Scoop; by Kuldip Nayar.

A worthy read for those interested in the region and the history. Nayar was close to centres of power and able to find scoops and talk to people, and more importantly have people talk to him. If his objectivity is only 99 percent, that is more than most others achieve.

The Associate; by John Grisham.

It begins with a pit of fear growing in the protagonist, and one of fear and disgust in the reader, what with the men who blackmail him as he finishes coaching underprivileged kids at sport as a social conscience duty, about to return to his room at Yale law school, and with every step thereafter it is a contest between him to keep his head clear and them to have him in their sights. The boy is intelligent and generally good, and really has not done anything wrong but a seeming wrong and the evidence thereof that can be fabricated is often damning enough, and his career, his life is at stake. How he manages to stay clean nevertheless is the story, and the astounding end is all too plausible these days.

This time Grisham abandons his favourite old ending - that of innocent victims and witnesses on the run hiding from criminals in islands in Caribbean or elsewhere. Not everyone can, especially when your career and qualifications are well defined and not in multiple directions. This time the protagonist takes another, more dangerous perhaps, route - with good reasoning he gives clearly.

Very readable and more, as all Grisham works are, but a bit unsatisfactory in that it leaves one at every chapter feeling he could have written more, made it more detailed and filled out. This one is barely a sketch compared to some of his earlier works. A good one, but still, unsatisfactorily bare.

Unaccustomed Earth; By Jhumpa Lahiri.

Lahiri wrote a complete in itself story when writing The Namesake, capturing most common experiences of a migrant community of well educated and middle class white collar people from across the world making a life in a surrounding so very unfamiliar. Now, in this collection of stories long and short she captures fragments of experiences and emotions as incomplete and jagged as shards of a broken mirror, leaving the reader forever dissatisfied and asking - what happened next to this person, that one? - and too, hurt by the various pains of the various characters she leaves no solutions or satisfactory endings for.

It is at once a testament to her quality as a writer that one not only ends up feeling this way about a whole lot of characters and a community that one might or might not be familiar with, but even nostalgic to the point of being homesick at heart for the places she mentions, whether one has loved them in fact or not known them at all.

One does not, of course, love every character - that would be inhuman, especially in case of a man who uses a society he does not stem from, and its freedom of people and relationships that is foreign to him, to make use of people pretty much as one uses facilities of a supermarket or a laundromat or so, only to discard them or reuse them as it suits his purpose. One wishes Paul could have done something rather than being stunned by the audacity of the guy in threatening to sue him, having himself perhaps ruined one or more lives that Paul was witness to the process of of. But Paul does stem from the society that offers the freedom and has the values that make it possible to have them, which is, to be civilised in a way the other male is unfamiliar with and perhaps even contemptuous of, and so Paul ends up looking like a loser in a contest with a comparatively primitive male, which almost anyone from a civilised society would when suddenly confronting a beast of prey, even a small one.

And one ends up finally too stunned at the end of the tale of the sensitive son of the beautiful woman leaving no imprint except for his work documenting others, wishing it were not so, wanting to go back in time and shake the daylights out of him for the couple of mistakes he made - hurting the two adoring little girls with his words stemming from his own pain, being unable to seize the opportunity to grasp the woman that was his last chance at love and life and to hold on.

One wishes one could shake him into changing and wiping off those mistakes, make up for having hurt the little girls and be friends with them again since they already adore him and understand him enough to not tell on his tirade, and being able to find happiness - even living in the beautiful house his mother chose, to live with his love, and in fact marry her, so he could have a family, a wife, children - but then, one does wish for much.

Life often denies such beautiful ends.

The Lost Symbol; by Dan Brown.

Da Vinci Code was history's secrets, Angels and Demons was those of Rome in particular of Vatican, Digital Fortress about IT and coding and security, Deception Point about science. In this one Brown uses the same murder thriller format yet again to unveil some secrets and mysteries from ancient times until now, most hidden in plain sight.

Washington D. C. was named Rome by those that planned and settled it, and until the names were changed Potomac (which reverted to the original name) was called Tiber. Freemasons wished and planned for a glorious future for humanity and the architecture of the city holds their dreams in various symbols.

From this grand enough beginning explored throughout the book Brown connects today's latest science research to the most ancient secrets and far more, to a basic 101 beginner's discourse on spirituality. A good one too. He also manages to subtly albeit clearly bring out the distance and contradiction that has arisen between religion and spirituality, the power brokering by institutionalised religion, and so forth, and states it plainly too, not leaving it for surmise.

Most thrilling part on physical level, satisfactorily resolved, is the victim and killer in the dark vault with neither able to see the other, both using mind and other inputs to escape and kill respectively. Most horrifying, the death of our favourite Langdon by drowning towards the end. One wonders how Brown will write anything else interesting without him. But Brown surprises one.

Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

When one is finished, it is with a sense of wonder at how much beauty and satisfaction the writer has managed to create - beginning with funeral of an old great aunt of the protagonist no one in the family visited who died in an old home at ripe age of 105, everyone wanting the funeral to be over, and the successful ones there only to further their own interests via a photo op to proclaim the humanity of their character. And then there is a spirit that is - instead of the good old tradition of scaring one, or even seeming funny - plain boring and irritating as some children or old people (or any age relatives really) can manage to be, exasperating.

The transformation of this comes unexpectedly and so gently one is only aware of it at the end, after the growing grip and the not too severe jolts take one to a sudden pinnacle of interest, beauty, wonder, all so smoothly one is only aware of the change at the end.

An entirely satisfactory read if one is fond of art, beauty, jewels, young women, worthy men, love, and life. Although I am unsure if rhinestones retain their lustre over a century, and for that matter why the name, do they originate in the Rhine.

In an Antique Land; by Amitav Ghosh.

This work is partly autobiographical, describing as it does the writer's green years spent during his social sciences graduation in travels to and living in backwaters of Egypt, with a history of the region and the broader expanse of the region, that is to say, the whole area embracing Indian Ocean and its borders along with northern Africa, which once was the region that held world trade in its palm what with the proximity to two separate parts of the civilised world as it then was - India and Asia across the Indian Ocean and Europe across the Mediterraenean.

Silk Route now being researched was an overland route from China and Mongolia through Central Asia to West Asia to Europe, with a branch routed into India from Central Asia; the Spice Route on the other hand was mostly through shipping from Southeast Asia and India to Arab countries across Indian Ocean and then another shipping across the sea to north to Europe. And Arabic countries spread from Iraq to Algeria and Morrocco were the people that held this trade, migrated throughout the region temporarily or for life or generations in trading, and held the key to the trade of the world in their palms.

European colonisation of other continents with the rise of power of Europe put an end to this trade centred in Arab countries and smaller vessels and multiple trading houses, centralising the trade control in the few powers that used physical power to dominate most of the then known and too lesser known world, bringing a long era of exchange of culture and knowledge along with the trade of goods to an end and seeking to dominate, to impose, Europe's culture and values and world view everywhere.

That this was a success largely and most others if not outright extinguished were driven with attempts at embarrassment at their world, their culture and values is no secret. The fact is this book not only brings it out in description of others that the writer observed in his work for a degree at Oxford, it is brought out in his own reactions to various observations and encounters as well, in only a slightly subtler shade at that.

Few men would be less than outraged when faced with an accusation of sacrificing a wife, for sake of selfish interests of pleasing a boss or a bully, much less sacrificing the remotest possiblity of a life for a mother and that only for sake of gains even from a rich father, an abusive one at that who has been all too known to be responsible for not only abusing the mother of his son into being all but lifeless with consistent and heavy abuse of every possible sort but also blinding one dependent daughter with repeated physical abuse despite her taking care of his own home, and paying for public rape of yet another daughter who has had an escape and a semblance of an independence with consequent hopes of a better life for the rest of the family.

And while such an accusation might be either hotly denied, or even admitted but excused on basis of need of money for the son who consequently denies any help to the women thus abused by his father only so that his father's money is not willed to a cousin or an aunt who might be all to willing to take it away from the family, when the situation is related to not the nuclear family but an extended one, that of homeland, it is an even more easily excused and even usually publicly defended behaviour, since the ruler-subject relationship is now unencumbered by blood, and so is that of the majority of victims vis a vis those of the privileged few who benefit by siding with the rulers.

And while this goes on all the while everywhere - few have the strength to resist the pressure to give in to the demands of the powerful to protect their weak dependents or obligations of honour, and such a giving in is usually painted in convenient terms to be able to live with oneself, although it is obvious to anyone who would take blinkers off and look - it is nowhere more obvious than in the would be of a dominated colonised culture, even an ex-colonised one.

Partition of India into then two (- now three, what with the dissolution of the two piece nation into two separate parts now actively engaged in much terrorism against not only US, UK, other nations of Europe, but also, perhaps even majorly, the nation or part or centre of the once their own one nation, where the people of the two now separated parts nevertheless do migrate to, for economic reasons, by millions -), with one part unwilling to live with the mainstream breaking off, is now remembered by various people in terms other than the terrorism used to empty the two separated parts of the people who flocked as refugees to the central part. While Pakistan proudly proclaims "we took Pakistan with a smile and shall take India with a fight", although it was a bloodbath and not a smile, their eastern part (now Bangladesh) cloaks that same bloodbath as a struggle by the poor Muslims against the rich Hindu who were thrown out without a penny to go leave the then Pakistan, cloaking it in a revolutionary language and falsifying the millions of poor Hindus who were forced to leave as well in the same bloodbath.

