Category: Favourites

  • Freedom at Midnight

    Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

    It’s ironical that I picked up Freedom at Midnight thanks to the show, but this is how history needs to be written. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have created a meticulously researched account of the final year of British rule in India – starting with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of India and ending with the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.

    But it isn’t dry history, it is almost like a cinematic view of the events that led to the partition of India and its independence in 1947. The narrative is gripping, the prose is eloquent, and the descriptions vivid enough to make one actually feel it’s playing out in real time.

    Through a combination of interviews, archival research, and narrative storytelling, Freedom at Midnight brings to life the key players and tragic choices of that defining year. The Congress, the Muslim league and its leaders, the princely states and their colourful rulers, the machinery of the Raj, all come to life.

    So too do the places – Delhi, Punjab, Bengal. And the British’s summer capital Simla, and how supplies and earlier, even people, were carried up steep mountains by porters each year. The book’s strength lies in its ability to weave together high-level politics and decisions with the (affected) human stories. From the opulence of the British Raj to the celebrations across the nation to the brutal massacres of partition, it is a vast canvas, both geographically and emotionally.

    Freedom at Midnight is written like a thriller – the pace never slackens, even as it moves in and out of complex political drama, the horrors of large-scale violence, and the moving stories of people caught in the upheavals. If one had to pick, Lord Louis Mountbatten stands out. And so does Gandhi.

    Admittedly, the prose does point to a Raj romanticism and the authors have a bias for both the gentlemen. But I don’t think that takes away from the enormity of the task at hand, and they respectively achieved. Appointed the last Viceroy of India, Mountbatten is portrayed with as charming, burdened with the unenviable task of overseeing the end of empire. Gandhi is inimitable – both saintly and stubborn, a man of deep moral conviction navigating a world descending into chaos.

    Jawaharlal Nehru emerges as idealistic and modern, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah is painted in darker shades – stubborn, brilliant and aloof. The quietly important VK Menon, the strong and efficient Vallabhai Patel, an adamant Churchill, kind and gracious Lady Edwina Mountbatten, all play pivotal roles.

    Freedom at Midnightvividly brings out the price of freedom – on a date hastily (in hindsight) decided by Mountbatten in the spur of the moment – the chaos of partition, the failure of political leadership to prevent communal violence, and the limits of British imperial power.

    It captures the horrors of the time – the trainloads of corpses, the mass migrations, and the unspeakable violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. It is possible to simultaneously feel for the decision-makers and the moral cross they had to bear, and for the people who faced the realities stemming from those decisions. They were all just humans, caught in a particular time in history.

    Freedom at Midnight is a fascinating read with a level of detailing that’s quite astounding for the enormousness of the canvas. In my Bibliofiles 2025 long list.

    (Not by design, but Freedom at Midnight is indeed a worthy book for review #400 on Goodreads)

