Refugee by K.A Abbas - Refugee Series # 4

                                      

Today I would like to discuss a refugee tale based on Partition. The tale is narrated by K.A Abbas, an acclaimed journalist and filmmaker. He is the director who introduced Amitabh Bachan through the movie Saat Hindusthani which won the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration. Refugee tells the story of Maanji, a Sikh woman who is caught in three definitive periods of Indian history, before partition, during partition and after partition. The story of Maanji who moved away from Rawalpindi and reached Bombay is a poignant one. This is because it is difficult to explain why a good soul like Maanji had to suffer. She also inspires us even in her suffering. There is a meaningful line in the story where Maanji tells her son in Bombay these words – ‘Your Bombay may be great and grand city son, but we can never forget our Rawalpindi’. I would like to connect the story of Maanji to other dots. One is the history of the town of Lyallpur. The town is the birthplace of Bhagat Singh and the mother of Amitabh Bachan and was an important town which was caught in the historical whirlpool known as Partition. The second reference is to the movie Manto which chronicles the life of Shadan Hassan Manto. In one of the more memorable scenes when he bids farewell to Bombay, Manto recalls that he owes Re 1 to a shopkeeper. An actor friend (Tahir Raj Bhasin) suggests he'd pay on his behalf. Manto though doesn't want the favour. "I want to be indebted to this city."

(https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/reviews/story/manto-review-nandita-das-film-is-a-brilliant-portrait-of-a-self-destructive-creator-1345431-2018-09-21)

Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen Refugee Series # 3

                                                       

                                                       

Pulitzer Winner, Vietnamese American novelist short story collection is titled as Refugees and the first story in the collection is titled as ‘Black-Eyed Women’. The story is about a nameless ghostwriter who is haunted by his memories from the past. The book is dedicated to all the refugees, everywhere. The two quotes given at the beginning of the book is quite relevant to the theme of the book. 

‘I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time’ 

Roberto Bolano - Antwerp 

It is not your memories which haunt you

It is not what you have written down

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.

What you must go on forgetting all your life

  James Fenton - A German Requiem 

The narrator is a ghostwriter and her mother is happy about the fact that her name doesn’t appear in the book. She tells her a Vietnamese story about a reporter who was tortured for writing a newspaper report about the torture inflicted by the government on the people. Her mother is the connecting link between American and Vietnam. The narrator and her mother shared a passion for words, ‘I preferred the silence of writing, while she loved to talk’. Her mother kept on recollecting stories and gossip and her favourite kind of story was the ghost story. One day the mother says that she has seen the ghost of her brother standing in the living room, water dripping from his clothes. Narrators had died in the Vietnamese seas when the refugee boat in which they were travelling was attacked by the pirates. In a way, he died saving the narrator. There is a feeling of guilt that haunts the narrator. She says that ‘his eyes stared at me whenever I closed my own’.  The writer herself led a ghost-like life sleeping throughout the day and waking up at night for ghostwriting the life of someone else. The title of the story ‘black-eyed women refers to ‘the ancient crones who chewed betel nut who sat in the market and who had loads of stories to tell about the Korean, Japanese, American invasion of Vietnam. The story ends with the narrator facing the ghosts from her past including her brother’s ghost and taking up a writing assignment which is a book of her own. 

The Wanderers’ by Guadalupe Nettel - Refugee Series # 2

The second short story which I would like to introduce is ‘The Wanderers’ by Guadalupe Nettel. She is a Mexican writer and the short story is translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. The short story opens with a profound observation of childhood. The narrator describes childhood as something which ‘lingers crouched silently in our grown-up bodies and one day when we are old it reappears like lightning, striking us with its freshness, its innocence’ and this is when ‘we will get the last glimpse of it’. The story is about the friendship of Camilo and the narrator. Camilo’s parents arrived from Uruguay to Mexico. The two families lived in the same building - ‘Villa Olimpica’. The building was full of exiles and when the children played in the evening, their screeches and yells came in different accents, Mexican, Chilean, and Argentinian’. The narrator connects the inhabitants of the building and the birds which lived on the trees in the garden near the building. The narrator loved birds. She liked the songs, colours, sizes and feathers. In fact, it is the fascination with birds that takes the story forward. She remembers the trip with her father to the aviary which transformed her father into a bird enthusiast. The narrator’s family moves away from Villa Olimpica due to her father’s teaching job and the narrator says goodbye to Camilo. In one of her sea expeditions to spot the Brown Pelican, the father, daughter and the team of biologists’ unintentionally catches an albatross. They don’t kill it but sets it free. The short story talks about Baudelaire’s poem on Albatross, in which the bird is described as - ‘sky born kings, graceless and mortified. The narrator never wrote to Camila because she was ‘intimidated by the distance and time’ It was only when she was in France that she wrote to Camila. By 1983, half of the residents of Villa Olimpica left the building and went home. The author compares this to the natural behaviour of the albatross ‘even after flying across, barely touching the land’ some kind of ‘instinct guides them home’, not only to their country of origin ‘but just a few meters from the place where they were born’. The story is built on the symbol of Albatross. Unlike Coleridge who presents the bird as a cursed being (inspired by Baudrillard) here, the bird is connected to human lives and is also linked with the themes like migration, exile and homecoming. 