And in a twist, the refugees who did leave - those that survived, that is - recall the land they left with great nostalgia and love, preferring to blank out the horrors of being forced to leave. But there is a difference in the longings of refugees that arrived from the two sides, a seemingly small but a rather key difference. Those that arrived from west and northwest prefer to merely go on thinking of their lost homeland with a rosy tint, and disdain the people of the land they now live in (where they have prospered) much as their ex-compatriots do, they do not fool themselves about the realities unveiled during the horrors; while quite often those from east, especially those that were well to do landowning class of yore, are sometimes a more deluded lot, with ascribing of far more blame to the centre for not accepting unilateral terms of a minority and insisting on a regime of democracy, of one-person-one-vote adult franchise.

And moreover they prefer even to overlook the post partition history of the three parts, the fact that much of the time the central part has been a democracy with hardly a two year blip that was defeated with resounding success, while the separated parts that broke away are ever since then not only ruled with a growing religious fanaticism but also with little democracy, and far more often with military dictatorship rule, with huge debts from abroad and far less indigenous enterprise. They merely long for their lost land of water as it was named - Jol Baanglaa - and blame the land where they found survival, with tears for the lost homeland blinding their minds. The delusion they carry is often that of a happy landowning rich life for themselves if only the whole nation were united as a military rule under a religious fanatic minority rule, which clearly is rather unlikely - such a possibility might have far more likely meant the same lack of freedoms and same dictatorship throughout the whole united nation as it has been in the parts separated away.

And in all this the ex colonial mindset of those that can afford to disdain their own and look up to others, ex rulers, helps, immensely, pretty much the way children in US often blame a divorced mother for letting go of or driving away the father - never doubting that the father really loved the kids, he does sometimes visit with a gift or two, never mind he is delinquent on child support and is in fact contesting it in every way possible. Such delusion of children are only possible due to the kind, compassionate mother who braces up to support them with hiding of the facts from them, for if they knew their father couldn't care less their little hearts would break.

And of course there is no penalty for blaming and railing against the mother who breaks herself to keep the child alive and in health and works to educate the children too, just as there is no penalty in blaming and disdaining the homeland that gives refuge and feeds and allows a survival and prosperity, while longing for the lost father or ex colonial ruler or ex homeland that revealed themselves as willing to allow one to perish, or even in massacring for that matter. A mindset of disdain for the mother or the homeland is the least of the possible casualties in the less than open eyed child of the mother or the nation.

Colonisers usually do not give up the attempts to dismember the culture, the values, the very life of an ex-colony when a power shortage forces the dominant to give up the "obligation" to rule and rob, any more than a feudal landlord forced to let go of extensive lands immediately accepts equality with the serfs. The serfs do not lack mind much less hearth or soul, it has merely been physical power that was in short supply which made them serfs.

Hence the theories of revolution, however futile and mistaken in their naivete of assuming it will solve human behaviour. Quest of being seen as not the low serf but in fact as bejewelled and perfumed as the erstwhile feudal lord leads the would be equal-on-their-terms serf to abandon his own, be ashamed of them and their life and history and culture and values, secretly perhaps aware that in this he is aiding and abetting the still continuing domination of colonisers, but unable to turn around and see his way to courage and a better perception.

Thus are the massacred victims forgotten while the guilty are forgiven for a grandiose perception of oneself as the forgiver of the guilty - the dead, the raped, the robbed cannot be helped, and if a man has to heap shame on the helpless or even let them die without lifting a finger to help them, in the process of helping his own upliftment towards a better status, even if it is only that of being acknowledged as being an ex serf that is almost albeit not quite nevertheless gentlefolk, so be it. Most men know this and hence would not name, far less expose, the whole process.

There are some graphic descriptions of human behaviour, with an irony in the lack of cosmopolitan understanding of other cultures in the very people that have a history of trading and migrating especially compared to the far more tolerant and cosmopolitan life in another land that has been far less of a migrating and far more of a self satisfied land and yet a culture that has been able to absorb and learn what is good from all that it came into contact with, through history - although rarely acknowledged much less appreciated for this.

With the description of a six year old surrounded by flames held by a mob intent on burning people taking refuge in one house, one begins to see how a frightened little boy grows up into being uncomfortable with any admission of intimacy with the tradition and culture that might put his life in jeopardy only because he was born in it, all this compounded due to the noble attitude sported by those that could have informed him that the mob and their mindset were plain wrong but instead were at pains to equalise the situations across a border created artificially only due to some people being unable to live with any "other"s.

The boy grew up to sojourn amongst others, in faraway lands, but only uncomfortable and squirming when questioned and pressed to change himself and his people in what they see as different and therefore wrong - never able to turn around and see that if he is unable to or unwilling to change it might just be because there is something of a better value there in more than one term, on more than one level. He instead is livid with those who are not embarrassed as he is with his - their - past, tradition, culture; and so they are the focused objects of his safely unleashed fury, for being not embarrassed about the very culture he is facing barrage of accusations and embarrassing queries about.

The writer performs a valuable service in describing the history - the lost and forgotten part - and the geography of the regions he is visiting in the quest of certain facts discovered during research through ancient papers for his graduation work. This wealth of ancient papers is yet another gift of a Judaic tradition that survived within the Arabic fold and kept knowledge alive for posterity while libraries were burned in Europe and knowledge persecuted with a distortion and subversion of values and the very meanings of words. And so the papers of Geniza of Cairo join the far more famous works made famous by Dan Brown, for example.

One small mistake, not really small but it is about one word and the difference of concepts that encompass the meanings in two different cultures, is that of translation really. The writer perhaps in tandem with convention translates as slave a word, perhaps two words in two separate languages and cultures, that in fact in one amount to merely worker and servant, not a bought-like-animal human. He does go on to clear the several interpretations of the word in the other language and culture which in fact did have slavery, while fails to clear up one that in its own history never did.

One fact the writer points at through much of the book and never explicitly draws the conclusion or mentions the connection in words, is about the loss of trade, a primary source of the wealth (- perhaps the only source until oil which kept the wealth in chosen few hands rather than the shipping trade which allowed many to rise according to talent and opportunity and courage -) and livelihood of many in the lands from west Asia to northwest Africa, on one hand; and the tremendous rise in animosity from the regions that lost this livelihood for many and poor to the rich powers of Europe (including the colonies settled from Europe that today do not count as colonies but have their natives wiped out or penned in corners or pushed into bonded labour or serf levels) resulting in what the dominating world view sees as a big surprise, the acts of inhuman sort against what the dominating powers construe as their own benevolence.

That this is akin to the French or Russian revolution on a world scale is too frightening to perceive, perhaps. But every time that there is more wealth for few due to better machines - whether with tractors in Punjab or Suez and better ships from Europe or even the mostly forgotten poor of Ireland, Scotland and even England that were forced to migrate to Australia or Canada in an effort to get rid of them so the land could be consolidated in a few hands - there are millions disfranchised, youth with no employment for present and no hope for the future, and on the whole a ripe situation fertile for fomenting such horrors as we see around the world.

Which is not to say progress should be halted in favour of poor although fact is progress IS often - very very often - halted in favour of rich profiting from status quo (green tech including solar power comes to mind, as does the lack of public transport across US, or the lack of a healthcare system in the rich nation with laws favouring profit over life in surprising ways including arrests of poor old people buying medicine from Canada where it is cheaper - whither free trade, whither individual rights and freedoms, whither indeed right to life?!!!!). It is rather to say, it is time to perhaps see really what progress is, what better values are, by an open eyed examination of perceived notions handed down from dominant.

It would be amusing, if it were not horrifying, as one begins to perceive that (with no mention of bathing) cliterodectomy, along with circumcision and shaving of all areas, is equated with cleanliness and in fact with purity, and anyone in the world is considered impure if not purified with the required surgical procedure (carried out in women's cases by female relatives, likely, not professionals, but those details are not given). Such dangerous and pointless practices stemming from baseless superstitions or a denial of pleasure of any sort to the gender considered slave have been exposed as regards to African culture, but not west Asian or north African.

It must be said, though, that women and girls don't seem to be living in fear as described by the writer, or tortured or even cowering or hapless - they are in fact living with a balance of power of sort, with merriment often even at expense of males, and some power too, including that of telling off as and when they see fit, and even leaving a husband and living apart. The incidents where the writer or the little boy are subjected to ridicule, or where it dawns on the writer that the flirtation with - or rather the torture of - the little boy was, in fact, open stealing of straw from his fields by the girls amusing themselves in the bargain.

The writer takes us through his discomfort, embarrassment, and finally an inarticulate rage as he is questioned on and on repeatedly by everyone almost on these and instructed to go back to his country and educate them into following practices that the locals consider "pure", and stop being impure; all this even as he time and again is invited to eat in intimate family settings with friendly and more welcome by the same people, while they eat from one plate (the writer keeps calling them trays, but that merely means they are large metal platters on which food is served directly unless it is fluid in which case presumably the container is one large bowl for everyone to dip into) however large as a family - or two, separating along gender lines - and including any guests and this is considered perfectly clean and hygienic.

The story is as often with this writer in two strands that alternate, one of his own research and living in or travelling to Egypt, India and US while the other is the subject of his research, a story of a merchant from northern Africa who traveled to Egypt, Aden, and India, spending several years there, being married, and arriving back in Aden with his children to then reconnect with his people.

