Lahore is burning. General elections are right around the corner. The summer city rages with the drug-fueled parties of the oblivious, the rich and famous, while campaign posters and rally cries dominate the airwaves.
Nadia Akbar’s audacious debut novel, Goodbye Freddie Mercury shows a dark, rarely seen side of Lahore with intriguing, layered characters. Meet the main cast of this book below:
Bugsy:
Bugsy, a rock RJ and host of the nation’s top English radio show is young, charming and fabulous. Seeking more than wealth and fame, he is a true music-lover. However, he performs a dangerous favour for an old friend that plunges him into the dark recesses of desi politics.
Nida:
A young college student desperate to escape the oppressive atmosphere of her traditional family home and her conservative college, she throws herself recklessly into the drug-addled arms of Omer Ali. Still mourning the death of her brother, she enters a brand new world of decadence where the most important thing she will discover is herself.
Omer Ali:
Son of the prime minister’s right-hand man, labelling him as the boy who has it all would be an understatement. When you are a rich heir, life is a party and Omer lives up to that. With no career goals, it’s all about drugs, alcohol and girls for Lahore’s bad boy.
Aliya:
Bugsy’s girlfriend but not his love interest has all the makings of a rich diva: think manicured nails, blow dried hair, exquisite sarees, and unlimited cash. She thrives on gossip and isn’t always welcoming toward newcomers entering her clique of Lahore’s finest and the richest friends.
Faisal:
Bugsy’s best friend, Faisal is rich and has a heart of gold. Humble, modest and true to himself, he is ready to go a long way to create change, especially in Pakistani politics.
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What's your Ideal Fitness Book-Match?
The Communist Manifesto- An Excerpt
Since the Manifesto was first written in 1848 by Marx and Engels, the text has only grown more influential and relevant. It has been banned,censored,burned and declared ‘dead’ but is still required reading in several courses. The Communist Manifesto is an extensively researched edition that provides an authoritative introduction with the full text of the Manifesto.
This year celebrates Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary. Grab this edition that explains Marxism in a nutshell in a reader-friendly format.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
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Life under capitalism is a rat race not only inside the workplace, but out of it as well. In a society constantly on the move, social relations are turned upside down. Capitalism encourages greed, competition, and aggression. It degrades human relations so that they are frequently based on little more than “naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash payment’”. While its supporters prattle on endlessly about “family values,” capitalism itself rips families apart.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. (II.45)
Vast numbers of people are thus denied a truly human existence.
Capitalism’s ceaseless drive to expand not only destabilizes all social relations; sooner or later, it also undermines the conditions for economic growth itself.Marx and Engels argue that capitalism increasingly exhibits a tendency to run out of control—it is a system in which highly destructive economic crises are unavoidable and that has thus become fundamentally irrational.
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.(I.27)
In a world threatened by pollution, global warming, and the destruction of ecosystems as the result of uncontrolled capitalist growth, this image perhaps has a special resonance. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the search for profits threatens to destroy everything in its path, including the natural environment.
The Manifesto does not contain a fully worked-out economic theory—Marx was later to provide that in Capital—but it does provide a description of recurring capitalist crises, which, once again, fits the modern world remarkably well.
For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. (I.27)
The periodic crises that the Manifesto describes have continued to plague capitalism ever since, despite repeated claims that they have become a thing of the past.
13 Books to Pick Up this World Day for International Justice
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
In an effort to recognize the emerging system of international criminal justice, and to acknowledge it, we celebrate July 17 as the World Day for International Justice. On the occasion, we went through our bookshelves to bring forth 13 Legal books, you must take a look at.
10 Judgements That Changed India by Zia Mody
This book presents a compilation of 10 essays on some of the most influential judgments’ that were passed by the Supreme Court of India and proved to be life-altering for the common man and the democracy of the nation.
India’s Legal System: Can it Be Saved? by Fali S. Nariman
In lucid and accessible language, Fali S. Nariman discusses key social issues such as inequality and affirmative action, providing real cases as illustrations of the on-ground situation.This frank and thought-provoking book offers valuable insights into India’s judicial system and maps a possible road ahead to make justice available to all.
On Balance by Leila Seth
The first woman Chief Justice of a High Court in India, the first woman Judge of the Delhi High Court, the first woman to top the Bar examinations in London: Leila Seth has led a full life. In this autobiography, Leila talks about its joyous as well as its difficult moments.
The Case That Shook India by Prashant Bhushan
On 12 June 1975, for the first time in independent India’s history, the election of a prime minister was set aside by a High Court judgment. The watershed case, Indira Gandhi v. Raj Narain, acted as the catalyst for the imposition of the Emergency. Based on detailed notes of the court proceedings, The Case That Shook India is both a legal and a historical document of a case that decisively shaped India’s political destiny.
