Saket Suryesh's Blog, page 12

A Feeble Voice- On Single Parenting by Choice

"Your majesty, please...I don't like to complainBut down here below, we are feeling great pain.I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom, we, too, should have rights."
- Dr. Seuss in "Yertle, The Turtle"
Indian filmmaker and the man with alternate sexual choices who recently came out of closet, to the chagrin of LGBT activists, a wee bit too late, a wee bit too little, is a single father now. This is the front page news. Social media has sprung into action. 
This post has been kind of simmering in me for a long time. These are strange times of political correctness. On everything, there are defined positions, which are defined by powers that might be, approved for the lesser mortals as worthy of being taken. If one has some sharpness of the intellect, some audacity of the mind and, well, some brinkmanship of character; one would say that these positions are defined as correct and socially appropriate, not on their merit and substance, rather by their strength to uphold the intellectual stranglehold of the elite, their ability to  augment to fake grandeur of their enormous and often monstrous egos. 
It is hard to put thoughts in public without the fear of backlash. This is totally strange. Any thought not to the liking of the liberals (a fake term, I debated in my previous post), and you will be pounced by the very people who claim to be fighting for the right to dissent. So dissent you must, but only from the ideas 'they' approve. They will oppose the patriarchal masculinity, but will patronize a girl, twenty year old, if they find her words furthering their agenda, and they will attack and hound another twenty year girl, however accomplished she might be, if she happens to disagree with them. Let us not be fooled by the use of terms like democracy, liberty and Freedom of expression, by people who support the ideology proven worldwide for the establishment of theocratic, absolutist state. GK Chesterton wrote in his satirical novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I was reading few days back (accidental, totally accidental!) which he wrote referring to a fantastical time of 1984 (a fictional future, when he wrote it in 1904), so true, only he predicted the year about three decades too early. 
"What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech practically, in our modern civilization, that we must only talk about unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, because that is illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, because that is talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing, we must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate."
But we must talk about birth now. It will invariably fall on the wrong side of the debate, I am sure. Somehow, unconventional sexual preferences are linked with feminist emancipation, not only for women, rather for men, as well. For the life of me, I do not know why. Rights of people are important, for women, for minorities, for LGBTQ. But why must they all be bundle together as if some sort of bouquet. They are not only bundled, but are somehow put in one container and shaken so violently by the interested parties, that one hardly knows which is which. All the affected parties gets impacted by social orthodoxy in different way, but then clubbing it into one group, makes it easier for those who want to handle it as a tool to power, votes or escalation upwards in social hierarchy. 
So the fact that Karan Johar, a man with affluent past and even more nauseating affluent present decided to get himself two kids will somehow become a case for personal liberty and one will not even realize when it becomes a case of women's liberation. Elections in world's largest democracy quickly became that. Against a man with loose morals and corroding character, the argument was not another 'person' of nationalistic credentials, proven character and impeccable morality. It was a woman. How quickly slogans overwhelm the cause. The world women's Day is around the corner and Spa advertisements will be out to be flipped with manicured fingers in metropolitan cities; journalists and the self-proclaimed guardians of social conscience will make necessary and appropriate noise on Social media, but will sit like an obedient courtier when they are in front of the party leaders who campaign for a candidate charged with rape in recent elections. These will not make to studio debates and the tribal girl will wake up in the morning and go to collect firewood, under the slimy eyes of the forest contractor. Moral correctness will always fall short of political affiliations. 
The debate on a Tusshar Kapoor or a Karan Johar or even a Shahrukh Khan opting to have a child through surrogacy, is not a debate on surrogacy. It is also not a debate about Gay rights; nor is it about individual liberty of the man who wants to live an unconventional life and wants to have the fruits of an old-fashioned conventional life. It is also not about the consenting woman who offers her womb for rent, pushed by her economic distress. I would not call it a consent which is given under duress. Although I am not against surrogacy, per se, if it is a service given out of free will, although it will be hard to judge where empathy was elicited by economics for the consenting women, to couples struggling to have progeny. Although even for those couple, I would always advise adoption. There are kids around who deserve a better life, and who are not getting it, rendered homeless by cruel designs of nature, or even crueler designs of their parents. 
Parenthood is not about science. It is not an accidental fact. It is not a matter of enthusiastic sperm meeting a kind and receptive egg. It is much deeper than that. One does not become a father on the day of conception or on the day of the birth of the progeny. One becomes that much earlier than than, or the day when one listens to those urgent heartbeats for the first time, or the day you stand with pride on school function, or when an unnoticed tear drops from the corner of your eye when the kid leaves home. It hit at strange occasion in one's life. In all the process, we must be thankful to the child who is the catalyst to the sense of parenthood, as and when it chooses to embrace us. In the whole scheme of things, it is the child, who is voiceless, vote-less and power less, whose rights concerns me. The way a child is treated as a toy, as a fashion accessories that 'completes' a Karan Johar's or a Tushar Kapoor's life, is absolutely heart-breaking if one views the whole thing from the eyes of the child. Do we know that the child will be happy in a single parent's home? Single parenting is at times thrust on a child, when he has no choice. In evolved societies, there are special counselling for effected kids, landing out of misfortune into a single parent family on account of death or divorce. Why is the mind of child not considered, heart of child is not listened to when single parenting is thrust on the kid merely because the parent wants to enjoy his or her free will? Well, you have a right to have the choices of new age and generation and who am I to stop you. But then why seek age-old pleasures? And if you want to seek age-old pleasures, why with age-old orthodoxy? Why this obsession with DNA after all your sweet and sophisticated talk on the irrelevance of birth, family and caste in today's world? And this farcical argument Karan makes in a reverential interview by an interviewer, that he felt he was now ready for fatherhood because he has mentored people in his own organization. What kind of logic is that? So Mr. Johar has not decided to hire another employee in the newly created post of a Son (and one as a daughter). The PR machinery of the king of Bollywood, who yesterday advised a girl from small-town to stop playing victim-hood and get out of movie industry if she cannot handle it. None of the liberals, as was predictable, would rush to the rescue of Kangana Ranaut. Still Kangana can afford to hit back at Karan Johar's PR machinery with her own. 
But the little boy and girl, thrust into a motherless family because of liberal choices their father made, cannot. Karan Johar's fatherhood will be front page news, while the fetuses of unborn girls of Maharashtra will be page 9 news, somewhere hidden in small corner. Why could he have not volunteered to adopt one of those girls? This foolishness with which we play with nature is wrong at so many levels. There is no moral argument for it. And personal liberty is not a moral argument in itself. Such an argument will only produce a despot. The children, those little people, harbingers of hope, they too have rights, voiceless they may be. Sushmita Sen is a single mother, but she adopted kids. She has given them a life which they otherwise might not have had; Karan Johar, in a hedonistic drive, has offered his kids a life which they never did sign for. If we disown our children in our selfish, individual quests as a society, we are killing our world, in ways harsher than global warming or any such fashionable thing.
Khalil Gibran famously disowned parents from whatever rights parents believed they had on their kids, when he wrote
Your children are not your childrenThey are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself,They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
He calls the parents as bows and kids as arrows as he writes:
For even as He loves the arrow that fliesso he loves the bow also that is stable. 
Least we can do is- be a stable bow, it is not a job for the frivolous. Dr. Irvin Yalom, American psychiatrist has a view which is closer to my own. He writes, in When Nietzsche Wept - 
"It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness"
It is wrong. Parenting is does not make a man god, it merely gives one an opportunity to strive for divinity, to touch divinity. Parenthood is a conscious call to step into an arena where you will fight with yourself; bleed everyday and get better every day. It is not a fulfillment of selfish desires and ambitions. It is not about parents, it is all about the kids, because, they will define the kind of world we leave afterwards and also because, down at the bottom, those little people, chirpy even in the chilliest of the winter mornings like some miniature samurai walking awkwardly to their schools- they too, have rights. Choices are not always about us. 

