Category: Books

  • Brothers at War

    Alex Rutherford

    ‘Brothers at War’ is the second of the ‘Empire of the Moghul’ series and begins in 1530, right where the first one ended. Babur is dead, and despite naming Humayun successor to the wealth and the new empire he has founded, and asking him not to do anything against his half brothers, there is dissension among them. Humayun thwarts an early attempt by his brothers to grab the throne, but spares their lives and sends them away to rule far away regions.

    Despite early successes, Humayun fails to hold the empire together, and his preoccupation with stars coupled with an opium addiction ensures that he loses the hard earned empire to Sher Shah. After losing several strongholds including Delhi and Lahore, Humayun becomes an emperor without a kingdom. In addition to scheming feudal lords and other relatives, he also has to deal with the treachery of his brothers yet again. In the meantime, he marries Hamida, thus alienating Hindal, (who also loved her) the only (half) brother who had allied with him.

    Humayun wanders further away from Hindustan, fueled by a belief in his destiny – to rule the empire again. He finally gets help from the Shah of Persia, to whom he gifts the Koh-i-noor, but who also extracts a bigger price. From then begins Humayun’s journey back.

    The books seems to be showing a pattern – starting with a prince who has just ascended the throne and ending with the heir in the same position. Humayun’s failures are a tad repetitive, and are not helped by the fact that many of his journeys share similarities with Babur’s experiences, but the pace is more or less maintained and there are reasonable twists to keep the reader engrossed. Except for a few characters and events, history has been not tampered with much. Humayun comes across as a courageous, intelligent and driven man who, though lost the empire to begin with, ensured that he rectified his mistakes. If you’re interested in history, this does infuse life to the characters familiar from textbooks. 🙂

  • Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

    William Dalrymple

    In his introduction to the book, William Dalrymple explains how he has tried to invert the travel writing style of the eighties, highlighting the subject and relegating the narrator and his journey to the shadows. And that’s how this book manages to be a set of nine mini-biographies that are linked by the book’s tagline – ‘In Search of the Sacred in Modern India’. Each ‘story’ not only manages to show the protagonist, his/her belief systems, trade/artform in the context of a region that’s rapidly changing the way it looks at religion, spirituality and the world in general, but also manages to trace its (artform/trade) evolution across the centuries of its existence, and the inividual’s outlook towards his own journey. In that sense, it is also my favourite kind of travel writing – across time.

    From Kerala to Dharmasala and Tarapith to Sehwan, the characters flow, and though all of them are interesting in their own way, my favourites were the ‘The Singer of Epics’ – the story of a bhopa in Rajasthan, and “The Monk’s Tale”, the story of a Buddhist monk who takes up arms against the Chinese, is then forced to fight for the Bangladeshis against Pakistan and finally spends his last years in Dharmasala atoning for his acts by hand printing prayer flags.

    The narrative and the prose make the book very accessible, and the only concern I had was whether the author had let romanticism affect the truth of the stories a tiny bit. A great read.

  • 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.