Brajesh's Review: Reluctant Fundamentalist

If you haven't read Mohsin pick this one now. Great form, flow and construction, although the plot and insights could have been fresher.

Rating: 3/5


    

Kim's Review: Curses in Ivory

Curses in Ivory traverses three generations of women as seen through the eyes and memories of Sreya. The 3 main characters are Sreya, her grandmother Hansabati and mother Regina. The minor but still important characters are her mothers sister Queenie, her Fathers brothers wife Brishti and her sister-in-law Nilima.

The curse supposedly has its origin in the time of Hansabati's mother-in-law Kamala and carries on in various forms through the Rai Bahadurs family.

This novel is a subtle yet wonderful exploration on the status of women across 4 generations in West Bengal. Societal norms, the prevalence of purdah, the British influence, the lowered status of women who lost their mothers or were orphaned, the overwhelming obsession for a male heir all of these are explored in this novel.

Curses in Ivory is a relatively easy read but will leave lasting impressions on the reader. The slow decay of once wealthy households holding on to their past. Family secrets - explosive if revealed but even more destructive if concealed. Arranged marriages where pre-teen spouses grow up together and office romances that lead to marriage. The changing fabric of society reveals itself in the course of this book.

While Curses in Ivory is not chicklit, women readers will be more appreciative of the subtleties in the story telling and the implications of events.

Anjana Basu's story telling flows very smoothly and there are minor differences in the flow depending on which characters perspective is being put forth. The poetic turn of phrase around Brishti is the most palpable.

While not in the league of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay or Satyajit Ray, she still succeeds in bringing an older Bengal to life.

Launch of "The F Word"

I'd been reading snippets of Mita Kapur's The F Word even before the book was launched. A few illustrations with short tantalising explanations were enough to excite the foodie on me to start desperately searching for her book as soon as she announced that it was out. But it wasn't to be found in a single Delhi book store. Not surprising considering that Harper Collins hadn't launched it yet in Delhi.

So when the invitation came for the book launch at Cafe Zaffiro in Zamrudpur on the 15th, I jumped at the opportunity and dragged my visiting Sister-in-law along.

Driving to Zamrudpur was an expedition in its own right. Fortunately Cafe Zaffiro had put up enough sign boards to assure us that we were headed in the right direction. And when we reached there I realised that the hardest-to-reach places in Delhi can throw up suprising little gems.

Cafe Zaffiro is attached to Zaza Home - a store that sells clothes and knick knacks for around the house and kitchen. There were plenty of little items catching my eye, but we didn't want to be late and so we rushed upstairs to the terrace where the launch was to be held. And a good thing that we did, because inspite of sufficient seating, the location soon became a standing room only affair.

Mita Kapur comes across as a demure soft spoken lady, but she quickly dispelled any fallacies about her being the Adarsh Bharatiya Nari. A woman of chutzpah and determination showed herself in the hour to follow.

She said her motivation to write the book, came from her husbands threat to write a sex story that would be sold at Railway stations across the country, if she didn't write something more substantial herself.

I must mention here that the book is not just a collection of recipes. It is part autobiography detailing the struggles of a working woman trying to feed a nutritious diet  to her husband and children which is still exciting enough to eat and slowly trying to healthify traditional Indian recipes which are tasty but heavy and rich. Part memoir and partly a legacy that she wanted to leave to her children with a dose of advice and tips on how to cook healthy meals in a hurry.

The book can be enjoyed as a good read with enough recipes in it to excite the foodie reader yet not distract the casual reader from the humour in the stories behind the food.

Rocky and Mayur from Highway on My Plate were there to help launch the book and both confessed to not having read the book entirely. With Mayur confessing that his lack of reading skills made him depend on his wife to tell him what the book was about.

A triologue followed with Rocky & Mayur inviegling invites to be adopted by Mita and her Mother-in-law and be fed for perpetuity.

When asked if she had ever faced any disaster in the kitchen, she remembered the time, she and her sister-in-law had first made Gulab Jamuns from a pre-mix. The recipe called for making tiny balls. But her sister-in-law declared that they were too tiny and stingy and should be made much bigger. So what looked like regular size jamuns when rolling into balls, expanded to the size of cricket balls when being fried.