    Notes & Quotes from Freedom at Midnight


    1. Mountbatten’s last act as Viceroy was to promote the wife of the Nawab of Palampur to the rank of Highness. She was an Australian and had been denied that rank because she was not of Indian blood. Years later, she asked for the author’s autograph after a lecture in Geneva. Mountbatten also used the debt 3 years later to ensure the navy kept its customs’ privileges because the Collector of Customs had previously been the Nawab’s British Resident – Sir William Croft.
    2. The first British to land in India was William Hawkins, captain of the galleon Hector
    3. Cows were deemed sacred to protect them from slaughter during times of famine
    4. One of the people released thanks to the Irwin pact was Gurcharan Singh, right when he was about to be hanged. He became Gandhi’s follower and would be the person to hold Gandhi in his last moments. Irony!
    5. Gandhi refused to save his wife because the drug would have to be administered intravenously, and that went counter to his principle – natural cures
    6. “You will never know how much it costs the Congress to keep that old man in poverty” ~ Sarojini Naidu, because many in the crowds around Gandhi were Congress folks, to protect him
    7. The Nizam of Hyderabad combined his passions for photography and pornography to amass what was believed to be the most extensive collection in India!
    8. When Jinnah first announced the formation of Pakistan, his inability to speak Urdu meant that the only words he said in the language (after the announcement in English) was Pakistan Zindabad. Many people didn’t realise the language switch and thought he said ‘Pakistan’s in the bag’!
    9. Mountbatten decided on the transfer of power date in the spur of the moment, when asked by a journalist. Same date as the unconditional surrender of the Japanese in WW2 in his previous role
    10. So banal and petty was the bureaucracy of partition that dictionaries were split from A-K and L-Z and taken to separate countries!
    11. The man who had articulated the idea of Pakistan was Rahmat Ali in 1933, and at that point, Jinnah vehemently refused to be party to it
    12. To the orthodox Hindu, the navel is the body’s frontier – for acts above it, right hand, for acts below, the left.
    13. By giving Gurdaspur to India, Radcliffe also gave it land access to Kashmir, changing that state’s destiny
    14. Nehru and Patel were stunned in the early days of partition horrors. They asked Mountbatten to come back and take charge, and it became an Emergency Committee
    15. Pakistan blatantly lied about the Pathan force it had sent to take over Kashmir. Ironically, their sacking and rape of the nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary delayed them and allowed the Indian army to take control.
    16. India held back Pakistan’s share of the overall money – 550 million rupees, courtesy the Kashmir issue
    17. Immediately after partition, there were refugees chanting “Let Gandhi die” (I am assuming Murdabad and not anything this drastic) as he fasted for peace
    18. A few weeks before his assassination, Gandhi’s last fast for peace was almost fatal. His ask – a peace charter which had to be signed by all key political and social organisations – was an impossibility that the leaders managed to accomplish just in time.
    19. Godse and co, tried to assassinate Gandhi once before. They failed, and part of their attempt was a bomb going off. The enquiry, led by DJ Sanjevi, was an exercise in incompetence. One of the cops, UH Rana, even had the identities of the would be assassins, but didn’t share them in time.
    20. Two crucial people were missing on the day of the assassination. Sushila Nayar, his doctor who always walked ahead of him, was in Pakistan, making preparations for Gandhi’s planned visit. D.W. Mehra, the policeman who was assigned to protect him, had been called away for other duties.
    21. Jinnah’s condolence message called Gandhi one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community. When pointed out that Gandhi’s dimensions went beyond his religion, he insisted on retaining the line.
    22. Jinnah’s tuberculosis diagnosis was a well-kept secret, and so was his life expectancy – a few months. If Mountbatten had known this, he would have delayed the transfer of power because he was confident of swaying the other League leaders, and Partition might have been avoided.
    23. Roy Bucher prepared two funerals for Gandhi. The first was in Yeravada Jail in 1942, but Gandhi ‘declined to attend’ after somehow surviving his 21-day fast! His actual funeral was also prepared by Lt. Gen. Sir Roy Bucher.

    Freedom at Midnight

  • The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

    Neha Dixit

    ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ is the kind of book that forces one to look at one’s privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.

    It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless – the people whose desperate toils to survive we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.

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  • When The Body Says No

    Gabor Maté

    At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“

    “No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”

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  • The Tao of Physics

    Fritjof Capra

    The Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, and I’d say that it’s even more relevant now in the context of science and the direction of human advancement in general. As the subtitle of the book states, the idea is to explore the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. 

    Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quieting the mind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen – had already reached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered. 

    The Tao of Physics is divided into three elegant sections – the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physics from the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes’ philosophy – the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking – a mechanistic world. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large. 

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  • The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

    Alice Miller

    I discovered The Drama of the Gifted Child via a fantastic conversation on the Tim Ferriss podcast in which Dr. Gabor Maté spoke about his life and work. This was one of the books that was brought up when the latter spoke about the question that drove his life’s work – what is it that makes people be the way they are? Apparently, the German title of the book when translated is Prisoners of Childhood, which I think is more apt, but probably ‘darker’! 🙂

    Through logic and anecdotes of patients, Miller explores the complexity of childhood and the impact it has on us as adults. The title of the book makes sense because of some focus on the gifted child, who is more intelligent/ sensitive/ emotionally aware than someone their age. These children understand their parents’ expectations so well that they often develop a “false self” by suppressing their own emotions, needs, and authenticity to gain love, approval, or validation from their parents. This process often leads to emotional numbness, perfectionism, and low self-esteem, as the child grows up detached from their authentic self.

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