The British Council Library

The British Council Library has come up with new plastic bar-coded photo-id cards for members. Apparently, they have been issuing these cards for quite some time now. I got one when I went to renew my membership. My membership had expired more than two years ago but I had never got around to renewing it. This year when I got an invitation from them for the third time offering a discount of Rs. 100 if I renewed my membership by the end of March, I realized that these guys were just not ready to forget me. So I decided to renew their acquaintance and make our relationship a two-way one. Of course, the discount was an added attraction. It was not the amount of discount that appealed to me - Rs. 100 is less than 4% of my membership free. It was just that the offer was so charmingly conceited that I could not resist it. I could almost visualize BCL taking on the form of a prim old librarian (somehow librarians have to be prim and old) and putting her nose (I have nothing against it being a "him", I just think that prim old ladies are cuter than cranky old men) in the air saying, "Don't try to judge the value of what I am offering you young man, it is invaluable. However, since you are being so contrary and this is the age of consumerism <insert distasteful grimace here>, here is a hundred rupee note for you". To be fair to BCL though, the membership fee is not too high - the most expensive one (Senior Family) is Rs. 2600 per year, which comes down to hardly Rs. 200 per month, against which you can borrow upto 8 books/CDs/DVDs at a time as many times as you want. I took the Senior Family membership as this is the only one which includes DVDs. Any other membership type charges you Rs. 50 per DVD. And at the rate I borrow DVDs, I will cover any difference in fees in one month. After all, on the first day alone I borrowed 6 DVDs.

Read More

I am back...

Its good to be back after such a long time. My last post was two months ago. So many things have happened since then and I have so much to write about. I don't really know where to start. Its probably best to talk about the present first but I have had a completely uneventful week so there is nothing to talk about there. The week before that I bought a 6 DVD pack of Guru Dutt's classics and held a Guru Dutt film festival over the weekend. Needless to say, I was the only attendee. But more about that later.

I have been buying a lot of DVDs lately. The sale section at Crossword is to blame for that. They have a "Buy 1 Get 2 Free" offer going and I just could not help myself. I got Blade Runner - The Final Cut, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima for just 600 bucks. I also bought the anniversary edition DVD of Lagaan at half the price. I also bought a whole lot of books. The great thing is that I didn't have to spend any money on them. I had got Crossword gift vouchers as prize for something I did at work and I spent all of them. I will ramble on and on about my purchases later. Right now I have to go for lunch. Bye...

Read More

Bookmarks: Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

I got yet another Poirot mystery from my boss yesterday. Its called Elephants Can Remember. After reading it what I truely want to say is: I wish they couldn't. Christie is nowhere near her usual top form here. There is no real mystery for the reader here. Christie's forte is in letting the reader see all that is visible to her detective, sharing all clues with him, letting him try to figure out the puzzle on his own and still surprising him in the end. Here unfortunately, the reader is able to figure out the solution long before Poirot gets to it. I found myself struggling to concentrate on the plot after the first few chapters, a thing that rarely happens between me and Christie. One of the reasons was the distracting attempts at humour. These come from the person Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. This person is said to be a caricature of Christie herself. Now, I for one believe that caricatures do little to improve any suspense thriller. They merely loosen up the plot. I have never liked this character in any of Christie's novels and must confessed to being biased from the outset. But even by her usual standards, Mrs. Oliver was a little too irritating this time. For instance, the first three pages were devoted to describing her trying on her hats. And it is she who brings up the reference to elephants. Having made her point she, or rather Christie, should have let go of it. But elephants keep coming up in all conversations up to the point where they become tedious. So between Mrs. Oliver and elephants we somehow get to the climax in the twentieth chapter but it isn't really a climax because we already know the solution somewhere around the fifteenth chapter. And to top it all the motive for the crimes is really sentimental mush. The whole plot hinges on the fact that multiple women loved a man and he in turn loved multiple women. The ending where everybody is professing his/her love for everybody else was really embarrasing for me. For anyone not obsessed with eading all Poirot mysteries, reading this one would be an elephantine waste of time.

Read More

Bookmarks: The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu

After completing Rabindranath's biography, I have run out of new books to read and have taken to rereading the old books on my shelf. The first such book was The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu. Norbu attempts to fill in two missing years in Sherlock Holme's life between his apparent death in The Final Problem and reappearence in The Adventure of The Empty House. By his own admission Holmes spent the two years in Tibet disguised as a Norwegian named Sigerson. Norbu takes this as his point of departure and follows Holmes in his travels in India and Tibet.

