After a long time, I picked up a book by an Indian author and managed to finish it. And enjoy it. And, not tear out my hair in frustration at the pace of the story or the meta level philosophical inputs that keep creeping into story lines.


Smita Jain’s debut novel is a good fun romp through the murky pool that is the Television Soap industry. Krishnaa - real name Priya - is a soap writer with a writer’s block . When you have to churn out 4 episodes a week - and everyone and his kitchen sink are doing pretty much the same — there is a definite possibility that a writer’s block will set in. So she sets about turning her neighbour’s telescope into the homes of other neighbour’s and ends up with a mystery that could end up getting her killed.

Fun, contemporary, desi and without any metaphysical angst or mumbo jumbo — Krishnaa’s Konfessions is a fun read… do try and pick it up…

I am hoping to see more from this author….

I am currently re readingDr.Babasaheb Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste - It is a thin little well thumbed, book - actually a speech that is published in a book form. It

This is a book that every Indian ought to read…I read this almost a lifetime ago as part of what ever i was doing at that time. Read it fast, converted into data, precised it and forgot about it. This time around, I am going to savour it… and while doing so am going to post excerpts

As i read through it - some 20 years after I first read it - i keep nodding my head in agreement. Smiling at the humour. chuckling, when things don't seem too much different now than they were almost 70 years ago (two opposing factions. One threatened to burn the other's pandal if they held a political rally)…cringing when things don't seem too much more different now than when they were then (discrimination). And of course his wry comments…

The path of social reform like the path to heaven at any rate in India, is strewn with many difficulties. Social reform in India has few friends and many critics. The critics fall into two distinct classes. One class consists of political reformers and the other of the socialists.

I can't seem to find any copies in bookshops. But, it is online here and here 

It gives an insight into what ailed us, and what continues to ail us … caste …and more importantly deep rooted programming on caste lines. 

…..Not so much a concise book, as a slightly largish magazine feature. It has the wry observation, and the witty descriptions that is Bill Bryson's trademark .. but it isn't an involving read. And much like nicely written features for In flight magazines - there isn't too much to object to, at the same time there isn't too much that you retain. 

I don't know too much more about Shakespeare now, than I knew earlier. But, what little there is , is told nicely. It is more a nice brisk travelogue through the lives & times of William Shakespeare than a biography. 

I much preferred A Short History of Almost Everything or a I'm a Stranger Here Myself . It isn't that I didn't like the book — it is just that i have no memories of anything that I read :) 

Technorati Tags: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Almost Everything, I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I approached the book with some trepidation. I am not particularly fond of authors from the sub continent who write in English. I often find their narrative overtly lyrical, pretentiously mystical, and deliberately desi. But, so many people had told me so many good things about the novel that I succumbed. After purchasing the book, it lay on my table for three weeks, pristine in its cellophane wrapper. Running out of stuff to read, i opened it two days ago - and the book enthralled me from the first line.

I liked the sense of minimalism in writing. No unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. No takeoffs into the mystical / philosophical nature of eastern life. And no justifications for anything. It is a narrative that is shorn of pretense. The story is a monologue between the main protagonist Changez and an unseen American. And the monologue is an explanation of why a 20 something, ambitious, and brilliant young man from Princeton - who is expected to reach the top of his profession in the US - packs up and goes back home to be a teacher at the university.

Changez is very much a product of today. Someone who is very comfortable in his skin. Who neither makes apologies for his country, nor is his ‘culture’ in your face. He could be any of the friends that we have in the west, who are cosmopolitan - who feel equally comfortable in both worlds. And then disaster strikes. 9/11 happens.And Changez - like many we know - is appalled at his momentary sense of joy and satisfaction when the towers come down. And, this proves to be the turning point in his life.
At the time of 9/11, I was working at Zee at that time and we were at Chintamani Plaza. The first floor was full of television sets. And I was walking out for a meeting. I was stopped by this bunch of collegues huddled around a TV watching the footage of the planes ploughing into the WTC. At that time someone said - they bombed it, they have guts - we will never be able to do something like that. Even in a place like India, in a modern, cosmopolitan, broadcast environment, there was this satisfaction that the towers came down. “now they know how we feel” was a common response one heard. And, Mohsin Ahmed’s articulation of the satisfaction that Changez feels while enjoying a drink in a hotel room in Manila is an echo of similar sentiments in Mumbai.