Towards the end there is a sudden shock, even amongst the war one knows is looming around the region he revisits - more than one shock actually. One learns that Egyptian poor farmers and villagers have been travelling to Iraq for work for better money, are treated quite badly there and suffer it silently so they can send money home (same people, Arabic culture, same language, and religion too, one professing equality and brotherhood at that - so this comes as a surprise, that Iraq people were far from nice to Egyptians who were working there for several years); and this is from people, not officials either. Which is all the more shocking. Excellent exposé of economic world politic in the process too.

And then the final shock is of the writer being treated like a criminal for a wish to visit a famous and much worshipped saint's grave, grilled about why he would so wish, not allowed to visit it, questioned about if he is Jewish or Muslim or Christian (which he denies, puzzling them completely, but is unable to say what he is, perhaps puzzling them even more thereby) and then told to leave pronto. All the friendly life he had in Egypt is thereby sort of sullied, although he does not say so and goes on to try and keep in touch. One learns through his efforts that some of the characters have been able to return to safety of home before the gulf war of '90 began, and others are not known whereabouts of.

World indeed comprises of cultures and people that are poles apart although nobody in fact or hardly anyone even today lives at a pole, and certainly it is unlikely any culture arrived from the poles.

Indira Gandhi : an intimate biography; by Pupul Jayakar.

There could hardly be a more definitive and closer look at the life of this woman who lived life almost on world stage and yet was mostly a mystery to most people - this book is by one of the few people in her intimate circle, a friend from childhood years. As such she was a rare person who could ask Indira Gandhi why she took this decision or that, within the limits of decency and civil interaction between friends who care about one another, and get answers too. There are some answers surprisingly admission of sort one does not expect, and in circumstances changed hugely since they are all the more precious as they provide an insight into the lonely person that this strong leader of a democracy with almost a billion people as it then was (since then the billion mark has been crossed and well over), a nation she turned from a laughingstock to one to be reckoned with, or a beginning thereof, with some help from above.

Daughter of the most beloved leader of the nation, and yet so lonely in her childhood in the aristocratic setting of the wealthy family that doted on its only son her father who in turn wrote the famous letters to her from his jail sojourn what with the British throwing these guys in and out of jail like so much shifting of grain in a mill. Her ailing mother who approved of her choice of a life partner to take care of the only daughter after her as the father was busy with the nation, the daughter who valiantly turned herself into a helping hand for the father and a formidable leader after him, the admission of her weakness when her one widowed daughter in law was thrown out of the household as soon as the other was brought in when the now aging leader needed her one remaining son to be with her, and more, much more.

I read this well over a decade ago, and what with the history of the nation being that of certain parties quietly wiping off records from various places - a censored film that had its prints burnt during the infamous emergency comes to mind as too another where the dialogues were changed to suit the perception commonly held and the image considered desirable - perhaps the admission of weakness might now have been censored or will be so. Hope not, in the interest of the democracy and truth.

Gone with the Wind; by Margaret Mitchell.

Often people mistake characters for the actors that play them in a film, and just as often people judge them in light of their prejudices never apparent in spite of all progress of society and attempted enlightenment. It is amusing to notice the reactions of a hoard to a successful woman who was unfortunate in love, while they might claim to worship virtues that are held up nominally but practiced rarely. Hypocrisy and manipulation however do not come naturally to everyone, and one that is clear of those is seen with hatred by most who use the normal social tools.

Gone With The Wind is a part of US history, of the years around the civil war of US, and it gives a great deal of information about the era in an intimate way to those that are not from that part of the world.

Again, on an intimate level it is also about a woman who was very capable and independant in her mind before such ideas existed in that society - it does not mean not marrying or not loving, but knowing your own mind and will and being capable of supporting a family and a clan when necessary, in the direst of circumstances, through one's honest work.

For all the heroic qualities the heroine gets only brickbats, except from the other heroine - whose genre is quiet loving and a "thin blade of steel flashing" within, and supporting those people and those causes she believes in; - even the man who supported the strong, stubborn but a bit blind when it came to perception of people heroine, is not wise enough or strong enough to understand her or to be patient enough.

He is of course much supported and forgiven his flaws and misdeeds by all - while she receives almost universally bad sentiments from the people then and readers or viewers now. Little has changed in perception and gap of treatment in the century and half past.

It was only the writer who immortalised her heroine, who was based on someone real. The story was written as a way to relate to her husband the story of an era and a persona she had always heard spoken of as she grew up.

Strangely this is one of the convincing arguments against arranged or well thought out matchmaking for marriages when up against a love especially when both persons involved feel it. Thinking over the whole course of events it becomes somehow clear that if only Ashley had the wisdom, the courage to admit his love for Scarlett, if only they had married, Scarlett would be an adoring wife never stepping below the normally universally demanded standard of behaviour from "ladies" (which in fact she did not in action ever but was indicted just as universally for loving someone with a steadfast heart and going on with her life with marriages and children anyway, rather than living as an unwanted unmarried heartbroken woman pining for her lover who in fact loved her and desired her!), - much less looking elsewhere or a life that scandalised society in any way. A respectably married woman who does not care two hoots for company of another man is forgiven every other scandalous behaviour including the wet petticoats a la Grandma Robillard and Scarlett was not feminine enough to indulge in any of it, deep within she was more of man with a mind, a strong mind.

One wonders sometimes if then Rhett might have married Melanie, since he did always have respect and concern for her, and in this the two men are very alike, except that Rhett understood Scarlett - as a child who is willful and stubborn and crying for the moon - pretty much as her own father Gerald O'Hara did, and loved her for everything including her indomitable courage in face of every impossible adversity. Rhett was more Gerald's age or at any rate that of Ellen Robillard O'Hara, perhaps even older to her, anyway. And there have been some suspicions about Melanie's visit consoling him after the death of his daughter, which one suspects the writer had a toungue in cheek about, leaving the scenario the way she did.

All such speculations would hold water if the writer had not been so emphatic about her characrters, and explicit about every little detail. Thus one is told firmly that Melanie in fact was too timid and scared to death of anything male, especially virile robust males such as Gerald, and Rhett until he befriends her with respect and concern inspiring confidence in her, and that she sees him as a brother and says so. And if Melanie said so that is what she thought - neither of the two women are hypocritical when it comes to it, except in silence for sake of courtesy socially unless it is made desirable to break it or impossible to keep it.

Life would be very convenient if everyone loved those that make a good match, and understood that anything else was folly - but hearts don't do acccount books of life and have an instinct superior to mind often. Following heart takes more courage than some people have. Men ought to have courage in theory, but in this realm it is women who are wiser, with more courage to boot.

Why did Scarlett make marriages in cold blood is easily explained by the various discourses in the book if indeed it is a mystery in a system where a male might court anyone he wishes and a woman must hold her tongue and her whole self in check and respond only when asked, and accept one when suitable. Love as experienced by Scarlett's warm heart is a torture, and weary load to carry on her frail shoulders, and moreover an excuse for the hypocrites and the fortunate and the cold hearted to stone a loving hearted woman with impunity.

But there is more. Her mother, the aristocratic very proper Ellen O'Hara, loved just as impetuously and stormily and unfortunately at the same age, and married the first man she found suitable when she lost her love due to her family's interference. She was perhaps more fortunate in that her loved one died - which is when she married Gerald O'Hara, who had selected her after careful scrutiny of all possible eligible candidates. Gerald was in awe of his wife, and loved her, but while she was entirely proper and honourable in her life she also was a woman with her heart in the grave with her dead loved one, and cold.

With that perspective it is easy to see that what Scarlett knew about love was a little from her father and the rest from her own heart, with no example set for her. And in that perspective her entire conduct is more than noble, more than honourable. She is willing to give the promises her love asks - which is to take care of his wife, and the baby - and more. She is willing to labour and toil like a field hand when necessary to feed her own, never asking for help from others such as the O'Hara uncles or the Robillard aunts. In fact she sends them money knowing they have little to live on, money she earns with her own toil and risks she takes in the process in Atlanta.

As for her husbands, two out of three die before they know her heart was elsewhere and she married them for reasons other than falling in love. Which is fortunate for the first one, who never loved his fixed cousin and married Scarlett because he was in love with her and dazzlingly happy to think she loved him too. He died with this love, instead of a drab existence he had until then, and hence a fortunate man. As for the second husband, he was courting a younger woman and she was not in love with him either, except there seems to have been no one else from a neighbourhood full of young males courting Suellen O'Hara, who couldn't possibly have been so unattractive as all that - she was the younger sister of the same parents who gave birth to Scarlett and Carreen the fragile blossom beauty.

Frank married Scarlett the moment he thought she loved him, indeed he forgot about Suellen even in the first Twelve Oaks scene when Scarlett smiled at him and spent the barbecue vying with half a dozen other - much younger, strapping full blooded southern - males, bringing food for Scarlett. And he was happy enough - there are much worse mariages than his with Scarlett, with women who never have never experienced love and are far less attractive at that, and expect their husbands to provide for all their needs and luxuries too, unlike a Scarlett who worked hard to make her people secure so they never go hungry again.

