tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69730849869617015522024-03-13T16:48:22.671+05:30black-and-white fountainblack-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.comBlogger253125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-71202273624358580912021-07-10T22:36:00.040+05:302021-07-10T22:49:52.207+05:30Keeping in Touch by Anjali Joseph<h2 style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC97cXTkrlNX1y3-ExJ8dQyehJbGtUtT0nbmMgrznSZ9CiM1v6INsQ7b0N_izvibGM53b87hvGzUtx2VXpYGotdwCTA0Zwh6SvM_VWHlfB0nmGDrx9e3o4GYOom8iEr4otCKtuWS3kauI/" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC97cXTkrlNX1y3-ExJ8dQyehJbGtUtT0nbmMgrznSZ9CiM1v6INsQ7b0N_izvibGM53b87hvGzUtx2VXpYGotdwCTA0Zwh6SvM_VWHlfB0nmGDrx9e3o4GYOom8iEr4otCKtuWS3kauI/w446-h297/Anjali+Joseph+by+Geraint+Lewis+2.jpg" width="446" /></a><br /></h2><h2 style="text-align: left;">A writer's life</h2><div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6EDkKcggwi0HjR1BfVsGYqtQ3ZnOenl0gTqrlB5N0IAnw1z0sUWnlD24tKjqroLlMOBvyzxociz_h03CngTBOUvP-kiXodw1NeswEKLhLPsLZjb85NLRjy5TbPdCt_qe4G8mb0Nmp0so/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /><br /></a></div><div class="separator">Her father, Mathai Joseph, is one of India’s earliest computer
scientists. Her maternal grandfather, Principal Bannerjee of Elphinstone
College, was one of the most revered educationists of his time. Anjali Joseph
studied English at Trinity College, and completed PhD in Creative and Critical Writing
at University of East Anglia. In 2010 she was listed by <i>The Telegraph</i> as
one of the twenty best novelists under forty. Her books detail ordinary life,
delving inner lives and familiar realms.</div><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>A reader and a writer all her life, in her youth she may
have experienced, as many of us do, the torturous periodic shedding and renewal
of skin. The years passed – perhaps not (as she once wrote) as painlessly as
that clause implies. She followed her whims and explored possibilities. Call
them massive research projects, or immersion experiences, or the ashram life of
renouncing this and that. And then out comes a novel, a space to lose yourself,
experience new things, understand life in a different way – in the process, as
she says, of becoming the person who wrote that novel. <o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>1.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span lang="EN-US">What got you started with writing this book?</span><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_yojD1vXp9ClowJBRv2ib-fJKnnqER60fg7i2hmv_a0oFOkNfgqhhpzhQImxQKN3MURgD1vwehO9z_El8G1zxAJVxaVxYm_3q2Zm7c0PsInDWtA0ofZOF05qSOe_3eAyyr0UgIW7H3mo/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="182" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_yojD1vXp9ClowJBRv2ib-fJKnnqER60fg7i2hmv_a0oFOkNfgqhhpzhQImxQKN3MURgD1vwehO9z_El8G1zxAJVxaVxYm_3q2Zm7c0PsInDWtA0ofZOF05qSOe_3eAyyr0UgIW7H3mo/w132-h200/keeping+in+touch.jfif" width="132" /></a></span></div><span lang="EN-US"><br />I was
chatting to a friend in Norwich some time in around 2014 and she said she was
terrible at keeping in touch. The phrase hovered in the air, illuminated for
me, and I went home and wrote it down, convinced I’d write a book called <i>Keeping
in Touch</i>. That was also the year I moved from Norwich to Guwahati in search
of a new adventure, both at home and very much not at home, but fascinated by
Assam. I had the character of Keteki in mind for a while as I was finishing <i>The
Living</i>, and had even started writing about her, but Ved came along a little
later, in 2015 when I wrote a short story that turned into the opening chapter
of the book. The lightbulb called Everlasting Lucifer was a short story I’d
begun writing when I was about eight years old, and not finished.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>2.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>And the symbolism of that lightbulb?<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Maybe it’s some form of the light that’s in everybody. Maybe
a sort of objective correlative of something that is much bigger. Besides, each
of us wants to light up. But maybe the prospect is also a little threatening.
What would really happen if that light were seen?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I don’t know where the name came from. I was reading a lot of F Scott Fitzgerald at
the time, <i>The Diamond as Big as the Ritz</i> and several other of his
stories. I must have at that time or sometime earlier learnt that Lucifer meant
‘light bearer’ or read about the story of how Lucifer was the fallen angel, but
that it’s not necessarily a pejorative name. It was there as one of those ideas
and half-ideas, some of which you write down and some that remain at the back
of your mind. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>3.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Did your characters change as you wrote? <o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Well, they meet at a time in their lives when they are ready
for change. Their encounter is the catalyst that makes them step outside the
comfortable shells they have created. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Both of them evolved as characters in the way I wanted to
show them. My friend, the wonderful writer Tim Pears, was kind enough to read a
draft and from his responses, I realised that the initial iteration of Ved was
too off-putting, and Keteki a little too oblique.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At the opening of the book, Ved is a toxic bachelor, but
he’s also in coming to the end of a time of getting over his earlier geekier
self. He’s enjoying a period of his life when he feels he can be in control.
But obviously he’s also still at least in a latent way open to the possibility
of more. And then he falls for her. And Keteki – I had to say more about her in
subsequent drafts; initially I wanted to show her mainly through the effect she
had on other people. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>4.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Your books have always run quite close to
your own life adventures.<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When a child growing up in a provincial English town I was
waiting to start my life, the fiction that I read was about all sort of things and
these novels almost seemed to be carrying messages, telling me, maybe your life
will be like this! Or maybe it will be like that! I drank it all in. In a way,
reading fiction is a way of thinking about how to live. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now I get interested in one thing after another, and
sometimes that’s what my next novel will be about. Maybe the other things that
I’m learning around that time also become relevant. But I wouldn’t say most of
my life goes into my novels. There are lots of things I do and read about that
don’t directly feed into what I write. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I suppose for me, writing a novel is partly about finding
out more about the characters and place I’ve decided are interesting. But it’s
also a process of becoming the person who will have written the novel I’m
writing. It’s something that gets revealed as I go along. Each individual step
is in the dark, but there is a kind of feeling of what the next thing is.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>5.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Why Assam?<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I went to live in Guwahati in 2014, Assam was a new
place for me. I started learning Assamese, a beautiful and elliptical language.
I think there might be a flavour of that in the book. After a while of
studying, I realised that being able to say what you mean in Assamese hardly
means you can speak it. That is not how Assamese is used. As I wrote in an
essay for <i><a href="https://unbound.com/boundless/2019/04/16/playing-with-the-world/" target="_blank">Unbound</a>, </i>most people say something indirectly
related to what they mean; the person they are talking to then responds by
saying something indirectly related to the first thing. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I had two lovely teachers of Assamese, Dimpy Deka and my
friend and neighbour Babu’s grandmother, Bimal Rajkhowa, herself a writer and
lyricist. My Assamese remains halting but I can read and write, and some of my
learning comprised reading aloud books in Assamese and asking about the phrases
or words I didn’t know. It was a beautiful introduction to a sensibility as
well as a language. The culture of Assam has so much depth, so many layers.
There is a certain way of seeing life. It was just lovely to live there. And in
Assam, everyone is a reader, it’s a place where people understand books and
literature. In Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi if you say you’re a writer people
will ask whether you know this writer or that writer, or if you’ve written for
films, things like that. But in Assam people will want to tell you about what
they’ve been reading. I’ve had conversations like that with a taxi driver, the
man who works in the gas agency. Everybody is excited about reading, and for a
writer that is truly special.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>6.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>And your book has such a strong yoga
component too! <o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Well, I had a scientific, post-enlightenment sort of
upbringing. In my family, there was not much ritual or religious observance. Still,
as a child I was fascinated by religion, magic, and wonder. I’d read a
storybook and hark back to the missing word in a spell, thinking, one day I’ll
find out what that word is! And then I’ll be able to be invisible or do
whatever the spell was for. That interest in spirituality found its expression
much later, in my thirties, when I did a yoga teacher training. And there we
studied Vedanta and some yoga philosophy: that was the first time I felt, here
is a description of the world that makes intuitive sense to me. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yoga training, then learning about tantra, were ways into
these systems of thought. It was kind of liberating. And of course, if you are
a fiction writer, you can use that fiction to offer people the idea that
reality might not be quite as monolithic and quite mechanically materialist as
we – certainly my generation – were told when we were young. The idea is
important to me and the book is sort of soaked in that.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>7.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>The uses of a novel, then?<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I believe in the novel as a machine that can re-configure a
reader’s way of being in some way, perhaps for more lightness, or just more
joy. Imagination can bring us back to ourselves, and that’s something I’m
always aiming to do. Here I wanted to take the reader, while reading about Ved
and Keteki, through the idea that in some ways the past is imaginary, and its
weight that we have been carrying can be exploded into lightness. I don’t
necessarily see ‘enlightening’ as a one-off process after which one transcends
and everything is bunnies and angels. I think it’s part of human experience
that there is an intermittence to keeping in touch with that real self inside,
as well as with others and the way we really feel for them. It doesn’t matter
that this awareness drops; we can pick it up again, and that’s the process of
keeping in touch which also enables compassion, for ourselves, and for others.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><b>8.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Your life has centred around writing
since a very young age but in your books you come through as someone who has
led many lives through others. Knowing what you know now, would you have chosen
another path?<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I didn’t really choose writing; I just always knew that was
what I would do. And as you say, in a way through writing I can do anything
else I like.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>First appeared in the <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/interviewanjali-joseph-author-keeping-in-touch-101625833656293.html" target="_blank">Hindustan Times books page </a>on 10 July 2021</i></span></p><span class="”fullpost”"></span>black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-52555249139287084132021-07-03T17:21:00.006+05:302021-07-03T17:21:49.167+05:30Colaba The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai by Shabnam Minwalla<span class="”fullpost”"></span><div><br /><h2 style="text-align: left;">Shabnam's vale of serendipity</h2></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMCyVNe0uozxSlN7A7IGB7hELGCHgQY5WeLAkAPRStIEhh79kjnmNli0aiAXTu-Uj-mYPHHGeRWWuH7m1NQT6EJag09t4qcqSv8a6O86P4_JT3Q1QR-AQPEcly0tmvw_6MsU3-r8i9H0o/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="666" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMCyVNe0uozxSlN7A7IGB7hELGCHgQY5WeLAkAPRStIEhh79kjnmNli0aiAXTu-Uj-mYPHHGeRWWuH7m1NQT6EJag09t4qcqSv8a6O86P4_JT3Q1QR-AQPEcly0tmvw_6MsU3-r8i9H0o/w207-h320/Colaba+Shabnam+Minwalla.jpg" width="207" /></a>It was an online talk in which the author presented some of its
intriguing photos, experiences and learnings, that led me to this book. Her discoveries,
couched in the easy wit and bubbling energy so compelling in the talk, were just
as much of a pleasure to read. </div><div><p class="MsoNormal">“What Colaba doesn’t have is easy to list. What Colaba does
have, is not. Its qualities are concealed by voluminous skirts and peeling
paint,” writes Shabnam Minwalla, and proceeds to treat the reader to a
comprehensive expose, weaving personal experiences from a range of people
interviewed, with widely diverse secondary sources. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The latter include facts and administrative data from Gazetteers;
iffy maps and exaggerations from travellers’ accounts; colourful descriptions
from novels; even gravestone epitaphs (“doleful postcards from the past”). The
one I enjoyed most was an August 2002 <i>Busybee</i> column which lampoons the
Arabs who for decades holidayed in Colaba to revel in rain, a novelty rendered
anachronistic by global weirding. The exuberant snippets provide information,
they create atmosphere, and their depth and diversity well represents contemporary
Colaba, a place whose character transforms from corner to corner, sometimes
quite dramatically. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As for the people interviewed, most are long-term residents
and colourful neighbourhood characters. The best stories come from the author
herself, memories of Colaba haunted houses, lingerie shops that date back to before
the word lingerie arrived in Colaba, glimpses of a prim schoolgirl, one of a
horde, who transformed into hoydens tumbling down the staircase the instant the
evening bell rang, only to be harangued on the way home by the fierce battleaxes
of Cusrow Baug. Biographical details are introduced not in a self-congratulatory
or coy manner or even in bland lists, but in a festive jumping-about that
interweaves energetic adjectives, provides vivid pictures, and sometimes has you
laughing aloud. The creative happiness is impressively balanced with deep,
fault-finding, nit-picking research into this unabashedly grimy district of
India’s financial capital. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Colaba has no medieval fortresses, tales of tragic queens,
or echoes of bloody battles. Just two hundred years ago it was a
jackal-infested island – fine-grained diorite, composed of feldspar and
hornblende! – separated from the emerging metropolis by a temperamental creek,
ghastly shipwrecks, and a cemetery greedy for colonizers. When a causeway was
built, the inconvenient outpost transformed into a place of buzzing industry,
and the malodorous creek with mosquito-riddled mangroves and criminal-infested
bays was eventually replaced by traffic-choked streets lined with art
galleries, cakeshops, and more. Who doesn’t love Colaba for its street shopping
– those cool, billowing cottons, coolly-replicated designerware? Amidst the
thronging crowds, familiar faces pop up and cheery “Hieee!”s ring out in
Shabnam’s vale of serendipity, the place of which one well-known resident (read
the book to know who) is reported as having instructed, “When you go shopping
down Colaba, Ma, don’t forget to give everybody my love.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Besides the extraordinary energy of the haphazard streets of
the southernmost tip of a city rapidly sprinting northwards, this book also documents
nooks and structures: Colaba Lunatic Asylum, Royal Alfred Sailor’s Home, the
garden of a Mrs Hough and its magical mango tree which fruited twice a year;
the reincarnation of Buckley Court from a haunted Indo-Saracenic mansion to a
guesthouse packed with fascinating residents to a ‘luxury skyscraper’;
dragonflies fluttering by enroute to East Africa. And the fascinating stone
which clarifies the boundaries between Colaba and Old Woman’s Island of yore –
inside a residence encroaching into, of all places, the trendy and laidback Colaba
Police Station.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I called Shabnam Minwalla to tell her how much I had
enjoyed her book, we naturally compared notes and, though we’ve never met, and even
claim different territories of Colaba, found much to celebrate. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Colaba is still somewhat in the nature of ‘native place’ to
me, the venue of childhood winter vacations escaped to from bone-chilling
frost, sultry evenings strolling on the Cuffe Parade promenade, playing in the piles
of rubble waiting to take their place in swanky buildings, snacking on peanuts
and sometimes even illicit bhel (because typhoid). “Which building?” Shabnam
asked and when I replied, she knew exactly which one, and together we moaned
the decaying grandeur and eventual demise of the townhouse with its authentic stained-glass
windows, Minton tiles, sagging wooden staircase and unpolished banisters, residence
of former presidency magistrate KJ Bijlani for nearly fifty years.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Every chapter of this book ends with a pithy ‘Colaba
lesson for life’, and the one I’ve picked to pass on here, one that sears me
with regret, instructs: “Quick! Talk to your grandparents before it’s too
late.” </span></p></div><div><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><i>First appeared in <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/reviewcolaba-the-diamond-at-the-tip-of-mumbai-by-shabnam-minwalla-101625233492881.html">Hindustan Times books page on 2 July 2021</a> </i></span></div><div><br /></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div>black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-21170196814634057902021-06-16T08:12:00.003+05:302021-06-16T08:14:49.129+05:30Wall Paintings of Sindh by Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro<h2 style="text-align: left;">Secret treasures</h2><span class="”fullpost”"></span><div><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NYMa5KBtykvKIyG9wQzYWcVIUKGgvD24LhatYmSHO6OUi1gNuLQ0LW9SwQuMnCgl1X5gf3LcVuL1v5VziaU_4zR5gv01WWgYMmWr5-oZC1C5VH2QcorCoeiGtaa_Mtas0wMkqd-DDGQ/" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="377" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NYMa5KBtykvKIyG9wQzYWcVIUKGgvD24LhatYmSHO6OUi1gNuLQ0LW9SwQuMnCgl1X5gf3LcVuL1v5VziaU_4zR5gv01WWgYMmWr5-oZC1C5VH2QcorCoeiGtaa_Mtas0wMkqd-DDGQ/w151-h200/Book+cover.bmp" width="151" /></a><span lang="EN-GB">In India, Sindhis are most often seen as a
mercantile community – hardworking and enterprising, but </span>almost entirely
focussed on material gain and pursuits, with limited interest in art and
culture. Sindh itself, the ancestral homeland which the Hindus left after
Partition took place in 1947 and to which they have almost no access today, is
seen as a hot and dusty place of limited opportunity. So this book is a real
eye-opener which showcases a very unexpected dimension for Indian Sindhis to
understand something about their lost heritage.</p><o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">In 1998, early in anthropologist Zulfiqar
Ali Kalhoro’s career, a field visit took him to the necropolis of Mian Nasir
Muhammad Kalhoro, where he saw many beautiful paintings on the exterior and
interior walls of its monuments. He could see that they were crumbling and in
urgent need of restoration. Feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the art around
him, feeling equally disturbed that it would all soon be lost, Zulfiqar
resolved that he was going to travel all across Sindh to seek out every other
similar site he could find, and record whatever he saw in them. This book is a
result of many fulfilling journeys the author made over more than 20 years, to
do so – and a great gift to people who are interested in the history of art,
and in particular the history of the art of Sindh.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4C-WS-6dmJvDM8a6qQ34WrtCSMrzeuqfV_dmpKpA6OHTo5TnSMn4dpNh30JKh3a2jNp1ZNwL_iuh37_MvmIeQeDQcn92H1pu9Z_MbhjB52sur7TRXt6TNK6HnKl9HI_Q_AZDjKVQ4ihM/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="778" data-original-width="567" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4C-WS-6dmJvDM8a6qQ34WrtCSMrzeuqfV_dmpKpA6OHTo5TnSMn4dpNh30JKh3a2jNp1ZNwL_iuh37_MvmIeQeDQcn92H1pu9Z_MbhjB52sur7TRXt6TNK6HnKl9HI_Q_AZDjKVQ4ihM/s16000/Screenshot+2021-06-15+14.27.30.jpg" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">What I learnt from this book is that Sindh
is strewn with monuments of many kinds and these include tombs, places of
worship, and palaces. Most of these are filled with works of art, and besides
architectural flourishes, ceramic embellishments and tiling, many of the walls
are covered with paintings too. <o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU205etHis5ShGA5VK456VxIUdMtzimSKa5W1MYvAqohOSWn2wMDfct44H3YybIQBL96dJpixIJmgKvodCeblkOZfrr6L-C6vhp85tODdIrunM05m7phCz7Skm0ZIc71jJ7VxHr_MUePs/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="810" data-original-width="1057" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU205etHis5ShGA5VK456VxIUdMtzimSKa5W1MYvAqohOSWn2wMDfct44H3YybIQBL96dJpixIJmgKvodCeblkOZfrr6L-C6vhp85tODdIrunM05m7phCz7Skm0ZIc71jJ7VxHr_MUePs/w400-h307/Screenshot+2021-06-14+16.37.43.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB">In many places, Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro noticed that in the process of maintenance of the tombs by their followers, they were whitewashed on the inside, and the paintings were damaged. For example, in the tomb of Mian Yar Muhammad Kalhoro in Khudabad, Zulfiqar found it all whitewashed except for some paintings which may have required too much effort to reach. From these traces, he deduces that<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt;"></p><blockquote><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px;">“the whole interior of the tomb was adorned with stylized flower vases, fruit dishes and a variety of flowers covering every panel, soffit, niche, squinch and arch recess of the tomb.” <o:p></o:p></span></blockquote><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14.2667px;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB">His research indicates that the art was a
tradition of long-standing, but very little of what was created before the
seventeenth century remains and this book largely covers art of the Kalhora,
Talpur and British periods of Sindh’s history. Many of the previous era, glimpses
of which sometimes pop up in historical records, no longer exist. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIYaOz2We3W1jhN0AHkdUHhoxjEEizkT70b3X8Imf8N47YN9yQUbwiuTrMw3vD5N3ZkBzy1EYl1Q2pUI0Sr8DaeSaOxRLfpI_zI9RYF2ag_8YVK32Pab66hVp4vWs447IGxmvqECW7XwY/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1082" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIYaOz2We3W1jhN0AHkdUHhoxjEEizkT70b3X8Imf8N47YN9yQUbwiuTrMw3vD5N3ZkBzy1EYl1Q2pUI0Sr8DaeSaOxRLfpI_zI9RYF2ag_8YVK32Pab66hVp4vWs447IGxmvqECW7XwY/w400-h253/Screenshot+2021-06-15+14.12.24.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Zulfiqar has covered tombs of rulers and
tribal chiefs, as well as the tombs of Sufi saints, and the book has excellent
illustrations of the structures as well as of the art inside them. </div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">Royal
tombs, Zulfiqar points out, are not embellished with figural motifs, except for
birds. They carry gilded Quranic verses in striking calligraphy; traditional
geometric patterns; and floral, vegetal, plant and tree motifs. The lily flower,
Zulfiqar points out, is a favourite motif of the Kalhora artists in both
paintings and glazed tiles. Zulfiqar also explains the symbolism of other
favoured motifs such as the cypress tree, and varieties of birds and flowers.