TMSH is a delightful pastiche. Jamyang Norbu has maintained seamlesss continuity from Doyle's stories in both language and atmosphere. His description of 1890s India from the bustling crowds of Bombay to the hills of Shimla is superb. His recreation of Thibet and the forbidden city of Lhasa is fabulous. My personal favourite is the passage describing the traveler's first view of the city as they enter through its gates. Norbu draws his characters from not only Doyle's stories but also from Rudyard Kipling's works, Kim being the most prominent among them. Since Watson cannot be here his shoes are filled in by Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee - one of Kipling's creations - who becomes the Bengali Boswell to Holmes. In fact, the tale is populated throughout with characters from Kim and the language is nearer to Kim's than to any of Doyle's works.

The book has decidedly political overtones. This is not surprising given that Jamyang Norbu is an eminent Tibetan political activist fighting for its independence. The events in the book happen in 1892, the Tibetan Water-Dragon year. This is just about the time when China was making her first moves to grab Tibet. Setting the story in this year allows Norbu to introduce a political backdrop. Needless to say, all the villains are Chinese.

TMSH is an extremely well researched book filled with interesting nuggets of information about the peoples, events and places of those times. The narrator is an enlightened Brahmo Samajist and is as such familiar with most of the prevelant philosophies and scientific theories of his times. One of the most amusing conversations in the book takes place when a character mentions that the light waves are electrical and magnetic vibrations. Though we know it to be true today, our narator, true to his times, dismisses it as bakwaas and having "nothing scientific about it"

(To be completed).

Read More

Bookmarks: Tintin

What is it about Tintin and his escapades that makes them my favourite comic adventures? I really cannot put a finger on it. What is even more puzzling is that my favourite hero is not Tintin. That crown belongs to Spiderman. Spiderman, with his emotional conflicts, the desparate-to-be-normal attitude and existential dilemas, torn between love, friendship and duty facinates me. Any ordinary man faced with huge responsibilities and even huger decisions forced upon him can identify with the dimunitive college boy who suddenly has to look after the whole world. Tintin, on the other hand, presents no such problems. His world is a black and white one, made up of a hero, his sidekicks and a bunch of villains. A one dimensional character who can put any psychologist to sleep, he jumps from one problem to another with the alarcity of a school boy. The only things that keep him alive are his luck and the imbecility of the villains. One would think, Tintin is only for little boys who have not yet started to expect the world to be grey. Yet, strangely enough, I have not stopped loving him since the day I first made his acquaintance. And its not just me. People far older than me are diehard Tintin fans. I have seen middle-aged fathers discuss Tintin among themselves with the same animation as their sons. It seems like people never really outgrow the Tintin-phase of their lives. I can ascribe only one reason for it. That is the simplicity of Tintin's world. Tintin never tries to fit into the adult world. He is happy in his world where good people are good and bad people are bad and you can always know one from the other. Whenever we are stressed, frustrated or plain bored we can escape to his world where we can solve all our problems with a little bit of luck and a little help from a dog.

Read More

Bookmarks: An Epic Retold

I finished re-reading "Prince of Ayodhya, Ramayana Part-1" yesterday. Ashok Banker's retelling reads like a fairy tale. Now I have no objections to retelling Ramayana like a "The Hobbit", (I enjoyed it well enough to have any), but I would have been happier if Banker had not gone about it in such a light hearted way. A darker tale in the style of LOTR would have been more enjoyable. Banker has attempted to convey a sense of a vibrant and mischevious Vedic Bharat. That is a refreshing change from the "prim and propah" image of those ages we get in the traditional tellings of the epics with adarsh pita, adarsh mata and adarsh putra. Rama and his brothers are typical 15 year olds who happen to be extremely talented. Banker's Rama is much more human with his doubts, weaknesses and emotions without having to live upto the reputation of a God. He actually feels anger at his father leaving his mother for a younger Kaikeyi, kills a poacher for resisting arrest and takes lives with glee when the lust for battle is upon him. This is very different from other works where the you find Rama given a secular treatment only in academic discussions. Having said that, I should add that this is just the first part of the story and I do hope that Rama does not tramsform into an avataar by the time his adventures end.

