A Philosophy for Modern Life

 I read a book like this and I want to go back to school. The ideas, the people, the history!

We often think of existentialism as something a moody, rebellious teenager goes through, but Bakewell recasts this philosophy for us in her deeply illuminating book. Her cast of characters is huge - from the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger in Germany to the superstars of existentialism -Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus along with other lesser known but no less important philosophers - Karl Jaspers, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, to name a few. Not to mention the famous people these philosophers influenced deeply - Iris Murdoch, Vaclav Havel, James Baldwin.

Bakewell explains the core of what seems to be a complicated philosophy quite simply. Freedom, Sartre says, is at the heart of the human experience. As a human being, I create my nature as I go along. I may be influenced by biology, personal and cultural backgrounds, but none of this completes me or defines my essence - I make my essence up as I go along. "Existence precedes essence." It is a philosophy that debunks anything that impinges on that quest for personal freedom - be it organized religion or the state or racism or patriarchy. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex for example, is a book about how the world imprints itself on a woman through her life, holding her back from her true self. The world makes her a woman - feminine, modest, decorous, restrained at home, forever in thrall of the man's gaze. Written in the forties, it was revolutionary - it made women re-think the lives they led.

In a post-war world, this philosophy asked people to go ahead and make the world they wanted - and it made these philosophers stars. The most interesting parts of the book are when Bakewell combines the biographical and the historical, showing us how each of these philosophers navigated the political circumstances around them - fascism and communism, the Cold War and the anti-colonial movements. And how these circumstances and their personal reactions to them created deep divisions and rifts among these friends and colleagues.

The ideas these existentialists and phenomenologists wrote about were intrinsic to how we see the twentieth century today. The fight against racism, the feminist movement, the anti-colonial movement - all of them at some level, had at its core, the philosophy of existential freedom. It also led to what we today call 'existential angst' - the anxiety we face when confronted with the freedom of personal choice.

But for Bakewell, this philosophy is more relevant today than ever before - at a time when we are surveilled, when issues of race, gender, identity and culture are becoming critical once more, this is a philosophy that puts agency in an individual's hands, refusing to let us off the hook by blaming biology or environment.

Bakewell writes a long book, and parts of the book are less interesting than others. Some of Heidegger's later ideas are not easy to comprehend, for example. But as with her previous book on Montaigne, Bakewell proves to be a great teacher - inviting us into a fascinating world of huge personalities, their mind-altering ideas and the history they made and recorded.
A big recommend for anyone interested in the twentieth century and/ or philosophy.

The World As A Miracle

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
By Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard does a Walden, only this time set in ‘70s Virginia. She describes a year in her life, living in a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains next to Tinker Creek. She spends the year, observing the natural world around her -and there is much to observe in the creek and in the mountains – observing minutely, paying attention to the changing seasons, the light, the wind, the insects and the bugs, the muskrats and the birds, the fish and the snakes. She is a devotee of paying attention – to experiencing the present, ‘catching grace’ as she calls it, unselfconsciously, losing oneself in the tree, the bird, the cloud. It’s the only way to catch the ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ quality of the natural world. ‘’A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals a grand nonchalance, and they say of a vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils.”

Dillard writes beautifully – her descriptions of nature are transcendent. In one passage she describes starlings going to roost, how they flew over her head, for over half an hour, how they ‘seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein…Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind’, how it left her transfixed, ‘bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty’. In another, she describes a stunning sugar maple tree in autumn –‘it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea.’ And in yet another, she describes the migration of the monarch butterflies – “The monarchs clattered in the air, burnished like throngs of pennies, here’s one, and here’s one, and more, and more. …It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley, like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of hardwoods from here to Hudson Bay. It’s as if the season’s colour were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding.” Gorgeous, gorgeous prose.

Dillard is not just an observer of nature. She also reads extensively about the living world around her. It allows her to display a naturalist’s knowledge that deepens her engagement – she observes the praying mantis and gives us an insight into its mating habits; she tells us a newt can scent its way home from as far as eight miles; that the average size of all living animals, including man, is that of a housefly; that there are two hundred and twenty eight separate muscles in the head of a caterpillar. She has the ability to find the dramatic – the egg laying of the praying mantis, the abdomens of South African honey ants, a dragon fly’s enormous lower lip, a water bug draining the flesh of a frog…Dillard is amazed at the intricacy of creation and the variety of form, the utility of each of the forms – and we stand amazed with her.

And it’s not just the beauty. Dillard is as aware of the horror that goes hand in hand, and the ubiquitousness of death. “The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die…The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age’. This is what we know. The rest is gravy.”

