In The Kill List, Forsyth deals with problems faced today, not merely by first world or west, but any nation attempting to stay on a path of progress and well being of all its people, along lines of democracy and every individual's rights to life and liberty.
In an era where internet is used as means of communication over and above most others, it can become a weapon in hands of those that would see rights of humanity to life severely restricted along their own chosen political path whatever that may be, and it no longer requires a state machinery to curtail individual's life and liberty, or even a physical trail of evidence leading to a criminal; such a trail is often hard to trace, being chiefly albeit not only in cyberspace.
From a preacher that invites faithful with haranguing sermons to kill those of other paths of life, to the agencies that try to track down the source of multiple killings across various nations, to remote and primitive nation situated at the confluence of continents and conveniently at location suited for piracy and known recently for pirates, to various small groups and organisations that help track the pirates and kidnappers and killers and their leaders down, and men that risk their lives and more in this, Forsyth takes a reader across three continents and several time zones with a rather happy ending for most characters.
Sunday, January 5, 2014.
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One common mistake most people make is to assume that everyone else shares their thinking, emotions, preferences, and more importantly prejudices. Frederick Forsyth is no exception.
He shares the prejudice peculiar to colourful people, who usually - and quite mistakenly or falsely - are called "white"; mistakenly or falsely because it ought to be obvious to anyone with normal sight that if any person were really white rather than merely pale, such a person would look naked while dressed in white, and certainly no one does. Brides in church do not vanish with exception of hair and eyes and nor do men in white formal suits, nor anyone in a white bathing suit or lingerie.
The particular prejudice much prevalent in people that could more appropriately only be called pale - or technicolour, what with variety of colours of eyes and hair - is that beauty is defined by pale skin and even more so by colours of light eyes and - or - light hair. This they assume is a prejudice shared by everyone on earth, and perhaps they do not realise it is merely a prejudice rather than fact which perhaps they fail to notice it is most definitely not. For just one example, Elizabeth Taylor was beyond any possible argument one of the most beautiful women if not the most beautiful, and this was true when one could not see colour of her eyes, when she was a preteen and films she worked in were black and white.
In The Kill List, Forsyth describes how a man - from a part of what was India until a few decades ago - falls in love with a young woman from mountains of northern Kashmir, and marries her in spite of his family's objections and loses their support and more with no regrets on that account. Subsequently however he merely describes her as a woman with jade green eyes, and explains that some part of the spent force of Alexander's soldiers stayed on in the high mountains of Himaalaya in that region, rather than go through travails of return to Macedonia, and this is the reason some people there can be found with light eyes. He thereafter unfailingly refers to the son of the couple as one with amber eyes, almost making it as the only possible way to identify someone.
Forsyth - like many of his race or nation or continent or generally west, even, perhaps - fail to realise that not only Asia but in fact India teems with people of all sorts of colouring, and while light skin is more common than light eyes, while light hair is more rare, none of it is so rare as to be an identity of someone from India much less central Asia; more to the point, it is not considered a definition or chief feature of beauty either.
And with good reason - one only has to open one's eyes and look, really look, to see just how many pf the colourful races are in fact not good looking at all, much less beautiful; and the other side of that is just as true - other races teem with people of good looks just as much as the technicolour ones do. Any prejudices for light skin exist either in people of light skin or at most in people colonised and ruled by them.
Monday, January 6, 2014.
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