Monuments of other rulers and saints, however, carry all kinds of figural
depictions including scenes of a bird feeding its offspring, rooster fight,
mourning scene in a tomb, action-packed animal fight scenes, hunting scenes and
battle scenes, as well as representations of cultural activities, such as
dance, music and sports, and many romantic folk scenes. In all, they provide a rich
illustration of the social and political life of Sindh. There are even tombs
which also show domestic activities such as dancing, cooking and churning, such
as the tomb of Othwal Faqir, located south of Mian Nasir Muhammad Kalhoro’s
shrine. In fact, locations of each monument have been meticulously provided – a
poignant resource for the many who may want to visit but are unlikely to ever
be able to do so.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzoOOIk1rBH65RpgNTEeA71PUFiu_qMYZx0kR9MRSkV3CEcb1amg3YKDM06b4pKxchGKJQFQ9ErrUudflVoMu_RAN173ZV6BzhRqe1Fo8DKAC9ms6DvsA9mBONseV7jx0Y090WrrEddg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="1081" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzoOOIk1rBH65RpgNTEeA71PUFiu_qMYZx0kR9MRSkV3CEcb1amg3YKDM06b4pKxchGKJQFQ9ErrUudflVoMu_RAN173ZV6BzhRqe1Fo8DKAC9ms6DvsA9mBONseV7jx0Y090WrrEddg/w400-h251/Screenshot+2021-06-15+14.13.49.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Through Zulfiqar’s commentary, and through
the rich colour schemes of the illustrations, we get a sense of the people of
Sindh and their daily occupations through history. He has also linked these
paintings with recognized schools of other neighbouring regions, and compares
their features. All these give us a rich visualisation of various historical
events as well as folk stories and together they bring alive folk romances,
battle scenes, and a broad spectrum of social life in eighteenth-century Sindh.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvBKqKJH0kOnb8ogKBROlqzm4pXtX23-qNJS1uoofXkj3XKnaBdr8jmGgtln7_gI-66XpbJRL_pnaCUFYvVtIHifR6bVHsabTh_s8_lhwV_iG1LTw278VfMfWK9xk14Ku3IFkxTDG6Aek/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="1057" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvBKqKJH0kOnb8ogKBROlqzm4pXtX23-qNJS1uoofXkj3XKnaBdr8jmGgtln7_gI-66XpbJRL_pnaCUFYvVtIHifR6bVHsabTh_s8_lhwV_iG1LTw278VfMfWK9xk14Ku3IFkxTDG6Aek/w400-h248/Screenshot+2021-06-15+12.32.52.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Zulfiqar has detoured with extensive
coverage of the folk tales he found illustrated, sometimes two or three
adjacent inside a single monument. Along with the commentary and symbolism, he
has also recounted some of the most loved folk tales to accompany the
illustrations, and these add depth to his book.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9x-_02Ts__CJ1fSCFpG7xiHW1d08pO18BDiv43SV_gKf6lHyX2PohIW4J4vVyYR9o9wWFC5LZXs6UEA1gv7gXUKmsj2vVsJwa9EveY833IlsMxKNguu2UtpD5Ec6JXEhgoyp2_O3hnUI/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="633" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9x-_02Ts__CJ1fSCFpG7xiHW1d08pO18BDiv43SV_gKf6lHyX2PohIW4J4vVyYR9o9wWFC5LZXs6UEA1gv7gXUKmsj2vVsJwa9EveY833IlsMxKNguu2UtpD5Ec6JXEhgoyp2_O3hnUI/w400-h272/Screenshot+2021-06-15+13.16.13.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">We also learn from this book that Mihrab, the
arched niche on the qibla wall that indicates the direction of prayer in every
mosque, is also seen in the monuments of Sindh. It was a common feature in the
tombs, and evolved into the depiction of actual mosques. Many tombs carry these
and most tombs built during the Kalhora, Talpur and British periods also depict
Makkah and Medina.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeXxRkE89aT3GV-LM_4DBmUrGNgARsHJ2eFcHiaEc3s5AfkjBkxGOdlaUx9TanLbsiaYHT5Qzfs4A4ceR-zcXbKCWyxsH7Ft_zsKQJE0YCgswhGa-iqQ4PkQhrQXvgEcfbvpZIuV_tobs/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="809" data-original-width="564" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeXxRkE89aT3GV-LM_4DBmUrGNgARsHJ2eFcHiaEc3s5AfkjBkxGOdlaUx9TanLbsiaYHT5Qzfs4A4ceR-zcXbKCWyxsH7Ft_zsKQJE0YCgswhGa-iqQ4PkQhrQXvgEcfbvpZIuV_tobs/w278-h400/Screenshot+2021-06-15+14.27.00.jpg" width="278" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I was also intrigued to observe the
presence of Khudabadi on some of the monuments, because this was a script thought
to have been developed and used by the Hindu traders of the province.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB">Most of these art treasures, Zulfiqar Ali
Kalhoro reports, are in sad repair. In the twenty years of his quest, he has
seen them decay before his eyes, under the ravages of extreme climate. It is
sad to think that in the decades to come, most will vanish, unrestored, and
live on only in the pages of this book. It’s not just the government which is
responsible for the neglect – but who can blame needy peasants who till the protected
land close the beautiful monuments to fulfil their simple needs?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;">What I learnt from this book moved me deeply.
What I saw and read made me feel connected with a precious and distinctive
heritage which has been frittered away and is only saved from complete
obliteration by books like this one.</span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2iyTeTmScW9J2q_D1bBGiArJybgHJ-doljrU8b2mlxaSoYfBhxnkd552ftUwFDQhyphenhyphenmuwj-TS9yJqlSYqSGQCZ96hLJkqvU8O5phb3FxZr72tfc3glcHcJRj4haxaDP7K9hbCSjt8gd8/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="877" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2iyTeTmScW9J2q_D1bBGiArJybgHJ-doljrU8b2mlxaSoYfBhxnkd552ftUwFDQhyphenhyphenmuwj-TS9yJqlSYqSGQCZ96hLJkqvU8O5phb3FxZr72tfc3glcHcJRj4haxaDP7K9hbCSjt8gd8/w400-h299/Screenshot+2021-06-15+14.24.11.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /><br /></span></p><br /></div>black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-39741147719249844582020-12-20T12:27:00.003+05:302020-12-20T12:27:43.169+05:30BEYOND THE CARICATURE by Rajesh Pant<span class="”fullpost”"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_VqoKtxGnbhsdq7k-osiScZk_5sGzPF5dsz5zjOhKue0wMqXafloqsILOz8oIYXiJVxTlTzQHbD7gP9rul-xHdP8lV-2q49Wu1LdNw14hSXPbw-Ipa13GreQJqnxY1M0-o6Yy2A5z9FU/s420/Rainbow+front+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="277" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_VqoKtxGnbhsdq7k-osiScZk_5sGzPF5dsz5zjOhKue0wMqXafloqsILOz8oIYXiJVxTlTzQHbD7gP9rul-xHdP8lV-2q49Wu1LdNw14hSXPbw-Ipa13GreQJqnxY1M0-o6Yy2A5z9FU/s320/Rainbow+front+cover.jpg" /></a></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="b2r5p-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="b2r5p-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Many years ago, as a child in class three, I saw something amazing. A tall for his age boy, a classmate, proudly walked up to the Maths teacher and presented him a cake. “It’s my birthday”. The Master who was about to read the results of a quiz, stopped him; read out his marks. He had failed the boy. Then in a rage he threw the cake on the ground, kicked it out the door and roared “don’t try and bribe me you dirty Sindhi”. (Those were the days of course, where Teachers were forgiven for being impolitic!)</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="7g1to-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7g1to-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="7g1to-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">After class, the boy went out, quietly picked up the cake, and took the first bite himself and shared it with us saying his mother had baked it, why waste it? The memory of the incident has not left me because it was the first time I had heard a Teacher being abusive and the first time I had heard of someone being called a Sindhi. Before that I only knew that the boy’s name was Pooran. The ‘Sindhi’ caricature of a scroogish person who accumulates cash and real estate while constantly prattling ‘vari sai’ is widespread; egged on by actors playing bit stereotypes of Sindhis in yesterday’s Hindi films. And thereby hangs a tale.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="81dl0-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="81dl0-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="81dl0-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Caricatures are an unfortunate sociological phenomenon, particularly in our country; we draw upon them and use them very matter of factly mostly disrespectfully. This in turn causes diminution of our strength as a society. Constant usage somehow cements these social and untruthful caricatures till they becomes part of our believed folklore – said by elders, repeated by the young who will ape anything. And so it will go till we mature as a Society.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="7gog3-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7gog3-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span class="diy96o5h" data-offset-key="7gog3-0-0" end="13" spellcheck="false" start="0" style="background-color: var(--text-highlight); font-family: inherit;">Murli Melwani</span><span data-offset-key="7gog3-1-0" style="font-family: inherit;">'s collection of short stories ‘Beyond the Rainbow* goes a ways in breaking the caricature. It is a melange of colourful people, exotic locales and some adventure. All characters and events are supposedly fictional. But I suspect, very strongly, each story is true or at least has a broad element of truth. It is said that a people whose homeland is sparse – or who have no homeland at all - causes them to move to far and foreign lands. To make their living or ply their trade. True of Marwaris, Jews and Scots and certainly Sindhis. The sweep of the locations of the people and stories is ample evidence of the truly international spread of this group of people.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="fr2qq-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fr2qq-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="fr2qq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Stereotypically Sindhis have settled in Haang Kaang and have shops in Chunking Arcade! Melwani’s book serves us a different and exotic cocktail – Curacao, Toronto, Taipei, Bangkok, Bombay, New York, Honduras, Darjeeling and of course HK and Ulhasnagar. He paints a picture of their fads, foibles, beliefs, customs, strengths, weaknesses. These stories illustrate the ease with which they adapt to (or do not) to stressful, and strange situations.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="dp3b2-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="dp3b2-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="dp3b2-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">In one of the longer short stories – the protagonist is called to the Holiday Inn in HK for an interview. This took me years back on my own first trip overseas and to HK; I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Kowloon and was amazed to see a small statue of Lord Shiva near the entrance with a ‘fountainette’ from his locks depicting the source of the Ganges. I was told that the property was owned by the Harilela’s. “Sindhi, you know, flom your contly” – the Receptionist informed me Though I believe they are Hongkongers stretching back a century. Coming back to the tale, ‘Head of a Chicken’ is a textbook narrative of poor boy, with remarkable insights “…but, a Sindhi would not ask a question without a motive…” he is economical with ethics, makes good and then faces the same situation he had left his earlier employer. An interesting take on ethics and business, a motif which runs through a some of the other stories.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="d8k3r-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="d8k3r-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="d8k3r-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Another facet about Melwani’s writing is the simplicity and honesty. In one of his stories he writes “there’s a writer in each one of us”. He does not use artifice; the story is what the story is – and that is where the writer’s true craft comes in. It is very complex to keep a narrative simple. This is exemplified when he writes a commentary on one of the most intricate machinations of our society, almost like a Rube Goldberg contraption – the fixing of a marriage, narrated by the Marriage Broker. It is mirth and thought provoking in equal proportions. Explaining it is like instructing a Martian the process of lacing-up shoes and knotting them. ‘The Bhorwani Marriage’ is a treat. Having made a fair amount of money in the transaction, which is what arranged marriages generally are, the Broker adds his punch line “One must be grateful for the crumbs that life throws one’s way”.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="4e7o-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="4e7o-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="4e7o-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Sex is is not taboo. This is refreshing because our public posturing is prudish and fairly Victorian. So when a well off and retired businessman has a romp with a Bar girl; it does not seem shocking. The twist is later in the tale like in the thought process of a man in another story, watching a call girl undress. And more – a Father who can shoot to kill – to dictate a marriage in his family. As they say - you can take a man out of the home but you can take the home out of the man.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="3ic5j-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3ic5j-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="3ic5j-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Like all those who have spread across the globe and settled; names soon change to suit or accommodate or better still to merge with the chosen country of abode. Meaning we are here to stay and be a part of you. An endearing quality which makes Jetharam convert to Jimmy and Metharam change to a more suitable Mike. A subtle change of status too? Which brings me to another story.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="8rpe-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="8rpe-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="8rpe-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Years ago in the middle eighties, my Boss called me to substitute for him and make an unscheduled presentation to two gentleman sitting in the Conference room. The object was to present India, as a country full of promise yet not hide the pitfalls. The two were obviously ‘from overseas’. Post the presentation I introduced myself and the young guy stuck out his hand saying “Tommy, Tommy Hilfiger. I’ve just started a line back home with him and this guy brought me here because he’s very hot on India though he’s never lived here.” The other gentleman’s calling card was a folded affair. The top read Gloria Vanderbilt and the card opened to reveal his name ‘Mike’ Murjani.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="1o7s6-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1o7s6-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="1o7s6-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Rajesh Pant</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="aej99-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="aej99-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="aej99-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Pune, December 2020</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="e07rg-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="e07rg-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="e07rg-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">*Beyond the Rainbow. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="aa5ei-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="aa5ei-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="aa5ei-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Murli Melwani. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bs3pn" data-offset-key="4acrj-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="4acrj-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="4acrj-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Published by Black-and-white Fountain.</span></div></div>black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-59961770829464957302020-08-06T17:25:00.000+05:302020-08-06T17:25:57.496+05:30Learning to read all over again<div><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWfWB4CzQML-NcsZnQCGnVMP4TvXC1t-OvRPsq72CsMgsqYq3TVFzgvJHZSmR3hIau828uqptSY8h2theB9aa0ZEb8gab9GOyUta8QxoAys1jXyEWOIDCoPnjuNdmBOXJgJ5zmp9q4Mo/s864/Hindu+Books+Homing+In+03082020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="527" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWfWB4CzQML-NcsZnQCGnVMP4TvXC1t-OvRPsq72CsMgsqYq3TVFzgvJHZSmR3hIau828uqptSY8h2theB9aa0ZEb8gab9GOyUta8QxoAys1jXyEWOIDCoPnjuNdmBOXJgJ5zmp9q4Mo/w195-h320/Hindu+Books+Homing+In+03082020.jpg" width="195" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When the
lockdown commenced, life turned grim overnight; stranger than fiction. I was
reading the </span><i>Memoirs of Seth Naomal Hotchand of Karachi</i> (1804-1878), a
well-told narrative of a wealthy merchant of Sindh. Being the elaborate
personal account of someone who belonged to a community about which not much
documentation exists, the book, with an interesting history of its own, is
fascinating. However, my eye lazed mid-sentence while my mind wandered, and the
pages stayed put.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In despair,
unable to read, unable to write, I dug into my files seeking comfort, and came
across <i>Forgotten Stories from my Village, Harwai</i> by Hari Govind Narayan
Dubey. In 2015, I worked with the author to translate this charming book, based
in rural India during the freedom struggle, into English. It has dramatic
stories – pots of gold uncovered by a farmer ploughing his fields, a
spectacular jailbreak, the impact of caste division and social boycott, and
more. What makes it a classic is the ringside view of the lifestyles, thought
processes, and other subtleties of an epoch of Indian history invariably
dominated by political figures with vested interests. To make it easily accessible
to all, I uploaded it for free download on <a href="https://www.academia.edu/43182218/Forgotten_stories_from_my_village_Harwai_by_Hari_Govind_Narayan_Dubey">this link </a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Still
unsure about being able to concentrate, I decided to attempt a slim volume with
an uncomplicated cover: <i>The Impossible Journey</i> by James A Coghlan. This
lovely story of a Scottish boy’s experience of serving in the Indian army is
fiction, but, based on the diary of the author’s great uncle’s accounts of a
road journey from Rawalpindi to London in 1936, is quite as alive with engaging
detail as Naomul’s memoirs. Along with glimpses of world history and geography,
the reader understands a little about the connection between India and
Scotland, while revelling in the wry turn of phrase that permeates the book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And then, a
drowning woman who miraculously began to swim, I picked up <i>The Strange Case
of Billy Biswas</i> by Arun Joshi. This book shows that IWE were quietly
turning out classic prose decades before the term IWE was coined. Billy Biswas
belongs to two peculiar and mutually exclusive communities: the privileged
anglophiles who once governed India, and an ancient tribe, both groups reduced
today to appendages verging on extinction. Though I found its traces of
schoolboy fantasy a little annoying, the plot captivated me and I read in long
happy bursts, freed at last from lockdown.<o:p></o:p></span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This column was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-enclosed-space/story-YWetT7VDeKasVmM35iH6HJ.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;">The </a></i><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-enclosed-space/story-YWetT7VDeKasVmM35iH6HJ.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;">Hindu </a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Monday 3 August 2020 </span></div>black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-25239168117901717272019-12-01T07:59:00.003+05:302019-12-01T07:59:34.698+05:30Circus Folk and Village Freaks by Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHcDKr0rLZpsk4J-AL39lB9sOJTMoGplUSVFCHPMu5tQXV_G21D4p-dnI-YvuzMojnIOEtsmLhBDYXczOtij8ilsUp0h6LKjyGGwNo9-W0WS2Y0bIji7Cmf3FDNqGsSeDmurTfDxiMsU/s1600/circus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHcDKr0rLZpsk4J-AL39lB9sOJTMoGplUSVFCHPMu5tQXV_G21D4p-dnI-YvuzMojnIOEtsmLhBDYXczOtij8ilsUp0h6LKjyGGwNo9-W0WS2Y0bIji7Cmf3FDNqGsSeDmurTfDxiMsU/s320/circus.jpg" width="213" /></a><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
There are organs and organs</h2>
This
attractive-looking hardcover book turned out to be a surprising treat. Each of
its eighteen stories, all written in verse, are about people who are different.