Lies and Liberalism- Crooked Lies of Communism

There is unrest on Delhi streets again. Some say, it is the eternal struggle between Liberal and Orthodox thought which is spilling over on the streets. There is inherent fault in this definition. The definition further expands to interpret leftists or communists as Liberals and Right Wing intellectuals (Leftists will not like the term intellectual with Right Wing, is another matter). I have trouble with that. Because this is a dishonest classification. 
I am told, I am a Right-winger in my approach. But I am, like many called Bhakt in a very derogatory sense, very liberal. While you will not find a communist to come out in public and condemn say a Sitaram Yechury or a Lenin or even China's murderous history of communism. You will not even find the mainstream media people projecting themselves as neutral commentator with known loyalty to Congress which ruled India for larger part of our independent existence, criticizing Congress for their ugliest episodes. On the other hand, Pakistan based terrorists attacked Indian Air Base in Pathankot, and RW, so-called Modi-Bhakts, also called Paid trolls (unfounded) by media houses, even by those who were paid in cash and kind, allegedly by Nira Radia who used Journalists in establishing her private kingdom of loyal members of Congress cabinet, pounced on Narendra Modi. It is therefore, totally absurd that Right wing be called Bhakt and Left Wing media and Celebrities be termed objective intellectual minds. I find myself liberal, and I find myself more liberal than those who are called Liberal on a good day. 
Left is quite deprived and bankrupt in terms of intellect, to be honest. Left thrives on uniformity. Comrades, they call one another. Comrade is nothing but "Number xxxx" referred to in Ayn Rand Novels assigned to people. People scares the left. They thrive on mob, more unthinking the better. In most of the countries across the world, communism has fallen. Because it is stagnant water. Communist rule is absolutist rule. It operates best when men are beheaded, in spiritual and intellectual sense, and bodies which can be counter in number walk under an absolute leader. Just like Islam and Christianity are religion of book, Communism is an ideology of book. Marx wrote a book, and what he wrote is the absolute and final test of truth, decades later. A Dostoevsky who would write anything deviant from the truth of Marx will be sent to Siberia. Any mass movement runs the risk of falling rapidly into intellectual abyss. Mostly because they usually grow on the number, and the quest for numbers leads into mobs. Mobs are difficult to handle and will eventually run over. This is not only communist problem, it happened in French revolution as well. Intellect is not common, sensitivity is not popular. That is why a Lenin will get replaced by a Stalin who will rule with iron hand, for a movement not based on idea, but based on mob will quickly become a lion, which you cannot get off, once you get on it. 
The idea of communism quickly disintegrates, primarily because it runs contrary to the natural logic. At the peak of communism, we had twenty nations in the world which were communist. Now, we have five nations which call themselves communist. The swift fall of communism can be explained in the fickle argument of distribution of power and resources, on which communism is based. The concept of all people being identical is flawed. Men are different. When anyone comes out with a flawed idea of equal distribution of wealth, one should be very scared of this idea. Any distribution would essentially mean that there will be few who will hold the power to distribute it. Any fictitious equal society will invariably have few who will be more equal than others. This is the fall out of basic human nature. Men are not equal and men do not believe themselves to be equal. Humanity progresses through individual pursuit of excellence. Communism frowns over it. Discontent quickly rises when the hypocrisy of those who took the charge of wealth distribution are found holding the most of it. Before being comrades, they are human beings, who believe themselves to be better than their brethren. Therefore, an Arvind Kejriwal quickly moves into his huge bungalow, the moment he gains power. When the gap between their act and their rhetoric is pointed out, they are annoyed and quickly respond with most violent and aggressive manner. There is not room for debate. One cannot win a communist argument in a debate. It is a lofty but failed idea. Once the debate fails, quickly violence escalates. It is mob around, bitter deceived, angry mob. 
Lacking of its own rational feet to stand on, it borrows it from right, it snatches them away from the right wing. Therefore, suddenly we find George Orwell's masterpiece 1984 which of all things, wrote about the dangers of absolutist communist rule, becomes a leftist literature. Communism has not argument on its side so it appropriates intellectual arguments of the right and pretends as if it belonged to the left. Why left has so many intellectual leaders? Because they need that many. Rightism is an argument of human survival and human growth. You don't need to justify it. When a child is born and struggles to get the first drop of milk, she understands the value of self. You do not need complex arguments to prove the simple facts of nature. So communism pretends. They become liberal leftist, which is the worst of irony. The ideology which could impose itself on masses only through purging and Gulaags, pretends to be the warrior for liberal thoughts. Naive young people buy their false truth. They move well-coordinated. So before the students come, comes the teacher. Any doubts in the minds of the kids is allayed by the legitimacy offered by the teachers. To the leftist teachers who currently rule the roost in most Indian universities are sometime old dreamers, who still believe in the possibility of equal distribution of wealth; but mostly they are into it because it gives them the access to unprecedented power. To politicians, it offered captive votes, which possible explains late entry of the word "socialist" in the preamble of our constitution. 
They extend their argument and bolster their fragile legitimacy by annexing the right-wing space. As it is becoming more and more common. Suddenly atheist communists are friends of Muslims, the proponent of equality are biggest lovers of Dalits. On only needs to make a quick google search to find the number of Muslims in the five communist countries- namely China, Cuba, North Korea,Vietnam and Laos. The idea of Islam, and in fact, the idea of any religion runs counter to the idea of communism, although it is surprising that the numbers of Islamists move around in India pretending to be communist muslims. It is a pity that people still buy that. How come a communist Hindu is an atheist communist, but a communist Muslim is a communist muslim? This is all facade, as stupid a facade as a communist shouting in the TV studio about Free speech and democracy. Free speech is inconsistent to the idea of communism. History tells us that. Philosophy also tells us that. When you stand on a stage and make a statement, you are putting yourself above your audience. That is crap. It doesn't stand the logic of equal citizen. So when you stand there and knowingly lie, you need cunning in the character to keep lying with a straight face and you need the assurance of brutal force, in the event your falsehood is called out. Therefore communism is a violent force. It runs with armies, if not formal, informal. This we have seen in other countries, this we have seen in West Bengal and Kerala. And don't let them fool you with the idea of fake democracy. Democracy and communism do not go hand in hand. When you run a communist government, you silence the democratic voices. We have seen this in any instance of Communist government. Communism is invariably mobocracy, it has not respect, nay, it has no tolerance for an indiavidual. Communists may cry hoarse of State oppression, in any communist design, citizen is nothing in front of state; State rules with impunity, with iron hand.
 I do not know why I am writing this. I actually started with an intent of writing something else. I ended up writing this. I do not know why. I am troubled by the way young people are sucked up in this evil philosophy which has no logic. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago- A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.  Our campuses are full of sheep. I am also troubled by the way earlier governments created this close eco-system of leftist teachers, leaders, professors, writers and politicians that very few have the courage and time to show mirrors to those communists shedding fake tears on Muslims, on Dalits, on Freedom of Speech and on Democracy, all things running against the very fabric of communism. Don't let them annex your basic character. Democracy, freedom, liberty, justice belongs to the right. It is not in communist character. Communism cannot survive a state which not absolute, which is not overpowering, which is not monstrously powerful and which is cruel enough to run tank over every single individual who stands for free thought. You cannot let those people fool you into believing that they stand for individual liberty. Individual and liberty both are foreign to their vocabulary. Still they will appropriate your words, your words, not their, remember. They will talk about freedom, liberty, democracy and even nationalism and martyrdom. Be very wary, for in the desperation to exist they will soil everything. And it is not even for the existence of their philosophy, it is for the continuance of the sham of the righteousness they embody, discussing starvation over a glass of champagne, which protects their elitist existence. They walk in the space you cede. Every time you do not stand for a Salman Rushdie or Vivek Agnihotri, you cede the space. You allow fake warriors to walk in. They are surprised with the strength of your voice. Speak up without embarrassment, and reclaim the bulwark of your philosophy, the philosophy of much-slandered right.
You need to acknowledge individual first to have these things; communism thrives on the defeat of individual and the victory of mob. The mobs can only offer Guillotine. Those who are most vocal for the rights of the poor are found in the most elite of the social environments.  Some day truth will prevail and you will fall out of the mob. It will not forgive you for that. Do not wait for that day. You will find yourself walking alone that day. It leads to the Gulag or the guillotine is only incidental. 