Bernard Malamud's The Refugee - Refugee series # 1

This week in Books and Authors, I would like to introduce six literary pieces based on the theme of refugees. The first in the series is a short story by Bernard Malamud. In his interview with the Paris Review, the author says that he wants his books to speak for themselves. He asks the reporter “You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me”.  He talks about his parents, who were not educated but ‘their values were stable’. He fondly remembers how his father gifted him the twenty volumes of The Book of Knowledge and received a radio from him when he was in high school. He enjoyed ‘watching movies and reading the dime novels’. He had made up his mind regarding what he wanted to become in life when he took to literature. As early as eight or nine, he used to write little stories in school. Bernard Malamud shares his wonderful perspective on learning and teaching. He says, “You learn what you teach, and you learn from those you teach” He enjoys writing more than talking because he loved the privileges of the form. The Refugee is the story of Oskar Gessner and Martin Goldberg. The former is a refugee from Germany in the US and the latter is a teacher of English Language. The former tries ‘to hide his despair but not his pain’. The latter made a little living from the poor refugees. Bernard Malamud has invested heavily on this student-teacher duo. I was reminded of the movie – The King’s Speech which again presented to us the guru-shishya bonding but in a highly power centric manner. The student is a king and the teacher is an ordinary phonetician. Even the movie “Anna and the King brings the teacher-student bonding based on power. One of the interesting notions that are presented in The Refugee is about the powerlessness of the tongue. Oskar can speak, read and write only German and using this the author represents the sad plight of refugees in a foreign land. “To many of these people, articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of the language – that they could no longer say what was in them to say”. One character further says that – ‘I felt like a child or worse often like a moron, I am left with myself unexpressed. What I knew, indeed, what I am becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.’ The story has a tagline – ‘I thought I knew his story. But there was some deep secret he had never told me’

Calm, the app and the book - Review

                                    

Today I would like to introduce the book ‘Calm’ as part of the ‘Books and Authors’ series @ RR. The author is Michael Acton Smith. It is a book which is based on the mobile app by the same name. We can roughly label it as a workbook for the ideas presented in the mobile app. The book (along with the app) is pitched for the sleep-deprived and stressed human beings. I remember posting a note in this blog long back about the significance of sleep in the modern world. 

https://premjithmathew.blogspot.com/2018/11/of-memory-dreams-and-sleep.html

Like Macbeth yearning for sleep, there are many sleep-deprived souls in our midst. How to sleep is only one area that is explored in the book. 

The innocent sleep, 

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, 

The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, 

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, 

Chief nourisher in life's feast.

The book is part of a new self-help project which has a book, digital version of the book and the mobile app which contains audio clips and short videos. The book deals with mindfulness, relationships, workplace, happiness. The book begins with a beautiful quote - ‘Calm the mind and Change the World’. In the short introduction to the book, the creator talks about the need to develop a calm mindset for acting responsively rather than reactively. They say that attaining this state of calm is one of the greatest challenges of our times. The book is designed in the form of a journal in which the reader can add handwritten notes and jottings. The book heavily borrows from literature in terms of quotes from Wordsworth, William Shakespeare and even from music - George Harrison. If you are interested, you can check out the mobile app to experience 100 + guided meditations and life-changing master classes by world-renowned mindful experts like Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Gilbert. (The premium features are available only for subscribers)

