The Week - Books

hades-argentina-review

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 15:39:15 GMT

Hades, Argentina, the just published novel by Daniel Loedel, is about the killing, torture and “disappearance” of thousands of leftists during the brutal Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s.

Tomas Orilla, the main character in the novel, is a medical student who moves from his hometown La Plata to Buenos Aires in 1976 to be closer to his teenage sweetheart Isabel. He discovers that she has become a member of the Montonero leftist guerilla movement. She seeks his help to infiltrate the government agencies involved in the detention of opponents of the military regime. With the help of Colonel Felipe Gorlero, his guardian in the city and a senior official in the military intelligence, Tomas gets a part time job in a secret and illegal military detention centre. His job includes drugging the detainees to induce confession, revive them when they pass out after torture and provide minimum medical help to keep the prisoners alive until information is extracted from them. Thereafter, they are transferred for “disposal”.

Tomas is traumatised seeing the macabre methods of torture, screaming of the victims and their suffering. The torturers carry out their gruesome work coolly and casually while listening to football match commentaries, joking about colleagues and making cruel comments on the victims. Eventually, he is caught for espionage and helping some detainees escape. He becomes a detainee himself. But the Colonel Gorlero comes to his rescue and helps him escape to Rome. However, in exchange for the colonel’s help, Tomas had to give out information on Isabel’s hideout location.

From Rome, Tomas moves to New York where he marries an American. But the marriage breaks down since Tomas is unable to settle down, haunted by his nightmares.

In 1986, he travels to Buenos Aires to see Isabel’s mother in the hospital with a terminal illness. During his stay in the city, he is haunted by the ghosts of the colonel and Isabel. He returns to the sites containing his darkest memories and most profound regrets. He wanders in the Recoleta cemetery and in the streets of the city lost in the labyrinth of memory, guilt and loss. He realizes how hard it must be for those Argentines who hadn’t left the country, having to go about their daily lives with the possibility of bumping into their torturers at train stations and random intersections or having to wonder, because they’d been blindfolded back then, if the man giving them a funny look on the bus had raped them.

There are Dantesque dialogues between the colonel and Tomas on death, sin, hell, purgatory and redemption. The two carry on their long conversations, alternating between real life and the after-life, during their wanderings through the Recoleta cemetery and long hours of sitting in cafes.

Loedel’s novel is based on the real life story of his own half-sister Isabel Loedel Maiztegui, a Montonero activist, who was murdered by the military dictatorship in January 1978, when she was just 22.

Loedel was born and has lived in New York, where his father had moved from Argentina after the coup. Loedel travelled to Argentina in 2018 for DNA confirmation of the identity of Isabel from the bone and skull remains in the forensic lab. He buried her remains formally in a ceremony in 2019 in La Plata next to the others who were also killed during the Dirty War of the dictatorship.

The author reflects on his identity crisis as a US citizen of Argentine origin. His father refused to let him visit Argentina because of the bitterness over the loss of his daughter. It was only at the age of 22 that he visited Argentina for the first time. He connected to the extended family and friends of Isabel and collected information for the novel. His father translated the novel into Spanish, adding authenticity to the spirit and language.

On the character of Argentines, the author comments aptly, “we Argentines are so particular, no one else would put up with us. The Porteños (residents of Buenos Aires city), who fancy themselves so European, turn up their noses at anyone from the rest of the continent. The country is one of the vainest in the world. So many of our problems stem from that. ‘Have to be better than the Brazilians, have to be pretty, have to be European’. These are comments I have often heard from my Argentine friends themselves who would express the same more colorfully, with the choicest abusive words.”

On the capital city of the country, the author comments, “Buenos Aires never showed its scars, never let its surface be ruffled; it was a city made for forgetting as much as for nostalgia”.

The author has an interesting definition, “Peronism is like poetry—it can’t be explained, only recognized.” He says, “Peronism was the ideal vehicle for those like Isabel who wanted change but didn’t necessarily possess a full-fledged ideology or agenda. After Peron himself was booted from the country in 1955 and his party proscribed, their right-wing aspects were widely forgotten and the label evolved into a catchall for populism of every stripe, a handy banner for anyone who wanted to step on the battlefield. (Indeed, the Montonero guerrillas originally took up arms to bring Perón back from exile, before growing into a broader insurrection against state oppression.) The word almost had spiritual connotations now; for some, it was a moral lifestyle as much as a fight against injustice”. Peronism continues to divide the nation vertically even now. There is a constant and strong Peronist voter base which is seduced and cultivated by the politicians. On the other side, there is a significant part of the population who hate Peronism and blame it for all the problems of the country.

The military has gone back to the barracks irreversibly since 1983. But the civilian governments since then have mismanaged the economy periodically causing tragedies of hyper inflation, debt default, foreign exchange shortage and misery for the common people. Argentina, which was one of the top ten richest countries in the beginning of the 20th century, has regressed and is in the middle of yet another cycle of financial crisis at present.

Hades, Argentina reminds me of another Argentine novel Purgatory by Tomas Eloy Martinez. This is a similar story in which Emilia, the protagonist, is haunted by the memory of her husband who “disappeared” during the dictatorship.

Argentina seems to be still struggling to come out of the shades of Hades and purification in Purgatory.

The author is an expert in Latin American affairs

novel-take-on-the-new-normal

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 17:18:27 GMT

Why would one need to go through a gargantuan non-fiction title to hear the same message that has been repeated several times over the past few months across newspapers, magazines and social media—how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought in ‘the new normal’, how you have to transform yourself to survive in this new reality, and so on and so forth…

The answer comes in the form of the big ticket names behind this new book, Transformation in Times of Crisis—a veteran Fortune 500 entrepreneur presently heading one of India’s biggest IT services companies, as well as a marketing master often cited as one of the predominant authorities when it comes to organisational behaviour and marketing strategy. Transformation in Times of Crisis is the brainchild of Mphasis CEO Nitin Rakesh and Wharton academic Jerry Wind.

And no, it is no mere repeat of what you have been reading in newspapers of professionals and companies racing to digitise themselves, become nimble in operations and transform themselves to meet the new reality thrown up by the pandemic. As they write in the beginning, “This might be a new reality but that does not mean we should surrender to it. We can transform any crisis into opportunities.”

But unlike the umpteen articles that tell you to ‘re-skill’, but remains vague on what one is supposed to actually do, this book wades in, leisurely and in detail, with excel sheets and tools on what you could try. It all boils down to eight principles that will do the trick, the authors say.

While the book is copiously peppered with ‘re-’ jargons (‘reimagine’, ‘reinvent’, ‘redraw’), the good thing is that it explains each of the eight principles thoroughly for whoever cares to read through. The principles include:

Challenge your mental modes and always stay ahead
Reimagine and reinvent your approach to customers and stakeholders
Speed up digital transformation and design for personalisation at scale
Reinvent your talent strategy and embrace open innovation and open talent
Seize the need for speed and design for ability, adjacencies and adaptability
Innovate, then experiment, experiment, experiment
Redraw your timelines and build a portfolio of initiatives across all innovation horizons
Deploy idealised design, recreate your organisational architecture

The book delves into crunching each of these principles in detail, with explanations and anecdotes galore, along with a complete set of tools to help with the implementation, including what to do and how to do it. There will be a dashboard to monitor the progress real-time, and a future app (the co-author is a software tycoon, remember?) which will help as a strategy worksheet.

