Panjab – Journeys Through Fault Lines By Amandeep Sandhu

 

Panjab – Journeys Through Fault Lines
By Amandeep Sandhu
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Book Review No. 1, March 2020

 

This book has taken me a very long time to read. 540 pages is not a small number, but the reason for my lingering through its pages is not just the quantum. It is the nature of the story being told in them. It is a story I feel I know, and do know, yet have been blind to. I didn’t feel I could do justice to the epic nature of the book but here I am attempting a summary and a very personal review.

Amandeep has journeyed through Panjab over many years, collecting testimonies and facts, researching history and context, meeting numerous people in villages and towns, learning anew about a place that was almost – but never really – home.

He is an outsider, because he doesn’t live in Panjab, and he is also an eternal insider because of his roots. The story he pieces together is a journey of a deeply personal nature for him. I found that it is also a very personal journey for me. As I read the book, I was travelling through my own family history, paying renewed attention to the stories I have heard growing up, replaying my own memories and encounters with Panjab in my time there, and reexamining my experience of being a Panjabi who is mostly outside Panjab.

Panjab’s story in the world’s popular imagination is a collage of stereotypes. It is a flimsy palimpsest of impressions and feelings about the place, infused with smug indulgence, ignorance and indifference. Amandeep’s book comes as a reality check, and fills many gaps in knowledge about Panjab. It was at times impossibly harrowing to read, because denial and forgetting comes easy to us, specially when it is about things no one questions us about. But I feel I am in a better place to speak as and be a Panjabi, having read this book.

But looking at this book as just an exploration and a narrative about Panjab would be too narrow a reading. If it tells us anything at all, this book tells us about so much that is typical of our times, of our way of government and politics and economics and systems of justice. It tells us that the story of Panjab is far more than the story of just one state. It is the story of India and its past and its future.

Panjab has been and is a physical frontier – for India as an ancient geographic location, and for India as a modern nation state. It is the place where armies clashed, and races mingled. Syncretic and subversive socio-cultural and political movements have emerged and sustained in this shifting soil of a marginal borderland. Change and resistance mark the region and its people. No borders have stayed fixed here for long, not even its most marked physical features – the rivers.

What happens in Panjab is both an experiment and a lesson for all of India, in so many ways. In that sense, this is a book for all of India, and also a manifesto for all its dreamers. Will we learn from the tragedies of Panjab?

Amandeep classifies his stories of exploration and discovery under fifteen heads, using Panjabi terms. Each of these sections become the lens through which the current situation regarding a key issue is viewed, and its historic context and unravelling is understood. I will list these heads here, with a short explanation, because they evoke the mood and the content of the book very well. Each section is like tributary that flows into the others and together all these strands of stories make up a complex narrative of Punjab now, and in the recent past, with a lot of insight into an earlier history as well. Throughout the narration. Amandeep weaves in his own memories and his personal stories into the flow, and we join him on the rediscovery of his roots and his forging a new connection with, and understanding of, Panjab.

Here is a brief overview of the sections of the book. These may look like a litany of wrongs, but the only way forward through a knotty place is to face the tangled web. Easy explanations will not do for Panjab. Nor will treating it as an isolated and idiosyncratic case all of its own kind. Panjab holds lessons that are universal. I am sure readers of this book will have many an enlightening, insightful moment as they go through the book.

1. Satt – Wound; The author’s memory of Panjab, and the gaps in his connection to it, is a personal wound. Panjab is itself wounded. The phantoms in the room are unacknowledged, unaccounted for.
2. Berukhi – Indifference. Follows from the idea of a wounded people, a wounded land. Agrarian mishaps are tools in political games, with grievances rarely addressed. The state and its farmers and workers in a face-off cannot bode well for sustained wellness for anyone.
3. Rosh – Anger. Along with old wounds that religious minority holds, anger builds up over new incidents of religious sacrilege. Beadbi becomes yet another arena for political manipulation and scheming, which has plagued electoral democracy and the issue of religious purity, identity and representation. Hurt turns to anger, and finds no resolution, no hearing, no closure.
4. Rog – Illness. Anxiety, depression and despair, addiction and denial. Panjab is not well, but it put on a brave face and pretends, or it goes into punishment mode. What is not done is a facing of the traumas of the past that feed the present.
5. Astha – Faith. One of the most complex chapters of the book for me personally, this is where the author tries to untangle to knot of the phase of militancy in Panjab, and the links between politics and religious identity in a modern secular federal nation state that is India. How did a faith based on universal brotherhood and fraternity and service become a cornerstone of a violent movement? What led to the violent reprisals from the state? How was the political economy of Panjab and India linked to these developments? And then, it goes on examine the erosion of democratic institutions that all of this is a sign of. Where and how is one to have faith in the promises that underpin the nation, when there is a lack of accountability and no reckoning for bias, betrayals and memoricide?
6. Mardangi – Masculinity. The macho male ideal persists in Panjab’s imagination even as it withers in a reality. Violence to women, children, those at the margins and to the land persists. Sexual dysfunction plagues men with big moustaches and bigger cars. Humiliation and shame shadow marriage and sexual relations. The degradation of the land, livestock and diet with pesticides and fertilisers and hormones, the change in a physical culture and the use of medications for bodybuilding have all taken a toll on the virility of the land and its people.
7. Dawa – Medicine. Drug Addiction in Panjab has made news in the post-militancy years, but the issue is not a sudden scourge on an otherwise pristine canvass. Amandeep goes into the maze of old cultural practices and modern twists in the tale of alcohol and narcotics use in Panjab and shows us how the punishment model in use is self-defeating.
8. Paani – Water. The water problem in the land of five rivers is a tragedy of geo-politics and rapacious economics played by hegemonic powers- the imperialists first and then the national government. The people of Panjab have been reduced to litigation and protests that lead nowhere.
9. Zameen – Land. In a region that is the country’s breadbasket and has always been agrarian, land means more than just a place to build a home. Land rights have been a matter of death and wars since forever in Panjab. The modern nation state promised economic justice and land rights but has struggled to implement the same.
10. Karza – Loan. Farmer loans and farmer suicides are linked to bigger issues of industrial agrarian economics, caste, politics and human rights and justice. Panjab with its culture of bravado and show of self-reliance suffers acutely when faced with no way out of financial insufficiency.
11. Jaat – Caste. Punjab, the land where egalitarian Sikhism originated, has the largest percentage of Dalits among all Indian states, and practices blatant caste-based discrimination. This is a caste conundrum that contradicts every tenet of Sikh religion.
12. Patit – Apostate. A fascinating section on the growth and consolidation of Sikh practices and texts and their interpretations, and the growth of organisations that are seats of control and direction for the faithful. Organised religion naturally faces divergence and factions, and there are followers who find their own unconventional paths not strictly as per the norms of a centralised and organised creed and its gatekeepers. Then there is the fear of appropriation and loss of a special, unique identity due to the forces of the other, external dynamics of politics and culture. There is also the decadence of those who claim to represent the true religion and corporates style control of the faithful and their institutions.
13. Bardr – Border. The people of Panjab are truly caught in the pincer – literally and otherwise – in the event of a war on the western border. Not only are the Indian armed forces supplied by many men and women from Panjab, it is also the state with a continuous land border with Pakistan where border skirmishes and past wars have caused much death and dislocation and disruption of life in every way. And yet, these people and their land and livelihood scarce seem to figure in national security calculations as worthy of care and precaution.
14. Sikhya – Education. I grew up hearing many jokes about the genial but unlettered Sikh bumpkin who had no brain power. In reality, I have only found most Panjabis of modest or poor means – like most such Indians – desperate for economic and social mobility through education. But education remains a messy affair in Panjab, where unemployment remains high, and the exodus to foreign shores causes immense loss of human resources. Universities – bar one – have had no elections since decades and can scarcely be the training ground for democracy or constitutional values. English is all the rage, though badly spoken and barely understood by most.
15. Lashaan – Corpses. Hindi films and Punjabi pop culture showcase exuberant bonhomie and joie de vivre as hallmarks of life in Panjab. Panjabis are known as brave and resilient and Sikhs in particular revere the tradition of martyrs, where death is a moral victory. Yet, for the last many decades, a pall of death has fallen over Panjab and with it, a shroud of silence too. These violent humiliating, unjust deaths and disappeared bodies have marked millions of homes across Panjab.
16. Janamdin – Birthday. This last section before the Epilogue is about the last assembly elections and the near lack of fresh vision and alternatives that is electoral contest in Panjab. This chapter also serves as a conclusion to the journey the author has traversed. It is a sobering expose and an affirmation of faith in Panjab’s resistance to power and hegemony.

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Amandeep’s book is a work of immense depth and reach, and superbly researched. Written with painstaking detail, I am sure it will soon be known as a classic of documentation and serve as a valuable archive. All of us – no matter what our identity or roots or geographic lineage and location – will have much to learn and resolve, after reading this book. I also look forward to many more such in-depth books being commissioned about other states.