Republic of Rhetoric by Abhinav Chandrachud
Exploring the legal and political history of India, from the British period to the present, Republic of Rhetoric examines the right to free speech and it argues that the enactment of the Constitution in 1950 did not make a significant difference to the freedom of expression in India.
The Dramatic Decade – Landmark Cases of Modern India by Indu Bhan
some cases have impacted the collective conscious of the entire nation. But There was a lot that happened inside the courts during these trials which has remained hidden from public view. The Dramatic Decade is a collection of these stories. The book gives the reader a ringside view of what happened both inside and outside the courts.
The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament by Arundhati Roy
On 13 December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by a few heavily armed men. Fifteen years later, we still do not know who was behind the attack, nor the identity of the attackers. This reader brings together essays by lawyers, academics, journalists and writers who have looked closely at the available facts and who have raised serious questions about the investigations and the trial of Afzal Guru, was hanged to ‘satisfy’ the ‘collective conscience’ of society
Legal Eagles: The Story of the Top Seven Indian Lawyers by Indu Bhan
Indian judicial system has garnered worldwide fame through its historical and remarkable judgements and the hard work of its judges and lawyers rarely catches the glaze of common public. Legal Eagle tries to bridge this gap. Indu Bhan’s ‘Legal Eagles: Stories of top seven Indian lawyers’ traces the story of the top seven lawyers in India.
The Man Before The Mahatma: M.K. Gandhi, Attorney At Law by Charles Disalvo
At the age of eighteen, a shy and timid Mohandas Gandhi leaves his home in Gujarat for a life on his own. At forty-five, a confident and fearless Gandhi, ready to boldly lead his country to freedom, returns to India. What transforms him? The law, the man before the Mahatma is the first biography of Gandhi’s life in the law.
The Rebel: A Biography of Ram Jethmalani by Susan Adelman
In The Rebel, A Biography of Ram Jethmalani, Susan Adelman, a longtime friend, presents the most updated, authentic and detailed account of Ram Jethmalani’s life. Peppered with personal accounts, unknown facets of his life and insider titbits, the book reveals the man behind the larger than life persona of Ram Jethmalani.
Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women’s Rights in India by Richard Sorabji
British historian Richard Sorabji’s book Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women’s Rights in India is the riveting story of a woman who was intellectually courageous and physically daring at a time when women of this category were far and few. This tale is about a genuinely – remarkable lady, one who was a beauty with brains and ambitious too.
Legal Confidential : Adventures Of An Indian Lawyer by Ranjeev Dubey
Rookie lawyer Ranjeev C. Dubey slogs his way through the corridors of Delhi’s trial courts and realizes that the legal system is anything but fair. In this dark, racy memoir, the now-well-known corporate lawyer exposes the world of the black robes with his trademark wit and leaves you wanting more.
Breaking Up : Your Guide to Getting Divorced by Mrunalini Deshmukh, Fazaa Shroff
Divorce is usually painful and complex. Breaking Up: Your Guide to Getting Divorced, answers every question you might have on the subject. Mrunalini Deshmukh is one of India ‘s top divorce lawyers. She and her associates have handled some of the most high-profile cases in the country. Using their twenty years of experience and expertise, they have put together this book on understanding divorce law.
Book of Rachel- An excerpt
Esther David writes about Jewish life in India and personally illustrates her books. Book of Rachel, her latest book, is a captivating tale of a woman’s battle to live life on her own terms. Continuing the saga of the unique Bene Israel Jews in India, it adds to Esther David’s reputation as a writer of grace and power.
The book follows Rachel who lives alone by the sea. Her children have long migrated to Israel as have her Bene Israel Jew neighbours. Taking care of the local synagogue and preparing exquisite traditional Jewish dishes sustain Rachel’s hope of seeing the community come together again at a future time.
Here is a recipe from Rachel’s kitchen that you should try –
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METHI BHAAJI
Ingredients: methi or fenugreek leaves, potatoes, onions, garlic, oil, red chilli powder, coconut, salt
Method: Take two fresh bouquets of methi, cut root ends, pluck leaves, wash well and soak in a large bowl of water, changing water frequently to get rid of residue. When washed clean, drain methi leaves and keep aside.
Slice three onions, chop six cloves garlic and fry till golden brown in two tablespoons oil. Add one large potato peeled and cubed. When potato is almost done, mix well with methi leaves, chilli powder and salt. Cover the pan and cook on slow fire in its own liquid till cooked. Add a heaped tablespoon of freshly grated coconut.
Methi is a bitter herb and coconut helps reduce the bitterness.
