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.

Indian Controversies; by Arun Shourie.

Arun Shourie as ever steps into regions of situations in India that most people in public life steer clear of for fear of being object of mudslinging or worse, and treats the subjects he looks into with the same clear incisive light of reason that he used to for his journalistic career, giving facts about the issues from history and present, and analysis without partisan considerations. Shourie brings his usual journalistic integrity to the whole topic, with facts found and laid before the reader, with clear light of reason and analysis of the whole issue - or rather the whole basket of issues that he deals with in this book.

From Sikh extremists turmoil and their harping on various quotes brought to table with the various vitupertions of some of the Sikh revered Gurus against mainstream and very popular deities of India (which explains the surprising change of name of one extremely popular deity in north - much visited by both Hindu and Sikh people - a name change that goes against ancient tradition in a strange way) and sects, and reasoned analysis of today's - or rather yesteryear's perhaps, since the Sikh extremism fomented by exterior (to India) interests is now seemingly over - propaganda; to the history of various Islamic invaders and destruction of temples by them, and the issues about whole temples destruction by various invaders and reconstruction thereof matter; to the historical proofs thereof being removed from libraries and later editions of English language books (but not the original versions), to the court cases that have been going on for over two hundred years and have been delayed in the political interest first by the British rulers and subsequently by the Indian ones, especially those that ruled most of the time since independence; to the question of a common civil code for India and history of the question thereof, to other various issues, Shourie deals with various controversies that have plagued the nation increasingly more in recent years. Which is why this book is a good place to get to know about the various stormy controversies that India has been plagued with often quite unnecessarily and for such ignominious reasons as a dirty political game overriding the interests of the nation.

None of these things, or at least very very few, are actually secrets - they are no secret to anyone with even a little acquaintance with history, and this book contains few surprises except that of finding someone willing to speak out the truth and lay facts before public so clearly. In a country like India where one cannot do much without everyone around being aware with gossip and comments without reserve, there can be few secrets really - but while most people do know all this and might admit it the truth of it all in privacy, most people steer clear of such issues, especially in public life where the overwhelming considerations are security for oneself and family on one hand and to some extent (especially for those in power most of the time) pandering to the dominating interests; and those that don't do so are in danger of being at the bull's eye of everyone's free range for shooting slime and being treated like criminals, merely for telling it like it is rather than pretending for sake of pleasing partisan interests of mostly powers from outside the nation.

Most people therefore do know about all of this in broad terms and perhaps well over half the details he brings to light, but most also refrain from speaking out or admitting any of it for fear of being a target of mud slinging and being forever at the receiving end of slimeball politics.

And yet the book is worthy of much credit for documenting once for all various details and evidences and proofs and reasonings involved in the various issues, - and the author is deserving of credit for the qualities that go into his persona and work.

So one has to thank this ever fearless journalist from the pre emergency era who has not given up telling the truth as it is. If anyone doubts about the risk he is incurring - one site has just gone blank on me for posting this review, so I had to write this one all over fresh. Perhaps the review benefited from a rewriting, but one can only know for certain if the other version is recovered.

From the very public - and yet shrouded in secrecy - murder of John F. Kennedy, to Diana's death to the grail question, various attempts have been going on to pooh pooh what they usually term conspiracy theories. One can add a grand one to them all now, about that against India and her ancient civilisation and roots. The conspiracy deniers and pooh poohers might one day deny there was a nation so wonderful as India with her unbelievably rich heritage. Hope this never shall come to pass.

The picture that comes to mind with an uncanny similarity - not for the book but more for the situation, generally - is that of the ancient epic Mahaabhaarata where the sons of Gods lose and go on losing time after time, almost until the end when Divine finally has to step in and help the fight on the side of right, and meanwhile the ignoble, the greedy, the manipulating and the evil go on scoring and exiling the good, the reasonable, even the loved ones. Not that Raamaayana was or is different in this by much - but it had fewer villains and less complications, being earlier in history, and the villains were strangers to the good ones, to say the least.

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The Name of the Rose; by Umberto Eco.

Medieval times era of Inquisition when people were burnt alive at stake, quite regularly, for being disobedient in the slightest measure to the authority of church in any matter whatsoever, and consequent social and psychological upheavals and insecurities.

Monasteries attempting to preserve knowledge and travelling monks in search of the knowledge. Various sects attempting to search for a spiritual path proliferate. People have ideas and visions, and wish to reform the established decrepit decay.

Ordinary people serve landowners including monasteries and suffer horrendous punishments for ordinary normal human behaviour.

People who would rather hide knowledge and let darkness prevail - for sake of survival really, but ostensibly in name of faith, and obedience to authorities in all matters - manage to finally survive through it all. Others often don't, however innocent of any guilt.

From murders in an abbey to looking for clues in dark towers to finding a monk bent on hiding an ancient Greek manuscript and stopping at nothing in the attempt only because the said manuscript by a much revered ancient Greek philosopher not only allows but justifies and exalts laughter and joy, which the monk cannot allow for sake of faith holding fear of church supreme and hence must wipe out any trace of any idea to the contrary, it is a bewildering journey the reader is taken through by the writer.

Strangely enough the protagonist justifies it all, holding fear and obedience to church as the only virtue, and equating thought with arrogance and denouncing it all, and justifying burning down libraries for the effort to keep authorities supreme. One wonders if Eco is keeping his own defence just in case, in name of protagonist and his declarations at the end, or is it all a dark portrayal of the times and that is all.

A portrayal of those dark times that are past, thankfully.

Falling over backwards: an essay against reservations and against judicial populism; by Arun Shourie

Most people, whether individually or as social groups, communities, have two very distinct, very separate needs, often but not always necessarily, conflicting.

One is for more of wealth, more of power, stability of well being, security, and so forth. This is of course well understood and often used for a hold over the person or group as a leverage to use them.

Another is of the sort that might begin to border on higher ideal - of a rise in terms of things other than those considered worldly needs.

However, when the two conflict, often people free to choose will go for the worldly needs rather than higher ideals. And then resent those that do not, or cannot, for whatever reason.

Hence the effort to portray one's community as higher if that gives a rise in status and all out efforts to prove it so, and on the other hand the opposite if that pays in terms of economic security.

Given a chance - that is, if the two do not conflict - most people would prefer the higher ideal and rise in terms of other than worldly criteria.

It is a pity that such chances are withdrawn and instead there is an incentive to downgrade one's roots in order to secure a better economic status.

But it is a far more bitter shame to a nation to encourage this, or to perpetrate fraud of the sort that Shourie describes, for reasons of clamouring to be seen as "more secular than thou" while downgrading quality of personnel of nation by requiring very little except a certificate to the effect of a low caste birth, an no merit if such a certificate is indeed possible.

Affirmative action in US is based on all other criteria being equal, in which case offering a position to the person of an under priviledged group indeed has some justice. But this practice in name of reservations in India aided and abetted by the judges of not only giving low level entry positions but all possible promotions and advantages to people of low or no merit, indeed not even taking into account a proportion of merit scaled to the background but a blank cheque so to speak, cna only go towards downgrading the nation's affairs.