The Audience was then treated to some traditional Suryamukhi kebabs (with smoked meat) whose recipe is also in the book. The rest of the snacks served were also very tasty. But as we were in a hurry, I didin't find out if the preparations were from Mita's repertoire or the kitchens of Cafe Zaffiro.

I'm still reading the book and will review it on Jhovaan - My Food Blog once I have cooked a couple of dishes from the book.

The book is now available in Delhi bookstores. I saw it at Om Books the other day. The Jaipur launch is on the 30th.

And I will go back to Zamrudpur to investigate that market further.

CMYK - Meharchand Market

I had recently read 2 articles, I think it was in the Hindustan Times and Time Out, Delhi extolling the virtues of Meharchand market. I was all prepared for something like Khan Market or GK1 N Block market especially given the big names of some of the shops here and its location on Lodhi Road, behind IHC.

However, once I reached, the market itself did not inspire a lot of confidence. Its difficult to find a "clean" market in Delhi, but this was worse than most. A lot of run down shops scattered in between a few new ones. This was less Hauz Khas Village and more Hauz Khas Market.

There are a few gems in this street though, if you can be patient or know exactly where to head.

CMYK is my favourite of the shops here. A bookshop started by Roli Books, it stocks all their inhouse publications - an excellent selection of Photobooks and Coffee Table books - and a few other books that aren't very easy to find in other bookshops in Delhi, that mostly cater to bestsellers. They supposedly have a terrace upstairs which I did not know when I visited, I will definitely check it out the next time I am there. The store itself is starkly furnished in black, with chairs from Pantone that are on display, lending some bright colors to the decor.

Picture from Live Mint

Kim's Review: Disgraced

Picked this book up on a whim, as it seemed to be in the vein of Jean Sasson's books. It promised a glimpse into the life of a young British-Pakistani girl growing up in a traditional Muslim immigrant family  in the 1980's.

Was it a good book? Well, it won't win any awards for the writing, but the story did make me empathise with her. It created an emotional response in me and isn't that what good writing is supposed to be about?

Saira is brought up in an ultraconservative Pakistani muslim family that lives in Britain, where the entire extended family is involved in the family garment business. Men rule the household with iron fists and women are treated as property to be used and abused.

The danger for someone unfamilar with Islam reading the book, is seperating what stems from religious practice and cultural practice,  since Saira herself is not sure of the distinction. Bullied into submission from a young age by all the men in her family, it is not possible for her to question any of their actions or decisions.

However, after being forced into an abusive arranged marriage with a distant family member on a trip back to Pakistan, she slowly summons her courage and uses all her wits to escape back to Britain where she finally lands in a safe house. It is here that she glimpses an alternate way of living her life and starts working outside the family business and outside the traditional ghettoes.

Unfortunately this respite is only temporary as she loses her job for no fault of hers and is forced to come up with money to pay off the debts incurred by her family. Her parents who keep sending money to relatives near and distant, back in Pakistan and her older brothers drug addictions.

The only way she can make money fast enough to repay the interests on the debts of the loan sharks is by selling herself as an escort. It is during this phase that Saira oscillates between guilt of doing something haram, even though her intention is halal - to help her parents.

The story ends abruptly  when she stops herself from committing suicide for the sake of her daughter and manages to follow her original dream of designing fabrics and textiles. A more "respectable" job.

The book gives the reader a glimpse into a slice of Saira's life. There are definitely a lot of questions, I would have liked answered. How does her family travel so frequently between UK and Pakistan if they are constantly in debt and money is tight?

A reader unfamiliar with the "extended familial responsibilities"  concept in the sub-continent, would have many more questions as to why a lot of the personalities in this book, behave or react the way that they do. In that manner, Disgraced isn't very illuminating. But it is a story that might have been repeated in a number of immigrant families from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka to the UK. It is a story that deserves to be heard.

Kim's Review : Yajnaseni - the story of Draupadi

This is a translation of the work of Oriya writer Pratibha Ray on the story of Draupadi. This tale portrays Draupadi in a completely different light from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Draupadi, in Palace of Illusions

I feel this book has lost a lot in the translation. The first half of the book was very diffcult to get through. The language is clunky and for someone unfamiliar with the multiple names for Arjuna, Krishna, Yudhishtir and Draupadi, the characters can be extremely confusing.