Annie Dillard was 28 years old when she wrote this (and when she won a Pulitzer for it). She writes with all the passion and intensity of that age, but it is never empty rhetoric. There is an underlying self-confidence, and a wisdom and gravitas that recalls the writings of Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver and of course, Thoreau.  As with the best of nature writing there is a deeply spiritual vein that runs through the work - Dillard quotes the Bible and the Koran and sees the world as a wondrously inventive creation.

It's a beautiful piece of work that Dillard has created, one to savour slowly and mindfully. There was a sense of loss when I finished it, but with so much of note taking and underlining, I am sure it will be a source of joy for years to come.  

My Good Reads of 2022

A reading slump in the latter half of the year saw me average just less than a book a week in 2022. There was a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, new authors and old favourites, happy-making and thought-provoking. But there was less poetry, less Indian writing, less classics, than I would have liked. My favourites in no particular order were:

1. Devotions. The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.
A self-curated anthology of Oliver's poems, it is a lesson in paying attention to the miracle of our world. Her poems are prayer, consolation, magic, redemption.
2. The Living Mountan, by Nan Shephard

Probably the best book I read all year. It is nature writing at its best, as Shephard pens a peaen to the Scottish Cairngorms where she lived all her life. She is precise and exact and scientific; but also lyrical and meditative, bringing a poet's sensibilities to her descriptions of the mountains. Gorgeous, magical writing.
3. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Stories within stories, fantastical, funny, tragic, this one is an example of how fiction can be truly spellbinding. Left me wanting to read more of this Peruvian Nobel Prize winner.
4. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. By Susan Cain
As an introvert, this book spoke to me. It might exaggerate the power of introversion, but it does a good job of arguing for balance, where quiet certitude can be a counter to a world of networking and Dale Carnegie.
5. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. By Suchitra Vijayan
Vijayan travels along the borders of our nation, documenting stories that describe the human toll of borders and the nation state. A powerful, hard-hitting book that asks questions most of us do not want to hear - what makes a nation, does culture trump nationhood, do borders make good neighbours or unequal people.
6. The Places In Between. By Rory Stewart
A superb travelogue describing Stewart's walk from Herat to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. It is an observant, non-judgemental look at a wild, harsh country with multiple ethnicities and loyalties, whose concept of nationhood is fragile and of democracy non-existent.
7. The Lincoln Highway. By Amor Towles
Towles' storytelling abilities were on full display as I finished a 550 page book in 3 days flat. It's an ode to road trips and friendship, myths and fables, as we are taken on a roller coaster ride across America.
8. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return. By Marjane Satrapi
Combining political history and personal memoir, this graphic novel is warm and funny and poignant.
9. These Precious Days: Essays. By Ann Patchett
Patchett is masterful at the personal essay - warm and witty, frank and vulnerable. She writes on a wide variety of subjects, bringing in perspectives of a wife, daughter, writer, friend, bookshop owner. All the while re-iterating the preciousness of the lives we live.
10. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. By Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane takes us deep into subterranian spaces, where we still find the reach of human activity and where we encounter mystery and awe, fear and fascination. His erudition is on full display, bringing into play knowledge of biology and geology, history and epic poetry. A masterful tome.

There were others that kept me engaged too - a Maggie O'Farrel, a couple of Le Carres, Keene's fascinating narrative of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland in 'Say Nothing', Srinath Perur's funny look at us Indians on our conducted tours in his 'If It's Monday, it must be Madurai', Mischa Berlinski's superb debut novel 'Fieldwork' - a mystery set amongst the tribes of northern Thailand, May Sarton and her brilliant Journal of a Solitude, Shrayana Bhattacharya's study of a generation of Indian women that has seen possibilities open up for them without corresponding support of the men in their lives in her Desperately Seeking Shahrukh.

That's my list for 2022. Tell me about yours.

Shah Rukh as metaphor

Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh 

By Shrayana Bhattacharya

This is an important book, one that documents the lives of a certain generation of Indian women, born in the early 80s, straddling a time period when society changed irrevocably with liberalization, “women who were on the cusp of adulthood when the world entered a new century.” A generation of women that has seen possibilities opening up for them personally, yet having to deal with families less enthusiastic about their enjoyment of them.

Bhattacharya tells the stories of these women, across social classes - a housewife in high society Delhi, a young cabin attendant from Jaisalmer, a single independent working woman in Delhi, an accountant in a government job, a young Muslim woman in UP doing piece work embroidery in Rampur. She peppers these stories with statistics. The labour force participation in our country is heavily skewed (77% of India’s workers are male). Nearly 71% of urban Indian women between the ages of 30 and 34 are engaged solely in unpaid housework. Among the wealthiest twenty percent of urban Indians aged 20-55, only 6% of married women are employed. 84% of marriages are arranged, nine out of ten are within the same caste.  In 2018, only 43% of women in India owned a mobile phone, compared to almost 80% of Indian men, the largest such gap in the world. The suicide rate of Indian women is twice the global rate. All of these to show that “there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None…All the data on gender in India, despite progress since Independence, confirms that our country is profoundly unequal and that the gap between male and female achievement and access to resources continues to grow.” 

