The Curious Incident of the Young Man in the Night-Time

At that point in time a decade or so ago, life played the tune of a broken record for him. The same routine was repeated countless times and this kept going on and on until one incident jolted him out of the reverie. It was the first time he had stayed away from his hometown in Kerala and the night shifts at his workplace did not help matters much either. Staying alone from his roots in a large city like Chennai was also taking a toll on him. Work was scheduled in such a way that starting from late in the afternoon, he was working till around midnight post which office transport drops him off at a lane near to his apartment. Before we get to the incident proper, let us also spend a little bit of time to understand the locale which plays a very important part in all this.

He was staying in a shared apartment with a few other teenagers all of whom were of the same age group and working on shift timings that were equally weird. The apartment was not immediately visible from the main road and there was a narrow lane that needed to be crossed before the complex even became visible. Right after leaving the main road and after a few hundred meters there was a slight fork in the path. At this fork was situated a street lamp that shone onto both sides of the path. The right fork led through a by lane and into an area which was bordered by houses on either side and which further widened and led to his apartment. The left fork on the other hand led to a crematorium that was built and maintained by the municipal authorities. The crematorium was a place where the final rites were done for the  derelicts, homeless and the unknown. In a large city like Chennai, the number of such nameless deaths were quite high and the crematorium was operational on all days of the week. The entry point to the crematorium was also such that it did not have steps and was wide enough for a gurney to pass through. Day time also saw a large number of feral street dogs in the area.

Our protagonist is someone who would rather die than be seen as anything other than an alpha male. Even when he would be petrified on the inside, he would never show that face to anyone ever. Everyday after the office transport dropped him off around 12.30 AM near the road, he would put on a song on his mobile phone and without looking at all to the left side of the fork would jog to the residential area keeping the street light as his target. The light and the residential area beyond was what he always identified as the safe zones.  Over the weeks he became so adept in this approach that he had even committed to memory that the number of steps to the street light was 60.

On the day of the incident, he forgot his mobile phone charger at home and by the time it was 11 PM it had ran out of charge and was switched off. When the office transport came to a halt at the start of the lane by around 12.30 AM, he was greeted by pitch darkness. It seemed to be a late night power outage and the street lights and the familiar front porch lights of the houses on the right side were all out. After the cab left, there was just darkness and him with no way of figuring out what was where. An initial wave of absolute terror washed over him but he fought it all away and decided to rely on muscle memory to resume his nightly routine jog. The difference today was that there was no music to calm his raging nerves and no light to direct his attention to. He began the jog and pretty soon the steps reached 40, 50, 60 and even 70 but even then there was no familiarity to the surroundings. He stopped the jog and turned around a time or two but still no luck in figuring out where this place was. A few tentative steps here and there and still nothing. His watch did not have a luminescent dial and all he could hear were the seconds ticking away. In his own evaluation, maybe 30 minutes would have passed and he was pretty much completely disoriented by then. In that state of mind, all that he could think of was to wait. A few of his flatmates finished their shifts by around 1 AM and reached the lane by 1.30 AM or so and if he were to wait on the road then it would be easy to catch up with them and go home together and plus it would be safer on the road than anywhere else by the wayside. With this reasoning in place, he sat down on the still lukewarm road and by sense of touch found a stone lying nearby. The stone was to repeatedly tap the surface of the road with, in order to keep any curious creepy crawlies at bay.

The weight of the day hung heavily on him and sleep was pretty overpowering an emotion by then. He stretched out on the path and went to sleep. It was an uneasy and fitful sleep and later into the night he woke up to the sound of male voices talking to each other. In the sleep addled state that he was in, the exact language that they were using was something he could not figure out. In whatever little Tamil he knew, he raised his voice and shouted : “Anne ! Kaapathungo ! “ (Brother, I need help here !). Immediately the voices stopped and resumed only after a few moments of silence. There was a slight breeze and while he could not hear footsteps, the voices seemed to be coming closer. He sat up and waited for them to approach but they never did arrive. The breeze kept blowing and the voices disappeared soon after. In a dejected and hungry state, he went back to sleep again.

A harsh light shining on his face was what woke him up and it took a few moments for his brain to register that power had resumed and it was the radiance of the street lamp that had woken him up. The first thing he looked at was the watch and the time read 4.30 AM. Nearly four hours since he started walking home and never reached and this was motivation enough for him to sit up and take stock of his surroundings. The sights that greeted him were almost enough to make him collapse again but somehow in that petrified state, every single thing that he lay eyes on was registered on to his mind. Apparently, muscle memory had failed him and he had chosen the left fork on the road and ended up walking straight into the crematorium. To make matters worse, all this while he was lying on the floor right next to the pyres where cremations happen ! This was like a bucket of cold water to his face and he fled immediately to the apartment. Adrenaline kept him going until he got home and collapsed on the bed. His roommates had a laugh riot at all that happened and since his phone was switched off, were under the assumption that he had either slept off at his desk or found a romantic tryst !

The fever that started next morning lasted for a week and the memories of the night are etched permanently into his mind. It is so much so that graveyards always fill him with a sense of dread now.

Note : This was narrated to me by a friend. Factual inaccuracies, embellishments etc. are all mine.