If this is hard to believe, just imagine you have a near and dear in dire need of surgery and the person to perform it not only was given an entry but every possible promotion and position on basis of birth and no merit shown at any stage. I doubt the most secular or pseudo secular of people would view such a moment without flinching.

Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claims; by Arun Shourie.

While the facade is that of innocuous and benevolent faith, in fact there is much deliberate planning and extensive funding efforts to increase numbers and little effort to keep any promises made to converts either explicitly or implicitly, even in matters of the basic creed of equality. Church is very aware of the caste equations and discourages a low caste face with separation of high caste converts from the low in the church, and when protests grow then the storm is waylaid into demanding special reservations for converted low castes from the Government of India. This is but one facet of the various devious policies and practices of the missionaries in India.

There is more, often either deliberately not taken into account politically by the so called secular politicians or denied falsely, to the effect that missionaries are deliberately breaking laws in India. If missionaries travel to India is not allowed for purposes of mass conversions they travel pretending to be tourists and if mass conversions and lies for the purpose are illegal they do "forest camps" where the activity can take place in seclusion away from the eyes of law or people. There are lies about attacks on the missionary activity and maligning of any protest against their activities as communal, while their attacking Indian culture is taken as normal activity.

The activities and policies and subversive nature thereof is there to see in plain sight, even publicised in pamphlets and other literature in various countries where funding drives go on. The self styled secular politicians of India deny it of course since their political aims are served by such denial of attcks on India and Indian culture.

Missionaries in India ; Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas; by Arun Shourie.

Shourie is looking at missionary activity in India, which is a long history although not as long as that of the faith originally - what with Thomas arriving on the south west coast and hence the christianity in India being of older times than that in Europe, with that particular branch being named Syrian but in fact deserving a better epithet since it was brought by one of the supposedly original apostles, perhaps a twin of Jesus according to some of the recent or not so recent (depending on your age you tend to look at three decades ago as prehistory or yesterday) research. But then even Jesus according to some recent (or not so recent ....) research learned yoga in India during the years never mentioned in his story, and in fact not only returned after the crucifixion but has a grave in a village in Himaalayan region that the people of that village and surrounding have known is his.

Missionaries came later of course, with Europeans, and this book depicts their stance in India vis a vis the nation and the changes in the stance.

Does this book describe the travails of Vivekananda and the malicious attacks by missionaries on him, or is that in another book about the missionaries activity in India, I am unsure, but it certainly gives the position of Gandhi against conversion activities and his debates with various missionaries, and their stance about neither Buddha nor Gandhi being deserving of staying out of hell for variuos reasons.

A Secular Agenda; by Arun Shourie.

Shourie was the reason Indian Express was read avidly by the intelligentsia, the youth and anyone who cared, until he left - which is when the Express dwindled. There is a new version and some attractive writers which might mean it is worth looking at again. Meanwhile Shourie continued his fearless reporting and incisive analysis of facts, prima facie and those behind, and this has been in form of books he published from time to time.

From the time British almost lost an independence war in India in 1857, they woke up to the necessity of breaking of the spirit of the nation by any and every means possible, and the surest way of doing it is they realised was to discredit anything good while harping on all that was or could be called bad, and the war of propaganda was on thenceforth. All ancient traditions, all ancient knowledge and those that protected it and kept it alive were to be discredited as bad, or worse. From discrediting Vedas and interpreting them in the stupidest, falsest way possible, to inventing the Aryan invasion myth and Aryan versus original Dravidians myth, to heaping all sorts of discredit on Brahmans, to spreading lies about Vivekananda and other great personalities of India - of which there has never been any shortage - to finally separating the nation by actively encouraging and in fact fabricating separate identities not only where the separations had ceased to exist but even where they did not even exist as separate, ever, they did their best - or worst, in this case - possible.

To some extent, it worked, especially with the population that had only India as the identity. Embarrassment, if not outright shame, about a purely Indian identity, were the gifts of the colonial rulers' manufacture that stayed deep in psyche with those that had lost any real acquaintance with their roots, and they have been forever apologetic and hungry for approval of anything, anyone "foreign". All this is perpetrated and encouraged forever in perpetuity by the schools opened by missionaries that were forever publicised as the best possible education, however deficient they have proved in producing pupils of intellectual superiority of either scientific or most other necessary sorts for any nation, except that of being excellent colonial subjects. This estranged embarrassment about roots of India is what passes for secular in the nation that inherited and kept the name of India, while other pieces that separated went the way of fundamentalist or military rule and worse. And thus the perpetually losing status of India in the hidden war being propagated against her by either physical weapons of terrorists that can come and go freely from either side of the border or simply in the propaganda war that is hidden in plain sight for all to see.

If any other nation would do this sort of conjuring trickery to aid and abate those bent on destroying it for reasons of fear of what the world might say - or even worse, for personal or political gains for a small clicque, as often has been going on, the nation doing this would be a laughing stock of the world. That India does not see herself as such is perhaps a stubborn blindness to facts or a convenient closing of eyes for small, temporary, immediate goals of winning an election or so by the few that have ruled it for long. Laughingstock it is, and that is why major achievements of the nation even in areas of major importance only invoke further ire or ridicule in various parts of the world, mainly Europe and US, whose approval India craves while a second focus of this craving is towards nations that would never give it anyway, on grounds of "faith".

Hence the ridicule reminding India of "starving poor" when India launches a completely indigenous missile or manages to acquire nuclear capability totally on its own in spite of disapproval of world powers, and hence the much punishing of sanctions against India even as nations that cheat on aid and abet terrorists are given further aid on escalating scales.


Hence the abuse heaped on poor hapless call centre workers who painstakingly learn accents and idioms to get along with the customers and stay up nights to help out clients clear around the world, for a pittance compared to what their counterparts would be paid locally to another worker in the client's neighbourhood and have the prices of services go up there to levels they would rather not pay.

Of course, it is easy to abuse someone on phone while it is impossible to do so when one sees clothes or cheap gadgets or other products in shops across US made in some east Asian nation - usually China - but it is also the perception of China as a formidable nation with a nuclear arsenal and unambiguous intentions of domination of territory in and around its borders, while India is seen as poor, starving, and pretentious.

The starving was way back in the soon after independence era, when the nation had accepted responsibility for all the debts of India after partition, while Gandhi had forced the governrment to part with the unfairly demanded share to the part that separated (and accepted no part of debts). It has been more than a few decades that India achieved self sufficiency in terms of food - and indeed has many other achievements to her credit.


What India does not have is a habit of - or even one instance of - retaliatory strikes, US fashion (or even the overtaking of another nation or two or more, China fashion) when terrorism is perpetrated on the innocent citizens, year after year, in the name of some facade of a reason or other that provides a convenient excuse for those that would whip the indigenous of India into submission or oblivion, but are in fact nothing but this effort to wipe out the very nation and its essence and turn it into another robot land of human weapons.

On the contrary, Indian politicians often have pretended infiltrators were not from another country at all, to create vote banks in regions where a local awakening of population might just not go with the one party rule that has been norm for most of the time, no matter if the infiltration is pointed to wresting the land away from the very nation by changing its demographics and more, and the fact that this is not a fear or guess but an openly declared, indeed printed (and circulated for purposes of funds too) policy in some nations near and far is conveniently ignored.