Cook on slow fire, till the vegetable absorbs the oil. Serve hot with chapattis.
Optional: Use jaggery instead of grated coconut.
Variation: Vegetables like gavar or cluster beans, french beans, snake gourd, dudhi or marrow, tindla and padval can be cooked in the same way.
A sprig of fenugreek is used as karpas or the bitter herb in the Pessach platter if parsley is not available. Methi has medicinal values and is known to cure constipation. A plain bitter soup made with methi leaves is supposed to have medicinal value when taken early in the morning on an empty stomach. A few methi seeds, soaked and swallowed whole, are also known to cure many ailments.
Whenever Rachel made methi, she missed Jacob. He loved methi and when he was in India he lived on it. Rachel called him methi-mad. And, just for him, she had a patch of methi growing in her backyard. Rachel never understood how Jacob had developed a taste for this bitter herb, which was disliked by the rest of the family. She wondered whether it had anything to do with his thumb-sucking habit as a child.
Soon after Rachel had weaned Jacob from her breast to the milk bottle, he had taken to sucking his thumb. This continued and Rachel was worried when he was four years old and still sucking his thumb. She was ashamed. His habit made her miserable, especially when they went to the synagogue. For no reason at all she felt all eyes were on Jacob. Even if they did not say anything, she felt the women were laughing at her. Rachel would nudge Jacob, whisper veiled threats, scold him and even bandage his hand. Jacob would sulk as they walked to the synagogue, watching his mother with big watery eyes, ready to burst into tears.
Jacob would sit next to his mother in the synagogue, hiding his bandaged hand in the folds of her sari. He felt insulted but suffered till he could bear it no longer. The prayers were long and his mother kept her eyes averted. Besides, she had not hugged him even once. The sobs collected in his chest and he needed his thumb.
James Bond: How It All Began!
M laid down his pipe and stared at it tetchily. ‘We have no choice. We’re just going to bring forward this other chap you’ve been preparing. But you didn’t tell me his name.’
‘It’s Bond, sir,’ the Chief of Staff replied. ‘James Bond.’
The sea keeps its secrets. But not this time.
One body. Three bullets. 007 floats in the waters of Marseille, killed by an unknown hand.
It’s time for a new agent to step up. Time for a new weapon in the war against organised crime.
This is the story of the birth of a legend, in the brutal underworld of the French Riviera.
Let’s read an excerpt from the book here-
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‘In the last transmission he made, a week before his death, 007 said he had concrete evidence.’
‘What sort of evidence?’
‘Unfortunately, he didn’t say. If 007 had one fault, it was that he liked to keep his cards close to his chest. In that same transmission, he mentioned that he had arranged to meet someone who could tell him exactly what she was up to – but once again, he didn’t tell us who it was.’ Tanner sighed. ‘The meeting took place at the basin of La Joliette and that was where he was killed.’
‘He must have left notes – or something. Have we been to his house?’
‘He had an apartment in the Rue Foncet and the French police searched it from top to bottom. They found nothing.’
‘Perhaps the opposition got there first.’
‘It’s possible, sir.’
M tamped down his pipe with a thumb that had, over the years, become immune to the heat of the smouldering tobacco. ‘You know what surprises me in all this, Chief of Staff? How could 007 allow himself to be shot at close range in the middle of a crowded city? Seven o’clock in the evening, in the summer months . . . it wouldn’t even have been dark! And why wasn’t he carrying his weapon?’
‘I was puzzled by that,’ Tanner agreed. ‘I can only assume he must have been meeting someone he knew, a friend.’
‘Could he have actually met with Madame 16 herself? Or could she have found out about the meeting and intercepted it?’
‘Both those thoughts had occurred to me, sir. The CIA have people out there and we’ve been trying to talk to them. In fact the whole area is crawling with security services of one sort or another. But so far . . . nothing.’
The heavy, sweet smell of Capstan Navy Flake hung in the air. M used the pipe to punctuate his thoughts. The age-old ritual, the lighting and the relighting, gave him time to consider the decisions that had to be made.
‘We need someone to look into what happened,’ he went on. ‘This business with the Corsicans doesn’t sound particularly pressing. If there are fewer drugs coming out of France, that’s something to be grateful for. But I’m not having one of my best agents put down like a dog. I want to know who did this and why and I want that person removed from the field. And if it turns out that this woman, Sixtine, was responsible, that goes for her too.’
Tanner understood exactly what M was saying. He wanted an eye for an eye. Somebody had to be killed.
‘Who do you want me to send? I’m afraid 008 is still out of action.’