The Queen of Jasmine Country

Book Report – March 2019

The Queen Of Jasmine Country: Sharanya Manivannan

Books that have to do with retellings of things religious or mythological find me resisting them, or reading them with a critical and vary eye. Even if sometimes a book holds my interest initially, it is hardly ever able to retain it for long. But The Queen of Jasmine Country is not quite myth, and it is not quite religious retelling. It is steeped in the religious, and the mythological, but it is also beyond the familiar treatment of myth and religion. It is a book like no other – a book I won’t forget, and one that is far more than a book for me.

I came to know of Andal and her work through the author’s social media posts, and while I was not too interested in a saint-poet of the 9th Century, I was very interested in the way Sharanya wrote abut her, and about the dream that had made the author write a biographical novel about her.

By the time the book came out, I had read and re-read the author’s refreshingly different The High- Priestess Never Marries, and found it to be one of the best lessons in self-reflection. It is also a deep -dive into in surreal, lyrical, magical prose. So it didn’t matter what the story of the new book was, and who it was about, anymore. I simply had to read more of this writer’s work. And I was amply rewarded for my faith.

Written in the first person, The Queen…tells the story of a teenager who, after a mysterious birth and adoption, lives as the beloved daughter of a poet-priest, and is a great devotee of Vishnu, and finally gives up earthly form and life to merge into the deity she adores.

What happens between the beginning and the end of the story, and how the author imagines it to have happened, and how she tells the story to the readers, is what makes the book remarkable. The author makes Andal or Kodhai come alive as everywoman, with wishes and dreams of her own. At the same time, there is something about her that is way more than what the limits and norms of her situation, as framed and decided by others, will allow.

From praying for a good match in marriage, to rejecting marriage to any mortal man, to surrendering completely to the longing for the Supreme Lord, as a carnal, erotic and sensual need, this Kodhai is Meera and Radha to my north Indian mind, but only more real, more relatable and more clear.

The setting, the people, the kings and court, and markets and temples, the rituals and the farms and the towns and the cowherds and the seasons are all there in rich flavors, holding the story, as it moves. I feel Kodhai’s heartbeat in the words of the author, and know her desires, her frustrations. The quality of sensuality and earthiness in Manivannan’s writing goes right to the reader’s bones, and I have had to stop to breathe, to stay with and feel the feelings rather than rush on with the reading. Even though it is a very slim book, I took my time reading and re-reading the lyrical prose, letting it change the texture of those moments for me.

That a young woman so long ago owned her voice and wrote her heart out when it was not the norm for her to be even literate, was surely the gift of divine grace. And it is divine grace that has brought the story to us. Do yourself a favor and allow this beautiful gift to touch you, to seep into your heart.

A Fractured Life. February 2019 Book Review

A Fractured Life : Shabnam Samuel. Green Writers Press.

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I came to know about this book and its author through Facebook, and what I came to know made me most curious. A Fractured Life is a memoir, and it is an unusual story in so many of the facts. Yet, it is a most relatable and universal story too. It is a woman’s need to tell her story to herself above all, to ‘prove that I exist’ after all the mixed messages her life has been full of.

Shabnam’s is a cross-race and cross religion family, and her story for me is a palimpsest of the lives of all our forbears. We quite often do not know or forget the intermingling and the boxing in that all of our stories and pasts necessarily involve. Reading A Fractured Life reminded me that all of us are looking through a tunnel of limited vision at fragments of our stories, arranged in a vast and ever moving mosaic, quite like the images seen at the far end of a kaleidoscope. A shift in focus, a twist of the wrist, and the image changes, never to be the same again.

Shabnam is the granddaughter of a Russian Revolution refugee and am Indian man from Orissa. They were working – she as a nurse and he as a soldier- for the British Empire in Iraq during WW1. When the war ended the two married and come back to Cuttack to start a new life. The two had little in common except the Christian faith, which made the marriage possible at all. Moving to India, the family found worldly success, and many children were born to the couple.

The Russian refugee’s life as a displaced, alien presence in a land she came to without any connection is described and evoked wonderfully by Shabnam, with her own memories and from her grandmother’s musings. Those parts of the book filled me with wonder.

Shabnam’s mother marries against her parents wishes, and later her’s turns out to be an unhappy marriage. Its breakdown leads to Shabnam’s abandonment by her mother, at age two. Shabnam is brought up by her grandparents. The conflict, the tension between love and loyalty, anger and betrayal falls heavy on the child caught in the middle of it.

The parts of the book dealing with Shabnam’s family background and how it was for her to grow up with her grandparents, and her own state of mind as nobody’s child are what gripped my attention and had me emotionally invested in the story. It is heart rending storytelling, and is written with fearless openness. Shabnam shares her grandfather’s journal to show us his point of view on the matter, and we get to see the situation from different perspectives.

In the later half of the book, when Shabnam is an adult, and then married and when she moves to America with her estranged husband and little son, I felt the richness of views and stories petered out somewhat. But then it is here that the real shift in Shabnam’s life and personality emerge, as she finally finds her own sense of self and can begin to live by her truths, on her own, overcoming a lifetime of fragmented fragility, thwarted dreams and suppressed longings. The book ends on a happy and hopeful note, with a promise by the author to tell more about the current and more recent story of her life in another book, soon.

I am glad Facebook led me to this book and its author. In the simple, stark, at times uneven and rough telling of her own life, in her insights and her heartfelt questions, Shabnam Samuel and her book have made me relook my own life experiences from yet another angle, and discern new patterns.

Beloved Delhi. January 2019 Book Report.

Speaking Tiger books.

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I grew up in love with Delhi. And I grew up in a family where Urdu was a lived experience. And yet, I knew so little of the past of both Urdu and the city of Delhi- beyond the verses of Ghalib, beyond the common usage in spoken language, beyond the monuments and the modern part of the city, or the kings who ruled here, or the wars that were planned and fought over it. Reading Beloved Delhi (with its English translation of Urdu verses in Roman script) has been a delightful guided tour of discovery.

Saif writes in his Introduction, “I am neither a historian nor an Urdu scholar. But I have grown up around dining-table conversations not only about but also in Urdu Poetry. This book is the culmination of those conversations.” And he asks us to “read it also as a taster’s menu for those who love Urdu, its poetry and cadence, but have little or no access to it.”

I know very little Urdu myself, even though my father had learnt to read and write in the language in his early years. For my paternal grandfather, who ran a dairy business in Lahore, and whose relatives had farming interests in undivided Punjab in pre-partition times, it was very much the language of literature and business. For my maternal grandparents, this was not so, despite their roots too being in undivided Punjab, and despite my great-grandfather being a sort of raja of a small principality comprising Urdu and Punjabi speaking populace. Having pledged allegiance to the British Crown, my maternal ancestors embraced many kinds of cultural and linguistic changes, and become an early version of brown sahibs.
I remember looking at sepia toned photographs of grand-aunts in chenille ghararas, with tiara type hairband on their carefully coiffed hair, holding tennis racquets in one picture, posing with a hunting rifle in another. The photographs were almost all captioned in English, with a smattering of a few words in Gurmukhi on some. And I remember thinking to myself, “these are English princesses from the Arabian Nights’. When I told my mother and her mother what I thought, they told me about the North West Frontier, the connections with Persia and Afghanistan that Sikhs and other Indians had through centuries, and that we had relatives who had lived in and travelled to Basra and Bhagdhaad.
I imagined those long lost relatives speaking in Faarsi, even writing in it, even as I admired my Naana’s perfect cursive hand, and tried to emulate it. I don’t recall if he knew Urdu, but I am sure his father and most certainly his grandfather would have known Urdu and possible Faarsi as well if they had anything to do with the court and government work in their time. Courtly language in North India, till the middle of the nineteenth century was Persian. Urdu was what was the language of the margins at first, of the bazaar, and common people… and then, thanks to the poets and their popularity, it became the language of art and culture and emperors and nobles wrote in it, and were patrons of it. Till the next churning of times, and the shift in fortunes of kings, company, crown, commoners and cultural capital, which made my Naana proficient in English and Hindi as his work languages, and which is how it has continued with his children and their children.

While the idea of Farsi speaking relatives lent a romantic air to my sense of my family and their adventures, it is only in recent years that I have started to discover stories of what happens when languages, cultures, geographies and histories churn in a massive vortex over centuries of comings arrivals, wars, trade, and cultural innovation. Only recently have I begun to notice that we exist in a continuity of ideas put in words by the famous Mughal Delhi poets. For instance, it is in reading this book that I learnt that a much loved Hindi Film ghazal I often hum is not some modern poet’s work but that of Mir Taqi Mir. And so is my personal non-favorite …Patta Patta boota boota, which I never liked in the film, but have found a new fondness for, when read in its original form.