After all it is cheaper to browbeat someone Indian with a name-calling - one can accuse anyone pointing out these and other disturbing facts as non secular, communal, right wing (no matter if the person is ascetic and poor in lifestyle compared to Gandhi) and a new one, sword wielding. One wonders when a young idiot who makes such accusations is unaware of any facts about his or her own nation if this idiot would respect weapons more modern than swords, and that is the reason that the bombing perpetrators who manage to kill hundreds of people in India every now and then (- every couple of months, on ignored levels since they are poor or middle class, and sometime even the spectacular levels such as the Taj attack to attract attention by targeting US, UK and Israel citizens apart from Indians) are not indicted even in supposedly innocent conversation this way, because by definition communal can be an accusation only made against someone who cannot have loyalties anywhere else other than India. No wonder India is seen as ridiculous, the nuclear and other intellectual achievements as pretension of an ex-slave nation with not even an ability to defend its citizens on its own streets.

Shourie gives a great deal of facts and discusses the various actions and various facets of various issues involved around the issue of secularism, whether the Kashmir issue and who is responsible for what, or the Assam bomb that is ticking, and more.

Foucault's Pendulum; by Umberto Eco

Perhaps it was deliberately written this way with a purpose or more than one, but no book has ever been this hard to read, not a book with a story anyway, due not to anything other than being highly distasteful - so much so it would not be too far off to say if you hate someone and wish to convey it without a word, give this as a gift; if the person likes it you may have a private laugh or a smile, if not the message might get conveyed.

Was it the defense of establishment and their tales, or a deliberate thumbing of nose at the relatively recent - then - research and questions about past published in early eighties, or did this writer actually have some information to give but chose for his idea of fun to hide it in a whole jumble of details thrown about in profusion like a tangled forest and then cover it with some slime here, some sewage there, who knows! It does remind one of the 3D pictures in vogue during the early nineties which then were all rage, and this one gives a headache in trying to see if there is such a picture hidden, or is it just a joke to make a viewer go cross eyed and looking all the while at exactly the tangles forest with slime and sewage the writer has portrayed quite deliberately - one finally just gives up, since he has not really said anything till the end that is either worth note or apart from the story establishment enforces as a creed - true or otherwise, history or fabrication, fact or benevolently intended but otherwise turned out fiction.

To add to the general idea he also adds literal portrayals of sewage with history, and believe it or not manages to also give some other stuff far more disgusting.

If you have fun with this, there isn't much you will recoil from.

Daughters of Shame; By Jasvinder Sanghera.

I have only just begun after finishing the first one - Shame - in two days, and this one naturally takes off with a flying start. Every one goes to heart. One wishes one could do something, even if it is only to hold the hurt little ones and reassure them.
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It took a couple of days longer to finish this one, since it gets rather oppressing to realise it is all quite so ubiquitous - a systematic physical and emotional and in fact every other form of abuse of daughters geared towards using them as currency to keeping up one's own social prestige. Young girls somewhere around their teens, from as early as preteen to as late as early twenties, are held hostage to the concepts of honour that involve a slavery or worse for the women concerned, with no concern for their mental or emotional or often even physical well being and the only concern being to hand them over and to make them docile and servile to the men who own them in a farce of a marriage.

These forced relationships are really not marriages, they are a male bound (in his ownership of her) to a woman, often as young as fourteen and expected to be a robot in her compliance with the expectations of her from everyone including in offering no resistance to rape by the husband (he has often no concept of any other form of a relationship with a wife), with both cheated of any possible joy or love in the relationship and in fact in life. There are frequent enough instances of the young wife's father offering to murder her if she is unwilling to allow a consummation of a forced marriage. And all this in a community that claims to give rights to women what with a formality of a consent asked in public at the wedding, which often is given on threat of murder ensuing non compliance from her of course.

These girls, even when they grow up in UK going to schools there with the local population, are not really familiar with any other world than the one the community forces on them what with rules of behaviour pertaining to all spheres of life, and they have a window in the schooling years to a better world with more freedom - albeit with dangers too, but then freedom with dangers is better than dangers guaranteed at home! But even when they have a courage and spirit to try to take a flight to a better life, often what cripples them is this very inability to connect to any other life when the old life steeped in the community is cut off from them.

And why should the community be cut off if they do attempt a better life? It is because in the communities - not all Asians, but those from a particular region in Asia, and of some but not all religions in those parts - the possibility of a daughter or a woman with any choice, any possible better life is simply unthinkable. Not that men of the community benefit in this, and one has to question who does. After all a family with a mother and wife unhappy and daughters disallowed to blossom cannot possibly be happy, they just don't know any different. And people who are not happy at home are easier to control.

So the mores imposed like a poisonous weed flourish to the extent that when a girl, a young woman leaves a home in fear for her life and in protest against a forced marriage, often with as honourable a wish as an aspiration to education, she is hunted out again and again until she gives in - and the whole community is a part of it until she is unable to find any solace in familiarity of the world she has known by meeting any people of her own community even when they are strangers. Even a person working for governmental institutions in UK who are supposed to help her and protect her might find his (or her) loyalty to the community override the work ethic, and inform on her, resulting in her being hunted out by those intent on kidnapping and - or - murdering her. Emotional blackmail is used successfully too, and some women do cave in after a while.

All this if the young one escapes in the first place. Until Jasvinder Sanghera started educating the police and schools and other institutions of UK that could and should help and protect the young in the immigrant communities of the nation about the issues involved, and pointed out that being sensitive to culture difference was resulting in murder and kidnapping and rapes and general abuse of the young British Asian girls, there was really no way for them to escape, no route as such. Often they did go to teachers and police, but with no help forthcoming.

Now, there is a growing lot of institutional help what with a growing awareness about the issues, and hopefully there will be a growth in the enlightenment of the general community too, resulting in more education and benefit for everyone, with a better quality of life.

Marriages can be arranged without being forced, Queen Victoria was key in arranging her children's and grandchildren's marriages with holidays arranged so the young could meet and be familiar - just an example.

In the world wide expatriate community rooted in India the "arranging" merely amounts to the young ones being free of concern for hunting out and wooing their partners until their education and career concerns are at a stage satisfactory enough to find a partner, and the family along with the various other routes used by dating agencies in the world - advertisements, marriage agencies, websites now - help to locate possible choices.

Often a young person looks at the data selected for him or her with a few candidates shortlisted from the few hundred or so responses, there are meetings arranged where the young have a conversation with some privacy and might judge how they feel, and each has a possibility of saying if they wish to proceed to be engaged (which is when they get to meet more, but still on relative privacy, chaperoned by a member or few of either family or both).

In effect, this amounts to either person being as well educated and able to pursue his or her career as the family and the circumstances afford, all things considered. Hence the wide spread progress in the majority of people with roots in India, with excellence in education and career being a foundation considered important.

