K.C. Bhatt's Blog, page 5

Dog Years by Gunter Grass : It makes one bleed with the pathos of the writer.

What a dogged reading. Looks if nothing is going to happen. None of the character talks with himself to bring out any kind of insight. There is a parasitic dependence on the things without to have any movement in the story. It at times is a dog thinking and reasoning like a man and the other way for a man. What is the point of it is as uncertain and as non starter as it appears, if not a sudden quirk or a twist in the story which makes it worth to continue?
Before you reach the middle of the book Gunter Grass begins to overwhelm a reader with the brilliant way he uncovers the distress and consequences of the war under Hitler in the country. An elderly school teacher, a neighbor of the narrator, who taught literature and writing to his students besides other subjects, disappears for his crime of failing to celebrate the birthday of Hitler. He was charged with eating the candies the school administration has allocated for his students.
The cousin of the narrator, Tulla, who he fingers at times beside the daughter of the disappeared school teacher Jenny, to check the depth of their holes, speculate that the teacher has been taken to a place from where a heap of freshly collected human bones have been dumped in open in their town, which foul the air of it all the time and attract a large number of rats and crows.
Sex scenes, more often than not, by Gunter Grass, are not the tenderest and delicate type. They are vicious, crude and occur like an act of sabotage. Taking a reader by complete surprise besides the characters performing it. Similar can be said about the writing style. It makes things obscure in the way they are described in a convoluted language which often is difficult to get hold of. By keeping the going on a scene surprises by its sudden arrival, for it is shocking not only for what it is but also for the lucid and forth-coming language in which it is described.
One hopes the original German language edition reads better than its translation. Also that, a better translated version comes soon in English, which also cares about readability as well. For the subject is the most deadly war one has known; written by someone who fought it as well. Little other literature is available on this subject otherwise–from the side which lost it.
Tulla takes Harry and Jenny to a leech infested area and makes them attach leeches to their bodies and feed them till they are fully fed on their blood and become easily detachable. Then she collects those leeches and cooks them in a tin pot till it becomes a thick paste and eats it and asks them to eat it as well. Tulla think this is how his brother, somewhere fighting in France, might survive the war. But he was killed soon. In their early teens, these three characters try strange things to deal with the effect war has created in their lives.
When the school teacher’s daughter is taken away by a middle-aged dance master and a probable Nazi official, who wants to keep her as a mistress while she learns dance in Berlin, she comes to knock at the door of the narrator’s family to say her goodbye, but the narrator and his parents do not open the door.
Poignant and heart-breaking scene is when Harry, now inducted finally into the army at the age of sixteen comes to say goodbye to Tulla, who is pregnant now at the same age by a person she never discloses, working as a bus conductor to support herself. She wanted Harry to make her pregnant but he always declined this possibility. She offers her bundles of ticket as a souvenir with which he plays with his fingers like a child. It makes Tulla laugh. How the war was sucking in and destroying the lives of young children fills one with a profound sadness. A while ago a bomb drops at a place Jenny was performing and both her toes were amputated to end her dancing career. But the war was to last another three years. Tulla asks Harry to pay the bus fare for the distance he traveled with his modest luggage.
The third part of the novel deals with post war years in the country. Grass deals with so many trends in a desultory manner in the beginning. He picks technology, economy, politics and much randomly in an arcane language, without making any point clearly.
But soon he picks the people trying to practice a conscious amnesia in mass to forget the bad memories of the war. But then a glass comes to the market for children of ten years of age, which makes them see the past of their parents clearly. They see all the murders which their parents have committed but never discussed. It leads to an epidemic of psychiatric diseases in the children using those glasses and many of them commit suicide.
But, some how, behind the religion, liberalism and progress the society tries to hide from its past. The author sarcastically deals with the hypocrisy of the society to collective forget a criminal past. It shows how neatly and effectively the author is capable of dealing with the things he really feels are important before he goes absent minded again and talks about so many generalities in a language which is difficult to decipher.
In a way he expiates alone for the scores of unacknowledged sins committed by the society he belongs to. There are not many writers courageous enough to take up such a thankless task, though many other countries have perpetrated no less horrendous crimes on man kind than the Nazi violence.
It makes one bleed with the pathos of the writer.