‘You’ve spoken to Sir James?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sir James Molony was the senior neurologist at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and one of the few men who knew M both socially and professionally. Over the years he had treated a number of agents for injuries, including stab wounds and bullet wounds, always with complete insouciance and discretion. ‘It’s going to be another few weeks.’
‘And 0011?’
‘In Miami.’
M laid down the pipe and stared at it tetchily. ‘Well, then we have no choice. We’re just going to bring forward this other chap you’ve been preparing. It’s been on my mind to expand the Double- O Section anyway. Their work is too important and right now we’ve got one injured, another one dead . . . we need to be prepared. How is he doing?’
‘Well, sir, he managed his first kill without any difficulty. It was that Kishida business. The Japanese cipher man.’
‘Yes, yes. I read the report. He’s certainly a good shot and he kept his nerve. At the same time, though, firing a bullet into the thirty-sixth floor of a New York skyscraper doesn’t necessarily prove anything. I’d like to see how he works at closer quarters.’
‘We may very well find out,’ Tanner replied. ‘He’s in Stockholm now. If all goes well, he’ll be reporting back in the next twenty-four hours. I already have his fitness report, his medical and psychological evaluations. He’s come through with flying colours and, for what it’s worth, I like him personally.’
‘If he gets your recommendation, that’s good enough for me, Chief of Staff.’ M frowned. ‘You didn’t tell me his name.’
‘It’s Bond, sir,’ the chief of staff replied. ‘James Bond.’
Storytelling as Life and Art – By Usha Alexander
Usha Alexander grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, as the second of three children. She has lived in four countries and continues to visit as many as she can. Her first novel, Only the Eyes are Mine, was selected as a Semi-Finalist in the Multicultural Fiction category for the 2006 Independent Publishers Book Awards.
She is the author of three books, the newest of which is The Legend o f Virinara. The book is set in ancient India and is a thrilling tale of adventure and political intrigue that stirs up timeless questions about war and peace.
In this piece written by Usha Alexander, she talks about how we each tell ourselves the story of our own life, whether in large ways or small.
‘It was only some twenty years ago that I finally returned here to my ancestral lands, called back by the need to remember, to gather up the fragments, to reconstruct the cracked vessel of my life and pour from it my own story. I don’t know if any good will come from this exercise, whether there’s any wisdom to be had from it, but I feel compelled to put down my tale. Who knows why one feels this human urge to preserve and perpetuate ourselves, our visions and desires? Who knows why this need for art, this brazen denial of death and emptiness?’ ~ Shanti, The Legend of Virinara, page 5
Like Shanti, the primary narrator of The Legend of Virinara, most of us have moments when we reflect upon our own lives. We reckon with our choices, good or bad, to understand how we became the person we are today. We look for a coherent thread of cause and effect, of consistency in our own personality, of personal growth running through the events in our memories like beads. Perhaps we need to understand our own drives or desires—or explain to others why we’ve done what we’ve done. We might wonder what it all means—the sum of our life, thus far—or whether we can draw any lessons from it to teach others, to do better ourselves, or to build our sense of connection with others.
So we each tell ourselves the story of our own life. We do it in large ways and small. It may be a boy marvelling that he survived a war in which his parents perished. Or a mother wondering at her decision to take a job that brought her overseas and made her children’s lives unrecognizable from her own. It may be a young graduate trying to understand why she didn’t get that job or promotion she was surely qualified for. But however great or small or even petty our questions loom, compelled by a need for connection, continuity and meaning within the vagaries of life, we may tell ourselves almost anything to create a story that suits our needs, up to and including the grandiloquent and absurd; we even invoke the supernatural.
Consider two famous historical examples: Joan d’Arc was a French girl who led an army into battle against the British in 1429. As a teenager, she presented herself to the king of France, saying she’d been in conversation with several Christian saints since childhood and now god instructed her to lead an army; the king believed her. But soon after her battles, Joan’s story became less convincing to others; she was burned at the stake for heresy. Later, her version of events was re-evaluated and deemed sensible, so she was labelled a martyr and a saint. Similarly, in 1881 a lawyer, Charles J. Guiteau, assassinated the American President James Garfield, a champion of equal rights for the former slaves. Guiteau said that god told him he must get rid of this President to change the course of national politics and so—he insisted at his trial—what he’d done wasn’t murder. But Guiteau was hanged for his crime. His version of events was discounted as a symptom of an undetermined illness.
However else we might characterize the accounts d’Arc and Guiteau gave of their own actions, we must also recognize that their self-narratives gave them courage, absolved them of guilt, and helped them sift through or bind together their understanding of themselves in the world. As such, they remain testaments to our common human need to impose story upon our individual experience. And while theirs may differ vastly from our own self-narratives in details and biases or maps of belief, perhaps they are less different in their richness and force, in their essential creative impulse to find meaning and purpose.