The Politics of Language- Rekhta

Languages live and die with human interests. Language does not have with in it to carry itself through public apathy. Language cannot survive vacuum and apathy. One of the biggest loss of the 21st century is the death of languages. While technology has been one cause of it, religious appropriation and attribution is another important reason. Suddenly we have Latin for Christians, Sanskrit for Hindus and Urdu for Muslims.
Absolutist religions have brought clash of civilization to our doorsteps. This reflects in the election of Donald Trump in the US and the books on Islamic supremacy being in best-sellers in France. It is not totally unfounded. Technology connects the mankind in unprecedented manner. Therefore, famines of Bengal in 18th and 19th century could not cause mass transfer of humanity from Asia to Europe nor could most bloody of wars in 7th century push people westwards, as much as it could today. One can easily call names to people who are simplistic and intellectually brow-beat them, but the fact remains that immigration without assimilation is invasion, not immigration. There is an old story of Parsis who landed on the Western coast of India and were brought to the King. When the King questioned them, placing a glass full of milk in front of the refugees, as to how do we accommodate you when my resources are not sufficient for my own people? The immigrant leader took a spoon full of sugar and mixed in the milk. When you land into another country and insist that the local people change their way of life and insist on not only insulting rather changing the existing customs and way of life, insecurity rises. That reflects everywhere.
In the latest edition of Rekhta, an annual event to celebrate Urdu, noted journalist Tarek Fateh was allegedly heckled. It was cited as a proof of intolerance on the part of organizers of Rekhta. There are multiple literary events happen in the country these days, and on all counts, by selection of panels, selection of guests, Rekhta has been the most honest effort for celebrating Urdu or Rekhta. Tarek Fateh is a brave journalist and has suffered much at the hands of authorities in Pakistan. He also calls himself an Indian, considering, like many either side of the border, the partition of India and creation of Pakistan on religious lines a grave folly. I am with him on this, I was with him on changing the name of a road after Aurangzeb.
Tarek Fateh who has vigorously spoken in the past against Urdu and the attempt of Pakistan government to enforce Urdu, as against Punjabi, which he loves, did wander off in the festival to look at Urdu literature, since he was told (as per his tweet) that there were wonderful Urdu books available there on the stalls. He tweeted however later calling Rekhta an Islamist festival. I would believe this was his later thought. Given his history, I would not suppose he would walk into Islamist festival (although given his dislike for Urdu, I do not know why he would walk in to an Urdu festival either). I was in the festival the two days, although, I was not at the place where the incident happened. Probably I was attending the discussion on Urdu in Global literary market at the time it happened. However, if there was hugely violent, Islamist environment; I, for one, did not notice it.
I was there. I am a Hindu and proud one at that. There were volunteers there, I do not suppose all Muslims. No one was checking the religion of the attendees, No one noticed the saffron thread on my wrist. The biggest attractions of the event were Dr. Gopi Chand Narang, great Urdu Scholar, and one Sardar Sampooran Singh Kalra also known to most of the people as Gulzar. Neither of us were heckled, nor were any of my other co-religionists at this supposedly Islamist event. Muslims formed a large number of attendees, there is no denying that. That is possibly because our politicians somewhere feed this into the mind of Indian muslims that Urdu is a Muslim language. As a reactionary response to which Hindus tend to shun Urdu, at least in public, while most Whatsapp inboxes are full of couplets by Ghalib and Meer. Mr. Fateh was not a speaker at the event, so I am not able to understand how his freedom of expression was gagged. If at all, we have an example of gagging of Freedom of expression, it was Salman Rushdie being barred from JLF last year and Taslima Nasreen being barred this year. Media houses have also take to organizing literary fest, which are mostly propaganda fest, with propagandist debates as highlights. Times Litfest had Dr. Swamy and Owaisi debating, neither of them exactly men of literature, ending with ABVP’s Saket Bahuguna debating with Kanhaiyya Kumar of JNU. India Today did another literary festival with TV anchor and journalist interviewing Javed Akhtar, trying to bring the topic time and again to demonetization and feels-like-emergency narrative in current government.
Rekhta on the other hand is least pretentious in this regard. It is pure literature which gets space in Rekhta. And as is the wont of literary minds, it is quite iconoclastic, if not blasphemous. No one seems to mind that. Last event, Javed Akhtar mentioned as to how Muslims are wrongly caught in the stereotype, that they all were descendent of Mughals with all Hindus as their legitimate subjects. He was upfront, witty and dismissive of this nonsensical idea, as he referred to the fact that it was mostly deprived, down-trodden Hindus who converted to Islam and were no way inducted into Mughal aristocracy. The attendees largely where the same as this year and no one hooted him. He got a big applause instead. This time Prof. Irfan Habib quoted an interesting case of UP, where huge hiring was done for promotion of Urdu language. He plainly mentioned that in a meeting with new teachers he found that most of them did not know how to write Urdu and had only one thing in common- they were all Muslims. He also plainly put in front of the people that since giving job to one religion was not possible due to SC guideline, Urdu promotion was a façade used by UP government to give jobs to Muslims who knew nothing about Urdu. At many panels, concerns were raised that attempts were being made to identify Urdu with Muslims, while Urdu did not came from the birthplace of Islam. It came from India. It was termed as  Rekhta, or thrown away, because it was looked down by the purists writers of those days who preferred to write in Persian. An interesting event detailing the journey of Progressive writer’s association, mentioned an anecdote about noted poet, Majaaz. To a great applause the narrator explained how when the poet went to Aligarh, for a lock exhibition (Aligarh is famous for locks), and saw a huge lock at the stall. He asked his friends what that thing was. When his friends responded that it was a Taala (Lock in Urdu/Hindi), he shook his head and responded thoughtfully, “Na, Allahtala”. Will such jokes go in an Islamist event?  An Islamist event will not celebrate Meer who himself wrote about himself- Meer ke deen-0-mazhab ko, kya poochte ho unne to, kashka khaincha, dair mein baitha, kabka tark-islaam kiya (he (Meer) who has put on a Tilak, sits in a temple and has disowned Islam long time back). This man is also called  Khuda-e-Rekhta  , the God of Urdu, quite blasphemous, no? Can we trust a Hafiz Sayeed to preserve Meer. 
People have jumped over Rekhta. Outrage builds over outrage. I would only say, please attend Rekhta once. It is not about Urdu only. It is about a language. That language is not a Muslim or foreign language. It is our own language. We made Sanskrit language of Brahmins and killed it. Let us not do it to Urdu. While in western countries, one is not considered cultured enough without the knowledge of Latin, in India, pushing for Sanskrit makes you a Sanghi and pushing for Urdu makes you’re an Islamist. Mr. Tarek Fateh must not look at India as he looked at Pakistan. Urdu is not a contradiction to secularism and local language. Both Urdu, Sanskrit and Hindi are custodians of the jewels of world’s oldest civilization. Languages are too big and important to be left to religious fanatics. Language needs scholars not fanatics. It is sad that right-wing thinkers are jumping into the debate and in process, trying to belittle Urdu. This language has served us well. It gave us writers like Premchand. True writers are bigger than politics and do not go about returning awards because the government is not of their liking. Let us read Urdu, read Ghalib and Meer, and lest you feel offended, instead of outraging against a language, read Dinkar, Kalidas and Nirala as well. Lost languages erase the past and history of a civilization, eventually leaving it rootless. We cannot let this happen to India. A language cannot be appropriated by a religion or an ideology. Left acts as if literature and all things cultural belongs to it, in India. Through our own stupidity, let us not substantiate this fallacy. Religion rides over language and not vice-versa. Religious writings survive centuries not only because they are true, rather, because they are written well. Virginia Woolf wrote- “When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke around me I am in darkness- I am nothing.” This is as true for an individual as it is for a nation and a civilization.