That is also a peeve one could harbour against this book—its heaviness. It is no airport read, nor is it for the bibliophile (it might look good on your bookshelf as a Zoom backgrounder, perhaps!), but a serious syllabi for the serious professional (or corporate) earnest about their future. Filled with anecdotes, case studies, infographics and even ‘Ask Yourself’ sections at the end of each chapter, this is as good a lesson in re-skilling as may be the refresher course need of the hour.

Transformation in Times of Crisis: Eight Principles for Creating Opportunities and Value in the Post-Pandemic World

By Nitin Rakesh and Jerry Wind

Published by NotionPress

Price: Rs 899 (Hardcover available for Rs 791 from Amazon.in)

Pages: 549

humour-in-stilettos

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 14:30:14 GMT

Meher Castelino—renowned fashion journalist, former model and India’s first Femina Miss India—knows the world of fashion intimately. So when she writes about its inner workings, you better sit up and take note.

Glamour is a snarky world—full of tit-for-tats and dog-eat-dogs. That is why the snark in Castelino’s words matches the world she is describing. There is the head buyer of a fashion house whose “personality does not match her job profile”, who hates maths, travelling and is paralysed by enochlophobia, or the fear of crowds. There are the “fro queens”, or the page 3 regulars and movie stars who occupy the front rows at fashion shows. They are the trend-setters and the proud owners of the best dresses from the designers’ latest collections on the ramp. There are the couturiers who are great with resort wear, but bring out bridal wear collections that are a mish-mash of swimwear and sheer lehengas.

Castelino is a mistress of irony, and when she picks out certain “quirks” of the fashion world, such as the ever-increasing categories in beauty contests (best grey matter, Rummy champion, Tombola queen), you cannot help but smile. She is often ruthless, and no one is free from the fiery darts of her drollery, from the showstoppers who are tutored on how to talk, to the celebs who launch paediatric wards in Red Carpet gowns. The question-and-answer format in which the book is structured makes it a breezy read. And gives her leeway for some hilarious one-liners.

If some of the characters who unwittingly waltz into her line of fire are turned into caricatures, one must excuse the irreverence. After all, satire demands sacrifice of some form, and the fashion world seems to have taken the jibes in the right spirit. It is great that some of the biggest Indian designers, like Tarun Tahiliani and the late Wendell Rodricks, have chosen to endorse the book.

A designer might be nimble with his needle, but what a dud he would be if he cannot poke some fun at himself with it.

Fashion Musings

By Meher Castelino

Published by Meher Castelino

Price Rs295; pages 160

powerful-evocative

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 14:26:25 GMT

I found poetry in a pandemic, says Sneha Bhura, senior correspondent, THE WEEK, about her first poetry chapbook. The lockdown brought many lives to a standstill. As work from home became the new normal, people found outlets to release their pent-up energy—writing, running, cooking, singing, painting—leading to discovery or re-discovery of hidden or buried talent.

Though Sneha was busy reporting during the lockdown, she started to write for herself when work was long over. “It took a pandemic-induced lockdown combined with a desperate bid to save one hope-instilling event from melting into inconsequence to heave out my fear and anguish into midnight poems. Since then, there has been no looking back,” she says in the introduction.

Her collection of 31 poems is intimate and evocative. They speak of heartbreak and loss, hope and happiness. From purging the past to igniting new fervour, the poems touch upon different relationships and their emotions. Friends, family, flatmate, life back home in Kolkata and in Delhi, and even cooking during a pandemic inspires poems.

There is longing, anxiety, laughter, events and also a pen drive full of memories. Sneha has written about everything she felt before and during the lockdown and ends on a note of acceptance and understanding.

Velvet Grapes is honest and simple and, if, as the book says, it is drunk midnight poetry, it is of fine quality.

Velvet Grapes: Drunk Midnight Poetry

By Sneha Bhura

Published by Hawakal Publishers

Price Rs250, pages 56

inside-kalam-world

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:22:12 GMT

After the Kargil conflict in 1999, three service chiefs briefed prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about the inadequacy of modern weapons and the delay in development of systems by the Defence Research and Development Organisation. This put Vajpayee under pressure to ask DRDO chief A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to step down. Vajpayee, who had great respect for Kalam, instead made him principal scientific advisor to the government.

Dr A. Sivathanu Pillai, architect of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, has narrated many such anecdotes in 40 Years with Abdul Kalam: Untold Stories. Pillai shared many iconic moments with the former president of India over the four decades they worked together. Besides stories about ISRO, DRDO and BrahMos, the book gives insight into the evolution of national security technologies over the years.

Pillai says Kalam was a man without ego and could adapt himself to any situation. Kalam once told Pillai that Vajpayee had even requested the president to travel less as he had become more popular than the prime minister.

While the first four chapters talk about Kalam’s early days as a scientist, the chapter on strategic industries gives insight into how India has steadily progressed in the defence sector.

While assessing Kalam’s life, Pillai counts the upsets, too. When Kalam failed in his ambition to become an IAF pilot, he landed up at Swami Sivananda’s ashram in Rishikesh. He learnt to deal with the disappointment and the experience changed him. Kalam would go on to become commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces.

40 Years with Abdul Kalam: Untold Stories

By A. Sivathanu Pillai

Published by
Pentagon Press

Price Rs795; pages 230

colaba-chronicles

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 09:17:20 GMT

Shabnam Minwalla is an amazing writer. So much comes through in each of her sentences—detail, description, research.... Above all, she puts her soul into her writing. So, when she writes about Colaba, that southern nub of Maximum City—that little corner where her world begins and ends, even though she may have travelled far and wide—one knows, even before opening the book, that it will be an intense read. She knows this place, and how.

Colaba is that Mumbai locale which is so quintessentially Mumbai. It is from where the BEST's Bus No 1 plies. It is sometimes wrapped in the past—with those old houses with Italian-tiled floors and ancient lifts and ancient people who are still dressed in styles from the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, it still remains one of the most happening places in the city, even though the action may now have shifted to the queen of suburbs, Bandra, and beyond. It retains top spot in every tourist's itinerary, and has the most recall value internationally, for both good and bad events, the last being the terrible 26/11 attacks, where three Colaba spots—the Taj hotel, Cafe Leopold and Nariman House—were targeted.

Minwalla's book has something special for every reader—history and legend for the passing tourist, and what might be surprising discoveries for the veteran Colabawallah. On the one hand, this is a personalised account of her family's Colaba roots, and on the other, she shows how intrinsic Colaba has been to global developments, even perhaps influencing history. Like it did when Winston Churchill got injured at Sassoon Docks, resulting in him using a pistol instead of a sword in the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan, which saved his life.