9/11 brings down more than the towers. It crumbles Changez’s life. His girlfriend - who is emotionally damaged - recedes further into depression. Changez finds himself isolated from his professional ‘bretheren’ and his well constructed life begins to unravel until an encounter with an old man who loves books.

‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist‘ is not a book that glorifies fundamentalism. Nor is it one that calls for violence. There is no good or bad. There just is. Even when Changez makes a seemingly anti-American statement it is tinged with a sense of embarrassment that we all feel when we behave badly.
Read the book - it is definitely worth a buy.

Technorati Tags: Mohsin Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Finished reading Vrinda Nabar’s excellent "Caste as Woman".

It looks at women in India not from the point of western feminist theories, but more in terms of looking at India’s own unique socio-cultural systems, which essentially serve to keep the woman as an uncomplaining victim to many ills. As she puts it:

"… in India, the discrimination against them (women) would be by and large three - fold: Sex based (Stri Jati), caste based (jati) and class based. To be caste as woman in India is to live out this triple layered existence."

Starting with a look at our women and their women - a broad literature review of western feminism and Indian sociological thought regarding women (Nabar does not believe that Indian feminism as such exists) the book moves onto look at the various staus that women occupy- from the girl child to the widow,to the roles that she plays - daughter, wife, mother - in modern society.

In the week that the UNICEF report has shown the extent of murder of girls, Nabar’s statement on the girl child is telling:

Discrimination between the sexes in India begins at birth, or even before it. It starts before the child is born, in the mother’s womb. None of the conventional blessings showered on a pregnant woman mentions daughters. ……exhort her to have atleast one son, prefrebly the first born. No well wisher, it would seem, would admit to wanting anything else.

On the great Indian Marriage - Nabar is equally caustic. Her little ballad had me in splits.

View Point ( A modern Indian Ballad)

Bring out the silver & polish the brass,
Brush off the cobwebs, and clean all the glass
Unlock the pantry, lay out the food
Keep away grandma, her manners are crude.

We’ve got a daughter we are willing to sell
He is the bargain, the profit as well;
He’s coming to see for himself, so he said
How she and our money would look in his bed

Our daughter’s a graduate, he’s no cause to moan
She’s a well brought up girl with no mind of her own
She speaks English well, has a fair pretty face
And is Five foot four inches by Lord Bhagwan’s grace

Of course she’ll be happy, I’ll tell you that flat
She’ll have her own home, produce brat after brat,
Forget all her youth, as she spins out her life
In waddling behind him, a good Indian wife.

And she’ll long to have sons; they’re boons from above
Take it from me that they’re proof of God’s love
And when all her daugthers are suitably grown,
She’ll marry them off as we’ve done our own

The book is surprisingly a lightish read. Neither too academic nor too soap boxy. In fact I think that Nabar approaches quite a few issues with almost a bizzare sense of the ridiculous. And if you read some of the strictures about women, the only response is laughter. If you took it seriously it would be far too depressing.

Definitely worth a read.

Technorati Tags: Vrinda Nabar, Caste as Woman, feminist

A few months ago one of dad’s friend’s gifted him this book, which has been gathering oodles of dust on the book shelf.

Yesterday, finding nothing light to read - I picked it out of the bookshelf, dusted it, and tried to read it.

Tried is the key word here. I managed 3 whole chapters before I gave up. Part spiritual mumbo jumbo, part management gobbledegook it is a scary read. The prose is turgid, the characterisation worse and the self help out of Yoda’s school of gurudom.

The monk should have pledged his ferrari and taken writing lessons. Seriously!

Currently re reading an old favourite. Tranlated by Sir Richard F Burton(the explorer not the actor), and with an introduction by A.S.Byatt

Scheherazade’s attempt to save her life and the lives of all the eligible women in the kingdom by weaving a story that would divert her husband’s rage against all women for having been cuckolded. It almost seems an allegory for the lot of women in modern days. Cajole for your rights rather than fight for it. Somethings never change.

It has all the old favourites - Ali BAba, Alladin, Sindabad, the Potter’s story etal. The kind of stuff that you used to get in Chandamama, Champak and a half a dozen hindi films.

Somehow, the versions that I read that i was a kid were more sanitised than the one I am reading now. And, I am sure that the original tales were even more bawdy and earthy and that the English translation by Sir Richard Burton was keeping in mind the sensibilities at that time - Victorian England.

The one irritating thing about this particular Modern Library edition is the complete lack of paragraph breaks.