Book Review- The Red and The Black - By Stendhal

Book: The Red and The Black (Le Rougue et Le Noir)Author: Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)Pages: 608, Published by- A Levasseur (1830)Amazon Page - Click Here Recommendation:Must Read. A novel and an Education. 

A story, to my mind, succeeds if it breathes, lives like real organism. Then and only then will it grow inside you, around you and about you, and merge your reality in its fantasy. This in simplistic terms mean that it will hold your finger, sweet-talk and take you along to the point where the real melts into imaginary, with such sudden slyness that a reader can hardly distinguish which is which. It is this fantastical writing which emerges from a real environment which makes classics utterly readable. The ephemeral envelops the eternal in these works of art.
These stories do not float in air, they are the products of their times, and their roots are planted firmly on the hard soils of the time, the epoch whose story they tell. They are neither historical recordings nor the even claim to be that. Stendhal writes- I make no claim to the veracity except in matters that touched my feelings. It matters not that this masterpiece rose out of a news clipping regarding a sensational murder. Stendhal tells us a story, a gripping story. The characters of this story are real, and like real people are the products of their times. Most modern writings unfortunately short-changes us on that. The novels which attain immortality carefully and delicately tell us about the world in which those stories came to life. So Middlemarch takes us to an old British countryside, Heart of Darkness takes us to an African Colony and Love in the Times of Cholera takes shape in a fictitious Latin American country. These writers take time to describe the social and political realities of their times, before they internalize the story which germinates largely into the minds of the protagonists. 
It is a very delicate task to shift the vantage points between a wide external reality and the intimate internal psychology. The writer never lets the story stand on the staid neutral ground of nearness to a character, it oscillates between the two worlds- the inner recesses of human mind and the wide universe viewed from the top, the socio-political vantage point. It grows in the mind of the characters, much like Dostoevsky and when at times the author steps out of the mind of his character, he jumps and stands a a high vantage point from where he observes the world in which the character exists. This difficult but brilliant technique makes the character not only believable, it also makes them forgivable. Stendhal whose initial education took place under Ideologues, a group of 18th century investigators of psychology, puts his understanding of psychology to a great use as he creates the landscape of the minds of character on which the great story plays. As I writer, in this regard I find Stendhal much closer to the great Russian, Dostoevsky than any of his contemporary European writers. This style, this realism, about the impact of society on human mind and impact of human mind on its relation with the world around him (or her), makes it also easier for the writer to establish the characters, with honesty, without the fear of a reader rejecting the character. As is the wont of any novel with serious psychological treatment blended into it, one doesn't find any of the character evil, whether it be always scheming mind of desperate social-climber Julien Sorel, or the Adulteress Mme. De Renal, the wife of his employer, a minor officer in a minor village in France. The extremely status conscious, and somewhat snobbish Marquis De La Mole in Paris who offers Julien his second lease of employment and uses  plebeian Julien for amusement and later, exploits Julien's exception memory to use him as a tool of political conspiracy also comes out as a very human character, stuck in the compulsions of his own circumstances. You are almost sympathetic to every character of the story, and one embraces the ever scheming Julien with open arms, his very human flaws, notwithstanding. This is the magic of a story that plays well in the mind of a character.
 Napoleon, post his defeat, left a legend and dashed dreams of liberation from social hierarchies particularly for those who came from lower strata of the French society, like our hero, the carpenter's son. Napoleon, who from a humble beginning made it to the highest place in the French polity made it possible for people to believe in their dreams, even after his failure. He was a self-made man, who stood not only to the erstwhile French social order, but also to the church. It is absolutely to the credit of Stendhal to have written a novel which not only takes a very critical view of the church, to further complicate matters for himself, also in the person of Julien, celebrates his failed hero, Napoleon. He subtly brings forth the Nihilist idea when he, with great truthfulness writes- "A revolution cancels all the capricious society's titles and distinctions. In a revolution, a man assumes whatever rank he earns by his behavior in the face of death."  No wonder that Nietzsche called him France's last great psychologist. 
That is to the credit of his mastery over his cunning craft that with all the politics contained in the story, he refuses to let the novel become a political tome. He writes, as a kind a confession, or probably as a tool to remind himself, in the novel- "Politics in a literary work is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert; something vulgar and however, something which is impossible to ignore." So the undercurrents of politics- a neglected aristocracy, a powerless plebeian society deprived of any say in the social power structure, a Church struggling to regain its lost foothold, an aristocracy desperately fighting for relevance and to regain lost legitimacy- It is the story of a society in a flux. I correct myself- It is a story about people in the middle of a society in flux. It is therefore not a social commentary, it a story of a small-town officer, his wife, bored and looking for a fling, but unable to bear the guilt of adultery, Julien, the hero, a social pariah with exceptional intelligence and romantic bend of mind, looking for affirmation of his place in the world through his wins in terms of female affection, Abbe Pirard, the religious figure, who briefly becomes Julien's mentor, and Marquis De La Mole and his family, aristocrat, and Mathilda, Marquis's daughter, falls in love with Julien, captivated more by her own ideas of love than by the charms of Julien. These are all the character floating about in a very fluid time, searching for their own pieces of firm ground to settle upon. The story ends with Julien being sentenced to death- strangely, a death he happily walks towards, with a definite sense of achievement. One is left with a bitter-sweet taste of loss and win, both as undefined and as incomplete as the other, in the end. The Red in the story stands for the state and the Black for the church, the two axis which held men in their place in those days of 18th century, and with the two axis themselves unhinged from their sure stations, it left men who referenced their lives to them, floating and struggling with their own very human desires and ambitions. In the immediate aftermath of the demise of the greatness, all that is left in the society is a bitterness of mediocrity, all ideals lie decaying in the dust and the individuals are gasping for an opportunity to restore their faith in the greatness of human spirit. The writer, an admirer of Napoleon (Stendhal was a part of Napoleon army when he crossed to Italy (the Rise) and when he went on his ill-fated Russian campaign (the Fall)), comes out waving a definite flag of admiration, in the person of Julien Sorel, when the Napoleon had already fallen and critically looking at the mechanization of the Church, when it was regaining its lost station in the scheme of things; at the end of the story, looking the times he lived in, Stendhal is the biggest hero of this story. This novel is at least as brave as Crime and Punishment, if not more. His earlier book, On Love, published in 1822 sold 17 copies (worse than Schopenhauer who sold 32 copies of his first book), his second, Armance, published in 1827 also failed spectacularly right after he was charged with spying and asked to leave Italy. To write a brave book after this, in 1830, stands an testimony of what literary courage is all about, for writers even today to get inspired about. It is an example of how to be true to your ideas, your convictions without becoming a propagandist or and dutifully staying away from misusing the pulpit of an author. He tells the story, narrates the back story of the time when it happened, the mind which made it happen and then he stops. He does not tell you what to think. He leaves his characters without being judging them for the reader. He wrote once- "A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is reader's soul." He is one great writer who respects his reader and it comes out in his writing. 
This is a story well told, this is a story told very lovingly. This is a reader's delight (if you have the patience to sail through French names and long narrative) and it is definitive part of a writer's education. Do read. This novel is a lesson in writing and it is a lesson in living. 