It is within this context that we read the stories of these women. Bhattacharya frames them through the fandom of Shah Rukh. The conceit is wonderfully worked. Through this shared fanhood, Bhattacharya draws out the desires and fantasies of these women, as they tell her why Shah Rukh is so important to them. They tell her he is self-made, that he is intelligent, that he understands women, that the love he portrays is the stuff of their dreams, that they have never seen a man peel carrots in the kitchen as he did in DDLJ. But, as one woman says, “No wonder our generation of women is so fucked when it comes to love. We saw this beautiful man dance on top of a train, romance women in the most beautiful settings and do it all with such conviction that we all bought the dream of love that he sold us.” But the men in their lives are far from the idea of Shah Rukh - “Every fan-woman I had met - from Lutyen’s Delhi to rural UP - would offer stories of how a man had compromised her selfhood, how her family would treat her like a ticking time bomb, how the marriage market made her feel worthless, how they were underpaid and how public spaces remain unfriendly.” 

But the women Bhattacharya writes about, all defy some convention, negotiate some form of space for themselves even while never openly breaking away from the patriarchy that holds them back. It could be taking a short break from a stifling marriage, or staying single and committing to a career, or seeking new guideposts to negotiate love. Bhattacharya distinguishes these ‘deeply private rebellions’ from the vociferous sloganeering on the internet about smashing the patriarchy. This is real, lived feminism, that ‘chips away at the social structures everyday’ - ‘feminism that won’t catch the eye but that can trigger change.’.Critics of DDLJ might see Raj’s refusal to run away with Simran and his attempt to stay and work to gain the support of her family as a concession to patriarchy. Yet, one of the women, Manju, the home-based textile worker in Rampur, sees it as a measure of Raj’s strength and maturity. Because in her lived world, she knows the dangers of being cut off from her family, the only source of support if, in fact, something does go wrong. And so we realize that “freedom is won through incremental negotiation, that dialogue amongst loved ones can be a path towards social change.”

Bhattacharya, through her research and reading, has come to believe that access to independent income is one of the most powerful tools of resistance women can have. And that as long as our institutions tax us for ‘seeking a self beyond beauty and duty’ and as long as the state does not recognize the unpaid labours women perform, it is difficult to keep women in the workforce. Which is why a mass female exodus from employment (women’s participation in the workforce has declined quite dramatically) can be so dangerous.  

It is a thought-provoking book, and a very interesting one, putting faces to the data points we read about. It uses Shah Rukh as a topic of mutual interest for women across social classes, in a country as diverse as India, women for whom it would otherwise be difficult to find common ground. As Bhattacharya says, she is “obliged that all talk of Shah Rukh liberated me from a researcher’s extractive gaze of ‘data collection’, that his films and songs freed me from having to look at the lives of women through the prism of deprivation and poverty alone.” It’s a Shah Rukh fan-girl’s take on a generation’s collective ideal of masculinity.

It’s a tough world out there, the change women seek is always too slow in coming, and the next generations still continue to have to negotiate their way through social change to try and achieve the autonomy they crave. As the author says, “Change involves regular people imposing censure and costs on friends and family members, on making personal acts of discrimination dishonourable and shameful. For the brave, change requires bearing the isolation and costs of resistance…Mindset isn’t enough, morality is embodied in how we demonstrate our liberal views in our daily encounters with people, places and our self. Without these intimate revolutions, the best laws and the strongest movements will fail.”

Imagining Nations

 Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan

This is a hard-hitting book, one which raises more questions than it answers - what makes a country, does culture trump nationhood, how does one define empire, or freedom, and ultimately, do good fences make good neighbours, or do they just make unequal people?

Suchitra Vijayan, a journalist and a lawyer, travels 9000 miles along India's borders - through Afghanistan, Rajasthan, Punjab, Kashmir, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam.. documenting people and their stories at 'the frayed edges of the republic', counting the human toll of borders and the nation state. "Where you are born, what passport you hold, can shrink your world, cripple you and sometimes kill you," she says. Of course, most of the people in her stories have no conception of a thing called a passport. All they know is that Messrs. Durand, Radcliffe and McMahon drew lines on a map that changed their lives forever, dividing families, uprooting homes lived in for generations, disrupting ways of life unimaginably. 