However, Banker would have done well to give a little more attention to the settings of the story. I found it very difficult to believe that Rama loves Marathi and Bengali food. But the real low point was having Ayodhyans cooking in tandoors during Holi. For Heaven's sake, tandoors in Vedic Age!!! One other thing, why does everybody speak in Hindi? I failed to understand why Banker tries to give the impression that he is translating from Hindi for the benefit of his readers. He could just as easily have made characters speak in Sanskrit - which was the language of the educated classes in those days. There were no Bengalis, Marathis or Malayalis then. And most of all, there was no Hindi. Moreover, Rama certainly did not dance the bhangra during Holi. All these points take away from the authenticity of the story. However, these inconsistencies may not be apparent those not very acquainted with Indian history (this book marks the US debut for Banker - and is presumably targetted at Westerners).All in all, its an enjoyable book. Ashok Banker is no Tolkien or Shashi Tharoor, but he certainly can write a good story and retelling The Ramayana is not for the weak-hearted. I give the book 3 out of 5.

Read More

Bookmarks: Reading Poirot

I and my boss have discovered that we share a passion for mystery stories. He is a huge fan of Hercule Poirot and has the entire Poirot collection. My regard for Poirot is second only to that for Sherlock Holmes. I have a small Poirot collection of 12 novels. We have agreed that we are going to exchange books. I am afraid it is going to be a one-way traffic of books. I have nothing that he does not already have. He has been lending me the novels two or three at a time for the past couple of weeks. I have already read Mrs. McGinty is Dead, Murder in the Mews, Lord Edgware Dies and the The ABC Murders. I am currently reading Appointment with Death. It is beginning to head towards its climax.
The book which had me most engrossed was, surprisingly, not a Poirot mystery but one without any detective.It was And Then There Were None. I read it over the weekend. I had asked for it even though Poirot is not in it. I had seen the movie Gumnaam a very long time ago. Someone had told me it is an adaptation of this book. I have been wanting to read it ever since. I was not disappointed. It is one of the most chilling murder mysteries I have ever read. Agatha Christie’s works usually appeal to the head and not the heart. This is an exception. I could not help sharing the helplessness and the fear of the characters as the unknown murderer selected his victims one by one. I had forgotten the movie sufficiently to be kept guessing till the end. And there was no hero to rescue the heroine in the book as was in the movie. I finished it in one sitting.

Read More

Bookmarks: The Flood by David Maine

I just finished reading a delightful novel called The Flood by David Maine. It is a funny and imaginative reconstruction of the Biblical Flood as seen and endured by Noah and his family. David Maine takes a simplistic god-punishes-bad-people story and a set of one dimensional characters from the Bible and infuses them with so much warmth and humanity that they start coming across as real people. Eight ordinary people who are faced with an extraordinary journey and must make it together. No one really knows what is happening. Even Noah is not certain of what God wants from him or why. He can offer no reasons for what he is asking his family to do. He only has an unshakeable faith in his God.
Each chapter of the story is told from the point of view of a different character. Each of them has a different take on the events. We see each character evolve as the flood changes him or her in unexpected ways and we leave them as very different people than we find them at the start of the tale. Maine injects just enough irreverence and humour to enable us to suspend disbelief and avoid getting bogged down by the fantastic events in the story. In his hands even God ceases to be a unidimensional all powerful entity and acquires motivations and intensions that can be questioned. Towards the end of the tale each character tries to answer the question: Why did God do it? They come up with eight different answers. Answers which reveal more about them than their God. Sample some:

"Because He wishes to cleanse the world of sin and punish the unbelievers"
"Because He can"
"Because He wants to encourage us to do better"
"Because, like most males, He loves destruction for its own sake"
"Beause there is no limit to the suffering He makes available to us, for reasons only He understands"

The Flood is ultimately, the story of a family, its trials and tribulations and individuals who, inspite of all their differences, love and respect each other. Its humour and irreverence hold more lessons in life and love than is readily apparent. But what stands out above all is the humanity in the novel. Its refusal to come to a tame happily-ever-after ending only enhances its humaneness. Blessed with a thousand year life and cursed to out live all his family, Noah's fate is far from being what we would expect.

The Flood is David Maine's debut novel.

Read More