Category: Non fiction

  • Mofussil Junction

    Ian Jack

    What a lovely read!

    Now that we have settled that, let me elaborate. Mofussil Junction is a collection of the author’s articles about India, written for various publications, over a time frame of more than 30 years. There are essays, profiles, and some wonderfully wistful travel writings. The book is divided into five parts – places, people, (the Nehru-Gandhi) dynasty, ‘Life and Death’, and ‘Fellow Travellers’.

    He had me hooked from the first chapter, when I learned that Bihar was the birthplace of George Orwell! There are vivid portraits of Bombay and Calcutta in the late 80s, but it is the tales of Serampur and McCluskiegunge (not to forget this chapter’s superb title) that truly amaze! (more…)

  • The Age of Kali

    William Dalrymple

    I love doing this – reading a commentary long after the age has passed. It’s more than a decade and a half since the book was published and I’ve read four of the five books that the author has written since then. Both of these factors gave me quite a few perspectives on the book and the writing.

    I see this book divided into two on multiple counts – first in terms of geography, second in terms of narrative style, and third in terms of being true to the ‘script’ of the book. (more…)

  • The Difficulty of Being Good

     Gurcharan Das

    I’d liked Gurcharan Das’ “India Unbound” (that was a long while back, I haven’t read his later works) and I’m generally a sucker for all things epic, so buying The Difficulty of Being Good was a given.

    The blurb created quite the hype for me by stating that the book “shows us how we can come to terms with the uncertain ethics of the world today.” (a world which according to them can be compared to the one in Mahabharata) On hindsight, this does seem a reasonably impossible task and I should have figured that out before I started.

    (more…)

  • Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

    William Dalrymple 

    “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” This book brings that quote to life! More than the book itself, kudos to Dalrymple for choosing a subject that has so much of relevance in the contemporary era! In fact, I wish it were written a few years earlier. ‘Return of a King’ is the story of the British (East India Company) invasion of Khurasan (modern day Afghanistan) in 1839 in an effort to establish their man Shah Shuja ul-Mulk, (descendant of the Ahmad Shah Durrani, regarded to be the founder of the modern state of Afghanistan) on the Kabul throne in place of the incumbent Dost Mohammed. That was the easy part, but as one Afghan commented then, the British had gotten in, but how would they maintain this status quo, or even get out? In a couple of years, the Afghans, in an ever changing mixture of coalitions, rebelled against the British and massacred them on their way back to Hindustan. The British then created an Army of Retribution to avenge this, and ended up bringing things back to square one.

    What set off this chain of events is something I have read about in some Sherlock Holmes adventures and seen alluded to in other works like ‘Kim’. The Great Game, an international milieu of intrigue that pitched the mighty powers of the time – Russia and Britain – against one another. Afghanistan, as per British intelligence, was where Russia was poised to strike next, to control Central Asia. This was supposed to be achieved with Dost Mohammed’s help. The Russian plans were far less threatening than reported by the British and ended up creating a war that need not have been. There is some amazing parallel here with what the Russians (80s) and the Americans (now) tried to do in Afghanistan! (more…)

  • Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography

    Naman Ramachandran

    The definitive biography of perhaps the biggest star that India has seen – THE superstar Rajinikanth – is quite a big thing to bite off. At 255 pages, I’m not too sure it does complete justice. This is not to say that the author hasn’t tried, but to me, the contents just didn’t seem enough. In fact, it was in the second half that I felt he was warming up to the task at hand.

    The first half includes the early years of Rajinikanth, his entry into movies, and the first decade and a half of his movies. The author does try hard to remain objective and not be in awe of the object of his attention, but that’s obviously not an easy task. What results is a mix of two things – a kind of retrofit applied to his formative years which tries to show that he was always meant to be the Superstar, and an almost bare factual filmography. It’s probably not the author’s fault because he might have found it difficult to find anecdotal material from that era, or people might have altered their memory to fit the image of the superstar who exists now. Either way, the first half swings between these two, and does not really make a great read in terms of narrative. You’ll love it if you’re a Rajini facts junkie and it also shows the amount of research the author has done, as he tries to explain the milieu and the context of life, culture, movies and politics of the era, mostly in Tamil Nadu, but sometimes even beyond that. (this was really done well, I thought) We do get glimpses of Rajini the person, and his life outside cinema, but never really enough. It almost seems as though the author was in a hurry to start with the contemporary era. [To be noted that this part also manages to show how big a star and talented an actor Kamal Hassan was in that era] (more…)