When worlds collide, it isn’t just always terra-firma that rubs together, nor just oceans beds that rise into mountains, and not just river that flow anew or change directions. Languages are born that didn’t exist before, and new art forms give shape to the zeitgeist of the changing times. Urdu or Rekhta is one such creation of the sub-continent, forged and birthed in the flux of the cosmopolitan, multi-national cities, serais and Sufi khwankaahs from the 17th to the 20th Century. As the political and economic nerve-centre of the region, Delhi soon became the place where a lot of Urdu poets worked and earned a name. The flowering of Urdu however, was also the time of the collapse of an era, an ebbing of the tide of all that had made Urdu possible. Saif Mahmood’s brilliantly compiled book captures the story of those times through its telling of the life and work of Mughal Delhi’s eight most popular and well regarded Urdu poets. The book opens with a Foreword by Rakhshanda Jalil, that sets the context for the interplay of poetry and politics in the book. A deeply informative Short History of Delhi’s Urdu follows, written by the master storyteller and historian Sohail Hashmi. In these early pages, the Dilli-wali in me was entranced with the book before I even got to the stories Saif goes on to tell. It has taken me a long time to read the book, and I have already done a second quick scan through of my favorite marked out parts once. I am sure I will be going back and discovering new enchantments again and again, digging about in the old world I didn’t quiet know, and one in which somehow always feels familiar, like being back at home.

Reclaim Your Life. Book Report

December 2018 Book Report.

Reclaim Your Life. Shelja Sen. Westland Books
#mentalhealth #depression #anxiety #narrativetherapy #mindfulness#nostigmanoshame

Closing another year of posting about books that have made me learn, grow and live. In this series of monthly posts I almost always write about books which have left a lasting impact on me, are meaningful personally, and are therefore books that I will go back to again and again.
Reclaim Your Life is definitely one such book. It is my good fortune that I also happen to know the psychologist- therapist-author Shelja Sen and her work at Children First through my two children. But that connection apart, this is a book that stands on its own merit, and is a refreshing mix of the personal and the professional in talking about mental health issues. Specifically, the book is about looking at depression, anxiety and other related matters with the belief in personal agency, and potential for change inherent in all of us. It is also a book very much aimed at ‘normalising’ the fact that that people with mental health difficulties are faced with a particular set of disability, but that their life is not just the disability. To thrive and cope well, their difficulties needs acceptance, not silence and shame, and they need coping skills rather than stigma. I would also say that this book would be great read for those caring for loved ones with diagnosed, labelled difficulties, but falling in the ‘normal’ category themselves. Because these difficulties lie outside what is accepted as the typical way to be, they are difficulties not just for the one with the issue, but also for those they are in relationships with, and frequent contact with. So as much as it is a guide for the person with anxiety, depression and so on, it is also a manual for those not diagnosed but still affected by these issues by proximity and emotional labour.
Using her grounding in Narrative Therapy, Situation Focused Brief Therapy and the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and loving-kindness Shelja Sen shows us what is meant by the principle “The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem”. With this kind of an empowering and positive lens, she has structured the book into seven sections of Lightposts of COURAGE, which is her acronym for the tools and means of coping which are expanded on in specific chapters.
The author argues her case with the help of her own lived experience with depression and with the stories of her clients. Throughout the book she affirms her unalloyed hope and acceptance of the magic possible despite the dark and painful destructive episodes that visit each life, some more devastatingly than others. She offers many practical and simple ways to practice reclaiming one’s life, be it Owning your Light or Change the Channel or tuning out the Radio of Negativity and switching to the Mindful Brain, for example. She shares the progress and triumph of her clients and her own successful negotiations with anxiety and depression.
While it tells us about the horror of abuse, of depression and the disability it brings on, of anorexia and grief and guilt, it also shows us that it was possible to come through those and heal, with the right kind of interventions. The book is free from heavy jargon and impersonal labels and expert-speak. The accounts feel personal and compassionate, are imbued with care and dignity, and therefore all the more appreciable and believable. The simplistic acronym-making and light bantering tone of the book also helps make a heavy, little known and disturbing topic accessible and easier to come to grips with. Above all, Shelja’s personal experience as part of the story makes the powerful point that while we are all – in varying degrees- less than perfect, we are all deserving of life’s richness and beauty, and capable of reclaiming our lives, re-scripting our stories, no matter what.
Do yourself and your friends and family the good deed of adding this book to the Christmas hampers. This is a gift of love.

September 2018 Book Report : Island of A Thousand Mirrors By Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera is the author of two books. The first, Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013.

In this book, the story builds around the lives of a Sinhala and a Tamil girl in Sri Lanka, growing up in the shadow of simmering societal strife that soon turns to a bloody civil war. I was a school girl when news of the war in Sri Lanka used to be on newspaper front pages in India, but it was still always a far away matter, at least in our circles. Today, among most people I know Sri Lanka is a cool, more-affordable-than-other exotic location for a holiday. But apart from the holiday pictures of friends and family, and very cursory reading of some fiction and non-fiction about our neighbour, I was pretty much tuned out of any realistic contemporary story about the place and its people. After reading this book, I can never think of Sri Lanka just as a tourist paradise or a shopping destination. As I reader I relish Nayomi’s exquisite descriptions of Sri Lanka- the verdant beauty, the rich sights and smells of a Sri Lankan home, the delightful ocean. But now I can see it as much more than a stunning backdrop for holiday pictures. I can see it as a real place with people whose lives I can imagine – to the extent one can imagine reality from fiction.

Reading about the politics of war, even politics sans overt war tires me and enrages me, and I avoid books with such themes. But Nayomi’s book is not like that. There are no big heroes and no very specific villains in her telling of the story and no complex plot lines to tie up. She leaves the politicians and the war lords and their specific machinations mostly at the periphery of the telling of her tale. We meet the foot soldiers, the mobs, the ordinary man turned hero, the ordinary village girl turned suicide bomber, and we see them as humans in search of meaning, driven by love at times, and hate and revenge at others. Stark in-your-face brutal violence never leaves the reader for long in this book, and neither does a sense of beauty. We see the play of old prejudice, stereotypes and we see how they can be overcome or fed, even in the same people.

I am no longer the school girl who didn’t look beyond the headlines, and now I relate to the horrors of war anywhere as if it could be happening to us, to me and to my loved ones. I read about Yashodhara and Saraswathi and Shiva in the book, but I imagine many others… in Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nagaland, Manipur, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, on all sides of the conflict, in every such conflict. I read about a family leaving their war-torn homeland, and settling into new lives abroad, and I think of the displaced everywhere, and their stories. In so many big and small ways, at so many levels, this book speaks of our times and our world, and about the universal nature of human pain and human redemption.

I would count this as one of the most necessary books on our times in my fiction collection.

July 2018 Book Report

Love And Marriage In Mumbai- Elizabeth Flock

 

This book had me intrigued. Its coverage in the press had me waiting to lay my hands on it. But having started reading it, I almost didn’t want to finish it, and almost gave up on writing this report. But then, a disappointing, baffling book too needs talking about. Maybe someone else has a different point of view, and will share that in response.

 

This book a hard one to classify. It is reportage, it is creative non-fiction, it is sociology, anthropology and ethnography, and all round confusion. Probably inevitable, given that the topic it covers is in the throes of some of its greatest upheavals and confusions. On top of that, it is written by an American, for whom Mumbai and India are new territory.

 

Elizabeth Flock comes to Mumbai, just out of college, and is fascinated by the filmy, ritualistic, larger than life notions of love and marriage she encounters. She wonders if there is something new and deep that Indian marriages and Indian couples in love can teach her. She is looking for such perspective in the shadow of her parents’ multiple marriages and divorces. And she has a book idea. About the kind of book she feels no one has written about India, about Mumbai. She decides to write that book.

 

Mumbai and its middle class are caught in economic and socio-political transformations. Middle class marriages seem to be going through tectonic shifts. It takes her almost ten years of repeated visits, months of being immersed in the lives and homes of her three case studies, and hundreds of hours of interviews and observation, to create this book. In the process she realizes that the impressions she first formed about love and marriage did not stay the same over time. This book is her deep deep dive into what happened to three couples through that period, and even before they became couples. There is plenty of show, and some tell, about their lives. But there is little else.

 

In the story of Maya and Veer’s surreal love affair and runaway marriage one sees a desperate grabbing for the fantasies of Bollywood. In their arriving at some sort of peace after experimenting with an ‘open’ marriage does one see pragmatism, or fatalistic resignation? Is Shahzad and Sabeena’s arranged marriage (and later issues with infertility, and a crisis of the man’s sense of self) the more typical case, closer to the reality of millions, and not just in their particular sect of Muslims, but almost all Indians? Ashok and Parvati are well-educated, professional, urban upper middle class Tamil Brahmins who get married through a matrimonial portal. Parvati is haunted by the memories of her Christian boyfriend. Ashok has never quite been able to hold on to a girl friend, and has a broken engagement behind him. Both understand that marriage is something that takes work, and that love is not always the best beginning for it.

 

The book opens with great promise, and feels unique and refreshing. But as the couple’s marriages grow and change, the narrative seems to drag, and get repetitive. The excruciating details and stretched out sequence of things tends to get boring, rather than interesting. I felt much irritation at typical ‘firangi’ mistakes in writing about India. Sharp and careful editing should have taken care to remove those bloopers. Also, Suketa Mehta’s claim on the cover that it is “Easily the most intimate account of India that I’ve read…” makes me wonder about how little he really reads about India, if at all.