As for Rhett, the never marrying man who fell in love and met his Waterloo in her and married her because he finally couldn't get her in any other way - he was about twice the age of the young woman (at her age most women of her class today are still dealing with various pleasures of life and not committed much less required to toil and fear starvation or being without a roof) and should have had the patience and understanding not to speak honesty. Having been the catalyst for her exclusion from society, the least he could have done is to reestablish her when he did so himself for his daughter. That he could not see her heart, concealed by her pride and her fear of his sarcasm, was his deficiency.

The film suffered not only from necessity of being shorter than required to show so huge a canvas of a story, dealing with generations and families from Ireland and France to beginning of Georgia and Atlanta and civil war, but also from biased direction and screenplay, and poor casting except for that of Scarlett O'Hara. Beautiful Olivia de Havilland was far from the timid and plain Melanie afraid of males (- Audrey Hepburn could have done far superior a job of portraying Melanie, if the film had not come at a time when she and Anne Frank alike were part of the victims of the war going on in Europe and the occupation of their country by the brutal), Rhett really ought to have been someone far more like Cary Grant - and as for Ashley the dreamy love, he is a blond noble beautiful dreamy thinker, and only Gregory Peck would do except for the blond bit which is a must. Mitchell's descriptions leave no room for a doubt or a different interpretation, and I don't know if there is any performer that would suit to play Ashley.

The Circle of Reason; by Amitav Ghosh.

An early work of the writer, this has a flavour of the literature of Bengal where the author originates from, with the first part reminiscent of the works of many great authors of the land in its style, language and even in the humour, the imagery and the motivation of the characters, the conflicts. Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya, Bimal Mitra, one is reminded of a whole sea of literature behind this that is the heritage of a rich culture, as one reads the first part. The second part is reminiscent of One Hundred Years Of Solitude in its silent ominous extinction of the people, and the nameless, faceless Oilmen and the power that employes them, with a little flavour also of Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

Named Circle of Reason, it is no circle of any kind at all, even in the broadest sense possible, but really a curve fitted to three hillocks of events across planes and valleys of thought and people and cultures across two huge continents, events that illustrate the philosophy and concepts for the writer. The journey depicted is hardly a circle, it is not even closed at any level be it conceptual or geographical - he travels from Reason to Passion to Death while moving from rural and capital scenario of Bengal to northern shores of Indian Ocean at Al Ghezhira to coasts of Africa, ending across from Gibraltar after the last episode at an Algiers small town.

The first part goes on about phrenology, and one is puzzled - isn't that the theory that was turned into a basis of a huge genocide less than a century ago? Then as it goes on one cannot help but begin to chuckle inward, and much of the first part stays at that level of beginning to perceive the characters and the philosophies and motives while the chuckling continues sporadically, never rising to a laughter but always bringing comfort. One begins to understand that it had to be phrenology, since Bose is a follower of Reason and fan of Pasteur and hence could hardly go with a normal human face reading that most people do subconsciously, much less the more evolved palmistry or astrology that the education he had made him deprecating or downright denouncing of, and phrenology provides a semblance of reason being pseudo scientific. It does not stop one chuckling, though.

As usual the author provides a great deal of information across time and borders of geography, with the not so widely known connection between today's computers and the evolution thereof, and the connection with ancient weavers of India and their craft, expertise, art of creation of finest weaves, cotton and silk both. It is a wonder, the connection of reason with creation of art, art that is not merely bought for ridiculously high price to hang or lie about the house just to score against someone or show off but is a direct use and pleasure and wonder for millions for millennia.

The connection has always been there, of course, or there would be no progress or evolution of human history in either field, physical need being supreme and reason merely a nuisance taking time away from needs for useless philosophising - but now the connection is often unperceived and an artificial division of the two is seen wherein often people feel justified in claiming their education was of no use whatsoever, that is, unless they are in medical or legal fields professionally in US, making money far more than minting would enable them. (In other countries and cultures of course no such disconnection or uselessness is claimed as far as education goes, and one wonders if it is merely a case of ingratitude for the free education with opportunity for all that brings such attitudes into fashion.)

But progress is never unopposed and nor is reason or higher faculties of humanity, and here too there is the landlord (literally that is the meaning of his name as well, in another bit of humour) who is more about political power and cares for progress or education only in so much as it serves his purpose. In a conflict reason literally explodes killing all but the young new expert of weaving forced to flee across the land and ocean to another country in search of a safe life.

This, the Lalpukur revolution that is basically benefic, yet ending up in tragedy, is perhaps an eternal tale where good motives do not succeed without power behind them - and when power comes in there has to be care about its taking over and burying reason and truth trampled underfoot, which can happen with power on reason's side just as well as opposite.

The second part, passion, takes one to Al Ghazeira, somewhere on the north shore of what is named Arabian Sea but really is one of the two northern ends of Indian Ocean - the other being just as named Bay of Bengal but the two really being similar in size and practically mirror images for all that.

Here one sees humanity from many parts of world arriving in search of a livelihood, living together and adjusting to the land and one another, in harmony until the nameless and ominous Oilmen finally are successful in taking over - not without a gunning down and wiping out of a whole populace wrongly - perhaps deliberately - labeled suitably for the purpose as troublemakers, revolutionaries, whatever.

In reality there was a small, peaceful revolution, tremendous in impact on thought and behaviour but with no violence, on the contrary, in the making before the ambush and the wipeout. The weaver had thought during being trapped under a huge collapsed building, and come out and begun to speak what he thought; and as strange as it seems to the reader if not understood those listening to him did understand perfectly, and begun to organise around his words, his now nonstop weaving. (There is a bit of allegory here, with Gandhi's spinning of a century ago made a crucial factor of his entirely too real revolution in defeating a wealthy and powerful empire into walking out albeit after much loot over the centuries they ruled, which stays unaccounted for including the jewels exhibited in the tower of London.) The people thus able to see his point organise their society with balanced and perfectly accounted books replacing money transactions within the neighbourhood, much like a bank and co-operative organising the social structure akin to a family's, with the effect that the people's energies are freed to achieve more and the money is saved for everyone to be able to do more.

And all this flowering of a neighbourhood to a better life is destroyed while still in the bud by a misguided attempt of an erstwhile information trader who is as overwhelmed by the happening as others, only unable to give up his older trade and ideas, and thus is not only caught and brought to death (with his own employee profiting by informing on him and inheriting his whole property after his death against his will, too) but jeopardises the whole movement, every innocent one out for an outing for shopping, and much killing in the process. The weaver is saved ironically by the mother figure who has not been enamoured of his talk, of the money-and-germs connection, into giving up her savings for accounting into a book - the accounts are entirely honestly and meticulously kept, this is not communism - and uses them to hire space on a boat to take them away to safety.

The third named death is in Algeria after a harrowing travel across the Indian Ocean's northern ports along Africa and then into Mediterraenean, with a glowing description of sand dunes of the border of Sahara where the story takes one. Here the confrontation is finally between dry theoretic reason attempting to destroy all heritage of millennia and unscroupulously clawing for power - since reason can always be employed to achieve justification of all if other bases of mind and heart and more are let go or destroyed - on one hand, and a humanitarian ideal tempering and finally rebelling against this dry movement of reason on the other. The humanitarian ideal wins, even in death, and frees the living to proceed to live with hope, looking north to another continent or west to another ocean, or back to home.

One could wish the writer would overcome his temptation for the slightly or more than slightly disgusting details of life's necessities and realities - what sharks are gathering around a small ship for, for instance, so an accidental unfortunate falling out of an unfortunate man results in others helplessly watching him eaten alive even as he pleads for help - but if one reads this writer one comes to expect some such details of one nature or another. In later works the scatological, prevalent here a la British taste in humour, gives way to equally shoddy details of what is supposed to be titillating, and it begins to seem as if it is a concession he makes on demand of the publisher and prodding by his editors just to shut them up, since everyone is afraid lack of such concessions might result in lesser profits.

It is interesting in the final part to have a merest whiff of history of Algeria, whetting one's curiosity and appetite for more, and to see one beleaguered ex-colonial now free culture make concessions to another, in humanitarian terms.

Sea of Poppies; by Amitav Ghosh.

In some ways this work is structured like his other earlier work, the first one, the Circle of Reason, what with the journey of people from variuos corners of the earth together and the geography, the difference being this one is set in past where timeline is shortly after the beginning of The Glass Palace, while the other was closer to present. The humour though that was pervasive in the first one, at least in the first part of it, is a mere whiff here in some of the pronouncements of a character that hears a penny whistle and unfamiliar with the particular item mistakes it for a flute, taking the one playing it as yet another incarnation and cautioning him about his conduct - to his, the cautioned one's that is - utter confusion.

One small surprise at the very outset as one begins to read this book is that this is not about the recent Afghanistan, but about India over a century ago, when opium trade was beginning and escalated by British and China was forced to accept the trade from European (and US) powers during the famous Opium wars. India, post independence, made a conscious decision not to use opium trade, which could have benefited the then poor nation weighed under with debts of the legacy of the British rule, and forego the profits of the opium trade however high, since it was a substance mostly misused to get people addicted and thereafter not good for health.

It took most part of the remaining century, however, to get tobacco industry (mostly centred in US) to be contained in any way at all, and that too mostly in US and Europe - while in the rest of the world tobacco smoking is promoted aggressively nevertheless. In Thailand for example police were used to arrest anyone protesting against the tobacco promotion being held outside schools and colleges by US corporations or local subsidiaries thereof, handing over free cigarettes to teenagers, from what one read within last couple of decades at the most - so even as court battles were being fought in US and Europe was banning smoking in most places, minors in other parts of the world being inculcated into the ill practice with aggressive use of law enforcing agencies was used to make sure the profits at expense of world health would continue.