Brothers Karamazov, By F Dostoevsky: Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

After three hundred pages you have an impression if the story is gaining momentum. Not quite so. You have to read another two hundred pages to find that things are now actually leading to the event which the author had in mind all the way. The big distraction is that a character is being called by four different pet names which are mercifully shorter than his real name.

The life described is stifled and stultified by the conditions around–till it suffocates. Landlords philander and drink recklessly and compete with their own sons to win a lover. The tyranny is so deep that the serfs are deeply scrutinized to see if they are rebelling against the state or the religion. They are engaged in an intellectual discussion only to make that inquiry. It is on top of the physical or sexual exploitation they are subjected to in the estate of a landlord, where they can live for many generations with their legal or illegal children. It was possibly a little better and a little worse than the slavery world witnessed due to colonialism at that time. For it was possibly not as penurious but emotionally was more exploitative.

But deep down the life was far more intellectual than in many other societies of the contemporary era.

The renowned poets and authors are frequently referred to. At times in a very discreet manner to remind a reader that the rebellion was never tolerated in the Russia of that era and any literary work with such undertones were silenced not too long after it surfaced.

One such instance is the reference to the banned poetry journal published by Pushkin twenty years before this novel was written. It is so discreet that one has to read the three-line paragraph many times to realize that the author wants to turn the table on the world around him all the way while writing such a lengthy novel. In a literate society revolt is crushed in a literature long before it grips the society.

Always aware of their class, the underclass characters in the book are conditioned enough to behave in a way which is politically correct to the core. Inviting ire of the power-that-be is something no one wants among them. So they witness but never interfere in the wasteful and indulgent lives of their higher class masters. But in their heart they harbour all kind of emotions including the idea of liquidation of a master.

This book the author wrote after the death of his beloved young infant son, one came to know, who was epileptic. There is a character who is epileptic in this book also it deals with the death of a young boy. Also there are other impressions of the life of writer in the characters of this novel.

The author lived only for a few months after his this last novel was published.

However, the Russian revolution completed only after thirty five years of his death. If one is looking for the conditions in the society which lead to violent revolutions like the Russian one, they are described in this book.

The apparently quaint and self-satisfied life of the rural Russia, where religion was used as a tool to perpetuate the system which is so unfair for the large majority, entailed what ensued.

It might not have been a surprise to this author, if he had lived longer, to witness the revolution unfolding and concluding.

The Translation by Mcduff is good enough for me. It effectively portrayed the ailing landlord too, among many other things, who sends a young man, one of the brothers Karamazov, seeking loan from him to a person who remained drunk for two days before he dismisses him with an utter disdain for his folly. This young man is planning to runaway with his young lover, who is almost a prostitute, who his father, another big landlord of the town, wants to marry as well. When he explains this matter to others to win the loan to finance his plans, no one seems interested and instead ridicules him behind him. The book is full of such characters and events which portray the life of the country then at a great length.

It took a long journey and waiting over the drunkard for two days for him to realize that the first landlord was only tricking him to ridicule him by sending him to some one who will simply scoff at his plans. But he does not mind it and is busy to find someone else who might lend him the money.

This book is described as the best ever novel by any writer in any language by some critics. One never came across any other one which under took a more comprehensive project while holding the attention of a reader as well.

Having been written such a long time ago, the book details everything. At times the furniture of a room during an important scene is dealt with–with a long description, which is very distracting. At times the author, speaking as a first person, warns that if he went into the full such detail of a person or a setting or a place, it might entail writing an entire book independently. So he is sparing those details–(and the reader as well, possibly). In modern times an author has no such authority over a reader to patronize him in such a manner.

However, lasting nearly a thousand pages, the book is full of characters being introduced as a sub plot often, who frequently make long discourses; mostly trying to make clear their position on religion or politics or other issues, before they do something which might actually give impetus to the story.

At times a character may speak for five pages without the paragraph being broken.

When the book reaches the denouement, the murder around which the story is built almost loses its importance and a character starts arguing at length with his alter self, trying to make several things clear with himself. He possibly has a psychiatric issue or too much time for intrigue; however, in the earlier part of the story, he is too clever to be a madman and seeks his interests with a great focus. But he is not alone in that. Most of the characters had many layers of thinking which they reveal one by one as the book progresses: Just like the layers of a Russian doll emerging one by one.

