New mantras for a new age
At first this book made me nervous because it put emphasis on Speed and Acceleration as abilities ‘the new atmosphere’ (the one thrown up by ‘a world gone digital’) requires us to master.
I prefer an unhurried pace of existence and even the thought of being forced to move fast by forces beyond my control makes me giddy. But as I read, there was so much wisdom in its concepts – and so much that struck me as good and true – that I soon became a raving fan. After all, the other two abilities it endorses are Direction and Discipline – my favourites, actually.I became who I am from reading stuff like I’m OK You’re OK and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (Can I call them self-help books? Or would that evoke a great gnashing of teeth by the stakeholders of this one? On the other hand maybe it’s ok: I’ve heard self-help books outperform every other genre many times over in India. What a sweet, earnest and well-intentioned people we are!)
Velocity gives us seven laws that recommend new ways of thinking and behaving. What I liked was that these ‘new ways’ are very often very old ways – stuff we really should have been doing all along in the interests of long-term thinking and sustainability, but somehow forgot.
Along with specifics of new situations that the modern world presents, there is a focus here on ethical, goal-oriented, action-oriented thought and behaviour. In a world of confusing choices, I felt reassured that these were being held up as precepts for success. For instance:
Wondering which half of your ad spend is wasted? Velocity says, “Wrong question. Try again.” Instead of just interrupting people, serve them and make them feel something. Sorry, but that takes longer than thirty seconds.
And:Velocity will disproportionately reward organizations and individuals that aim to make a meaningful and enduring contribution. ...
Do the right thing: always play from your heart.
And:
Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.
The line that struck me most was held out as a guide to Design, borrowed from the value system of the Byzantine monks of yore:
Balance, gentleness, absence of haste and clarity of spirit.
And that's when I realised that it was the idea of haste that had worried me to start with, and not the idea of speed.
Another thing I liked about this book is the uncluttered way it’s laid out, which makes reading and absorbing concepts easier than in closely-fitted text. And one of the clever things it does to avoid the monotony of long theoretical passages is to break them up into shorter ones by having each of the co-authors speak alternately. Buy this book and read it. More important, practice what it teaches – it will work towards bringing you lasting happiness and peace – and making the world a better place too.
Easy to read; hard to come to terms with
Sometimes books transport their readers to a time they once knew, and the feeling of a familiar territory overwhelms, becoming even stronger than the plot or style. I felt that way when I read Day Scholar by Siddharth Chowdhury and A Pack of Lies by Urmilla Deshpande, and this book did the same to me too. These books were about places and people I had lived among! I didn’t really want to go back there or anything – but they filled me with nostalgia for a time long gone – like looking through an old family album.Impeachment is set four years after the event best described as “the Bhopal gas tragedy”. There is a lot of information here about this infamous tragedy; all the complications and ramifications and the terrible deadlock that ensued. It forms an elegant showcase of the sort of mess a third world but wannabe country could get itself into: a country in which industry is somehow viewed as a blessing and industrialists are vested with divine rights. (Employing people is not a necessity of industry but a favour done to them by kindhearted investors.) And here is a government that is part owner of the factory that went amuck – and who disparages its own experts by bowing to the versions of Western scientists (and looking away red-faced when those white scientists confirmed what some Indian doctors had said the day after the leak.)And in the end, who should be impeached? The politicians and officials whom Carbide financed, who went shopping with their wives in New York at company expense? The inspectors who gave a clean chit to faulty gauges and malfunctioning meters they found, in exchange for hefty fees? The doctors who floated theories that people did not die of the gas, they died because they were already ill and dying, and who was going to miss them anyway? So this is an important book because it forms a ready-reckoner of a very important but never resolved historical event. But though it is about a serious issue and explores it in painstaking detail, it is also good-quality entertainment. The characters are lifelike and very true to their time: sincere and well-qualified professionals and socially-concerned citizens – but with the level of awareness prevalent then. They participate in events and get embroiled in emotional situations that – and even though these, too are socially relevant and in particular feminist issues which create awareness – keep your interest up all the way. Consider this:Dear old daddy! She felt like hugging him. He would not even mention the word abortion. He only wanted to be rid of the proof of her actions. Was it her mother’s belated idea of saving the family from disgrace? If there is no proof does that mean the act had not been performed? What hurt him more? The fact that she had slept with a man she was not married to? Or any man who did not want to marry her? Or the idea that there may be more than one man in her life? Or that she was going to have a baby without being married? … Is that what he would have wanted had one of his students been pregnant by him? … How do even highly educated people like him explain their double standards to themselves?
And:She found it strange that all the commonality of thought and perception was not considered special; only physical intimacy was thought to make a relationship special.
One of the characters in this book is a journalist who tries to give comprehensive and balanced information in her reports about this tragic and horrible event but her editor says, “Save your historical analyses for your memoirs”. I was tempted to email Anjali Deshpande to ask if that was actually her, and how much of this book arises from her personal experience and knowledge of what happened on that horrible night in Bhopal and the events that followed. But the author blurb in the books says that Anjali Deshpande “manages her world without much discipline, any sense of design or patience, and cultivates the virtues of laziness. She lives in Delhi with her husband and without cats or children.” Though this made me smile, it also intimidated me from getting in touch and I decided to quietly draw my own conclusions.
Glamour, vengeance ... resolution
Here’s a murder mystery that draws you in and keeps you engrossed without providing so much as a dead body.
It arrived yesterday, and though I have a number of books waiting for their turn, was so impressed with its cover, perfect binding, and elegantly-laid-out font that once I started turning its crisp pages, I just kept going till I’d come to the end.
There are four separate stories here and as I raced through them, waiting eagerly to find out how they would link together and provide solutions to the burning question each one raised, I must say I enjoyed the easy visualization of its fast-moving pace. I admired these four Indian women, happy to be acquainted with their independent thoughts and lifestyle and the way they inhabited a new world which did not hem them in as Indian women have been in centuries past. I was a bit surprised at how their giddy-headed emotional attractions were so easily categorized as ‘love’ – but I will admit to ‘loving’ the different locales Lata Gwalani has depicted in authentic detail in her book.