And it does help when one is not supposed to deviate from those aims while still young, not worry about being popular or learning to use cosmetics or being with fashion. One might do it a bit but it is far from a stigma to be plain, simple and good at academic and other achievements - on the contrary. In addition, often someone who finds love is able to deal with it, since such a concept is not considered evil but merely something the family has to deal with on par with any other way of finding a partner.

The key difference of the two pictures, of course, is - education, career, choices, and a help with finding a partner rather than the family forcing one at a young age out of a good life into a bed with an unwanted stranger against one's protests and in fear for life.

And the most major key difference is the concept of family and woman, with a forced marriage being based on no recognition of individual, considering everyone as a property of the family, and any individual choices being threatening to the honour of the family. This idea of the honour being so fragile as to be threatened by a blossoming of the family is the root of all the evil described here.

In the wider Asian community rooted in India, honour is neither so fragile nor dependent on the living death of the family and women - on the contrary. It is the growth and blossoming of the family - including the women - with education and achievements and careers and progress that is key in the wider community, these essentials replacing the killingly misplaced concept of honour that are used in forced marriages.

There can be no honour in forcing a woman to marry, (or even a man unless he has played with a woman or raped her - and even then it is no good for her - ) - much less in abusing and kidnapping and having her raped by the officially designated person in the name of one's own prestige in the community. Such a concept makes one a slave owner and one's family robots, no more.
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At one point there is a further analysis of the situation of immigrants, with some commonalities to the general migrants around the world (including the various colonial rulers through the ages in lands far away from their roots) but with some frightening consequences in this case.

The immigrants in UK, even those of Asian origin and even those that speak a particular language or two that are related to one another really, are further divided by one important difference - that of religion. And while two out of the various different religions in this context have a concept of "honour" about ownership of daughters to such an extent they would rather hunt out a woman and murder her, there is one that allows, indeed takes pride in its tradition of, easy divorces. This usually does not in practice result in a freedom for a woman although in theory that is the idea - in practice it results in the woman being cast aside as soon as her forced husband has achieved his aim of getting a legal status his own to settle in UK. Then he is free to bring another bride from back home, one unable to speak English, with no ties and no support for her in UK. And thus the community grows - grows as immigrants growing further apart from the ambient society even as they grow in number. And in this lie the roots of much of the disturbance plaguing the world today.

These immigrants have no ties to the land they live in, have little or no intention of being connected much less absorbed or even a part of a salad bowl. All the pain and travails of being far away from one's emotional roots are translated thus into a hatred of the very society they clamour so much to be legally a part of, with marriages paving a way as a ladder to climb from being an Asian to a UK citizen.
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Other parts of the community, those without easy divorces, have had ties to other just as horrible ways to take their pain and hatred out on another part of the world - back home, in fact, with much pain inflicted in attempt to carve out pieces of a land they left behind; they do not and never did intend to return, of course, merely to attempt a show of what they could do. The talk of a separate homeland goes on still amongst these migrants to faraway lands while back home it has gone away, it never was a real possibility there with the community so very widespread as to make it another farce.

Those immigrants, with no easy divorces allowed in their faith, instead resort to killing the daughters that do not comply with being objects traded for prestige.
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Again, majority of the world wide population with roots in India have not so much fear or aversion to being integrated into the ambient society where they live, however gently - most migrants do not easily give way to losing their own culture, and indeed flourishing of such cultural gardens is a key to growth of nations that are not xenophobic. But they do accept the children growing up abroad with them as part of the nations they have migrated to and while they might impart their cultural values and attempt to keep in touch with relatives back home or fellow immigrants around, marriages are not forced and education a matter of pride as is any other achievement, and of course careers.

Marriages of children with local population or other immigrants (not of one's own culture but those of roots far away) do happen and are accepted, and attempts are made sincerely to make things work. In fact often enough a first generation immigrant ends up marrying a person from the place he or she has been living in, and such marriages are accepted too, and often work quite well.

Which is not to say things are all perfect in one community or another - only, that the practices of one or two of the communities of the general "Asian" immigrants in UK are far from ubiquitous of the region of their origin as a whole.
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In fact, the people mentioned in this book, with forced marriages and abuse and rapes and killings and kidnappings in name of prestige (I don't, really don't think it is honour in any way for anyone, it is only prestige and status!) - they remind me of another set of migrants, those of Asians in US (which there means orientals, that is, mostly with roots in China and related lands).

Chinatowns in US have long had the notoriety of being difficult for the local or state or any other agencies in the country to deal with, and there is generally little protection for the people being smuggled in and trafficked as labour or white slaves.

The difference is, in UK they do it to their own daughters and wives and family members. Not just fellow community members, as in Chinatowns of US, but actually their own blood - daughters and sisters and nieces - and life partners.

And often sons too.
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Shame; by Jasvinder Sangheera.

I am not sure if this was the book published under the name Bezti, meaning dishonour, with death threats for the writer subsequently from males of various Asian communities in UK including - especially - the one she belonged to.

There have been various books and films about the travails of the children growing up in Asian immigrant communities, with a mixed heritage including a contrast of home and surroundings - East Is East being a very popular and famous one amongst them. That one has a mixed ancestry at home to begin with, and the travails of a brood mostly male, while this one gives the real dire version of immigrants (sans mixed race) living in localities where the populations are mostly people like themselves, so the version here is the starker one.

Both are about the insularity of the first generation immigrant parents to the ambient society and its values and opportunities, which often has children caught between the world of parents that they are trying to recreate half a world away, and the ambient society the children live in and also belong to, far more than the parents do. The recent very well received Bend It Like Beckham is another milder version of the reality, where the edges have been trimmed to show a community mostly doing well. This one goes into the travails, the horrors, the swept-under-the-rug realities.

If I were not exhausted when I began reading this it would have been finished in one go, and as it is it was in two days - never read anything that fast for a long time now, and generally I take time to savour reading. But this one cannot put down, not easily. Moreover, when I began and was only about halfway there was some question about if it was a work based on the general stereotype albeit there was no doubt about the authenticity of the whole life depicted herein, of a community living half a world away from their roots and trying to preserve ties to home by the worst route possible, by keeping to the dark ages practices that are now only in poor or rural or generally unenlightened communities back "home", but are far gone into oblivion, especially in urban or middle class and above or educated and enlightened parts of the society (especially in India).

At a few pages more, however. there was no doubt as to the reality, the absolute authenticity of the story being completely autobiographical. One pities the poor rural folk that go to distant lands half a world away and live there in urban settings but dare not open their hearts and eyes and minds to the whole new world of opportunities open to them through education and other freedoms, and work hard and menial labour to preserve and create another copy of their social setting back home where they came from. But this pity can only go so far, while the brunt of their burden is carried willy nilly by the hapless women - indeed little girls - of the emigrants and at the pain of death too, not merely physical abuse and worse.

In a poor society, when the social setting makes it imperative to balance the reality with aspirations, one can understand a lot about marrying children while still young - especially when both the groom and bride are of a compatible age.

There is a twofold reason for this, the urgent one being a security for a girl found early in form of a home and clan that claims her and would at the very least be likely to strike back at anyone harming her, so a girl thereafter can grow up with relative safety from male adults around. A girl in her teens in a poor locality, either rural setting or an urban slum, and without parents strong and rich enough to protect her in the former, might be prey to unsavoury male adults around; but a knowledge of a husband somewhere generally deters such attention from being at a level where the husband and his clan might be obliged to defend or avenge her honour with death of anyone offending.