Life in the time of Covid-19

The one sub-genre that I have always relished reading much of is post apocalyptic science fiction/survival and the way the past few weeks have come to life have begun to make me question how lines between reality and fiction can often become blurred. In most of these stories, there will be an individual or a small group of individuals stuck together in a shelter (out of choice or otherwise) who venture out only for the essentials while being extremely wary of the threats that the outside world holds. The color palette that fiction holds gives the author freedom to make these threats take a myriad of forms : roving hordes of barbarians, murderous zombies, vampires et al. If you sit back and peel away the layers of these fantastical elements then what you are left with is the hard reality of how the world has been coping with a pandemic over the past few months. Starting from a province in China, the Covid-19 virus has swept through almost all nation states and left a trail of death and suffering in its wake. There were quite a few articles (and optimistic ones at that) which I read of late that spoke about how on a relative scale this pandemic is not as a life threatening as some of its predecessors ( read Smallpox, the Bubonic Plague, Spanish Flu etc) but that said it really is rather terrifying to be sitting at home while being laid siege to by an invisible enemy.

India is now in the second week of a lock-down which as a methodology to prevent large scale community spread of the disease has been decently effective if one looks at the numbers at the moment. It also serves as a realization that situations that you had earlier left to the realm of fiction can come to life in surprisingly short a time. While the lock-down meant whiling away time in the comfort of home for a lot of people, there still are multitudes in India who eke out a hand to mouth existence. The miserable plight of such people were brought to light right after the lock-down was imposed when such laborers started leaving in droves to their villages from the large cities like Delhi. Their source of livelihood in the form of daily labor having ground to a halt and with the increasing threat of a deadly disease in the horizon, they opted to flee back to the villages they had migrated from. If you have been to India in the summer, you will know how unrelenting the sun can be and most of these people decided to undertake a journey of an average of 300 KM on foot in the smoldering heat with their children while even shops that sell basic essentials would not be open. It was tragic and extremely brutal a scenario.  Since this happened in my own country and also since there was widespread media reporting around this, I came to know of this story and I can only imagine how those that live their entire lives on the borderlines of poverty might have fared in these times.

Most of the people I talk to in these times express a hope that things will be back to normal at the soonest but that also makes me pause and think. With so much changing around us, what will be the new normal ? The aftermath of this pandemic in economic terms is something that is still not fully felt and there is every early indication that the new normal will be something that we as a society cannot begin to fully anticipate yet. The question really is : how will we cope with it and how will we adapt to it ? Maybe the balance of power will shift to hitherto unseen countries and regions, maybe there will be new titans in the fields of industry, new forms of entertainment might arise and how humans coexist might also undergo a change. Unless the rapid spread of the pandemic slows down to a trickle, these questions will have no immediate answers and yet it is impossible to stop doing a guesstimate of how this will all pan out.

These are dark times and more than anything at the moment, what the world needs is a bit more kindness, hope and cooperation tempered with common sense. If there is anything that the past weeks has taught me, then it is that human stupidity is a far, far more dangerous aspect than any viral strain will ever be.

Stay safe everyone, let your humanity be the guiding light through this dark tunnel !

P.S : Please do check out this succinct article by Yuval Noah Harari ( a personal favorite) on FT. The perspectives he puts across are compelling food for thought !

Book Review : New Kings of the World by Fathima Bhutto

 

The way that the world has looked at domination and control has changed drastically over the last few decades. Barring a few nation states rife with warfare, you do not need to roll battle tanks over the promenades of cities to actually win them over when you have the internet !

A little bit of flashback here – my childhood in a small town in southern India was in the 90’s and one of the biggest wonders of that time was the VHS tape and the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Most of the kids of from that era eagerly waited to get VHS tapes and watch movies which otherwise never made it to what little number of theaters we had then. It was through this medium that I discovered Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Terminator and Tom & Jerry among others and also got a rudimentary understanding of how to use the English language as a medium of communication. All of these movies came out of American stables and were all pop culture icons for a generation. Even when we could not pronounce the name “Schwarzenegger”, us children used to call him Arnold and debate as to whether he could beat Stallone in a fight. With the entry of cable TV into the Indian home, the stage was set for the American lifestyle to invade the minds of people. It was only with the passage of time that I could reflect and come to an understanding as to how much the sensibilities of America in the 90’s had coloured my thought process for a long time. The point that I wanted to drive home was that all you needed was a culture worth exporting and you have it made. The era of American omnipotence in the arena of global entertainment is now a faded silhouette for there are some other big players out there. Fatima Bhutto comes up with a crisp account that introduces three of these players : Bollywood cinema, Turkish Soap Operas and the world of Korean Pop music (K-POP).

Bollywood and it’s movies have spread their wings and flown all over the global market and Bhutto picks up one of the biggest celebrities of the industry – Shah Rukh Khan and tries to explore his impact as a global business icon and also through his presence in the lives of normal people. Bhutto distances herself from the most obvious aspect of Khan’s fan base in India and tries to understand how a star and the characters he has played has touched the lives of people in places far flung across the world. This is also the best part of the book which delves deep into the subject of stardom and what it brings for the person and also how cinema touches the lives of people. It is an insightful view of how mainstream Indian cinema in the guise of Bollywood has a pan-global reach where language counts for next to nothing when it is comes to people enjoying the movie.