As the story comes to a close, it suddenly takes on a different character and I found the transition rather abrupt. Moving from a racy, event-strewn narrative to a complex, theoretical arena cannot be as simple as changing gears – at least not to me. I was expecting to race through to the end but the last thirty pages held me back and if I didn’t particularly enjoy the ending, I should acknowledge that it was my fault for not giving it the time and attention it probably deserved.
Enchantment - underlaid with common sense
This book has seventeen stories for children and covers a wide range of topics and locales. I was impressed with the scope of imagination here, and found the stories absolutely delightful. Starting with three tales of enchantment which I felt even very young children would enjoy, The Story Catcher goes on to casually introduce respect for tradition, awareness of the scope of the subconscious mind, the relative nature of problems, the different perspectives of parents and children, and other important concepts of life. These are interspersed with liberal doses of wish fulfilment – and also occasional humour which made me giggle.One of the themes of this book is the overwhelming childhood preoccupation with winning and losing – and I admired the way three of its interesting and well-written stories developed the importance of level-headed thinking and the right values in these areas.I also admired this author’s skill in writing for Indian children – creating the kind of global environment they are more used to in the books they read, while occasionally introducing subtle reminders that they are very much at home.
Elegant depiction of fading grandeur
Human civilization throws up institutions of culture which grow gradually, gather momentum, and peak as they deliver aesthetic and sensory pleasure. Then historical events intervene, and decline and decay develop. This book is set in an alcove of an Indian city in which such institutions once flourished. Though this private world remained unscathed by the ravaging winds of Partition, the changes that it brought led to its end.
Gohar Jan is a courtesan, celebrated for her beauty and skill, pursued by the wealthy and aristocratic. Ustad Ramzi is a pahalwan, head of his clan and defender of the highest wrestling title in the land. In this book we get a peep into the kind of lives they led, the problems they dealt with as their world faded away, and the lifestyle and emotions that tradition compelled upon them. The crux of the story is in the unlikely relationship they developed.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a wonderful storyteller. His unfussy, pastel prose engrosses you as it tackles even dramatic or painful topics with calm. Here is a sample.
Ustad Ramzi saw Tamami grapple with him for a few minutes. The thought occurred to him that Tamami had missed a few opportunities for takedown, before he realized that Tamami was deliberately prolonging their engagement. The trainees who had not understood it became restless wondering why Tamami was unable to bring down Sher Ali. Another few minutes passed before Tamami finally took down Sher Ali.
“What were you trying to show others? That Sher Ali is your match?” Ustad Ramzi said to Tamami after Gulab Deen had left.
“No Ustad… I was just trying to see what he knew.” Tamami smiled sheepishly.
“Don’t waste time playing with your opponent,” Ustad Ramzi said.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi has used this unhurried and deceptively simple style to good effect while exploring the complex emotions here. Tamami is Ustad Ramzi's brother, much younger, and a classic example of a sulky and inept but adoring inheritor. I enjoyed traversing the layers of the insights into how such a relationship might be exploited. I had been looking forward eagerly to Between Clay and Dust ever since I read the author’s first novel The Story of a Widow, and was happy (and relieved) to find it just as gentle and evocative; a reader’s delight.
Adventures in a faraway world
This book is set in the 1930s and 1940s in Champaran, Bihar, near the Nepal border. It is a true story, based on the childhood memories of the author. It starts with tales of her great-grandfather, Alfred Augustus Tripe. A young man from a prosperous family, he had left his home in England in 1848 to settle in this distant, untamed land, and made a fortune of his own. Sylvia Dyer grew up in a time of great drama. There was the massive earthquake that killed many and destroyed the family home. There was immense wealth – and greed from some quarters balanced by generosity in others. There was murder, illness, suicide, complicated family relationships, illicit love affairs, devoted but peculiar family retainers, a dacoit with a heart of gold, animals charging into buildings … and much more, all in a complicated, colonized and highly stratified society. Yet, all is founded in fact, and beautifully detailed. I enjoyed this book very much and what I admired most was that although the author was very young during the time of which she writes, she has created an intricate and evocative work strewn with insights that surely come from her adult years. I found the descriptions enchanting, and they brought the bygone landscape and lifestyle alive. Here are a few:We ran home to wash our hands in the bathroom, in a big aluminium mug with ‘1 seer’ stamped on it. The bathrooms those days were very spacious, with polished teak wood commodes, bathtubs and grand wash-hand stands, each with a large mirror, porcelain washbasin and jug. A lantern sat on our wash-hand stand. Inside its polished glass chimney, from out of a bubble of metal, it stuck forth its yellow tongue of flame, steadfast and reassuring. But the water in the mug was as dark as the khariyan well with its monster.
Puckry village was blessed with two wells that never ran dry (a dry well was unimaginable in this land of the Baghmati), one in the east for the Brahmins and upper castes and the other in the west for the lower castes. Priests, warriors, clerks, merchants, farmers, blacksmiths, masons, carpenters, oil men, milkmen and the whole long string of trades that existed at the time. You could gauge from his surname what caste a man came from. Puckry village had just about every caste with the exception of Rajput warriors, even a witch – though there was no particular caste for her.
They chewed a lot of tobacco, and did a lot of spitting. Besides, in the old days, people couldn't swallow all the things we have to now. There were spittoons in homes. Even pure silver spittoons. Outside, men were free to spit everywhere; spitting out paan and tobacco, noxious odours inhaled, revulsion, indignation, guilt and perplexity – unpalatable things seen and heard, that they could not stomach, and sought to expel with spittle, “Thooooo!”
It was spitter’s paradise.
Every January, the mustard bloomed, turning the fields to carpets of gold. Mustard was followed by linseed, which when in bloom looked like the sea on the calmest, clearest day.
Man chuckled softly. “You know,” he told us, “once a drunken Musahar was on his way home from the bazaar. It had grown late, and a full moon was up. He came to a linseed fields and – baap re, he tried to swim across! He thought he was drowning and started shouting. In the end he gave up and fell asleep in the linseed!”