Paulo Coelho - Inspirations - Book Review

I would like to introduce a book from the author of Alchemist which is a collection of selections from classical literature. The collections are arranged in four sections – water, earth air and fire. It is a collection of extracts from classic books that have inspired him. The works are as diverse as The Art of War, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Frankenstein. Paulo Coelho talks about the way he received a book from his friend when he was getting ready to compile this book. The title of the book was 'The Book' by Jorge Luis Borges and it was written after Borges lost his vision. Coelho describes the style of writing in the book as conversational and he further adds that ‘the text had the fluidity and closeness of a talk’ Borges also describes the importance of the spoken word and how the ancients did not revere the book – the written word. They had this feeling that the written word ‘imprisoned the spirit’ of the oral teachings. 

Most of the great teachers of antiquity never wrote a single word. The teachings of Buddha, Pythagoras, Socrates or Lao Tzu were all oral. The sacred books in the written form became extensions of memory. The Ten Commandments was inscribed to make the human beings understand the divine stipulations. The written word enables us to remember and at the same time, it perpetuates the loss of memory. Just like Emerson who believed that a library was a magic cabinet and in books, we find the best demonstrations of the human spirit but to bring them to life we need to open the books and read them. Paulo Coelho is attempting to compel his readers to go to their magic cabinets and re-awaken their imagination. The collection or anthology has gems like the ‘Hymns to Agni, God of the Sacrifice’ - Rig Veda, from Bhagavad Gita, and Rabindranath Tagore’s selected poems – Brahma, Visnu and Siva. 

Robin Sharma - Daily Inspiration - Book Review

Continuing on my journey of introducing books from my personal collection, this week it will be self-help books. To start with the series, today I would like to introduce a small book by Robin Sharma which provides you with daily inspiration. The quotes are culled from the books in the Monk who sold his Ferrari series. For the sake of sampling, I am giving you the daily inspiration for February 10. I hope to add it as a regular feature in Morning Mantra series in the coming days. “If you really want to improve your outer world, whether this means your career, your relationships or your finances, you must first improve your inner world. The most effective way to do this is through the practice of continuous self-improvement. self-mastery is the DNA of life mastery. Greatness is an inside game.” Excerpt From: Robin Sharma. “Daily Inspiration from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.” Apple Books.

James Patterson - Along Came A Spider - Book Review

This week we have so far covered Japanese, Swedish, Malayalam crime fiction writers. Today we are looking at the American crime writing scene. The author is James Patterson and recently I read his book ‘Along Came a Spider’ which introduces us to the detective Alex Cross. The series based on Alex Cross has been running since the 1990s and is ongoing with the latest book which came out in 2019. What is so evident in the book is the life of Alex Cross who is an African American detective who has to face the social inequalities of the times. He is also a psychologist and a family man, and the novel can very well be termed as a psychological thriller. It is a mind game just like a game of chess. The events in the novel are based on a historical event which happened in the year 1932 when the infant son of Charles Lindberg was kidnapped and murdered. James Patterson has made it a point to make his detective humane. This is achieved through the interactions of Alex Cross with his grandmother and family. He is also close to his partner John Sampson. There is one line which is said by Alex Cross describing his long-standing friendship with Sampson. “Sampson knows me better than my own kids “The tribute he pays to his grandmother is also quite poignant - “She made a homicide detective, with a doctorate in psychology, who works and lives in the ghettos of Washington, D.C.”. The book was made into a movie and Morgan Freeman donned the part of detective Alex Cross.

Lajo Jose and Esther - Series Review

In today’s Books and Authors, I would like to introduce an author who is just 3 books old. He has already become a sensation in the world of Malayalam Crime Fiction. His name is Lajo Jose. I have read his first two novels - Coffee House and Hydrangea and I am listening to the third one ‘Ruthinte Lokam’ (The World of Ruth) using the Storytel app (Thanks to KLF20 delegate kit for the three-month free subscription) There are three reasons why I was attracted to these books. First one involves the childhood memory of reading the novels of Kottayam Pushpanath, Batton Bose and Ettamannur Sivakumar. These three are considered to be the doyens of Malayalam Crime fiction. They ruled the literary scene in the ’80s and ’90s. It is through them that I developed a flair for reading and also the passion of seeing places in the world. Kottayam Pushpanath wrote about the Egyptian Pyramids and Amazon forest and even Hitler’s bunker. So, when I heard that there is a new kid on the block writing like Kottayam Pushpanath, I immediately ordered the two books and I was even lucky enough to meet him in the Author’s lounge of KLF20. The second reason I love Lajo Jose is that he introduced a female detective Esther who worked as a journalist. She debuts in the first novel as a journalist who drawn into this case and later becomes a full-time investigator. She doesn’t have a companion only a friend Aparna who is also a journalist. Lajo Jose is different because he had the guts to introduce a female sleuth when the world of Crime Fiction is dominated by men. The third reason why I appreciate Lajo Jose is because he followed his passion to be a writer. He was working as an investment banker and he quit his job to become a full-time writer. He has found what he wants in his life and is diligently pursuing it. As I write this short note, Lajo Jose is working on his fourth novel in the Esther series. 