 

All in all, the inside picture of love and marriage in the life of three Mumbai couples, as written up by Flock, is likely to fascinate Westerners. As an Indian having had my share of the laddo of marriage, and heard hundreds of inside stories of friends, relatives and strangers on the matter, I was left wondering as to the point of the book.

Book Report: May 2018

I am two weeks late, by my own rules, for the monthly book report for May. The first and only time I am allowed to do this. (Promise to self).

Knot for Keeps – Writing the Modern Marriage. Edited by Sathya Saran

Any attempt to dissect and discuss marriage is bound to be mired in complications, contrasting viewpoints, and dollops of hope and despair. Pretty much like the thing itself, it can follow no simple trajectory or denouement except a clear beginning and an uncertain end. So this book is an ambitious project in every way.
It gets sixteen writers together within its well designed, prettily packaged and bound pages, offering readers different perspective and stories on marriage. In that diversity of approaches, content and concerns, readers can find plenty of information and insights, and possibly a connection to their own unique situation vis a vis the idea and practice of marriage.
The stories, essays and a lone poem together offer a general overview of the modern state of marriage, and at times the telling is refreshingly at variance from the more popular presentation of coupledom in entertainment and art.
Sharanya Manivannan leads us into the book with a stellar essay that both questions marriage and posits the singledom as a state of arrival. Most poignant, incisive and deeply personal, this piece asks us to reconsider the idea of pairing as the default adult mode of existence. As she says, ‘…the first thing I must tell anyone about finding a meaningful paradigm for an unpartnered life : It is possible’ …..’Consider the absurdity of the term ‘pre- marital sex’. What is that except the presumption that sex before marriage is out of the norm because marriage is an eventuality?’
The book ends with an assessment by Vijay Nagaswami, of the nature of the recently emergent New Indian Marriage and its participants, the New Indians. Based oh his work with couples he holds out hope of a uniquely Indian response to the changing contours of individual expectations in the evolution of marriage.
In between the challenge posed to inevitable partnering in the first chapter and the hope held out in the last for an evolution to a better form of marital bliss, there are varying shades of marriage stories shared.
Milan Vohra‘s recounting of a husband and wife’s breathless, racing complaints against each other entrances us into their love story, only to leave us achingly heartbroken in the end. This story captures beautifully the ‘gusse mein bhi pyaar’ notion in its most positive expression, in my view.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli and Chitra Viraraghavan offer us fictional glimpses of marriages navigating infidelity and incompatibility, but the absurd games of one-upmanship the stories move through are not too far fetched for many a real real life marriage as well.
Neha Dixit’s piece on the rigmarole and harassment that goes with a ‘court marriage’, specially in the case of ‘love’ marriages of interfaith and intercaste couples, is something Hindi films never show.
Abha Iyengar writes with searing pain about the lot of a girl of a certain age in our culture, where her marriage is deemed more important than her selfhood.
Further heartbreak, as also warmth awaits us in the real life story of a married couple living with the foreknowledge of death of one partner, cherishing each other and their time together. (Rita Mukherjee wrote this piece and did not live to see the book in print).
On the other hand, Noor Zaheer’s piece lays bare the inherent biases and blocks to the dissolution of the most prioritised and protected of social and religious institution – that of marriage – across cultures and political systems even today, with her focus in particular on the struggles of Muslim women.
Wendell Rodrick’s touching personal essay on same sex couples being forced to the margins of love and legitimacy is another pointer to the long march ahead in the transformation of marriage towards something more just, equitable and in keeping with the progressive individualistic values of the modern world.
Not all is serious gloom and doom though, in a collection as varied as this. There are essays on the imperfect pairing of a chhottoo and lamboo as the Hindi term goes, the winning over of relatives and their prejudices in a Bengal-Punjab pairing, and the choice of marrying late and finding it surprising suitable and enjoyable, after being opposed to the idea of marriage for years. There is the heartening story of Aparna Sen’s marriage to Kalyan Ray as told by the husband – a long distance second marriage for both, of over two decades, across continents.
On balance, this is a book for keeps, for reading in small doses and large, as mood dictates, and thinking over, as your married or not married life throws curve balls at you. I wonder if the absence of a divorced or widowed contributor was a choice or an oversight. After all, what the once married and now single have to say about the modern marriage is also an important reflection on the subject.

Lost Connections: Johann Hari. May 2018 Book Report.

For all the familiarity with the term Depression, it is still shrouded in confusion. For all the exhortations for removing stigma and shame around those who suffer, there is still too little focus on context and systemic causes. Johann Harris is an award winning journalist and best selling writer who has suffered from depression since childhood. He has been taking medications since his teen years and believed that his condition was all about a chemical Imbalance that pills could put right. But his experience with drugs- while it provided some relief, specially early on, did not lead to lasting improvements. It led him to ask what wasn’t working and why. 

What he found in the course of his wide ranging investigation is the story of this book. 

The stories and data he investigates are surprising and shocking, as well as commonsensical and intuitive – sometimes all together. He looks at the nature of pharmaceutical research and trials and publishing of trial results. He looks at the nature of the experience of grief and other emotional and relational trauma. He looks at social context. He looks at man as part of the natural world. He talks to scientific and scholars and doctors and social workers. 

He comes to see that Depression is a lot more than a chemical imbalance that pills can put right for ever. Some of his suggestions for course correction are utopian and because they point to the need for systemic changes, they may sound impractical; and yet there is a core idea in all of it that is possible for us to follow in our lives and interactions.
Given pervasive thoughts of stress and anxiety in our lives, this is a book for all of us, a book that takes a wide angle sweep and a close up into what all of us are now touched by directly or indirectly. 

Book report – Home Fire By Kamila Shamsie

 

I read A God in Every Stone four years ago, and found it stunning and unforgettable. It is a very complex and layered book, contains centuries of history and references and literally digs into archeology and archives to tell a story of people caught in geo-political shifts and between betrayals of a more personal kind. It is staggeringly well researched and well imagined tale.

 

So I expected a lot from Home Fire. And it has lived up to the expectations, but it has also surprised me with how different it is from A God In Every Stone. It is very current story – an adaptation of Antigone’s story to this period in time, and it takes the old concerns and conflicts of ties of family, love, religion, and nation states, and places them in today’s world of immigration, terrorism and Jihad, and Muslim identity in the West.

 

Home Fire was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, and has everything that a smash hit must have, and it is presented in great style. There are strong, memorable characters- the three siblings Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz, the love interest Eamonn, and his politician father. Isma is the much older sister who had been almost mother to her younger twins in London for years since their mother died. Their father had been a Jihadi, long absconding from their lives. Free at last to go and pursue her own dreams independently, in America, Isma can never be free of the fallout of her family’s history.

 

Isma stands by the rules of the country that is their adopted home, above all. The younger twins are closer to each other than to their elder sister, and Aneeka is willing to go against sister and country and ‘use’ her lover to save her twin when he seeks to undo his ‘mistake’ of trying to be his father’s son. The story feels like a true life narration because of wonderful characterisation, and because of the contemporary nature of all that goes on.

 

We move through the story with trepidation through airport immigration security hold up, attempted and aborted romance in small town America, politics and fiery love and guilt in London, and Jihad in Istanbul and Syria and the climax across London and Pakistan played out to the world over television.

 

The story steps up in tension as it progresses. The choices keep getting starker and the characters more and more desperate as the plot unfolds. The ending is one of the most heartbreakingly bleak ones I have read in a novel in recent times. It is so real and yet so fantastic that it could certainly be tonight’s news.

 

The book raises eternal questions about the nature of love, and the conflicting claims of family, lovers and the state, to our loyalty. In the life and deaths of its characters, we also see the longing for home, and the craving for a fixed identity. The author is masterful in braiding all of it together powerfully, and unforgettably, in a bravura piece of elegant and refined storytelling.

 

This is a memorable, classic novel you won’t forget in a hurry, and will go back to again and again to find new stories with each new reading. I really cannot add a negative point to artificially try to be more balanced in my view. I think Kamila should have got the Booker too.

March 2018 Book Report .Ghachar Ghochar.

Ghachar Ghochar

 

By Vivek Shanbhag. Translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur

Meeting Mr. Shanbhag recently made me go back to his internationally acclaimed, translated into English novel. This is also the time I have been paying more attention to translations in general, and I must say that if you haven’t been reading outside the borders of English language originals, please start to do so.

Ghachar Ghochar is a masterpiece of subtle storytelling. The nonsense title phrase is easily understood as something terribly tangled, and needs no translation. But the rest of the book could not have reached non-Kannada speakers without the brilliant trans-creation. And that is something all discerning readers can be grateful for. Because this a novel that is not to be missed if you appreciate a finely crafted, solidly rooted story of large themes and concerns, that is as subtle as it is disconcerting.

Ghachar Ghochar is a scathing social and moral indictment, a detailed empirical study, and a precise self-reflection of the unnamed narrator on himself and his rather toxic, enmeshed family. Nothing is quite as it seems, in the claustrophobic life in the narrator’s home. The early privations of the family and its later wealth change something in the nature of power, loyalty and obedience between them. They remain a unit ready to defend and attack as one, through the change of fortunes, from attacking and crushing ants to breaking any intrusion or opposition in any form from anyone inside or outside the home. Into this tribalism comes the wife of the narrator, an outsider who refuses to assimilate and become a cog in the system of daily cruelties and blind obedience. Her independent stance and critical eye on what goes on around her are the undoing of much, in horrific ways.