The second cultural aspect that Bhutto explores is how the Turkish dizi (which is what the soap operas from that country are called) have an even bigger audience base than anything that is being created in the west. In the book, there is an interesting comparison of how a wildly popular dizi called Magnificent Century overtook the popularity of Game of Thrones in its heyday. And this was only one of the many series that Turkey puts out into the world. There is also an exploration of the gender politics of Turkey as seen through the prism of a dizi named What Is Fatmagül’s Fault? which also touches upon the topics of power, politics and the realities of life for a rape survivor. To me this study on how Turkey exports its culture as a prime selling commodity was one of the finest aspects of this book in terms of its depth and research involved.

The third and final part of the book is about how Korea (the South) has come to dominate most of the music industries across the world. Bhutto delves into the lives of the young celebrities from the K-Pop scene and gives an understanding of the grueling regime of discipline and backbreaking work that are needed to climb the rungs to global popularity. This part is also a case study of how the nation of South Korea has made entertainment their mainstay as an industry. My only gripe with this part of the narrative was that it was not as elaborate as the first two. While the subjects were undeniably interesting, it pretty much felt like it ended before it even got started.

There is a definitive pattern in the way the book is constructed : the largest piece is on Bollywood and Shah Rukh Khan, Turkey and it’s dizi are a shorter narrative and Korea gets the shortest part in the whole book. If it was spanned out in way that could focus equally on all three of these areas then this book would certainly have imparted more by way of understanding and knowledge.

Recommended. This would be a good addition to understand how the Western monopoly in the business of culture is being challenged by new and refined players.

Book Review : The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H Wilson

Circa 2012, there was a streak of reading that I went through by soaking up almost all of Michael Crichton’ early novels. These were the novels written prior to Prey and which in my opinion was when he was at his most creative and exuberant. Inevitably The Andromeda Strain also found a spot in that list and my initial impressions of the story was of high interest. For people like us who are treated to a plethora of disaster movies and novels in any given year, a story that spoke about an extra-terrestrial microbe with the potential for an extinction level event might not appear to be all that unique now. However, Crichton published this novel in 1969 and that is saying something for his innovative thinking. This said, I did not think too highly of the overall novel since it followed the trampled upon path of Hollywood thrillers : extinction level event begins in America – world threatened – America leaps into action – America saves the world. Amidst all the other books that I have been reading, this one was totally forgotten and only recently while browsing the stacks at my library did I come upon this book which labelled itself as a sequel to Crichton’s original.

While I have heard of Daniel H Wilson’s Robopocalypse, I had not read it yet and the faint memory of having heard about this title was one reason I picked this book up. Wilson takes the whole concept of an incredibly potent extra terrestrial organism and plasters it over a global landscape. Beginning deep within the Amazon rain forest, the action jumps all over the World and sometimes even out of the planet. This expansion of scope is really a high point in the storytelling with the reader being taken over landscapes that are dangerously beautiful and otherworldly. Keeping in tune with the industry norm of making characters more inclusive, the world saving bunch this time includes : An American nerd, an ambitious Indian scientist, a ruthless Chinese woman (who is also a spec ops operative and a field medic) and an African wise man. In my reading though, beyond serving the purpose of diversity there wasn’t much of an ask to have such a group out there. Keeping these aspects aside, the story is rather rote and proceeds in ways which you would anticipate it to go. I had a bit of hopes for the climax but no : America does save the world again !

The ending opens the doors to expand the story into a series but considering how lackluster this one was, I think I will let it pass !

Book Review : She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

With each passing day there come new interventions into the world of technology and disruptions are now no longer an exception but a norm. This has led to a lot of articles, apps, sites and gadgets clamouring for our time and which unsurprisingly makes our attention span rather superficial. In this time and age when one looks at investigative journalism, it feels rather antiquated when compared to the torrent of news articles that wind up on our screens each day. And yet, there are individuals and institutions that still persist in this fine art and ensure that a reader gets to understand about an issue in great depth and detail. On the 5^th of October 2017, the New York Times came out with an investigative article by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that brought to light the decades of sexual harassment perpetrated by the then celebrated Hollywood Moghul Harvey Weinstein. Almost 75% of this book is dedicated to how Jodi and Megan investigated this case in extensive detail and published it for the world to see.