Yet another remarkable character is a fatherless, thirteen-year old boy Kolya, who reads widely from the books left behind by his father and tries to surprise the established intellectuals of the town and his friends with his knowledge. He at times pretends to know what he actually does not, in doing so; but he never fails to deal with an adult on equal terms and his peers as his underlings. In his younger days, he once slept on a railway track, on the prompting of his friends, and let a train pass over him. It was to prove that he is desperate character and it made him famous in the town.

So, most of the important characters are well-literate in this story, including a servant of the father Karamazov, who actually is suspected by all of being an illicit son of him. Father Karamazov is later murdered and his two sons and his servant are the main suspect.

Even the women looking for a financially profitable relationship with a high official or a landlord discuss a column published in a journal or newspaper published in St. Petersburg, which speculate about the people and society of their town. At times a character casually passes a serious literary judgement like if Lev Tolstoy can not actually write.

If it was not for the lockdown and isolation Covid19 imposed, one might have never had the chance to go back to a book long back abandoned after reading a few pages. The complicated names, slow pace and the formidable size of the book are not an appetizer really.

All very well but one feels that it could have been avoided and the book shortened to keep focus on the main story of the novel. It is the last book of the author which he wrote while he was in a fragile stage so possibly he wanted to say everything he had to, or having been co-opted into the system at this stage, he wants to make every character politically correct mostly, to save his position in the system. But he has less control over them and they surprise a reader often.

Because, a trained engineer Dostoevsky, after launching his literary career, suffered greatly in the earlier part of his life. By a General, who was an uncle of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, the literary group he was a member of, which did the crime of reading a banned literature, was sent to the notorious Siberian prison where they were to be executed by a firing squad.

While a few have been killed possibly, and he was the third in the line to be fired at, a missive from the Czar himself arrives and the remaining members including Dostoevsky were saved from being executed and were subjected to live for many years in sub human conditions in the jail. It all was before he wrote any literature seriously. So it had an impact on most of his writing.

The book has characters who are often corrupt to the core. A landlord and his sons have affairs with common women. The women know it all but vie with each other to win a common lover. His sons and the servants at his home want to eliminate him. All the characters mostly know each other and create intrigues against one another. It defines their whole life, as they seldom are involved in some other business or intellectual pursuit.

If it was not a murder mystery, about which even the author is not much bothered towards the end, then too the book is readable for the way it explains the social situation of the country.

The court scene in the end does not conclude the story by saying clearly who committed the murder, though it lasts more than one hundred fifty pages. One of the brothers Karamazov, who is convicted by the court, who is very sick after the verdict has been given, always maintains that he is not guilty; the other brother of him, who claims in the court to have committed the murder, is so sick with brain fever that the court and people think if he is having hallucination due to his condition. The third suspect, the servant and a suspected illicit son of father Karamazov, who is very sick during the trial and commits suicide on the eve of the verdict day, does so without saying clearly if he was guilty or not in his suicide note.

Another character dies who is a sickly child, who always is tormented by the insulting way people treat his father for being a drunkard and underclass and a former low-ranking soldier.

Possibly the author himself was very sick at this stage and dies a few months after this book was published. He writes so many things in such a great detail but finally himself loses focus from the story.

He often makes the dubious kind of characters in this book look like the people who are cynical and rebellious. But the upper class people too are very conservative. The Father Karamazov is an erstwhile under class who becomes rich due to his chance marriage to a wealthy women and once she dies he indulges in all kinds of excesses.

The system is so corrupt that the convicted Karamazov is already planning an escape to America while on his journey to the jail somewhere in Siberia–by bribing the guards.

It is a relief to have finally completed the books after dropping it so many times.

Fiction and imagination

In the days of yore, plutocrats or autocrats ruled the roost. They behaved as if the area they ruled is their fief.  They were photographed mostly in front of the library, which had a sumptuous collection of books, at their homes; wearing dresses, sun-glasses or watches of renowned foreign brands. It was to impress the public which often had no shoes in their feet.

Now since the people hitherto belonging to the peasantry have replaced them, their eccentricities too have been inherited by the new rulers without any hesitation. One might unsurprisingly find racks full of thick volumes of hard cover books–still not removed from their plastic covers–behind the seat of a leading politician of the country talking to a You Tube News Channel, betraying how plebeian he still remains for keeping his books in mint condition. Only if he had opened and read a few of them he would have said things more insightful.