The novel leads us to the edge and then does not tie up any lose ends. The reader can form their own conclusions with a mix of dread and hope against hope.
At 115 pages this is one of the slimmest books you can find so go get it if you haven’t yet. I am sure you will be left reeling.

Book Report : The Librarian

 

February Book Report

The Librarian by Kavitha Rao

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A book about books is always going to draw me in, but that it does so while being a dark and disturbing one about a destructive obsession, now that is a new one. The fact is that I have been in love with a couple of libraries long after having been away from them for years, and the vivid descriptions of the library setting in this book had me hooked from the start. Just as much of a hook were the highly relatable main protagonists, a little bookworm of a girl and a librarian who cares only about keeping his library going against all odds. I could relate very personally to the story and its setting even though I must clarify that I bear no resemblance to any character or thought in the book. Just so you know.

I bought this novel at the TimesLitFest Bangalore a few weeks ago, where I met the author. I was intrigued by the backstory she shared about the inspiration for the book. What a spin the artist’s imagination can give to what they come cross.

The Librarian is set in these times, and has a very current ring to it. It is a fast paced character and plot driven story with quick twists and turns and keeps the reader engaged and curious. The author works wonderfully well with a rather unusual approach to the theme of relative ethics, crime and corruption in the setting of a staid and decrepit library. The book is also the story of the coming of age of a precocious book worm and her later day disenchantment from the hero of her childhood.

The writing is polished and smooth and the story weaves in realistic portrayal of a part of Mumbai and some true historical events. And being about a library and a couple of book mad people who run the library, it also often has references to many books and authors. I read the book at one stretch because I just had to know where it was headed. The end is sad though inevitable, and I wonder how difficult was it for the author to give a negative turn to the character who is such a devoted book lover.

The October Book Report; Posted Late. Jim Corbett.

The October 2017 Book Report.

Jim Corbett.

(Forgot to shift it here when I wrote this on Facebook!)

It isn’t really about these books. I had no plan to cover them in a review. More than books to read, they are a part of me, and echo some of what I experience in the wild mountain back of beyond-ness. They are about much more than hunting man-eating predators. They are rich nature and place writing. They are also excellent specimens of narrative and descriptive writing. And they offer a wonderfully detailed cultural history of the hills of Kumaon and Garhwal, of the government and social order prevalent then.
Heidi speaks to my love of mountains but its setting is alien and I am no longer a little girl. Innocent love of place and rootedness are common traits that attract me to Heidi and Ruskin Bond. Bond is a personal idol and a writer after my heart because he creates beautiful prose and eternal meaning out of nearly nothing, located mainly in the hills or other lost places and about lost people, evoking a nostalgia for gentler times and attitudes that are gone or fast fading away.
Bond’s is essentially an urbane sensibility-even when he writes about jungles or ghosts; gentle, mildly sardonic at times and always civilised and soothing. Whereas Jim Corbett is the essential loner of the wilderness, at home on the machan or marching on foot through the wilderness missing not a change in the wind or temperature, and noting his observations in meticulous methodical detail, courageous and unflinchingly honest with himself and others and with a rare capacity for seeing the bigger picture way ahead of his time. For all this, he too is a personal hero and an inspiration.
Today I realised I had reached the end of a month and had forgotten all about my monthly goal of a book report. I looked at my shelves for a book to report on, and saw these books. This is a personal account of my own and some others’ engagement with the matter of wilderness and Jim Corbett.
I first read Corbett as a school girl and was suitably impressed with the adventures and the romance of this invincible hunter. We lived in the fore sts of MP, in a pure Mowgli setting, and tales of wolves carrying off children were part of the legends we grew up with. My mother had lived this life before me in various raliway bunglows in places like Khurda Road, Umaria and Gondia. My father, an army officer had jungle survival as part of his professional training and had served in rather wild places in Assam, and around the Chambal ravines in central India, and had encountered nearly every kind of wildlife. So my childhood experiences in lonely army outposts on edges of jungles and always far removed from the urban sprawl were layered on the subsoil of my parents’ stories.
Encountering a cobra on way to school stopped sending shivers down the spine after one or two occasions. News arrived of tigers and bears being sighted during night patrols and we felt safe and snug inside our pucca homes with locks. Then a snake or a scorpio would be sighted slipping into the house and there’d be an hour or two of commotion to get it out. One day the Tandons found a cobra coiled over their breakfast. That day Tandon Aunty had trouble concentrating on her teaching. She taught us Geography in the tin shed and tents collection of make do structures that served as our school. On a hike through the forest we were told how a bear had attacked a forest guard at the same forest inspection hut we were having our lunch at. We heard of hunters too.
So you see, Jim Corbett, Heidi and Ruskin Bond were what fit into my experience and imagination more easily than the glamorous and out of reach stuff occasional visitors from America, Bangalore or Delhi talked of. I had never owned or even seen shops that sold clothes like what they wore so casually, never imagined talking on topics they approached like experts. Books were practically my only window to the outside world, besides the summer holiday trip to a place of historical or geographical importance.

Just once a movie came to town that made us feel our story was being told. The movie was Bahadur Bacche. Anyone recall the line ‘kitna maza Ballu? Maza hi maza”?
The ideas of conservation has not become common currency, so that aspect of Corbett remained beyond my ken. It came to me in high school via the Nature Club, when I moved to a metropolis. For the first time in my life I was far away from jungles or any kind of rusticity. At first I talked a lot about where I had come from, to my new city bred friends. They found me amusing, and were not impressed or interested at all in my rapturous recall of adventures from the middle of nowhere. Slowly I stopped talking of how much fun life was back in the wilderness. I got busy with all the preoccupations of an urban teen – clothes, fashion, crushes, gossip, music, movies, socialising, studying, clearing exams in school. Then came college, and getting a job.
There was an exciting detour back to the hills and jungles, after University. A hostel mate excitedly showed us an article in Inside Outside about the mountain home of an Uncle, Dr. Lal of Sitla, at the edge of the protected forest outside the IVRI at Mukteshwar. He ran an NGO Chirag in the mountain villages around, and Smitie Misra and I promptly wrote to him to let us intern at CHIRAG.
Killing two birds with one stone we were, mixing work with pleasure all the way. The long walks from our village rental abode to the Post Office in Mukteshwar to encash our travellers cheques are etched in memory. The hoofbeat of the herd of racing deer, the never seen but always felt presence of leopards and the singular sighting of a fox in a field of golden wheat are still fresh without the help of any day to day fb records.
For all my love for the life far from the chaos or the city, I was beset with doubts and the then unlabelled and unsaid FOMO when time came to take up a regular job offer from Chirag. I came back to the rather predictable urban middle class trajectory of a corporate career, marriage, kids, slowly sidelining own career and dreams to family needs and husband’s priorities and so on. But the Chirag experience marked and taught me much for life.
Ages later, I started getting reacquainted with the wild in a more intimate way. Small hikes and overnight camping led to bigger steps. I hiked in the buffer zone of Corbett along trails made or followed by Corbett. I learnt of his hunts and his transition to a conservation advocate. I visited his home in Nainital and at the villages he helped settle around Choti Halwani, near Kaladunghi, and the canal network he initiated for agriculture. He is still fondly recalled as Carpet Saheb by the locals there.
On the Corbett trail from Kaladhungi to Powalgarh, the writing in his books came alive with every step. As it does every time I cross through Haridwar into Rishikesh and start climbing towards my home ahead of Rudraprayag.
I have come here nearly a century after Corbett did, chasing dreams and goals very different from his, with abilities not a patch on his (to me) divine powers. Yet, reading his The ManEater of Rudraprayag is the best testimony to what I witness on my journey here.
I always assumed most people who come to these areas are somewhat familiar with Corbett and his work. Imagine my surprise when a recent group of travellers turned out to have no idea about who Jim Corbett was and why a National Park they visited before arriving here is named so. Another visitor claimed to be a wildlife fanatic, self proclaimed expert on all there was to know about wild animals and the wilderness. On a hike to a nearby temple he insisted on returning from almost near the summit because “leopards are crazy” and the sun would set soon and he knew all about the mad and cruel ways of wild animals from watching youtube. I wish Jim Corbett ‘s bhooth haunts that fellow till he learns the proper way to educate himself about wild things.