Henning Mankell - Wallander - Review

                                               

Inspector Wallander who is the sleuth in Henning Mankell’s novel is a casual being who doesn’t have the urgency or excitement of Holmes. He is prone to all sorts of human follies and foibles. A middle-aged and melancholic male detective who returns to his empty home every day. The home reminds him that he once had a family. “Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing workday, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion,” (The Troubled Man, 2009) In a way, the corruption and decay found in the hero is an echo for the corruption and decay of the society around him. The first novel which I read in the Wallander series was Sidetracked which was followed by Dogs of Liga and Faceless Killers. My fascination towards Swedish crime thrillers began with the Girl with Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson. When we read a series, we get so used to the characters and their life. We know the characters inside and out and it creates a kind of fascination. Maybe that’s the reason why Henning Mankell wrote nine novels which were all made into movies. The BBC series Wallander made the author famous in the English-speaking countries along with the translated works. This crime novel is about the deaths of three young Swedes and the death of Wallander’s colleague. 

The Devotion of Suspect X - Review

This week ‘Books and Authors’ will feature crime and mystery novels from my library. The first novel that I would like to discuss is ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ by the Japanese author Keigo Higashino. I got introduced to this author 2 months ago through an old friend of mine from MCC. Keigo Higashino is known for his mystery novels. Most of his books have been turned into films and T.V series. He started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso company. The book that I am introducing today is the second highest-selling book in all Japan. It won the prestigious Naoki Prize for Best novel which is the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. The story involves a mathematician and his neighbours. The life of Ishigami, Yasuko and her daughter Misato get entangled in this novel. The reader also is treated to some valuable insights about Mathematics and Education. There is also the celebration of academic camaraderie between two mathematicians, Yukawa and Ishigami. There are references to mathematical geniuses like Arthur Cayley and Paul Erdos. There are some interesting insights based on the art of teaching and learning. Sample these lines – ‘Yet too many teachers refused to answer simple questions of relevance from their students. No, Ishigami thought, they probably aren’t able to answer them. They taught without really understanding their subjects, simply following a set curriculum, thinking only of coaxing a passing grade from the students so they could send them on their way to make room for next year’s flock. Questions like Morioka’s would have been nothing but an irritation to them’.

You can also trace the true ‘inspiration’ for the Malayalam movie ‘Drishyam’ which was later made in Tamil as ‘Papanasam’. This book inspired the Japanese director Hiroshi to make a movie titled – Suspect X which in turn inspired the Korean movie – The Perfect Number (2012) and since most Indian filmmakers watch Korean movies, Drishyam came out  in the year 2013 followed by Papanasam in 2015. 

Enigma - Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

Like a good book, a visually rich film mesmerizes the human mind for some days. The movie I am referring to is 1917 which I saw yesterday. Based on the WW1, the movie is a good ‘textbook’ for both history and literary lovers and is also technically perfect as the whole movie is composed of a single camera shot. Today’s Books and Authors present a book which is based on the Enigma machine which was used by the German navy to take out the English ships. The book is titled as Enigma - the battle for the code. The book delves deeper into the story of the Enigma machine and it will be an interesting read for individuals who are curious about the past. The book takes us beyond the scenes from the movie - Imitation Game which chronicled the life and times of Alan Turing. It is a commonly held belief that Alan Turing broke the code and saved hundreds of British U-boats and ships. The book tells us that the encoding the Enigma machine happened due to the sacrifice of ordinary British seamen who risked and sometimes lost their lives in the battle for the code. They are the ones who captured Enigma codebooks and manuals which led to the team at Bletchley Park to break the code. The capture of the Enigma spy, Hans Thilo Schmidt also was also an important step towards the cracking of the code. Bletchley Park is an important historical site and to quote from the website https://bletchleypark.org.uk. ‘Bletchley Park is a place of exceptional historical importance. It remains highly relevant to our lives today and for the future. It is the home of British codebreaking and a birthplace of modern information technology. It played a major role in World War Two, producing secret intelligence which had a direct and profound influence on the outcome of the conflict’.