The translator Pradip Bhattacharya, is an IAS officer and the text of the first half is very heavy with convoluted sentences which made me feel like I was reading a bureacuratic report. It takes until the second half, for Bhattacharyato get into his groove and start writing a bit more naturally which really helps the story flow more smoothly.

Pratibha's Draupadi/Yajnaseni/Krishnaa is a woman trapped by circumstances. First having given her heart to Krishna (then told by Krishna himself that her destiny lies elsewhere) and then to Arjun, she is forced to split her time as a wife between 5 husbands, each with their own personalities and peculiarities.

A pre-occupied Yudhisthir, a demanding Bhim, Arjun who blames her for accepting his brothers as her husbands (for not saying no to the suggestion, although he himself didn't), childlike Nakul and Sahadev. Each husband needing to be treated differently according to his temparament. It is easy to empathise with Ray's Draupadi and feel sorry for her predicament.

To love Arjun and want to be his alone and yet have to spend 80% of her time with her four other husbands. Plus Arjun's long travels, as penance for intruding on the privacy of Yudhisthir and Draupadi, to gain astras from the different devas while marrying different princesses along the way. The final straw is when he marries Subhadra and brings her back to Indraprasth, before Draupadi herself has had the chance to be a wife to Arjun (in Ray's sequence of events). Yet, she manages to reconcile herself to all of this with the help of Krishna's council.

In this interpretation of the Mahabharath, Draupadi and Krishna share a spiritual level of trust and love that her five husbands accept and understand unquestioningly. Draupadi, even instructs one of Krishna's wives on how the wives have got it wrong in their constant fighting to possess Krishna for themselves, while what they should be doing is surrendering themselves to him.

Karna is not the flawless noble hero, but an insecure man who nurses his insults and loses no opportunity to rub salt in Draupadi's wounds, even though he also saves her life at one point of time.

Ray, bases her novel on the Mahabharath by Vedvyas and the Oriya Mahabharath by Sarala Das. She also adds a few incidents from her imagination and mixes up the sequence of some events to help her own narrative.

Although Draupadi is one of the five satis, she is often insulted as the one with five husbands and hence implied to be a woman of loose character. Ray's objective in writing this tale was to clear this "negative" interpretation of her and to give her the honor she deserves for holding the Pandavs together and being an "agent of change" in her time.

Rating: 3.5/5



Also published on desicritics.org

Yajnaseni - The Story of Draupadi

Kim's Review : The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History

The Hadrian Enigma - is a story of love, intrigue, politics, and scandal set in pagan Rome and Egypt, about 130 years after Christ.

The story is based on real characters and falls in the genre of speculative fiction. It starts with the discovery of the body of the Bythinian youth Antinous rumored to be Caesar Hadrian's lover or eromenos. While history says that his death was an accidental drowning in the Nile, George Gardiner weaves a story of intrigue around the incident that is quite entrancing.

The tale is revealed as a series of depositions to Special Investigator Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus who is charged by Caesar, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Antinous within 2 days.

Within the first few pages, it seems the suspect is so evident, that you wonder why the story runs to 476 pages, but as you read along, you realise there are many more players in the mix.

Gardiner has written an interesting and gripping story, but I do wish the editing was tighter. Given that large parts of the book are third person reports, a lot of the minute details included seem superfluous and out of place. He seems to have suffered from a typical writers problem of having done extensive research and then wanting to include as much of the details as possible into the end product.

The language keeps oscillating even when the same person is speaking, from high brow Latin and Greek peppered sentences (sending one scurrying to wikipedia and dictionary.com) to American colloquialisms like "that guy".

Font sizes change suddenly and inexplicably, quite often. Words are underlined for emphasis, which left me feeling like I was reading a manuscript or a draft, rather than a final copy.

While the novel is based on the same sex relationship of Caesar Hadrian and Antinous (currently deified as the God of Homosexuality by some) and marketed as a male-male romance novel, it isn't a turn off to the average reader who wants to read it as a mystery novel. What is vexing though, is the repeated use of the word "crutch" when the author actually means "crotch". Whether this is a problem of the "spell check" software or new slang (I checked urbandictionary.com which did not imply any such meaning to the word - crutch), I'm not sure.

Its an extremely readable story, shedding insight into the life and times of a not-as-renowned Caesar, who had one of the most peaceful and prosperous reigns of his dynasty. It's a page turner, once you get past the initial Greek and Latin terms. I just wish the editing could have been tighter. Then this book would have really stood out for me.