 

 

January Book Report.Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. By Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.
By Gail Honeyman

I picked up this book the favourite way I like to explore and buy books. I regularly walk into bookstores and browse many volumes. Linger over blurbs and jackets and flip through the pages. And then buy some because they make me want to spend more time with them than just the moments or hours possible in bookstores.
Anyway, coming to the book. I picked it up because of the catchy curious title. And something about the way the blurb was framed. I could sense this was a story with an emotional load I was going to savour. And I was right.
This debut novel set in modern day Glasgow is so refined and polished and subtle that I wonder how long the author held the story in her mind before it actually got published. And what a story it is. A gut wrenching tale of loneliness, soul damage, social anomie and being saved, of being on the outside and wanting to fit in while being clueless; at the same time a story filled with gentleness and warmth and finally, hope. And keeps a genuinely light funny attitude to things without sounding clever or over sophisticated.
Eleanor is the narrator who is an odd one who leads a lonely life of fixed routine and simple habits. We realise soon enough that this is her safe holding phase after a traumatic childhood and an unsettled youth. She wants to be left alone and yet she longs for love and can get pretty delusional about it too.
The story starts with Eleanor attempting to make a change. And then relentlessly keeps bringing change and novelty to Eleanor, and with ever so natural nudges the house of cards that holds memories and emotions in check comes tumbling down.
Eleanor is by chance pulled in to help save a stranger’s life, and then into befriending his family. In all this, she also becomes friends with her office colleague Raymond. All the while, she also has an almost delusional crush on a no good musician. From a recluse and office robot Eleanor starts shifting into someone who meets people, goes out and starts to dress well and groom herself more stylishly. She cries without warning. She takes risks. She is ready to be different, she thinks. She wants her life to be different, to mean something, to be fine. She is desperate for something to change, for the ‘correct’ love to rescue her somehow. But of course life is not a simple wish list. Eleanor’s delusions come crashing to the ground as soon as she tries to make them real. But while she breaks down along with her dreams, she is finally able to come to grips with the truth about herself, and reach out for help offered by her new friend, and to overcome a lifetime of fear and fabrication.
The author shows immense control over a suspenseful narrative while threading a plot through past and present. I don’t want to say more about the story as that would be giving away too much, but I can talk about the intelligence with which the narrative unfolds. It is a lesson in crafting a gripping drama in the first person. The voice is intimate yet never lazily familiar, and helps each of the characters become real people we know and care for and cry for and hate and feel scared of. I love how the book remains light and nimble and conversational while it goes at difficult themes and macabre minds. In the end it feels like a simple good versus bad kind of story that leaves the reader full of hope for the characters, and with a paisa wasool feeling for themselves.
A recommended read if you want an old fashioned drama with innocents and villains and good samaritans and a few twists, and a redemptive closure, laced with wit, intelligence and lots of warmth and grace.

December Reading Report. Pathways of Possibility. By Saikat Majumdar

It has been twelve months of my monthly book report project. Twelve months of doing something which I never imagined I was going to do, which nothing in my education and professional experience or training specifically covered.

 

It is fitting then that the last book I review this year is also about breaking education out of its confines of arts versus science, general versus specialised, and liberal humanist versus vocational. College – Pathways to Possibilty is a book that is a thoughtful, studied reflection on the past, present and future nature of education and careers.

 

This is a book that is calling out to be read, discussed and debated. Young people in school, parents, policy makers, college students and teachers, sociologists, college counselors, educational consultants, researchers, professionals and anyone with an interest in theories of knowledge and the future of work and education would enjoy the many nuances and tangents of thought in this slim yet substantive book. It is a book which could, and which should lead to much more work in this area. I hope it is the spark that lights many more.

 

It is a call for change, a manifesto of new pathways to doing things differently, and an idealist hope for the future of college education. For many in our country today, a college degree in the arts or sciences is a dead weight of no particular practical application or use in the evolving market place, or in terms of life skills. On the other hand, the narrow deep dive into specialisation of professional/vocational courses leaves out a world of general learning from its scope, and is not usually any better in imparting lifeskills like critical thinking, analytical ability or creative ideation. Too much fragmentation. Too little integration. Silos that do not talk to each other. And there is history and sociology and ways of engaging with the world behind all of this.

 

“The liberal arts are sometimes imagined to be in opposition to STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine. But this opposition is a confused one, as the foundational S of STEM, science, occupies a pride of place in the liberal arts. The “liberal arts” are not synonymous with the arts and humanities; the archaic term is the surviving legacy of a time when the sciences were arts too.In fact, it is perhaps not generally remembered today that the word “scientist” was coined on the analogy of the word “artist”. This happened, as the cultural critic Marjorie Garber reminds us, in the 1830s, when the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science felt the acute absence of a term to describe the practitioner of science: “Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty…savans was rather assuming…; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist*=.” ”

Written by a novelist, critic and scholar who is currently a professor at India’s first liberal arts University, this book is many things – it is the author’s professional stock taking exercise, a thoughtful reflection on the state of post secondary education, and a manifesto for change of mindsets and systems .

 

Saikat Majumdar’s pitch is for a broad humanist college education that is not straightjacketed into narrow walls of cramming and regurgitation, consumption and reinforcement of the status quo. And he makes the pitch in a mix of serious scholarship, anecdotal vignettes and flights of literary fancy. This is a book that talks to the reader about the souls of different disciplines, when talking of their epistemology. It argues in favor of the souls over the bodies, i.e, the content of the syllabus. It is book that is inspired and takes off from a lot of educational and psychological theory I have been long familiar with but hadn’t found put together in context of college education in the Indian setting. It is a book that has made me think about my own educational and career journey, and my children’s education and career plans. It has made me more determined to follow through with certain ideas I have in the realm of preparing high school students for college and beyond, back in the rural communities I am involved with.

 

A strongly idealistic vision and deep philosophical and historical enquiry mark the writing across eight chapters and 111 pages. From how different models of modern college education arose across the Western world, and then travelled to India, and where we are now at. Saikat juxtaposes his own experience with his college education in a premiere college and leading University in India with his experience in the American university system as both a student and a teacher.

 

The familiar story (it is what most of us have gone through, after all) of contrast between a narrow, body of content led coverage model of the former with the broader, more general epistemic approach of the latter is explained in novel frames.

 

Most interesting is how the author then moves into the exploration of the nature of intelligence itself, with a strong focus on Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Linking types of intelligences to different professions and the skills suited best to them, he makes an emphatic case for an education that acknowledges and nurtures the broad, humanistic learning potential of human minds without the restrictions of vocational exclusiveness too early in the college years.

 

“…it is intriguing how often disciplines are curricularised and taught in ways that are incompatible with a liberal artscience education. It is especially ironic with subjects that are considered to be at the heart of the liberal arts. If the economics major in the US university system begins to feel the suffocation of relentless research training, a very different story has been scripted for humanistic fields under the colonial university system in India. Let me pause here at my own discipline, English literature.

The whir in my head started when I received an email last year from my then six year old daughter. With a sunburst of smileys and emoticons impossible to replicate, it asked:

 

“Papa, have you written any future-fiction stories? Stories, which are now fiction but can become true later? Take lizards, which are teenage dinosaurs. If you live too long you will be in the future where they will be dinosaurs again. Please die on time!”

…..that the idea of literature as fiction, as made up, untrue stories emerged at a certain historical moment was something that I never received during my college education in English literature. These are questions that embody what Gardner calls disciplinary ways of thinking: the fundamental spirit and methodology of disciplines that lie deep inside the maze of facts and information that make up their bodies.”

 

All through the book, with progressively linked argument and examples and references, a case is made for a generally accessible, liberal artscience education – education that is both deeply immersed in one specific discipline while also covering a broad range of general education topic, along with a focus on skills of critical thinking, analysis and creative originality, as the base of all post school education.

 

While I enjoyed the book, and am definitely going to go back to its pages and my notes on it many times in the future, I found it a little rushed or curtailed overall, like a project that stopped short of becoming all that it could have been. And I wish the title did not quite highlight the College part so strongly, since it is much more than a college admissions guide book. The heavy duty theories could have been illuminated with more examples, more real life stories, more personal anecdote. Nevertheless, in every way this is an important and timely work.

 

November Book Reading Report

The Whole Shebang – Sticky Bits Of Being A Woman

By Lalit Iyer

Despite the somewhat misleading title, the book is really not about women in general, or even some women. It is a series of personal opinion pieces sorted into seventeen chapters on varied aspects of being Lalita Iyer, the woman. The author herself is at pains to point this out in the Prologue, which I would recommend as necessary first reading on picking up the book. Above all, it is a book for anyone interested in how a particular woman thinks of her life and herself.

This slim 142-page compendium based on earlier columns and writings, connects, soothes, provokes and preaches, and manages to feel mostly likeable and a just a little unsettling. There are the usual suspects- bitchy schoolgirls, teenage angst, breast longings, and infatuations based on nothing but a look…and then there are unconventional storylines playing tug of war with the standard issue memo on being a woman. There is frankness, wit, courage, confusion, confession and hope. And listicles in some chapters, with authorly gyaan and tips.

Claiming to be still figuring out “How to be a woman’, Lalita lays down her belief that “being a woman is a serious amount of admin.” And talks of the sense of things “left undone” and “checklists crawling beneath our epidermis, reminding us” of this. The rest of the book then unravels the author’s sense of being a work in progress through puberty to middle age, to be an independent person, in delightfully devilish detail.