The stories are hearbreaking, the ones from the eastern borders especially so, since these are stories being enacted now - in Assam and West Bengal, people who have lived in their homes for decades, whose families live across a line that exists only in maps, forced to prove their citizenship with documents they do not have, their futures dependent on arbitrary rulings by courts and lawyers they cannot afford. "They all look the same, speak the same," says a BSF guard in the Bangladesh-India border, "..that is why we need to keep a close watch." Vijayan calls this "the perfect distillation of Indian nationalism, a foundational myth about the nation's beginning and who belongs within its boundaries and who doesn't."

The partition vignettes from Punjab are less startling, mostly because the tragedy happened more than seven decades ago. Yet even here, Vijayan makes us realize that while we might know the history, and we have all read Train to Pakistan and watched Tamas, there still remain thousands of stories to be told - harrowing, soul-destroying, tragic.

Kashmir and Nagaland are different. For the first time in the book, we encounter people who do not want in, who believe they are not part of our country. Vijayan writes of a memorial outside Kohima dedicated to Khrisanisa Seyie, the first president of the Federal Government of Nagaland (!), with a plaque that says, "Nagas are not Indians; their territory is not part of the Indian union. We shall uphold and defend this unique truth at all costs and always.". The counter-insurgency operations impacted thousands of Naga families, and have left graves across the state, some of which have stark messages for us - a gravestone in a remote border with Burma reads "India killed my son." The Nagaland chapter is terribly disconcerting - it is a chapter in Indian history we have never learnt, and this, along with the Kashmir one are the ones that make us wonder the most about the Indian state - what makes us less of an empire than China or Russia?

Vijayan writes with passion and deep empathy. She is transparent about where her sympathies lie and is scathing about Modi and the Hindutva agenda that seeks to discriminate against a particular religion with state instruments like the NRC and CAA. But this book is not a political rant. It serves as witness to the large human cost of manmade borders and the narrative of the nation state. It is an important book, a complex one, one that as Indians, we need to read, if we want our nation state to mean anything more than lines on a map guarded by an armed force.

Reading Art

 

Olivia Laing has been quite a favourite. Over the years, she has introduced you to new ways of seeing the world, through the eyes of artists and writers, and her own personal take on them. This one is more patchy than her normal work, perhaps because it is a collection of essays and pieces she has already published, a bit of a hodge-podge. It still inspires.

Laing writes about the value of art - about artists “who look with sharp eyes at the societies they inhabit but who also propose new ways of seeing.” She believes art can change things, by opening us to possibilities, while showing us the interior lives of others. She did that for me - managing to create that feeling of a window opening somewhere, into a world you haven’t really traveled to before. 

She leads you to artists who worked through rough times - when being gay was a crime, when Reagan-era government ignored the AIDS crisis, when borders closed and the world became insular. Literally, artists who created art in an emergency. Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Wagnarowicz, Derek Jarmen, all names I had to google. She has essays on Georgia O’Keefe and Hilary Mantel, painting and writing during times of personal crises. She writes love letters to David Bowie, Freddie Mercury. She writes about contemporary writers - Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, Chris Kraus, Sally Rooney; about women writers and alcohol (an echo to her own previous The Trip to Echo Spring); about Frank O’Hara and the New York school. She despairs about the state of the world - Brexit and Trump, walls and inhospitality. And it is always the art that is ‘reparative’ - planting a garden to stop a war. 

There are times when it can all be too much - too many artists you haven’t heard of, too many artworks you haven’t seen. But Laing writes as beautifully as ever. And as she brings one more unknown name into your consciousness, or when you are thrilled you have read someone she is writing about, you open yourself just that bit more to the ‘abundance of the cosmos’, to the ability to smell the flowers amongst the ruin. Laing does that to you. She is quite terrific that way.

In Defence of Liberal Hinduism: Tharoor's Why I am a Hindu

The politics of religion forces one to re-evaluate faith. At least, it did for me. You are born a Hindu,
you grow up conditioned in the traditions of the religion, follow the rituals almost unthinkingly. And then
there comes a time when you feel you can’t defend it in the world anymore. Not when you see terrible
things committed in its name, not when you realize the contradictions within it (the caste-ism and
sexism, for example), not when you start to despise at least some of the people who proudly claim it.
Your liberal soul revolts.

Yet you want to defend it. Because there really is so much to love about it. Those rituals, for one - the
ones you cannot do without, the ones that center you - the lighting of the lamp every morning, the
reciting of the shlokas you learnt as a child, the visits to temples where you can almost feel the power
of the idols that have been prayed to, for centuries. And then what about the sheer beauty of the idols
and the architecture? And the joi-de-vivre of the epic stories you grew up hearing? The familiarity of
your favourite gods and goddesses, beings who are almost part of your family?  What about a
philosophy of the religion, one that you know vaguely, but one that makes some sense in this screwed
up world - a philosophy that preaches a universal soul, and looking inward to find oneness with it? Oh,
there really is so much to love about it.

