At Scroll.in, we look at books through many lenses. There are, of course, the conventional reviews and excerpts to help readers gauge what is being published and how good – or bad – it is. There are also analyses of the publishing market, essays on deeper issues contained in specific books, and perspectives and rejoinders to the statements of literary figures.
Here’s what the largest number of people picked from this wide range this year:
The Vigil Idiot reviews Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Need we say more?
In his new book, 42 Lessons I Learnt From Bollywood: The Vigil Idiot’s Guide to the 1990s, Sahil Rizwan – whose Vigil Idiot reviews of Bollywood films are legendary by now – took his wicked knife to Hindi films of the 1990s.
Which brings me to 1998’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a little blockbuster that was, legit, the coolest movie that Bollywood had come out with till that time. I, however, will forever remember it as the last of the movies that was deemed cool by the general public, despite showing actors air guitar on screen with an actual guitar in hand.
Was the Ramayana actually set in and around today’s Afghanistan?
An examination of physicist Rajesh Kochhar’s book The Vedic People – Their History and Geography debunks the notion that the events of the epic took place in modern-day India.
Although it is not possible to prove archaeologically, there is considerable reason to assume that the lineage of Dasarath (and of Ram), the Ikshvakus, were from western Afghanistan. For the Puranas say that King Kubalasa slayed a demon on the shore of the Sabari. Vishwamitra received his second birth where the Saraswati met the sea. And Valmiki discovered Sita on the shore of the Sarayu. Which is why there is little room for doubt that today’s Hamun-e-Sabri is the sea mentioned in the Ramayana, one of the islands in which was the kingdom ruled by Ravana, lord of the rakshases.
‘I thought sex before marriage didn’t happen, because you don’t really know each other’
An excerpt from Kaushik Barua’s bizarre, post-modern novel No Direction Rome, about a paranoid hypochondriac Indian working in Rome.
She’s gone. Gone back home; her mom came to Amsterdam to pick her up.
Mom picked her up? So the marriage is off?
I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t want to hurry. I didn’t want to get married anyway.
Did you guys do it? Wasn’t that why you went to Amsterdam together? So did you do it?
Almost.
Fifteen ways to tell if you’re living in a Haruki Murakami novel
Disappearing cats, empty wells and mysterious women, Murakami’s world is yours if any of these feels like your life.
# 2: Your best friends suddenly stop being friends with you. They begin to avoid you and eventually, cut off all ties with you. You continue to live with the misery and confusion of not knowing what went wrong. All you can do is blame yourself.
Steve Jobs should have been worth a mind-bending $127 billion. So what happened?
A review of Becoming Steve Jobs, a new biography of the man who made Apple what it is today raises more questions than it answers.
If Jobs had, indeed, held on to the 11% stake he had in Apple in 1985, somebody has calculated, he would have been worth at least $54 billion when he died.
And – to pursue this argument – if he‘d held on to the 26% stake he originally held in the company (understandably, he sold a lot of it in the early years for his own personal reasons), he would have arguably have been worth a mind-bending $127 billion – more than twice as much as Gates.
The incredible sexual problems that Indians are facing
In his book It’s Normal, Sexual counsellor Mahinder Watsa, 91 and wicked, answers perplexing questions posed by people around India.
I’ve heard that a lizard’s tail grows back when cut. I was curious if the same holds true for my penis?
I would not advise you to attempt such an experiment.Your penis is not a tail, and I am quite sure that there will be no volunteers for your research.
Why there has never been a military dictatorship in India
Stephen Wilkinson looks at this question in his new book Army and Nation.
Prime Minister Nehru believed that the new India needed to re-think the role of the army, and initiated a policy that would firmly subordinate it to the civilian authority. One of the first things that happened after Independence, for example, was that Teen Murti House, traditionally the grand residence of the army chief, was assigned instead to the Prime Minister: a small matter by itself, perhaps, but a clear indicator of the way the wind was blowing.
Next came a series of budget cuts (resulting, among other things, in hefty cuts in army officers’ generous Raj-era salaries). And when India’s first army chief, Field Marshall Cariappa, publicly criticised the government’s economic performance, he was immediately rapped on the knuckles, and told not to meddle in matters that did not concern him.
‘Indians writing in English cannot come close to Manto, Premchand or Bibhutibhushan’
An argument with Jnanpith winner Bhalchandra Nemade on the limitations and inevitable failure of Indian writing in English.
But what I am saying is that in India, there is no such compulsion where they should quit their mother tongue and choose a language which is much inferior to their own language. I think Bengali or Marathi is much superior to the kind of English – I am not talking about English of the British Isles – we get here. That kind of English which we call Indian English, is not potent enough for any writer to have that compulsion.