As interesting is the number of well-known figures who have lived in Colaba at some point. This includes Mohammed Rafi; Kawas Nanavati (whom she refers to as the most famous Colaba killer); Ramaiah Naidu, who helped set up the Tata Memorial Hospital; his daughter, actor Leela Naidu; and her husband, poet-author Dom Moraes. Minwalla also writes about the people who were part of her life—teachers and tailors, for instance—whose stories add colour and detail to the Colaba mosiac.

Even though the book is an engaging read, there is something the reader would crave, especially one like me, with a naval background. Minwalla's Colaba chronicles stop at the beginning of the military station, though she does touch upon some landmarks there—like the Afghan Church and the Parsi Agiary. The naval community, however, adds much of the colour and variety to Colaba, giving the locality two added dimensions—its continuing maritime and military importance. She has also given a miss to the infamous Geeta Nagar slum, which gave Shabana Azmi one of her first brushes with activism. She has not even mentioned the Naval Kindergarten, said to be Asia's largest. Or the weather station and the famous football-shaped radar atop a residential building. And while she has described the residents and buildings of the Causeway in detail, she has barely craned her neck upwards to comment on the Adarsh building scam. Then again, this is a personalised book. Where Minwalla leaves off, another Colabawallah could pick up the story. Or perhaps, she could think of another book?

Colaba, The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai

By Shabnam Minwalla

Published by Speaking Tiger

Price Rs499; pages 177

a-translation-tribute

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:41:33 GMT

Chandrasekhar Kambar, one of the leading figures in contemporary Indian literature, is known for his works rooted in the rural lore of north Karnataka. The very fact that his works carry a rich folk idiom from his land makes their translation a tough job. Krishna Manavalli, however, has triumphed in providing a faithful translation to his mesmerising works, The Bringer of Rain: Rishyasringa and Mahmoud Gawan, in the book Two Plays.

The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa is a spin-off of Kambar’s long poem Heleatini Kela (Listen, I Will Tell You). Both the poem and the play are set in a fictional village, Shivapura.

The play starts with the famine-struck Shivapura waiting for village chieftain's son Balagonda; there is a prophecy that his homecoming would bring rain. But it becomes evident that his mere presence will not bring rain. The correction needs to be done to get rid of the “bundle of old karma”, and Balagonda has to confront his father for that.

As a play, Mahmoud Gawan is very different from Rishyashringa. The “rural” Kannada in Rishyashringa makes way for a “neutral” Kannada in Mahmoud Gawan. As musician Rajeev Taranath notes in the foreword of Two Plays, Manavalli “was able to create a language which can handle these two extremes of the source language”.

Mahmoud Gawan is a historical play that portrays the life of an Iranian merchant who comes to India and later becomes diwan of the Bahmani Sultanate. As diwan, he treats people with compassion and promotes equality and religious harmony, but the treacherous political atmosphere in the sultanate causes his tragic death. Kambar's plays are layered at multiple levels, and Manavalli has produced the best translation—and thereby an apt tribute—to Kambar’s works.

Two Plays

By Chandrasekhar Kambar

Translated by Krishna Manavalli

Published by Penguin Books

Price Rs299; pages 212

understanding-power-dynamics

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 18:34:31 GMT

There have been three opportunities since 1960 in resolving the border dispute with China, writes Singh. The first was when Zhou Enlai offered an east west swap—Aksai Chin in lieu of Arunachal Pradesh—when he visited India in 1960, but India's reluctance to equate the two sectors saw this offer being rejected. Then, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping offered the package solution to the then foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, an offer repeated several times subsequently. Indira Gandhi did briefly consider this offer, but it fell through because of disagreements in her national security team. A third opening came in 2005, with the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles agreement which declared the package solution as the only way forward. This time, however, China pulled back.

Singh, in this book, traces the history of the border dispute with China, explaining the messy arrangements India inherited from the British rule, and how subsequent geopolitics worked into making a border—so beautifully and clearly defined by the great Himalayas—into an unresolved problem that is drawing blood even 70 years later. He weaves in the changing dynamics of the world with the growing stature of the two countries, explaining how the two simply cannot afford to be engaged in conflict especially when the Asia of 2030 is shaping up, an Asia that is more like it was for 1,800 years of the last two millennia—flourishing on its own and not being simply as assembly hub and export powerhouse for the west, as he puts it. “One cannot fit into the Asian economy by completely sealing off China from the Indian economy,'' he argues.

As Singh traces the events of recent history, elaborating on every opportunity missed, he also looks at the reshaping of the world, and explains the efforts of the two big Asian nations to stamp their imprint on this emerging multipolar wold order, as he terms it. There is depth and detail in this book, making it a ready reckoner for any scholar or researcher wanting to understand the dynamics at play between dragon and elephant, whether military, geopolitical or economic.

He makes a strong argument for peace, emphasising that conflict and bloodshed are to the advantage of neither country and their growing global ambitions. He argues for competitive co existence in a common neighbourhood. He points out that both Beijing and New Delhi engage with smaller states in the neighbourhood , yet neither side is under the delusion that India's neighbours can be rallied against it (with the exception of Pakistan), or that India can rally southeast Asian states to balance Chinese power. Another discernible trend, he points out is that neither country seems to be pressuring smaller south Asian states to make hard choices that run contrary to the interests of each other.

He discusses if the “present negotiation structure is leading to an endless scramble over regularising conflicting LACs, can the overall approach be amended?'' According to him, that will need political will on both sides, and the give and take would involve the Akshai Chin- Arunachal Pradesh swap. This however, requires strategic trust and sensitivity to each other's security perceptions. That trust and sensitivity, he says has dissipated since 2017.

Singh says the next opportunity for a border settlement might emerge as unexpectedly as it did in the past. “If history teaches us one insight, it is that opportunities to solve this question last for brief windows before the cycles of uncertainty rear their impact on India- China relations. It would require bold leadership and geopolitical acumen to convert fleeting moments into an enduring settlement.''

These are strong arguments he makes, and he writes them with much insight and clarity of thought, making the book a very engrossing read. With China dominating India's mindspace right now, Powershift is a recommended pick up.

Title: Power Shift

Author: Zorawar Daulat Singh

Publisher : Pan Macmillan India

Price: Rs 650

Pages: 335

of-love-and-poetry

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 21:00:31 GMT

Busy right now with my precious bamboo flute,

my delicate fingers on the holes.

Darling, can't snuggle you now,

I'm lost fiddling this melodious flute.

Chill out—have some chilli!

Can't squeeze you right now.

Busy with my precious little bamboo flute,

my delicate fingers on the holes.

This anonymous poem in the Gondi language is as casually titled as 'Chill Out'. Amongst all established names in Indian poetry cataloged 'The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems', highlighting this nameless little one only reinforces the speciality of this collection. Poet-diplomat Abhay K. has traced an arc of Indian love poetry spanning 28 languages over 3,000 years in this anthology conceived and put out in the world in 2020. This includes verses in Kokborok (from Tripura), Khasi, Gondi and Mising, Tibetan, Oriya, Sindhi, Nepali, being truly reflective of the multilingual social fabric of the Indian subcontinent.

“While I was editing my series on 100 Great Indian poems, I found out that many of them were actually love poems. There I got this idea that why not do an anthology of love poems," says Abhay, who has also edited 'The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems' (2019). Abhay knows Hindi, English, Russian, Nepali, Portuguese and Sanskrit.