We are inventive with our personal narratives: We build chronology, connecting the dots of cause and effect, usually reasonably, but not always. We imbue actions and outcomes with meaning. We select which facts and feelings to include. Our fears and egos shape our perceptions. We embellish facts to make ourselves feel good. Or to make ourselves feel bad. We disregard information that doesn’t fit our biases. We forget or misremember what makes us uncomfortable. We bridge the unknown with presumption, deduction or imagination, even fabricating details or whole events, adjusting the story to our needs.
It is in this very shadowland between ‘truth’ and imagination, a realm of uncertain borders, where each of us actually lives, alone. It’s here, among the shadows and flickers of our incomplete understanding and our desires, that we fashion narratives of our lives and our world, hoping to communicate it to those around us. We come up with stories that are always part ‘fact’ and part ‘fiction’. So every one of us is actually a storyteller, a world-builder, whether or not we’re aware of our own powers or how we wield them. And this innate storytelling impulse, which we use to bind together our inner and outer lives, is a seed of general human creativity.
As a novelist, I try to excavate this, to understand how we use storytelling, how it works for us, how it works against us—for it provides a broad and ever-astonishing view into what it means to be human. The power of storytelling serves as a theme in The Legend of Virinara, which depicts, in part, how stories are used to create realities. But understanding the foundations of our self-narratives can also enrich the creation of intentional fiction. Some of the richest characters and most deeply moving novels seem to stick close to the writer’s own emotional life, applying the same perceptive and imaginative facility they’ve surely used to shape their own life stories in order to imagine the lives of others.
One example that jumps immediately to mind is V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, with its heartbreakingly wry pathos. Though the details of the story are altered, one feels acutely that Naipaul is writing a paean to his own father, his struggles and triumphs, through the lens of a loving but troubled son. Something similar is discernible in Harper Lee’s late-published first novel, Go Set a Watchman, which, despite all its flaws, reveals her tormented struggle to understand the corruption of those whom she dearly loved and admired as a child. At moments, the distinction between young Lee, the author, and Jean Louise, her character, seems to disappear.
As readers, too, we bring our own sense of story to make sense of a creative work. The novels we often enjoy the most are those we recognize as uncannily ‘true’ and familiar through the questions, metaphors or feelings they generate, perhaps mapping in some way onto our own shadowlands. Jane Austen confined her writing to the very small world of British landed gentry of the late eighteenth century; none of us readers have lived in her time and place, yet she was able to mine the dissatisfactions and pleasures of the heart in a way that’s almost universally relatable. Arundhati Roy pulled up something similarly universal about the vulnerabilities of childhood in her first novel, The God of Small Things.
As Chinua Achebe said, ‘Art is and was always in the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and legends and told their stories for a human purpose.’ Storytelling is, above all, the art of social beings. A novelist’s greatest satisfaction comes from knowing that she has connected with a reader, touched another human heart or mind and illuminated a patch of their world, in resonance with her own.
The One Story and the Many – by Anjum Hasan
Anjum Hasan is the author of several books including Lunatic in My Head, The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti, Street on the Hill and Difficult Pleasures. Her latest book, A Day in the Life, is a collection of fourteen well-crafted stories that give us a sense of the daily life of a wide cast of characters.
Her books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award.
In this special feature written by her, Hasan tells us about her relationship to the form of the short story.
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Anjum Hasan
The first short story that haunted me was Anton Chekhov’s The Bet. Till then, I believed that narrative resolution meant happy endings. Rip van Winkle might find, when he wakes up, that twenty years have passed, or Sinbad will see that his only hope of survival after the shipwreck is to hang on for life to one leg of the giant roc, but these disruptions are only delicious means to redress. Whereas all the dark prefigurings of The Bet end in nothing – the hero simply vanishes on the last page.
The story is the case study of a philosophical question – is life imprisonment better or worse than the death penalty? The young lawyer who stakes fifteen years to prove his point does not emerge triumphant from the cell where he has been living out his self-imposed solitude. He decides – following on a decade and a half of the most voracious bibliomania, hundreds of books consumed and discarded – that human concerns don’t matter one whit, and then he slips out of the garden gate and disappears. To where? And why does he forgo all that money, two million roubles, that he is to get for winning the bet? As a ten or eleven-year-old, immune to irony, this tortured man’s strange renunciation and sudden disappearance, not to speak of that unclaimed cash, bothered me. Chekhov, master of enigmatic endings, provides no answer. I had to learn to live with my discomfort, accept the slippery nature of the modern short story, understand that its author might open a wide window on time and then leave it ajar for all eternity.