Shashi Tharoor, in his book, Why I am a Hindu tries to reclaim all that, defending Hinduism against the
ones who preach a narrower version, an illiberal one, one that goes by the name of Hindutva. Part of
his book looks at the history and the philosophies and the route to today’s version of the religion.
Reading that part, you want to go back to the basics, re-learn Sanskrit, read the Vedas and the
Puranas and the Upanishads. You want to read Ramakrishna Parahamsa and Swami Vivekanand,
Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo. Because all of them just seem so interesting - as literature and as
philosophy, as reformers and explainers of a religion. You know there are parts that will contradict
each other, that there is a terribly regressive Manusmriti, but that there is also beautiful poetry, hugely
entertaining fables and philosophies for the modern soul. Tharoor does not shy away from the
contradictions - yet his take on them is the weakest part of the book. Because honestly, not even the
erudition of a Tharoor can explain away those.

He then goes on to chronicle the rise of political Hinduism and the Hindutva brigade. You read about
Savarkar and Golwalkar and your heart starts to sink. This is the most painful part of the book, and
you can feel the welling up of despair as you see how much destruction this pair has caused to the
fabric of a religion and a nation. He is soft on Deen Dayal Upadhyay and his Integral Humanism, but
is quite merciless on the others.

The last part is meant to be a call to arms, a totem pole for the liberal Hindu, a refusal to cede ground
to rabidness and the ‘Semitization’ of his religion. Here he is passionate and intense, and the ardour
is inspiring. Deep in your heart, you want to believe that we can do that - that we can reclaim the
vastness of our faith, we can shame those who choose to narrow it to a holy book and a few gods,
that we can prove to enough people our faith is ‘eclectic and non-doctrinaire’ and that it is the perfect
one for a plural society, since it never has to put down another religion to uplift our own. Deep down,
you want to believe we can. Deep down, you are not entirely sure we really can.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness : An authentic, beautiful mess

It’s untidy. Like the India in which it is set. Characters, each of whom deserves a novel himself/ herself, drift in and out. All the causes worth fighting about, in this strange, beautiful country of ours, find their space - gender, caste, religion, class, Kashmir. All the major political events in the last three decades are there in some form or the other. Like I said before, it’s a complete unholy mess. Like watching the world in Krishna’s mouth.

It works, though. Because somehow, in spite of the overwhelming political backdrop, Arundhati Roy does what she does best. Makes you care about the small people - the boy Aftab who becomes a girl Anjum, my favourite character in the book; the IB officer Biplab Dasgupta, on the wrong side of the war in Kashmir; Gulrez, the old, simple Kashmiri, who is killed and paraded as a dreaded militant; Dayachand, aka Saddam Hussein, the lower caste boy who sees his father lynched by upper caste Hindus as he clears a dead cow’s carcass; Azad Bharathiya Guru, on permanent fast in Jantar Mantar; Maoist Revathy, raped and tortured, and yet writing to the world from her grave.

The small people stand tall amongst the ruins. They make the fight worth fighting. They are the redeemers, the salvation of a world gone horribly wrong. They make the book.

My least favourite character was Tilo - an amalgamation of Rahel and Ammu from GOST and Arundhati herself. It’s a rehashed character and feels like it. But she is the conduit to another beautiful character - Kashmir.

Yes, Kashmir is a character by itself. Roy has some exquisite passages describing its beauty amongst the rubble of a self-destructive war. It’s a long death spiral we cannot look away from - and it forms some of the most powerful parts of the book.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a great read. It is also an important one as it conflates some of our country’s biggest issues into fiction. Is it great fiction? Yes, the agenda could have been better framed. The pulpit could have been better disguised. But then, would it have been an authentic Arundhati Roy? And can anyone ask for anything more than an authentic Arundhati Roy - conscience-keeper, rebel, wordsmith, a god of small things?

The Wisdom of Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge

By Elizabeth Strout

In my teens, when there was a chance to watch world cinema on television, I watched a Russian movie. I remember very little about it - except that it was in black and white and there was a boy and a girl, very much in love. The boy goes off to fight in World War II and does not return. But the last scene is something I can see clearly so many decades later. The girl is grieving, in a way that chokes you up as a viewer - and then she looks up at the sky. A flock of white geese is flying through and for that fleeting moment, the beauty of it makes her smile through her tears. It is almost like the world is telling her and us, that it’s all ok. That however hard are the punches life throws at you, it also throws you lifelines and hope and beauty. You can survive.I read Olive Kitteridge and it brought that scene back to me so very vividly.