Forgive me, dear lord
What a lovely, evocative title! Imagine a Mumbai commuter train stuffed to the brim with flamingoes in startling shades of pink, red, and orange – their bright feathers flapping in the breeze as they swell from overcrowded doors, and their strong, hooked bills pressed against the side, as the Local banks and hoots. I’m afraid I found much of this book as unlikely, as cutely stylised, as this image. After a tedious build-up of characters and situations, aptly couched in laboured language, a woman is shot dead in a bar – just as Jessica Lal was. If you want a more lifelike version, go see the movie No One Killed Jessica.What upset me most about this book was the rave blurb by Amy Tan on the cover – if not for that, which marks it out as a fabulous global work of art, I wouldn’t have dreamt of demeaning it in public. In any case, to be fair, maybe it was just too artistic for my plebeian tastes. 
What I will always remember about this book is the leering looks the waiter gave me as I read. It was a roadside joint near the Dadar flyover, and the yumptious-scrumptious pau bhaji dripped with butter and soothed some of my aesthetic senses while this book jarred some others as I waited for my ride home. It must be ten (or twenty or maybe even thirty) years since anyone gave me those serious oh-my-god-you-hottie looks. Only later, when I took a closer look at the cover of the book I was reading, could I imagine what the man might have been thinking watching me sitting there, slurping at the food and reading engrossed, but with expressions of distaste flitting across my face every now and again.
Shadow people, real lives
There was just one thing that troubled me about this book as I read – and that was the way the author had got inside her subjects’ heads, revealing their inmost, and sometimes very private, thoughts. How could she have known them?This quibble was resolved when I read her explanatory note at the end and it described exactly how.To write this book, Katherine Boo spent four years observing and understanding Annawadi, a slum near the Mumbai international airport, and here she has profiled some of the people she met and written about the events in their lives during this time. In Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is beautifully written, easy to read, full of drama and tragedy, and confronts the reader with complex thoughts and feelings – especially privileged readers who believe that Mumbai belongs to them (like me). It attempts to answer Katherine Boo’s questions:What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?
I felt sad to think that we are probably a long way away from a situation in which someone from inside the many Annawadis in our country could write a book like this – a long way away even from an Angela's Ashes kind of book.
What I admired most about Behind the Beautiful Forevers was its high standards at every level and in every area – time and attention spent on listening and observing, previous perspective, accuracy and detail, literary and intellectual quality – something I’m afraid I have not encountered for a very long time and had begun to believe that I was fortunate to have ever known that it existed at all, but would probably never see again.
A new lease, or something
As I approached fifty, I was filled with incredulity, overcome with the conviction that surely someone must have counted wrong – a cosmic miscalculation. I felt relaxed and energetic – not decrepit or ready to begin planning retirement, or prepared to accept trendy new algorithms that declared “fifty is the new twenty-one”.
A few months later, settling into (but still a bit bemused by) the (yes, unexpected) new seniority, I received this book – not something I would choose off a shelf, except perhaps for a friend on the verge of fifty – as a gift. It was given to me by Janaki, the creative and dynamic owner of twistntales,a bookstore in Pune where we launched The Songbird on my Shoulder on 10 March and had a women’s-day related discussion on ‘the changing role of the Madam’.
What an appropriate gift – what an attractive cover! And when I started reading, the stories moved smooth and easy, and painted lovely pictures of the different lives of women who had arrived at this significant milestone.
Though the language is uniform throughout the book, it’s clear that these are separate women, each with her own voice and personality – her own unique problems and pains, gifts and opportunities. We have village women and city women; women who go to live in a new country and learn about different cultures and different cleaning materials; women who have endured torturous mothers-in-law; those who have remained the envy of their siblings because they never married, those patronised by their grown-up children – and more.
Fifty was a turning point for sure: life might become simpler, or you might come to the end of your tether, or – after a lifetime of submission and repression, new horizons might suddenly open up. You might perhaps encounter a nice young man while walking in the park – and though you walk faster, hoping no one will see him asking you the name of that tree over there, you might just find yourself chatting away and he telling you about himself, very quickly and with amusing details, as if he was mining someone else’s life, as if he was a character in a comic strip.
All kinds of new possibilities appear:
I thought love could only happen between a man with a good job and a pretty, fair young woman. Nothing else was possible. Older woman and younger man, man and man, woman and woman were unheard of in my world.
and:
Why couldn’t he run off with a woman? Surely there were female secretaries in his office. Why shame us like this by going off with a boy, for God’s sake.
I enjoyed this book very much and it made me think seriously about being fifty and what a wonderful, perfect age it is and how, like Winnie the Pooh, one might want to be fifty “for ever and ever”.
Now We Are Six - A.A. Milne
When I was one I had just begun
When I was two I was nearly new
When I was three I was hardly me
When I was four I was not much more
When I was five I was just alive
But now I am six, I'm as clever as clever;
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
Play, colour, song and prayer
This is an unusual and very attractive book. It links Nirmala Savadekar’s collection of photographs of doors with Ashutosh Bhupatkar’s translations of Muktabai’s devotional verses.Muktabai, revered as one of the saints of 13th-century Pandharpur, was the youngest of four siblings and the only girl. They led a hard life as children, gaining spiritual prowess in their wanderings, shunned and ridiculed for no fault of theirs: role models for generations of the oppressed.As they rose to sainthood, they shared their learning through exquisite verse and song that emerged from them in effortless bliss.
In this collection, the imagery of young Dnyaneshwara as he sits in a terrible sulk having locked himself up in a hut, his little sister knocking on the door, beseeching him to open it, works at different levels. Perhaps gaining enlightenment really is as easy as just opening a door!Nirmala’s photographs of doors are colourful and thought provoking. My favourite is a battered blue and red wooden door – with a shiny keychain hanging on an ugly curved nail in one corner. I enjoyed the verses, though in some places idiomatically discordant, and tried to focus on their deeper meaning.Nirmala (who connected to me on facebook) told me that she is a fine-art photographer whose work has found a place in the “world’s most creative photographs” and in the permanent collection of the Samuel Dorksy Museum, USA. She said that her interest in spirituality and psychology has led her to a study of different meditation techniques and therapies and that painting became a road to self discovery and meditation. You can see her work on www.neermalasavadekar.com and she offers her Door series on request in enlargements in archival quality paper and archival ink. You can also contact her with queries about this book through her site.