The other reason of course is that people do wish to secure a marriage for a daughter and if the social custom is to do it early then waiting might leave no good possibilities of a match for her around in the society. So the family tries to find the best possible match for her by doing it early enough so the best possible match is not lost (with another family getting it instead) due to waiting. If the society one lives in has a norm of children being married by the age of eight, one benefits by looking as early as childbirth for a match, and begins to lose by the time the child - especially a daughter - is near ten. Such might be, in fact is, the reality in many parts of the world.

This is far from saying it is desirable much less universally so, and as a matter of fact even in Panjaab (usually spelt Pubjab) where most of immigrants termed "Asian" hail from, there is no dearth of families with better practices and women who not only are not forced into an unwanted marriage (goes without saying men are forced into marriages quite often too, although women suffer more either way), but in fact very often women are exemplary in their careers and they in fact have set universally shining examples too.

Kalpana Chawla, Kiran Bedi and many many more such women hail from smaller towns of Panjaab, and for that matter even Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Provoked is her autobiography) is from a small village - she had had a college education before her relatives looked for a match and she was very central to the process (unlike the daughters of the immigrants in UK who are forced with no voice in the matter) of finding a suitable person, as is usual in an "arranged marriage", a key difference from a forced marriage. Kiranjit Ahluwalia had not known trouble much less pain or abuse until she married a man living in - born and brought up in - UK; and this too is common, daughters in India finding pain and abuse only after they are married.

But when people emigrate to a free country such as UK from rural parts of poorer countries, and then do not see much less allow themselves or their children to take advantage of all the possible opportunities, education and career and development of mind and self, much evil results - and it is all here in this little account of a life and surroundings. And this includes not only beatings and locking up the daughters, but rapes too, by brothers and uncles - since the males bear no burden of keeping virtue by any norm while the women bear it in every way possible.

In a sense one might say such immigrants live in a time warp, where they hang on to a culture they think is theirs but are in fact contributing to the creation of one that is changing rapidly back home for far better, even as they are creating a draconian version of it in a far more liberal and progressive society, wasting all opportunities in their blind quest to hold on to what they left behind.

It is all the more pathetic and horrible therefore to find that those you might think - and they do in fact think - are in a better position in the world are not only harking back to but rather creating all on their own a version of dark ages far worse than one can imagine, what with daughters not allowed to wear clothes worn in society around or possess mobile phones or not being allowed to speak to their local peers (plenty of racism and other forms of discrimination involved, with only those from one's own original roots being termed one's community). Or of course finally being forced into marriages before they are eighteen, with deception of a holiday visiting relatives used to force them to marry and then leave them before they come back (so they can work in low paying jobs to sponsor the new unwanted husbands to arrive in UK) - and in all this suffering physical abuse and other forms of abuse plenty. The descriptions here, all factual, are horrific.

One relatively recent Indo-Canadian documentary film (Canada is the other country where a major population of immigrants from rural Panjaab and neighbourhoods to the north and west of Panjaab flock to) showed a mother living in Canada hiring killers and ordering them to murder her daughter and son-in-law, for the sin of having married someone in India having fallen in love on a visit, against her - the mother's - will. The killers had the daughter speak to the mother on the cell phone, the daughter pleaded for her life and asked forgiveness for having married and assured her she was happy in the marriage; the mother listened and then asked the daughter to give the phone to the assailants. Then she asked her to kill the daughter. The son-in-law was beaten up badly, left unconscious unable to save his much beloved bride, and has been in hiding until the time of the film; the poor and much grieved, bereaved mother-in-law of the dead girl, filmed in the poor rural house she lives in where the loving daughter in law had "adjusted very well" in spite of being a well to do woman from a rich nation, had her body brought home and cremated as per tradition with all the ceremony involved, since the mother couldn't care less apparently, and the body had been thrown in a ditch along the road where she was murdered.

Read Provoked, read this one, and then there is the recent film (Heaven On Earth) too, by Mehta. And then ask yourself if you have been closing your eyes to such gross injustice, nay, crimes and sins, around your home. Chances are, it might be so. School teachers and other authorities in UK have been aware of it all for a few decades, what with students from certain background regularly going missing and their marriages no secret. When they die, just as often it is termed accident or suicide, conveniently. The community knows the truth of honour killings, has always done and has condoned it too.

What is truly wonderful is how this young spirit struggles again and again overcoming various deprivations and abuses, and more than coping finds paths out of the locked situation that others like her are staying in; and what is more goes all out to help others like herself, after getting a degree from a university while caring for her small children and helping other women, and yet dealing with the abusive males (not by passive acceptance, but attempting to have a good marriage until it is clear it won't happen) - and is forging ahead too.

I am already beginning the sequel, Daughters of Shame.

Jane Austen - Sense And Sensibility, Pride And Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma

Every time one reads Austen, it is a different experience.

Of course, few read a book repeatedly around the same time unless one is either studying it for an exam or one is really bored and has little other recourse to a life of mind. But a good book entices one to repeat it aftere a while, when one thinks one knows all about it and yet is not quite sure of some small details, or one wishes to refresh the joy the book gave. Some are of course repeated for the reason that one realises one did not quite understand it completely, and then again when one repeats a book one loves one may realise one had not understood it quite, or this time one might see yet another perspective and understand it at another level. In Austen's case many of the above happens - one loves her books, thinks one understood them - there is really not much there, is there, it is all about country life in England and a love story or two, some misunderstandings and resolutions one way or other.

One reads a favourite, then, a few years later, and then realises there is a whole level one had missed. One is surprised one understands a little or a lot more this time, and one gets back to life. Until one picks it up yet again a few years later, and there is a lot more. Jane Austen is deceptively simple in her style of writing - something Agatha Christie did later, in another genre - and goes about describing a little town in countryside in England and its characters, all seemingly as normal and common as everyone else's neighbours, and their concerns just as universal across time and boundaries of geography, of nations and cultures.

A volume like this, with four of her best in one, is a find one cannot pass and that was the reason to buy it - and read it with a desultory beginning, and some revelations along the time I read them through finally. The first growing revelation was an obvious one, that Austen's writing was not about amusing oneself or her reader although she did that plenty all along, what with caricatures and strongly sketched portrayals in few short strokes, with all too human follies and habits of vanity of various characters. And of course English countryside is no longer a stranger once one has read Austen, or of course Agatha Christie or P.G.Wodehouse for that matter. Austen's beautiful descriptions make it come alive in all its soft gentle beauty. But her real objective is to give a discourse on values, as little or as successfully hidden as a quinine bottle with a clear label and yet no discernible taste when one does have to swallow one, the sugarcoating so successful. In case of Austen, moreover, no one has to prescribe that quinine either, it is so sweet to the last a child could chew a whole bottle full (I know of one naughty, very loved one who did just that) - the Austen readers seldom realise they are getting a discourse on values and cautioned about common follies leading to risking misery for life.