Even Bible has something about sins coming home to roost, doesn't it! Only, very unfortunately such roosting is not as accurate as it ought to be and instead of those that practice such ill practices being affected by their own sins coming home to roost, it is other innocents of their own society being affected by what is misnamed party drugs even as innocents of all ages across the world are being bombed so the weapon producers ought to not suffer losses post cold war.

Now post 2001 some parts of the unhealthy trade have not only resurfaced in countries that deal more in arms and uses thereof than in health of their own people or their needs of food, education, and a good life even at the most basic level, the trade is escalated at cost of all other farming and of course the health of those that are paying hefty amounts across the world to use the substance in a highly altered form.

Addictive substances for killing weapons trade is not new, it was exposed during the Iran - contra scandal and trials, and some rightwing publications in US published the details (during mid to late eighties) of military airplanes being used to bring such substance back in what would be otherwise empty planes returning from a run to central America to supply the favoured with weapons.

But now the scale is escalated beyond recognition and uses too, and the tales of women not remembering a day or two of rapes or men deprived of their organs are covered up under the (what ought to be confusing logically but is very well understood) name of party drugs, falsifying both the words that make up that name.

Hence the surprise at the outset about this book so recently being up for Booker prize being not about Afghanistan today but about the British empire of yore - one tends to overlook the roots of a problem in the concerns of today, of being tangled in the vines and branches we are attempting to free health of the world from. But as one reads on it becomes clear why the Booker buzz about this book ended in a rather puzzling silence, and it becomes obvious there could not have been an official British recognition of this any more than there could be an oscar for any film made in India about the independence struggle. It had to lose the Booker since it is so clear an indictment of the British rule in India used for forcing poor farmers into changing their harvest from growing all their necessary food crops to growing poppies, using their own people at low rates and in horrifying conditions in manufacturing opium for export into the world, and going to war with China when the Chinese decided they did not wish their populations to be addicted to this substance for sake of profit of those that sold it.

China lost the war now remembered as the Opium War and subsequently one saw substance addiction of US veterans from Vietnam or Asia in general blamed on their being in company of the orientals who got the good boys addicted, the part of US fleet in Opium wars being conveniently forgotten. One wonders if the use of Indian men in the British military in those wars had something do to with the China India relationship as it has been during last half a century or so.

This story begins with one main character's soon to die husband is an ex volunteer of the British military in the short war that was conquest of Burma and joining of it to India for over a century, but this tale is about a journey down the Ganga for some characters while others have come from as far as Baltimore or Canton, all finding themselves together on a ship carrying bonded labour from Gangetic plains to Mauritius, along with some convicts proven guilty for reasons other than guilt as often as not.

Just as Australia was the penal colony for Britain as well as yet another place apart from Canada where the poor of Britain were encouraged to go settle in an attempt to clean up the mainland and solve the problem of what to do with them, Mauritius was used as a penal colony along with Andaman and Nicobar island group off coast of Burma near equator, and here one gets a glimpse in to the human tales of those that are forced to leave home and go forth into unknown lands for one reason or another - a son of a Maryland freedwoman who leaves for fear of being enslaved if he stays on, a couple in heart of Gangetic plain that flees her relatives who will kill them both since she is a widow saved by him from the pyre convenient for them for economic reasons and he is a low caste male too incidentally, an unwanted wife who was left at a fair and found her husband living with his new family when she found her way back finally, a Frenchwoman in India who is looked down on by the local British for being well educated and unprejudiced and bathing every day like the local people rather than the twice or so a week that the ruling wives do, and so on.


At almost the beginning the author brings out the fact of British in India forcing the local population of Gangetic plains - one of the most fertile regions of the world with few to compare - to plant their fields with poppies that they control the product of and make profits from, and it becomes clear opium trade was as much forced on India as on China. These poor farmers had to forego their harvests of food, which in turn not only made food scarce and therefore pricey with affordability going steadily above the capacity of the farmers, but it also meant the loss of biodiversity - farmers prior to being forced to grow poppy typically planted several crops and rotated them to suit their needs and that of the land - and, too, impoverishing of the soil. All this together with loss of extra benefits such as the straw now being no longer free to refurnish the thatched cottage roofs, and hence the direness of poverty being worse, makes a graphic picture. The farmers harvesting opium for the British cannot afford to seal roofs over their own heads with even straw, since now straw is no longer the free byproduct of their own wheat harvest every year.

On the other hand or rather in the other strand of the story, which by now one is used to his playing with two or three strands alternately as he weaves his tale, he brings in a son of a "freedwoman" by her ex-master, skin the colour of "old ivory" and able to pass for "white" (as if any human could be the exact, precise colour that white is!) - who benefits unintentionally through the dire circumstances of his ship sailing from Baltimore to Calcutta after having bought for opium trade, and along the journey is the fascinating description of men who take to ocean for a living from various corners of the world. Their linguistic stew consists of traces of every language they have encountered and so does the lingo of the British masters in India deliberately mixing up their vocabulary just so, one cannot be good at the local languages lest any colleague accuse one of having gone local and one nevertheless must speak the half or less version of English lest one is taken by local populace for a naive newcomer on the land. It seems that another unspoken precept is also that one must distort any word one picks up from the locals, but that may be part of the first rule.

The lyrical tale of a journey, or rather many journeys of many characters who are from various corners of the earth and come together at the port on the river in Calcutta for yet another journey together to an island off coast of Africa where a new society is being forged, hides a great deal of research visible behind the thin veil of a well told story that ends rather abruptly. One cannot help thinking there is another book or many in the offing, and that this one is just the prologue. The writer practically promises it, all but, in the ending sentence that leaves one looking through the book again, puzzled about where exactly was the reference tantalisingly mentioned in the last sentence, only to be convinced at the end of the search that it was the vision mentioned in the beginning and no other event. It is a veiled promise so if it is reneged on it counts as the temptation and promise offered with an exchange of glance that is never given in word, just in case. Still, it would be a piece of folly not to follow this up with the stories of the characters further in their willy nilly chosen land of migration and how the society developed there.

One personal favourite is the description of the tidal bore, so far shown post the recent tsunami only as a phenomena in east coast China on some information channel when the tsunami trauma was new.

The Hungry Tide; by Amitav Ghosh.

Amitav writes closer to his origins in this one, and the writing has a subtle flavour of Bengali (or Bangalie or Bangla) literature - quite appropriately too, since it is about coastal region of the land where the great river - after Ganga meets Brahmaputra forming a humongous river flowing through the north-south axis of the land - goes to meet the ocean in several branches, hundreds of them, with estuaries forming and swallowing up coastal islands all the time, where mangrove forests emerge in short time and are submerged at high tide.

How people live in this region is a mystery for those that have never experienced living in low lands, and for that matter it is not that different in any low region of a great river. Netherlands has her dikes protecting the country from the ocean at north; and the Mississippi delta has the unique city of New Orleans with its unique style of cemeteries - graves have to be not under but above ground, for one thing - and other characteristics peculiar to features common to all low lying regions of great river delta around the earth.

When storms hit, these people are affected by not dozens or hundreds but just as often by thousands or mind boggling hundreds of thousands. One wonders why they live there when they know this will happen for sure in another few years yet again, and in this book one finds why.

For the love of the land, this land, is why - it is this simple. If they are resettled elsewhere, another land just as loved by others who belong there, these people are not happy to be safer, they want to return, they dream of their own river delta country and they steal a march to walk back hundreds of miles at nights to return to resettle on another island.

The region is a biopreserve for many many species that are unique to this region often, some too that exist elsewhere but just as precious for all that. Royal Bengal Tiger among the former, and species of riverine or general dolphins for examples of latter. Some dolphin species are common to river and ocean but choose an environment and stick to it, while some belong to rivers.

The author describes the history and geography of the land along with the species and the people that belong here and know their land, the ins and outs of the islands and what one might encounter, having lived here for generations, albeit illiterate. We see it through prism of a young cetologist who is here for research and is amazed at the knowledge of the local fisherman, illiterate, who saves her life more than once - giving his own in the final such event, though it is of necessity and not a choice. There are townspeople who are visitors or settlers discovering the land, choosing to live here and helping the locals one way or another, in another strand of the story that weaves with the main. It all forms a delta of a story like a river reaching its finalé, mirroring the region the story is set in.

The author neatly avoids mentioning the cataclysmic events that were set in motion by the storms of 1970, when hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in the eastern part of this region, after having actually described the storm and the fact of losses of life. That was when finally Bangladesh separated (from the two part fractured nation that had separated from India as Pakistan in '47), having had enough of being dominated and exploited by the western part for most of their history as a joint nation, after a prolonged two year struggle involving much massacre and worse before arriving at freedom. But of course, he stays off most of the struggles of this nature except the leftist thought stream of the region in this one, and even that is fleetingly given here only to refer to the history of the region and the struggles of the people who settled and live here.

The portrait of this land is lovingly sketched and goes straight to heart. At the end, the characters one forgets mostly except perhaps the mostly mute fisherman, the child of his and the mother who returned to live here, and they are sort of off in corners while the main characters through whom one one sees the story are, while not unimportant, recede with the storm. One approves of the women who tenaciously decide to stay here although of affluent and more city backgrounds - one from Calcutta, another from US where she has grown up and returned to her birth land only for research as a professional cetologist to begin with - but it is the local people personified in the fisherman and his mother and his child one remembers. They, after all, are one with the region, the islands, the river and its hundred fingers holding the islands as sand grains while it reaches out to the ocean in south of the land.