When English poet Simon Armitage's poem Lockdown, published last year in March, mentioned a reference to the Kalidasa's epic poem Meghadūta, Abhay was put on a path of delving deeper into the ecstatic stanzas of Meghadūta and Ritusamhara—extracts from both the classics in Indian love poetry find a place in this collection. In fact, there is a profusion of Sanskrit love poems here, from Rigveda to Bhavabhuti and Bhanudutta, alongside classic Tamil and prakrit love poems. English verses from Sarojini Naidu, Kamala Das, Pritish Nandy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra to Tishani Doshi, Ranjit Hoskote and Arundhathi Subramaniam round off a captivating list of contemporary poets.

Although Indian love poems have been extensively anthologised from Tambimuttu's 'Indian Love Poems' (1967) to Amrita Narayanan's 'Parrots of Desire:3000 Years of Indian Erotica' (2017), Abhay would like to distinguish his collection as more expansive and diverse; some of his translations are also an attempt to make them more accessible. "I felt we needed newer, more contemporary translations of these classic love poems, so it can speak to the current generation."

Savoured slowly and surreptitiously, this cornucopia of love, longing and desire should easily resonate with the young and the old.

The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems

Edited by Abhay K

Page 200

Price: 399

a-new-poetry-anthology-shimmers-light-for-the-road-ahead

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 20:03:53 GMT

Sueyeun Juliette Lee, a Korean-American poet, once expounded on the poetics of light through her meditations on Salpuri, a traditional Korean dance. By recalling the origin story of the shamanic dance form—performed by a solo practitioner, whirling in a long white robe—she sought to reveal how one can 'speak the light', heal and restore.

So a long, long time ago a calamity reared its ugly head when two suns rose in a sky. To dispel this excessive stream of daylight, the king called a philosopher who composed a poem as a possible remedy. To this curative poem, he danced his first salpuri. One of the suns dimmed and the kingdom was cured. In the same essay for the Poetry Foundation, Lee writes, "This ugly era will end. And how are we being human and alive in its midst. What lights are you leaning into and casting out; what is your body’s heat murmuring with every breath you draw in, draw down, release.'

As we flip open the next chapter in 2021 in a virulent world outside, what kind of lights are we going to inoculate to stay "human and alive"? Barring the most obvious one, a glittering volume of poetry could also offer much solace. Especially if it's about light pixeled across time and space, light acquired and transmitted by a cross-section of writers in a global anthology. Such is the radiance of 'Shimmer Spring', edited and curated by award-winning poet, editor, translator and publisher Kiriti Sengupta.

Featuring 39 emerging and well-known poets, including Mamang Dai, Akhil Katyal, Sudeep Sen, Rochelle Potkar, Joan Kwon Glass, Alan Britt, among others, the prose and poetry in this collection are all sparklingly new and urgent. Lavishly produced, with a rich mosaic of abstract illustrations which unfurl on a white backdrop, the album is a glowing mixtape of art and poetry. Sengupta was keen on studying luminescence in poetry, or how writers derive and disperse light. "Light need not always connote something positive; there is no linear interpretation. To me light is synonymous with enlightenment or realisation. I always wanted to gauge how my contemporary writers perceive light, what is the source of that light in their lives," says Sengupta who was awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize.

Author of eleven books of poetry and two books of translation, he has co-edited six anthologies. His poem 'Troth' (which means faith or loyalty) opens the collection and is a touching reaffirmation of a marital pledge.

In 'An Evening Walk', Delhi-based poet Katyal remembers student and activist Natasha Narwal, arrested in connection with the Delhi violence which erupted in February and who continues to remain in jail under the stringent UAPA simply for expressing dissent.

The sandstone heat

near your home.

The way the sun eats

the South Block dome.

The inevitability

of your freedom.

All the ordinariness

belongs to you.

In Anu Majumdar's 'Seed', there is a sense of an awakening, a kernel which has revolted. It may struggle to sing and love, it is "Hidden but resonant/ A sun-chant of dreams".

Poet and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh, Mamang Dai, ruminates on rain which is "trying to transform some sad absence/into the patience of green" in a piece titled 'The Tree With a Thousand Flowers'.

In Tim Kahl's 'Excelsior', light in all its blazing brilliance becomes the exterminator shooting off animal carcasses in the dark, that "light was a hunter they should fear". Pakistani poet and filmmaker Ammar Aziz poignantly presents a mujawar (caretaker in a Sufi shrine), bemoaning the "darkling courtyard" of a dargah with its broken lamps and "fragments of the invader's young flesh".

Neera Kashyap's 'Incandescence' gets to the heart of the matter, the necessary rebirth born out of a "blaze" which "commands self-destruction". But the redemptive power of light is never too distant as Usha Akella envelops both the sun and the moon in one poem to make us see how "the anemic moon is red-hot with fertile myths" and how light can be "A luminescent sword/ splitting blackness in two" in Vinita Agrawal poem.

In a year of mostly groping in the dark, 2020 hasn't been entirely devoid of light for Hawakal Publishers, the bilingual publishing house behind 'Shimmer Spring'. Started in Kolkata in 2009 by story writer, translator, and editor Bitan Chakraborty, the independent publishing house has been bringing out books in English and Bengali literature with a special emphasis on poetry. They set up an office in the capital in a pandemic year which saw major disruptions in the publishing industry, including closure of small, independent bookstores and restrictions in delivery and movement of books. Hawakal released 38 titles in the traditional publishing format in 2020, among which 29 were put out between April and October.

Three were poetry anthologies, conceived and released in 2020, in a market which is hardly receptive to this form of literature in normal circumstances. Their highest selling English book this year is also one of these anthologies called Hibiscus: Poems That Heal and Empower.

"The way we have been releasing books in a pandemic year is quite noteworthy. We are not a big publishing house, yet we have come out with a hardcover poetry anthology in a coffee table format. We have practically raised the standards of a poetry anthology with Shimmer Spring," says Chakraborty about their latest anthology of poems.

2020 also saw the passing away of the noted poet and literatuer Akkitham, considered the doyen of Malayalam literature and recipient of the Jnanpith in 2019. One of his most resonant lines also draws upon light: 'Light is woe, darkness is bliss'.

Book: Shimmer Spring

Hawakal Publishers

Pages:124, Price: Rs 2,500

a-fitting-tribute-to-a-great-poet

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 16:43:58 GMT

This is no ordinary autobiography. 'Akkitham: A Pictorial Autobiography' chronicles the life of the doyen of Malayalam poetry Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri, but isn't written by him. Filled with his sketches, pictures and poetry lovingly put together by Bhaskarmenon Krishnakumar, the book is an intimate look at one of the towering figures of Malayalam literature.

There is no a better time to remember the poet. Akkitham passed away in October this year at the age of 94. Known for his simplicity—even when he was writing complex thoughts— Akkitham authored over 40 works, including short stories and plays. His most famous work is Irupatham Noottantinte Ithihasam.