And then, halfway through, one begins to see her world as one, with her people living in towns near or far but her characters with startling similarities and yet with no mass produced push button delivery of justice - instead, they are indeed individuals, and their separate actions bring them their deserts, their follies bring their risks and their virtues earn their rewards. Austen does have mery as well and often rewards the deserving or sometimes even the less deserving but not evil often, still, her rewards and schemes of luck smiling are never without reasonable possibility of events.

A Wickham is not punished only because a young, innocent, spirited Lydia ought not to suffer as well, she is not that guilty - quite guileless, actually - and in the event his punishment is having to put up with himself with no fortune brought by a wife found in an heiress snared for the purpose, while her reward is her ever stout and completely unsuspecting belief that she is the luckiest of women, with a handsome and loving husband. That he is no good nor loves her she will - did, Austen assures us - never see.

A Marianne on the other hand, along with another shadow of a young girl mentioned but never actually brought up to readers' sight, suffers and how horribly, only because of a lack of prudence in allowing - in fact, positively jumping into - an attachment without any knowledge of the character of the person, going by an attractive visage and a charming persona. This is not justice, after all Marianne does not deserve it nor does the girl Elizabeth any more than the mother of the girl (also named Elizabeth) - but it is lifelike in that often innocent suffer due to the faults of others who play with them for pleasure of the moment thoughtlessly, and Austen portrays the risks in all their possible horror. Marianne is not eventually punished but recovers due to her friends and is then rewarded with a life of love and security and happiness, with the ever consistent Colonel Brandon who takes care of Elizabeth (as promised to her mother) too, and deserves to find some happiness and love in his life as well. The character with a severe fault, Willoughby who is neither willing to do justice to the woman he brought into trouble - not so trivial in those days as it might be today in another land, another culture - nor strong enough to then stand by his love and strive for a life with her and instead is cad enough to marry an heiress, for only her money, is merely awarded his life as a punishment - he chose it, after all, and has lost the love and friends he knew for a short time. He has society, but knows the heaven he lost all too well, and must live with the life he chose.

The themes, the characters, the faults and the virtues, the natures and the circumstances keep changing across the world of Austen like patters of a kaleidoscope, every changing and yet with a few pieces of coloured glass to form them - the one constant is the values. Decency, propriety, prudence, due respect and courtesy, integrity, love and friendship, and discerning the truth of what is really love from what is an attachment that might be unwise, or in fact untrue but a mere pretense for sake of a goal completely different - marrying an heiress, playing for amusement for the time - very necessary now as it was then.

One might wonder endlessly what would have happened if only the Crawfords had been brought up more properly, or one can read Emma and find out - Henry Crawford loses Fanny Price, while Frank Churchill gets to marry his love Jane Fairfax since his faults of character, and his actions therefore, are not so disastrous. Emma delights one more than any other young woman with her follies and faults one can shake one's head at, while Jane Bingley and Jane Fairfax suffer travails of love to emerge victorious. Edward Ferrer is rescued by the truely low character of the fiancée he was unwisely attached to when too young and is too noble to break up with no matter if threatened with loss of all his heritance, since the fiancée suddenly marries his brother the heir. Darcy's redemption is his character, which helps him to see his own faults and the truth of the accusations and make up for the consequences of his actions and rescue the innocent. Mary Crawford plays with her own love, and loses him by her assumption that his preference for his values can be turned around by her charms and his attraction for her. Lady Bertram accepts an offer of marriage from a suitable wealthy gentleman and lives her life almost as if she were watching a film, while her sister Frances marries a poor sailor for love and has nine or ten children at the last count, with little thought for those she lost to either benevolence of Bertrams or to death. Mrs. Norris wishes to manage everyone's affairs and is finally only good enought to stand by the foolish Mariah she pampered and encouraged to marry a rich man without love when Mariah is foolish enough to go away with Henry Crawford believing this will force Crawford to marry her.

On and on go the kaleidoscopic patterns, with a little tweak here and there making differences in destiny, and Austen provides as much of a complete world as anyone could - and yet, she wrote less than a dozen books overall, with beautifully simple storytelling about simple English country life.

Just wonder - did anyone else realise Austen carries the seed for Agatha Christie to grow so beautifully into her own genre? Reading Emma again, it was wonderful to see how many gentle clues were strewn about, how deceptively blended into the general pattern of almost old women's gossip structure so one missed them unless one was totally vigilant, something very difficult when reading either Austen or Christie.

Provoked; by Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Rahila Gupta.

Rarely does one come across a true life story lived so courageously and the account told so simply - most people prefer to brush things under rug for sake of social pretensions and economic considerations. Few care about a life or a million wasted as long as it is lives of women, in the process forgetting that women are mothers and home carers who bring up choldren, and sacrificing them and their lives and their health and conerns is not exactly healthy for the children in any way whatsoever, whatever the gender of the children.

How could anyone forget Provoked - the book I read quite recently, this year that is, but the film came perhaps earlier and I am unsure if it was this year or last.

The film is a good make from the book and it is amazing how well a city born well educated Aishwarya Rai - she had a couple of years, perhaps three, of architecture before her Miss World crown - played a girl from a small village in way far Punjaab.

There are some factors kept out, though not quite hidden and changed, from the book to the film.

For one thing Kiranjit was not uneducated, she had been to college in Gujarat where her brothers were well to do, and then had visited her other siblings in UK and Canada to find a husband, while the guy who persued her through the usual channels did it against his parents' wishes in not worrying about their consent to begin with.

Subsequently she did work in UK and was appreciated in her workplace too.

All this was kept out perhaps because people have a simple - and false - equation in their minds, that any woman abused by a husband must be an illiterate simpleton. Disabusing this notion in this story, a difficult one already where one has to understand an abused woman murdering her husband, would have been a formidable task, and perhaps it was wisdom to leave that to another time.

But fact of the matter is simple solutions such as education and economic independence and financial security are just that - simple, but not quite solutions. None of those prevent women from being abused by a husband, a lover, or any other male willing to try. The change required is civilisation of males of human species.

What Women Want; by Patricia Ireland.

Dignity, Justice, Security, Humanity, and a civilised society. Being able to live without fear of the fellow men or afraid of being perceived as objects, and finding love without fear of being treated as those that are rightfully duped or fearlessly attacked - that would be roughly the agenda.

Equal pay for equal work and rewards for ability would be the goal every human aspires to and women are denied generally without men and frequently women seeing any injustice in this unequal view, since most peoples' perception is blinded by the overwhelming attention they pay to gender.

Think how famous a Bobbit or a Kiranjit Ahluwalia is, and then think of how many men you personally know to have brutalised their wives and children, and justified it.

Think of your own response to the sexual harrassment of an employee by an employer - when the former is a female you think, why does she not leave such a job, she deserves it or maybe she wants it, after all she is putting herself out there for money and risking her goodness as a woman by going amongst men. But when the latter is a woman, and the former is a male, he gets to throw the whole shebang at her of course, no one would say he ought to leave and find another job.

Or think Fatal Attraction - what if the tables were turned, what if the erring partner in the marriage was a woman and the lover came after her because they were expecting a baby together? Would he die, murdered by her, encouraged by her husband?

