Indira Gandhi : an intimate biography; by Pupul Jayakar.

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

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

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

Gone with the Wind; by Margaret Mitchell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Circle of Reason; by Amitav Ghosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea of Poppies; by Amitav Ghosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

The Hungry Tide; by Amitav Ghosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Glass Palace; by Amitav Ghosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thousand Splendid Suns; by Khaled Hosseini.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kite Runner; by Khaled Hosseini.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paths of Glory; by Jeffrey Archer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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.