Olive Kitteridge is a series of 13 interconnected stories, set in Crosby, Maine - a small seaside town where everyone seems to know everyone else. Olive Kitteridge, a crabby school teacher is the character that holds it all together. It really is her story - but we see her not just through her own eyes but also through others’ stories. Olive is not particularly nice - acerbic, unused to showing affection, a bit of a bully with her young son and accommodative husband. But she has a strong vein of love for her son and her husband running through her, even if that vein is wrapped up in something hard and harsh. It’s that same vein that allows her to deeply empathize with people around her -hurt people, damaged people. People like Kevin who cannot recover from his mother’s suicide; or Denise, the young girl who her husband is almost in love with, who loses her beloved husband in an accident; or Nina, an anorexic; or a criminal in a hostage situation.

Olive herself has her set of life’s challenges - her son, the love of her life, grows apart from her, and she cannot understand why. Her father’s suicide is a lifelong haunting. Her old age is marred by her husband’s invalidity.

And then there are the stories where Olive is not a central character. A piano player whose set life is upset by the return of an old love; a wife who finds out her husband’s infidelity the day of his funeral; a young girl who finds the courage to run away from an overbearing mother.

These are small lives, making just tiny dents in the universe. Very few people are truly likeable. Yet the magnificence of Strout’s characterization ensures we find the universality in every single one of them - each is trying to cope with what life is throwing at him or her, trying to make connections, big or small, trying to find that burst of hope or joy or comfort that makes everything seem bearable. That is the essence of what Strout is trying to say - life is hard, but all of us will find that flock of geese that lightens the soul.

It is a very wise book - the kind that shows how great fiction is really the best kind of teacher there is in the world.

Re-telling a classic - Bhima Lone Warrior

By M.T. Vasudevan Nair

To keep my resolution to read more Indian regional language fiction, (obviously in translation, since tragically my knowledge of the Indian languages I know – Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi – is so superficial, it would take enormous patience to read in the original), I picked up this one by MT. I had heard of it from my mother and I knew this was a book I would enjoy. I mean, how could you not enjoy a re-telling of the Mahabharata? And if it was a re-telling by one of the all-time greats, it had to be good, right?

I loved it. It is the Mahabharata from Bhima’s perspective. The Bhima we know is huge, with a large appetite, very strong, very short-tempered and utterly devoted to his family. We don’t give him much thought except as the muscle man of the Pandavas. MT’s Bhima is all of this; but he is also introspective and intelligent, a brooding, sensitive giant, somewhat of an outsider, with an ability to see his mother and brothers and wife with all of their flaws, yet unable to ever walk away.

The stories are all so very familiar. But MT strips them of any of the ‘divinity’ we have come to expect from them. Kunti’s 6 lovers who beget her sons are not really gods, but mortals whose special qualities are transferred to her sons. Krishna is not particularly divine – he is just a canny, politically astute friend. There is no divine help for Draupadi when she is disrobed – Dhritarashtra is prevailed upon to stop the dishonour. We are told in the epilogue that there are hints of these in the original, and that MT has just added his bit of imagination to re-tell them. The re-telling transforms the Mahabharata into an absorbing but simple tale of tribal warfare, a tale that has been embellished by bards with every re-telling, until we get to the epic it is today.

In some ways, this is a very subversive tale. Bhima sees the injustice women are subjected to – be it his own treatment of Hidimbi and Balandhara or Arjuna’s dalliances with his innumerable women. He also sees the inequality the ‘forest-dwellers’ have to deal with – as with his own son Ghatotkacha who Krishna sacrifices for Arjuna or the forest dwellers whose dead bodies take their place in the fire that consumes the palace of lac. He is also cynical about the philosophy Krishna spouts (that becomes the Gita), saying that when your own sons and brothers die, it is difficult to see the bodies their souls have cast away as ‘discarded clothes’.  

MT’s Bhima sees the cowardice and double standards in his older brother’s ‘Dharma’. He knows how manipulative his mother is – be it sacrificing forest dwellers in the lac house fire, or asking Draupadi to be shared between the five brothers or using Karna’s back story to save her sons’ lives. He knows his own weak spot – Draupadi, who is turned on by stories of violence, who manipulates him to get what she wants, yet who never gives him the love he craves. He keeps his distance from Krishna, who he knows is his younger brother’s greatest friend, but understanding his political machinations, as well.

This is an all-seeing Bhima, but one who never shirks from doing what he needs to do for his family. He knows war is inevitable, craves for it to avenge the injustice done to Draupadi and his family and when it comes, gives it his all. And at the end, on the Pandavas’ quest to reach heaven, he is unable to not turn back to pick up his beloved Draupadi as she falls, and so sacrifices his entry to heaven.

It is a fascinating character study – it surprises and delights, as you see these stories you have heard from childhood in a new light. There is poetry in the descriptions of the landscapes. And ultimately, the tale in the hands of a master storyteller is un-put-down able. Maybe I should find the patience to read this in the original.