Luxuriating in an inhospitable land
This book is set in the bleak, isolated area where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet, and begins with a glimpse into the life at a military outpost there. Each chapter then depicts different aspects of life and covers a wide range of subjects: the role of honour in different situations; the isolation of the Baluchis and negligence towards their needs in their own country despite their graciousness, trust, and spontaneity in offering affection; the wandering tribes, their culture and specific tribulations, and the points – sometimes fatal – at which they interact with the mainstream; the meddling of international agencies with vested interests in this crucial frontier area and how they use money and religion in twisted ways for short-term gains – and how their craftiness is sometimes played back against them; how a playground for privileged visitors can turn into a graveyard for locals … and many more.Jamil Ahmad is a retired member of the Civil Service of Pakistan and he served as political agent and then commissioner in these areas, and as a minister in Kabul. This book is testimony to his love for and understanding of the people and land in which he worked, and his prose is sparse and starkly beautiful, strikingly appropriate to the story. Here are a few examples.These men died a final and total death. They will live in no songs; no memorials will be raised to them. It is possible that with time, even their loved ones will lock them up in some closed recess of their minds. The terrible struggle for life makes it impossible for too much time to be wasted over thoughts for the dead.
In their minds, home and permanency only meant a stay long enough to wash clothes or to fix the cradles to the trees.
In this land where imputation of immorality meant certain death, both men and women were careful.
I must also say that, while the lives described here are hard, this book is very easy to read and I read it aloud to my friend Gladys in just three sittings.
I too was waiting eagerly for this one
When I read Ravinder Singh’s first book three years ago, it was with a sense of disbelief. HERE is the, er, dissertation I wrote about it on this blog. Leaving its flaws aside, however, I too had a love story is a seamless read, good for one sitting even if it leaves you slapping your forehead at the end of it. But this book begins badly, using a device strewn with irritating bumps and starts. I too had a love story sold phenomenally well and created a huge population of fans, and Ravinder Singh’s second book has been published by Penguin. So I was expecting copy free of major grammatical or style flaws and horrified to find, as early as pages 3 and 4 respectively, the words ‘disagreement’ and ‘nostalgic’ incorporated in unique ways:With this gesture he signalled his disagreement to take a cab.
Would that be his ‘refusal’ to take a cab? Or his ‘disinclination’ to take a cab? I suppose it doesn’t matter that thousands and thousands are going to read this book and will believe that disagreement can be used this way quite correctly.It was nostalgic for them to meet each other after so long.
The carnage continues, with Penguin India setting new standards for an entire generation of second-language English aspirants.Grammar and style may certainly remain subservient to a good story. Ravin has grown up a bit and moved on from the rustic lad he once was - he can even use the word 'Voila' in daily speech. “Unlike India, where a sandwich is more like a snack, in the West it is more of a meal. Having lived in various countries I have adapted to every kind of meal now,” he tells us modestly. And Ravin, a wonderful new role model, “loves to booze” and unerringly picks yet another true love who is “very fair in complexion” and has “shining white teeth”. She also has any number of “cute” habits which you are going to love. Alas, I promise you.The part of this book I liked the most was when Ravin’s true love no. 2 drinks too much and begins to vomit. Instead of vomiting right back, Ravin understands his responsibility and takes tender care of her. This book is not as easy to read and gripping as his first one – but it does deal at some level with some of the issues of ‘real’ love such as understanding each other as separate human beings, and the need to develop common goals rather than battling bitterly against each other’s goals forevermore.
The way we were
This collection of short stories is based largely in the 1940s and 1950s and takes us back to the time just before and just after Indian Independence. Gladys brought this book for me to read to her, and we both enjoyed the stories and found them engrossing and beautifully written. Abbas takes us into a mujra at Kennedy Bridge and shows us the meaning of true love; he depicts for us the horrible farce behind Independence-day celebrations in a north Indian village; gives a glimpse of the oppression of underprivileged women and the odd circumstances by which they are sometimes afforded an education; the dissipated erstwhile royalty of India; the ways in which Partition changed the course of innocent people’s lives – and many more.Each story is alive with imagery and the kind of detail that bring a scene alive before your eyes.On a bus ride on the top deck, the hero of one of the stories (a lowly Indian proofreader), sits next to an attractive English girl:Now we are passing through Bhendi Bazar. Across the road was stretched a cloth streamer bearing the legend: PAKISTAN OR DEATH. In the rain, the ink had spread and distorted the words. Pakistan had grown a beard and Death had become more fearful. I thought to myself, I am afraid of Death. Give me Pakistan instead. And then my newspaper mind said, “You are Hindustan and this girl is Pakistan. And this umbrella is the Himalayas which protects both …”
After the death of Patrice Lumumba a ghost enters the UN building in “the world’s second-largest city”.Not a bullet, a hundred thousand bullets are flying about to kill children like Henry Junior. Bullets and bombs and rockets and atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and poison gas bombs and bombs loaded with typhus and plague germs, I know. I have been to all corners of the earth. In Algeria, I have seen the custodians of the celebrated French culture torturing Arab nationalists with live wires, shooting enough electric current into their naked bodies to burn their flesh, to crack their bones, to make jelly of their muscles, but not enough to kill them …
Besides fictionalised political events, this book’s themes include social class distinction, and wry and despairing comments about the state of the nation. It is filled with passion, and is highly dramatised, in keeping with the idiom and genre of the time. To be honest I found this a bit disturbing. The other thing I didn’t care for was the rather sloppy editing.Finally, I felt that these stories were rather poetic in the sense that they are clearly figments of the author’s imagination and not necessarily grounded in reality. Most fiction-writers try to mirror reality. Here I saw little trace of that aspiration. In the story Sylvia, for instance, Sylvia is a nurse in the General Ward in a government hospital in New Delhi. Sylvia is kind, patient, and solicitous. Even more surprising, the doctor is concerned about his patients too! I’ve never seen anything like this in an Indian hospital – not even in private ones which have the most highly-skilled medical practitioners in the world, and the best equipment and infrastructure.
I recorded some of the stories to pass on to another friend and, though I was disappointed to hear myself sounding like a prim Anglo-Indian schoolmarm, uploaded Three Women. In case you want to hear it, along with a few wry comments from Gladys - click this link. .