Not just different but significantly so, some quite peculiar, and the stories
deal with different aspects of how the difference arose, how it was dealt with,
and what happened in the end. Along the way, each story has earthy overtones.
It starts quite naturally – I was surprised at first and then admiring, but as
it went on and the bonking got more intense, I wondered whether it wasn’t just
to say that people who are different are actually like everyone else – or that
by virtue of their difference they are more highly sexed. Though the question
occurred to me while reading, I forgot to ask it to the author when I had the chance.
The former, I suppose, based on what she revealed of herself and her book
through the discussion.
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Aparna told
us that she woke one day about a year and a half ago, with a strong vision of a
character. “It was about 5 in the morning,” she said. “I tapped my husband on
the shoulder and I said, ‘Subramanyam’. So he said, ‘No, darling, it’s Abhijeet,’
and he turned around and went back to sleep.” <i>The Strange Case of
Subramaniam the Crocodile Man</i> was forming rapidly in her mind. Noyon, their
son, was not yet four and though Subramaniam was clamouring to be let out,
Aparna was a busy mommie and did everything she had to do until finally, at the
end of the day, she could sit down at her computer and write down the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiInMaDo6feJx9GHxq-03tMMK6GCQrE2Er9Dz_AUsevEdq4bx1nGarBPTeq68IbQKXEpZ_kxTD3Efh8QHQPNQ03aQsaLKdt4EZagkx9M18FuC_nouQ4PXb37i3z9yJJVNlXfb8o_3xddH4/s1600/IMG_20190724_112748.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiInMaDo6feJx9GHxq-03tMMK6GCQrE2Er9Dz_AUsevEdq4bx1nGarBPTeq68IbQKXEpZ_kxTD3Efh8QHQPNQ03aQsaLKdt4EZagkx9M18FuC_nouQ4PXb37i3z9yJJVNlXfb8o_3xddH4/s200/IMG_20190724_112748.jpg" width="150" /></a><span lang="EN-US">Over the next
three weeks, she had written eighteen stories, waking every morning with new circus
people and village freaks performing various antics through which they conveyed
meaningful messages about human beings and the way we lead our lives. After a
rapid, fully-charged run, Aparna stopped and only looked at her stories two
months later: “The first thing I said to myself is, ‘You are sick!’ I could not
believe I wrote these stories.” (And her mother would moan, “Where did I go
wrong, was it I who filled such nonsense in your head?”) For Subramaniam had
turned out to be a ‘Crocodile Man’, a source of income but unable to gratify
his wife, who had to make her own arrangements. Pablo the Clown had a
‘foot-long schlong’ which women thronged to view and engage with. Vishu, the
Village Exterminator, came between a husband and wife in an unusual way.
Urvasi, the Devadasi, developed culinary skills that threatened to make the
entire village and its surroundings obese. Miss Rita, born a bonny, baby girl, developed
a ‘fertile chinny-chin-chin’ which sprouted a thick crop of hair. Murali, the
Metal Eater, is a reverse-Midas who eats and coolly digests metal: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US">Sweet Murali, with a whistling
throat and surreal digestion within –</span><span lang="EN-US">Never ate a bit of meat or gran, but
gorged himself on mountains of tin</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Miss Luxmi,
The Daredevil Dart Thrower, highbred, born wealthy and fancy free, happened to
be too dusky-toned to attract any good Brahmin boy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN-US">Of Sita and Gita, the Siamese Twins,<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US">Who separated themselves in a bid to
win</span><span lang="EN-US">Love, and for half a heart each, a
home –<br /> </span><span lang="EN-US">Instead,
lost it all and grew old alone.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Twisted
passions, lustful charity, drunken brutality, servitude and fawning delight,
accommodating girl, dumbstruck wife, furiously praying, gilded cage – these are
a few themes; they are also phrases picked at random from these tales – or fable,
allegory, parody, if you will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">People
close to Aparna told her that the book reads like an autobiography: “I grew up
feeling like an outsider. I dealt with mental health issues for a very long
time. I have major recurrent depressive disorder, and it took me a very long
time to find a kind and compassionate neuropsychiatrist. Growing up, I felt
like a square cog in a round hole. So the book addresses a lot of issues to do
with a person not fitting in – a freak, as it were. I grew up in a conservative
town and people would look at me and say, ‘What is this?’ So I guess this reflects
my experiences. Issues are important to me, whether the LGBTQ community, caste,
physical appearance or others.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Aparna’s stories
veer towards South Indian motifs including names, features and other hints, and
this Aparna explained by saying while she had tried to be geographically
neutral, she had grown up with the work of RK Narayan and when constructing
this world, the visuals that came to her said, “Malgudi”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">While each
one had turned out pretty much whole in terms of its theme and content, the
rhyme in which it manifested was lacking. Aparna said that her work had been
published in international journals like Pen Review and others, but more
abstruse and in free verse. She now began a rigorous study of metre with the
help of a mentor, Shantanu Anand, and every syllable in the book was read and
re-read at least eight times to put it into the exact metre. Still, these
eighteen pieces do not follow a satisfactory structure. They are not in the
same metre; some verses change metre in the course of the verse; in some, I was
unable to stretch them to fit a metre at all. Aparna is not, she said, a master
like Vikram Seth who wrote <i>Beastly Tales from Here and There</i>, and maybe
one day would be skilled enough to write in a particular metre. Meanwhile, her
next book is short-form prose and is on the theme of variations in ways people
torture each other. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHUKATVsrJ2wlMIsH0m6WYOrl5vJfszGsmvO5ibf9zOH6yfJIinYWS4Dwa0drH9GmfERDABpibu2Y7hLnmJUPuo3CQRoAk7fPxJWm8dXGhZyxS1BL9ufFuAZhaTMZdVzGIGiA5OYkXHw8/s1600/Organ-Sisters_d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHUKATVsrJ2wlMIsH0m6WYOrl5vJfszGsmvO5ibf9zOH6yfJIinYWS4Dwa0drH9GmfERDABpibu2Y7hLnmJUPuo3CQRoAk7fPxJWm8dXGhZyxS1BL9ufFuAZhaTMZdVzGIGiA5OYkXHw8/s320/Organ-Sisters_d.jpg" width="320" /></a><span lang="EN-US">This book
is hugely amusing but it’s also strewn with pathos. Its plots are inventive, and
the illustrations by Rachna Ravi, aesthetically pleasing, are a great lead-in
to each story. Most interesting, a stroke of genius I felt, was that while the
male organ is bandied about quite lasciviously, when female organs are brought
to the page, they turn out to be brain, lungs, liver and heart. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-enclosed-space/story-YWetT7VDeKasVmM35iH6HJ.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;">Hindustan Times </a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 30 November 2019 </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-circus-folk-and-village-freaks-by-aparna-upadhyaya-sanyal/story-UEhVmc2zxnu0PBxPCIolaM.html">https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-circus-folk-and-village-freaks-by-aparna-upadhyaya-sanyal/story-UEhVmc2zxnu0PBxPCIolaM.html</a></div>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span></div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-86435378012162825442019-08-08T18:03:00.001+05:302019-08-09T09:22:14.924+05:30Why do some stories seem more important than others?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On Wednesday, I spoke to the Book Club at Gyaan Adab about “Some complexities of depicting Partition in literature”. I recorded what I said so you can see it <b><a href="https://youtu.be/FhDnX2q0Uts">here </a></b>if you like!<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiSW3nr8BvD_Z1IpVnf4y1MHZ0aCW_jvaCNgMhUl5QnJEpdAEAU_4Uwd8elSHiKNOzzQALGJ2MK2H4yVBY6lWXjKueEKRerRZ7y7Fb0ncyUCorIH8nZgtN6hu6DPWuPwGANcb3B0zJYN8/s1600/IMG_20190807_183617.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiSW3nr8BvD_Z1IpVnf4y1MHZ0aCW_jvaCNgMhUl5QnJEpdAEAU_4Uwd8elSHiKNOzzQALGJ2MK2H4yVBY6lWXjKueEKRerRZ7y7Fb0ncyUCorIH8nZgtN6hu6DPWuPwGANcb3B0zJYN8/s200/IMG_20190807_183617.jpg" width="155" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saaz Aggarwal speaking at <br />
the Book Club, Gyaan Adab <br />
on 7 August 2019</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
While preparing the talk, I remembered that my very first foray into this subject had been on facebook. It was 14 August 2011, and I <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/saaz.aggarwal/posts/10150265038627120">posted </a></b>that I intended to spend Independence Day thinking about my grandparents who lost their homeland when Independence took place in 1947. I was bemused when some of the responses were argumentative if not actually hostile. I also received a private message:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Saaz, with all due respect, time we forgot those memories. They don’t let us go forward. It’s time we buried hate which is redundant.</blockquote>
This message I found quite annoying (if well-meaning). I hadn’t said a word about hatred or indicated anything like that – all I was doing was speaking with affection and admiration of my grandparents and thinking about a difficult time in their lives which they had faced with courage. It seemed clear that referring to Partition could get you into trouble. I’m not sure if this was the spark that actually set me off on my journey, but it certainly did give me an important insight.<br />
I also looked through my books to see what I could refer to for the talk at Gyaan Adab, and found that they all seemed to have been written by people who had witnessed the horrors of Partition themselves. Some of them were personal accounts of trauma and tragedy. Along with this were indications that the accounts were not welcome by others: someone had even filed a petition to prevent the screening of the TV serial based on Bhisham Sahni’s Sahitya Akademi Award winning <i>Tamas</i>. It was 1988, more than forty years after Partition. The Supreme Court rejected the petition, and the serial ran. The Bombay High Court judgement said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Tamas </i>takes us to a historical past – unpleasant times, when a human tragedy of great dimension took place in this subcontinent … Naked truth in all times will not be beneficial but truth in its proper light indicating the evils and the consequences of those evils is constructive and that message is there in <i>Tamas</i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span>.</blockquote>
Even Manto, so beloved by lovers of literature today, was badly reviled in his time, twice prosecuted for obscenity, and once accused by a critic that he had “desecrated the dead and robbed them of their personal possessions to build a collection<span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span>.”<br />
The stories I have collected about Partition do have trauma and tragedies but, being based on extensive interviews of people so many decades after the event, they give a more balanced view of what life was like before Partition, what happened during Partition, and the story after that. The most remarkable thing about these stories is not the horror of the event but the heroic rebuilding of lives that were disrupted. We have not done justice to these marvellous stories or given the people who lived them the appreciation they deserve. I feel very privileged to have interviewed so many of these exceptional people and heard about their lives, and they will always be role models to me on how to deal with adversity.<br />
Since a very large majority of the people I have interviewed are Sindhis, a little more than half my talk presented aspects of the Sindh Partition story, including:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>how they put aside their grief and confusion and worked hard to adapt to new places and succeed,</li>
<li>how this approach caused them to blend into new communities so seamlessly that nobody noticed that they were a people who had lost their land, their language, their culture and their past,</li>
<li>that they themselves did not really think they had a story worth telling,</li>
</ul>
and so many more that, towards the end of the interesting discussion that had ensued after my talk, someone stood up and said, a little puzzled, “but this talk was not about the REAL Partition”.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijzQpREPymkYmBn-Cb3IemUyyexwReJ8kX0peumMLfMMWoMFx8kLQFuFMTD4Ujlh3qCw5PtDdDqdS5NL8JcOgGIElXXHeiqK7bt3k0bsAvJ4qHMD-P_3LBp1L-UBKEj1-fZONjrj54-XU/s1600/Gyaan+Adab+audience.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijzQpREPymkYmBn-Cb3IemUyyexwReJ8kX0peumMLfMMWoMFx8kLQFuFMTD4Ujlh3qCw5PtDdDqdS5NL8JcOgGIElXXHeiqK7bt3k0bsAvJ4qHMD-P_3LBp1L-UBKEj1-fZONjrj54-XU/s320/Gyaan+Adab+audience.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An audience of the book club regulars that day</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I found it interesting to experience at first hand how it can sometimes be difficult to convey subtle messages; to change perspectives. It reminded me of something I’d spoken about earlier, in the course of that evening's talk, one of the most terrible things that happened during Partition. A huge number of women suffered rape, abduction, separation from their children, being used as instruments of torture, being forced to jump into wells to supposedly save the family ‘honour’ and more. And then, many who were rescued and returned to their families were rejected by their families. These things had been known all along but not considered significant. The first major work on this extremely important human history was <i>The Other Side of Silence </i>by Urvashi Butalia – in 1998, a full FIFTY years after it took place.<br />
It has taken even longer for the Sindhi story to gradually emerge but even now, seventy-two years later, there are some who don’t think it is about ‘real’ Partition.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<b>Saaz Aggarwal</b></div>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">*</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>India Partitioned </i>edited by Mushirul Hasan Vol 1 Roli Books p114 </span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">**<i>India Partitioned </i>edited by Mushirul Hasan Vol 1 </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Roli Books</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">p88 </span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span></div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-34243977487404626622019-07-22T10:33:00.003+05:302019-07-22T10:33:42.222+05:30Afghan Hindus and Sikhs by Inderjeet Singh<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIa-6UKxOb9CEOqMILhDbA2EL-pmEswcX7Q0slt2Xw4kIXrN0TwHzLYZopF9QNAYseyG62nbLtXWYU1QZfoZL_zAToWSDHr00MYASMdhhImDEegJuf7CLCxPYD0ASQDn4Hgk-oxOTcW3M/s1600/Afghan+Hindus+and+Sikhs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIa-6UKxOb9CEOqMILhDbA2EL-pmEswcX7Q0slt2Xw4kIXrN0TwHzLYZopF9QNAYseyG62nbLtXWYU1QZfoZL_zAToWSDHr00MYASMdhhImDEegJuf7CLCxPYD0ASQDn4Hgk-oxOTcW3M/s320/Afghan+Hindus+and+Sikhs.jpg" width="200" /></a><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US">A plea for recognition</span></h2>
Can a Hindu
or a Sikh be a real Afghan? Or could it be possible that people left their homes
in India to settle in a country where they would always lead challenging lives because
of their religion?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This book
is a systematic and earnest compiling of a wide range of information about the
origin of this once strong and mainstream, but over the last few decades blighted,
community. It is clearly structured, written in simple language and, an earnest
and poignant plea for recognition, aims to prove once and for all that Afghan
Hindus and Sikhs are an indigenous people and not recent settlers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A superficial
and prejudiced understanding denies native origin to Afghan Sikhs and Hindus by