Also Published on desicritics.org

Kim's Review : The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

The latest book from the Philip Pullman stable, being called in certain quarters as the Gospel according to Philip.

The plot is based on an innovative concept - that Mary gave birth to twins - Jesus and Christ. In Philips narrative Jesus starts out as the mischievous one, getting into trouble which his quiet, academically oriented brother Christ keeps getting him out of. But then Jesus goes into the wilderness and returns as a preacher and Christ follows him around discreetly chronicling his words and deeds and yet giving a "twist" to the tales to make for better reading. And these twists are what are commonly accepted details today.

Pullman draws on various sources and uses commonly accepted "facts" and twists them around in this book. It is an insight into how details "might" have changed in the re-telling.

For eg: the miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana is offered a possible explanation of Jesus shaming the chief steward into producing the wine that he had hidden away to sell on the side.

While staunch Christians might find the book blasphemous, Pullman disclaims the book with "This is a STORY" in a large Gold font on the back.

The writing style is extremely simple and may come as a shock for those who enjoyed the complicated storylines and concepts of his Dark Materials Trilogy. The book makes for extremely easy reading with short simply written chapters.

Pullman also finds time to denounce the current child abuse scandal being faced by the church in the words "prayed" by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. For me, it is this chapter written as a monologue of Jesus - trying to communicate with God - that holds the crux of the book. The whole point of writing this book, seems to be concentrated in this chapter.

As someone who was brought up on the Bible and has read up on the beliefs of the orthodox churches too, it was very easy to correlate all the incidents and compare them to their "original" tales. I would be interested to hear from someone who is not that well versed with the "original material" who has read this book. Did you find it confusing? Did any of the tales seem irrelevant?

Also published on desicritics.org

Kim's Review : The Other Queen

This is my first book by Philippa Gregory and I admit that it was the movie version of "The Other Boleyn Girl", that got me interested in her as an author.

While I knew the basic outline of the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, this novel still kept me engrossed. It brought to life characters from history in a way that only movies seemed to be able to do until a few years ago. It is wonderful the way so many new authors are re-looking history in the form of personal stories. It humanises the past as no text book or ledger of facts and figures ever can.

This novel tells the tale of Mary Queen of Scots from 3 perspectives between 1568 and 1587, with a few flashbacks thrown in for good measure. Bess, a self-made woman who has used husbands as stepping stones to the higher ranks of aristocracy until her current rank as "My Lady Countess of Shrewsbury". Her current husband George the Earl of Shrewsbury, forced by a request from Queen Elizabeth, to keep Mary under house arrest in his home and Mary, Queen of Scots herself.

Bess is a woman constantly worried about the finances of housing Mary, who though a prisoner is also a Queen and has to be treated as such. The Earl slowly finds himself falling under Mary's spell and Mary manipulates everyone around her to try and get what she wants.

Unfortunately for Mary, (as you all know) things did not work out for her. But Philippa's novel has done a wonderful job of bringing her to life. Not as a helpless twit at the mercy of political machinations, but a young woman entrapped by birth and circumstances to spend most of her life as a prisoner, but never giving up on hope and the desire to free herself and rule her own country.

Also published on desicritics.org

Kim's Review : Sister India

Peggy Payne is a travel writer and her attention to the tiny details when traveling come through in this book, her fourth.

My husband who has lived and worked in Varanasi for almost 5 years, found it suprising that a "foreigner" could grasp the essence of the city so well.

Sister India is a work of fiction, which tells multiple stories of the guests at the Saraswati Guesthouse managed by the formidable Madam Nataraja, but the true hero/heroine of this story is the city of Benares/Varanasi itself.

Historically, one of the Holiest cities in India, a lot of "foreigners" visit this city on a quest. Each ones quest may be different. Some find answers, some do not. Some pass by as tourists ticking off another city off their list, some stay back and become a part of the teeming multitudes of the city.

A bundh call by the city officials as a consequence of the unrest following a murder with religious tones forces the inmates of the Saraswati Guesthouse into closer quarters than normal. The forced isolation sets each one on a journey of the discovery of their self, leading them to remember incidents in the past that moulded them into who they are today.

Would recommend the book to anyone who is visiting Benares and wants to get an idea of the city before arriving, a lay-of-the-land so to speak.