Chatpata Chowpatty Bhel
On my way home on the Deccan Queen (which has more leg room than Business Class, and portly, uniformed waiters courteously dishing out chai-coffee to accompany their spicy, deep-fried snacks), I was transfixed, agog, gobbling kanda bhajias in a daze. When the train pulled in to Karjat, my resurfacing consciousness flashed back to similar trysts with James Hardley Chase on Local commuter trains in decades past. This book is composed of elements of Mumbai masala, including Bollywood and the construction mafia, and how things fall into place for two smart young small-town lads to achieve fabulous success. Each chapter paints a quick, action-packed scene. Sex and drugs shimmer discreetly in the background. Who am I to complain about the numerous factual inaccuracies in this book, or to wish that the author had spent more time getting the language right instead of scurrying recklessly ahead in an effort to be “heralded as the fastest-published Indian author by the Limca Book of Records” (whatever that means)? After all, the racy story certainly had me hooked.
A pleasant afternoon
Preeti Shenoy is a talented storyteller, and this book has a sweet story with a good dose of wish fulfilment and some unorthodox angles. It reminded me of the Mills and Boons of yore – a similar pace, similar peaks and troughs, and uncomplicated passions, although with contemporary characters in a contemporary Indian urban setting. If I didn’t consider the description ‘chick-lit’ patronising, that’s the label I might have used. In the specific genre of romance wannabes or ‘metro reads’ this book is reasonably high-end, with almost-there editing and unusually few loose ends. The only (minor) thing that I found annoying was the use of the expression ‘cilantro’ which sounds misleadingly exotic; it’s a herb used every day in Indian kitchens and taken for granted as dhaniya or kothambir or kothamalli or even coriander – but cilantro, really, please.
Black and white
I would normally not be attracted to a book with an archaic title, and which claims to reveal intimate information about people I’m not much interested in. But my friend Manjula Sen, whose opinion I value, said it was a good book – and I’m glad I bought and read it.And All Is Said is a memoir, with the focus on the author’s parents’ troubled relationship. Minoo and Shakuntala Masani were exceptional individuals, at one time important characters in Indian political and economic life. The book intersperses their son Zareer’s memories and insights into past events with actual letters and diary entries written by his parents, both of whom write beautifully too – though much of what is published here was never meant for anyone else to read, and that vaguely troubled me.What I did enjoy were the real-life glimpses into recent Indian history: Minoo Masani’s violin lessons from Count Odone Savini who also taught Mehli Mehta, father-to-be of the conductor Zubin ... the life and contributions of Sir JP Srivastava, Shakuntala’s father ... Minoo’s father’s refusal to allow his son to be given a grant (the Law examinership at Bombay University) when he was in the chair:
This is a country full of nepotism. Everyone is helping his own sons and nephews. Somebody has got to set an example. That’s what I’ve done, and I’m sorry you’re at the receiving end.
... and many more. I liked the endorsement of the now dissipated knowledge that Independence was won for India by Indians who had been educated in England.Father often used to say that the British Raj ‘played cricket’ in the way it dealt with nationalist agitators like himself. These Indian nationalists, after all, were the children of British education and liberal values, steeped in the literature of Western humanism and radicalism. Except in their treatment of avowed ‘terrorists’, the authorities used to torture or gratuitous violence and treated political prisoners with the respect they deserved, even during times of greatest crisis like the Quit India agitation during World War II. “Had the British authorities not behaved like honourable officers and gentlemen,” Father always maintained, “Gandhi’s non-violent campaigns would never have been possible.”
Much else has changed in the world around us. The Masani family lived as tenants of an aristocratic half-French Muslim called Barodawalla du Randé in a home with beautiful mosaic floors which were scrubbed with soap and water every week, high ceilings, a multitude of windows with elaborate wooden shutters and long verandas with elaborately carved, latticed, wooden railings looking out to the Arabian Sea, which lapped at the foot of Cumballa Hill. This is architecture a contemporary Mumbai-dweller would recognize – but these homes have long lost their glory to laundry hanging in those balconies alongside money plants in tinpots.Zareer Masani was deeply attached to his mother but not to his father – and what touched me most about this book is his painstaking honesty in presenting his father’s point of view fairly and without judgement, while describing just as honestly, but in a judgemental way, his mother’s behaviour and how it affected him.You can read more about this book in Manjula Sen’s interview with Zareer Masani HERE
Keep smiling, Charlie
A book by a first-time writer, from a small publishing house, and with mediocre production values, usually evokes some prejudice. So I was happy to find that this book, though lacking in cutting-edge idiom (and the services of a highly-paid editor), is written by someone with the knack of keeping a reader engaged.
It is the story of what happened when the author lost his well-paying job at a large BPO. Losing a job is not a simple story – and here the author builds a whole context around himself, presenting a wonderful picture not just of his period of unemployment but also his family, his values, his community, and some of the important events of his life.
What happens to a person who loses a job, at which they have excelled and been appreciated and well rewarded, merely because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? What does the blow to self-esteem and the feeling of insecurity caused by loss of income do? Lakshmanan Solayappan is blessed with a reflective nature and maturity, and they enabled him to use the gap in his career not to blindly rush into the first job opportunity that presented itself, to protect his self-esteem and cash flow. Instead, he took time out, did a few really important things that he never had the time to do before, and wrote this book. In the process he also did a little research to find out how people in his position were prone to react.
His findings are useful to anyone who has just lost a job – or fears that he or she may do so – pretty much most people, that is. So this is not just a good, interesting read – it’s a useful book too and gives plenty to think about.
Here’s a photo of Lakshmanan Solayappan, mike in hand, at my book launch in Landmark, Chennai.
We were meeting for the first time. I had read and liked his book. And what was his question?
“How do you feel – launching your book, seeing this display?” he asked.
I answered that more than anything else the whole concept amused me. That I was glad I’d written it – but it wasn’t exactly a culmination of a goal or fulfilment of a dream. “Actually, I feel like laughing,” I told him.