Most cases it is not that drastic, it is about seeing things for what they are, without prior prejudice along what institutions insist on gender roles. Fairness is what women want, and love - or the possibility of growing it; a life for all of humanity without fear of half the humanity.

Ganga Descends; by Ruskin Bond.

We had returned from a journey along the river to two of her sources and very pervaded with the essence of the river and the memory of the whole experience, and so when we saw the book, that too by RB, it was inevitable to buy it even in those days of counting pennies, and it was with a hope of recapturing some of our memories and experiences forever.

Beautiful pictures, of course, and writing as benefic as the river - and why not, he lives in the neighbourhood, has done for a long time now - but of course the book had both more and less than what we had lived for a short period. Every life, every journey after all is different.

I think we have both the copies, one reading and other coffee table small for the pictures. Those are after all the memory keys.

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers; by Maria Augusta Trapp.

I remember reading this long ago, and several years later when driving about in Vermont I managed to find the place where the Trapp family has managed to make a second home after leaving Austria. They told us Maria Von Trapp usually came down early to dinner, but we could not wait too long, driving in dark in rather unfamiliar hills would be risky. We waited as long as we could and then went away.

Another decade and more, and now we were in Salzburg, the hometown of Maria and her family where in fact they have special Sound Of Music tours. We took the comprehensive which included a couple of the important sights anyway. It was funny to discover that the house shown in the film, the Von Trapp home, is in fact two different houses, one with a lake front and another where there is the driveway. The chapel is very popular for weddings.

None of that compares with the delightful writing of Maria Von Trapp - the anecdotes, the simplicity, the spirited young woman who grew into a loving and still spirited mother of ten - she lost two of her own and had seven from her husband's previous marriage.

Some that stick in memory are the episode about the sandwiches, the camera, the baby that did not stop crying and embarrassed the mother (and runs the place now), the horse and the house and the singing camps, the woman who told the greengrocer indignantly "ten cents? I can become a cabbage myself around the corner for five cents" - perhaps my memory is incorrect about the cents number, but other than that it is as fresh as the film based on the story.

In Great Waters 1939-45: The Epic Story of the Battle of the Atlantic 1939-45; by Spencer Dunmore.

The subject is sort of a side facet of the whole history of the war, with main stage being the continent of Europe and the second, perhaps more important, being the resolute holding on by British, and the later tough fight by Russians.

But all along, the battle of Atlantic was a key factor, and Allies could not afford to lose it or give way any more than the world could afford to make treaty and stop fighting in name of wistful dreaming of Peace, which sometimes one has to win when endangered by forces against it.

Britain could then fight openly, but however convinced Roosevelt was that the forces of darkness had to be defeated, he was bound by the various facets of his nation that he had to herd along before he could join his nation in the battle on the side of right.

The battle of Atlantic is here told in some detail, with descriptions of U-boats attacking convoys ferrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and in turn the British giving a tough fight back. There is the Enigma and its having been broken and yet the necessity of keeping the fact secret - and hence sacrifice of unsuspecting sailors. There is the various instances of British treating the pow Germans well, to their surprise, since they had been doing the opposite and expected the worst treatment in return.

There is the background of U-boat, the so named wolf pack that was officially and otherwise much celebrated in Germany, since they were perceived as the front and the dangers of their lives very well understood. However, they succeeded for long enough to forget about the last part and then had surprises.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany; by Hans J. Massaquoi

There is generally little heard about how "other" people fared in pre-war Germany, in the darkness that enveloped the nation. Here is one window, with an astonishing tale of a boy who was born and raised German, with his father a member of the diplomatic core of an African nation with a distinct class structure of its own.

This boy grew up taking the difference of skin colour as casually as that of colours of clothes, and his mates as well as his teachers did nothing to break that either, until such time as the distiction was no longer invisible so to speak. He gives a moving description of how he was a sudden hero himself by association when an African American won the gold medal at an Olympic event in Munich, and he felt proud of his other race, and his classmates asked him questions about the Olympic hero as distant from him as from them.

Survived through the war he went in serach of his other roots in Africa, and tried to find a life - and eventually migrated to US. He compares the two nations, his first and his last, and no surprises there, the last does not come off much better than the first.

His mother staunchly tells him to not allow anyone to tell him he is less than anyone, ever - and not on the basis of his being half German, either. He is a child born in love, and that is a strength never lost. This keeps him from sinking in a morass that many cannot help drowning in.

Contact; by Carl Sagan.

From attempted discovery of aliens to space travel through worm holes across light years to questions of what is conveniently termed paranormal, fear of which makes mobs of normal rational people willing to discredit the respected and persecute the fellow humans, even colleagues and other well known professionals.

It is a bit like watching someone painstakingly constucting a pendulum clock in the atomic wristwatch and gps and blackberry age. Or a tall building without a steel skeleton structure in the landing on Mars age.

While he does mention wormholes, actually using them for travel seems to have been a slate of hand sort of trick, what with the observers never seeing the vehicle leave the spot much less earth. Leaving on a plane other than physical needs no vehicle much less one constructed with instructions arriving from space.

There is the laborious effort to keep everyone happy, with meticulously portioned out considerations.

And then the scary pendulum to stand under. It could crush you and standing under it requires a great deal of faith in science, the people who constructed it, and more.

Dahan (The Burning); by Suchitra Bhattacharya.

The original was published a few decades ago, and I remember reading it long back, it made a vivid impression. There is much horror, depicted through a young woman that went through much including being gang-raped in the middle of a street, and another one that attempted to help and th horror it brought to her own life.

The city where it all happened witnessed much in terms of a horror in public several times, majorly during what is known as the Naxal (extreme left terror groups) era of sixties and seventies, which was to overshadow even the horrendous massacres of '46 and dim the memory of the so called Bengal famine which reallly was - like the famine of Ireland before that - an appropriation of harvests of the lands by the ruling for the soldiers, resulting in several hundred thousand dead of starvation in Bengal.

This story belongs to the Naxal era if I am not mistaken, when the supposed ideals of left - equality, fraternity - often took a back seat to the goons that ruled the roost and neither women nor middle class were entirely safe as they normally are or at least perceived to be more so under better circumstances.

For that matter the "party" generally followed either of the two major communist nation's diktat, depending on the faction, and several "intellectuals" proudly declared themselves convinced of superiority of Mao over the way their own nation took, of consent and freedom rather than enforced ideology.

It was quite obvious even then that it was an attempt by a neighbour country to take over the nation if possible without sending anything more than pamphlets that would turn young heads. The about turn by the nation they then aspired to emulate has left the movement, the party, the young and the now not so young a bit confused, a bit embarrassed, and turned the naxals into mostly highway robbers with a few ideologues fighting feudal remnants in the few states where history has not washed away the feudal system so firmly established by the various colonial rulers.

The terror of the general times compounds with a goon-dominated street terror atmosphere and further adds to a general pervasive culture where normal middle class families, including men, are afraid for their lives and those of their own near and dear. And hence the whole street being unable to testify to the goons burning a young woman alive after rape, while the sole witness woman is turtured deeply within even as her own family attempts to dissuade her from making her witnessing the horror known.

