Category: Books

  • The Five Dollar Smile

    Shashi Tharoor

    This is a collection of Shashi Tharoor’s early works.. really early 🙂 It has 14 stories and a two act play. While they are not of the fantastic quality of say, The Great Indian novel, it definitely shows the class of the author, who even during school and college days, displayed an affection for words, and humour.
    Each story is preceded by a note from the author that explains the context, and the mood. This adds great value to the reading.
    The stories range from semi autobiographical to takes on the social, cultural and economic milieu prevalent at the time the story was set, and pure fiction. Some of them are also unique perspectives on commonplace occurrences. A lot of stories reflect the ‘Indian middle class’ values and mindset, and I could identify with that a lot. A lot of the wit is pun driven, so if you’re a wordsmith you’ll like it. 🙂
    The play is a wonderful humorous metaphor on the Emergency.
    In essence, a decent read.

  • Breathless in Bombay

    Murzban F Shroff

    Breathless in Bombay is Mumbai..completely, teeming with characters that gives Mumbai its current character. Shroff uses characters from many walks of life and across age bands to describe the lives that make up the city. And these are not just the Mumbaikars, but also those who come from different parts of the country and end up being absorbed by the city and its machinations for love, money, power and everything else that makes it tick. With 14 stories, each of which showcases different Mumbais/Bombays – from dhobighat to Bollywood and from victoriawallas to Page 3 socialites, it shows the struggle of humanity, the aspirations that give the city its rhythm, the ability of its citizens to pick up the pieces and move on, and their eternal elixir – hope.
    I’d loved Pinki Virani’s ‘Once was Bombay’ for showing the transition of a city brilliantly, and I’d put Shroff’s work at the same level, for bringing out so well, the dynamics of Mumbai.

  • Siddhartha

    Herman Hesse

    Somewhere in Pankaj Mishra’s ‘The Romantics’, there’s a conversation about ‘Siddhartha’ and it being a reason for a Westerner’s interest in Buddhism and India. A conversation, not my view 🙂 That, and the fact that it also finds mention in Mishra’s other book ‘An End to suffering’ is primarily what led me to the book.
    The book is best described as the story of an alternate version of the Buddha, and the Buddha features in the story too, including a conversation.
    The message is perhaps like a quote I read somewhere, which amounts to “There are many ways to the top of the mountain, but once there, the view is the same”
    The arguments are compelling, and makes you think, not just about the end, but also about the ways in which you get there. I especially liked the thoughts on the concept of time, the ‘goal vision’ obscuring everything else, and ‘the opposite of every truth is also true’.
    Forget Buddhism, it is an excellent read on life, what we strive for, and my favourite paradox – the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of our existence.

  • Afterwards

    Jaishree Misra

    Having read both of Jaishree Misra’s earlier works, I was almost given into believing that this was going the same way as ‘Ancient Promises’ had. While the premise and the characters – woman, husband, extra marital relationship and a child are recurring, somewhere down the road, there is a fork, and that’s when it becomes a good book, not that Ancient Promises wasn’t , just that this worked better for me.
    To her credit, the author moves quickly over the part till the fork is reached, and while I’d have preferred some slicker editing after that, I can see how it might not be that way for others.
    A good read that captures the pain of loss, the hand of fate, and of letting things go being the only way to be sometimes.

    (spoiler alert) Special mention must be made of the wonderful way in which the author has captured the trauma of a 4 year old who realises her mother is no more, but perhaps can’t understand its ramifications in her life. I was deeply moved by the three pages that covered this, it gave me a different perspective of a 6 year old I knew once in similar circumstances. Echoes.

  • Space

    James A Michener

    ..the final frontier. To me, space has been an abstract, with a few perspectives molded by the science fiction I read. with this work, albeit a novel, James Michener gave me a lot of tangible snippets of how humans working in this wonderful scientific field have evolved over time.
    From the time of the Second World War, when creating rockets that would destroy opposing forces and cities was the priority to a nation’s obsession to place a man on the moon, during the Cold War, to NASA and later scientists who grapple with manned and unmanned explorations and the possibility of life outside earth, this book, as with all of Michener’s works, is one vast canvas.
    And mirroring, and perhaps concluding a debate in the book, (man as a measure of success..and interest) Michener uses the lives of the politicians, astronauts and the scientists working on the missions to show the universal nature of man’s self doubts, his trials, tribulations, joys, sorrows, successes and failures. Personal battles – with self and others, mingle with professional clashes to make the story..human. A few real life figures like Sagan and Asimov get a mention in this work of fiction.There are some wonderful hat tips to some excellent works in sci fi.
    In tackling Space, Michener also draws attention to other profound things – evolution, religion, culture and gives some amazing perspectives on questions that each of us carry within us. A wonderful read, that re-created the awe and splendour that the cosmos invokes, and reminded me of the fundamental paradox of human existence – the preciousness in finite time and the meaninglessness, in the infinite.