However, the finance ministers of the country one witnessed over the years were said to be an educated lot, as, more often than not, they wielded a high degree from a Western university.

One of them once expressed his aversion to fiction and a preference to nonfiction. His policies lacked imagination obviously. While the economy of the country almost tanked, he returned to the office often enough. Before long he was winning awards financed by banks in Europe, as the capital was flying to them from here unabated in the name of liberalization.

In the meanwhile a group declared a war against the state, as it saw no chance of things improving in spite of the democracy the country now had. It did cost dearly to the country and nearly a whole generation suffered the great turmoil which a civil war entails, before the things became peaceful again, though the country is now a republic.

The incumbent Finance Minister too could not be accused to be a well read person either, or possibly, he too prefers nonfiction. As, while he made chocolates inexpensive, he increased taxes on electric vehicles and, the—of all the commodities—books, in the last budget he made public.

At a time when the country is expected to have surplus hydro power, which it plans to sell to the neighbors; and the bill of petroleum in dollars drains most of the hard-earned forex—mostly by the migrant workers, and the electricity is the most costly in Nepal than anywhere else, such policy of deterring the consumption of a local product only needs an education a foreign university imparts on a natives, to formulate. It could not be even an over- worked imagination, which comes by reading too much of fiction.

Also, as the journalists have unearthed a business house which imported a fleet of electric cars just prior to the day the Finance Minister announced the budget and cancelled a large import order of chocolates. So too many coincidences here indicate that it was not an act of genius on the part of businessman but the sensitive information has been leaked by the state for private gains. Besides the journalists here only do not lack imagination.

One cannot forget here a Prime Minister one saw, who too holds a foreign university degree; who nearly established a diesel plant to produce power in a country which is the second richest in hydro power potential in the world. It later transpired that the country already had enough power but it was being stolen by businessmen with the collusion of politicians and bureaucrats. Thankfully, the PM lost the office before long, as then the political instability prevailed in the country and we do not have a diesel power plant to feel proud of.

The political instability was, during yesteryear, a blessing in disguise in one way, as it did not give any politician enough time to do all the damage he could have done. But now since politics has become stable, one wonders how the country could fare.

K. C. Bhatt

Nemesis by Philip Roth: A review of a novel about an epidemic during a pandemic.

When you drop a book and then return to it often only to realize that you want to get away from it at the earliest again and won’t return to it any time soon–is a feeling which fills you with sadness.

The changing scenes and the moods of the characters fail to charm you because it all sounds superficial and sterile.

None of the characters seems invested in anything he or she says in dialogues which are dull, rhetorical and devoid of any emotions. They could have said anything or everything without meaning any of them.

The background is perfect for a book as the second world war is going on in far away locations and an epidemic has taken hold of the immediate world. It must have forced anyone with any developed sensibility to look for deeper meanings in the everyday phenomena like God, nature and the inadequacy of human beings to deal with relationships one falls into and other vicissitudes of life.

Out of it something could have come which might have enamoured one, or engaged one, or entertained one; or enlightened one.

So finding nothing that delights or surprises one even after coming back to a book recalling that life around is similarly beset with an epidemic now besides the problems of other hues–as was the times in which this book is set, is a feeling of an infinite loss.

Touching all kinds of emotions without dealing with any of them to an appropriate extent betrays that the work one has in hand, to regale oneself, was done only half-heartedly. Possibly it was already sold before it was even created. So it is not honest and sincere. It is rather smug, self-sufficient and arrogant.

May be you live till another pandemic strikes the world near you to return to this book again, if not earlier. Also hope that by that time you are conditioned or have mellowed enough to appreciate this work from a writer who is mostly regarded very highly. For the other kind of writings available could be even more prosaic.

Or, may be, you develop an art of feigning emotions half-heartedly, like the characters of this novel, to like this book. In any case, the relief is that the book is short and your patience will not be tested long–longer than the time you survive daily life and the periodic pandemics.

Because the failing could be on the part of a reader too. But one can not be sure either.

The Pandemic and The Probity

One of the mistakes one could do is to compare a pandemic like Corona today with the Spanish Flue of 1918 or the Plague of Europe even before that.