claiming that they were brought to Afghanistan as slaves by Mahmud Ghaznavi in
the 11<sup>th</sup> century, or later when they fled Babur’s territory in the
13<sup>th</sup> century – or even to the influx of Sikh and Hindu traders in
the 17<sup>th</sup>, 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. Inderjeet
Singh disputes this with a large number of written records, starting from the
rule of Kabul by the Hindu Shahi kings which ended in the 10<sup>th</sup>
century, all the way to the present. From his citing of these, the reader
learns that Hindus worked in responsible positions under the Ghaznavi rulers in
the 11<sup>th</sup> and 12<sup>th</sup> centuries, serving as physicians,
important court officials, and even army generals. He exposes a trite
understanding of history by underlining that Genghis Khan’s 75-year rule was
the rule of an infidel: his name was Khan but he was not a Muslim. In fact, his
was a period that introduced unfamiliar religious traditions along with
non-Sharia taxation, non-Muslim personnel in high office and a liberal approach
to all religious practice which reduced the status of Islam in the area. The
book also has descriptions of Hindus during Timur’s 35-year rule. Then, in the
16<sup>th</sup> century, the Sikh religion emerged and spread as Guru Nanak
travelled and preached, and the community developed in the area. Through the 17<sup>th</sup>
and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries, the migrations continued, supplementing the
indigenous population. Lifestyles are seen through the eyes of the many
travellers across this region. Inderjeet Singh also documents the gurudwaras of
Afghanistan, providing important historical information and their present depleted
condition. Some have proof of antiquity with dates on handwritten copies of the
Guru Granth Sahib.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Through the
19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> centuries, as the beautiful landlocked
country developed into a battlefield of international intrigue, the Hindu-Sikh
community became a victim of internal as well as external attacks – denied of
the freedom to eat, drink and perform their religious rituals; facing violent
processions when they tried to cremate their dead; their real estate in peril;
their children mocked in school and told to go ‘home’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This book
is largely a clean read, with little slips that a sharper proofreading eye
could have caught. To extend the whines, I could also point out that it did not
give me a sense of the difference between Afghan Hindus and Afghan Sikhs. I
asked Inderjeet, and he said that in a way Afghan Hindus are similar to Sindhi
Hindus. (Most Sindhi Hindus observe the tenets of Sikhism, their prayers are
largely from the Guru Granth Sahib and their ceremonies at the gurudwara. However,
mainstream Sikhs generally disapprove of their easy affinity with Hindu ways;
neither do they classify themselves as Sikh.) Inderjeet specified that Hindu
places of worship in Afghanistan do not keep </span>Guru Granth Sahib; that Hindu
and Sikh attend each other functions; that their numbers are approximately 2:3.<span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">On 22 June 2019,
when India played against Afghanistan in the World Cup Cricket match at
Southampton, the stadium was packed with fans cheering loudly for India (and
against Pakistan, not Afghanistan). There were Afghan fans too, and I was
intrigued to see one box of Sikhs with flags of both countries. I messaged
Inderjeet Singh asking if he was in the stadium. Silly question. He replied confirming
that they must be Afghan Sikhs, of whom there were 10,000 in London. And 20,000
in Delhi – in contrast to just 8000 in Peshawar today, depleted to half over
five years by kidnapping, extortion, and the murder of prominent Sikhs, which
caused many to flee their homeland.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-enclosed-space/story-YWetT7VDeKasVmM35iH6HJ.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;">Hindustan Times </a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 23 March 2018 on </span><a href="https://m.hindustantimes.com/books/review-afghan-hindus-and-sikhs-by-inderjeet-singh/story-UOkRikj52eraPFPHbTivbK_amp.html">https://m.hindustantimes.com/books/review-afghan-hindus-and-sikhs-by-inderjeet-singh/story-UOkRikj52eraPFPHbTivbK_amp.html</a><br /></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-17611207691072853052019-06-26T12:45:00.002+05:302019-06-26T12:47:44.872+05:30The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian by Upamanyu Chatterjee <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Absurd comedy and grand horrors</h2>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtiYNhgTbZjTUzVnfu8znRa0LzAtq4-2tEkx-NG4CM6Koct5HxcsV0YXnJ4wUkD0Jfvt544VxV5YfFbNNoCG1V7RDRuDAIezLTmZjOAOTBbzQkp1_1oLA4BC9_McIXz0-CJwRlbmzRaiw/s1600/the+revenge+of+the+non.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtiYNhgTbZjTUzVnfu8znRa0LzAtq4-2tEkx-NG4CM6Koct5HxcsV0YXnJ4wUkD0Jfvt544VxV5YfFbNNoCG1V7RDRuDAIezLTmZjOAOTBbzQkp1_1oLA4BC9_McIXz0-CJwRlbmzRaiw/s200/the+revenge+of+the+non.jpg" width="137" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I wanted
something light and fulfilling to read on a journey, and picked <i>The Revenge of the
Non-vegetarian</i> by Upamanyu Chatterjee from a teetering pile (a very patient
teetering pile) on my bedside. It turned out to be the perfect choice because I
thoroughly enjoyed every one of its well-chosen words. At the end, the jacket
blurb included this sentence in the author description: “He spent over thirty
calm and undistinguished years in the Indian Administrative Service; during
that time, he wrote six novels – when no one was looking.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That was
inspiring </span>– I got online looking for the other five. I remembered reading <i>English,
August</i> when it was new and enjoying it thoroughly as a work of literature
but being revolted by quite a bit of the story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The
description of <i>The Assassination of Indira Gandhi</i> said that “In the
twelve long stories that comprise this volume, he investigates, as only he can,
the absurd comedy and the grand horrors of the human condition.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">‘Absurd
comedy’ and ‘grand horrors’ are indeed the fabric of what I’ve read of Upamanyu
Chatterjee. Perhaps not entirely of the human condition, but certainly of a
westernized IAS officer reigning supreme in rural India.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The
Revenge of the Non-vegetarian</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> is one of those books that evokes vivid images and transports the
reader deep into its plot using tightly-packed and crisp prose. At one level it’s
a grotesque story of vicious murder followed by a ludicrous implementation of justice.
At another, it holds a mirror up to us as a people who exploit those weaker
than ourselves, make the wretched even more wretched, and then accuse and
incarcerate them of wretchedness. It is a brilliant parody of the truth that
comprises India and its administration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-20232839556511779122019-03-29T13:54:00.001+05:302019-03-29T13:58:24.378+05:30Shillong Times by Nilanjan P Choudhury<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Violence in paradise</h2>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl8fsDQwQZHfs_WpiouQtROu3CMjHoyFb6zwuJpFLbJapJJuCQbic3_b5zcv0usMj5gprnRk4Oo3yi7tHBVN-0co2uBcdOD7W3xcdoQXEUspkOq1xoxIhPd2c4Y0R-ywlQckGvRXS5qPw/s1600/Shillong-Times-3-303x420.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl8fsDQwQZHfs_WpiouQtROu3CMjHoyFb6zwuJpFLbJapJJuCQbic3_b5zcv0usMj5gprnRk4Oo3yi7tHBVN-0co2uBcdOD7W3xcdoQXEUspkOq1xoxIhPd2c4Y0R-ywlQckGvRXS5qPw/s320/Shillong-Times-3-303x420.png" width="231" /></a>I read this book
because my daughter recommended it. It meant I was assured of a really good read; what I did not expect was that it would be so strewn with unhappiness. After
all, the central character, Debu, is just 14.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Like most people
who lead insular lives preoccupied with their own minutiae, I was unaware of the
civil unrest in Shillong at around the same time that I was growing up in the
peaceful Nilgiri Hills. When I read Murli Melwani’s book <a href="http://blackandwhitefountain.blogspot.com/search?q=melwani"><i>Ladders Against the Sky </i>and interviewed him</a>, he told me that his family had left Shillong at this time and on account of the strife.
I did not ask for details, and barely
sensed the pain of disruption his and so many other families experienced. Reading this book brought
the situation starkly alive. I wasn't surprised to see Murli's name in the author's acknowledgements, and when I emailed this to Murli he replied saying that he had suggested people for Nilanjan P Choudhury to interview. Murli wrote a review too and you can read it on <a href="https://www.openroadreview.com/2018/12/06/shillong-nilanjan-choudhury/"><b>this link</b></a>. He told me that the title of his review is a line from one of Bob Dylan's songs and that Dylan is very popular with the Khasis of Shillong. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While this book skillfully presents social problems and human suffering caused by human greed and
political vested interests through an interesting story, it is more
than just a device to do so. One of the things I enjoyed most was the way
it gripped me. It took me back to my younger self, bringing alive that old familiar feeling of resenting anything that
came between me and what I was reading. Beyond the story, there are also
passages of commentary which give context, sometimes in a thoroughly amusing
way. And the excursion to Mawphlang had me admiring the poignant symbolism of violence erupting in paradise, as well as hoping that I would one day be able to visit the ancient sacred grove.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-4140844858164133062019-03-25T08:40:00.000+05:302019-03-25T08:40:34.710+05:30The Women's Courtyard by Khadija Mastur<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Zooming in on a microcosm</h2>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNgJJEPLOVFY6Bs5_vA-VBwZe4CUewwi9CZBiEO4dLt0zgAqyp-12EaxpRrzcsS1E6Ul-qdcz5TuQG8l0o-1Z6Q1GBZ9uA8bueJ-U26S_LcGpbeBu5Mj6ryCVVBKNTFGt9FPo49nbaAsQ/s1600/The+Women%2527s+Courtyard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNgJJEPLOVFY6Bs5_vA-VBwZe4CUewwi9CZBiEO4dLt0zgAqyp-12EaxpRrzcsS1E6Ul-qdcz5TuQG8l0o-1Z6Q1GBZ9uA8bueJ-U26S_LcGpbeBu5Mj6ryCVVBKNTFGt9FPo49nbaAsQ/s320/The+Women%2527s+Courtyard.jpg" width="208" /></a><span lang="EN-US">If a women’s
courtyard is considered an enclosed inner space, this book is a canvas with
streaks and splashes of unexpectedly vibrant </span>colour and design<span lang="EN-US">. The women that inhabit the
courtyard are strong and lifelike, and the qualities that each one epitomizes
is perceived through her actions and speech. So while we never learn the given
names of Amma (also known as ‘Mazhar’s Bride’) and Aunty, we experience them
very clearly as real people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This is a
historical period and a segment of society where poets sing on the streets –
but also where arrogance is native to wealth and privilege. Amma has been
betrayed by her circumstances, and her constant taunts, bitter appraisals,
never-ending self-pity and glorification are received with tolerance and even empathy
simply because life has been cruel to someone who expected better. Her
sister-in-law Najma, an MA in English and a working woman who in the 1940s arranges
her own marriage (and later walks out of it), is vain and consistently demeaning
of those she considers beneath her because they have not studied English. She
flaunts elitist opinions such as, “Only people who are incapable of getting a
job know Arabic and Farsi”. Najma’s sister-in-law, Aunty, on the other hand, is
that loving and giving woman – one whose eyes can be seen ‘filled with
centuries of grief’ – on whom every large household relies. Even when immersed
in disappointment, loss and financial struggle, she </span>labours<span lang="EN-US"> on, almost always emanating warmth and
kindness. Young Chammi – acknowledged as
Shamima but once by the author – has the status of one whose mother died and
whose father left to live elsewhere, his new life overrun by new wives and
their offspring. Beautiful, unwanted Chammi, treated with love by Aunty,
somehow became that wild, shrewish girl whose tantrums are feared to such an
extent that when her marriage is arranged, no one dares to inform her. Kareeman
Bua, who came with her mother in the mistress’s dowry, lives a life of domestic
servitude, devoted to the family, oblivious to scars formed by disproportionate
rage on her body.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This book
is not just about women and their cloistered existence; it also shows how
global events infiltrate the courtyard and shape their lives. It is set in a period
of Indian history of which authentic details have been so obscured by political
propaganda and regressive patriotism, that what remains in textbooks and the
general mindset is a trite caricature of what once truly was. Khadija Mastur was
known for her own underprivileged background and her political views, and the
lives and conversations in this book open a window on the actual terrain of the
era. Here is a Muslim household, steeped in tradition and piety, and the
nationalist reality portrayed is complex. There is an overwhelming love for
country, which leads to sacrifice of family life and personal comfort,
imprisonment, suffering and death. There is also an irreparable rift between
members of the family, some of whom follow the Muslim League while others
consider them traitors, believing that party to be an instrument of further divisiveness
and a fundamental cause of inciting violence and continuing strife. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The most enchanting
voice in the book is of Aliya, the heroine, who shares her reality with the
reader. Sensitive and thoughtful, Aliya feels the pain of the women – but just
as much of the men and their inability to bring happiness to their families. The
stories on which Aliya thrives mirror through romantic legend the lives of
their characters, fueling their wellsprings of emotion and, more than once,
resulting in ghastly tragedy. (Women would commit suicide for love and depart
as examples of perfect fidelity, and then, some dark night, men would appear to
momentarily light a lamp over the tomb, then leave, and that was that).
Intertwined with the tradition of stories originating in Arabia runs a strong
and persistent strain with the stories and symbols of Krishna and Rama making
numerous appearances.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And the
most beautiful scenes are as the book ends, in the newly-created Pakistan. The
clamour and strife subside and wonderful fictional coincidences transpire, one
bringing a tragic finality and another opening out onto a horizon of love and
hope.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-enclosed-space/story-YWetT7VDeKasVmM35iH6HJ.html">Hindustan Times </a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 23 March 2018. </span></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-9000570666447095852019-03-17T08:54:00.001+05:302019-03-17T08:55:23.400+05:30The Sunlight Plane by Damini Kane<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJQhtF6GluX-eV84TuNmQgzakHa0y4hP-Tj70BaD4Jx115r742mqpUDoWSoILmprvqO50dYdR7HvOo_uaAF7zfHcdH-Epdlekaz7jhdiZe09aHZlNLfKlqdONb_1RMHdP35mKOnUoX3U8/s1600/The+Sunlight+Plane+by+Damini+Kane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJQhtF6GluX-eV84TuNmQgzakHa0y4hP-Tj70BaD4Jx115r742mqpUDoWSoILmprvqO50dYdR7HvOo_uaAF7zfHcdH-Epdlekaz7jhdiZe09aHZlNLfKlqdONb_1RMHdP35mKOnUoX3U8/s400/The+Sunlight+Plane+by+Damini+Kane.jpg" /></a><span lang="EN-US"></span></div>
<h2 style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US">Coming of age, in Bombay</span></h2>
I started reading this book primarily
from curiosity to learn what a 22-year-old who grew up in a home full of books,
and with parents who are both writers, would produce. Not surprisingly, it
turned out to be a mature, well-written, entertaining story with strong characters.