I thought about my response later and wondered why I really wasn’t excited about having brought out a book – and a rather good one, if I may permit modesty to step aside for a bit. There were a number of good reasons – more about them, in a separate 500 words, another time. But there is one which is relevant here: I myself have traversed this nebulous twilight zone of Being Without of which Lakshmanan Solayappan writes, and learnt to tread carefully, understanding my innermost values and priorities before making the next choice. A book like The Songbird on my Shoulder is a milestone on the path – not the end of it, and I think Lakshmanan Solayappan would agree that that’s a good feeling to have about any achievement or disappointment in life.
Rave review
Reading this book I found myself thinking, after a very long time, “How I wish I could write like this!” I very much admired both style and content.Harsh Sinha is good-looking, well-educated, articulate, regular Joe and premier arranged-marriage votary. He has never wooed, never flirted. (Never learnt the give and take, the sensitive yes and no, the important maybes, the gestures, the unspoken thoughts, the ups and downs that make for companionship with women.) The drafts folder of his email is always full with his jottings. (Naerapongo: Go straight is the only direction you will ever get in Chennai. ‘Naerapongo saar’. It is accompanied by a wave of the hand that could be in any direction. Go straight. I think it is a philosophical derivative because it usually doesn’t get you very far.)Through Harsh’s story, the author gives us a sweeping view of the Indian art world: how some artists live, the cold silence and unique marketing style of Mumbai galleries, the ad-hocism of price and purchase, the hard-to-decipher (although very elegant and all) language of art-catalogue writing, the wide scope of art studies – including the what-will-they-ever-think-of-next of Confessional Art – and even, right at the end, a comprehensive (and in-your-face) answer to that provocative question “Why do people buy art”.The characters in this book are real ‘characters’ … check this.Newton Kumaraswamy. Given to speech at the oddest times. Like when there was no one around.And Gopi … he was in a halfway house – all the time. He had been single for a decade, during which the closest he got to a woman was when the ayah swept the floor under his bum as he lay sprawled on his chair.Manoj Tyaagi’s parents fretted for years at his lack of communication skills and social etiquette – little knowing what a prolific and exhibitionistic writer he would turn out to be one day.There are others, equally fascinating.One of the things I admired most about this book was that sections are presented in different voices and each one is unique to its owner – a skill only the best writers have.And – the book is an intriguing combination of fact and fiction (and some minor errors). Many of the names are of real people and real works of art or writing. But many are entirely made up and I found that confusing – were there all kinds of insider references I wasn't getting?
What I didn’t like is the editors’ poor knowledge of Bombay – mixing up Arthur Bunder with Arthur Road Jail and calling the Bombay Gymkhana Club the Mumbai Gymkhana Club – hahaha.Anyway ... Sanjay V. Kumar – can I get your autograph please?
A memorable journey 
This is the story of a sea voyage from Sri Lanka to Britain, told by one of its passengers, looking back to his time on it as a young boy with two other boys of the same age. It’s a story filled with every element of drama – not just the usual seaboard romance and idle crime but such delicious features as terrifying illness, a mysterious prisoner, an intense young woman with a disability that turns out to play an essential role in the plot, a terrible storm that causes danger to the children and results in mayhem on board, an exotic herb garden that could bring the passengers intoxication – or even worse … and too many more to list here.But this book is not all masala. I would read it over again for the way its language and imagery wash over your emotions and intellect. Here, as an example, is a small description of what the boys saw at Aden Market when they (slyly) went ashore:I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket – a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade form the dust in the air.
Each short chapter offers vignettes: a look at the different characters, new angles, thoughts and insights. They hang well together and build together to form a powerful story. I was particularly impressed because Michael Ondaatje’s last book, Divisadero, was so bad – neither well written, nor interesting, nor, to my mind, any sort of redeeming feature.
In a book about childhood memories, one of the most critical attributes is the difference between what the child actually experienced and the perspective of the adult telling the story, and there is a brilliant balance between the two in this book. In the privileged position of being invisible to ship officials such as the Purser, the Head Steward, and the Captain, the boys learn about life. There’s an Australian woman they watch carefully, observing that none of the female members of their families behaved this way. Why is their table called the Cat’s Table? They discover that each one on it has an interesting reason for the journey – even if unspoken, or as yet undiscovered. Yet, the table’s status was minimal while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
They experience total independence, smoking twigs broken off from a cane chair that they lit and sucked at. (Because of his asthma Ramadhin was not enthusiastic about this, but Cassius was eager that they should try to smoke the whole chair before the end of our journey.)Most interesting of all is that our narrator’s name is Michael. So is this a true story of his own journey from childhood to adolescence? There’s a disclaimer at the end. And yet – in the author’s list of ‘thank-yous’, there are indications that much is rooted in reality. It’s nice to wonder.
The Royal Bengal tiger has always been a creature of fascination – but over the centuries, the Sundarbans tiger reserve has had limited appeal as a source of tiger study and sport. This book gives us a privileged view of the reserve, and strips away the confusion, myth and false data that further endangers the tiger by obscuring honest study of it.Sudipt Dutta first visited the Sunderbans as a young journalist in 1985. Over the years he went back a number of times and was so committed to spending time in and studying the area that he built his own motor yacht and made it his home for 50 days each year between 2006 and 2010. Added to his own observation and analysis, in this book he also examines data from various sources and interviews officials and experts.There is apparently a popular belief that the tigers that live here are different from other tigers physically and psychologically, and Sudipt Dutta explores each myth in detail, showing logically that these tigers are not different. In this book he also proves that the Sunderbans tigers are not natural man eaters and if they eat humans it is almost always because of poor management by forest officials.There are two things I admired very much about this book. One is the author’s passion and dedication to his subject. He has used personal resources and gone out of his way to speak on this important subject, and he has taken the considerable risk of exposing bad governance in this area, in particular the tendency of forest officials to alter data to show themselves in a positive light. The second is the fact that, even though this book was peer reviewed and accepted for publication by a reputed international publisher, he set aside personal glory to bring out the book quickly but without fanfare rather than wait for the years the international publisher said it would take, a period the tiger might not even survive, without the practical means this book prescribes.
Sadly, however, this has meant that the book lacks in production values – its paper, print and edit quality are mediocre, though the cover image, by Devika ‘Inca’ Dutt is original and very striking.