 

There are instances of harassment recounted by former employees of the Weinstein company and Miramax which are called out extensively through the initial chapters of the book. These are without exception horrendous, demeaning and not circumstances that any human being should go through when they try to work for a living but happen they did. What was even more unbelievable was that the man who was behind all these continued on this path with utter impunity. Harvey Weinstein threatened, coaxed, cajoled or purchased out every single one of his accusers and ensured that there was nothing but a wall of silence that met anyone who tried to broach this subject in public. This horrifying trend continued for decades across employees, contingent workers, actresses and aspiring stars. Weinstein did not seem to make any concessions for anyone, he was a great white predator on a hunt. When Jodi and Megan begin their investigations based on a series of accusations by actress Rose McGowan, they hit walls everywhere. No one is willing to open up or tell anything that might compromise them later and that is frustrating for the duo. But they are incredibly tenacious and keep at it and slowly but steadily a picture begins to emerge of a man who reserves zero respect for consent but even more disturbing is the system that helps him to thrive. Weinstein has the backing of his company, his financial and personal clout over Hollywood, a phalanx of hot shot lawyers and even a spy agency which he employs to discredit his accusers. The two reporters however have their skills of connecting with people, empathy, loads of patience and a great eye for detail. The parts of the book that deals with how they brought the story to publication reads like a breakneck thriller. As a reader I was more surprised by how people like Weinstein can continue to be untouchable while the women who were mistreated had to find other means of livelihood. At a macro level, She Said is not about the Weinstein case but about Power and how it’s abuse can go unchecked with deep pockets and a legal system with loop holes.

 

Like the little pebble that lets loose an avalanche, the publication of the story led to the #MeToo movement getting launched. A few sub chapters explore the complex nature of the movement and it’s outcomes and is followed up by the case of Christine Blasey Ford. Ford underwent a Congressional hearing wherein she accused Republican Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual harassment during their teenage days. What follows is how the case went forth and defined the movement in finer detail. This part though was less satisfying after a brilliant predecessor which could be since Jodi and Megan were only audience to the whole occurrence. The epilogue is where the reporters bring together all their female sources (who had been victims to Weinstein) together in a sort of conclave to talk things through as to how life has been for them after they went public with their accusations. This part is left slightly ambiguous (and it did feel intentional).

 

I am told that Ronan Farrow’s (who shared the Pulitzer prize for the reporting of this with Jodi and Megan) account of the same case Catch and Kill is also an excellent one. This book is now certainly on my TBR pile.

 

#MeToo has been an important movement in the past few years and if you are looking to explore the roots of this cause then dive in. This case is only representative of the hundreds of thousands of instances which we know of, don’t know of and may never know of.

 

Recommended !

Book Review : The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

At a time when my expectation of real life business was naive, I always daydreamed of running a bookshop once I was financially independent. The driving factor behind this wish was in fantasizing about all the time that I would get with books without having to worry about real world problems. And then reality intervened and I came to know about what the bookseller’s world really entailed : the not so active market for printed books, the fierce competition from the larger commercial chains and the giant called Amazon, customers ranging from the polite to the dumb and the pressure of dealing with them all day, the hauling of books, inventory making, account keeping and other such nuts and bolts of running a business. Summing it all up, what I have come to understand is that it certainly was not an idle dream as I imagined it to be and would take a lot of hard work and quiet dedication to make things work. This book is a series of diary entries from across 2014 by Shaun Bythell who runs ’The Bookshop’ which is a big part of the cultural landscape of Wigtown, Scotland. Bythell’s shop sells second hand books and the diary entries talk broadly about his days working in the shop, organizing the annual book festival, traveling around Scotland evaluating personal libraries on sale and also dealing with irritating humans while doing all this !

My expectations on the nature of this book met with a jolt as I began reading it. To put it quite bluntly, Bythell is quite an apathetic narrator and dispassionately talks about people, his employees, the Wigtown literary fest, customer experiences, his personal life and quite sacrilegiously he takes the same tone when talking about books too ! Let me talk about his views on books first. It might have to do with the fact that he has spent 15+ years being a bookseller, but Bythell does not have much of an enthusiasm about books anymore. He treats them as a commodity and that is the tone that pervades the whole of the book. So if you are someone who might pick up this book thinking that I would certainly get some great insights from a fellow bibliophile, then consider this is the first red flag ! Bythell’s brand of bibliophilia is quite different from what I had believed this term to mean. The best parts are when he goes to evaluate second hand libraries and to understand how commercially viable they would be. I couldn’t care much about the commercial viability of the stock but reading about personal libraries did give a warm feeling.

Two things about Bythell’s overall tone stands out :

1.His dislike for Amazon : Every alternate diary entry talks about how Amazon is eating into the roots of indie bookstores and would spell the end for smaller stores. However, the black humor in all of this is that Bythell’s store is a member of the Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) process and he does fret often about the rating of the store on Amazon’s seller statistics. He also makes it a point to tell the reader that he hates the Kindle and has made a point to use a shotgun on a disused device and has mounted it in the shop too ! My sweetest revenge to this puerile act of indignation was to read this book on my Kindle !

2.His dislike for People : Bythell is not a people person but he is fair : he dislikes everyone ! This extends to his employees, his customers and mostly the general public. It must however be said that he might have evolved into such a shade after having worked in an intensely people facing job, the customer base for which would be rather irritating most of the times. Bythell uses the deadpan British humour occasionally but mostly he comes across as rather blunt and sharply sarcastic. It does sound fun to read initially but when one thinks about the people at the receiving end, the humor part vanishes.

You can read this as a strictly utilitarian manual on how to run a second hand bookshop but there is very little if any material here that would make someone feel good about book-selling or about customers !