Akkitham was eight when he wrote his first Sanskrit sloka: “If you irresponsibly draw such figures in the temples, the almighty god will bring everything to naught.’’ He wrote this on the wall with a coal, after he saw a lewd graffiti on the sanctum at Harimangalam temple.

Exposed to Rigveda from when he was a toddler and to aksharaslokam—literary pastime of those days where people sat in circles and reciting slokas “beginning with the first syllable of the third line of the shloka recited by the earlier participant’’—poetry came naturally to him.

He was 11 and emboldened by cashew fruits—forbidden to Namboodiris as they were ‘firangi’—he wrote six or seven shlokas. “I was delighted. Indeed amazed. But whom do I show these shlokas? I went to a knowledgeable lady in the neighborhood. She was well versed with Ezhuthachan’s works and Puranas. She could just not believe that I had composed those shlokas,’’ he writes.

Littered with anecdotes from his childhood—“My classmates and most elders took me for an imbecile,’’—including his love for drawing, him discovering poetry after reading Amarakosha, the unique thesaurus in verse, the book makes for a fascinating reading. “It was then that writing poetry turned out to be a not too difficult task,’’ he writes.

Going beyond just his life, the book also offers a glimpse into his thoughts, his beliefs, Communism—why he was attracted to the idea but didn't become a party member—and his philosophy. And more importantly, the reason he wrote poetry. “Why do I write poetry? To serve the society?,’’ he writes. “That there’s an intense desire to do so is true. But if it were only for that, why is it that I’m unable to write when everything is set? Or is it for my pleasure? If so, I should be able to write whenever I feel like. But that’s not done. And on many occasions poetry gushes out uncontrollably, when I plan to defer it. This is what it’s in brief. Guess what you will.”

The book is for anyone who has ever wanted to understand him better and even for those who just want a glimpse into the world of a committed poet. It is a tribute well deserved.

Book: Akkitham: A Pictorial Autobiography

Publisher: Rupa

Pages: 272

Price: Rs 2,500

veterans-insights

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:23:39 GMT

With a long career in the civil services before eventually moving to politics, N.K. Singh’s life story is also a chronicling of the few crucial decades in the life of the nation. Portraits of Power, his autobiography, is much more than a ringside view of how India has evolved socio-economically. Singh’s humorous and anecdotal style enriches the retelling of both the personal and the political.

Singh writes about how his formative years were shaped by the contrasting influences of academic rigour on his paternal side and the Zamindari affluence of his mother’s family, with the highly feudal Bihari society forming the backdrop. He narrates the amusing scene at home when he got selected as a civil servant at 23. While most debated whether he should opt for IAS or IFS, his headmaster grandfather insisted that he go for the legal profession.

Singh, who was secretary to the prime minister, notes that the prime minister’s office became a powerful entity during Lal Bahadur Shastri’s tenure, unlike the popular perception that it was during Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. “Nehru’s prime minister’s secretariat was not significant since he believed in the institutional structure of the cabinet office, which he had inherited,” writes Singh.

When Shastri appointed Laxmi Kant Jha as the first secretary to the prime minister in 1964, it brought a “spectacular difference in hierarchy”, he notes. Singh adds that with the arrival of P.N. Haksar under Indira Gandhi, the practice of committed officers came into vogue and meritocracy took a back seat.

Portraits of Power: Half a Century of Being at Ringside

By N.K. Singh

Published by Rupa Publications

Price Rs595; pages 472

an-ode-to-the-brave

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:20:35 GMT

It is a cruel joke. Soldiers, who would lay down their lives to defend us all, are almost always taken for granted. Their sacrifices get converted into statistics and are diluted. In our misguided haste to paint them as superhuman, we often forget that they are fellow human beings, albeit exceptional ones. Lieutenant General (retired) Satish Dua’s book—India’s Bravehearts—is a necessary reminder.

It is a moving tribute to soldiers from a soldier who rose to command. Lt Gen Dua’s writing is fresh because of its honesty and simplicity. He transitions easily from the action-packed narration of an operation to his grief at the death of the first soldier he lost as a commanding officer. He boldly opens up about his guilt and fears, and his realisation that so many heroic deeds in the world were also tragedies.

Lt Gen Dua describes the surgical strikes, which he oversaw as corps commander, his methods as a commanding officer, the close shaves and his learnings. His accounts about reactions to situations which emerged during operations are most fascinating. He also mentions that the greatest satisfaction for him was the remarriage of the widows of two of his bravehearts who had died in operations.

There is much to learn from India’s Bravehearts, and much to be grateful about.

India’s Bravehearts: Untold Stories From The Indian Army

By Lt Gen Satish Dua (retired)

Published by Juggernaut Books

Price Rs299; pages 224

the-many-reasons-to-read-its-all-in-your-head-m

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 19:14:06 GMT

This year saw anxiety become an unwelcome guest in houses across the world, one that refuses to leave. In 2020, a time when mental health and the fragility of emotional well-being made headlines, Manjiri Indurkar's personal story in It's all in your head, m makes for essential reading.

Not for her honesty—laying herself bare about her struggle—but for her voice: Incredibly powerful, laugh-out-funny, warm, poetic even, compelling and addictive.

It is a rotavirus attack that leads to Indukar's self-discovery into childhood secrets that she has kept hidden. The virus usually hits young children and not adults. Hospitalisation followed and she soon realised that her body was reacting to something deeper than just an infection. “This pain that was hiding in my gut, rotting slowly, coming out in the form of stinky, disgusting bodily fluid had to be cured. It was time,'' she writes.

In the book she maps her journey to self-discovery, the therapy to finally let go.

Abused when she was a child, Indurkar writes about being taken from playing hide-and-seek by “Ajit'' and her clothes being taken off. It happens frequently. Her grandmother Aaiji witnesses it, keeps quiet and never does anything to help her. She writes about her shame, her confusion, her betrayal, even her best friend discovering it. She writes about the trickiness of memory—and how she digs out her childhood photographs for this chapter. “Does it hurt, she says. I nod, it does hurt. How many times? Is it only Ajit? I say no. I tell her about Mogambo,'' she writes. The incidents are vividly described, matter of fact, desperately sad, but she doesn't write with a sense of victimhood. In her retelling her story, she does so with dignity, vulnerability and certain defiance, she makes the reader part of the pain of her struggle—and lingers long.

It is this core of resilience, a spark—and her courage—her sense of survival that stays even longer. The book is also about family, the complexity of it, its secrets, beyond just the ties of love. The bonds of pain that bind people even closer. The relationship with her grandmother, her boyfriend's Avi's relationship with his mother. But beyond just a memoir of deep secrets of childhood, it is also a book about heartbreak, finding a voice and letting go.

It is also about love. She writes about love beautifully, with awareness and not sentimentality; the thrill of falling in love, the courting, the slow cementing from friendship with long evening walks, reading together, the buying of books and shelves, the total all-consuming overwhelming aspect of love. “I had gone home to Jabalpur for Diwali, when I returned to Delhi after a week, Avi came to pick me up at the airport. We kissed in front of the Arrivals Gate of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi, while people watched us. Some even made judgmental faces. But it was an important kiss. My inner small-town M wanted trademark big city moments, and this was that for me. Later on, picking each other up from the airport became our relationship ritual,'' she writes.

