India's Unending Journey; by Mark Tully.

Mark Tully is afraid of becoming too Indian, and is like the person fascinated by Gangaa but holds on to a chain on shore while attempting to wash a little of his grime.

Interesting how he sticks to his bringing up prejudices in various contexts where he can open his eyes instead to how much further India takes it. Changing emphasis in the story of Shiva and Paarvatie for instance, reducing the tremendous Divine to the objectified ignominous of a semitic background, not understanding the difference between penance and Tapas, and so forth.

Also, he minimises the various threats that India has faced far more than west, as long as they are from sources British found closer to their ethos - so the massacre of '46 is minimised to a bare mention rather than the graphic butchering of a few thousand within a day or two that occurred on command for the demand to divide India along religious demands of the intolerant. He rightly identifies the two parts thereafter as fanatic and secular, but fails to give enough credit to the mainstream religion of the secular nation for making it possible at all in the first place. (Most so called secular nations of the west have an underpinning nevertheless of some variety of religion recognised by some church as proper, with due recognition of other religions as dim as light of the brightest star on earth, no matter how brilliant it be compared to earth's sun.) Moreover, he fails to take into account the effect of the trauma of years, centuries of butchering suffered by the said mainstream culture still continuing in forms of terrorist attacks orchestrated from across the border, along with organisations like simi. He thinks stick wielders are more of a threat to peace because they speak out, and those that are ready to massacre with more modern weapons than they used in '46 (which was with knives) need no mention in threats to terror.

As for the usual albeit slightly better expo about castes, he shows the same shortcomings. West's failure to recognise that castes are everywhere including in Europe and have always been (the very word being of Anglo Saxon origin in English from German), only the structure of castes being different as in vertical strata unlike the usually horizontal one - in Indian system money is below intellectual and protective functions while elsewhere money is above all and united with power so the lower strata has very little hope to do better or have recognition, for one thing; women had knowledge on par with their male counterparts in India unlike in west, for another; and so forth - and as for being defined by birth, that anomaly in India came in with other cultures dominating after conquest and attempting to dismantle the indigenous culture, whence the discontinuation of the schools called ashrams conducted as live in places for all pupils accepted (various instances have been always clear about people of different backgrounds having lived their student days in the same place, with the poor Braahman - and Braahmans are usually very poor - along with princes and other rich pupils learning on par just as pupils from variety of other backgrounds). Tully has failed to see the significance of something like Mahaabhaarata, and goes only by the usual criticism lashing out from those that had a vested interest in destroying the indigenous culture and imposing theirs.

All in all, he makes it clear he has a long way to go towards evolving into a fair mind, much less a higher comprehension.