Home- A Story of Divorce and Devastation

Dev sat on his knees as if in a confession, staring at the bright red shirt spread on the bed in front of him, his eyelids dropping with a sadness that sits so heavy on the soul that it makes one’s shoulders droop. Tears welled up in his eyes, fogging his spectacled vision, as he ran his palms over the soft fabric lying in front of him. He felt as if he was trying to touch the person for whom it was meant. His eyes narrowed as if trying to find something in a distance. He looked from one side of the wall to another, as if trying to ease out the lump in his throat, as if trying to loosen the sudden stiffening of the neck. He threw his head back and stared at the blank ceiling for a while as if looking for some sign from above. He could feel his desperate silent prayers rising up and eventually falling on his face unanswered. Sadness does not come at once, it comes in waves, one after another, each more cruel than the one that went before. He felt as if the space and heaven was shrinking fast and he was going to be crushed between to unfeeling sphere colliding around him.
Questions were floating around him in the sad, solitary and stale air of the fourteenth story room of the Hotel.
“Will this, this perpetual pain, end with death?”
“When will death come?”
“Could this all be a bad dream that has gone on for so long that it seems like a reality of his life?”
Questions floated around like serpents floating about, eventually tying themselves around his neck, threatening to stifle his soul. He longed for someone to shake him by his shoulders to wake him up from this nightmare which hounded him. Tears rolled over helplessly over his angular, near-impoverished faced.
Read the complete Story on StoryStar.com (Click here )

The Unbearable Agony of Unwritten Words

The weather has changed. Skies are clear once again, fog lifted. Azure, cloudless skies; trees bare. The dawn descends with the shy, blush of a fair, newly-wed woman. The days are not yet jaundiced with the pale, bright yellowness of the summers. There is a distinct hint of red in the yellow. 
Writing is sporadic, very less. A few intermittent blog post. Unwritten words sit heavily on the soul of a writer. To accept oneself as a writer is to embark on a dangerous path. It is a solitary profession and a hard one at that. 
I read to prepare to write. I tell myself. Be at some point, even reading has to make way for writing. Writing is not a quick job. It takes time, time and sitting all agitated inside and all peaceful outside, the incongruous internal and external world pulling one apart, in diverse directions. Writing takes time. One needs to tie that heavy stone to the neck of a reckless, wandering mind and allow it to sink to the depths. Bubbles of air escaping to the surface, a brief struggle, gasping for breath and eventual settling down to the bottom of the ocean. Then and only then the world is vivid and the pen is unencumbered. 
Writing won't happen in a hurry. There has to be a pattern to precede it- Reading, pondering, understanding the subject, empathy with the subject, shared suffering -all of it- before the first true sentence breathes on the paper. My novel sits at page number 280, which would mean 140 to 200 pages post editorial massacre. It is sitting there for long. Page 281, blank and barren, sits waiting like an obedient, trusting child in a crowded marketplace, left behind by a father who has wandered off to get a muffin. It sits silent and will not talk to strangers, and it awaits my return. 
Another attempt to get off Social media. Step one- deleted the two applications, Twitter and Facebook from the phone. It is so easy to get on it that it become addictive. Social Media nibbles from the corners on both time and the mental space. Some good friends discovered on Twitter and some old friends re-discovered on Facebook. That said, being on social media is as important as being off it, for anyone as a writer (even as a serious reader, as some studies suggest). 
The agony is unwritten word is unbearable. Reading Stendhal's "The Red and the Black". A brilliant novel. My first Stendhal reading. He is closer to the great Russians than any other European writer I have read. The story largely unfolds into the minds of the main character. A very long book, much like Middlemarch (George Eliot), unhurried in treatment. Halfway through, need to finish (note to self). 
Read "The Journals of Sylvia Plath" on the flight. She writes- "Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible." I do agree. I know she helps, so does Conrad, Fitzgerald and Homer. Reading for writing, essential. But then writing has to follow. Ms Plath writes at another place- "If I am not writing, I haven't been last half year, my imagination stops, blocks up, chokes me, until all reading mocks me (others wrote it, I didn't). So common, plagues writers great and small similarly. That feeling, that unbearable, indescribable agony of unwritten words, which left unaddressed, will soon rise up and fade away like wisps of smoke rising from dying embers. Write, I must. Keeping a distance from technology. Write by pen on paper. SM only for sharing what I write. Write with discipline. 
(Wrote this by hand (not on desktop). I find it is quicker and to reproduce it on Computer is an opportunity for descent edit. Pleasant discovery, to quote David Ogilvy, that my fingers have not lost their cunning. )