The Glass Palace; by Amitav Ghosh.

One cannot but think of various writers and their styles in reading this - Khaled Hosseini for one (are they of the same school of writing, did they attend a class together, one wonders) and to some extent Pearl S. Buck for another. She wrote about China and US, her two nations, and wrote more than one saga describing history of the place with more than one generation in the forefront of the story. There is also a reminding of Maugham when one comes to the part about Malaya, but only because of the plantations, there is no other similarity there of course.

The value of this work is in the fact that it does describe in detail some of the history of the parts of the world that are globally mostly forgotten.

Somewhere during the exodus of the Burmese royals one begins to wonder why the writer would use names of known places in the story and checking on the note from the author at the end gives a clue - it is based on history. But then, the characters of the collector and so forth are detailed, and one begins to have a growing sense of it all being a family tale of someone who looked up his various relatives and wrote, only to read a disclaimer at the end to the effect that only the royals are real figures - this could have been mentioned in first few pages, say after the title page and before the story begins, as is often practice.

Anyhow, the story is gripping, mostly because of the historical details of of an era much written about but not dealing with the parts of the world this one covers (except for works of W.S.Maugham) in most known literature. The characters are sketched well in spite of the racy nature - the story covers over six decades of events in southern Asia, by which I do not mean the euphemistic term South Asia used to cover up the fact that that is only a name now used to indicate what was India; here the events take one extensively in Burma and Malaya (today Malaysia) and parts of India in east and west.

One sees the underbelly of the empire that the sun never set on, and the shoddy treatment of the subjects especially during times of humongous stress - when the war tide is turning against the British, the soldiers are expected to nevertheless fight on for the empire but the non European civilians are not allowed on the one train out of Malaya for evacuation to safety, just one example.

(Here is another fact about the said empire and its claim - something not mentioned in this story, but a fact of history. Allied soldiers behaved exemplary fashion in occupied Germany but not quite so during war in empire colonies with the civilians, a fact known to locals but not admitted much less publicised in general, and Amitav - pronounced Amitabh - makes no mention of it and for that matter might or might not have a clue about it either, in that there were casual rapes of innocent civilians by soldiers of allied forces with no redress from the authorities, a fact that belies the "obligation to protect" claim of the empire rulers completely. If the subjects were uncomfortable complaining to the rulers about such atrocities performed by allied non-local soldiers due to the racial preferences meted to the soldiers who were racially of the rulers' side, then the empire had gained no trust whatsoever from the ruled, clearly.)

From the heartrending exile of the Burmese royal family to the long march of the protection denied civilians from Malaya to Burma to India, and the later travails of the Burmese people under the repressive regime, it all touches heart - except where the author for no reason whatsoever finds it obligatory to give shoddy details of lower physical or sexual nature, which this tale could very well have done without. Often one gets the clear sense that he is unable to settle in comfort with his identity and would like to be one with the neighbours of his choice, western and sahib, except the ghost of his real identity won't let him rest - and so he exploits the heritage to write engrossing tales such as this but attempts to keep his own head above it by subtle mistakes of spellings or pronounciations such as made by callous rulers of colonies who deliberately steamrollered over ruled subjects in various matters (including temples razed to build roads or railway stations, temples of major import too) just so he can keep on the right side of the world population generally.

At the end, when one finishes reading the end of the story of several generations over the huge expanse of nations and turns to the author's note only to read that it was mostly fictional characters, which one has come to believe with growing certainty due to details of unnecessary nature if it was indeed so, one begins to wonder why he would attempt to discredit the work from both directions - if it was all fiction it could certainly have been done far better, and if it was not why claim it so? One wonders if the claimed fictionality of characters is only to protect the relatives he exposes with a determination for sake of a shoddy lot of details given unnecessarily and mud thrown that he would not like to be taken to court for or be looked at with contempt by his people for, the mud thrown at his own to attempt being accepted by his chosen people as once some had to do by eating forbidden stuff but is no longer enough. All in all, if only he had avoided that shoddy part and temptation to thus make it dirty in an unattractive way, he could avoid making statements about the fictionality of characters when the events are so real and the whole work not quite literature, not quite history but bordering on the verge where its only worth is by virtue of being historical tale; on the other hand perhaps the multiple veils thus drawn over the tale allow the author to keep a semblance of success in the attempted impossible of belonging to rulers and ruled simultaneously, for as long as he can keep a foot each in two very diverse boats.

A Thousand Splendid Suns; by Khaled Hosseini.

Having explored sensitive problems and horrors of male life in The Kite Runner, this one is about the downtrodden gender across time and geographical boundaries, still with the same background of Afghanistan from seventies to recent times in the country, one of the most turbulent times in the history of the land and that is saying something - we are talking about the crossroads of the huge continent of Asia here. Before Arabs invaded and converted it to Islam it was a Buddhist land offering respite to silk route travellers in the various monasteries strewn around central Asia - Bamian, Bukhaaraa, ... - and a flourishing home of learning, arts, world trade. Most people do wish to live in peace and attempt to keep up the learning, arts et al, except some lands are almost cursed in that the turbulence keeps invading in form of various armies criss crossing time and again. Kansas has tornadoes, central Asia has humans invading and occupying from east and west.

Yet it is a beautiful land, as seen through the rosy memories of the writer who clearly loves its various features from snow to desert, orchards and fields. This book coupled with the other more famous one of his (TKR) makes one almost wish one could instantly travel and see all that he is writing about, even though one is aware it is no longer the same - not only he rues it but that is all one has been familiar with unless one is another expat Afghan. The ravaged land with trees and fields of life sustaining fruits and grains and so on replaced by tanks and guns and bombings and opium fields that help the drug-gun trade prosper. Bamian Buddha has been destroyed quite deliberately, in between all other destructions of towns and humanity, and in the place of peace is now desolation and destitution which is all this sort of war and coup ideology, supported with gun and drug trade, can bring. People try desperately to survive, by staying on for the love of land or leaving with a heavy heart for safer shores until one can return.

The writer begins this one with the most downtrodden possible a person, an illegitimate daughter of a servant by a master who is doing penance through giving the mother and daughter provisions for life as long as they do not intrude on his legitimate life of respectability. Still, the girl knows no sorrow or downturn of life except the bitter mother who keeps telling her truths she won't acknowledge - children need to love and dream, to survive, and the truths are bitter. When she sets forth to make one dream come true, a small enough one at that - have her father take her to a film in one of his theatres with his other children, see the film together, eat ice cream - she is faced with devastating realities of her life none of which are her fault, and loses her mother and pretty soon any possibility of a real life. She tries to make life as best as possible, but innocent downtrodden ones are not necessarily spared by providence and she loses the one happiness she could have had, children and any possibility thereof.

The writer jumps to the life of a younger neighbour inexplicably and one wonders if this was a composition brought together in a book form but initially consisting of separate connected stories. Then with more happenings of history the two are woven together like the simple braiding of hair with different sections brought together. How fifteen year old are forced to grow up and make very adult decisions and choices to survive, to find what happiness they can and to protect those they must, is a reminder of how the world lives beyond the teenage haven of US with cars and malls and proms and popularity their only concerns. Here in this story, education is a luxury not everyone has, and in fact the most liberal fathers of daughters are forced by the bombings and missiles to keep their daughters home finally, and teach them privately. Young males of course have gone to war and died, or lost limbs early in life with land mines. Or died trying to escape it to safer lands.

The meanness, the petty cruelty and nasty tricks of the male largely looming in the lives of the two women is symbolic of a class hatred for no reason that the lesser male feels for the higher whom he can conquer only in one way, by raping the women that belong to their class - and even better, doing so within marriage so the women have little if any chance of escape, it is their own life, their own husband, father of their child or many dead ones. The elder one is daughter of a richer one and in some way higher class in that she speaks Farsi (Persian), and does not speak Pashto; the younger one is not only half the age of the elder one, who in turn is less than half the age of the male who married them, but is also the daughter of a teacher, with an educated mother and is being educated herself, has a friend she loves, and is beautiful - and he clearly hates all of the superior qualities of this one, and tricks her into marrying him by having someone tell her a false tale about her love being dead.

This level of petty cruelty, nasty evil mindset, comes only from a lesser person who knows he is lesser and hates the superior ones for it, questioning their assumption of superiority - but if he had it in him to aspire to their level nothing could stop him, in fact the teacher would encourage and help the neighbour. It couldn't be that difficult for a man who owns a reasonably prosperous business and is in demand to find some time for rising above what he suspects is a low station by being well read, but he prefers to spend the time on porn and hates the better ones. The difference is not that the better ones think they are above, it is that the lesser one not only knows it he would rather trample them in the worst way he can think of and thus equate the better ones with dust under his feet.

And yet this does not satisfy him, so he goes on to be more cruel and manipulative and nasty in petty ways that hurt his wives but do not benefit him in any way. All this would be unbelievable if one has not met such persons but they unfortunately are all too real, and exist across all differences of geography, nationality, class, rank, caste by any other name, community and faith and colour of skin or eyes or hair, gender or power or wealth. When it is a male empowered by his society to brutalise his wives and daughters it all takes more dimensions of cruelty, and this writer describes them in detail enough to make one cringe.