Book Review : Empire by Devi Yesodharan

There was this comment on the front cover of this book which called it ”Filmy and Bahubali-esque” and that lowered my expectations to a large extent. Bahubali was a movie that became a grand spectacle on the Indian screen but equating a book to a movie has always been a turn off for me. Having entered with this sour note, this book really surprised me with its tone, writing style and content. Empire gets a lot of things right and much more importantly it was able to hold my attention and made it a quick and easy read. When it comes to new authors and popular fiction, readability is the one factor that I place above all others and Devi Yesodharan ticks all the boxes in this debut novel (which also does not feel like a debut novel at all !).

Indian history has a wide plethora of stories that can be used for umpteen retellings and it is delightful to see that there is many a book or a movie coming out lately that makes people familiar with the tales of their own past. Even the aforementioned Bahubali was a fantasy epic that had its roots in a fictional South Indian Kingdom. Devi Yesodharan chooses the influential, rich and colourful time of the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu to tell her story. Now for a bit of history :

The Cholas were a Tamil dynasty that ruled primarily from Tamil Nadu in Southern India. Two of their Kings namely Raja Raja Chola and his son Rajendra Chola were men whose exploits have become legends in Indian history. Raja Raja elevated the Cholas from a typically Tamil dynasty into a truly formidable force to be reckoned with and that too across the whole of South India. Raja Raja expanded the dominion of the Cholas across Sri Lanka, Maldives and also across North-Eastern India and the dynasty reached it’s apogee in his time. The son Rajendra who did not want to be outdone by his father continued the policy of expansion by strengthening an already powerful Navy into a far more superior weapon. In Rajendra’s time, the Cholas initially came close to being a pan-Indian power and his conquests led him as far as Bengal and Bihar. After his victory at the banks of the river Ganga, Rajendra acquired the title of Gangaikonda Chola which translates into : the Chola whose conquests took him as far as the Ganga. Rajendra did not stop there though and led his naval forces across the oceans and brought under his control parts of Cambodia, Thailand, Sumatra and Java thereby again transforming the dynasty into one that spread across Southeast Asia. The Cholas were patrons of art, music and grand temples and the Brihadisvara Temple at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu is a standing testimony to the grand vision of these kings and is a sight to behold.

Empire is set during the reign of Rajendra Chola and the major part of the story occurs just before and during the time he mounts a campaign against the Srivijaya Empire in the Malay Peninsula. The story unfolds through the view point of Aremis who gets captured at a very young age by the Cholas while the Greeks conduct a raid in the former’s ports. Aremis grows up as a warrior in the Chola barracks and gains repute as a fearsome archer. It is her viewpoint that becomes the most prominent in the story. The second principal character is the commander of the King’s armies by the name Anantha who was also the man who took the decision to acquire Aremis as war booty during the ill fated Greek raid. The two characters share a love-hate relationship and while there isn’t anything close to camaraderie between the two, they acquire a sort of equilibrium as the story proceeds. Triumph, tragedy, heartbreak, sorrow, blood, sweat and tears all find their way into the lives of these two individuals while behind them rises the grand backdrop of the war that the Cholas are mounting against the Srivijayans. As a reader, something I really appreciated was that the larger than life King was treated more or less as a supporting character while Anantha and Aremis took the story forward. If the author had chosen to focus just on the militaristic aspect of the Cholas then this story would have been just another run of the mill albeit forgettable one but the author focuses extensively on human emotions and also about life in a bustling capital city at the height of its power. The writing is empathetic and gives your vivid snapshots of the little things in the lives of these two people.

While there is so much that the novel accomplishes so well, it also leaves a lot to be desired in terms of plot closure. In the early parts of the story, there is an important sub plot around the Queen which gets almost fully forgotten (save a tangential reference) by the time the story comes to a close. The final battle scenes also do not do justice to the massive build-up all through the story and pretty much gets brushed aside rather quickly. The human side of the story is pretty solid but it stops just short of being a great historical novel when it does not explore the larger themes of history towards the later parts of the story.

Recommended ! There needs to be more such stories that delve deeper into Indian history.

Book Review : Upon A Burning Throne Part 1 by Ashok K Banker

 

Retelling the Mahabharata would be daunting and exciting at the same time for any author is what I think. Exciting since the epic offers a multitude of human emotions and scenarios to choose from and daunting owing to the amount of individual stories that all form the part of this large mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, a Malayalam magazine began a series of essays on the epic in which the author called Mahabharata as a free software which you can build and expand on.  Principally ,it is this road that Ashok Banker walks down on and while he retains the skeletal framework of the epic he chooses to expand and develop his own fictional universe.

At the time this book was coming out, Game of Thrones was all the rage and echoes of the Iron Throne finds itself in this story as the Burning Throne : the seat of the emperors of the famed burning empire. Any one who is not a rightful heir to the empire would be instantly burnt to cinders if they were to try sitting on the throne and the story opens with the two young ones – Adri and Shvet being brought about for their ordeal by fire. The initial sequences of the tale are exceptionally well etched and Banker excels in laying down the lay of the land of the empire and it’s vassals. He takes the nuances of the Mahabharata and weaves them into his world of fantasy easily and so we have Dritharashtra and Pandu as Adri and Shvet , Bhishma as Vrith and Satyavati as Jillana. Being the first part of the series, the book covers pretty much a good part of the Adi Parva and leaves it at that. It also features Banker’s favorite mythological supervillain – Jarasandha as the principal antagonist (If you haven’t seen Jarasandha in action then you should check out Banker’s very entertaining Krishna Coriolis series too) . The framework already being there, Banker derives his own interpretations of a lot of key points in the Adi Parva including Kunti’s young age , her tryst with the Sun god, the birth of Karna and his later coming of age. What I did find best was a small section that described how a rift formed and widened between Adri and Shvet and if I borrow Banker’s own words then this was probably the time when the seeds of war were sown.