That couple next door
I spotted this book on facebook and it looked interesting so I bought and read it. As the plot built up, I was impressed with the flow of events, realistic characters, and contemporary idiom. The central theme of this book is the relationship between a young urban couple in an arranged marriage and how the stresses of work and their expectations of each other shape their future. Subsidiary characters create an environment in which Nishant Kaushik is able to highlight a number of important issues in an unpretentious, effective way. As in life, daily tedium is unexpectedly peppered with drama and, occasionally, horrors of life. Some of the things I admired in this book were the brilliantly caricatured scenes from corporate life, insight into preoccupations with reality TV shows and their impact on individual lives, the chafing of community prejudice and how simply a new paradigm can remove it, and the gentle hint to prodigal offspring to reconsider the benefits of the parental bosom. Best of all was the simple understanding that 'love' might be as simple as ‘I like it when she’s at home’.
But what about the ghost?
Kiran Manral, I, and two other writers, Shital Mehra and Tishani Doshi, were on a panel together at an event for new books, Fresh off the Shelf, at the Kala Ghoda festival in Mumbai yesterday. We each read out a little from our respective books and answered audience questions. It was fun. 
I had just finished reading The Reluctant Detective and wondered, when Kiran Manral introduced me to her husband and son before the event, how much of them I had already met in the book! Kay, a young housewife and mother in Bombay, is the giddy-headed narrator. At first I found the language convoluted but once it had made me laugh aloud a couple of times, I decided to stop being judgemental and enjoy myself. The rapid-fire monologue is even in tone and describes the people and events in Kay’s life – her obsession with clothes, her hyperactive son (um – wonder where he gets that from), her neighbours, friends and rather serious husband. Check this.I am a kind-hearted sensitive soul. I take stray cockroaches from my home and let them loose in the balcony, hoping they find other homes to inhabit, favourable wind conditions permitting. Before they hit the asphalt. It is not in my nature to splat them with a slipper. Murder and violence of any sort disturbs me. I cannot watch news bulletins without tears trickling down my face, and if by some chance of fate I land on a documentary on starving children, the world is guaranteed a full-fledged howling session.
A dialogue that had me in splits was between Kay and her housemaid Jamuna, when she instructs her not to disturb her unless there was need for immediate evacuation of the building. Jamuna nodded the kind of nod she has when she values her life and limbs.
“Phone aaya toh?” she asked warily.
“Take a message,” I replied.
“Urgent bola to?” she persisted with the kind of attention to detail which has me pleased should she choose to use it to get that last bit of grime out from behind the door in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink.
“Saab ka number de do,” I replied in the kind of tone which brooked no further conversation. But not to Jamuna.
“Saab ne nahin uthaya to?” she went on.
I blew a mini fuse and did some yelling, and ended with closing the door hard and loud, and had the effect quite ruined with the child pushing the door open the next second and asking me to hop and shaoud laoudly agin so he could call his frens to watch.
There is even a dead body – two of them, actually – so I kept thinking that Kay was one of those Inspector Clousseau type bumbling detectives but was ultimately disappointed there because there’s no serious building up of suspense or the kind of dramatic revelations that one expects in a murder mystery. At Kala Ghoda, Kiran explained that she had wanted to write about the specific demographic that she is immersed in – that of young, educated women who have chosen to devote their lives to their families rather than career. This she has done well – Kay is a magnificent example of this group with all her matching accessories, Wodehouse-Blyton-Austen language (including sharp spikes of Manral original), domestic staff, incessant tweets, and more. And The Reluctant Detective is a funny, enjoyable book – but not really a serious detective story.
Murder mystery in my backyard
It’s always a pleasure to read a book set in a place you happen to be visiting. So … why did I pack this one in my things for Hampi? I think it was simply because I was so excited to discover a thriller writer who lived in my own city that I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. I had actually been reading a much-acclaimed ‘literary’ novel with a blurb by none other than Amy Tan on the cover! But that soon fell by the wayside. As I confessed to my (disappointed) husband, there’s no use in my pretending to be an intellectual – give me a good murder mystery any day.And this did turn out to be gripping, well written and very local to Pune, which I particularly loved. I have to admit that I’m tasteless enough that the macabre humour also made me laugh: “What’s this new technique of custodial death you’ve adopted, Ghorpade?” asked Saralkar cheerfully. “You tow away people in their cars, and then eliminate them?”
PI Ghorpade chuckled. “No, no, it’s our traffic colleagues who’ve decided to start penalising all parking violations with death.”
Our hero, Senior Inspector Saralkar is astute, afflicted by mood swings (though generally of grumpy nature), and a reader’s delight, sarcastic about the Secrets of Living spirituality course the department has deputed him to attend, and astute at popping perfect Catch 22 questions to his longsuffering subordinate (“Are you in a hurry, Motkar?”)
Luckily 'raps' were a thing of the past; he can but pound the table with his fists and hiss with contempt, Get out, Motkar! You aren’t fit to be a police officer! You ought to be a clerk in one of those fancy companies that give paternity leave!
But Saralkar can be gentle too – surprising even himself – when the need arises. I liked almost everything about him – except perhaps the fact that he didn’t care for some of the many thumb rules and unofficial norms of policing – such as delaying police intervention to let matters sort themselves out – it’s a tactic that the sadly overburdened Pune police really cannot do without.One of the things I liked best about this book was the author’s sensitive and commonsense approach to life.- When children lose a parent – there may be no immediate sense of loss. But the loss grows and continues to haunt them long into adulthood.
- On the Mumbai-Pune expressway: Why in the world did people believe that their reflexes would work at such high speeds, and prevent fatal mishaps? Why couldn’t they stick to the recommended eighty kilometres per hour?
- When a child gets out of hand, a little brutality from a normally meek policeman father might just be the solution to the problem.
- When even barber shops keep fresh magazines for their patrons, why do doctors, who earn much more, only leave tattered ones in their waiting rooms?
- The seven deadly sins are called so because they draw you into a world where sin becomes a lifestyle – the new virtue for sustenance and success. And the only way to survive the consequences of deadly sins is to commit still deadlier ones.
By the time the second body appeared, I was concentrating more on the book than the fabulous rocks, foliage, ruins and Israeli food of Hampi. And in the end, why hadn’t I been able to guess the killer?