Another reader's review made one believe it all ends well, and so the failure of the women in escaping together was a severe disappointment while the death of the senior wife in helping the others live by murdering the husband left the tale with its final blow of tragedy, in that she was not only one of the two protagonists but also had finally nothing. One finds solace in the junior wife and her daughter finding the friend-lover-father of the daughter again, in that he was not dead, and their escape to a better life, until they return to rebuild the nation - but the tale has suffered irreparable losses in losing Mariam pretty much the way the nation has lost much. Humanity cannot give up, life does not, and a nation must grow its life back from its roots, as they do in the final part of this story. But one must remember those that gave life so others could survive, too.

The Kite Runner; by Khaled Hosseini.

It is always a true tale when told from within, and therein lies half the secret of why this book is good, gripping, raw, imagery strong and unforgettable. Layers upon layers of the life as the protagonist knew in a country that was ravaged by wars and marauders since mid seventies in recent times, even apart from the historical ever trampling of the land by various warriors in their path.

Several questions, several interesting points. The nature of caste and the role played by race in the whole caste-class question, and an almost slavery sort of level of relationship of master to servant in most respects except an actual sale of humans involved, for example - very intriguing in that rarely is this structure admitted as a caste, and is then taken for granted, while being usually clothed in terms of race or nationality. Islam is supposed not to have any iota of inequality between men (that women are held and considered inferior is usually swept under a rug and since women rarely are equal and happy on the whole in any society even now this is not questioned except peripherally) - but slavery and rank has ever been a part of most Islamic societies, and the fiercely independent Afghans are no exception in this. This book begins with the whole racial question of Afghanistan and the treatment of one race by another, dominant one, is central to the story, albeit not in a general form but in form of characters. Still, they do speak and give the general facts in their society as they were and in all probability still are.

Funnily enough, the discrimination against Hazara is due to their being of oriental mix; strangely because the moghuls that ruled a large swath of the regions around were Mongols, who settled in India finally but spent a large time in the central Asian regions generally. Not only Changez (mispronounced Genghis in west, while the real name is closer to Chingis in Mongolia where he came from and Changez where he fought to begin his empire base) Khan is revered in the region - several villages claim total descent from him, in that everyone is supposed to have descended from him.

The very name Khan is of Mongol origin, for that matter. And this name being used proudly throughout the region one would think people respected the origin of the name, the race that bequeathed it. Not so. Pastuns, or Pakhtoons or Pathans as named generally, not only look down on the central Asian mixed races of the regions, Hazara amongst them, but treat them in generally horrible way quite often. One is reminded of the now deposed despot in Pakistan "warning" US that Afghans won't accept a leader who is racially closer to Tajik or Kirghiz, not so long ago.

This is played out in a relationship that strikes close to heart of every male of human species in particular - that of childhood buddies, master and servant, brotherhood, threatened by the racial and caste tension around in the society.

Interestingly the villain figure is a half caste from every perspective - with an Afghan Pashtun father and a German mother - who embraces the worst of his heritage by choice, and is described as crazy in a way that goes to the very root of nazi ideology and those that believe and practice it. His German mother disapproves of what this boy has chosen and in fact is unaware of the son's choices, she is in all probability running away as far as she could from the horror of the past of her heritage, and yet it appears in the mindset of the son who has her racial features making him look different. Not that the region - central or south Asia for that matter - lacks light eyed or light haired variety, even before colonial days, but that this particular villain figure of the mixed race boy is very aware of his nazi heritage, his looks and his identity; and he has chosen all that his mother rightly discarded as a horror. And his way of adhering to that choice is by beginning to rape what he considers as males of lesser races. Beginning with little boys.


The main interest of the story must remain with the protagonist however, and his guilt at not saving his friend, his brother that then he was unaware of the relationship with. He never points the finger at his father for not acclaiming the son he had from the servant's wife, though, being the adoring and idolising son who is jealous of the attentions the other boy gets, and attempting to rise to deserve the father's attention.

But the reader must question, was the father such a hero after all, since he stood up to guns for strangers but did nothing to protect his own son from a relationship outside wedlock and had him work as a servant in his house, unschooled and poor? Whatever the guilt of the master's legitimate son, it does not begin to compare with the original sin, that of the father of the two boys who left it to the legitimate son to correct his father's sin by lifelong omission.

The coincidence of the young nazi-inspired boy growing into the sadist taliban leader who is murdering people publicly with any accusations possible, persecuting Hazara people to the extent of going about murdering a whole town (Mazar - e - Sharif massacre of 1998) and still going about using orphans - often those he deliberately made orphans and then hunted out for the purpose - to sodomise just to see them degraded, is perhaps too trite - except this; the ideology of racial persecution and elevating sadism to the level of an ideology to be followed and replacing old faith with this persecution sadism is all too really borrowed from nazi by taliban.

And finally, the women - who are mentioned in the book only fleetingly and not too nicely until the protagonist falls in love, and then finds human contact with his wife to be and her mother. It is almost at the end of his journey of revisiting his past that he gives an account of the mother of the little friend of his childhood that is not dismissive as it is in the beginning, describing her in terms of male lascivious and degrading mindset - still, it is not as comprehending in human terms as it could be, or perhaps it is an exercise he leaves the reader to perform consciously or subconsciously depending on how closed the mind of the reader is, what society the reader belongs to. The protagonist perhaps would rather not go that far from his own roots.

The poor woman married to a servant, her own cousin who married her for a marriage of convenience (convenient for her father and for him, not so much for her in any way one could possibly think of) who is not only handicapped with one leg paralysed in a polio attack and the lower face paralysed too, on top of being the racial dominated Hazara as she is too - she is initially described as far too beautiful to look at only once, and perhaps this is her only crime really in a society so unfriendly to the gentle sex as to brand them with all sorts of allegations if they happen to be attractive and without a powerful protector, indeed a society which turns into the taliban land easily enough with women beaten up by strangers for simply speaking out audibly in process of shopping for their family's need of food.

The poor beautiful woman is described to her own son in horrible terms by soldiers who in all probability were lying, with affirmations of having used her with her complicity. Nevertheless she runs away leaving her secure position in the powerful household. And yet, if sex was all she desired and she could have had everything she needed from the master of the household including the protection she lacked, and respectable married life with children, with only one proviso - to continue as the servant's wife and a servant herself while in reality being the mother of child of the master, and perhaps his concubine for life too. This is what she ran away from leaving her newborn son to his legal father, one who might or might not have known about the truth of the son's blood - he had enough evidence to know, but might not wish to and to what purpose after all since the master would not acknowledge the second son by the servant and so the little boy was for the servant to bring up after all, and to protect to the best of his abilities?

The mother returned to find her son and had a few years with his family at the end of her life, and it speaks volumes for the Hazara code and conduct that while he had pain accepting her he did so to his and his child's benefit. She in all probability had run away to have a life of open state of affairs in that there was no pretense of being a respetable wife while in reality being the master's concubine - she had no reason to not expect the master to call upon her services again, although he perhaps would not have done so and did it once only due to grief of losing his much beloved wife in childbirth - and preferred the group of singing dancing troubadours to the hazards of the town, the society of Kabul looking at her beauty askance and victimising it.

Victimisation she did not escape, but perhaps she did have a life.

Paths of Glory; by Jeffrey Archer

Archer is a master story teller and this book is another point in evidence, that he holds one glued to the tale that is mostly historical and documented - one assumes he is writing intimate scenes and private thoughts from his own ability rather than any sort of actual documented evidence thereof - and it is not only an eminently readable book, it is one to be recommended on most counts, not the least of which is the sort of determined effort that takes one and more over a barrier, and humanity to a new horizon.

George Mallory, along with his companion for the climb Irvine, has been suspected to be the first known person, certainly of the western world (which, ironically, includes Australia and New Zealand, without anyone giving that particular twist to or convolution of geography a second thought), to have set foot on top of the highest peak of the earth, known by various names - Gaurishankar, Saagarmaathaa, Chomolungmaa, and Everest, amongst many others in all likelihood. Very likely there have been local persons that have climbed it or even traversed the landscape in all sorts of paths as the Himaalaya was rising over the millennia after millennia as it still it, but those are unrecorded and hence even less admitted than the known previous discoverers or even occupants for millennia of other continents that were new to west. Mallory and Irvine vanished around a corner on the climb in 1924 and the body of one was discovered only recently in 1999 while that of Irvine is suspected to have been seen by a Chinese climber who died in an avalanche soon after.

This book is the story of the person and the life of Mallory. Very very interesting, gripping, with all the details about climbing the Eiffel tower and the tower in Venice, and the peaks in Alps and Himaalaya. One is almost there and triumphant for Mallory while weeping for Nyima and laughing ruefully at the Finch escapades.

Archer is strangely callous about some details, perhaps they - one, likely - belong to the history where the British climbers mention one amongst them speaking "the local language" is helpful - which is a bit like an Oriental, an Arab or an African speaking of a fellow Oriental, Arab or African speaking "The European language". There are other such careless little details, but then Archer while benefitting from his readers' avid interest in his work no matter where they are from must affirm his loyalty to the crown and hence show a willingness to be callous to the colonies, even ex colonies.