Then the expectancy of human life was less than forty years even in Europe. The literature of Charles Dickens, Maupassant or Tolstoy is full of details of the people who are unable to control either their fertility or their fate. In turn their progeny suffer dire poverty and its consequences. The lives of these illustrious writers were those of a victim of the prevailing social conditions in most cases. Be it deprivation or affluence.

Then an epidemic breaks out and the world reaches to a condition where a war is waiting for it. At times, in the middle of a war, it is caught by an epidemic which takes a heavy toll on either side.

In fact, the contemporary literature of that time, elsewhere too, is full of such descriptions.

The magnificent growth of science since then has made those diseases treatable with very cheap and easily available medicines today. Besides the standards of hygiene today are way ahead than those times.

So, if ever, the humanity is better prepared today than ever before to stem an epidemic or a pandemic long before it reaches the proportions of the old times.

Also, we fortunately live in the age of information which has made it impossible to hold it back for a long time. It spreads in real time all over the world at once.

So, theoretically, it is impossible for an epidemic to terrorize the people like in old times, even in poor societies, which have an easy access to information.

However, it the memory of those epidemics, passed on over the generations, which haunt the people and causes panic among them.

Also, in some cases, the complacent attitude of the people about their safety from a recent epidemic like Corona have left them vulnerable to its ravages even in the affluent part of the world.

It is also important to be watchful about the political implications of Corona as well. Some politicians, who were standing on a shaky ground, could use this situation to fortify their position by doing things which could make the situation worse.

Like black-marketers and hordes, who try to enhance their capital in such conditions, politicians could use this epidemic to gain a political capital.

Therefore an ongoing vigilance is necessary on the part of the savvy, to preempt the possibility that such nefarious designs are allowed to prevail unbridled while the society loses. The standard of probity are still poor among the people who are benefiting from the system prevailing.

A glass of Yak’s blood

Middle age brings crisis in the life of Rajib with health, job and family issues arising and compounding his problems. He begins to see the world in a different way and feels as if he was being short-changed by everyone he tried so hard to please all his life in his family.

He tries to find love in a relationship with a much younger woman Gitu. They escape to different hill stations from their work during week ends to steal a few moments of intimacy. Then Gitu drops out to marry even older and richer man than Rajib.

Gitu is an unwanted child of her parents whose family was displaced by the deepening Maoist war in the country. Then her mother dies and her sister turns insane. Her brother finds a job In Japan later but he seldom helps his family. Gitu suffers emotionally and physically in her married life too even after she becomes a mother. She meets Rajib after many years and they revive their relationship. Rajib finds that she is now very different than the impetuous young girl he had fallen in love with.

Then Gitu’s husband dies and the story takes a strange turn.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/554305

I will try!

It was the book shop I went to visit in Bag Bazar after many years.

Earlier I lived in Exhibition road area and often went to this shop for it had a good collection of fiction, non-fiction and other books of general interest.

It was a unique shop in this regard as all other shops in Bag Bazar and Putli Sadak area mostly sold text books as there were so many university campuses around and the roads remain crowded with students throughout the day and evening.

The students were often also smartly- clad-in-dress students of a women’s college in the area. When you are young you want to be around such company hoping to make an acquaintance with a suitable woman.

It was a time when Late Princess Shruti, the only daughter of King Birendra, too studied in that campus. However, it was said that she came and left in a car and only her closest friends had a time to look at her and talk to her. Only a few people ever claimed to have seen her at the campus.

The bookseller running the shop was an elderly man with a kind face. He often was himself reading a book silently. He barely smiled at a customer who entered his shop before his gaze returned to the book he was reading.

He did not mind if a customer lingered long in his shop and browsed through many books before he left the shop without buying any. He just smiled again at him while he left.

He smoked often on his seat when he took a break from his reading. So in his shop there was always a residual reek of tobacco all the time.

Mixing with the scent of books and glue it formed an aroma I liked, while I leisurely perused the books I took out from shelves one by one. I carefully placed each of them back from where I had taken them as I did not want to bother the seller with any additional work on account of my visit to his shop.

It was from here that I purchased many titles of Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, V S Naipaul and many others. Those titles still remain with me after more than twenty years. Finding Diary of the last Indian Viceroy Lord Mountbatain and the stories of Gay De Maupassant were some spectacular discoveries I made at that shop. These writers enriched my world tremendously. I kept rereading their work as they answered best my anxieties in different stages of my life.