The extras that I enjoyed were its solid moral base and quite a few giggles
along the way.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
<span lang="EN-US"><i>The Sunlight Plane </i>is a book about a
group of children and written in simple, engaging language. I emailed
Damini to ask if she’d had a reader in mind while writing it, and she replied,
“</span>I imagined the reader to be anywhere above the age of 18.” Actually,
while reading it I’d felt I’d recommend it to ‘young adults’, expecting them to
enjoy and gain from it the way they would with <span lang="EN-US">books like <i>Catcher
in the Rye</i> or <i>The God of Small Things</i>
– or even <i>Portnoy’s Complaint</i>. This book does not have graphic and potentially controversial
scenes as the last named, it does have a central issue which is quite horrific
and it clearly outlines the trauma and the dilemmas of the children who
encounter it from different angles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
<span lang="EN-US">Damini told me that she </span>started
writing this book when <span lang="EN-US">she</span>
was 19, when she was in college. She started with a clear idea of who the characters
were, and how their interpersonal conflicts would further the plot. The first
draft took six months, and after that it was just rewrites and editing. While
this book will not have a sequel, Damini is working on monthly fantasy and
science fiction short stories, just for practice. These she uploads on her blog
<a href="http://www.everythingkane.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">www.everythingkane.wordpress.com</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
In
answer to my question about her advise to aspiring young writers, she replied:<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
Practice
and read, read and practice! There's no short-cut around this. It's especially
important to practice the things you're not as good at. Personally, I'm doing
these monthly short stories because I'm not half as confident at writing short
fiction. Working on what you're weaker at will only make you better.</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 4.8pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .4gd;">
Good
advice for anyone doing anything, is what I thought, and it felt good to know that
young people today aren’t all low-attention-span, low-hanging-fruit gimme-gimme
type people as it quite often fearfully appears to be.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-69942135433590155632019-02-22T20:25:00.002+05:302019-03-17T08:28:19.269+05:30Even Against all Odds by Sunder Advani<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIwCqH1QbpcwEdMkqx-gjB373uO47bHep1e33xgMZoUbRm9S1U2dcrwbJd5yYdhEVXC6Q9DoO07y60Yb1CoTJJPRv7x0FiCa8wa_9YuDYGSY62lx_RkmhUc__4Ds0ePLshu0xGUb2m8zI/s1600/Even+against+all+odds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIwCqH1QbpcwEdMkqx-gjB373uO47bHep1e33xgMZoUbRm9S1U2dcrwbJd5yYdhEVXC6Q9DoO07y60Yb1CoTJJPRv7x0FiCa8wa_9YuDYGSY62lx_RkmhUc__4Ds0ePLshu0xGUb2m8zI/s320/Even+against+all+odds.jpg" width="217" /></a><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Looking back</h2>
</div>
<div>
On Tuesday,
I attended a book launch at the US Consulate, an event held to honour an
extraordinary person and his commitment to Indo-US relations.<br />
When I first met
Sunder Advani a few months ago through my research into pre-Partition Sindh, I
had no idea who he was. His family’s story was fascinating, and I felt
gratified when he liked the way I had presented it, and commissioned me to work
with him on his memoirs. As we proceeded through the story of his life, I felt surprised and impressed to learn the extent of his contribution to the Indian hotel
and hospitality industry. I have lived in India all my life, enjoyed the Taj
and Oberoi in Bombay when I was young, and later hotels of the many
international chains that entered in the 1990s. However, I had absolutely no
idea that there was an individual, one sole person, and that too someone
without family money or political connections or even a home of his own when he
first came to live in Bombay – who had significantly shaped India’s hotel
industry through his personal vision and efforts.</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirp4S1f5iEs2KVqk2IZhs2atW6Ko-w4A5pmxaPD3gTAsBE7bIQ_YhrhCobRRHgAsyjSuujaRQVrzwDnm5SOterig5SSN4Ydt11qMF25i-aEtvRG0qyjaDn9v5D5_h6PefSYVV8yqOoWQs/s1600/US+Consulate+book+launch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirp4S1f5iEs2KVqk2IZhs2atW6Ko-w4A5pmxaPD3gTAsBE7bIQ_YhrhCobRRHgAsyjSuujaRQVrzwDnm5SOterig5SSN4Ydt11qMF25i-aEtvRG0qyjaDn9v5D5_h6PefSYVV8yqOoWQs/s320/US+Consulate+book+launch.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edgard D Cagan, Consul General and Sunder Advani</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Sunder had
been just too busy working, and struggling to get things done, and his story had never been
told until now. For a full fifty years, Sunder had also been committed to
developing stronger ties between India and the US – starting long before the time
when the two countries were considered natural allies, as they are today. It
was a fitting tribute that the US Consulate launched his memoirs a few weeks after
they were published on his eightieth birthday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFqZ9nJbeVfGQCWzIN_5zIkaHPC6Y6beR8fNhOX35ks7DsyzDlrYeHoA5FKR3o6AlEzGg1IdESbCau4FJngD-Uq01UO4mHHJxlqABdcyDqtrWIA5gp6rtPVIvtsQykvVMGHQL8XwVdO4Y/s1600/142.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFqZ9nJbeVfGQCWzIN_5zIkaHPC6Y6beR8fNhOX35ks7DsyzDlrYeHoA5FKR3o6AlEzGg1IdESbCau4FJngD-Uq01UO4mHHJxlqABdcyDqtrWIA5gp6rtPVIvtsQykvVMGHQL8XwVdO4Y/s320/142.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunder (seated, left) with his boss, economist Frank Piovia,<br />
at EBS Consultants, Washington DC, 1968</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In the
1960s, as a young man living in the USA, Sunder worked in a prestigious and
well-paying job where he used his education and analytical abilities to provide
information on the basis of which decisions important to that country would be
taken. At his father’s urging, he left it behind and came to live in India –
then still a developing nation, newly independent, overpopulated, rife with
poverty, illiteracy and corruption. Every step of the next fifty years was
fraught with peril – and bravely defended. He was badly let down by his partners
and suffered a series of business betrayals, hostile takeovers and concept
pirates. Through it all, he worked his way through the hardened maze of
government bureaucracy with steadfast courtesy and tenacity, endlessly seeking
and acquiring one permission after the other to conduct his business and grow
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUmKUx3QtvPJzdEsG9E9BcAkxTrQ5xoRGl84w92Rj1kS5QDuCZgLVYJoS6o5OmAKy1ak9QYdDISCaR1S-U7IFmmarGc0-Nlq-gD7-vInHgTv1bhovDzygvImouz6heEtR_vLb9RBXcyU/s1600/85.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUmKUx3QtvPJzdEsG9E9BcAkxTrQ5xoRGl84w92Rj1kS5QDuCZgLVYJoS6o5OmAKy1ak9QYdDISCaR1S-U7IFmmarGc0-Nlq-gD7-vInHgTv1bhovDzygvImouz6heEtR_vLb9RBXcyU/s320/85.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With
Kemmons Wilson, Founder and Chairman of Holiday Inns Inc.<br />
in his office in
Memphis, Tennessee, 1970.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Sunder
Advani was the first person to bring international standards to the hospitality
industry in India, through the mature systems and processes of Holiday Inns
Inc., USA. His visionary public issue in 1972 – preceding those of both Taj
(Oriental Hotels) and Oberoi (EIH Limited) – was fully subscribed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In the
1970s, when Bombay was serviced by just one domestic airline and just one
airport for domestic and a few international flights, Sunder set up a </span>flight kitchen, and India's first sound-proof airport hotel, Airport Plaza (later Orchid Hotel, after it was bought by Vithal Kamat). In 1978, a time
before mobile phones, the hotel had the only discotheque in the Bombay suburbs
and a pool with a jacuzzi.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Sunder
Advani was among the first to see the potential in Goa and work single-mindedly
to develop it for tourism and foreign-exchange earnings. In 1988, when Goa only
had the infrastructure to attract backpackers, his was one of the earliest
luxury hotels. It was viciously maligned and put under litigation, despite his
having kept strictly within the limits of the law. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">To extend
tourist spend in Goa over the lean monsoon months, Sunder envisioned indoor
entertainment in the form of casinos. His offshore Casino Caravela provided an
elegant evening and attracted well-heeled spenders. When competition made the
playing field murky, Sunder gracefully withdrew.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUx7YVGNXuwuNHt5sjVXZEg2dGqHa03l3k3ozn2KQhMJ9K4poTCeuAHgcvZqp49WQkNLJOGy8eawR4d-P9Vdrdd225AwrYOEX76ChXdxT4rEiS-alugDE7QbOSbEYAYnQSO1iEOVV_qo0/s1600/Caravela.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUx7YVGNXuwuNHt5sjVXZEg2dGqHa03l3k3ozn2KQhMJ9K4poTCeuAHgcvZqp49WQkNLJOGy8eawR4d-P9Vdrdd225AwrYOEX76ChXdxT4rEiS-alugDE7QbOSbEYAYnQSO1iEOVV_qo0/s320/Caravela.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">The Five-Star Caravela Resort, luxury living surrounded by<br />
smiling faces and a beach of soft, powder-white sand.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span lang="EN-US">One of the most
interesting things I observed about Sunder is his commitment to a good life. He
works hard, but his family is always at the centre of things. All through the
years, he has travelled on work and taken them along with him on enjoyable holidays.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Today, at eighty just as much as when he was a young man, he continues to work hard, committed not just to his own Caravela Resort in Goa but also to his continuous campaigns to increase
tourism in India. You can get a sense of his achievements in the glowing Foreword Amitabh Kant wrote to his book:</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyidS2MdDqIDQySKThLTNrLW055baJ1-vuk8b08PwsgU8vXmiCrEUKF362gssp42PC_bWSM_fngBMEqIdXVsxvBEygvRuPd3ifIepLcd7FLckZkYq_VvCr2d788Zyt8f5cZkwywDzH_bc/s1600/Foreword.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyidS2MdDqIDQySKThLTNrLW055baJ1-vuk8b08PwsgU8vXmiCrEUKF362gssp42PC_bWSM_fngBMEqIdXVsxvBEygvRuPd3ifIepLcd7FLckZkYq_VvCr2d788Zyt8f5cZkwywDzH_bc/s320/Foreword.jpg" width="220" /></a></span></div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-16766609897453933452019-01-13T08:07:00.001+05:302019-03-25T08:35:17.814+05:30Mappillai by Carlo Pizzati<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Happily ever after</h2>
<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mANP5iPQ4aXX7CKHRe_3ffjFIWGhwXjvDfq4-SDnEwMAG8RJMKedK7s-1bDWTs8f0kcJSYxMWvgj0_-KsOfIPA1eclzg0K5MlLSRiRiMOx7B1SUe5OtJf37n0zbvm7vaWDrIm19fcNA/s1600/Mapillai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mANP5iPQ4aXX7CKHRe_3ffjFIWGhwXjvDfq4-SDnEwMAG8RJMKedK7s-1bDWTs8f0kcJSYxMWvgj0_-KsOfIPA1eclzg0K5MlLSRiRiMOx7B1SUe5OtJf37n0zbvm7vaWDrIm19fcNA/s400/Mapillai.jpg" /></a></div>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Carlo Pizzati, who suffers terribly from ‘the most interesting man in the world’ syndrome, came to India as a ‘yoga-person’, and stayed on. He married a woman who proposed to him in the course of their relationship. “I think you should marry me. Hello? I’m a caaatch!” she said, and he agreed. Many locals thought he wouldn’t last but, so far so good, he has. It can’t be easy because even the gated communities named Bella Rive and Calm Waters are ridden with mice and snakes, and when the tsunami comes it will wipe away your foundations.<br />
This book is partly biographical, an account of
the author’s life in India in a beach house with the woman he loves and their
large family of stray dogs. His love for his wife, respect for her family, and
admiration for her very cool chemical-engineer father are refrains so
persistent that I wondered what exactly he was trying to sell. But Carlo also claims
to grow luscious tomatoes and splendid roses on inhospitable beach sand so
perhaps it was only good energy manifesting.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk534436936;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Besides a little about his earlier life, and what
happens to him in village Paramankeni and environs, this book is also quite a
lot about Carlo Pizzati’s conclusions about all kinds of things in an
incredibly complex land! While he stoutly claims not to be Wendy Doniger,
William Dalrymple, Patrick French, – or even Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Al Biruni
(and so on) and therefore this CANNOT be ‘an India book’, he does have his own
engaging theories about the way things work here. Arriving in ‘the watershed
year of 2008’ he embraced ‘Mamma India’ in a period of exceptional cyclones, of
Tata Nano, Premier League, an Indian winning the Booker Prize and 8% economic
growth. Through his journey as a ‘yoga-person’, someone who made exceptional
choices and landed up as a mapillai (Tamil for ‘son-in-law’) of Gujarati Jain
in-laws in Besant Nagar, Chennai, Carlo’s narrative is strewn with interesting
data and contextual information. He well understands the importance of the
mango and its role in parochialism and identity across India. He has observed women
staying married to violent mummy-spoiled brutish husbands, surrounded by
friends and family members who may gossip but never intervene. He marvels at how
Indian law allows a person named in a suicide note as psychologically
responsible for the suicide, to be arrested, tried and at times convicted. When
he muses on the auntie-uncle cultural nomenclature, it is to spot the auntie
concealed within the hottie, the uncle germinating in the stud; to appreciate the
stud nature in an aged uncle with a wild streak and the charming seduction of
the hottie quietly inhabiting the auntie. Carlo Pizzati experiences India’s synthesis
of religion, politics and commerce, and highlights one of the exceptional icons
of this nexus: the best dressed poor people in the globe, with their
multifarious saris, striped lungis and wrap-around turbans. In his relatively
rare setting for ‘an India book’, he <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>approaches the ‘marvellous human experiment
called India’ – from its outskirts, a location of limitless sea and sky where
open defecation abounds. And the brave, sporting Carlo attempted open
defecation too, but sadly found himself unable to perform.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk534436936;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In slow, contemplative sentences and in rapid
exclamatory ones, his prose and his theme switch rapidly. Perhaps this is just
a modern book, aimed at the sophisticated short-attention-span reader who
delights in toying with new formats – but it is rather effervescent at times (like
a stereotypical Italian?) Not surprisingly, Carlo has mastered and neatly documented
Indian hand gestures. Fingers pointing inwards and then, suddenly swinging out
an open hand to say ‘all!’. And the sudden twist with index finger pointing
upwards for ‘wtf?’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk534436936;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The insight that most impressed me was the truth
about why natives consider vellais (Tamil for ‘whiteys’) better than them. It’s
not the scars of colonialism but because they are – SPOILER ALERT – mentally
freer, with fewer social obligations to succeed, to marry, and behave as
required.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk534436936;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And the claim that most annoyed me was that “Indian
women are like Italian men”, indicating that the entire population of Indian
women tends to encircle men, sniffing to select the delicacy they might savour.