One rather glaring example of such incorrect detail bordering on false is his epilogue where he mentions someone being murdered by a "Pakistani" in 1931, which is when not only such a thing did not exist, but was not even a demand, only a tool for leverage in hands of someone machiavellian hungry for power who was dismayed to be granted his demand since he would not play by any fair rules or means of any possibility of a dialogue, while in reality he had wanted to really rule India undivided. To set Archer straight, it is no secret that in '31 the concerned person could only have been Indian, and saying Pakistani merely conveys the information in a short and therefore incorrect, false manner that that person's roots as well as future choice of a nationality lay in that direction.

What is irresistible is the descriptions of beauty of Himaalaya, of the peak they tried to conquer, of the view. One almost is catapulted into going over pronto to do it for oneself. Alas, one's years of any such activity are now definitely over, even though now it is practically a highway with several teams a year from anywhere and everywhere around the world achieving the conquest - including handicapped and blind climbers, old people and repeat climbers.

Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar and the Facts Which Have Been Erased; by Arun Shourie

Most people who were not familiar with the facts of history, accept the officially approved version handed out in mainstream media, with little thought of asking if it were true, much less challenging anything so given to masses.

That is where the value of someone like Shourie - in as much as he questions the official or current fashionable versions, and brings up facts and quotes with extensive research into the history, and brings alive the reality forgotten by those that did not suffer the consequences, or did not have anyone they care about go through any. And those that did not thus suffer have little reason not to forget the reality of the times of an independence struggle of epic proportions - it is far more profitable to get on with an education that tells one the powers that were ruling were all good, since today it is as profitable to get along with the former masters (and their cousins across the pond) as it was in the times Shourie is writing about in this work.

The dead of the Irish "famine" are as forgotten by the rest of the world as the dead of the "famine" in India during British rule, and the fact that neither were famines is conveniently swept under the rug, even when the empire is broken into shards and splinters, with the erstwhile rulers taking care they did not leave any piece of the erstwhile empire without ensuring it will be shackled forever, by various splinters hurting other shards of the same piece.

What does live on is the various speeches and dialogues, especially the documented and witnessed ones; and while some have been hidden under the pretext of official secrecy, others have been out there for all to read and comprehend, with convenient avoidance of taking notice thereof by the official versions. That Ambedkar was involved with the committee that formalised a constitution for the nation of India is escalated into a stature of his being the sole sculptor thereof, while the surrounding factors of reality are forgotten. Which is ok until the idol thus made takes over - due to interests of the now would be kings - and others, the great personalities that did commit sacrifices for the nation, are either pushed aside or subjected to mud slinging in the interest of the now would be kings or any other political shortcuts, and it all turns to falsehood of the grossest sort. Not just one of a misunderstanding, not a lack of comprehension due to an inability such as Churchill's in regard to Gandhi, but far worse, that of an inversion of reality.

And so an exposé like this is needed to debunk a myth, built around a man who not only protested vigorously against any possibility of independence of his country, much as an English landlord in protestant north Ireland would (calling himself Irish so he is not told to leave but claiming he needs protection against his own countrymen by the occupying nation) but far worse - he went to any length to secure the approval of the masters, and couldn't care less if well over a million of his countrymen starved to death, in the artificial famine created by rulers who simply took the food for their own, and let the poor of the ruled nation die and called it a famine. Stalin too did the same to Ukraine (taking the harvest and sending people to Siberia or getting rid of them in other ways so the food was free for the rest and it got counted as an economic miracle for his regimé), just another example of the horrible, great crimes against humanity committed by callous or worse rulers; and today Russia no longer keeps Ukraine, pretty much as the British - and various other European nations - lost their empires in various parts of the world.

So while reading this one is reminded that the British rule in India was not only fair and just, but in fact it was the very opposite just as often, and in horrendous ways, what with the repression of the independence movement with hundreds of thousands of people that suffered injuries or death at the hands of the forces of law, when court decisions were flouted with regular routine ordinances, and people were shot or beaten for instilling a terror for no fault of the ones that were thus treated.

That the subject of this book did not care to protest against any of this and wanted to keep the subjugation and in fact went to any length to please them so his own position was somehow was secure, and that for him was the whole and sole criteria of upliftment of his people, is one of the points Shourie makes with documents that are not only not hidden all these years but sold at a discount with the governement publishing (the taxpayer bearing the burden) and all this while Gandhi fasted on and off every time the British repression of India went beyond cruelty.

The machiavellian rulers pretended to be disinterested bearers of an obligation to protect - while in reality the nation was exploited in huge, humongous terms; and the conferences for discussion of independence - much publicised - were an out and out fraud. And while the rulers could count on people like Ambedkar and Jinnah whose primary interests were in their own exaltation and any completely atrocious demands made only to twist the elbows of everyone else (the latter died heartbroken, when much to his surprise he got his demand of a separate nation granted, since in reality he had not anticipated such an event, and had in all probability expected to be the next mogul emperor) - the rulers had little to fear from a nation of three hundred million people who did not want them around. The me-first people such as those who were consequently very easily manipulated were the easy tools of the rulers in keeping a facade of a fair and just execution of a noble obligation, while in reality it was little of the sort most times or fundamentally.

Scandals, Vandals, and da Vincis: A Gallery of Remarkable Art Tales; by Harvey Rachlin.

I am still in the middle of reading this amongst other books, but it seems promising. A collection of various interesting tidbits, anecdotes and history of various art works including the famous Mona Lisa - did you know it had been stolen once, for quite some time with no clues? I certainly did not.

Then there is the critic who was sued by Whistler and lost, but Whistler was only awarded a farthing and went more into debt while Ruskin's friends took up a collection to pay his costs although he wasn't poor - but we know history turned the verdict around, and Whistler is far more the famous one through his simple and eternal evocative Mother. Does anyone know about the guy who criticised him in abusive terms and drove him into bankruptcy? Of course except for his descendants, only those that go looking for details of Whistler's life and trials and travails, and come across the man who was lacking in vision of art.

There are many, many tales, each a huge piece of history, and very interesting. There is the portrait by Holbein of a possible could have been consort for Henry the eighth, after he lost his third wife to childbirth when he finally had his first legitimate son. Duchess of Milan, Christina of Denmark, was related to the emperor of Spain and so the whole affair was politically suitable as well, but the king was adamant about marrying someone who would please him personally too and hence he sent around not only for portraits (a common tradition of those days) but insisted on meeting various candidates as well, and this is one candidate he was pleased with the portrait of to the extent that he signaled negotiations to begin for a marriage. That however was not to be, since the negotiations were connected to Spain, and Catherine being divorced had not been forgotten. Hence the Anne of Cleves was the next choice.

One of the telling stories - telling about a supposedly liberal artist as well as about this writer - is that about Nelson the hero of England and Lady Hamilton, love of his life. Both the artist who painted the picture the writer is telling the story of Nelson and Lady Hamilton in context of and the writer would like to be considered liberal and compassionate, but they straddle the fence without perhaps being aware that their compassion and sense of justice is faulty. They blame Lady Hamilton for qualities that go unpunished not only in men at all times, irrespective of time and culture and geography, but also in most women of high - read wealthy and socially considered upper class - origins. While superficially they indict Lady Hamilton for having an affair and generally being far from virgin or celibate, the exact same life story in another - any man or a woman born to wealth and position - not only goes unpunished but remains unspoken except in inconsequential whispers that might in fact lend glamour to the persona.

Lady Hamilton is in fact indicted and despised by the society then and the artist Redgrage and this writer now, for being of poor origins and achieving not only a position of wealth and glamour for a while, with social status and political achievements to boot, but also being fortunate in being loved and loving - and that too a hero of the stature of Nelson. He did not give her up in spite of the displeasure of not only society but even the king.


Then again, who ever claimed monarchs were virtuous, unless one is talking of the virgin queen Bess, beloved of England! One has only to read Daphne du Maurier's biographical Mary Anne. Or know about the ancestors of todays royal couple being illicit paramours a few generations ago. Hypocrisy amounts to ascribing one's distaste for someone to questions of virtue and vice - and all the while it is merely a question of if you knew the person socially, if you could have been related, in past or in future.
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One of course has to mention Guernica, however worthy other entries. The whole story of the wwII is something no one ought to be allowed to forget but this part, the beginning and the field where the axis weapons were tested and showcased, with the destruction of Spain in general and Guernica in particular serving as a show and a warning to other nations that might think of opposing the Axis, is often overlooked, and it is the theatre where many Europolitic factors became clear. There were those that helped the fascists, and then those that not only agreed to stay away but threatened to persecute such of their citizens who went individually to help the new nation of Republic of Spain, the democratically elected government being socialist. The net result was the poor populace got massacred, and this time the word is used literally.

Too many people on either side hold up the bombing of Dresden subsequently by allies as a heinous crime - forgetting not only the bombing of London with thousands of civilian casualties including women and children, but also the very purposeful destruction of Guernica and Spain, which was not at war with those that did the bombing, namely the nazis. And while it is not to say one murder is justified by another, it certainly ought to be remembered that you cannot expect to reap strawberries by sowing cactii. Or that while Dresden citizens might have been less innocent of the war and the nazi crimes, the poor of Guernica were entirely innocent by any criteria even if someone (neo nazi, for example) manages to argue that citizens of London deserved the few months long relentless bombings due to their nation not giving up to the nazis.

Picasso could paint, and he portrayed the massacre, the butchering of Guernica. The painting went home when fascism gave way and Spain became a democracy, according to his will.
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All in all, very interesting and thought provoking a read.