More than just a memoir of her unravelling, the book is a book about coming together, being broken and hope. Grab it.

Book: It's all in your head, m

Publisher: Westland Tranquebar

Pages: 218

Price: Rs 399

murder-mayhem-and-mirth

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:58:23 GMT

This is not so much a novel as a riot. It’s a wildly funny, extravagantly inventive, no-punches-pulled, no-expenses-spared tale of a kitty party veteran, viz., Kannan Mehra (Kay, for short) who takes to moonlighting as a private detective for a bit of extra income, and a loads of extra excitement.

The Gods conspire to keep our sleuth busy 24 x7. When she is not hot on the trail of presumed murderers and suicide abetters (how topical is this!), Kay is called upon to referee what she believes are wife-beating bouts, and bust a gang which purloins wedding gifts. The scene of the crime – or rather crimes, since Satan never takes a day off, is one of those apartment towers common to upwardly mobile cities. It’s where uber snobbery and self-centeredness are sheathed in faux courtesy. Its inhabitants are at that tantalizing mid-life stage when love is no longer in the air… and yet yeh dil maange more.

The narrative swings like a rollercoaster, and at the controls, author Kiran Manral seems to be having a whale of a time. Her humour is on uppers so frequently, it will make Bollywood starlets look like novitiates in a particularly severe order of Sisters. Manral is prolific with her punch lines and there are such a plethora of them, that one wonders anxiously if she will have anything left for the end. But the storehouse is large, and stocks last the last page and beyond.

The author is a fan of P.G. Wodehouse and, as a detective would say, the legend’s fingerprints are on practically every page of the book. Wodehouse was justly famed, among other things, for his outrageously funny metaphors. It is clear that Manral loves metaphors too, but does she love them not wisely but too well? Perhaps, just perhaps, the self-restraint that our heroine advocates at the buffet table would have been in order even as her creator was belting out the lines.

But the swagger and panache of the book and its manic energy levels help you gloss over its excesses. Indeed, casting a critical eye on The Kitty Party Murder would be almost as bad form as taking the proverbial spade to Wodehouse’s soufflé.

Who’s the villain of the piece? For amidst all that high-octane humour, we mustn’t forget this is a murder mystery. Who-dun-it? I am not giving out any clues for that would spoil the ball that you are going to have reading this.

Book: The Kitty Party Murder

Author: Kiran Manral

Publishers: Harper Collins

Pages: 243

a-promised-land-obama-delves-deep-into-the-grand-political-issues

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:00:51 GMT

Barack Obama could have made a career as a successful writer, if he had chosen writing instead of politics. This is evident from his book A Promised Land in which he has displayed his creative language skills, gift of storytelling, poetic sensibility, intellectual depth, and philosophical ruminations. Obama attributes his learning to a number of authors who had influenced his own writing and inspired him. He keeps the readers interested throughout the thousand pages of its length with his stories, analysis of events and cerebral reflections. He delves deep into the grand political issues while at the same time paying attention to small details and giving graphic description of people, places and situations through his observant eyes and rich imagination.

Obama has approached his life of achievements with a deeply introspective and detached manner in his signature style of self-criticism and self-deprecating humour. He is a rare politician who openly admits his weaknesses, limitations, dilemmas, gaffes, flaws and failures. He tries ‘constantly taking stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was’. He has not been carried away by the glamour and power of the POTUS (President of the United States). He concludes, ‘for all its power and pomp, the presidency is still just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other, and the men and women who work in the White House experience the same daily mix of satisfaction, disappointment, office friction, screw-ups, and small triumphs as the rest of their fellow citizens’. He confesses, ‘The work, I loved. Even when it didn’t love me back’. For him, ‘each day had its share of aggravations, worries, and disappointments. I’d stew over mistakes I’d made and question strategies that hadn’t panned out. There were meetings I dreaded, ceremonies I found foolish, conversations I would have rather avoided’.

Here is an example of his self-criticism, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four “e lede!” Axe (his advisor) would practically shout after listening to me drone on and on and on”. He then started making his statements brief and go with the absorption capacity of the audience.

He has not filled the book with just about himself. He has given generous credit to numerous people who inspired him, supported and advised him at all levels including his butlers, security men, secretaries, drivers and gardeners with whom he had sincere conversations and shared experience and jokes. He shows genuine interest in the lives of others and expresses appreciation for other people’s achievements and sacrifices.

Obama gives pen portraits of people describing their face, body and appearance with apt descriptions such as ‘tall and angular, with a jutting jaw, deep-set eyes’, ‘face of an Irish boxer’, ‘ long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl’, ‘ruddy-faced with a whisk-broom mustache’, ‘voices soft as the patter of rain (Japanese emperor and his wife), ‘smile brushed with melancholy’, ‘raspy-voiced, lip-biting Arkansas charm (Bill Clinton), ‘the man was all muscle, sinew, and bone, with a long, angular face and a piercing, avian gaze’,’ broad-shouldered and sturdy with a Roman nose’.

Here is his take on some of the world leaders he had met:

British PM David Cameron – ‘possessed an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language, and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life. With a youthful appearance and a studied informality (at every international summit, the first thing he’d do was take off his jacket and loosen his tie)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel – ‘I found her steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind. But she was also conservative by temperament, not to mention a savvy politician who knew her constituency’.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy – ‘was all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric. With his dark, expressive, vaguely Mediterranean features and small stature he looked like a figure out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting’.

Sonia Gandhi – ‘striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence’.

Rahul Gandhi – ‘has an unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject’.

PM Manmohan Singh – ‘a gentle, soft-spoken, wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest and uncommonly decent man’.

On the substantial political issues faced by him, he gives clinical and comprehensive analysis approaching the issues from all angles besides his own. He gives meticulous details of the issues, the various options to deal with them, the challenges in finding solutions and the compromises he was forced to make by the Republicans and other players.

Obama reveals the powerlessness of POTUS on three issues: impunity of the Wall Street bankers, the all-powerful Israeli lobby and the multi-billion dollar military-industrial complex.

He is of the view that ‘Wall Street really did increasingly function like a trillion-dollar casino, its outsized profits and compensation packages overly dependent on ever-greater leverage and speculation. Its obsession with quarterly earnings had warped corporate decision-making and encouraged short-term thinking. Untethered to place, indifferent to the impact of globalization on particular workers and communities, the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors, leaving huge swaths of the country.’ He was outraged when the AIG executives pocketed 170 million dollars of bonus after the company was saved from collapse by the 70 billion dollar rescue by the Treasury department with tax payers’ money. These were the same executives who had caused the subprime lending crisis with their reckless greed. The regulatory system and legislation was gamed by the Republican leaders and lobby to ensure impunity for the fat cat bankers. Obama expresses his anguish saying, “many of the people most culpable for the nation’s economic woes remained fabulously wealthy and had avoided prosecution mainly because the laws as written deemed epic recklessness and dishonesty in the boardroom or on the trading floor less blameworthy than the actions of a teenage shoplifter”. The all-powerful POTUS could not touch them except expressing his anger in private.