Was this supposed to be a compliment? An enticement? A joke? I don’t think so.</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 12 Jan 2019. </span></div>
</div>
</div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-40551718716100072492018-07-07T00:07:00.000+05:302018-07-13T17:24:54.039+05:30Ladders in the Sky by Murli Melwani<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
A gift of his travels</h2>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
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I picked up this book and started reading it as reference material for a research paper on the global Sindhi diaspora. The author is a global Sindhi businessman and I knew, in a patronising sort of way, that I was surely going to learn something interesting. Halfway through the fourth story, when I had to get something else done and it was a wrench to put the book down, I realised that I was in fact reading entranced. These were splendid stories: good plots, lifelike characters, beautifully laid out in clean, distinctive language. What made them even more fascinating was that each one is set in a different, exotic location. Murli Melwani is an inveterate traveller and this collection, as the jacket describes it, is a “gift of his travels”. 15 of the 23 stories are set in different parts of India and in them we encounter separatist movements, landslides, cramped urban spaces, insights into different aspects of religious devotion and various other complex situations in unexpected locales. Murli grew up in Shillong. Between school and college, he travelled a lot and visited different parts of India. Later he worked in the English Department at Sankerdev College, then took up a Coca Cola distributorship and for a while ran a bookstore. In time, he moved to work in Taiwan and his job took him to countries around the world, doing something many Sindhis do.</div>
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A little more than half the book features this diaspora, families which originated in Sindh and now live and do business in countries around the world. <i>Water on a Hot Plate </i>is set in Toronto. Hari and Rajni are visiting their son and in this story, they meet an Indian Chinese lady who runs a restaurant there. They converse with her in Mandarin – from their several years in Taiwan; of course they speak to her in Hindi and English too. From the Bollywood music playing in the background, Hari can tell that the India she belonged to was not the India he had left. Resh, their lunch guest, is visiting from Curacao. She speaks Dutch and English and even idiomatic Papiamentu – a Portuguese and Spanish-based Creole language – but not Sindhi.</div>
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<i>Writing a Fairy Tale </i>is a gripping love story in which we somehow journey into the rainforests of eco-versatile Chile – and also, unexpectedly, encounter the Arabic aspects of the country too. <i>The Mexican Girlfriend </i>is also a love story, and though set in a home by a lake where migratory birds flock – a real place – has more sinister than exotic twists. Followed by <i>The Bhorwani Marriage</i>, a high-energy satire of Sindhi weddings, including an expose of the business opportunities offered by matchmaking in the diaspora, it appears that Sindhis don’t really do romance. Family comes overwhelmingly first; business and profits are a priority; living comfort is never going to be sacrificed for a lover. </div>
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It’s not that everyone in the community is money-minded. This book takes us beyond that stereotype, with businessmen who are polite, mature and love to read. And the skilled portrayals of many different kinds of relationships reveal the author to be an exceptionally subtle and discerning person himself. Even the businessman in <i>Shiva with a Garland</i>, lonely in his marriage, “had grown sensitive and become aware of many things. He had come to understand the right and wrong of things and the meaning and worth of happiness.”</div>
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Still, Murli is not just an observer of humans and their situation, not just a weaver of tales. He is a skilled businessman too and his stories give us practical never-fail tips on selling, exposure to business cycles, and the understanding that large investments, even the most obvious, could turn out to be ruinous. There are young employers who clone themselves, swiftly learning the trade and soon enough snatching it out from under their employer’s feet to set up as competitors. Some families have members living in other countries: the father ships out goods from a manufacturing location while the sons sell in other parts of the world, creating hugely profitable companies which run around the clock. So while Murli’s Master’s is in English Literature, this book tells all kinds of things he didn’t learn at IIM-A.<br />
I wrote this review for <i>Hindustan Times </i>and it appeared on Saturday 9 Jun 2018 and can be read on the HT site on <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-ladders-against-the-sky-by-murli-melwani/story-hfq4m60igv4wUAIPczkBTO.html">this link</a>.<br />
Before I wrote it, I emailed Murli Melwani to find out more about him and we had an interesting discussion. One of the emails was about the pseudo Sindhi names that his book has, creative and great fun, as his explanations show, with the personality trait cleverly embedded in the name like erudite clues in a detective game! Murli said:<br />
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<i>Phado </i>in Sindhi means someone who throws a spanner in the works in order to negotiate an advantage. No Sindhi would take on a name like that!<br /><i>Karomuwani</i>: a curse word in Sindhi is “<i>Karo mu thia yi</i>” which figuratively means “you are behaving like a blackguard”. The Hindi “<i>Kaala mou</i>”<br /><i>Kurwani</i>: “<i>kur</i>” in Sindhi means “a lie”; which Sindhi would like to be called a liar even if is one in real life.<br /><i>Dingowani</i>: <i>dingo </i>has the same connotation as “<i>tera</i>” in Hindi, not straight.<br /><i>Loliwani</i>: “<i>loli</i>” is a Sindhi paratha; a glutton<br /><i>Budhwani</i>: “<i>buddhu</i>;” there a bonafide Sindhi name : “Budhrani.” Which an opposite meaning, someone with “<i>buddhi</i>”<br /><i>Gawlani</i>: “<i>gaw</i>”in Sindhi means grass; a man of straw.<br /><i>Fatwani</i>: comes “<i>phatako</i>” (the Hindi “<i>fataka</i>” or firecracker;) sound and fury signifying nothing.<br /><i>Bujowani</i>: “<i>bujo</i>” is the Sindhi term for a goad; some people have to be whipped to move their limbs.<br />“<i>Thaparwani</i>: same as the Hindi “<i>thappar</i>”; same type as the last one above<br />Varyowani: “<i>viaro</i>” is Sindhi for “spaced out”<br /><i>Charyowano</i>: “<i>charyo</i>” is Sindhi for “mad” </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYvXODYgOs_z0tKBkWDm374U58jXmdw0-D6PckAGy4KeEEvpU_43Ak67uCDlw3yeLIRjv0hEQJdhWJmhRy8RrIBEBAxtw22noOLs-PRVRGDe3nVmUp11ju4ko2EiR4sEDwCsXH23W6j9k/s1600/IMG_20180709_222809.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYvXODYgOs_z0tKBkWDm374U58jXmdw0-D6PckAGy4KeEEvpU_43Ak67uCDlw3yeLIRjv0hEQJdhWJmhRy8RrIBEBAxtw22noOLs-PRVRGDe3nVmUp11ju4ko2EiR4sEDwCsXH23W6j9k/s200/IMG_20180709_222809.jpg" width="200" /></a>About a month after the review appeared, I visited Santa Clara, California, to attend the 25th International Sindhi Sammelan and was was able to meet him and his wife Mona, as they live nearby. The book in this photo of Murli and Mona is a collection of the stories which are based in India and it is the first copy the publisher sent to Murli. The dedication reads</div>
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To<br />My wife Mona<br />My “lucky charm”</blockquote>
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and of course Mona was delighted with the tribute.</div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-27966978728717776402018-02-24T09:42:00.000+05:302018-02-24T09:42:31.577+05:30Paiso by Maya Bathija<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Well told, but only a small part of the picture</h2>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMKINTMX8L7zJamRfnVKHCVcimTJmIADoMCL0ckRrxMX_d1zpdML1wzD19NbdtbFWPYiAgRdqUuFt6LZayciyRdDgIfkeRAC4mM8YVa6dnYn21YRWJRFdbF1Pb4DKiqt5emHEGimZsbZ0/s1600/Paiso.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMKINTMX8L7zJamRfnVKHCVcimTJmIADoMCL0ckRrxMX_d1zpdML1wzD19NbdtbFWPYiAgRdqUuFt6LZayciyRdDgIfkeRAC4mM8YVa6dnYn21YRWJRFdbF1Pb4DKiqt5emHEGimZsbZ0/s320/Paiso.jpg" width="207" /></a>This book is well-structured and engaging, and provides an insight into five Sindhi family businesses. The Harilelas set out in retail and built their fortune in custom tailoring for American soldiers on R&R, turning Hong Kong into a popular global destination for mail-order suits. Merrimac Ventures, real estate giants and urban developers in the US, came about through the sheer bravery and brilliance of the indomitable Romila Motwani. Jet-setting Harish Fabiani grew to extraordinary wealth and fame using his native brilliance, and hobnobs with the likes of Donald Trump. The Lakhi Group is a diamond empire so professionally run and a family life so admirably simple and equal-opportunity that it shines forth in this narrative like a dazzling solitaire. And Jitendra ‘Jitu’ Virwani built his real-estate dominion brick by brick, racing ahead with giant leaps and battling all the way.</div>
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Each of these extraordinary stories has elements of some of the characteristic Sindhi ways of doing business: difficult times bravely faced; fearless risk-taking and the ability to move with great swiftness when opportunity is sighted; intensely close and devoted family relationships; the role of women defined by family background (Sindhis are remarkably heterogeneous in this and a range of other important matters); the talent for shoring up against business cycles with real estate; and an impressively large commitment to philanthropy, sometimes vulgarly demanding attention, but often (in fact in more cases than can ever be known) completely anonymous. However, the book also has disturbingly anachronistic statements like “the Fabiani family has its roots in Pakistan.” (Roots, really? But Pakistan only came into existence in 1947 and that was when the Sindhis were rudely evicted!) </div>
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Sindh has an ancient tradition of trade and mobility and its own range of rich products. Marco Polo wrote of the curiosities of Chin and Machin, and ‘the beautiful products of Hind and Sindh, laden on large ships which sail like mountains with the wings of the wind on the surface of the water.’ In the 1860s, a group of young men set out on the British steamship routes and ventured into trade in ports around the world. The retail chains of these early capitalists, M Dialdas, JT Chanrai, KAJ Chotirmal and others, formed the first Sindhi multinational companies. Inland, the money lenders of Shikarpur had extended their services into a phenomenally secure and sophisticated banking system with bases in South India and a network of agents on the trade routes extending from Central Asia into Russia, China and Japan. </div>
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After Partition, many of the Sindhis forced out of their ancestral homeland with nothing, took to trading as a dignified means of earning an honest living in the places where they settled. Working on low margins, selling the packaging for an extra buck, they interfered with the profits of long-established trade cartels, for which they were resented and bitterly derided as ‘cheats’. </div>
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Most of them had not been to Harvard Business School but they understood that the key to business success is to directly address the customers’ need, and they rebuilt their fortunes by doing precisely that: in garments, construction, education, and in time in every other industry. Partition also swelled the global outposts into communities and there are Sindhi shopkeepers in ports around the world. <b>Many of the 'shopkeepers' grew their businesses with enterprise (and real estate) and are billionaires just as much as the five profiled in <i>Paiso</i>. Many of them retain links with each other, the remarkable phenomenon of a community which lost its roots when evicted from its homeland by Partition – but retains its connection in strong links which encircle the globe.</b></div>
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There are Sindhi shops across the length and breadth of India too: Coonoor market, so remote in geography and culture, had a Quetta Stores when I was a child. So the phenomenon of Sindhi business is by no means restricted to glamorous billionaires.</div>
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Similarly, it is true that traditional Sindhi business families considered education “a waste of time” and that this is by no means the case today. What is less known is that a huge population of Sindhis did hold education to be extremely important. These include the entrepreneurs coming from three and four generations of education who established the Indian multinational companies Onida (Mirchandanis) and Blue Star (Advanis); the global retail giant Landmark Group (Jagtianis); and in the case of Inlaks (Shivdasanis), three generations of Oxbridge education. The Ador Group, another multinational conglomerate, continues with the third and fourth generation of university educated partners who started their business in Sindh 110 years ago. As for Dr NP Tolani of the highly reputed Tolani Shipping, he earned his PhD in 22 months – still a record at Cornell – and returned to Bombay in 1964, intent on taking up a business in which there was as little corruption as possible in India.</div>
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There are many more and most, despite strong bonds to their community and their families, and linked by the complex unspoken trauma of Partition, prefer to remain low profile and never flaunt their Sindhiness, perhaps to avoid being tarred with that ‘loud and vulgar’ brush that haunts the Sindhis, doomed as they seem to be to be represented by their flamboyant, attention-seeking brethren. Perhaps this book will help bring them out of the closet.</div>
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I wrote the above review for Hindustan Times and it was carried today. You can read it in the newspaper online <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-paiso-how-sindhis-do-business-by-maya-bathija/story-fDa5wO6a73VBJOSV0z82xM.html"><span style="color: cyan;">here</span></a> but without the line highlighted above which I have just added. It is interesting to see that HT illustrated this review with a photo of Harish Fabiani, one of the billionaires featured in this book, and his wife – who, according to <i>Paiso</i>, he doesn't 'allow' to call him by his name.<br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 24 Feb 2018. </span></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-13389751018629604432017-12-24T12:54:00.000+05:302018-02-11T18:05:10.894+05:30Reaching for the Sky by Urvashi Sahni<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The best book I read in 2017</h3>
The most important thing I learnt from this book is that women’s education is essential not so much to make India a great country, but to empower a girl to live a fulfilling life, experiencing herself as an autonomous person deserving respect and equal rights.<br />
Reaching for the Sky is the documented history of Prerna, a school in Lucknow, written by its founder. Established in 2003, Prerna’s students are underprivileged girls and part of the book is their story, with their photos and in their voices, and it shows how a school can change a girl’s life. These six girls were among the first to join Prerna, and have articulated their experiences objectively. They are girls who come from homes so poor that some were cleaning others’ homes along with their mothers at age seven. One had a brother who drowned in a pond at the construction site where their mother was working. Some had been forced into sexual intercourse by their own fathers. These and other Prerna girls belong to that enormous population of Indian women whose fathers and husbands exercise almost absolute control over their minds and bodies. So Prerna’s educational goals, Urvashi Sahni writes, in addition to imparting the government-mandated syllabus, include guiding a girl to recognize herself as an equal person and emerge with a sense of control over her life and aspirations for her future, with the confidence and skills to realize them.<br />
One of the instruments described is critical dialogue, a conversation in which a girl describes her life situations and begins the process of understanding the social and political structures that restrict her, empowering herself to deal with them. Another is the use of drama through which a girl may immerse herself in role-model characters learning, for example, to speak loudly, walk tall and hold a steady gaze – things her real-life contexts have taught her not to do.<br />
It turns out that Dr Sahni is an entrepreneur like her father, SP Malhotra of Weikfield, with a group of entities, one funding the other. Her first school, Study Hall Educational Foundation (1986), supported Prerna for its first four years. In 2008 she established DiDi’s, a social enterprise to provide livelihood to mothers, its profits diverted to support the education of their daughters in Prerna.<br />
The part of the book that moved me most was Urvashi’s own story: a brave and gracious exposé of her own gradual liberation from strongly patriarchal, if privileged, situations. A family tragedy propelled her into social work, and her higher education at Berkeley University imbibed in her the value that the teacher-student relationship must be one of mutual respect, response, acceptance, empathetic understanding and care.<br />
<a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/ht-contributors-pick-their-most-interesting-reads-of-2017/story-V8qIipJ6lnHlyvykskiUUK.html" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9-8obHGa7AjVBypCWSkubsr2mFGPVHBZHRSRPswlZNdGWtdrMlyq3NKcCUzMA3EjV7edCoNN74lXHW8dfUL3TlAsCxayJ9yePLQREUMbudFHCMu4dMQ5YWaab7BH_UASqKnpxKHFanIo/s200/photo+in+HT+on+231217.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 23 Dec 2017. It can be viewed online about halfway down the page </span><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/ht-contributors-pick-their-most-interesting-reads-of-2017/story-V8qIipJ6lnHlyvykskiUUK.html" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px;">on this link</a> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and with this image! </span><br />
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-85210867769982956592017-12-01T12:45:00.000+05:302018-02-10T12:55:14.374+05:30Behind Bars by Sunetra Choudhury<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Criminal justice in India: perversion, sleaze and corruption</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5nK4QTOdlxs_xk-mBFwrgKQSRY5VNM-yUXraqllc0x9XXa0AibY9AnimaMFC_sKIwAB0bm000kosFJCvH_H1hXvDyX6Aj7n9rGGuQK4VS7Ahm9pY4s6uy7aofELYvMv7mZKmlfnWsoY/s1600/Behind+Bars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK5nK4QTOdlxs_xk-mBFwrgKQSRY5VNM-yUXraqllc0x9XXa0AibY9AnimaMFC_sKIwAB0bm000kosFJCvH_H1hXvDyX6Aj7n9rGGuQK4VS7Ahm9pY4s6uy7aofELYvMv7mZKmlfnWsoY/s400/Behind+Bars.jpg" /></a>In jail, if you have money you can be comfortable. You can wear expensive clothes, eat whatever you want, and keep personal servants. If you don’t have money, you can still buy favours using your body. And if even that is not possible, prison life will be an unimaginable hell. </div>
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As Indians, we may have been dimly aware of these simple truths, and this book puts them on the table. Sunetra Choudhury got the idea for it when a high-profile prisoner, Anca Verma, contacted her to tell her story. What she learnt was fascinating, and she decided to look for more people like Anca: people so extraordinarily influential that they knew they were never going to get into trouble for telling the truth about what happens inside an Indian jail. While some of the stories are anonymous, most are well known. We are also treated to snippets of information about jail legends such as Charles Sobhraj (apparently he quietly killed off a cellmate to get more jail space for himself.) In clean and engaging language, rich with detail and well-chosen adjectives, the book presents interesting facts about jail food, extraordinarily sincere jail employees as well as corrupt and perverted ones, rituals such as mulakat – and more. Says an un-named prisoner whose imprisonment suddenly and unexpectedly turned his life into a nightmare: “The toilet was full of goo, so much so that when I was lifting my feet off the ground, the black peanut butter lifted off my feet.” Some stories extraordinary, with a fable-like quality: Rajesh Ranjan, alias Pappu Yadav, was apprehended at a young age and found protection through a member of his caste. Over a period of nearly thirty years, he completed his entire education in jail, fell in love and got married. All this while he was building institutions in jail such as the ‘VIP’ ward and gym at Tihar. These days he is a Member of Parliament and his primary occupation is philanthropy.</div>