The Necessity and the Difficulty of Writing History

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history." - Cicero
Cicero, the unauthorized historian to record to history of Rome has put it so aptly. This necessity of history makes the past so relevant not only to our present, rather also to our future. Any decision, any idea, not pivoted in the lessons of past is essentially flawed. The decision, the idea and the action which follows through could be innovative, brave, new but it needs to have its reasons in the dark alleys of the history. It is a great advantage to Human beings that we have a sense of continuity from our times, our children's times to a history dating back to the first known human being who ever walked on this planet and told how his day went while sitting around the fire after a long hunt in the jungle. 
Our history defines us as people. There is no two thoughts about it. This makes history an important tool to moderately and modestly bring about changes in our present world, when told well. This same feature about history makes it a tool for mischievous mind attempting to change the intellectual fabric of a nation's mind. It was an important tool in the colonial past. And trust me, it did not begin with the British. For Mughals too, India was a colony for a long time. It is evident from the attempts made by Akbar to reach out to the Khilafat, in Turkey, seeking recognition as an equal to the Caliph. Typically a colony is defined as a large group of people, ethnic people, being ruled by a smaller and more powerful, but numerically smaller number of people coming from foreign land. The disparate balance of power can only work by ensuring that the spirit of native majority is crushed in the believing itself to be inferior to the smaller but stronger ruling elite. This makes History an important tool and tempering with it an act of strategy to perpetuate the irrational power imbalance. 
George Orwell alludes to it when he writes, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past." We see this theory very well applied in the British formulation of Indian academic. Unfortunately, the lies and half-lies which found place in our Historical studies, sometimes innocently on account of their lack of understanding our cultural nuances, and sometimes with devilish design to crush any sense of the pride the natives might have in their own history and culture, to bring them into not only military, rather a moral submission. Military submission weakens with time and is hard to perpetuate, primarily on the account of numerical inferiority of the ruling class. Moral servitude, on the other hand by taking away the pride in their own identity helps perpetuate the supremacy of the colonist. The colonials stop believing that they have a right to overthrow power. Their own history is so blemished, their own distrust in their own legitimacy is shaky that they accept the supremacy of the ruling race and surrender any desire to become free. 
This is what happened in India. History is a record of event. Politics make it lean to one end or another. Recently History has come back to haunt us in earnest. For a very long time, we believed the lies and half -lies which continued for so long, even after the British left India as free nation. The early rulers of the India, who set up a destiny, making us look almost like a despotic, loony monarchy, with an emergency rule thrown in, giving way to greedy men unable to handle sudden taste of power in the aftermath of emergency, allowed the academic history created in British rule continue with all its lies. The anglicized Indian rulers became what great revolutionary Bhagat Singh had predicted, Brown Sahibs replacing White Sahibs. Seemingly they understood this and felt comfortable in the continuance of the British system, unsure of their ability of self-rule, rather falling back on the British approval for legitimacy, and eventually when it could hold no more, falling back on hereditary legitimacy. The cabal of English speaking aristocracy came about from those who gained prominence by being closer to the British and by being educated in British system. They felt their lives, there charmed lives, of power, of riches depended on continued shame among the natives (even they themselves were natives, but they rarely believed it). It was a lie, and like any lie, in due course it began to wither away. This is the struggle that we find these days. As the darkness of ignorance tries to keep the light of the truth hidden, the compass of objective history oscillates vigorously. Only last month, I was in Rajasthan, one of the most historically rich regions of India, around the time the debate on a movie allegedly depicting Rajput Queen Padmavati in love with the attacker and tyrant Khilji came about. On one side were shrill debates and editorials in English about freedom of expression, on the other was noisy slogans of Rajput pride. 
Truth was all colored. But it lies somewhere in between. On one side is snobbish eye casting downgrading truth, one the other also, a outpouring of deprived people, people who have been deprived from the glories of their own ancestors. The truth sighs somewhere between the two. I remember, amid the slogans of Rajput and somehow, by implication, Hindu glory, reading the writing in Amer Fort, inscription by none other than a Rajput King, who gave himself the Mughal title of Mirza (Mirza Man Singh of Jaiput), on the walls where he profusely thanks the greatness of Muslim Mughal King Akbar for recognizing his kingdom and granting him enough support to help him build the fort. Truth is neither in the Rajput King who succumbed to Mughal power, nor in the Mughal power, in Emperor Akbar, who while did begin as soldier of Muslims, Ghazi, once spurned by the Turkish Caliph, turned to India, making friends with Hindus. Religion was a potent device to rally the soldiers. Everyone used it. He in fact effected the advise given by Iranian King to Humaun, Akbar's father, while Humaun was in exile. Akbar's initial years were undoubtedly marked with extreme cruelty. But if we look at the military culture of middle-east, even during Karbala, which was essentially Muslim versus Muslim, we understand that Akbar's cruelty was not of a Muslim fanatic against non-Muslims, rather it is a product of his times and his origins, even if we term as Islamic brutality of Middle-east from the times of the Prophet. I would think Akbar's motivation was military victory and throne of India, a rich and prosperous land, unlike the cold and dry deserts of middle-east, and religion was one of the tool he used to unit and rally his armies and eventually, to gain legitimacy. 
Rajput history is equally plagued with stories of betrayals and cruelty for the sake of power and huge inner fights. These wars were not fought to bring some benefit to citizen, or to protect their religion, but to protect and expand their powers. I always tend to believe that one major reason of loss of power of Hindu kings could be that later kings (after those who established worthy kingdoms, in bare and bland military camps) gave no reason to citizen to have a sense of belonging, with a huge gap in the living standards of the ruled and the ruler. So you have a complex systems for hot and cold water for luxurious baths of the kings and queens in Palaces in the most arid, most drought -prone region. We need to read the truth, know the truth in its objectivity. Thus we may learn our past greatness and also our past mistakes. Both equally necessary for a fulfilling future for our children. One visit to Singapore National Museum, which tells the history of Singapore in such a structured pattern, makes one wanting for such a method to be deployed in India, with all honesty (on one information board, it mentions British Raj women in inverted commas as Memsahibs, mocking the social divisions brought in by the British without hiding). We needed teachers who understand history and who can teach history with enough sensitivity, without lying and without some kind of Monkey balancing. Those men, Mughals, British, Rajputs, Mauryas, Gupta, Cholas and Chalukyas, were products of their times. I do not think that they imagined that someday, hundreds of year after they are gone, we will sit in judgment of their actions. Let's not judge them. Let's know them, understand them and their times. I believe they all had a dust of greatness in them, which makes their names survive the forgetfulness of a hasty generation, searching greatness for themselves in the past. Whether it was Rao Jodha, probably breaking bread with his soldiers in his camp establishing a city much before the royal dinner table became out of bond for the commoners, or it was Akbar praying to the Sun, facing east, much to the chagrin of Mullahs, pondering about his place in the history, greatness is not the fiefdom of one religion, one race, one ideology. We must come to terms with our history and become a citizen assured of our place in the modern world and not become fanatics of our own fantasies. I am no Historian and mostly benefit by reading, on my own or following some great people on twitter (like True Indology- @trueindology , Dimple - @dimple_kaul and @sona2905 ) , but I do believe, in all its imperfection, the answers to the future are often hidden in the past. History writing is often impacted by the leanings of the writer. But that is how History writing is, that is how it should be. We must read enough to sift through the false and emotion and find the objective truth. And truth has many faces, depends on how the Sunlight falls on it. Let's not hold it against ourselves for the way we view it, as long as that view is not borrowed from someone, or forced by someone- as long as it belongs to us, based on our interpretation of facts, it is our solemn truth.  A quote of Julian Barne reflects perfectly on this very inadequacy of history which makes it so adorable at the same time. He wrote in The Sense of an Ending "History is that certainty produced at a point the imperfections of memory meets the inadequacy of documentation." 