Fishy Tales

Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

By Samanth Subramanian

You read a book like this and you are reminded once more that there is little as compelling as truly good travel writing - delving into the idiosyncrasies of people and places with genuine curiosity and empathy, working with journalistic rigor yet bringing in a subjective viewpoint, combining good writing with unexpected insight.Subramanian’s first attempt at a book is an extremely interesting one.

He works his way around the long Indian coastline - Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, moving to the west, to Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra, Gujarat. Every state has a story to tell Subramanian, unique yet strangely connected, interesting tales, bringing to life both the diversity of the Indian subcontinent and the commonality of the life on a coast.

In Bengal, he writes about the Bengali obsession with hilsa (“If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court”) - the right way to chew it, separating the bones from the flesh within the mouth; the difference between the Bangladeshi and the Bengali hilsa; its availability year long, rather than just during the monsoon in an earlier time; and its preparation in the delectable shorsha ilish.

In Hyderabad (not really the coast, but close enough to warrant a fishy tale), Subramanian encounters India’s predilection for faith-cures. The Bathini Goud family’s cure for asthma includes a medical preparation stuffed into a live fish that you then need to swallow - live. Subramanian leaves it to the reader to decide if this is the real thing or plain old quackery.

In the Tamil Nadu coast, he meets the Paravas, an old fishing community converted to Christianity by the Portuguese but whose Christianity is mostly a veneer that envelopes age-old Hindu customs. “There is syncretism in language, in how words such as ‘kovil’ and ‘aradhana’, traditionally intended for temples and Hindu celebrations of worship, are now applied to churches and Catholic feasts. There is syncretism in practice,in the lighting of lamps instead of candles, in the full-stretch prostrations that men performed at Our Lady of Snows, in conducting both the Hindu valakappu ceremony for pregnant women and Christian baptism for newborn babies, even in the respectful act of leaving one’s shoes outside the entrance of the church. And sometimes, there is syncretism in thought, in how a Christian fisherman still propitiates the Hindu god Murugan and refers to him ‘Machaan’ or ‘brother-in-law’, because Murugan’s wife Devayani came from Parava stock - at least according to a Parava legend that has somehow been comfortably ensconced within another faith for five hundred years now.”

In Kerala, Subramanian goes in search of the perfect toddy and realizes that ‘the best toddy, toddy that is fresh and untouched by base additives, should taste only marginally less mild than milk, with a slight sweetness, a faint note of ferment, and the occasional granule of coconut husk.” He is introduced to a world where work can literally stop for toddy, where certain types of it are rigidly sold only to certain types of people, where toddy food is only meant to increase your appetite for toddy itself, where the fish fried in coconut oil is truly an acquired taste and where toddy can make sworn brothers of men who otherwise were vastly different.

In Karnataka, he goes looking for his childhood memory of the perfect Mangalorean fish curry - and finds it after considerable effort in the home of a local official of a Mangalorean fisherman’s co-operative. In a small town between Goa and Maharashtra, he goes fishing for the fastest fish in the sea - the sailfish. He does not find one, but in the process, he gives his readers a peek into the joys of recreational fishing - “The sight of a worthy catch is breathlessly anticipated; the thrill of the sport resides in how suddenly it can turn. But for the rest of the time, the art of fishing is really the art of waiting in thin disguise - waiting not only from hour to hour, as we were doing at sea, or from day to day, as with the fisherman Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but even from year to year, as for the annual Indian variation of the sailfish. There is no room in the boat for impatience; I can’t think of any other sport that so effectively screens its participants on the basis of a single quality of temperament.”

In Goa, Subramanian finds an entire lifestyle slowly disappearing - where the traditional fisherfolk are giving up their ancient fishing jobs for the easier and more lucrative jobs generated by the tourism industry, where the sand of the beaches is fast disappearing into new construction, where the oh-so-authentic Goan shack culture is actually so completely inauthentic, and where the seas have been so over-fished by trawlers and mechanized boats that most of Goa’s fish is now actually brought in from neighbouring states.

In Maharashtra, he goes looking for the Koli community, the original Mumbaikars, and their food. And discerns the difference between Gomantak and Malvani cuisine, while discovering also the Koli challenge to chicken soup - the Nisot. And in Gujarat, Subramanian meets the boat makers, people who have been making boats for generations, with little change in technique.

In his journey along the coast, Subramanian realizes that inspite of the differences he finds across states, what really surprises him is the discovery of similarities - the livelihoods rising and falling with the fishing calendar, the cosmopolitan nature of the fishing communities, ever willing to absorb influences of visitors from the sea across ages, and the battles with the modern age where the traditional fishing trade is being rapidly displaced by businessmen in motorized boats and trawlers. The similarities are so strong because at the end, as he says, “Fishing is still elemental in the most elemental sense of the word - an activity composed of water and air and light space, all arranged in precarious balance around a central idea of a man in a boat, waiting for a bite.”