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Prison, this books also shows, can be an opportunity for spiritual cleansing. The Tandoor Murderer has turned to piety. For Peter Mukerjea, it’s like being in a spa: “What can I say? No alcohol, no cigarettes, early to bed, early to rise, exercise for a couple of hours, lots of reading, plenty of time to think, no junk food – all very healthy.” Arushi’s parents, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, were reasonably comfortable in jail because, as doctors, they provided their services to the jail staff and their families. </div>
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Many, like the Talwars, are incarcerated by the scheming of an incompetent force trying to make themselves look good. This is most poignantly portrayed in the case of Wahid Sheikh, a teacher, who quietly reported to the police station every single time he was summoned to prove that he wasn’t a terrorist. Despite all the atrocities committed against him, he continued to obey the law and persist in firmly stating his innocence. He was acquitted after years; many who confessed just to stop the torture were put away for good. One young man confessed after his father was brought in, stripped naked and harassed. Torture in Indian prisons is routinely committed by well-known police officers who have been awarded medals for bravery.</div>
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In the Indian justice system, if an official doesn’t like an inmate or hasn’t been paid off by them, they would see that the release papers were not signed or simply disappeared. When someone in the court hurled a shoe, the judge ruled that no prisoner would be brought inside the courtroom with shoes on. Worst of all is that every inmate knows who is innocent and who is guilty of the crime they are accused of.</div>
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This book kept me up at night. It made me feel so terrible that I wondered whether life was worth living at all. It made me remember that, less than eighty years ago, Indian prisons were filled with people protesting against British rule. Prison authorities were harsh and dictatorial but never stooped to the ghastly perversions of cruelty this book documents. Prisoners knew their rights and were placidly confident that the law would prevail. What happened, how did things go so badly wrong?</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 1 Dec 2017. It can be viewed online </span><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-behind-bars-by-sunetra-choudhury/story-Cy2U39xop3wQcOgNhNYmzN.html" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px; text-decoration-line: none;">here</a></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-84715634890957591752017-05-16T07:19:00.000+05:302017-07-19T07:20:22.975+05:30Perhaps Tomorrow by Pooranam Elayathamby with Richard Anderson<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
A hug for the kaamwali bai</h2>
A blurb on the back of this book attempts to lure readers seeking greedy shudders at the horrors of domestic servitude in a barbaric country. There is an underlying promise that we might be gratified to find that we treat our own ‘servants’ in a generous and praiseworthy manner.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilQ5FgbIhVPT3trONh5jFHSlVXQ_WDkn0MUtKmIl10VUzRVrJMidMQW1OJ5ksRKQVrb2I7uaTgRH0zVuqsJp_n6JMQafg4OGAfOKx0Qj2LwdwhGoMuF-pvrL6EvMIysWadwuy-HWpCl5M/s1600/Perhaps+Tomorrow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilQ5FgbIhVPT3trONh5jFHSlVXQ_WDkn0MUtKmIl10VUzRVrJMidMQW1OJ5ksRKQVrb2I7uaTgRH0zVuqsJp_n6JMQafg4OGAfOKx0Qj2LwdwhGoMuF-pvrL6EvMIysWadwuy-HWpCl5M/s400/Perhaps+Tomorrow.jpg" /></a>Despite the titillating invitation, this book is not merely about how badly Pooranam’s employers treated her. Like the best kind of memoir, it presents more than just a few aspects of a person’s life. The authors of this book weave different narrative strands together, skilfully introducing social, historical and political context, and evocative pictures emerge.<br />
Kommathurai, on the east coast of Sri Lanka, is a Hindu town that follows the social segregation of traditional Hindu casteism. Pooranam herself is of the ‘laundry people’, the middle daughter of five. Life is sweet and beautiful. Then tragedy strikes and her father dies under his bullock-cart, leaving her mother with five little girls and no source of income. A strong and enterprising woman, Kanagamma starts her own business. Part of this is taking eight-year-old Pooranam and seven-year-old Sodi out of school and putting them to work, carrying thirty-kilo sacks of rice from the wholesaler’s village, cooking, drying, re-packing and selling the processed rice from door to door. Neighbours whisper that farm animals get better treatment.<br />
When Pooranam is privileged to capture the attention of the town’s most eligible bachelor and he marries her, the book gives insights into traditional or cultural male entitlement where helping yourself to your wife’s belongings, violence against her, and sexual relationships with other women are considered acceptable. In counterpoint are the quality of dependence and attachment a strong and intelligent woman can experience despite these ignominies.<br />
Set in the jungles of northern Sri Lanka at the height of the LTTE insurgency, this book presents the Tamil side of the story: the marginalization and persecution of a people historically perceived as subordinate. In the jungle camp, we observe how ordinary people suffer in a political battle. Kommathurai is abandoned, then ravaged; Pooranam is left a widow with three children before she turns thirty.<br />
Meanwhile, the housemaid market in the Arabian Gulf, initially restricted to non-idol worshipping monotheists had expanded so much that it was giving ‘religious’ fussing a miss. Pooranam took employment contracts, aiming to convert, as many did, domestic drudgery into cement homes, proper furniture and a future for her children – though this would entail sad years separated from them.<br />
After many adventures, much intense hard work, getting renamed Sandy, learning about different aspects of life in the desert as well as all kinds of new recipes – this beautiful, intelligent, determined, enterprising and hardworking woman has her happily-ever-after. Pooranam marries Dick, an American professor of architecture at Kuwait University. She enters a phase of stability and comfort; he helps her lead her children to a better life, and in time they write this book together. It turns out to be well written and engaging, and Pooranam’s warmth and depth of character shine through. While the contextualisation and odd literary reference appear to be in the voice of the architecture professor, it is surprising that the book is littered with racial stereotyping: Arabs are lazy; Egyptians are stingy; the British are not expected to be arrogant and mean-spirited.<br />
Besides all this, this book could serve as a useful handbook for the Indian Madam. It could inspire us to consider that the wretch who stands between us and the jhadu/pocha/bartan might have left terrible times behind at home her family from starvation. She misses her children terribly. So when she throws the food out because she misunderstood what you said, don’t scream at her in rage. Laugh, give her a hug, and gently explain what you actually meant so that she’s motivated to get it right next time. This is what Pooranam’s Indian employers, the Khans, actually did.<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">and appeared on Saturday 13 May 2017. It can be viewed online </span><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-perhaps-tomorrow-by-pooranam-elayathamby-with-richard-anderson/story-f3znVkYP2yq88uSXNuAIRK.html">here</a><br />
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-91423241239115120422017-02-20T15:49:00.000+05:302017-02-21T07:14:03.682+05:30The Silliest Autobiography in the World by PG Bhaskar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
The Silliest Review in the World</h2>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/of-the-rajan-effect-and-suchlike-review-of-the-silliest-autobiography-in-the-world-by-pg-bhaskar/story-m0JrNJP3ebl41aZNQtb3tO.html" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8LSuZgXJLk4xXrR1_tJPxHY5peFoTTDNaTjm-xNR_Ca1xf5CP-Py_1fIbis1euPQi9vrmpmyEiMgfiUciMogYDZtg-EXu6oZcHyU-jVlnaBZowSqHVjDy2rEqVgdhZauZIbtkZZsBE0/s400/Silliest.jpg" /></a>Finally, a book that really does deserve to go into a time capsule, carefully placed in a steel cylinder and buried deep into the earth to await eager historians from future generations or from outer space. Before this, Bhaskar wrote two books which mysteriously turned out to be both modestly-successful as well as best-selling. Somehow, he remained unknown to billions. Now he has written a silly autobiography but structured it meticulously. Bhaskar, the son of an LIC ‘odditor’ and himself a fully-qualified chartered accountant, opens with a chapter called 1963, by a fascinating coincidence, the very year in which he was born! The next chapter is 1964, then 1965, then 1966, and all the way up to 2015. Through the life experiences of the unknown Bhaskar, the eager historian of the future will learn how people lived between 1963 and 2015, especially those who lived in Madras, Udupi, Delhi, Bombay, Coimbatore and, erm, Dubai. They will also obtain some mildly useful information about movies, cricket, politics and entertainment. From an anthropological perspective, Bhaskar gives an insight into transitions in his world. To begin with, people would hang onto their toothbrushes, discarding them only after the bristles began to resemble a strip of savannah grassland that had been viciously trampled upon by a herd of stampeding elephants. They would stealthily pocket cutlery from aeroplanes. Then, as the socio-economic environment advanced, they began buying whole sets of crockery which sadly did not last as long as the stolen cutlery. They developed quaint professional rites of passage called ‘mini-offsites’ at which overpaid bank officials engaged with ‘escorts’ and later, exposed on Facebook, bought expensive presents to placate their enraged spouses.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIp4F9-paQAi91pwnY2VwKk1oB8F2gzkYh6cAI003SsfvCaOpiS7Wy-ACLByP09zf7Ow_XCfS-MJwaX1Rtr64OKetdxdmGTSjJNi_p4YKDG3wlUfbBnRBxRJCp8N7ym-Lssq2RQHGp_es/s1600/Silliest+autobiography+review.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIp4F9-paQAi91pwnY2VwKk1oB8F2gzkYh6cAI003SsfvCaOpiS7Wy-ACLByP09zf7Ow_XCfS-MJwaX1Rtr64OKetdxdmGTSjJNi_p4YKDG3wlUfbBnRBxRJCp8N7ym-Lssq2RQHGp_es/s200/Silliest+autobiography+review.jpg" width="129" /></a>At a personal level, Bhaskar reveals himself as one who, to the great merriment of his friends and classmates, faints. He faints quite often! Let us hope he is not going to faint when he reads this review. Or, perhaps the friends could get together and sell tickets in anticipation.</div>
<div>
While this book could emerge winner in a time-capsule competition, it could also gain esteem as entertainment to the present-day reader. I was laughing very loudly, and my husband, lying in bed next to me and waiting for his turn, became increasingly agitated, muttering to himself, “Who is this Bhaskar! Wait till I get my hands on him,” etc.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOOdY3BFM052HtefSjbN4q_BclmSxli17h6wunF57O3SLGVhDPEpF2T7T3JRmNWGrL41Eu0Md4guG-hRHbRUIbIvT0E2BG_kqsBSQXuHU9Q7TeHggAJH-1b52Zc1sJmxEde8i66ZWSvn0/s1600/002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="123" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOOdY3BFM052HtefSjbN4q_BclmSxli17h6wunF57O3SLGVhDPEpF2T7T3JRmNWGrL41Eu0Md4guG-hRHbRUIbIvT0E2BG_kqsBSQXuHU9Q7TeHggAJH-1b52Zc1sJmxEde8i66ZWSvn0/s200/002.jpg" width="200" /></a>To be honest, I started cackling away right from the dedication which is really very funny. Towards the end of the book, there is an explanation which I was glad to read, because without it the dedication would have remained a mystery to the future historian unless Bhaskar’s publishers had contrived to also squeeze a few c1980s telephone directories into the capsule to provide context. It occurred to me that the enterprising publishers might also want to introduce footnotes for the puzzled historians wondering why the trend of women taking to the study of economics in droves should be called The ‘Rajan’ Effect. And how come, when the family driver in Udupi was Bhavani Shankar, in Delhi too the family had a driver with the same name! And the ‘household help’ in Chennai was also called Bhavani! Could this be coincidence? Or was Bhavani a generic of Bhaskar’s time? So – footnotes, please, dear publishers.<br />
There are also long passages where the humour lags and verses which strike a wrong note. So, to end, a minor stricture for the author from an almost-fan of somewhat similar vintage and demography:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Bhaskar: your poems are not short or too long<br />But they’re neither doggerel nor ditty nor song.<br />Your ‘limericks’ rhyme<br />And the jokes are just fine<br />But the metre, dear chap, is all wrong. </i></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This review was written for </span><i style="font-size: small;">Hindustan Times </i><span style="font-size: x-small;">and appeared on Saturday 18 February 2017. It can be viewed online </span><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/of-the-rajan-effect-and-suchlike-review-of-the-silliest-autobiography-in-the-world-by-pg-bhaskar/story-m0JrNJP3ebl41aZNQtb3tO.html" style="font-size: small;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-size: x-small;">.</span></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-37157397418167135852016-04-26T12:31:00.003+05:302016-04-26T12:33:46.479+05:30With a little help from my friends by Dev Lahiri<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Energetic mud-fest</h2>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgfZL5ij08kGXphqKfi_NeKrqojNNDp4sisgfO_aScAIScCUgkG7nw0Wpmbo8B65RPON0FT-F7kO1gWU9Cp2fQAKv6pDcCwIusCDaMyv0TFxDu2Z5QM6ywgXTLk1nfYeV_vbQrFC7OjuE/s1600/with+a+little+help+from+my+friends.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgfZL5ij08kGXphqKfi_NeKrqojNNDp4sisgfO_aScAIScCUgkG7nw0Wpmbo8B65RPON0FT-F7kO1gWU9Cp2fQAKv6pDcCwIusCDaMyv0TFxDu2Z5QM6ywgXTLk1nfYeV_vbQrFC7OjuE/s1600/with+a+little+help+from+my+friends.jpg" /></a>This is the depressing story of a brilliant man who faced many
struggles. Though he writes with affection and gratitude of certain people and
events, the persecution he describes at different points of his career appears
to have dominated his life. His heart condition resulted in numerous dramatic
collapses and hospital internments. It is also unfortunate that Dev Lahiri, a
Rhodes Scholar and member of the heyday staff of Oxford University Press, has
his memoirs strewn with proofreading and design disasters. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This book has 222 pages, of which 66 are devoted to the
horrors he faced while trying to bring reforms to The Lawrence School,
Lovedale, between 1991 and 2000. Later, at Welham Boys’ School, Dehradun,
things went bad for him again. Lahiri describes his victimisation in detail,
blithely naming perpetrators and valiantly trying to clear his reputation with
an energetic mud-fest.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This review is not concerned with what actually happened, but
cannot help observing that the inaccuracy and exaggeration in the book reduces its
credibility. Lahiri sneers at a career in marketing, mocking the enthusiastic selling
of soap. However, his book exposes him as a master of the glib half-truth. A
few examples follow.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He says he gave up his job as a tea planter in a few weeks because:
“I just felt uncomfortable dealing with plants. I realized I needed to do
something with people.” Hmm! A tea planter’s job requires sound fundamentals of
agriculture, but it is in fact through the management of labour in the field and
factory that the job gets done and it is actually more about people than plants.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He also claims to have been the first headmaster of Lawrence
“to have actually allowed” a girl student to lead the Founders Day Parade. Not
true. Rohini Gopalan, a girl student, led the parade in May 1977.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lahiri writes, “My daughter was followed into the town, her
photos taken and morphed. Matters got worse. Anonymous letters started arriving
addressed to the student body, accusing me, among other things, of sleeping
with the lady teachers and Indrani of sleeping with the men.” But in the 1990s,
morphing photos was still only science fiction! Even if we allow that a
headmaster might have inadvertently used an anachronism and his daughter had
actually felt disgraced by misuse of her photo, by what standard could
anonymous letters, however scurrilous, make matters worse? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lahiri also quotes a report which states that it was he who made
Lawrence “one of the most famous schools of the country”. Well: Lawrence School,
Lovedale, was founded in 1858. When I joined, in 1971, it had long been recognized
as one of the best schools in India. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Every institution has its ups and downs, consequent on the
people who lead and manage it. Evaluation and improvement may vary in
consistency but they are continuous processes, never the work of just one
person. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This memoir is neither a work of literature nor a source of
inspiration to coming generations. When slotted as a ‘tell-all exposé ’, it could
provoke a careful reader to question whether the author (even if his intentions
were blameless) had the emotional strength and stability required to implement reforms
effectively.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">This review was written for <i>Hindustan Times </i>and appeared on Saturday 24 April 2016. It can be viewed online <a href="http://paper.hindustantimes.com/epaper/iphone/homepage.aspx#_article059b3cfd-2e1e-4a2f-b7fb-e6bfe57c9dfc/waarticle059b3cfd-2e1e-4a2f-b7fb-e6bfe57c9dfc/059b3cfd-2e1e-4a2f-b7fb-e6bfe57c9dfc//true/LahiriSent" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-68575778173404654112016-04-15T15:19:00.001+05:302017-03-05T07:52:21.158+05:30Forgotten Stories from my Village, Harwai by Hari Govind Narayan Dubey<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
A precious but forgotten world</h2>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiozt8DTXOWm0OuwEkAey32Aaw0TwS7sSGFZalkGsu-C1UJsXCnVUi5A7QZtOaWe6V3uyTN2XR_hz42WXOHP7zBY_jrZE2M9EyhiSODELayzvEeRQC3rw0-XJkMX_qxD8_BWten8UjJOAk/s1600/HGND+Sakal+Times+for+blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiozt8DTXOWm0OuwEkAey32Aaw0TwS7sSGFZalkGsu-C1UJsXCnVUi5A7QZtOaWe6V3uyTN2XR_hz42WXOHP7zBY_jrZE2M9EyhiSODELayzvEeRQC3rw0-XJkMX_qxD8_BWten8UjJOAk/s320/HGND+Sakal+Times+for+blog.jpg" width="264" /></a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One
evening a few days ago, sitting on the warm parapet to enjoy the unique charms
of Marine Drive, Mumbai, we noticed two buildings across the road: Firdaus and Ganga
Vihar. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">Why
would anyone name a Marine Drive art deco building facing the Arabian Sea “Ganga
Vihar”? As soon as the thought entered my mind, I realised with a pleasant jolt
of surprise that I did know who must have done so. It had to have been Lal
Singh and Man Singh, the Rajput brothers who had come to Bombay from Mainpuri
District in the erstwhile United Provinces in 1910 or thereabouts, to earn
their living.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I
heard about Lal Singh and Man Singh from Hari Govind Narayan Dubey in the
course of working with him to produce his book <i><a href="http://www.saazaggarwal.com/buy_harwai/" target="_blank">Forgotten Stories from my Village, Harwai</a></i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">The
book tells the story of his father’s life and work in and around the Mainpuri
District in the decades leading up to Independence. Dubey is a skilled
storyteller and his book is more than just the life of Pandit Ram Narayan Azad.