But the special pang that accompanies the reading of a good – that is essential yet elusive – story remained through the years of my coming of age as a reader. I experienced it with Tagore’s Kabuliwallah in which the unlikely friendship between a vagrant man and a radiant child can, once time has passed, never be recovered – no matter that the author, unlike Chekhov, does provide recompense in the form of a few banknotes to temper our sadness with. I felt it too with DH Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner where money itself is the object of lust and there can never be enough of it. Yet indulge too avidly in this passion and it can turn against you.
Over time I also realised that I wanted to do the same – not so much play with mutability as a literary device as snatch half a moment from the flow and give it life in writing. The short story is the ultimate temporal – and secular – form. There are no earlier incarnations and no hereafter. Now is the sum total of the aeons and this is all there is to the expanse. Anything can be a story and everything actually is. I’m always charmed by that anecdote about the demonically prolific Saadat Hasan Manto boasting that he could write a story on any subject. Someone knocked at the door of his office when he worked at AIR, Delhi, and asked “May I come in?” Manto was challenged to write a play by that name which he promptly turned out.
But this carpe diem spirit means that the older traditions of storytelling with their familiar tropes, their indeterminate locations, their shared myths, have to be put aside. For the short story is also the locus of a progressive imagination, one for which the people matter but the person matters more. In most Indian languages the break from the literature of the past resulted in the flowering not just of the short story but literary movements around it – ranging from the Nayi Kahani writers in Hindi and their championing of interior life to the hard-boiled urbanism of the Manikodi group in Tamil Nadu. Exploring the genesis of the form in his essay ‘The Indian Story’, Amitav Ghosh records its journey from the late 19th century to a good hundred years on. He writes that “the story was the chosen instrument of the subcontinent in the spring time of its nationhood.” But it is no more our weapon of choice, suggests his essay, which was published towards the close of the previous century. The short story has, perhaps, had its day.
This might explain our contemporary ambivalence about it. Modernism has passed some of us by and our paradigms for the short story are still Saki and O. Henry, rather than Manto and Carver. Then there is the growing occlusion of telling of a story with storytelling – not all writers of the short story are aiming to be campfire entertainers in this sense but the tag is hard to escape. One is either a great storyteller or a self-indulgent aesthete; nothing, it seems, can bridge literary pleasure with pleasure taken in literature. One is always tempted to quote Nirad C Chaudhuri to those who insist on the distinction between style and substance. “There is no such thing in literary works as good substance spoilt by a bad style, or poor substance undeservedly accompanied by a good style. To believe in such theories is to have the stupidity which is dead to matter and the vulgarity which is dead to form.” But Chaudhuri himself, precisely because of his English hauteur, the proud certainty of that tone, can seem hopelessly old-fashioned.
We are quick to dismiss values that seem out of date, always on guard against nostalgia in our reading of literature but curiously, because of our growing obsession with specifically Indian narratives and a singularly Indian identity, have taken to refurbishing antiquities in our fiction. We want to retell rather than tell, and our retellings are informed less by ideas about the past and more by the desire to just invoke it. The popularity of these invocations makes me ask if we really have lost our appetite for the here and now. Was it misplaced, this desire we once had to cleave to the short-lived, the fragmentary, the unresolved? Are we in search of the one story that will capture it all – the overarching explanation, rather than the numerous small ones? Is that a genuine need and if so can the short story address it?
I happened to find something of an answer in a marvellously metaphysical essay by John Berger on the nature of time and, thereby, the nature of stories. In older, more religiously inclined cultures, the timeless was a constant presence but this conception of a realm beyond human time has been edged out of today’s worldview, he argues in ‘Go Ask the Time’. And yet, despite this dominant, two-century-old, positivist European image of time, we can’t quite suppress our longing for that which goes beyond it. We’re made that way. “A need for what transcends time, or is mysteriously spared by time, is built into the very nature of the human mind and imagination.”
If we turn away from the European lens we will find a conviction underlying many traditions of storytelling – many discourses – that everything to happen has already happened before, says Berger. This is a realisation that the writer like me, trying to compose that one unique if microscopic narrative, that one telling that has not been told before, wants to stave off. But perhaps the most long-sighted of the storytellers have always known it. Talking about the prose of realist fiction and its gradual seeping into Indian writing, Ghosh in the essay I mentioned speaks of it as “a form of address that creates the illusion of objectivity by distancing itself from its subjects; it is a style of narrative in which the machinery of narration is a source of embarrassment that must always be concealed.” This struggle is still evident in Indian fiction, he says. So perhaps it is this – the embarrassment with the modern rather than the insight into the mythological – that makes us want to go back to a time before realism.
