give up for death in gas chambers, hoping the other would thereby - might, with no guarantees from the mass murderers - be safe. When she chose to give up her daughter in favour of her son, hoping he would live, she took the guilt of the murder forever on herself, in her own heart whether or not in fact.
There is riot, there is massacres - often by rulers - and there is wars conducted without declaration; and there is fighting fire by fire.
And then there is the option for the wise, not to judge when one does not really know all that is necessary to know. Any behaviour otherwise is mob hysteria or jungle rule. Meanwhile, hold on to principles and despise those that act ignobly - and don't make a principle of hatred, either, or targetting easy and soft targets.
Curiously another book I read recently gives a more journalistic background on Gujarat long before these events in one chapter - and since it is by Mark Tully, it should be no problem for anyone to credit it with authenticity. It is called NO Full Stops In India. He does discuss the riots preceding his interview (- they always existed, and the recent last ones that are being clamoured against were neither the worst nor the only ones but had another distinction, of being contained successfully by law enforcers -) with the poor women, and their lives as a whole.