Keeping all of this aside, I am skeptical of the whole project. For the uninitiated, the Mahabharata is 18 parvas (each parva is a book within a book and varies in length and breadth) big and is approximately ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. Now that the scale of the epic is clear, the question really is : how will Banker finish the series ? The first book has touched maybe one portion of the first parva and there are about seventeen and a half more books which comprise the epic…so how do we do this ? To add on to this, Banker has been known to put projects on deep freeze (here’s thinking of his project named Gods of War and also his earlier Mahabharata retelling titled The Forest of Stories) somewhere along the line and so unless I see this one through I cannot really comment or recommend this one.

Book Review : I heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt

 

This past week, I happened to see a clip from CBS Sunday morning in which the guests were Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro who were promoting their movie ‘The Irishman’. Coming to theatres and Netflix in November 2019, it is now open knowledge that this movie is based on the book that I had just finished reading. When I sat down to watch the clip after having read the book, there were two points where curiosity got the better of me :

1.While being a true crime/investigative non fiction book, the contents of this book easily outpaced most thrillers I have read of late. Come to think of it, this is vintage Scorsese territory around finding an identity in the Mafia world, loyalty and trust, finding your way to redemption and so on. What went on behind the scenes as Scorsese was developing the movie ? (This wasn’t answered though, Scorsese was sort of quiet through the whole interview)

2.Pacino and De Niro are two actors who I cannot get enough of and I still have not figured who I like more ( and yet, for a teeny tiny fraction I favor De Niro…mostly !) and Scorsese is a director who has been hit and miss with me ( more hit than miss though) and being the first time that all three of them collaborated for a movie, I wanted to hear what they had to say.

After a fair amount of pleasantries and also having the host trying to butter up the three celebrities, there was this point blank question asked to all three of them

“Do you believe what Frank Sheeran has confessed to?” (This here refers to Frank’s confession of his involvement in Hoffa’s disappearance)

After a minor pause in which Pacino and De Niro look at each other, De Niro replies that yes he does believe in it. Pacino follows it up saying that there are so many details and so much accuracy in the account that it is not really possible to disbelieve it. This actually stuck a chord with me as a reader since I found Frank Sheeran’s account to be as hard hitting (if not more so) than most Mafia related movies that I have seen. In the late 60’s and early 70’s there was very little going on in the US that either Frank or his bosses in the Mafia did not have a hand in. But what makes Frank an interesting character is how a single act and conflicting loyalties that resulted from it had changed him as he grew older. The term ‘late bloomer’ would not apply to Sheeran and yet there are definite parallels with that notion and how he opened up later in life.

Frank Sheeran had led a very colorful life way before he became a gangster. He had been by turns a street boxing champ, a performer in a travelling circus, a lumberjack, a soldier who fought in WWII and a ballet dancing instructor . Following his discharge from the Army and after a brief stint working as a truck driver, Frank forms bonds with two men which puts his life on an entirely different track. The first of these men was Russel Bufalino ( the head of the Bufalino crime family) and the second was Jimmy Hoffa ( trade union leader and later the sworn enemy of Robert Kennedy). While it all reads like a great thriller, as a reader you are given an inside view at how the American Mafia got its hands wrapped around and later manipulated the relationship between employees and employers and made itself a mountain of money in the process. All three of the men had action packed lives and the twists and turns and the ultimate test of loyalty that Frank needs to undertake between the two of them is not just a history of Frank’s life but also of the fall of one of the phases of America’s criminal underworld.

The structure of the book alternates between Frank’s memories and Charles Brandt’s analysis of them in light of facts and evidences. Being the Mafia hitman and the former attorney, they are at two ends of the law and this brings in a sort of balance to the whole narrative. Barring the fact that the legal battles between Hoffa and RFK are quite long drawn out in the book, I really could not find much to deter my attention to the main goings on.

It is interesting that I had this book on my TBR for a good three years or so until I realized Scorsese is making a movie out of it and that too starring Pesci, Pacino and De Niro. Next thing I know, I rushed out to purchase the book and raced through it. Knowing myself, this would be a movie that I would not be able to stop myself from seeing as soon as it came out and I had to read the book before that (we cannot have it any other way can we ?). Having read the book, the accuracy of Scorsese’s casting choices amaze me. Jimmy Hoffa was a man of mercurial temperament and volcanic tirades and Pacino the actor fits that to a T, Frank Sheeran was a stolid and brutally efficient Mafia man and that is safe in the hands of De Niro and the calm, silent and extremely dangerous Mafia boss Russ Bufalino is a role tailor made for Joe Pesci. As to how the movie will turn out to be only time will tell but that does not stop me from thinking up how such a movie will be rare to come by.