AK Ramanujan, that great theorist of Indian narratives, has described in his ‘Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?’ how till the 19th century no Indian text came without a framing narrative; every story was encased in a meta-story. Berger would have loved, for its effortless scrambling of linear time, one of Ramanujan’s examples. When the Pandava brothers are exiled in the forest, and Yudhishthira is despondent because he has lost wife and kingdom, a sage visits him and tells him the story of Nala. Nala too has had to forfeit wife and kingdom but then he fights his brother and gets everything back. “Yudhishthira, following the full curve of Nala’s adventures, sees that he is only halfway through his own, and sees his present in perspective, himself as a story yet to be finished.”
So it could be that Chekhov’s hero, when he runs away from his cell, is fleeing the paltriness of the short story itself, seeking a cosmic vista that no worldly thing, least of all money, can offer. Chekhov cannot follow him because that is not his business. His writ runs only in that arena where each tiny, ordinary, human detail is so mesmerising a story there appears to be no point asking for more. And that’s where I hope to remain too, in the grip of the strangeness and wonder of this present time.
Rain + Books = The Perfect Monsoon
This monsoon we have a great list of new books for you! Whether you enjoy literary classic, thriller, fiction or mythology, we’ve got you covered with books by authors such as Devdutt Pattanaik, Premchand, Alex Salkever and Vikram Sood – to name a few.
So this summer, cuddle up with a cup of tea and a good read!
Take a look at our list of July books!
Acid
Two striking women, Kamala and Shaly, helm an unusual household, fuelled by their intense, tempestuous romance in a rapidly changing Bangalore. Acid unravels the secrets that lurk beneath the surface of our lives, and marks the entry of a searing new voice in the Indian literary landscape.
Bihar Diaries
Bihar Diaries narrates the thrilling account of how Amit Lodha arrested Vijay Samrat, one of Bihar’s most feared ganglords, notorious for extortion, kidnapping and the massacre of scores of people. Bihar Diaries captures vividly the battle of nerves between a dreaded outlaw and a young, urbane IPS officer.
Premchand Short Stories (Volume 1-5)
Munshi Premchand’s prolific writing contributed largely to shaping the genre of the short story as we know it in India. His range and diversity were limitless as he tacked the themes of romance, satire, gender politics and social inequality with unmatched skill and compassion and this miniseries brings together some of his most celebrated short stories.
This miniseries brings together some of his most celebrated short stories on the themes of women, caste, the city, village life and animals.
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jehan
Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, while giving a new insight into the lives of the women and the girls during the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. In this book, Nur Jahan finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.
How India Manages Its National Security
In this authoritative and comprehensive survey of the challenges a changing global security environment poses to India, former deputy national security advisor Arvind Gupta outlines the important aspects of the country’s security apparatus and how they interface to confront internal and external conflicts.
India Moving: A History of Migration
To understand how millions of people have moved-from, to and within India-India Moving: A History of Migration embarks on a journey laced with evidence, argument and wit, providing insights into topics like the slave trade and migration of workers, travelling business communities, refugee crises and the roots of contemporary mass migration from Bihar and Kerala, covering terrain that often includes diverse items such as mangoes, dosas and pressure cookers.
Daughters of Legacy: How a New Generation of Women Is Redefining India Inc.
What are the challenges and perks of handling age-old legacies?
If you come into a position of power through a position of privilege, how do you make sure that you earn respect, more so if you are a woman?
These and many more questions are what Daughters of Legacy seeks to answer through the stories of twelve successful women who grew up with strong business lineages.
Mandodari: Queen of Lanka
Borrowing from Sanghadasa’s Jaina version of the Ramayana, Mandodari-one of the least known characters of the Hindu epic-is finally given a voice.
Considered to be one of the most beautiful apsaras, she was married off to the mighty Ravana, the legendary king of Lanka. In her story, she speaks about her struggles after her marriage, her insecurities and her pious nature that challenged her husband’s growing aspirations. She narrates the rise of Ravana’s power and the blunders he made that ultimately caused the downfall of Lanka.
The Unending Game: A Spy’s Insights into Espionage
As a country’s stature and reach grow, so do its intelligence needs. This is especially true for one like India that has ambitions of being a global player even as it remains embattled in its own neighbourhood. The Unending Game tackles these questions while providing a national and international perspective on gathering external intelligence, its relevance in securing and advancing national interests, and why intelligence is the first playground in the game of nations.