It is a tribute to the many brave men and women who sacrificed everything they
had to their vision of an India where every citizen would lead a life of
dignity and personal choices. Their stories have long faded away, and replaced by
simplistic icons such as ‘Mahatma' Gandhi and ‘Chacha' Nehru. Revived here, they offer charming tableaux of life in an Indian village and involvement in
various aspects of India’s freedom struggle.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh650UZoT1kkcx_D9IxaAITFopZoBNMWzoKmHf9hk7tV0cOcvtgI_z74Vme4pVDdsXiVip5malUXfgSnXJGNlqvCES-1AwEWXLuqQjElUfqGle6k19AvJyGJBtTz4Ql-DDim7xramUZ2S0/s1600/HGN+Dubey+in+Pune+Mirror+230815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh650UZoT1kkcx_D9IxaAITFopZoBNMWzoKmHf9hk7tV0cOcvtgI_z74Vme4pVDdsXiVip5malUXfgSnXJGNlqvCES-1AwEWXLuqQjElUfqGle6k19AvJyGJBtTz4Ql-DDim7xramUZ2S0/s320/HGN+Dubey+in+Pune+Mirror+230815.jpg" width="249" /></a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">Lal Singh and Man Singh found employment with a wealthy Parsi gentleman who owned one of the prominent jewellery stores in Bombay. Dubey told me that the Parsi gentleman lived in a building of his own, Firdaus, on Marine Drive. However, he hesitated in mentioning the name in the book since he, ninety-two years old, felt it was a risk to put into print any information which he could not verify. What was relevant to the story was that it was through them that Pandit Ram Narayan Azad got the opportunity to meet Jinnah. How this was possible forms one of the many charming stories in the book. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">Lal Singh and Man Singh had arrived in Bombay and in course of time, one of them became the cook of the Parsi gentleman and the other his security guard. The gentleman was old and had no heir. He fell ill and came to the end of his days. The registrar was sent for, to ascertain his wishes regarding the disposition of his assets. When the registrar entered his bedroom, the gentleman stared at him intently, raised his arm and pointed at the ceiling. He then collapsed and was found to be dead.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">The registrar sent the subordinates who had accompanied him to the higher floor. There, Lal Singh was in the kitchen. They called him down and informed him that his employee was no more – and that he had inherited his entire estate.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 15.6933px;">When Lal Singh and Man Singh next came to visit their village, they came as wealthy men. Over the years, they contributed considerably to the development of Mainpuri, starting a training school for trade skills as well as separate intermediate colleges for boys and girls. They also constructed a ten-mile road connecting their village, Bhawant, to Mainpuri town – something that the Government of India had neglected to do. These facts are known to Hari Govind Narayan Dubey. However, was it really Lal Singh and Man Singh who named their home Ganga Vihar?</span></span></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-82574062613155697832016-04-11T23:23:00.002+05:302016-04-14T15:59:31.100+05:30The Living by Anjali Joseph<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjybWJ2qJqDs4YjxMHXsEce2_soT8DTRwL0-FaEBU5RvmGv-7HhagEkZchvoppVLyqelYlpCKFGHwT3CvDTSITUI5Dwp7Itsqeeck0BZUFgmXHa1ulBUbV5r7ysYd6YFAIK3XSldeUXXo/s1600/The+Livinga+by+Anjali+Joseph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjybWJ2qJqDs4YjxMHXsEce2_soT8DTRwL0-FaEBU5RvmGv-7HhagEkZchvoppVLyqelYlpCKFGHwT3CvDTSITUI5Dwp7Itsqeeck0BZUFgmXHa1ulBUbV5r7ysYd6YFAIK3XSldeUXXo/s320/The+Livinga+by+Anjali+Joseph.jpg" width="201" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjybWJ2qJqDs4YjxMHXsEce2_soT8DTRwL0-FaEBU5RvmGv-7HhagEkZchvoppVLyqelYlpCKFGHwT3CvDTSITUI5Dwp7Itsqeeck0BZUFgmXHa1ulBUbV5r7ysYd6YFAIK3XSldeUXXo/s1600/The+Livinga+by+Anjali+Joseph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjybWJ2qJqDs4YjxMHXsEce2_soT8DTRwL0-FaEBU5RvmGv-7HhagEkZchvoppVLyqelYlpCKFGHwT3CvDTSITUI5Dwp7Itsqeeck0BZUFgmXHa1ulBUbV5r7ysYd6YFAIK3XSldeUXXo/s1600/The+Livinga+by+Anjali+Joseph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Illuminating the beauty of all our lives </span></h2>
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One
can usually tell that a book is bad in just a few pages but to tell that a book
is good, you do have <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">to read right through to the end. I held my breath as I
read this one. Its first few pages held the kind of promise that an eager
reader prays will last. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I enjoyed
the book very much, and enjoyed interviewing Anjali Joseph for <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/wanted-to-write-about-routine-habit-and-ruptures-in-both-anjali-joseph/story-gJJu4B2sn13ptbrHWUz4gJ.html" target="_blank">Hindustan Times. </a>In the
course of the interview, which I’ve pasted below, I realised, with growing
horror, that I was the longsuffering mother of the person with whom Ms Joseph
was accosting young men outside a bakery in the evening, to find out more about
‘haathbhatti’. A coincidence, I promise, but in the interest of full disclosure
and all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Why footwear, why these particular cities?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">For me, the impetus to write a novel comes in two forms. The
primary one is an image; the secondary is an idea or a question. For <i>Saraswati
Park </i>I had an image of a man at a secondhand book stall in Flora
Fountain in Mumbai, looking for books with marginal notations just before
evening rush hour. And I knew I wanted to write about the daydreaming,
book-reading, middle-class Bombay where I’d spent my early years and where my
parents and grandparents had lived. For this book I had the image of a man
making a pair of chappals. I’ve been wearing Kolhapuris since I was a child. The
first pair I had was brought for me by my grandfather from a work trip to
Kolhapur when I was three or four. I still wear Kolhapuris all the time, and
find them both beautiful and practical, and I knew I wanted to write about the
idea of daily work, of craft, and of some of the parts of life with which
fiction deals less frequently: routine, habit, and ruptures in both. I also had
an image of a woman in Norwich, originally in a place called Lion Wood, which
appears in the novel. I realized she worked in a shoe factory, a profession
that’s now anachronistic but which used to be one of the main trades in
Norwich, where I was living when I started writing this novel.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Could you describe the reader you were writing
for?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I don’t really know, but I did want to write a book that
plausibly might carry the voices of these two people – the kind of working
class people who don’t consider themselves especially interesting and wouldn’t
see their lives as the stuff of fiction. I am more interested in those lives
than in the apparently exceptional or heroic, and I suppose my larger project
is to illuminate the beauty of all of our lives, even (especially?) in their
humdrum moments: everyday magic.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then you’re not writing for a particular
reader as some writers say they do?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I don't think about anything other than the writing while I am
writing. The reader-writer connection does matter to me – as a reader to begin
with, and also as a writer. It's a small miraculous thing, the possibility of
connecting with someone you may never meet. It's a real connection.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I enjoyed your poetic translation of Akashvani,
any examples I may have missed because I didn’t have the context?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I did use a few bits of Norwich speech, though Claire, the first
narrator doesn’t talk in full Norfolk dialect, since she’s grown up in the
city. ‘There was weather’, for example, means ‘The weather was bad’. I was also
inspired by some of the things I’d seen when growing up in England in the mid
and late 1980s: canned Alphabetti Spaghetti, for example, or corner shops.
Those things are part of the furniture of the novel.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Did you find your characters changing as you
wrote, or did they stay true to your early conception of them?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Arun was initially more sarcastic, less tender, less nagging;
Claire’s relationship with her son is something that became much warmer than
I’d initially predicated. The process of writing a novel involves getting to
know characters: their facades and what’s inside.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Any interesting stories about the research you
did to get all this together?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I spent a week in a shoe factory in Norwich, in January a few
years ago. The people who worked there were generous with their time and
attention and let me watch them work, and chat to them as they did; I found out
the things I would rather not make up, like what it feels like when the bells
go for breaks, or how the light falls at different times of day; how the shop
floor, as it’s called, smells when the roughing machines come on in the
morning. I also visited Kolhapur and nearby Miraj twice. Once I met chappal
makers, thanks to the kindness of Vinayak Kadam of Adarsh Charmodyog Centre in
Kolhapur. Most of the chappal makers work at home so I went around their houses
with him and watched them work a little, and talked to them. The second time I
visited, I wanted particularly to do two things. One was visit a country liquor
bar in the area where the chappal makers live and work, because I knew Arun,
the second narrator, had been an alcoholic for many years. The other was to
find a small temple in a field that I’d dreamt of his visiting as a child. It
was good that I went to Kolhapur because I realized that unlike Bombay it
doesn’t have that many country liquor bars; government authorized country
liquor is sold by certain people in certain areas, and then illegal, much
cheaper and stronger ‘haathbhatti’ is sold as homebrew. A kind young man, a
non-drinker himself, helped me find some haathbhatti when I accosted him
outside a bakery one evening and asked where the country liquor bars were. He
was worried my friend and I would get into trouble so he chivalrously escorted
us to buy haathbhatti, then pleaded with me not to make a regular habit of
drinking it. And the next day, while we were aimlessly driving around in the
morning, we found the temple in the fields, basically as a gift.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I was going to say, ‘hmm why so much sexual
activity!’ but also wanted to note my appreciation of your female
interpretations of the sexual act.</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sex is a big part of life, isn’t it? For Claire I think it
represents a new opening out of her life after a long period of essentially
mourning the teenage relationship that resulted in and ended with the birth of
her son. For Arun I think it represents one of the few unregimented parts of
his life. Everything else – work, marriage, eating, sleeping – is somehow
inevitable. He loves his wife; he loves his family. But the randomness of
unplanned extra-marital sex creates a rupture in that, and brings both a sense
of freedom and sadness and guilt. I’m not sure what to say about a female
experience of sex in general. I think for Claire there’s an experimental
quality to the relationships she has. In her youth love was simple, but it
ended. In her thirties, it’s not so simple for a while, but she also has a few
transgresive encounters with a much younger man, her son’s friend, and there
are no repercussions from that. That idea, which somehow seems normal for a
male character, is something I found interesting. Part of the matter of
factness of these characters and the lives they lead, in which time is parceled
out in units that they make, is expressed in this experience that at times sex
is just sex. At other times, of course, it brings emotions: wonder, surprise,
grief.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sexual acts in the public domain invariably
describe men as experiencing mindless enjoyment whereas Claire does seem
capable of thought during the process, could that be a feminine statement?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I don't know. Now that you say it I seem to remember Molly Bloom
doesn't stop chatting to herself during sex either. Perhaps it is a type of
mind, not a gender-based difference?</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Amit Chaudhuri gave <i>The Living</i> a
rave review in <i>The Guardian</i> and a
disgruntled reader wrote in to say that, as your former teacher and mentor, he
must be biased?</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I was glad and grateful to read the review – it was written by
one of my favourite writers. I hadn't asked for it to be written, or tried to
influence what it said. Huffington Post wrote about the incident and asked for
my response, but I didn't see why I should engage with accusations levied in
anonymous emails. In any case, it’s for a reader to flip through the book and
decide if it seems to speak to him, or her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A
few years ago, I wrote about Anjali Joseph’s debut novel <i>Saraswati Park </i><a href="http://blackandwhitefountain.blogspot.in/2010/11/saraswati-park-by-anjali-joseph.html" target="_blank">in this blog </a></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">after
reading it aloud to my friend Gladys, once a librarian but no longer able to
read. We both admired its literary skill, and did not feel the need for more
action than it has. This is relevant because critical reviews at the time complained
that the reviewer had read on, waiting, but nothing exciting had happened and
therefore concluded that this was not a good book. We wondered what these
people would have had to say about Jane Austen if they were reading her for the
first time, before all the hype, and congratulated ourselves smugly when </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Saraswati Park</i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> went on to win the Betty
Trask Prize, the Desmond Eliot Prize – and in time the Vodafone Crossword Prize
too.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">With
<i>The Living</i>, Anjali Joseph has
surpassed her skill of saying so very much with so very few words. I look
forward to reading it to Gladys – and to hearing about the prizes that come its
way!</span></div>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span></div>
black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-59786149424342442092015-11-25T12:50:00.000+05:302015-11-25T12:53:14.391+05:30Mafia queens of Mumbai by S. Hussain Zaidi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Women leaders of a different kind</span></h2>
<span class="”fullpost”"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG8yJF6oOp6Xe6s_P19B0jF7k1SXFKrl_GPl_fQCjBwM0Bg1q0o7cMLeWBzVYhnWyYMKwlN69bmH35-6HqdsyVhJd_m28R_uuHcvMpVQrS-V3GMBrkCqxn9Py3B4QZuvF610yGiYqPGrE/s1600/Mafia+queens+of+Mumbai+by+S.+Hussain+Zaidi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG8yJF6oOp6Xe6s_P19B0jF7k1SXFKrl_GPl_fQCjBwM0Bg1q0o7cMLeWBzVYhnWyYMKwlN69bmH35-6HqdsyVhJd_m28R_uuHcvMpVQrS-V3GMBrkCqxn9Py3B4QZuvF610yGiYqPGrE/s1600/Mafia+queens+of+Mumbai+by+S.+Hussain+Zaidi.jpg" /></a>This book is a fascinating collection of true-life stories
of women gangsters who lived and worked in Bombay. The author, S. Hussain Zaidi, was a crime reporter for decades and some of his books have been made into
movies.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Not all the mafia queens in this book have blood on their
hands. Jenabai, the elderly Muslim woman who somehow acquired the same name as a thirteenth century (Hindu) Marathi poet, made her biggest and most
damaging impact because she was able to influence another powerful gangster
with her strategic thinking. Then there was Gangubai, who was lured into
prostitution by a young man with whom she eloped and who, instead of marrying
her, sold her to a brothel. Gangubai rebelled by first developing a reputation
for the highest skills of her trade, and later by rescuing other women from the trap she had fallen into, if she felt they were not cut out for life in the cages of Falkland
Road. She became a public figure, and campaigned
for the need for a prostitution belt in all cities. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Some of these female gangsters were drawn to their
profession by dire economic circumstances and some enticed into it by
exploitative males. Some are symbols of glamour; some admirable for their
courage and nimble thinking.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I was lent this book to read by a friend who is a police
officer more than a year ago. That turned into a year in which I did not read
many books at all. Eventually, I read it aloud to Gladys. It turned out to be a
quick read and, though a teeny bit raunchy at times, we both enjoyed it. One
problem with reading a book aloud, though, is that the proofing and editing
flaws stand out. I may not have noticed the many colloquial expressions and common
clichés of Indian newspaper crime-reporting that this book is strewn with if I
had just been reading it to myself. Another thing I wondered about was the
extent of detail in the book: was it fictionalised or was every setting
recreated from what was told to the author in an interview? I tried to contact
S. Hussani Zaidi to find out, but was unable to.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG8yJF6oOp6Xe6s_P19B0jF7k1SXFKrl_GPl_fQCjBwM0Bg1q0o7cMLeWBzVYhnWyYMKwlN69bmH35-6HqdsyVhJd_m28R_uuHcvMpVQrS-V3GMBrkCqxn9Py3B4QZuvF610yGiYqPGrE/s1600/Mafia+queens+of+Mumbai+by+S.+Hussain+Zaidi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6973084986961701552.post-64490913441992477612015-10-11T18:19:00.001+05:302015-10-11T18:19:43.954+05:30Kharemaster by Vibhavari Shirurkar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
A daughter’s view</h2>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC-vK8loOA7i4aY_Z1paTo66Cpj_lvtHsmYpF6TwEnrQLleYPwVzNxjCpBEUCji0kyk2YqBHFrbs4bdSdzVFRPkUqn-rZyoGK_k0qxLjqesdNZ3dGb1Pow8xHqTXbzo-Uuvr0AATdEyV4/s1600/Kharemaster+by+Vibhavari+Shirurkar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC-vK8loOA7i4aY_Z1paTo66Cpj_lvtHsmYpF6TwEnrQLleYPwVzNxjCpBEUCji0kyk2YqBHFrbs4bdSdzVFRPkUqn-rZyoGK_k0qxLjqesdNZ3dGb1Pow8xHqTXbzo-Uuvr0AATdEyV4/s320/Kharemaster+by+Vibhavari+Shirurkar.jpg" width="214" /></a>I’m lucky to have history professors for friends, and one of
them sent me this book as an example of what a biography could be. When I
started reading, I was compelled by the simple, emotional narrative of an
elderly woman writing her memories of her father’s life, an excellent translation from Marathi. By the end of the
book, however, I realised that it was the content and the way it was presented
that had most impressed me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Kharemaster was an unusual person for his time because he
made sure that all his children got educated. At a time when Hindu girls were
‘married off’ at the age of eight or even younger; a time when for even a boy to
complete high school and be ‘matriculate’ was the privilege of very few, he was
determined that his daughters would get a university education. When they were
little, he worked with them himself, developing their awareness and giving them
knowledge about the world. As they grew older, he went to great extents to find
ways for them to get the best possible education. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Still, the book is not a hagiography. Kharemaster’s faults
and weaknesses, and in one case a rather shocking incident, are presented with
the same warmth and confidence as every other aspect the book covers. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Vibhavari Shirurkar was in her eighties when she wrote this
book. All her life, she had written books about the women around her, and these
naturally revealed the ways in which they were exploited and dehumanised by the
norms of society. The books were admired but they were very controversial.
Right from the first one, they were written under a pseudonym. Though she did
reveal herself early on, perhaps retaining the pseudonym as her brand, this
book goes further. It is not just the biography of Kharemaster but also a
complete exposition of the identity of the well-known Marathi litterateur
Vibhavari Shirurkar: Balutai, one of the daughters of Kharemaster, and the
circumstances in which she grew up and became the person she became.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The story starts with Kharemaster’s own writing, notes from
his diary given to Balutai by her mother after her father dies. Then,
influenced by an old friend of her father, Balutai takes a decision to write
the book by projecting her imagination into the events she remembers and trying
to interpret them in her own way. This is a device that works very well, except
(to my mind) in one place. Towards the end of his life, Balutai depicts her
father as lonely and depressed, preoccupied with feelings of rejection. I did
feel that this particular projection might have resulted from feelings of guilt
and regret this sensitive woman felt for her parents and their needs, and the
conflicting pressures of her own life which prevented her from giving them the
attention and care they may have craved. Maybe Kharemaster wasn't all that lonely and depressed after all, maybe he spent his last years in the glow of silent achievement, knowing that all his children were well-off and well settled because he had made sure they got well educated.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the things I enjoyed most about this book is the
skilled depiction of life in those days, and I learnt a lot: a deeper
understanding of the way women were perceived and their own perceptions of
themselves; the relevance of caste in society; the human angle of religious
conversion, and much more. It was interesting to know that, during the First
World War, young Indian men were kidnapped and sent by force to join the
British army. It was also interesting to see how the emergence of women as
individuals made marriage more difficult because it took an unusual man to accept
that perception. Modern and educated young Indian men and women today are
rejecting marriage, refusing to enter into a contract that forces them into
traditional roles that they cannot and will not fulfil. It was a movement that
began with the dedicated actions and sacrifices made by rare people like
Kharemaster.<o:p></o:p></div>
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black-and-white fountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08580690922447351876noreply@blogger.com