Being pre-millennial, her recollections of childhood and youth bring to life times and images we have almost archived into non-existence, like the compulsory chemise worn under the white school uniform, wax-coated paper packed Parle-G, mixed tapes as courtship, and Ovaltine. A serial job changer, a science-y working as a journalist and writer, a woman who married later than most, and became a mother at almost forty, and is now at forty nine a single mother to her son, Lalita’s stories bring an unusual lens to the common and uncommon issues of her and every woman’s life.

I for one could not see the merit of so many pages devoted to getting one’s period, the travails with ill-fitting bras and the cruelty of thongs. But some of these, along with body size and image are topics I see many women of all ages obsess about almost forever. In Lalita’s blunt and vivid telling of these issues lies a comment on the tyranny of conflicting forces acting on women, and the cinch women are in, ironically, all at once, of seductive fashion, modesty dictats and a deeply conditioned desire for approval.

“Every once in a while, I muster the courage to walk into a Mango or a Zara or a Promod and try on clothes which fit one part of my body but don’t fit another and I tell myself – I am totally out of proportion. What I don’t tell myself is that these clothes were made to squash me into someone else’s shape.”

In the personal stories and stern guidelines of sorts, many readers will recognize how they don’t take themselves seriously as a person; beyond the relationship they have to significant others in their life. And how ambivalent they are about owning their careers and especially about money matters. And how they lose themselves even in the role that is supposedly their identity- that of a mother, or a wife.

“Mother love was not enough for me to feel me. I needed more, and I went after it. That was the only way I could retain my selfhood. That’s the only way I want Re to remember me when I am gone. Not someone who lost herself in him.”

The Whole Shebang has a bold, specific and contemporary tonality to its slice of life writing. There is vulnerability and openness of voice and individuality of details that draws the reader in. With confessions and intelligent wit it also exudes hope and sisterhood, and give wings to the reader’s imagination. The reader is likely to be comforted with a realization that she is not alone in all that confuses and confounds her. Someone else has been there too, and lived to tell the tale.

The most enjoyable bits of reading this book for me were the chapters on love, marriage, money, friends, the in-laws and the future. It is here I felt the writing acquired the most natural, most nuanced richness and depth. With engrossing self-deprecation and eyes open wide practicality Lalita reflects on the changes in her own thinking and the changing ways of the dating game. The affliction of imagining love stories is examined threadbare. The Idea of self-love is embraced.

“We are constantly examining our imaginary love stories in our heads – constructing and deconstructing scenarios – decoding what he said to reveal what he really meant, looking for signs, seeing signs while none exist: in text messages, whatsapps, Facebook, Instagram, and in all avatars in which it is humanly possible for one person to exist.”

I also specially liked the fact that topics like money, work, and motherhood are covered in a matter of fact way, without getting heavy handed or frivolous. Like in these lines from “Planning for retirement’.

“You need to have a nest egg both as assets and savings for retirement irrespective of a spouse or lack thereof or whether your parents are going to leave you a nice inheritance. … You will be surprised how few women factor this in. I have already budgeted for a halfway house with my friends when I am sixty. I don’t believe children should be treated as old-age insurance.”

Given the book’s chapters covers a wide span of time in a woman’s life it can grow along with the reader’s experience, and be a sounding board for the long haul, as well a companion for a brief fling. Rather like a combination shampoo-conditioner, unlike the dichotomous category of men someone put across to the author – that of being either a shampoo or a conditioner. (The shampoo is meant to leave, the conditioner meant to stay….read the book to know moreJ)

“When relationships are depleting, it’s friendships we turn to for replenishment, connection, a shared sensibility and laughs. Our women friends help us raise the bar; we look up to our friends more often and in more ways than we think. … How many times have you told a female friend, “You know, I should have so married you!”

The Whole Shebang is just one such friend every woman could commune with at least once.

 

Reader Report: Driven to Distraction. By Edward M. Hallowell & John J. Ratey.

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –

As if my Brain had split –

I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –

But could not make them fit

The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before –

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound –

Like Balls – upon a Floor.”

Emily Dickinson

——-

This time I report on a non fiction book about the little understood neuro biological condition of ADHD. This report is two days overdue by the deadline I set myself. The only good thing I can say about missing the end of month to post this is that such behaviour is perfectly in synch with the book I am reporting on.

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (earlier known as ADD) is a controversial and complex issue about which doctors, psychologists, educators, counselors, neuroscientists and researchers are still figuring out the finer points of origin, causes, treatment and control. Not just that, even the existence of this, the validity of a diagnosis with ADHD and the various current modalities of coping are subject to conflicting views and support or the lack of it. I recently met a noted cardiologist friend and shared with him my son’s diagnosis and the casual way he told me not pay attention to it was astoundingly shocking, coming as it did from the medical profession.

Needless to say, the attitude towards the often common sounding traits of ADHD complicates the situation for those thus diagnosed or unable to access a diagnosis and those who live with ADD in their family or in close relationships. In this simple to read and easy to understand book two doctors give a very detailed overview of the basket of traits and behaviours that show up in ADD, through sharing a series of extremely detailed case stories, explanations and decades of clinical experience.

They describe and define, and explain the diagnostic criteria and the treatment methods. They delve into the different manifestations of ADHD in children and adults, and how it impacts other aspects of one’s life and relationships and performance and self worth. All of this is done with graphic, vivid, engaging write ups of cases, of correspondence from patients and their families, and the authors’ own life.

Through compelling and compassionate accounts of diagnosis and progress of treatment of their patients, the authors make a convincing and comprehensive case for the need for early diagnosis and consistent multi-pronged interventions.

The authors have extensive experience in working and researching ADD/ ADHD and also personally live with the condition, so everything in the book comes from close experience of their cases and personal life. The case studies used are wide ranging, and each case is unique yet typical in its specificities. The three key components of ADHD- impulsivity, distractibility and hyperactivity are displayed in minute detail and all shades of manifestation. The distinction between various similar seeming psychiatric and behavioural conditions is explained and made clear.

There are checklists and guidelines, making the book a helpful practical manual besides a great introduction to ADHD. There are references to other researches and books that cover the history and latest findings in the field throughout the text, for those who want to explore the topic further. In that sense this is also a great reference resource.

In their approach to ADD the authors are categorical in approaching it as a neurological, biological phenomenon but they also stress the need for a comprehensive treatment plan that goes beyond mere medication, and at times need not include medication at all. To quote, they stress ”how important a comprehensive treatment plan is, a plan that incorporates education, understanding, empathy, structure, coaching, a plan for success and physical exercise as well as medication. …how important human connection is every step of the way…see the human connection as the single most powerful therapeutic force in the treatment of ADHD….Human connection is indispensable..the other Vitamin C, Vitamin Connect. “

What worked for me particularly in this book was the straightforward and detailed descriptions of the many ways the ADHD presents in the lives of people, and the numerous helpful checklists and resources included. It is a highly empathetic work of professionals, aimed at making the general public and those directly affected by the condition approach the idea of ADHD with open minds and and hopeful hearts. The authors seek to go beyond merely identifying something as a pathology, to acknowledging the issue as a composite of its problems and strengths. Instead of fear and stigma and misunderstanding, they advocate for acceptance and action.

Book Review: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The most thorough review of The Ministry Of Utmost happiness that I have found useful. Besides the one written by Jerry Pinto. One which is as compassionate in tone as the writer of the book.
“The challenge faced by the novelist who inhabits a clamorous country going through interesting times: how do you make up a world that can compete with the truth? One way is to lie outright, become a fabulist – but lies are now firmly the preserve of the fake-news expert, not the novelist.”

Till you can actually read the book, this is as good an introduction as any.

nilanjana s roy

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy

Penguin Random House

464 pages

(A shorter version of this review is published in the Business Standard.)

In the same week that I began reading Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published twenty years after her first, I came across an old interview between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Paris Review.

He says, “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”

The challenge faced by the novelist who inhabits a clamorous country going through interesting times: how do you make up a world that can compete with the truth? One way is to lie outright, become a fabulist – but lies…

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In Hot Blood. By Bachi Karkaria. A Review.

I have not watched a single one of the Nanavati murder trial and ménage-e-trios inspired movies, not have I ever been remotely curios about this so-called national sensation. Yet, after this book came out last month my book club decided to go for it. That compulsion, rather than the topic made me read it. And it turned out to be more than worth the time and effort. An enjoyable, educative and thought provoking read, in so many ways this turned out to be.

 

Bachi Karkaria has gone through exhaustive and extensive research to make the story richly detailed, in-depth, and almost a full sociological treatise on the times (1950-60) of the events, their background, context and aftermath on various aspects of the nation’s judicial systems and particularly Bombay’s socio-cultural life. From interviews with those who were around in those times, and those who can tell us something new as well as retell the old facts, she presents a fresh look at one of the most talked about murder cases in the history of modern India. Not a simple task, this, which Bachi carries off with élan.