Recommended !

Book Review : Yuganta – The End of an Epoch by Irawati Karwe

 

A few years back, a group of friends and I went on a road trip which was a slightly longish one. Since there was also a lot of driving involved at night, we resorted to telling stories to keep each other awake. Starting with anecdotes from life, somewhere along the way we started talking about the Kurukshetra war and then worked backwards towards the beginning of the Mahabharata. What started out as a story telling session kept us all awake with a lot of active discussions back and forth and sleep took a backseat (and maybe even listened to the stories). Personally I had more questions than answers once that night was over and looking back I wish this book had come my way earlier.

Yuganta (which translates into : The end of a Yuga (which means an epoch)) is a hard,unflinching and intensely erudite analysis of the Mahabharata from various angles. This book is also a splendid testimony to the fact that big things do come in small packages for the amount of great material contained in it, this is a very small book. Here was what it covered :

1.The Futility Of Human Effort : We struggle all our lives to build name and fame or in corporate lingo, to leave our mark on the sands of time. Yet what happens eventually ? Against the unrelenting blow of the winds of time, the sands scatter and all that were etched in it are wiped out. Even after seeing this happen time and again, we mortals are doomed to run the same race ! The Mahabharata has two central characters who lived to depict this concept : Bhishma and Karna.

Bhishma’s entire life is one that goes to vain in the end. He acquired the name and fame by the iron like vow of celibacy he undertook and then he lived to sustain his clan at the top of the Kshatriya pecking order. Forever just, pious and morally right Bhishma was said to be the paragon of Kshatriya virtue and yet he never raised a finger against the unruly gang of his great-grandsons, the Kauravas. One thing led to another and against the backdrop of the mighty Kurukshetra war, Bhishma watches the clan he tried so hard to sustain getting butchered to the last man. He had the gift of choosing his own time of death, a terrible gift it turned out to be for he was forced to stay alive watching the bloodbath. Irawati Karve shows a whole new group of perspectives which argue that beyond the guise of a colossus, Bhishma was a failure as a king, warrior and a human being.

There is a lot of lore built around Karna which portrays him as someone who never shied away from helping out others. A powerful warrior and someone who was always at a disadvantage right from his childhood at having been abandoned by his mother. Karna’s life was a struggle to obtain an identity and thereby be treated with respect by a highly caste oriented society. Try as he did, he never did attain what he was looking for. Popular portrayals of Karna have always maintained the wounded hero image of his and yet in portrayals based on the core text of the Mahabharata, Karna is a selfish and entirely self-centered man. The author does a very detailed inspection of this amazing character to arrive at a most human portrayal of him which I have seen very few other writers do. Drawing a parallel with Bhishma, here too was a man who all his life struggled for an ideal and ultimately failed at it.

2.The Women : The course of the main story of the Mahabharata is driven inexorably to the calamitous end by the designs of its pivotal female characters. Unlike most other tales where women are marginalized presences, here the women give new dimensions and meanings to the entire story line of the epic. The author assesses the impact and effect of three of the most powerful characters in the epic : Gandhari, Kunti and Draupadi.

The warring factions of Pandavas and Kauravas had two powerful matriarchs in the forms of Kunti and Gandhari. The whole story line of the epic boils down to a game of thrones with the Pandavas challenging the right of the Kauravas who held the throne and the inevitable backlash of this action. Through all these intrigues and complexities these two mothers held their clans strong and yet they were vastly different in the way their lives were lived out. Gandhari was the princess of Gandhara (which might have been Kandahar from the modern day Afghanistan) who was brought in to marry the crown prince of Hastinapura – Dhritharashtra. Belatedly she realizes that she was to be married to a blind man and chooses a life of darkness with the aid of blindfold. While her son, Duryodhana was born a crown prince, she lives long enough to see him degraded as an evil man. What is even more tragic about her life is that she gets to see each and every male member of her family except her blind husband get massacred all in the course of 18 days.

Kunti is renowned as the mother of the fabled five brothers. Yet her life from a very young age had been one hardship followed by another where she had to either stand and fight or perish. Whether it was to live with an impotent husband or with sons forever cursed to be deposed and living like ascetics, she chose to stand by the men in her life resolutely. The Pandavas struggled through life and on their way to the throne, they had to withstand social isolation, self-imposed exile and also fighting it out every step of the way. There were times when their morale was rock bottom and the will to survive simply vanished. Kunti was like a tigress in such moments, whipping them up to stand and fight and not to waste time languishing around. Our fabled heroes would never have survived where it not for this woman and her steely grit.

The most famous female character of them all is Draupadi. While I have read and written a bit about her with regards to Pratibha Ray’s brilliant Yajnaseni, there was one difference here that Irawati Karve points out. This was the questioning that she meted out to Yudhishtir at the time when she was to dragged into the court of the Kurus and was insulted in front of the assembled crowd. The situation fully justified her questioning her powerless husband and yet it left an ever widening rift between them. In the whole scheme of things, it was but a little incident and yet it ended up with them throwing poisoned barbs at each other even on their death beds. Draupadi was the singular force that kept the five together and along with Kunti strives to drive them towards their goal. As many an author points out, it is only at her death bed that she realizes that the true love in her life had been Bhima.