I also bought from here many books which I abandoned too. One such book was by a classical English writer half of which was written in Greek between English.

With the time however, my reading became diverse like the contents of my life. I had now my wife and children who were growing up fast demanding a great deal of my time and other resources.

Also, I shifted to a locality in the south of Kathmandu which had lower house rent and from where Bag Bazar appeared too far away and the Himalayan Mountains glittered in the north every morning as the sun rose. It all occupied me so totally that I was almost under a spell to only focus on the urgent matters and not to indulge.

So I did not go to this shop for a long time.

Finding the garlanded framed photo of the bookseller just above his seat was deeply saddening. His son, sitting on his seat, on asking informed me that a few years back his father passed away and since then he has been looking after the shop.

He just smiled as I said sorry at it. Then I went to look for a few titles inside the shop.

I found that now this shop had so many titles from Nepali authors too who wrote both in Nepali and English. Beside now it sold many text books too.

Many of the books were on a heavy discount. Among them I found a book which was a collection of articles from a journalist who wrote routinely for newspapers in older days. It was a collection of those articles.

I was never a big fan of his writing and mostly ignored his columns which appeared on every weekend issue of The Rising Nepal on Fridays and other newly arrived English dailies and weeklies. He then had a good following and readers were found talking about his columns in a social gathering.

I had heard some time before about the death of that columnist. He had lived to the age beyond seventy writing his scandalous columns almost till the end while living a life mostly supported by business and political interests he promoted in his writing, rather than by his writing.

Now finding his book in my hand at a discounted price my heart filled with ambiguity. I knew his name so well that I could not ignore his presence in the book shop. By his admirers he was possibly entirely forgotten as his book had no takers and it was on a discount.

I decided to buy his book less for reading more for keeping as a souvenir.

In a way it will help me to invoke the nostalgia of the age which is slipping away slowly for those too who have survived it, not to mention those who have passed on with it.

For the ever changing dynamics of time has demolished many old structures and has created so many new landmarks at their place that one feels at a loss while seeing a familiar old city disappearing and a new one emerging which has no sign of the one that has been replaced. It is largely true for the people too.

In such a tumultuous age, may be, only a writer one was familiar with, could help one relive the age which seems so distant now.

It was my love for the form not the content that I decided to buy the book, which had brought together me as a reader, him as a columnist and the book seller who sold his work. We were complete strangers otherwise.

Before I left the shop the son of the late book seller asked me to visit again. He was neither a smoker nor a reader—I had noticed. His eyes were restless, besides. He was a man very different from his father.

I said I will Try.

K C Bhatt

Stimulous far worse than recession

A recently published report has brought to light that the global debt is escalating faster than expected and has exceeded two hundred fifty trillion dollars earlier than it was predicted.

It was also mentioned in the report that the two biggest economies of the world account for sixty percent of the total borrowings recently which raced to a staggering 7.5 trillion dollars in the first six months of the current year.

It was not mentioned in this report by what percent it grew over the last year. It also does not mention which of the two biggest economies is more responsible for pushing the world to the abyss of a total collapse. It is important to note that while China has a growth higher than six percent, the USA too has a cool growth of three percent. It is a remarkable growth because the rest of the world is feeling either recession or, worse even, a stagflation. Communist China or the democratic USA: the economic success story is the same for both.

Recently, the Chinese middle class displayed its muscle by spending thirty billion dollars within twenty four hours in online shopping to celebrate the ‘Single’s day’. It can be assumed that the people behind it are young entrepreneurs or professional in their prime years. So it is unlikely that any time in the near future any one can put pressure on China through economic sanctions to make it more amiable to making changes in its polity. Actually reverse could be the case as it is almost similar to the leading economy of the world in size and is growing twice the rate.

It may be a reason that the leaders of former European powers make a bee-line to win favours from China, as recently, President Trump has not been very friendly to them and has placed trade barriers to reduce trade deficit of the USA with EU nations apart from arm-twisting them to cough up more money to foot the bill of NATO.

Besides many countries defined as Emerging economies are already having a debt more than two times their GDP and they are borrowing more to avoid sinking altogether.

Many economies in EU and Argentina and South Africa are incapable of keeping them afloat without a routine bail outs from either IMF or WB; or other agencies; or Germany directly. But for them every fresh economic stimulous has proved worse than the diseases which ail their economies, and they might never get revived for they have a strong culture of distributing social benefits way beyond their capacities.