 

The facts are supposedly known to everyone, but I will recap. Kawas Nanavati is being cheated on by his wife, Sylvia. She confesses to the husband, and tells him to be careful – she fears for his life as her lover, Prem Ahuja has a gun. The shattered husband is a naval commander. He too can get a gun. Which he does. And he then goes to confront the lover- to ask him what his intentions are, and if he plans to do the honorable thing by marrying Sylvia and taking care of the children. Kawas is seen going to Prem Ahuja’s room. There is no witness to what happens inside. Three shots ring out from behind closed doors. Nanavati walks out, his white dress unblemished and surrenders himself to the naval police for having shot a man. Ahuja is found dead with gun shot wounds.

 

In court, Kawas pleads not guilty. On purely circumstantial evidence the jury too calls him not guilty. Throughout the trail, Nanavati is the hero of the masses and the media. The jury system earns its nail in the coffin with this case and is never used again in India. Nanavati is found guilty on appeal, but again pardoned by the state governor.

 

These are the facts. But behind them lies a fascinating maze of coincidences, manipulations, prejudices, class and community networks of allegiance and privilege. Partisan media uses its power of mass opinion making, and forgets journalistic neutrality. The Blitz goes all out to defend Nanavati and runs petitions for him. How did all this actually play out? What factors could have worked behind the scenes to move which levers? Why was murder not seen as murder but a point of honor? What made Nanavati the hero he seemed to be viewed as? What made Sylvia not a vamp but an object of sympathy or even indifference? What made Ahuja a villain who no one shed tears for?

 

All this and more is the focus of Bachi Karkaria’s elaborate delving into this old story. Her recreation of the Bombay of the late 50s is picture perfect, in all details. The courts, the Navy areas, the localities of posh Malabar Hill, the cinemas, the markets, the streets all come alive as if a movie runs in real time. The dialogues, the imagery, the aura and ethos of the communities that play the main roles are all vividly and precisely depicted.

 

The writing does get over the top at just a very few places, in typical Bachi style, which I (in a case of absolutely subjective aesthetic preference) found a tad out of place in reading a serious book of investigative/reconstructive journalism, but I can’t say it took away much from the book. For a case as sensational as this, hyperbole and drama is part of the territory in the retelling. Bachi manages to keep the drama alive while she remains almost clinically detached in the retelling. Nothing is assumed or taken at face value, and the alternate possibility is considered and the alternate voice is given a legitimate place. Through it all if the author tends to lean towards anything, then it is to constitutional values and the spirit of constitutional law, and a sense of fairness and open minded questioning.

 

It can tend to feel repetitive and maybe slow reading for those looking for the more juicy kind of sleaze and gossip, but that is not the author’s intention, though she does not shy from presenting all of those facts too.

 

After all the points of law and constitutional propriety and Naval and Parsi privilege are debated and understood, the book still leaves me with the biggest mystery unsolved. How does a couple pick up the shot to hell pieces of their relationship after a man is killed in hot blood, over the matter of the wife’s infidelity, and go on to build a new life? The author does reveal a lot of factual details of the Nanavati’s life after their move to Canada, but those chapters lack the insights and depth of the proceedings of the trial, or of the context around it.

 

How did these people later forgive each other, if not totally forget the tragedy? I guess that will remain for us to guess and for them to know. Or food for another book.

 

 

 

It Ends With Us – A novel by Colleen Hoover. A Review.

My April Review. Kind of late, but still within my target of the month. Triggered by some things read recently about the abused wife of an Indian-born Techie CEO in USA.
———

“Why did she not leave him?”

“Why do you stay on?”

“If you take it, you deserve it.”

—

We have seen statements like those above. In the media. We have heard them from friends and in the family. We may have made them ourselves.

Judgments. Opinions. Rarely based on personal experience or insight. Rarely made with any degree of compassion. Often, a one up-manship. Or, a satisfied smugness, born of a safe place. Or, a resentment, born of denial.

Colleen Hoover is a New York Times best selling author who writes entertaining, contemporary novels about a certain kind of people in a certain milieu. ‘It Ends With Us’ though, is a very different kind of book from her; a work of fiction that derives directly from her own life. It has a message and a life lesson woven into the plot. With this book her avowed goal is to help people see things in a different light, and possibly find a way out.

This was not a book I had particularly wanted to read. It happened to be the selection of my book club group for March, and then they changed their mind. I already had a copy, and had started reading it when the change happened. So I carried it with me on my solo holiday to Kerala, not really intending to read it, but to give it away to a friend I would be meeting there.

And then, one night while it was raining and a rough high tide rolled up on the beach across my room window, I picked it up with a vague idea of studying the author’s plotting technique. I had a notebook and pencil ready.

I ended up reading the book over the next few days, carrying it with me to a fisherman’s home, to a beachside diner and around the hotel grounds. While Colleen Hoover plots smoothly and writes in a breezy, witty, chatty, easy to read style, those are not the reasons I kept reading this book. To me, the book is worth reading and worth reviewing for the compelling story it tells about the pernicious cocktail of love and abuse. And it is told with sensitivity, insight and honesty, coming from the author having lived that life, and her generous and kind decision to come out in public with it.

In her twenties, Lily bloom is trying to find her place in the word as an independent professional adult. She has come a long way from a childhood spent watching her mother being abused at home. The story starts right after the funeral of her father, whom she hated. She has refused to say anything in his praise at the funeral. It pains her that her mother never had strength to leave her abusive husband. She has her own past sorrows, and a journal where she has recorded her teenage turmoil in letters (never sent) to TV host Ellen. She is sure her life will be different from her mother’s.

Lily comes to live in Boston, works hard, falls in love, dreams of marriage. She is a girl with spunk, and a sensitive and kind heart. She is a girl who once sheltered and fed and fell in love with a homeless teenage squatter. She sticks to her ideals and values herself and is a loyal friend. Life seems to be finally offering her all her wishes on a platter- her dream of owning a florist shop comes true, the handsome, rich and brilliant neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid agrees to ditch his aversion of a committed relationship to get engaged to her. She can start to put her difficult childhood behind her.

Typical to a bestseller’s arch, and maybe real life, this is all too good to be true. There are horrible things that start to happen. Shadows emerge. Past secrets get exposed. Trust is broken and fears have to be faced. The present seems to resemble a forgotten nightmare. Love is put to cruel tests. There is a price to be paid, sacrifices to be made. What will you stay true to – to the one you love, though they hurt you, and let the cycle of abuse and indignity continue? Who has to take responsibility to heal themselves? Does being in love mean giving up responsibility for your own integrity? Does being in love also allow for boundaries? When do you know it is time to back out? How do you deal with the fear of losing all you craved for and have found?

The author takes you through the tortured back and forth of a relationship that stumbles from extremes of passion and commitment to jealous rage, mistrust, violence and regret. Lily starts to find a new understanding of her mother, once she finds herself in the same shoes. She can relate to what, as a child had seemed sheer cowardice and a shameful lack of spine. She can understand why her mother had stayed on. And she has to ask herself- can she be the person who will be different? Can she muster what it will take?

The author does a commendable job of presenting both sides of the picture, when it comes to the perpetrators and victims of abuse in loving relationships. There are no pure black as sin villains, no pure white as driven snow victims. Just real people with real problems, real hopes, real personalities, who are making the best they can of the cards dealt to them. People who decide they have a choice, to change the way they play those cards. Or not. And we are made to feel like we can see why each of them does what they do.

Lily comes into her own finally with her brave choice. And for that, she is willing to pay the biggest price. Because, somethings cannot be allowed to continue, no matter how much you love what they bring to you, and how much it pains to let them go. Therefore, the title, It Ends With Us.

Colleen’s skill is in making a story about the most painful choices in life seems like a feel good read. There is no shying away from the gore, and yet, there is a happy ending. The only issue I have with the way the book is the way the story ends. Lily’s bravery and her difficult choice seems less of a stand-alone act of strength with the twist at the end. In the novel the author has clearly tried to make things seem easier and rosier for her fictional characters than it was in the real life inspiration for this book. Most people in such difficult situations stay on because they fear the unknown outside the walls of the known hell. They keep hoping the better moments will prevail more often. They cling to every kind word, every positive thing that happens. They cannot imagine being on the other side, which looks like an even darker void. I wish the author had not gone for a neat tying up of all lose ends, and left Lily unclear about the shape of her future, yet firm and clear about the choice she made for the present.

Except for this one cop out at the end, I still think It Ends With Us makes a very important point. That we are the only ones who can chose to break legacies of abuse – as the ones who heap it on others, or as the ones who are its targets. It is never our job to be another’s punching bag, or to keep hoping against hope that their ‘better nature’ will prevail in the face of all proof to the contrary. And while making this point about taking responsibility for one’s choices and actions, the book also shows us why so many of us caught in situations of abuse in intimate relationships are helpless to break out of the cycle of enmeshment. It shows how difficult it is to gather back a sense of self, when enmeshed in toxic love. It lays bare in beautiful excruciating detail the guts and self-discipline required to honor one’s own dignity, the fears to be dealt with on the way. It brings a lot of insight and wisdom and empathy of a survivor to a topic laden with much judgment and prejudice. By sharing her own life story as the starting point for this novel, Colleen Hoover offers redemptive hope for all who dream of a better tomorrow in their intimate relationships.

I hope this book makes many more people feel brave enough to decide that It Ends With Us. It must.