After The Prophet- By Lesley Hazleton- Book Review

Writing on History is never easy. In the past, men were giants, Gods or Devils. Distances in time and Affection (or Hatred) impacts the way we look at history, and we tell history. It is often inability to offer human dimension to historical character and to presume that men in those times were, even in those times were guided by basic human instincts and merely responded to the customs and conventions of the times they were captive of. The writing becomes even more difficult when the pen slides on the slippery slopes on the edge where history meets religion. It is not about maintaining the superhuman narrative of the Heroes of those times because one believes in it, rather it is again the century old instinct of survival. How can a religion be legitimate if its founders and heroes were not super human? 
It goes totally to the credit of Ms. Hazleton that she makes an extremely impartial and objective inquiry into the truth about the youngest and fastest spreading religion. Being the youngest religion, with established contours of faith around them, Christianity on side and spiritual religions like Budhdhism and Hinduism on the other, and growing in a hostile land, amid hostile tribes rendered a distinct military feature to the religion. Water, food, greens were all fairly limited and tribes controlled access to them. The option to flee into wilderness did not exist. The only way to exist was to claim minor difference of faith (as Muhammad would do not only in Satanic verses, and later denying it, claiming all the while he was an ordinary man), until they enter Medina, exiled from Mecca by the powerful tribesmen. The tribesmen had until then existed on defined hierarchy and fight for supremacy between tribes was an accepted norm. The higher they stood on the hierarchy, the more resources they controlled. Muhammad's philosophy ran contrary to it, as he extolled them to swear allegiance to one God, with the concept of Ummah being bigger than the tribes, and resources being equally available to all believing Muslims. 
It is hard to believe that Muhammad actually thought of Islam to be a spiritual quest. If one examines the politics of those times, Muhammad, a poor orphan with no rights and only claim to any sense of societal respect resting on the riches gained through marriage to a woman, fifteen years his senior, Khadija, would sure have looked at it as an ideology with definite political contours, as a mean for socio-political reform and as a path to power. It had to be such for him and his new faith to survive and grow. When Ali became the first believer at the age of 13 and Muhammad escaped Mecca in 622 AD on exile to Medina, one would believe, he was still unsure of the new faith he had then founded, as he continued claiming himself to be nothing but an ordinary human being. It was only after winning over the Meccans in Battle of Badr and huge bloodshed of Jewish tribes of Medina, who had once welcomed Mohammad and his motley crew as immigrants, that he appears to have realized the great power that those who were kept away from resources by powerful tribes till then, placed in his hand. After that he was the last Prophet, his line diverted from the Christian faith and he was the last prophet of Humanity and first prophet of Islam. 
Ali still was with him, his constant companion since the first revelation and was the first person to believe in his revelation apart from Muhammad's first wife, Khadija. Hard to imagine now, if Mohammad saw what he created as a religion or as an empire, with all of middle east, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Iraq coming under his regime. The taxes were collected in the name of Islam and battles were fought to acquire more land. Probably this duplicity in nature of what he ended up establishing made it difficult for Muhammad to declare his heir. Even when he clearly defined his own family as People of the cloak (Ahl al-Bayt), when he had dramatically presented his family under the cloak to Najran Christians, deliberately resembling Adam's description of Prophets even when he had given to Ali his sword and as much as announced that He would live in Ali and guide his people; right at the time of his death at the age of Sixty-three, he stayed silent on his succession. Shia's believe it was because he believed Ali's stake to Caliph as Islam's sole representative on Earth was pre-established, while Sunni's claim it was left open because Muhammad sought to establish Islam as democratic religion and Shura should decide on succession. A human view would tell that possibly weakened by impending death, Muhammad wanted to avoid taking sides between Ali, his oldest companion and Aisha, his youngest wife, then a teenager. The cris-crossing relationships in the family relationships as was common in tribal customs of the desert, must have made it even more difficult. 
For all the affection Muhammad had for the girl he married when she was six, offered by her father, Muhammad's companion in exile, a fellow Meccan, to help him get over his grief after the demise of his first wife, Khadija. It was Khadija who believed in his dreams, his ideas, his revelation and stood by him in his worst times. By the time Aisha came in, Islamic empire was already getting established. There could be a reason why such little a girl was proposed to be married to Muhammad, then in forties, by none other than her father and friend of Muhammad, Abu Bakr. This little girl, called Humayra - My little redhead, Muhammad's first wife after Khadija, ambitious and feisty, detested dead Khadija calling her toothless, old woman, only to be stopped in track by Muhammad, claiming God granted him only child through her, while withheld it from other wives. The matter of lost necklace made it worse for Aisha, even while Muhammad stood by her. Aisha, her father and supporters ensured that Muhammad's earliest words claiming "This (Ali) is my brother, my trustee, and my successor among you, so listen to him and obey."
Ali was Muhammad's nephew, like foster-son to him. Muhammad was to soon marry him to his daughter, Fatima and make him his son-in-law. We have all indications that he was being groomed for succession. That notwithstanding, Aisha aggressively lobbied for her father, as Muhammad was dying, urging him to meet Abu Bakr, while Hafsa, another wife, proposed he saw Omar, her father, even when Muhammad called Ali's name. The prospective Widows in all fairness had little hope, unlike tribal traditions where widows would remarry. Muhammad had already declared his wives mother of the faithful. It was only power to be sought after which they tried secure through their respective fathers. The struggle began while Muhammad was still alive on the deathbed. He sought pen and paper, obviously to write his will, but the argument began in the room forcing him abandon the plan. What he would have written if he had what he asked for remains unanswered. It might have also resulted in a peaceful, prosperous, less fanatic, more spiritual Islam. But this also we would never know. What we know Muhammad died on 8th of July, 632 AD without an heir announced. Why Ali did not succeed Muhammad is a story of schemes, trickery, bloodshed and plain politics. The drift which began between Ali and Aisha here ends in a battle in which entire army of Aisha is wiped off, but the violence continues, till eventually, Ali's sons are also killed in the most ghastly manner at Karbala. It paved the way for split in Islam in another fifty years of fighting and eventually resulting in every kin of the prophet, not by non-muslims, but by the Muslims themselves. This book is a story written about that. 
It is a brilliantly researched book and paves way for the understanding of the most confounding religion for non-believers. The aggression of Islam, the distrust of Muslims in any thing un-Islamic, is narrated in this history of brutal bloodshed, which was absolutely political and had nothing religious in it. The book grips you and you will not stop until you have finished it. Not only for non-muslims, I daresay, even Muslims ought to read this book to come to terms with the most violent history which gave birth to the youngest and most absolutist religion on Earth, and shocked all the ancient religions. The only way to escape history is to understand it. While the whole world as on day, stands divided on Islamophobes and Islamists, the room for objective study is fairly limited. But it is worth the try for the flight into the future can only be taken by the those free of the cudgels of the past. I was reading Stendhal which I left in between to finish this book. That is no disrespect to Stendhal but is to illustrate the gripping story, which holds your attention till the very end on account of its truth which is more dramatic than any drama.
My recommendation- Do read. Pages: 256Publisher: Anchor, 2010
Amazon Link of the Book - Click Here

