Category: Books

  • The Diary of an Unreasonable Man

    Madhav Mathur

    Many of us could identify with Pranav Kumar, the advertising executive who suddenly thinks out of his cubicle and realises the perils of this generation’s materialism driven existence. But he’s an aspiring author too, so he quits his job and tries to change the world through his writing. But the publishers aren’t really interested in the social commentary and opinions of an unknown person. And that’s when he decides to really do something.

    With a little help from his friends, he treads the anarchist path and tries to shock the system into taking notice of what he’s trying to say. The creativity of his campaigns ensures he gets all the attention from the media and the public, and then some that he didn’t really ask for – the cops and the underworld, because he has managed to disrupt the lives of many important people.

    The book reminded me of the film ‘A Wednesday’ in terms of the basic premise – the common man shocking the system. But the author treats anarchy with the same irreverence that the protagonist has for consumerist society. The plot is fairly simplistic, despite the creative disruptions, and so is the climax. It is perhaps this simplistic approach that takes away from the believability of the book. But it still is a fun read.

  • Under the Dome: A Novel

    Stephen King

    (ex) Captain Dale Barbara is about to leave town when a gigantic, transparent dome envelops the town of Chester’s Mill. He could consider himself lucky since he survived the arrival of the dome. Several animals and people didn’t, as they crashed into the indestructible, impenetrable dome.

    The dome gave an electric shock when a person first touched it, but saved its disastrous results for those with pacemakers and hearing aids. The first victim on that count was the police chief Howard “Duke” Perkins, and that gave the town’s First Selectman ‘Big Jim’ Rennie to assert his superiority with First Selectman Andy Sanders serving as a willing puppet.

    He soon appoints his man as the new police chief and begins machinations to seize complete control. He pays special attention to Barbara, whose reason for leaving town was an altercation with Rennie’s son Junior, and his friends. The only people who can see through Rennie’s game are notably Barbara, Julia – the editor of the local newspaper, ‘Rusty’ – a physician’s assistant, and Howard’s widow Brenda.

    Even as the military reaches the town’s borders to address the ‘situation’, and the media update a stunned nation, Big Jim manipulates the town’s people into believing what he wants them to believe, despite television channels broadcasting his nefarious schemes for making money. The town and its people meanwhile, remain trapped under the unrelenting dome, like ‘ants under a magnifying glass’

    With a huge supporting list of characters, and spanning close to 900 pages, the author has tried to highlight a multitude of things – from human transactional relationships to environmental hazards. Unfortunately, the book didn’t really work for me, it was just too long to hold my attention, especially towards the end. The character snippets, the descriptions of town life and the jarring differences of climate inside and outside the dome, all gets repetitive after a point, and even the vast array of characters, interesting though some of them are, become too tiresome, despite the messages they seem to be carrying for the author.

  • Between the assassinations

    Aravind Adiga

    Halfway between Calicut and Goa lies Kittur, the scene of Aravind Adiga’s collection of stories, set in the seven year period between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. But then, despite some very 80s characteristics, the timeframe hardly matters, this could’ve been set in contemporary years too, for as a character says “Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change.” One instant comparison I could make was with Malgudi Days. That however ends with the similarity of multiple characters in the same town that is described in great detail – you can picture yourself in the town walking along its roads and identifying places and people.

    As the book summary says, the stories slowly bring out the moral biography of the town with its diverse set of characters – from the Dalit bookseller whose kosher relationship with the police is disrupted when he is caught selling ‘The Satanic Verses’ to the ‘sexologist’ who ends up supporting a boy with a venereal disease, and from the ‘mosquito man’ who tries to set limits for the relationship between a servant and his mistress to the mixed caste boy who detonates a bomb in his school.

    The book worked for me because the author has managed to flesh out his characters superbly across financial class, religion and schools of thought (political, philosophical) and use the friction between them to drive the stories. In that sense, each story is probably a different style, but the subtext of pent-up fury tinged with sadness cuts across.

    An excellent read both as an exploration of a microcosm of India as well as the different shades of human relationships and morality.

  • The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

    Pico Iyer

    In the autumn of 1987, Pico Iyer begins his journey into Japan, one that would last a full cycle of seasons. Depending on the prism you choose to see it through, the book could be many things.

    It could be a travelogue, though quite different from any I have read yet, and yet one that not only dispels any ‘second-hand’ notions (eg. the Japanese’ take on Kurosawa was surprising) but also captures the nuances of a place unknown to me, in a very sensitive manner.

    It could be the journey and yearning of one human being to understand and experience a culture alien to him/her. Him, from the perspective of Pico in Japan, whose original wonder and positive bias changes into a more pragmatic view as time passes, and her, from the perspective of Sanchiko, a vivacious Japanese lady with a husband and two children, whose heartfelt desire it is to escape the confines and constraints of her culture and upbringing.

    It could be a glimpse into the world of Zen – its monasteries and about living in the moment, without the baggage of the past or the future.

    It could be a relationship between cultures – not just east and west, as shown between the author and Sanchiko or other nuances captured through various other characters, but also within Japan itself – the free spirited Sanchiko versus her friends and family who are against this freedom she desires and wants her to just make the best of her marriage and the duties it entails.

    Or it could be an elegant love story, with Japanese poetry and beautiful descriptions of nature, and in the way of Japanese, one with a poignant ending, just like the story which seems to be the inspiration for the title.

    A wonderful read, and an armchair journey that has given me much to think about.

  • Maria’s Room

    Shreekumar Varma

    I’m still not sure whether I could ever describe Goa as languid, despite siestas and feni, but this book did make me consider that possibility, and for that, Shreekumar Varma’s way with words can take credit.

    The protagonist, Raja Prasad, an author from Chennai, reaches a Goa that seems to echo his own ‘broken down’ self. The sun takes an extended break as rains lash Goa, and the narrative alternates between the introspective author, willing himself to break from his past and his concerned/nagging father, and work on his new book, and his observations of life, people and places. Its in these initial sections that we see a Goa that’s rarely captured – heavy rains instead of sun and sand, decrepit hotels replacing swanky resorts and a local life relatively less centered around tourists.

    We then seem Raja get acquainted with another guest in the resort – Fritz, and later shifting to “Maria’s Guesthouse”, where he falls in love with Lorna, and gets interested in the story of Maria, the girl’s aunt, after whom the guesthouse is named. As Raja’s romance progresses and he follows the mystery of Maria’s life, and death, it seems as though the two stories are just different in rendition.

    What didn’t work for me was the inconsistent pace of the plot and a narrative in which we’re forced to follow the extended wanderings of the protagonist without facts that would indicate a plot in progression. There’s a limit to what descriptive prose can do to stretch curiosity.

    However, the book itself is a bit like Goa in pace, if you can get adjusted to it, you will perhaps begin to like it. Even the deluge of ‘loop closing’ in the end is a bit like you’ve been idling and suddenly realised that there are some places to see and things to be done before you bid Goa goodbye.

    I got the feeling that the author enjoyed giving Raja Prasad the freedom to carry the plot at his own pace and create his own subtext that some readers would enjoy.