Any efforts at reforms there have been stiffly resisted by their people. Moreover, these countries have always been advised by their donors like IMF and WB and now in no position to decline more advice from the same. So they no more are sovereign nations in strict terms.

In earlier days these countries were colonial powers, when the plunder of colonies sustained them. After the end of colonialism money-laundering kept them afloat. But now the global public opinion against it has dried it up significantly.

There are more countries which were colonies earlier but are steps away from falling in the similar situation and still have debt less than hundred percent of their GDP. They do not take many advice from the donors but have a colonial system which was not changed much after independence and preys on the people to create a native ruling class which is far more ruthless than the real colonials in exploiting its own people.

However, this can be reversed only if the two largest economies agree to diversify their trade. They account for almost half of the global trade presently and any disputes between them do not last long for it hurts both the sides. Besides their debt situation indicates that they are not in as good health as they claim.

For this situation is precarious for the leading two economies too, as finally it could reach a point of no return and bring down drastically the economy of the world which is barely growing at two percent.

K. C. Bhatt

PR 21 Nov. 2019.

Sold-Unsold

The book-shop had just opened and it was quarter-past-ten on the Friday morning.
As soon I entered the shop I saw on the left kept on the table dozens of unsold copies of a book titled Sold.
I knew it was a table where the books on discount were displayed before one climbed the steps to enter the shop-proper, past the billing counter, to find more books.
I checked the price of it to find that it was being sold at a tenth of the price mentioned on the cover.
Earlier too I have found many books there on that table from various other writers which were no less celebrated.
I distinctly remember to have discovered there a title of a model-turned-Indian-writer which has nearly a dozen photographs of her on the back of her novel.
Not to mention the pulp fiction which was so popular only a few decades back but had no taker now, from the likes of Wilber Smith, for example.
The clerks and staffs in the shop had just taken their seats and they were sipping their first tea in office--relieved possibly to have made it to the office in time, fighting the notorious traffic of the city at that hour.
Dipawali festival was to start from the next day and they possibly were already preparing for the holidays ahead. So they were talking with each other, not looking at the few customers who already were checking or browsing the books inside.
Reading population has steadily increased in Kathmandu over the years.
As I too entered the shop-proper I found the first few tables and shelves full of books just arrived.
It was a surprise to find a shelf full of many titles of V S Naipaul. I checked the price of his thin volumes like Literary Occasions and India a Wounded Civilization. I realized that their cost has nearly doubled than the edition I bought of these books a few years back. I recalled however, that in the meanwhile, the writer has passed away. So if I bought one of his books now, I will do so with a heaviness in my heart. Similar would be the case with Philip Roth. Writers you like pique you and you detest them often when they are alive but feel a sadness when they are no more for there is no one for you to look into the future and explain the matters. It is like having an additional sense to understand and deal with life.
You possibly never feel the same for anyone else you have not met ever what you feel for a writer you like.
There were other new arrivals from writers like Mark Tully and Pico Iyer and a few others, who sell well--as well; and a new edition of their books is always on display, at times with a different cover to charm a reader.
I was looking for a book of George Orwell, which was stored in the upper floors of the shop always along with other classical writers.
I found that the book I was looking for was available but the cost was way too much for a work whose copyright has expired and any printer can print and sell it.
Troubled by the scandals life brings one every other day, I prefer books to provide me some escape.
I felt scandalized again though this morning, while I saw yet another celebrated book, which was so much talked about by the newspapers recently and the people in book festivals and industry, being sold at a junk price.
However, finally it was reassuring to find that good writing never loses its value and that the not-so-good writing cannot go much far no matter how much puffed it is.
My apprehension about a new celebrated book has been often proved correct, and I wait for the hype to die down before I decide to go for it.
If it lingers as a celebrated book I will read it in due course. If it soon appears in the discount section of a book-shop at a junk price then it was never worth the bother.
To uphold a recent intellectual fashion comes with its risks.

Burmese days : A review

On 8 June 2016

A review of Burmese days by George Orwell

The most unflattering account of India and its people is there in ‘Burmese days’. The authenticity of the book is stunning. George Orwell saw things far more clearly than even Forster, who totally ignored Hindus for they appeared mysterious to him, besides noting passingly Dr. Godse.