My Take on Arun Shourie’s Interview to Swati Chaturvedi

Intellectuals and scholars like the leaders, at times hold a place of such high reverence in one’s mind that any minor slip, any pettiness on their part, breaks the heart of those who had at one point of time, admired them. I was like most of the Nineties youth was always charmed by Arun Shourie, the Journalist-turned-politician. He, with over-sized half-shirts with pens prominently parked in his pocket was probably the first common man politicians in the post-emergency era, much before Kejriwal turned that uniform into a political attire of Twenty-first century. I was quite young when Shourie came into the political arena and like all young men was quite a fool and romantic. Like Arvind Kejriwal, Shourie moved about with the air of middle-class men, hiding carefully and successfully his background of affluence- like his having been schooled in the elite Modern School and St. Stephen’s in Delhi, and his stint in the world bank, much like Arvind Kejriwal who almost made one believe as if the Deputy Commissioner in IRS is as poor a man as a teacher in a municipal school. But I am not angry with him for that. Those days what he wrote was strong, sturdy and substantive. Even his today cannot negate his yesterday. It is more of a disappointment when you find what negativity and unfulfilled ambition does to an illuminated soul especially when accompanied and nudged by someone who has built her own reputation out of bitterness.
For someone who had fiercely fought emergency, when it was imposed in real terms, with thousands jailed, censorship on free speech clamped down with a heavy hand, it is pitiable to come down to what can be only construed as rhetoric and unfounded allegation. If it were only a person record of lamentation confided to Swati Chaturvedi and not meant for public consumption, one can live with it. But with the reputation of the interviewing Journalist regarding the interviews, fake and real one, we might never know.
There is an interesting quote by JRR Tolkien, where he writes in one of his letters, “Criticism- however valid or intellectually engaging- tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say.” And in The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde writes, “Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.” This interview illustrates both the points. It leans on lies and struggles to stand on its feet. The slip begins showing from the very start. The cunning craftiness of the interviewer shows in the first sentence where she, inaccurately, begins the interview with a contention that Modi is only one among with leaders who follow abusive handles. The lady has been herself a most abusive troll and has been thoroughly exposed on the internet for being that. There is no evidence that none of the millions who follow the so-called world leaders are abusive, but that when the idea is to build a rhetoric, who cares about fact. Talking in absolutes, to exaggerate on extremes, is good politics, it sways people. It is poor journalism. But then what our journalists do is barely journalism; it is more of politics. So she falsely positions a lie and to a great disappointment, Shourie meekly surrenders to her propaganda. He quotes Modi calling for his Social media volunteers meet, some of abusive trolls might or might not have been a part of it. But by quoting the even Arun Shourie legitimizes Swati’s inaccurate assertion.
Swati then quotes emergency, which by her own admission, she did not witness. I believe the only truth I discover in this interview is that Ms. Chaturvedi, like many others who loosely quote Emergency without knowing what it meant, have not seen it first-hand and that she is many years younger than me. Mr. Shourie again goes with the flow with vague, obtuse “feels like emergency” statements, made loosely by haters of the government, while they throw choicest abuses at the elected head of government with complete impunity. Shourie even claiming that unlike today, Emergency imposed by Mrs. Gandhi, which had the entire opposition imprisoned, was legal and in some sense, legitimate. He largely ignores the state excesses of those time, in his urge to attack Modi, legitimizes the darkest era of Indian democracy. Swati then quotes Ashish Nandy’s statement, calling Narendra Modi a “textbook fascist’ and seeks Arun Shourie’s views. As with most questions, much like most journalists these days, unlike treating Interviews as an opportunity to bring out the views of the guest, she uses it to substantiate her own views. His worse is however, yet to come, Shourie’s that is, when he refers to Kashmir and in some roundabout way tries to link vigilantism of cow-protection groups elsewhere with the violence in Kashmir. He says that people who get into such skirmishes elsewhere in the country should beware of the reactions it will cause in Kashmir. But the same logic, reversed, never deterred the terrorists in Kashmir. The fear of how will mainland Hindus respond if we murder one Hindu in Kashmir, as a complete genocide was effected in the valley. Thus in his zeal to attack Modi, prodded sufficiently by Ms. Chaturvedi, he ends of legitimizing not only Emergency, but also the unpardonable terrorism in Kashmir. Swati then refers to some morphed pictures about Dadri, as if entire set of handles which she marks as Right-wing trolls were responsible for it. She never discusses it as an internet phenomena, but takes a one-sided view, exonerating Left-winger journalist friends like Rana Ayyub and Aditya Menon who had shared fake pictures from Palestine of decade back to fuel the unrest in Kashmir. She ignores the fact that the fake news shared by unknown handle will cause much less damage than the fake news shared by those who proudly write Journalist on their bio.

Swati in the end asks Shourie if his hatred of Modi emanates from the fact that he did not get the finance portfolio in the cabinet post elections (in which he had campaigned for Modi). Some pangs of old conscience probably does not allow Arun Shourie to deny that and he answers in some roundabout way. If one could use mumble unintelligibly in print interview that is what he does. He quotes as per his version, Vajpayee weeping after Gujarat riot, much like Salman Khurshid’s claim that Sonia Gandhi wept after Batla house encounter in which terrorists were killed, and one seriously feels sorry for how low this man has fallen that he looks more like a failed Congressi today. I would agree with Chaucer, with sadness and great disappointment, that, “the greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.” 
(To read the interview of Arun Shourie on Wire, Click here)

Book Review: Before We Visit the Goddess- By Chitra B Divakaruni

"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall." 
Ms. Virginia Woolf famously wrote the above on how she decides on the time to start writing her new book. I do not know Chitra B. Divakaruni well enough to know if she waits to write before it grows heavy, asking to be cut or it will fall. But the succulent prose of her novel does suggest a very ripe and mature story. Before We Visit the Goddess is one rare book by a contemporary writer, mainstream writer, if I were to say, that I not only finished; I savored it and finished it with a sense of longing. The story is written with such affection that it shows. 
Chitra comes out as a serious writer with deep affection to her story and sincere respect to her craft. The language is not lazy, and the emotions are never half-baked, it almost has the taste of a carefully cooked curry left to simmer overnight, rendered magical by the last breath of dying cinders. The prose is glorious, the story is charming. When was the last I came across a magical metaphor like The magician's eyes flit from side to side as though he were reading something very rapidly. Their whites are a pale yellow, the color of drowned sand at the bottom of a river. The author remains true to the story, thankfully. She is unhurried, honest to the story, not for once slipping into the typecast of modern Indian English writing. Modern English fiction writing broadly divides into two classes- Agenda-driven, Good language, but propagandist; and Lazy and soul-less, the chic-lit class of literature. This novel escapes both and shines in its own intrinsic radiance.
The Novel begins with Sabitri , the old grandmother writing to her grand-daughter, Tara, at the insistence of her daughter, Bela. They have never seen each other, never met and thus we meet the three heroines of the story- Tara, Sabitri and Bela. The story moves quickly from a village in Bengal, to Kolkata and eventually to America. The story is spread over great spread of geography and spans three generation (four if we count Durga who starts this slow and hesitant revolution). We don't actually know about Durga's thoughts about women emancipation but we do closely follow the other three women. Durga is able to put her daughter, Sabitri to college, with the help of a disinterested benefactor, Leelamoyi. But then nothing is rushed in this novel. The steps towards emancipation are light, the flights of freedom, faltering, and the voices of women mere whispers. The three women, of different times, different ages, enjoined by one thing that they have in common- being a woman. 

 The spread of story leaves some ends which probably author had tied up in her mind, but are hard to catch. For instance, what happens to the magician that Bella found in Assam? or what happens to Bijan? or the sudden changes in Tara on the visit of temple- whether it was on account of the story of the death of her Guest's daughter in India, or was it some divine intervention- is left to interpretation of the reader. Possibly it was meant to be thus. I do wish that it would have been nicer if some dimensions were given to Bijan. To be fair, she tried, when we have Sabitri meeting her old flame and getting caught red-handed, hitting at Bella and thus creating a fissure in the mother-daughter relation to be bridged only with the letters Sabitri wrote for her grand-daughter Tara, in her death. Through the intermingled lives of three independent-minded women, we trace the path to emancipation, realize the importance of independence. This is an amazing story. And the way in such a wide canvas, in such a complex backdrop, all ends are tied up neatly as the story comes to close, delicately, adroitly with red ribbons in the end, as words of the letter of Sabitri float in the air like some magical chants, glowing words floating through the dusk- 
'Satisfaction overwhelmed me. This was something I had achieved by myself, without having to depend on anyone. No one could take that away. That's what I want for you, my Tara, my Bela. That's what it really means to be a fortunate lamp.'

My recommendation: Absolutely charming story, absolutely lovely read, especially for women of all ages, and if your are a man wanting to understand a women of any age.  

Amazon Link to the Book (Click Here)