My Review : A Case of Exploding Mangoes

This book by Mohammed Hanif was published last year, and was a bestseller.It’s just that I got a chance to read this book recently and I must say I was very impressed with his debut novel. What works for the book is Hanif’s sharp writing. The book is satirical, witty, gripping and unputdownable till the very end.

Mohammed Hanif was born in Pakistan and graduated from Pakistan Air Force as pilot officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. Currently he heads BBC’s   Urdu Service and is based in London.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the run up to General Zia-Ul-Haq’s death in 1988 in an air crash. The airplane was also carrying several of his generals, and the American ambassador. The conspiracy theories abound and his death is still a mystery unexplained.

In the book Mohammed Hanif takes a satirical approach to who might have been behind the assassination of General Zia. The protagonist of the novel and narrator is Ali Shigri, a Pakistan Air Force pilot who suspects that Zia had his father killed. He's constantly working on plans for revenge, bringing in and dropping conspirators and making changes as needed.

The book also gives glimpses of what General Zia-Ul-Haq was all about. While being a dictator he was also very religiously inclined .He would consider drinking, not reading namaaz 5 times in a day a sacrilege. He was also a highly insecure person and much loathed by the people he governed. Hanif covers the people’s loathing to his style of governance brilliantly in the chapter where Zia tries to go out disguised as a common man on the advice of Nicolae Ceausescu. He wants to know first hand what people think about him!

It is true. In the 11 years after Zia executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the dictator's superstitious paranoia became fully justified. To know him was to fear and hate him. There were many willing assassins.The book shows that Zia had a premonition of his death and in order to keep himself safe he increases security around Army House to Code Red, he cancels all public functions including the National Day Parade. The entire parade is stage managed to make him feel safe!

I would highly recommend this book! A must read.

Review of Santosh Desai's new book

Sidin Vadukut reviews Santosh Desai's Mother Pious Lady  for livemint.com...here's the link

http://www.livemint.com/2010/03/11214351/We-are-still-like-this-only.html?h=A3

Read & enjoy!

Penguin & IHC present Spring Fever: an open air library, readings, conversations, food, drink, music, poetry...

This is an interesting event that I feel every book lover from Delhi must attend!I hope Penguin introduces such lovely lit events in Mumbai too!

More details available here:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fevent.php%3Feid%3D337335663084&h=a6f502c701aad7287193366858f26887

Made in India by Biddu

A biography written by Biddu, I was told. Why would anyone want to read it, I wondered politely, and thankfully silently. The ‘Thankfully silently” part comes post my reading of the book. Or I would have been eating crow right now. Titled Made in India, the book talks of his journey from a boy in Bangalore obsessed with all things Western, including Western music, to a best selling music composer in the UK.




The book is written in a droll, languid tone, which when you meet Biddu, you realise is exactly the way he is. With sudden sharp stabs of humour which have you clutching your stomach and rolling on the ground. And it is an interesting story. That of a young Coorgi boy in Bangalore, who was obsessed with Western music and wanted to reach the Mecca of Music, the west aka UK in any which way he could. This resulted in two failed attempts to run away from home, and the third which succeeded saw him go off to perform in Hyderabad and never return. Along the way he formed a band, played in Kolkata, came to Mumbai, played with a band in the Ambassador and then played solo at The Astoria Hotel, under the moniker, The Lone Trojan. And one fine day, he got himself a passport and struck out for the land of the Beatles. Albeit on a cargo ship to Basra. He then hitchhiked his way from Basra to the UK. As fantastic as that sounds, he definitely had luck and youth on his side. “I dont think when one is young one thinks of discomforts or what ifs, one just gets things done.” His entire experience saw him spend no more than five days in the open, he sang his way to food and shelter and was lucky enough to get rides with kindly souls. Of course, that was a much more innocent age than today. “I was so different from everyone in the Middle East that people were curious about me and kind to me. And the thought that I would never make it to London never ever entered my mind.”



He reached London, with the help of kind souls along the way and friends, and got day jobs to keep body and soul together, and Lady Luck helped him by putting him in touch with promising musicians. Tina Charles for one. The music happened. Charles Douglas. Kung Fu Fighting. Aap Jaisa Koi. And of course, Made in India. Details of everything in the book. The name of the book does come from the best selling album he composed for Alisha Chinai, but he wanted to call it The Boy with Gold in his Hair, something an Eastern mystic had told him he had. But Made in India does come through in the last chapter where he talks about how, no matter where in the world he goes, he will always be Indian at heart, because he is, after all, Made in India.



His music making days are behind him now, he states. His passion now is writing. He spends time in Southern Spain where he now lives and writes for six to seven hours every single day. He has one book ready for release, and another that he is currently writing. “I’ve been a professional musician since I was 13. I thought it was high time I tried something else.” But he is here in India to do a series of performances after a long long while. “But,” he shrugs, “writing is where my heart is right now.”