How our education infrastructure is being systematically demolished
The attempt is to make everyone conform to one body of information, that, inevitably, will be dictated by those who are without specialised knowledge – politicians and bureaucrats, says Romila Thapar in her book The Public Intellectual in India.
Education is invariably among the lowest ranked items in the Budget. And even when we say that our goal is development, the expenditure on education does not increase, rather it is cut, as has been recently done. Why don’t we recognise that even the quality of the much talked of “development” will change dramatically if we have a properly educated citizenry?
There is virtually no preparation for secondary school, leave alone college and university, in terms of both acquiring information and knowing how to handle knowledge. Nevertheless, we are rushing to open more Central Universities, IITs, IIMs and what have you.
‘Let us be proud that a brown-skinned man with an Indian name has achieved what he has, but let us not make the mistake of thinking that we should be proud of how he behaves, or what he stands for.’
Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathise with other people of colour, identifying their lot with other immigrants, the poor, the underclass. Vanita Gupta, in Tulia, Texas, another largely white state, won her reputation as a crusading lawyer by taking up the case of undocumented workers exploited by a factory owner (her story was depicted by Hollywood, with Halle Berry playing the Indian heroine). Bhairavi Desai leads a taxi drivers’ union; Preeta Bansal, who grew up as the only non-white child in her school in Nebraska, became New York’s Solicitor General and has served on the Commission for Religious Freedom, as well as in the Obama Justice Department.
None of this for Bobby. Louisiana’s most famous city, New Orleans, was a majority black town, at least until Hurricane Katrina destroyed so many black lives and homes, but there is no record of Bobby identifying himself with the needs or issues of his state’s black people. Instead, he sought, in a state with fewer than 10,000 Indians, not to draw attention to his race by supporting racial causes.
Nine books you must read to understand women’s issues in India
Indian women’s realities are multiple and complex. These books will help you dig deeper.
Why Loiter? is a work of beautifully written non-fiction about contemporary urban public spaces, and gender. Its basic premise coincides with the central demand that emerged from the December 2012 protests in India, perhaps best articulated in the slogan “bekhauf azaadi” - freedom from fear. This book explores the ways in which women deserve to be able to loiter anywhere they want, and at any time. Why Loiter? is now an ongoing campaign for women who assert their right to freedom.
When Narendra Modi spoke his mind on Islam
In his book Implosion, Journalist John Elliott reveals the details of his first meeting with the man who would become prime minister.
He acknowledged in his opening remarks that Islam had “many good aspects” but said accusingly that, “when one community says that my community is different from yours, it is higher than yours, and that until you take refuge in mine you cannot get Moksha [liberation or salvation], you cannot get Allah, you cannot get Jesus – then conflict starts”. Hinduism taught “Ekam sat, viprah bodha badhanti” (truth is one, says god in different ways), and there would be no conflict if it was accepted that “all religions are the same”. But, he added, “when one says your religion is hopeless and mine is better, then hatred starts, and later when that hatred gets linked into society, terror starts”.
Dear Aatish Taseer, you’re right, but you’re also wrong
Recognising the practical importance of English and honouring other Indian languages needn’t be a zero-sum game.
It’s not that these literatures have been ruined. They’re there, and often thriving. But since they don’t exist in English, they’re often not visible.
And this is the point that Taseer misses. I doubt he would have written this piece in the same way if he could walk down to his local bookstore and find a wide selection of good English translations of writers from Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Assamese, Oriya, Panjabi, Kannada, Gujarati, and other Indian languages. These writers do exist in English translation: not in as great numbers as they ought to be, not always translated as well as they could be, not on the main display tables because publishers don’t push them as much as they should – and not necessarily being read by foreign tourists sitting on the ghats in Banaras. But the books are there, if you care enough to look: English translations that perform the magic of transforming the assumed ruined into the visible and worth reading.
Chetan Bhagat wanted to know, and the nation told him
This is what happened when the writer asked his online fans for feedback and advice.
Ah, now time for some knuckle raps on CB’s last book. Here’s your data analytics, Chetan sir. No one was impressed with Half Girlfriend. You got called out on your “North-Indians can’t-speak-English” stereotyping and most were not a fan of the Bollywoodesque plot.
Some even tried to educate Bhagat on the difference between a book and a movie. (CB, take note: you don’t want those nasty producers buying your stories, stripping them of their literary nuance and merits and reducing them to hip-thrusting dance moves.)
