Hindustan Times
Four Books in Six Weeks
(Or, Work is Going to Ruin My Record)
Oddly, I haven’t read as much as I normally would have these first six weeks of the year. Actually, it’s not that odd. I lived out of a suitcase for most of January due to house painting and two weeks in Delhi and just as I finally got everything back in its place and could settle down to a book without the hunted feeling that I’ve got to clean the fridge or hang up the curtains or wash the sofa covers, now I’m off to Delhi again.
So I have a ton of books lying unread on (hooray) brand new shelves, while I’ve read only four this year. Two of them were books for young adults. These were Love Like That and Other Stories, with stories by a bunch of writers including Rupa Gulab (my sister), Tejas Modak (who illustrates for Brunch so often that as far as I’m concerned, he’s an honorary Brunchian), Jerry Pinto, Sheba Karim and Ira Trivedi (who now writes for Brunch so often, she’s on her way to being an honorary Brunchian too) and Whispers in the Classroom Voices on the Field, an anthology of stories edited by Richa Kha and set in and around school by writers like Mridula Koshy, Ranjit Lal (I love Ranjit Lal), Payal Dhar and Gautam Benegal.
Both books were overall okay – though the quality of writing varies from writer to writer – but there were some very satisfying stories in both, and I really loved the illustrations by Priya Kuriyan in Whispers…. Especially the way they were incorporated into each page depending on the mood of the story, instead of just being plonked down in a standardised template.
The other two books I read were more adult. Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth and Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s The Monk, the Moor & Moses Ben Jalloun. And both were revelatory.
What struck me most about The Butterfly Generation was how casual the drug scene seems to be in India. As I read the first few essays in the book, about young people and their aspirations, my jaw just dropped because I don’t know (or perhaps I don’t know I know) anyone who casually does lines of coke and other party drugs, but according to this book, everyone does!
It’s true I’m an introvert and I haven’t been to a party since 2005 (or thereabouts and I don’t want to, I have a ton of unread books at home), so I asked my friends and colleagues and apparently it’s true. Even the most unlikely people do drugs and I am most astounded.
So that was an eye opener and so was Saeed Mirza’s book, which is about a bunch of university students in the US, discovering how almost all the science and arts in the world has its roots in the east – something western scholars have conveniently forgotten or even hidden.
It’s an odd sort of book, part Mirza’s angst about how Islam is perceived in the world today, part novel, part textbook, but I liked it very, very much. Not as much as I loved Mirza’s last book – Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, which was just as experimental as this one, if not more. But I thought about it when I finished it and decided I want to keep this book. I know I will re-read it some day.
Now reading: The Extras *ing Ravan & Eddie. Kiran Nagarkar’s sequel to his Ravan and Eddie that I absolutely adore . I’m just 20 pages down and at the pathetic rate that I’m reading these days, it may take me a month to finish it, but so far, I think it’s great.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Kushal Reply:
February 27th, 2012 at 6:16 am
Thank you!
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