On the reverse side, the Gorge Orwell’s book presents the colonials in even poorer light. The true nature of colonialism and its soul-sapping decadence and corrupting influence on both the parties is pity-provoking.

You simply can not detest the British underclass, representing the face of colonials in India. They are capable of inflicting the severest violence on the natives to prove their loyalty to the Raj and win promotions, while they are distressed by their financial worries, childrens’ education or their future, once they complete their tenure in India.

For the ones not married yet, finding a suitable English match is almost out of question. At best they will find a woman who is considered too low in Britain and fit to be a servant only, or fit to marry a British man serving in India.

Then you have orphaned and destitute English young woman coming to India looking for a husband.

(Such was the tyranny at home–Towards which he was drawn ‘Like a moth to a flame” in the words of BBC–and Orwell went out looking for it all over the places to begin his revolution.)

The prospects of joining the retirees’ ghetto of British-Indian servicemen in England is the another loathsome inevitability at the end of a such a career.

That is, if an uprising of natives does not annihilate them before that.

They drink and indulge excessively to keep their minds off the dirty work they are doing here in most cases. Then there is the fear of tropical diseases.

From the first sentence it holds you by your neck and hits you with brilliance almost relentlessly.

He was disillusioned of his job and despaired as a writer to almost kill himself by smoking while writing 1984. He had weak lungs and a TB and lived a life of exile mostly. For his writing rendered him an alien in Britain.

To this day few writers have the courage to follow his legacy and Britain reads and produces occult-fiction or mommy porn mostly, if it not regales in foreign cultures.

The concept of home guard he suggested and the government adopted during the WWII gave him a hope that a revolt will take place in Britain itself, with millions of armed civilians. But he failed to see that British people were incapable of it, being very tribal by nature.

Before that he joined the Spanish civil war to fight the tyranny and got nearly killed. His personal life says that he was a born revolutionary with no true comrade. So writing was the last resort to him though it earned him very little to ever get settled in life. Today his works earn millions of pound in royalties.

What is the most appealing about Burmese days is the intimate scenes between Flory and his Burmese mistress in the earlier part of the book. The hostility and mutual distrust among them is total. Flory needs her to relieve his carnal desires and she needs Flory to extort money. They hate each other as much as possible otherwise. Once this relationship fails the woman turns vindictive, prompted by the villain and finally destroys Flory. The villain is a Burmese in British civil service who is against Flory because Flory supports a South Indian doctor for the membership of the club, where only one Indian will be entered to make it look more egalitarian, as per orders from higher commands.

It divides the members of the hitherto all white club, who sulk at the prospects of having an Indian now in a all white club. Now they want the one closer to them. It makes Flory an enemy of the rest of the whites and the other wannabe for the membership: the Burmese villain, for he clearly supports his friend the South Indian doctor for the membership.

It is the most forthcoming narrative of the writer where he doesn’t hide behind many symbols or allusions. Which is the case with his later work which was more celebrated than his first.

Though it is about Burma rather than India, it is almost about every country ever colonised.

The ending disappointed a bit. For neither Flory is that sensitive a soul to commit suicide after killing his pet dog when he was rejected by Elizabeth for the second time after his disposed Burmese mistress creates a scene in a church gathering. He was never that proud of his Englishness that the rejection of an English woman, who is an orphan and a destitute and is desperate to find a husband in India after finding none at home.

On the part of Elizabeth too, the second rejection of Flory is too much over done with. More so since she already rejected Flory for the same reason earlier and then accepted back after she herself was rejected by the military officer Varrell, who she and her aunt were prospecting for her husband. Flory was rejected first time as soon Varell arrives in the town and is accepted back as soon Varrell leaves without saying a goodbye to anyone after his month long stay in the town, during which he took out Elizabeth almost every evening but never proposed the marriage Elizabeth wanted from him so badly.

In the meanwhile the uncle who gives her shelter in Burma has repeatedly tried to rape her.

All British characters are too practical in the book for they are from the underclass at home and are out there to make a career in British Raj in India. When they appeared inordinately principled in the end of the book, it looked disingenuous to say the least.

If it was created to make the end dramatic it has failed completely. If it was done to uphold the uprightness and pride of British colonials it again fails miserably. For the book gave away a great deal earlier on that count.