Fluid by Ashish Jaiswal

A book for both educators and learners. It is based on ‘Vishnudharmottaram Puranam’. The book begins with the story of Malvina Reynolds. She, in her early fifties, attended the University of California, Berkeley to study music theory. The society always told her that she cannot go to the universities at the age of fifty. Malvina wrote on upholding the rights of women, equality against nuclear testing, protecting civil right, shopping wars and many such themes. In her seventies, Malvina was doing around 20 concerts a year ago and against the advice of many, she continued to perform until shortly before her brief illness and death. 

Malvina didn’t act as per the perceptions and myths of the world. Malvina was more than what she was taught to be. The book also has some interesting references. There is a reference to The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand and the character Howard Roark who refused to become a mere follower or ‘the second handlers – those who simply copy and do not have the courage to produce original designs. There is also reference to the Ramones and their song- It’s not my place (in the 9-5 world) - I took a 3 minute and 23 seconds break to listen to the song.  There is also reference to the spinning doctors to check whether you are a left-brained person or a left-brained person.

The literary reference to V.S Naipaul is quite interesting. He said that he would have become a better person if he had studied profoundly. The author, Ashish Jaiswal also talks about the life and times of scientist and novelist Charles Percy Snow who is the author of ‘The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution’ – Snow had a very interesting lifestyle. In the morning he would interact with scientists and evening he will discuss ideas with a circle of friends. The book Fluid is all about challenging boundaries. The book contains stories of people who refused to jail themselves inside the boundaries of one or the other island. They built their own hypothetical boats and sailed in search of new knowledge. The author calls them – ‘fluid thinkers. These were adventurers, unafraid to weather the stormy oceans, which existed in the form of threats and mockery from those who remained stuck with their existing learning. These wanderers travelled from one island to another without a set path, without a map, without the fear of failure – learning freely, challenging the existing world views and eventually changing the course of human history. 

Jack Kerouac - On the Road - Book Review

 

The book contains a detailed introduction about the creation of this novel. Bob Dylan paid rich tributes to this novel when he said, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s”. The introduction is prepared by Ann Charters who started collecting books written by Beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University. She was part of the audience which had gathered to listen to Allen Ginsberg when he gave the second public reading of ‘Howl’. After completing her doctorate, she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography. She is the one who first wrote the biography of Jack Kerouac (pronounced as care-ooo-ack) The introduction begins with the description of Joyce Johnson and Kerouac waiting near a newsstand on the midnight of September 4^th, 1957 for the New York Times. Jack was informed that the review of his novel ‘On the Road’ will appear in that day’s newspaper. Standing under a street lamp, they read the review which described ‘On the Road’ as ‘an authentic work of art’ which is ‘beautifully executed’ and contains ‘the clearest and most important utterance’... ‘of the beat generation’. Jack Kerouac was described as the ‘principal avatar’ of the Beat generation. The ‘Village Voice Reviewer’ describes the book as ‘the rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these times.’ The introduction continues to describe the way the novel was written. ‘On the Road’ is all about how Kerouac found ‘a personal voice’ and he was thirty-five years old when the novel was published. Just like Benyamin met Najib and wrote The Goat Days, Kerouac met Neal Cassady who is the inspiration for his character Dean Moriarty. The first version of the novel was a cheap imitation of the style of Theodore Dreiser. Kerouac wanted the novel to be a quest novel like Cerventes’s ‘Don Quixote’ and John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. 