While it is tempting to sum up this work as another example of a male dominated society, that would be belittling the work apart from a critique that is incorrect at the very least, showing a lack of perception and judgement; or possibly much worse, hypocrisy or dishonesty at a grave level.

Because a society that is old fashioned or conservative or male dominated - or as usually is all of the above - does not easily tolerate a violation of a woman by strangers. Such a toleration generally shows a lack of virility of males of the neighbourhood, the clan, the social setting the said woman belonged to. This is a direct result of the idea that a woman is a possession, not a person in her own right.

So a society that does tolerate this, or fails to protect or even avenge the woman, it in fact might be a modern society where people are in fact alienated and selfish in that they would rather not risk their own security; and when it is - as it is this story - worse, fails even to seek justice for fear, it amounts to a society paralysed by fear of the goons, the internal terrorist elements within the society. It could be fascist, or it could be terror by another self proclaimed label. Labels are less important when your lives are at stake, and goons are free to do as they please.

When terror reigns at street level, and acid along with other weapons are used freely, the prudent keep their own counsel until better times prevail. Then again, someone - or more than one - has to step forth and strike a determined blow at the terror or it would never go away.
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Aesop's Fables

I read the two - this one and the other very similar, but not at the plot level, old book from another old culture - Panchatantra, around the same time, give or take a few years, many decades ago. Both teach lessons of dealing with the world, how people play games, and so forth.

Every child should read them.

Especially those that need the skills to defend themselves socially, from those that would play various games to cheat or attack or worse. It might help, for some that can grow out of naivete to defend themselves.

Then again there might be those that never lose hope that the world is good and noble principles of justice are not to be given up, only to be taken a bite out of by someone who came pretending to be young and innocent and in need, and then bit the hand proffered to feed and help.

But of course, one should not lose hope, and perhaps other children might learn to be less naive and better able to defend themselves by learning to understand social games, by reading this book.

Srikanta; by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya.

Over the years when I read it, and reread it, baffled about the mystique surrounding it and the sparse nature of the book, it took some reflection about the time and space this came from and depicts and belongs to, to realise its height compared to the ground it rose from. Although that time was not short of people of great stature in the world and in the nation this came from, still, this was a shocking read for the age for the common reader, all the more so since here was a male writer depicting women of his own culture as all too human, deserving of the same consideration and respect as given men under similar circumstances. And he was perhaps saying they were greater in many ways, without saying it in so many words.

What sticks in memory when other details are forgotten is the small side story of the Burmese wife of the man from Bengal who not only leaves her with no intentions of returning to her, every intention of going back to his family and accepting the arranged marriage (with dowry, no doubt) and the society that would then embrace him - but cheats her, the Burmese wife he is leaving behind without informing her of this intention, of the money and jewellery, openly, declaring all this in his language so his compatriots comprehend and hers do not, and he has made of his wife of many years a public spectacle just so his own people might forgive him of his betrayal in taking a wife not of their own circle.

Such behaviour has been engaged in by others, of many other nations and of course few other continents, and certainly many of other faiths.

In fact one city has been known in decades past for selling its own little daughters with the traffic very very thinly veiled with a marriage contract which usually favours the rich - foreign - buyers.

It takes a writer of courage, however, to expose one of his own social circle, to subject the whole culture to a shame that they may not have wished to own or admit.

The Naked Ape ; by Desmond Morris

I remember reading this long ago and a few things stuck during the fast skimming while on a visit to a relative - unlike years before, one was no longer excused from conversation any more when in company - and one of the various things that did stick in memory was recently brought back to the surface of memory by some recent events - the terror attacks, the subsequent reactions, and the furious debates in media.

A member of glitterati was brought on camera to counter a minority leader of a party that normally gets all sorts of attacks without a second thought, except this leader was not offendable by the media due to his status and so the member of glitterati went obliquely to comment and counter the original comment by the leader.

The original comment by the leader was about people of the upper class aping western ways and to go on a candle lighting vigil at the historic site of recent terror attacks, and specifically he was dismissive of people who wear lipstick and have fashionable hair and show themselves at this site to be perceived as concerned about the nation while none of them have paid attention to the far worse attacks that have been going on during last decade and a half when it was not the rich and their lairs but the middle class on streets and in buses and in trains being killed by far greater numbers.

So the glitterati member went obliquely at the "people who do not like educated women", without thinking about what he was saying, let alone bothering to explain, or really stopping to consider implications of his words, about what - if anything - education had to do with lipstick.

It was not clear if he thought buying a lipstick or indeed a whole complete makeover had to be a matter of passing a tough examination on intellectual and generally knowledge plane, rather than handing over money; whether an education automatically implies a lipstick application and generally fashion consciousness, and whether the converse is true according to him.

Coming from someone from the country he belongs to, if he thought one thing implied the other in either direction, or if he thought that only those with some sort of western oriented schooling with much money forked over and aping of western fashions as the prime value taught was the only education he could perceive as education, it would certqainly imply he has had little contact with the earth he lives on, and his mind is in another world - I am not sure if that is a real one either.

Most well educated women - by which I do not mean those that have had an expensive high school level but little else other than consciousness of appearing like a Seventeen cover model - whether doctors, engineers, physicists or whatever other particular subject they chose to qualify for a higher degree, have little or no time to think of a personal grooming over and above a basic hygiene - bathing and wearing fresh clothes to start the day, and getting hair settled firmly out of the way - because they are far too busy with their responsibilities, in the world of their work and their own homes as well. They are far too busy to bother looking like a Seventeen cover.

At work their responsibilities are not reduced compared to male colleagues on par, and at home they do not have a wife to take over the need of attention and care they must pay the home and children, making them more than twice as busy as their male colleagues, and also their housewife neighbours. Not that the latter have it easy, for all that.

As a matter of fact all of that is all too true for a "working mother" in the west, and come to think of it for all mothers as well, since there are really no mothers that are non-working - and education whatever level, most women are far too busy taking care of the world to worry about a makeover every time they step out. That they manage to be well groomed and clean is one of the miracles they regularly perform without thinking.

No, the glitterati member was thinking of his own circle - those in professions where appearance is what chiefly matters, and other glitterati and "society" people who can delegate most responsibilities and in fact do, to hired "help".

It is not clear, when he equated education of women with a lipstick and a professional expensive hairdo, if he thinks no schools other than those imparting a western orientation - by virtue of their own origins or any other reason - are good enough, and if he thought that all middle class or poor are by definition stupid and ignorant, and if he thought he knew more of everything than every person taught in a non expensive school where lipsticks are not perceived as a hallmark of civilisation, or education.

Perhaps he could learn much by a journey to familiarise himself with his nation, but one does not know if he can benefit thereby.

Why is this relevant here is amusingly because amongst other things of similar sort Morris explains quite explicitly why humans have certain features, and if people read this on a wide scale - and comprehended it properly - lipstick and perhaps most cosmetics industry bubble would burst completely. That bursting of the bubble only needs a pin, and this is more like a stampede by a determined bull on intent on a duty to do farmwork.

For that matter a similar effect on many industries would be the result of people reading Subliminal Seduction and comprehending it.