3.The Puppet-Master : Krishna has been the architect of the war and the rise of the five brothers in a thousand different ways. If you look at the interpretations of the epic right now, Krishna is a god who walked among men and helped restore order in a world that was slowly going to hell in a hand-basket. The core text of the Mahabharata however differs from this version for there are no gods in them. The many retellings from different sources have taken the story away from the plausible to the entirely impossible. Krishna was a crafty and highly articulate King of the Yadava clan who is rather mysterious in the way he lived out his life. His way of totally being dispassionate in his actions is a source of bafflement in a society that reveled in being passionately involved in all that it did. A valiant warrior and charioteer, he was also the one man who orchestrated the death of most the famous warriors in the Kaurava clan . The author begins the episode on Krishna by dispelling the myths about him and points out that beyond all the deeds and words, Krishna also had his own selfish ends to meet while helping his cousins ascend to the throne. Ultimately even he and his clan is not spared from the whirlwind of violence that spreads over the land. At my earlier readings of the Mahabharata, I have always been held in thrall by Krishna’s discourse of the Gita to Arjuna before the battle and spurring him into action. Yet if one applies reason to the entire aspect, the Gita does not appear to be a part of the original epic. Krishna speaks to his friend topics that would take a book to cover and in reality such a conversation would last days if not weeks and yet it is said that Arjuna did pick up his weapons and went to war immediately on the first day, so how did this happen ? Krishna and Arjuna were bosom buddies and had a brotherly affection between them and yet later interpretations call Arjuna a devotee of Krishna which all point to the inexorable fact that later representations of the epic gave rise to Krishna as a god and moved away from the true nature of the story.

4.Societal & Class struggles : Being such a massive and intricate story, in the first couple of readings one fails to observe what happens off the main screen. By this what I mean is that it is only rarely that we look at or ponder over what was the effect of this game of thrones on the lives of others who lived at this time. One of the most interesting observations from an anthropological standpoint that the author advances is the rivalry that the Pandavas built with the Nagas. For all the time that I have read this epic, I have taken this word – Naga for its literal meaning which means a snake or a serpent but apparently there is more to it than just that ! At the time of the Kshatriyas of this tale, a good part of India was covered in virgin forests with its own indigenous tribes and other inhabitants. In an episode, Arjuna and Krishna burn down the Khandava forest and slaughter every organism in it for satiating the fire god. According to the author, this puts both of them in list of enemies of the Nagas. What then ensues is a rivalry that is even more bloodied than the Pandava-Kaurava clash. A feud that lasts three generations and one that has a lasting impact on the lives of people who came after the Pandavas with one side trying to out kill the other. The Nagas still exist, for they are the inhabitants of the state of Nagaland in eastern India. If one were to look at this from a social angle, it is the struggle between the settlers and the local populace which sometimes explodes into a frenzy of violence.

The setting of this story is also at a time when the caste system holds sway heavily over the Indian society. In the descending order, the entire society was carved up into : Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Sudras. Brahmanas were men of knowledge and Kshatriyas were the warriors. The essay in question talks of two Brahmanas who stepped away from the path of knowledge to the path of the weapon. The father-son duo of Drona and Ashvatthama were in the Kaurava clan and fought on their side in the war. At length the author goes about the purely selfish reasons that motivated the father and son to step into this role and also how Asvvathma, blinded by a quest for glory commits a remorseless massacre post the war. While Drona elicits sympathy for his fickle interest in riches, the warrior Asvvathma shows the early streaks of being someone who shows an insane attraction to violence.

In addition to these, there is also an essay that explores the nature of the half-brother of Dhritarashtra : Vidura who was also the chief minister of the kingdom. It also puts forward a theory that Yudhishtir could have been fathered by Vidura. Pretty much a far-fetched theory and yet it does offer a ‘what-if’ scenario to ponder over.

5.Yuganta : An epoch ends with the Mahabharata in the true sense of the word. An entire nations’s worth of people are wiped out in the great war and the world starts afresh. Across India, the belief systems and the social conditions were also undergoing a massive churn. This could also explain how such a stark and hard boiled story like the Mahabharata could at a later point be transformed into a melodramatic soap opera fit for TV. In most serialized renditions of the tale, the stories are full of miracles and divine interventions and yet in the core text there were no gods who intervened in the affairs of mortals. Men and women lived to eat the fruits of their actions and the epic was ultimately a tragic one. It was only perhaps with the advent of the Bhakti movement that the likes of wish fulfilling gods and dreamy literature entered the fray. This essay is also one that traces the anthropological roots of the epic. Was there a written language at the time of the epic ? If so what was it ? This does not appear to have a definitive answers for the tales were sung by bards across the nation. A well-grounded look at the world of the Mahabharata was this essay!

There is nothing purely black or white in this story. All characters serve their own means and live and die like all of us humans. It is a bloody, brutal and stark portrayal of humanity and it’s never ending fascination with destroying all that is dear to them and lamenting about it later.

It is not for nothing that Vyasa exclaims in the Mahabharata that Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere else !