(Reviewed by Kiran Manral. Cross posted at themagmag.wordpress.com)

My Review : A Fine Balance

Author: Rohinton Mistry

There are very few books that move you, emotionally drain you and make you feel, rather selfishly, that thank god you were not in the same situation as the characters in the book. ’A Fine Balance’ makes you go through all these emotions and more. It is a very hard hitting novel, it is a book about the human spirit, I would rather say the oft repeated ‘Spirit of Mumbai’. I was born and raised in this city and have seen lots of things around me that are part of this book. I have seen the slums, I have heard of the tough struggles people have gone through to make it big in this city. I have travelled in the overcrowded local trains, I have seen the filth, the dirt, the stink but there’s just something so vibrant and energetic about this city that such things do not affect you after a point. You see the slums but you also see the positive attitude of the people living in these slums. Many a times I have been bombarded by questions such as ‘How can you live in this city? It stinks, it’s filthy, poor quality of living, traffic jams etc ’ I don’t have answers to these questions but all I know is that this city is an example of a human being’s indomitable spirit, a spirit to survive all odds , a positive energy that binds us all. It is a city of hope. It might be hard for people who are not from Mumbai to understand or comprehend this but this is an answer you will get from every Mumbaikar! 

The book is set in the mid-70 ‘s in the city of Bombay,India at a time when the Government has declared a state of Emergency. The book describes the circumstances that prevailed in the country and the civil liberties that the erstwhile government took during that period. It gives you a glimpse of a time when the country was in turmoil. After reading about the atrocities perpetuated in that period I only ended up saying a feeble prayer for the people who suffered. It is so unimaginable in today's day and age the press was gagged, the opponents were jailed, the voice of the poor suppressed. It also speaks about how the men in power used and abused their stature. Like I mentioned earlier this book drains you emotionally and makes you feel the pain the people suffered during that period.

It is the story of Dina Dalal , a widow  whose refusal to marry has left her struggling to earn a living as a seamstress; two tailors Om and Ishwar who are initially from a chamaar (untouchables) family but learn the tailoring trade to escape casteism in their village and a life of drudgery because of their untouchable status, who come to the city searching for employment and join Dina’s tailoring unit; and a student Maneck from a small hamlet in the Himalayan foothills, whose father has sent him to attend college and lives at Dina’s house as a PG. 


The story brings together these four unlikely people from different parts of the country to live in one house in Mumbai!How the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.


A bit about the book :It has won the second annual Giller Prize in 1995, and in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club in November 2001 and sold hundreds of thousands of additional copies throughout North America as a result. It won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker prize

I highly recommend this book and it is a must read!

Committed. A Skeptic makes peace with marriage

Committed
A Skeptic makes peace with marriage
By Elizabeth Gilbert

When an author has a previous best selling book like Eat. Love. Pray. which goes on to break best selling lists, and be made into a motion picture movie starring Julia Roberts in the lead role, which is based on the author herself, any book that follows up is bound to be under great pressure. Something that the author herself acknowleges right at the start of the novel.
And right off the bat, I would like to say, Elizabeth Gilbert would have been better off had she left it at Eat Pray Love. Committed is the kind of book that shows the effort put into it. At the best of times, it drags. Is patchy. Needed a good editor to go through it with a finetoothed comb to unravel the tangential skeins that the author seems to be weaving a tapestry of tales of marriage the institution across continents and cultures, as she and her Brazilian beau travel all over in their bid to be together. The narrative jumps between her efforts to stay in a relationship that is precious to her, while confronting the demon of marriage, which they must go through if they are to be together, because the US immigration views Felipe's constant trips to the US with suspicion.
What seemed like an ideal relationship with no marriage (both Elizabeth and Felipe being divorce survivors and therefore terrified of the institution of marriage) must now morph into marriage, and Committed, as the subtitle goes is all about Gilbert's attempts to examine the institution of marriage across eras and cultures. And a very patchy thesis does she do on it.
Sadly, the voice of Eat. Pray. Love., the quirky self deprecating, fun voice of a woman recovering from a painful divorce and her trip around the world to heal herself, ending with meeting Felipe in Bali, the voice that captivated every woman reader who saw herself in Gilbert is not the same in Committed. It is a different voice. But then, Gilbert is now a different person. And while it stays in the realm of charming, easy reading, it lacks the straight from the heart quality that set Eat Pray Love apart.
What does redeem Committed is that it does make a strong case for marriage, despite the author's own painful divorce and the statistics for divorce going around. And yes, she does have the wedding at the end of the book, a wedding, where aptly the groom spends most of his wedding day in the kitchen with the apron on, cooking for the guests. (I'd like one of these please!). After all, arent we all suckers for a happy ending.

Reviewed by Kiran Manral

March 2010 Events

March 2010 Events

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