TRS Sharma - Reflections and Variations in The Mahabharata

 

The book is based on the papers read during the International seminar on the Mahabharata: tests, Contexts, readings held by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi as parts of its Golden Jubilee celebrations. The book contains 24 essays and articles The Mahabharata is described as a leviathan of an epic which is three times the size of Iliad and Odyssey put together. The epic is not treated as history but as a literary work which contains various complementary and contradictory elements. The epic in its first stage of growth called ‘Jaya’ contained some 8000 or so verses and its second stage expanded to 24,000 stanzas. The third stage it grew into what we now have with nearly 100,000 stanzas. The book also explores how, Siva, Rama and Krishna have become not only Indian cultural icons but are also part of the Hindu collective imagination. Various rewritings of the epic in various Indian languages are also discussed. The re-readings of the epic in Bengali was done by Buddhadev Bose with his well-known version known as ‘Mahabharater Katha’. The two novelists in Malayalam who tried to re-write the epic are P.K Balakrishnan and M.T Vasudevan Nair. There are also essays/articles about the Konkani version and Kannada version of the epic. In Marathi, one prominent work of interpretation is ‘Astika’ by Sane Guruji. In Hindi, the play by Dharmavir Bharati titled Andha Yug presents a modern version of the epic. The Kannada novel ‘Parva’ by S.L. Bhyrappa, and ‘Grandmother’s Desires’ by Kumudini (Real Name: Ranganayaki Thatam) are also mentioned in the book. 

Indica - A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent - Pranay Lal

20 years of research, travel, conversations, and interviews have gone into the making of this book. The book is hailed as the first definitive natural history of the Indian Subcontinent. The author begins the book with a personal note to the reader in which he discusses his love for nature. He recollects the days he has spent examining stones and logs, climbing trees, swimming in ponds. As a child and as an adult, he is excited about the ways in which nature constantly work and how everything is related to each other. He also pays homage to true scientists/researchers who are like explorers. They work tirelessly, excavating through layers of rocks and sediment. He celebrates these discoveries in this book. He starts the journey to discover the beginnings of the Earth and India at Nandi Hills in Mysore. He invites the reader to look at ‘the grey rock that glistens darkly in the rain’ He tells us that the rock belongs to the family of rocks called the Dharwar Craton which was formed 3.5 million years ago. The author then takes us around India to provide examples of different rock formations keeping the tale of how the Earth was formed as a background. His passion for geology is quite evident when he says that if we take a train from Bengaluru to Jammu, more than the 2700 kilometres that we may cover, it is the 3 million years of Earth’s history that we will uncover - just by simply looking out of the window. The book with its 15 chapters has beautiful illustrations and detailed maps to complement the narrative.

V. S Naipaul - Literary Occasions - Book Review

A collection of 11 essays by the Nobel Prize author about his writing life and the experiences that shaped his writing. The introduction of the books is prepared by Pankaj Mishra (Indian essayist and novelist) In his introduction, Mishra explains the ‘intellectual colonialism’ that happened in Russia which was beautifully described by Pyotr Chaadev in his series of letters known as ‘Philosophical Letters’. In the letter, he denounces the cultural isolation and the mediocrity of Russia along with the intellectual impotence of the Russian elite. He says, “Our memories reach back no further than yesterday and we are strangers to ourselves.” He was making fun of the Russians who looked up to Western Europe for cultural direction. Pushkin in his poem makes his protagonist wonder whether if the truth is somewhere outside him, perhaps in some other land, in Europe for instance. These comparisons with Russian literary scene are used to introduce the literary context in Trinidad where V.S. Naipaul’s father Seepersad worked as a journalist after making a long journey away from his peasant origins. He suffered for want of a literary tradition. Trinidad was small, politically unimportant and geographically isolated from the rest of the world. It wasn’t much encountered in print and like his father, Naipaul also found it very hard to write about the land. Naipaul says “Great novelists wrote about highly organized societies. I had no such societies…I didn’t see my world reflected in theirs” It took many years for Naipaul to free himself of this metropolitan tradition to find the courage to write about the Port of Spain street he knew. His first publishable book was ‘Miguel Street’. Literary Occasions has a companion piece ‘The Writer and the World’ which discusses writers such as Kipling, Gandhi, Nirad C Chaudhari, Conrad and R.K Narayan. 

Ruskin Bond - Lone Fox Dancing - My Autobiography - Book Review

The books begins with three quotes - ‘ There may be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but if a man believes with all his soul that there is, and spends his life in the effort to vindicate that belief, his efforts will surely bring him somewhere at last; perhaps to a brighter goal than even the rainbow’s end.’ - Aylward Edward Dingle - A Modern Sinbad. The second quote is from Sir Richard Burton - ‘From none but self expect applause’. The third quote is from Rabindranath Tagore - ‘Across the boundaries of life and death/There you stand, O friend of mine.’