He was equally helpless with the immunity enjoyed by Israel which got away with inhuman atrocities against Palestine because of the unconditional solid support by the US under the power of the Jewish lobby. The Israeli PM Netanyahu simply ignored Obama and went over his head to the Congress to get whatever he wanted. With his offensive tactics, he put Obama on the defensive and made POTUS powerless.

The generals and the arms manufacturers pushed for more wars and intensification of the ongoing wars for billions of dollars of profit and trillion dollar business. The military-industrial complex did not care for the peaceful and non-violent diplomatic methods preferred by Obama. This reminds me of the interview in which the Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma was asked about for his opinion on the loss of US jobs to China. He said, “The US had spent around two trillion dollars in the destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, If the money was used for constructive domestic development, the US would not have had any unemployment problem”. Obama reflects, “I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care”. He admits, “we meddled in the affairs of other countries, sometimes with disastrous results; we had invaded Iraq, broken that country, helped spawn an even more virulent branch of al-Qaeda”.

Since the right wing Republicans constantly attacked and teased Obama as incapable and unsuitable for being a commander in chief, Obama had to prove to them that he could also do what Bush did. This explains Obama’s regime change war in Libya and killing of Qaddafi as well as the raid and killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Obama has handled the ‘black man issue’ upfront in some places and subtly and discretely in other contexts. He preferred to send his vice president Joe Biden to negotiate with the Republican leader Mitch McConnell because of his ‘awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do’. Obama has analysed and come out with the reasons for the backlash in the ugly form of Trump and right wing extremism. According to him, the anti-intellectual and anti-reason movement started with Sarah Palin when she campaigned as vice presidential candidate along with John McCain. Unable to match the intellectual discourses of Obama, she took to trivializing and trashing Obama’s wisdom and erudition. Trump took it from where Sarah Palin left and made a career out of attacking the black man. Obama says, “antipathy had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety”.

Obama clarifies, ‘I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start’.

The book ends with the chapter on the daring raid and killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. I look forward to reading the second volume of the memoir Obama is working on.

I have read and reviewed his earlier books which were also equally inspiring:

The Audacity of Hope: https://floatingweed.blogspot.com/2009/02/audacity-of-hope-book-by-barak-obama.html

Dreams from My Father: https://floatingweed.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreams-from-my-father-obama.html

He wrote those two before he became president. But in this book he wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to be the president of the United States. He has done it candidly and lucidly. Still I like better the part of his story before he became president. His narration of his emotions and feelings in chasing his dream and the struggle he went through are more fascinating and poignant than his writings on his presidential years.

In the last four years, President Trump has made US as a laughing stock and insulted the intelligence of people with his shameless, wicked, indecent, racist and juvenile statements and actions. It comes as a relief and a source of confidence and optimism that the same US which disgraced itself by voting for Trump, had elected and reelected a black man with a Muslim name. Obama’s success becomes even more admirable and amazing after seeing the disastrous presidency of Trump who had unearthed the ugliness from under the ground.

Obama could not have achieved the success alone by himself. He could have become a successful lawyer or writer with his talents and skills. But to become the president, he had to move the whole country, which has a built-in system to discriminate the blacks even from voting, let alone get voted. He had to get past the torturous systems of primaries, no-holds barred debates, dirty tricks of the opponents, scrutiny of the media and above all the formidable candidature of Hillary Clinton. Obama was supported, helped and guided through the process by thousands of Americans who believed in him and worked hard much before he became famous. He also got the votes of many Republican states and whites. Most importantly, credit is due to the old rural white folks of Iowa who elected him in the very first primary giving him the much needed critical moral boost in the beginning of the game. This is why Obama calls the country as “A Promised Land”.

making-of-a-general-insightful-account-army-life

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 14:32:07 GMT

From the start of the Kargil war, the Pakistan Army was in a denial mode—that the insurrection was the work of Kashmiri insurgents ('mujahideen' in their lingo), and that the Pakistan Army had nothing to do with it.

The charade almost convinced the world till the Indian Army picked up the military I-cards and Army pay books from the pockets of a few 'mujahideen'. The evidence proved to the world that several of the 'mujahideen' were Pakistani soldiers in disguise.

Ironically however, the operation that led to the first such capture of military papers from the enemy dead is still not recognised as part of the Kargil saga “on the grounds that the battle was beyond a line marked by the staff as the area of Kargil war.” (That's military bureaucracy for you.)

Consequently, the unit, its officers and men who took part in the operation remain unrecognised. An officer for whom the unit commander, the author of this book, recommended Param Vir Chakra was given only a Sena Medal.

All the same, Col. (later Lt.-Gen) Konsum Himalay Singh who commanded the unit, the 27 Rajput, has no rancour. “I remain ever proud of my officers and troops and the fact that we played our part well in the war,” he writes in this account, a diary of his military life.

Konsum Himalay Singh had got his first diary in 1967. The first thing he scribbled in it, on January 26, was: “One day I shall become a brigadier in the Army.” Brigadier was the highest rank to which anyone from the northeast had reached in the Indian Army those days. Himalay, who was named so by a great aunt who believed that naming children after mountains would bring good luck, grew up, joined the army and became a brigadier, and then climbed two more steps to become the first lieutenant-general from the northeast.

This book, however, is not just about how this Manipuri officer reached those professional heights, but also an insightful account of various aspects of army life and major operations of the Indian Army through the 1980s and 1990s—the working of the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the northeast, the Mizo rebellion and accord, the operations against the Naga Underground in his own home state of Manipur and elsewhere, the insurgency in the Kashmir valley, the frozen war in Siachen, and of course the hot war on the Kargil heights where the author commanded the 27 Rajputs in one of the least reported operations which was the capture of Point 5770. Incidentally, the capture of Point 5770, was “a daylight attack, a silent assault where not a single artillery ... shot was fired just before or during the attack. This was one attack in the entire Kargil war where no artillery guns were used and where no casualties to own troops occurred...”

A month after the operation, the author was asked if he had the body of a Capt. Taimur Malik of the Pakistan Army's 3 Northern Light Infantry. When he said yes, he was asked to exhume it and hand it over to Pakistan Army. Himalay Singh refused, insisting that he would do it only if Pakistan would accept the bodies of all the four soldiers who had been been killed by his unit. Pakistan had to own them up.

The book is full of such first-hand stories of military life. The author has taken care not to test the patience of the reader with too many details of his personal life, except those which would give an insight to the reader about life in the military and life in the northeast.