It is a thought-provoking book, but equally, it is entertaining. If you enjoy travelling through the eyes of a first rate writer, this one is for you.

A Civil War Tragedy

This Divided Island

Stories from the Sri Lankan War

By Samanth Subramanian

“In its most hackneyed perception, the island of Sri Lanka is shaped like a teardrop. But it also looks like the cross section of a hand grenade, with the tapering Jaffna peninsula, up north, forming the top of its safety clip.”

We know the history. A beautiful island in our neighbourhood, torn apart by civil war. Years of festering resentment against discriminatory policies lead the Tamils into a violent struggle for self-determination, for an Eelam, a promised land. Prabhakaran and his band of Tigers develop into one of the most feared revolutionary (or terrorist, depending on where your sympathies lie) organisations in the world, assassinating prime ministers,taking control of the north and east of the island, fighting a guerilla war with the Sri Lankan army for decades. Until the tide turns, with a newly elected President Rajapkse, who takes the war to Prabhakaran, in a ruthless exhibition of military might. The Tigers are decimated, Prabhakaran is killed and thousands of civilians are dead in a crossfire of tragic proportion.

That is what we know. What Samanth Subramanian does is take us to the ground level actors in the conflict. The Tamil ex-military doctor in Colombo who still finds it difficult to acknowledge the role of the military in the decimation of his fellow Tamils in the end game of the war. There are the Jaffna-ites - Sundaram, the mechanic who ran a garage at the height of the blockade, converting petrol-run cars into kerosene-run ones because there was no petrol; M, the newspaper columnist, ex-Tiger and possibly part of their propaganda unit, still a Tamil nationalist, and only willing to talk incognito, who tells Samanth of the last days of Prabhakaran, when he watched the Hollywood movie 300 in a loop, willing himself and his troops to stage an endgame like the Spartans. The ones in exile - the ex-military Tamil in Canada, talking about what it was to be a Tamil in the Sri Lankan army, and what drove him out; Raghavan, the ex-Tiger, close friend of Prabhakaran, who bailed out when he realized he couldn’t reconcile himself to the violence of the Tigers; Nirmala his wife, married to a Tiger and whose sister was killed by the Tigers; Adityan, doing boring data-entry work in London, and nostalgic for the days when the Tigers administered Jaffna. Samanth meets some of the victors - right wing Buddhist monks preaching violence, completely comfortable with the contradiction it presents with their faith; also Buddhist monks who don’t agree with the current regime, yet unable to do much about it. He meets Tamil Muslims, not willing to take sides in the war and punished for their non-alignment from both sides. He meets Ismail, who describes surviving the massacre of a hundred Muslims in 2 mosques in Batticaloa by the Tigers. It is a description that is wrenching; and all Samanth can give him in return for his story is the promise that his story will be told. It is one of the most hard-hitting moments in the book.

Samanth meets Tamils in Sri Lanka who hate the Tigers, for forcing children to take up arms, for their cruelty to their fellow Tamils, for their inhumanity in the name of their cause. Ultimately, it is this hatred that leads to Prabhakaran’s downfall. “This was the war the Tigers lost first, the war for the unconditional affections of the island’s Tamils and for the uncontested right to fight on their behalf. Once this war was lost, once this earth was scorched, it could have been only a question of time before the Tigers lost the other war too”

The end game description provides some real kick-in-the-solar plexus kind of moments. When he describes first hand accounts of the Mullivaikal siege, where thousands of civilians are trapped between the army and the Tigers, when the Tigers drag every young person out to join them in a desperate attempt to prolong their fight and when the Sri Lankan army refuses to let any kind of aid through for fear of the Tigers confiscating them for their use. Samanth listens to dozens of these stories, each more horrifying than the other. And you are left wondering if there is anything man is incapable of doing to fellow men.

There is no redemption even at the end, in Samanth’s eyes. The Tigers are subdued. But their cause is relevant more than ever, as Rajapakse’s government goes into totalitarian mode, wiping out any trace of dissent, even among their own. The Sri Lanka after the war is a bleak world, with little grace on the victors’ side and little fight left in the vanquished. There is no reconciliation, South Africa-style. And that ultimately is the true tragedy.

As an Indian though, you notice the one thing that is completely absent - the influence of Sri Lanka’s neighbour in the conflict. No one talks of the tacit support of Indian Tamils, there is no description of or anecdotes about the IPKF foray, nothing about the big assassinations. It is a gap that is quite inexplicable.

This book is a journalistic narrative of a conflict but it is also a travelogue. The names in newspaper headlines come alive - Jaffna, Mullaithivu, Batticaloa, Mullivaikal. The beauty of the land is offset by the horror of the war that engulfs it. A Divided Island is a deeply disturbing book. But one that needed to be written.