Looking back through the pages later, I noticed the clever nudges that prevented it.
An Every Friday Novel
Gouri Dange’s new novel, Viva Voce is being published simultaneously on The Friday Novel
and black-and-white fountain in weekly installments.
Vibhavari Pradhan is approaching her 61st birthday. Listen, as this outspoken woman speaks about the events of her life over the period of about a year. Says Gouri Dange: "This is an Every Friday novel! The story is set in contemporary urban India, Nepal and parts of Scotland. It is peopled by Viva (61), Dhruv (13), Moni (40), Aidan (54), Shirish (42), Shruti (36), Farhan (49), Imanto (6), several street dogs, and some other beings. How they are related to each other will emerge as the story unfolds."
How easy is it to live life on your own terms when you’re 61 years old? Listen to Viva and find out.
Gouri Dange is a well-known writer, columnist and counsellor. Her three published books are
3 Zakia Mansion, The Counsel of Strangers, and ABCs of Parenting.
Many well-known authors have published in installments: all Charles Dickens’ novels were published serially – and Dickens created the episodes as they were being serialized. Explains Gouri, “The weekly installments put a different (and positive) pressure on me – and it is a bit of a trapeze act – you can’t go back and modify anything…you are compelled to tell the story in a way that you haven’t before.”
The first online novel was Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith; he wrote a chapter a day starting from 15 September 2008. This was published daily in The Telegraph, UK, until the final installment of what was the third novel appeared on 17 December 2010.
But why would the successful and much-read Gouri Dange want to give away her wonderful new novel free to internet readers?
She explains: “It’s not the garboesque 'i vhant to be alone' so much as 'i vhant to just write this'!”
To understand why Gouri has gone to this extent to do away with publishers, distributors, bookstores and accountants, here’s something she wrote for Open magazine about her tryst with the tedium and monstrous hierarchies of that world, and her darkly funny word-picture on how to behave at a book launch that touched many a raw nerve. “This is an attempt to sidestep the elaborate and absurd dance that is publishing, and pare it all down to just writer and reader, sentences and stories,” she clarifies.
black-and-white fountain salutes Gouri Dange’s initiative at making Indian publishing a more democratic institution and expects many readers to log on to The Friday Novel or black-and-white fountain and subscribe to weekly email or reader updates of Viva Voce.
Icons of MumbaiMumbai’s lunch boys came to public notice and became a world icon of ‘Quality’ when they were certified Six Sigma. I always felt this was rather unfair because so many of Bombay’s systems also work at Six Sigma levels of precision – the doodhwalas, the pauwallahs, the fruitwallahs, the engine drivers, the office boys, the traffic cops (and on and on) without anyone ever stopping to notice. But after reading this book I did get the sense that the success of the dabbawalas is not just a consequence of (a) economic factors and (b) the molecular structure of the professional that Bombay coerces onto its inhabitants. In particular, there is also the clearly-articulated customer philosophy which every member of this exceptional service industry is expected to read and preserve in his record book:- The customers should always be treated with courtesy and respect
- The customers should be dissuaded from using any ‘exotic’ and ‘fancy’ tiffin boxes which are prone to get damaged
- Except for extremely rare, unforeseen reasons, the tiffin box should always reach the customer on time
- If a tiffin box is lost in transit, half the cost should be borne by the concerned dabbawala
Another important factor that has made the movement so successful is that it is run as a cooperative – members are not just workers, they are owners.Corporates should be as clear-headed – no wonder management schools started looking to them for lessons.
Originally written in Marathi, the translator, Shalaka Walimbe, has done a good job of turning the text to idiomatic English. Mumbai's Dabbawala is written partly as the memoir of Raghunath Megde, present president of the association of dabbawalas - his father’s uncle, Mahadu Bacche was the first dabbawala back in 1890, and as such, founder of the association. And, it is partly a historical and descriptive narrative by Shobha Bondre, filling in blanks and creating context and perspective, in alternating chapters.As memoir, it is engaging, informative about village life in Maharashtra as well as the life of the dabbawala, and often touching, as well-told life stories should be. The author’s narrative is also easy to read and strewn with fascinating detail.
However, there are a few slips which I felt made this book fall somewhat short of perfect. For instance, we are told that when Mahadu Bacche came to Mumbai in 1890, There were very few restaurants in Mumbai in those days and certainly no fast food outlets. There were only a few Sindhi and Christian housewives who used to provide home-cooked food.
I’m not sure how well the concept of Sindhi and Christian housewives providing home-cooked food fits into this historical framework: to my knowledge, in 1890 most Sindhi housewives were still in Sindh; a large majority of the Christians belonged to the Anglo Indian community, and I’m not sure if its housewives would have considered sending out dabbas to others – surely the larger phenomenon took some decades to emerge.In another instance, a character introduces himself saying,
This is Rashid miya speaking.
But would any Rashid ever call himself 'miya'?
Mumbai's Dabbawala devotes considerable space to the much-hyped fascination and subsequent association Prince Charles has with the Mumbai dabbawala – including the details of their presence at his wedding to Camilla.
I have a fascination with the Mumbai dabbawalas too: they are a fascinating part of life in that fascinating city, and many of my paintings, which strive to capture its incongruities, feature them.
The part of the book I enjoyed most was Shobha Bondre’s experience of hearing the new management gurus Raghunath Medge and Gangaram Talekar address a gathering of students and executives at a two-day seminar in a luxurious, ultra-modern auditorium in Bombay. These dabbawalas had lived many years of their lives in village huts in rural Maharashtra and tiny overcrowded rooms in Bombay; and many years of their careers running balancing 75 kg lunch-box crates on their heads as they leapt into overcrowded Bombay commuter trains. Shobha Bondre was tense that they would feel out of their depth. “I didn’t even realize when I had stopped holding my breath!” she writes, and goes on to describe just how these wonderful men held their own and charmed the sophisticated crowd with descriptions and lessons from their inimitable lives.
At first this book made me nervous because it put emphasis on Speed and Acceleration as abilities ‘the new atmosphere’ (the one thrown up by ‘a world gone digital’) requires us to master.