Making of a General: A Himalayan Echo

By Lt.-Gen. Konsam Himalay Singh

Published by: Konark Publishers, Delhi, 2020

230 Pages; Rs 800

janaka-and-ashtavakra-an-ambrosia-for-the-freedom-seekers

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 14:05:14 GMT

When it comes to a book under the genre of mythology, there is a niche crowd of mostly the grey population who fancy reading it. While this generalisation might be false like all others, Ashraf Karayath’s Janaka and Ashtavakra―A Journey Beyond proves that mythology may not be just something of the past; these tales draw parallels to our present stories. Especially considering the fact that the world is in a state of uncertainty, thanks to the global pandemic. The turbulence, the confusion and, most of all, the in-betweens where everything is looked at as a conspiracy theory, political propaganda or, going by the myths, wrath of the gods. At a time like this, reading a mythological tale, dating back to the 5th century BCE, might seem thoroughly depressing. However, Ashraf takes a journey beyond these false notions and introduces the tale of the less-spoken Janaka (Sita’s father) who is in a quest for knowledge, spiritual liberation and enlightenment. He calls it one of the most gripping yet unknown episodes from the Ramayana. Interestingly, the author feels that the book is a pandemic read as this is the time that people should keep their negative emotions at bay and strengthen their quest. This, he believes, would elevate one’s immunity.

The mythological tale, like any other book, starts with a detailed prologue. From the walls to the dusty ground to the elephant shrieks and the tortured screams of men. Flipping through the initial pages of the book, one wonders how a king can go on a quest when there is an impending war in his kingdom. And who is Ashtavakra? A divinely intelligent boy who later goes on to disciple king Janaka. Unaffected by the scoffs of the courtiers for his deformed body, Ashtavakra lets his intellect do the work and triumphs over some of the most learned sages in the kingdom. After Ashtavakra’s victory, Janaka, awed by the boy’s extraordinary intellect and obsessed with his quest for spiritual liberation, submits to the sage’s guidance. While most people think the novel revolves around Janaka and hence his name comes first, there is a school of thought that firmly believes that Ashtavakra is the lead man.

Soon, the war horns blare and intensifies on the horizon of Mithila, but Janaka, unperturbed by the turbulence, stays on the path of spiritual enlightenment. At the end, he steps into a new realm that alters the reality for him and his kingdom. In the epilogue, the author quote Ashtavakra Gita: “Like a leaf in the wind, the liberated one is untethered from life—desireless, independent, free.” Surely, these three attributes are, in all ways, synonymous with spiritual liberation.

Published by Rupa Publications, the novel uniquely answers some of the reader’s existential questions on the realities of life. There is an element of drama in the initial chapters as the story of the king, his kingdom politics and secretive conspiracies unfold but the vibrant and descriptive style of writing has the reader hooked till the last page. Imagine, waking up in a different realm of mind and asking yourself, ‘Is what I see real?’ But what is true, the dream world or the conscious world? Ashtavakra says both of them are untrue. Maybe asking ‘why so?’ is not required; maybe, that is all we need to know. Maybe, this is what it means to be on a journey beyond; a journey beyond questions and set answers.

Book: Janaka and Ashtavakra―A Journey Beyond

Author: Ashraf Karayath

Pages: 218

Price: Rs 295

tales-of-men-in-khaki

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 21:12:30 GMT

Senior Indian Police Service officer Amod K. Kanth hates sensationalism. For a police officer whose career spanned some of the most critical and sensitive incidents of history from 1980-1991, he could not avoid being privy to sensational incidents which he documented in personal diaries, that were more an “aide memoire” at that time since he was on duty those days. But these have now become historical sources, important enough to be documented in historical records.

Kanth’s sensational book 'Khaki in Dust Storm'—the first of his series of police diaries—documents assassination of Indira Gandhi, 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, killings of Lalit Maken, Arjun Das, General A.S. Vaidya; multiple bomb blasts in Delhi and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Other crimes like human trafficking and drug based crimes are only some of the topics of the stories he has shared from his real life experiences.

The man in khaki was the deputy commissioner of police in central Delhi in 1984 when he was stepping out of his house on a day that has gone down in history as Delhi’s darkest moment, as dark as the Partition’s massacres. Kanth recalls how the small police control room of the Central Delhi police district got its biggest shock when a wireless operator rushed towards him after cross checking his information with the control room located near Daryaganj police station, next to the road between his house and the office.

“He spoke in an urgent and choked voice, and said that the Prime Minister madam had been shot at in her residence,” wrote Kanth . “A lingering premonition, a subconscious thought from deep within the recesses of my mind and the knowledge and experience from my days in security at the Prime Minister’s house at Safdarjung Road surfaced immediately.” I reacted, ”Was it a policeman?”

The police briefing that followed after all officers assembled in his office for discussing law and order in the city, is still considered by Kanth as the most significant meeting in his entire police career. Kanth‘s book is a unique documentation of challenges before a police officer who rises above his duties as a law enforcement officer to someone who grows to turn into a social worker and a globally celebrated cop praised by the US government for his work in combating human trafficking.

This journey wasn’t easy for a cop, yet Kanth‘s brush with emotional events like the anti-Sikh riots in the early part of his policing career had taught him to look at issues from a socio-political perspective. This ability to understand the fine contours of Indian society went on to motivate him to become one of the pioneers of “ community policing" in the country.

A book replete with facts, sensational investigations, brilliance of policing and anecdotes of hard decisions of men in khaki, Kanth gives a gratifying read in the form of the first part of police diaries, making the readers want to turn the pages once more .

Book: Khaki In Dust Storm: Communal Colours and Political Assassinations ( 1980-1991): Police Diaries Book 1

Author : Amod K Kanth

Publisher : Bloomsbury India

sex-and-chiffon

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 12:43:04 GMT

I didn’t choose Srilaaji, Srilaaji chose me,” writes Shobhaa De in the acknowledgments section of her book. According to De, she was finalising a deal for a non-fiction book when Srilaaji “appeared before me and demanded to be the heroine of my next book. It was an order, not a request.... She is for real, even if I imagined her.”

For a real woman, this sex-addicted, D-cup sized, high-born Marwari has a rather unbelievable life, comprising mainly of a string of various liaisons. Unlike most other novels, this housewife is neither bored nor ignored by her husband. Indeed, the couple has genuine affection for each other. Yet, Srilaaji is driven by some force within, and often even aided by her husband, as she breezes through the social swathe of Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi in her floral chiffons, and hops from bed to bathroom floor.

De gives a peek into the world of rich Marwari households, where characters dripping in Basra pearls and sparkling diamonds flit across the corridors of their mansions to top-notch hotels and clubs, munching on kachori at home and crab outside. In her inimitable style, she creates some convincing side characters, whether it is the matriarchal Buaji or the no-nonsense maalishwali. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the lead characters, including the heroine herself. Why, for instance, does a woman, who has as many coital encounters as Srilaaji, need to have the kind of sexual fantasies that she has? The only peek into her vulnerability comes in her interactions with her mother. For the rest, Srilaaji is little more than the sum total of her intimacies. This, even when the character is breaking out of her hypocritical Marwari shell and discovering herself.

Of course, one can always argue that the strength of the characters is not the mainstay in a book of that demeaning literary niche referred to as ‘mummy porn’. However, when there are so many books in that category, including the Fifty Shades trilogy, the reader does expect a little more substance in the plot between the various sexual encounters.

De writes in her typical breezy style, peppering her narrative with lots of desi lingo, and one gets a flavour of various cities as Srilaaji peregrinates through them. You cannot help but smile at her turn of phrase. That, in her own style, is total paisa vasool, and what her fans will be looking out for.

Srilaaji

By Shobhaa De

Published by Simon & Schuster India

Price Rs399; Pages 263