In the dedication and acknowledgement section, he says that even a fox needs a family referring to the adopted family of Rakesh and Beena who has looked after him these many years. He feels that he is part of the greater world; of India and the planet Earth and the infinite worlds beyond. He confesses that he decided long ago to stop trying to grow up. He declares that at the same time ‘he is a young boy and an old writer’, without any regrets. He says that almost everything he has written has been drawn from his own experiences. Thus, fragments of his autobiography are scattered everywhere, in his novels, stories, essays and poems. Some of the vignettes from his childhood revolves around food. He loved mutton kofta, and desserts like Gulab jamun, jalebis, rasagullas and laddoos and had the habit of washing them all down with a glass of lemonade. The stories he heard from his ‘ayah’ and the cook Osman stayed in his memory. He was named as Owen Ruskin Bond by his father after the famous Victorian writer and painter, John Ruskin. Owens means warrior in Welsh. His father’s taste for photography and music had an influence on him in his later life. Before they packed their bags from Jamnagar to Dehra Dun, young pleads with his father to take the gramophone with them. His love for railways also was nurtured due to the constant shifting of homes, from plain to hills and then back to the plains. His habit of walking was also developed in Jamnagar because it was full of spacious palaces, lawn and gardens. He describes his autobiography as ‘story of a small man, and his friends and experiences in small places’

Manu S Pillai - The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin - Book Review

A collection of essays by one of the young historians of India. The book is divided into three parts - The first part is titled as - Before the Raj, the second part as Stories from the Raj and the third part is the Afterword which contains the sources and list of further reading. In a single page introduction, (a rare thing for a book which has 350+ pages) the author discusses the need to study history in the context. He also encourages each reader to draw her own conclusions because the objective of the book is just to light the way. For want of time and ease of reading, I will share ideas from three essays. The first one is the story of the Italian Brahmin - An Italian Jesuit who came to Madurai to convert. Since the European missionaries were dismissed as unclean, Roberto de Nobili decided to give up his cassock for the ochre garb of a sanyasi. He famous pronouncement was ‘I will become a Hindu to save the Hindus’ in 1646, he was transferred out of Madurai and died, blind and ten years later in Mylapore. The second tale is about the courtesan who became a princess. The name of the courtesan is Begum Samru. She was transformed into a warrior by her husband Walter Reinhardt. She was an intelligent woman who played the right cards with the power centres to make sure that she stayed in the upper echelons of power. She was in charge of the province known as Sardhana in the present-day U.P

By the time she died in the year 1836, she was one of the richest women in India. The third tale about Mahatma. Manu talks about the ironical situation when the body of Mahatma, who was an advocate of non-violence, was taken through the streets of Delhi with a scene of dramatic military display. Policemen were stationed at every nook and corner, along with around 4,000 trained men of war. His body itself was taken around on a gun carriage. Even the life of Mahatma was ridden with ironies. Hope you will grab a copy of this wonderful book and experience for yourself the lucid and captivating style of historical narration of Manu.S. Pillai. 

Olive Again - Book Review

Today in the series Authors & Books, I would like to introduce the book ‘Olive, Again’ by the author Elizabeth Strout. The book was featured in the Oprah Book Club in Apple TV+. The novel is set in a fictional town known as Crosby, Maine. Maine is home for many creative minds like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Stephen King and Harriet Beecher Stowe. This is the second book discussed in the Oprah Book Club on Apple TV+. The first book discussed was The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates which dealt with the themes of racism and with some hard-hitting views about Thomas Jefferson. 

‘Olive, Again’ the second book after the novel ‘Olive Kitteridge’ (The novel won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) is a novel which talks about kindness, empathy, and remorse. The author says that she writes to make people aware that they are not alone, and life is sometimes uncomfortable. One of the participants who is from Somalia tells the book club members that it is very rare for White authors to write about refugees and discuss the theme of diversity. ‘’The novel is an acknowledgement of humanity’’ says the participant. One of the main themes discussed in the novel is ‘loneliness’. Oprah and her team while doing research for this session discovered the fact that the word loneliness is the most googled word especially during the night. The writing is visual and stunning and Olive tells us ‘to keep going’. One of the surprises in the book session was when Oprah introduced the first woman Governor of Maine. ‘We love a governor who reads’ Oprah announces in an excited manner.