If you don’t have an issue with online text and want to sample before you purchase - then you can get the stories here.

My current read is Karen Armstrong’s History of God .

Theogony has always fascinated me. So has how Gods are born, grow unfashionable and then die out. . It is almost a peek back into society and figuring out how society evolved and with it evolved faith - especially organised faith.

I know a bit about the Semetic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and reading Armstrong’s account of how cultures essentially polytheistic cultures adopted rigid monotheism is fascinating. Her opening lines hook you:

In the begining, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and the Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that did not want him anymore. Eventually he was said to have disappeared.

And then she starts with the origin of religion in the ancient world - Babylon, Assyria, Persia ,- how they began as polytheistic religons that focussed on agriculture, fertility and the like. And, how over a centuries they moved on to being something quite different. How Yahweh - the god of the Jews - claimed supermacy over all other Gods. How Christianity took root, and how Islam came in to fill a need gap. In his beahviour God is not very nice. He throws tantrums, bullies the devout into worship, blackmails them for their loyalty - Forsake all other Gods for me, and I will help you. The period Armstrong describes also sees the end of the mother goddess worship in the region.

From me ‘Hindu’ gods and godesses have fascinated me far more than the distant monotheistic God of the Semetic religions. For obvious reasons, I have grown up with the mythologies, the stories, and feel a certain closeness to them But, Hindu gods are not what they were many millenia ago.

I am sure that the earliest Indian - the Adi Dravida - worshipped some tree somewhere. But, Dravidian Gods were far more in human form. Skanda, Shankara, Amman.
The Rigvedic gods - were Indra, Varuna, Vayu, Agni and Mitra. They were like the Greek Gods - not really nice. Angry, Selfish, coveting other men’s wives, generally badly behaved. A bit like football hooligans. It is no surprise that we dumped them enmasse. Apart from Agni in front of whom we do our havan - we really don’t have much truck with that lot. So, though we say we are an “aryan” culture - what ever that means - the Gods that we worship are not. They are much more animistic, personal and probably ‘Dravidian’ gods - Krishna, Shankara, Skanda, Uma, Kali, Vithala, Ganesha and the lot. Hindu fundamentalists may argue that Rudra was Shiva and Indra became Vishnu/Krishna - but that is more because they like this unified concept of Hinduism - that started at one point and continued rather than a confluence of wars, cultures, people, thoughts etal. And they would rather be nomads from the Volga than of African origin
There is a fascinating story that I had read about Jaganatha at the Jaganath Puri Temple. He is worshipped there along with his siblings - Balarama and Subadhra. And the gods claim kinship with the local tribals. It is the tribals who make the main offerings to this temple and the Brahmins consume that.

I had earlier read a book by Sandhya Jain called Adi Deo Arya Devata - A Panoramic View of Tribal Hindu Cultural Interface. It is a fairly easy read on how there is a close link between Tribal and Aryan Gods. She blames the British - they are an effective scapegoat - for creating a chasm between the ancient tribes - Adi Dravida - and the much more modern settlers - Aryans - in terms of being different cultures. It is a slightly light book and i am not really sure of its scholarship. Yet, it did give me a lot of triggers for thinking about.

But, by far the most engrossing book that i had read on this topic was The Indian Theogony: A Comparative Study of Indian Mythology from the Vedas to the Puranas. It was also the most difficult of all my reads. It is aslo an extemely good starting point if sociology and society interest you.

Society and History and who wins makes such an impact on who is finally worshipped. But the Hindu system has been a bit like the Borg - assimilating everyone in their path and adding their uniqueness to the over all system. So it is a bit difficult if not impossible to untangle where which God began his/her journey. And for me the fascination with Gods is a fascination with history and society. Who were these people. Why did they worship these Gods - with their unique properties? When did they stop ? Was their a war? Was there something else? Given the lack of written history it is a fascinating what if scenario- who knows

For the record I am a theist. Mostly a rampant Polytheist - I adore all my Gods with all their innate weaknesses. And in my pantheon Christ, and Allah and Yahweh can fit without any issues. Afterall, when you have a few million Gods - 3 more is not going to break the bank. But at the most fundamental level my faith is in the nirguna bhraman - the most incredible concept ever. A god without shape or form. without atributes. and who is beyond space and time. Try and visualise this on a rainy day adn it becomes very apparent why we go back to our cuddly idols.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince : finished the first reading last night. Great fun. Will read it again over the weekend!
JD and I shared the book.