The Dhoni Touch: Unravelling the Enigma that is Mahendra Singh Dhoni
For over a decade, Mahendra Singh Dhoni has captivated the world of cricket and over a billion Indians with his incredible ingenuity as captain, wicketkeeper and batsman. Bharat Sundaresan, author of The Dhoni Touch tracks down the cricketer’s closest friends in Ranchi and artfully presents the different shades of Dhoni-the Ranchi boy, the fauji, the diplomat, Chennai’s beloved Thala, the wicketkeeping Pythagoras-and lays bare the man underneath.
Master Growth Hacking – The best kept secret of new age Indian startups
Full of riveting stories, Master Growth Hacking lets you learn from the pioneers of growth hacking in India. There are interviews with the founders of Zomato, IndiaMART, ShopClues, UrbanClap, Paisabazaar, Furlenco, FusionCharts, WittyFeed, UpGrad and a lot more.
Growth hacking is the new growth mantra that start-ups are using and don’t want you to learn about!
Frontiers
Aurangzeb’s aim is to conquer the kingdoms of the Deccan and expand the great Mughal empire to include hitherto uncharted, rebellious territories. Raja Shivaji, a jagirdar from the hills of western Deccan, dreams of Swaraj and has raised his sword against all those who stand between him and his goal.
Theirs is a battle of wit and might-one in which neither will give up. Frontiers, a historical saga, brings to life the complex and ever-shifting dynamics between these two arch nemeses.
Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich
Chanakya’s Arthashastra is an unrivalled political treatise that has been used by scholars, academics and leaders across the world. In Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich, Radhakrishnan Pillai brings out the inherent lessons from Arthashastra to present a strategic and practical way of wealth creation. This is a holistic study, written for anyone and everyone.
Your Happiness was Hacked
We’ve become a tribe of tech addicts, and it’s not entirely our fault.
But we can reclaim our lives without dismissing technology. The authors of Your Happiness was Hacked explain how to avoid getting hooked on tech and how to define and control the roles that it plays and could play in our lives. This profound and timely book turns personal observation into a handy guide to adapting to our new reality of omnipresent technology.
Shyam: An Illustrated Retelling of the Bhagavata
The Bhagavata is the story of Krishna, known as Shyam to those who find beauty, wisdom and love in his dark complexion.
Shyam: An Illustrated Retelling of the Bhagavata seamlessly weaves the story from Krishna’s birth to his death, or rather from his descent to the butter-smeared world of happy women to his ascent from the blood-soaked world of angry men.
Under American Eyes: Mark Twain in Bombay
For 230 years, America’s engagement with India, Afghanistan and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts-secular and religious-to remake the world in its image. Even as South Asia has undergone tumultuous and tremendous changes from colonialism to the world wars, the Cold War and globalization, the United States has been a crucial player in regional affairs.
In the definitive history of the US involvement in South Asia, The Most Dangerous Place by Srinath Raghavan presents a gripping account of America’s political and strategic, economic and cultural presence in the region.
Of the many interesting incidents and lesser known anecdotes in the book, one interesting narrative is Mark Twain’s visit to Bombay. Here is an excerpt from it.
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On a sunny morning in January 1896, the visiting American— decked out in a white suit and straw hat—took a stroll on the outskirts of Bombay. On seeing a row of Indian washermen sweating it out, he asked his guide, ‘Are they breaking those stones with clothes?’ Samuel Langhorne Clemens had kept his sense of humour despite the fact that he had practically been forced to travel to India. A failed venture with a typesetting machine and the bankruptcy of his publishing firm had left Mark Twain ensnared in a web of debt: of over $1,00,000. To shake this off, the fiftyyear- old writer had embarked on a year-long lecture trip covering a hundred cities in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and the British Isles, Ceylon and India.
In Bombay, Twain’s first appearance was in the Novelty Theatre before an overflowing audience worshipping ‘at the shrine of the world’s great humourist when he made his debut before his first Indian audience’. Twain spoke of, among other things, how there were 352 different kinds of sins, so that ‘the industrious persons could commit them all in one year and be inoculated against all future sins’. He told stories, some apocryphal, about George Washington and other great Americans, and also read a chapter from Tom Sawyer. Twain lunched with the Governor in his official residence and met Jamsetji Tata over dinner.
Like many well-informed Americans of his generation, Mark
Twain had thought of India as a land of fantasy: ‘an imaginary
land—a fairy land, dreamland, a land made of poetry and moonlight
for the Arabian Nights to do their gorgeous miracles in’. Ahead of his trip, he had written jocularly to Kipling, ‘I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild buffalos; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.’3 After spending two months in the country and visiting over sixteen cities and towns, Twain concluded that India was the most interesting country on the planet. But his view of India was a tad more realistic: ‘This is indeed India—the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle . . . the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.’
Twain was a curious and sympathetic traveller. The people, he wrote, were ‘pleasant and accommodating’. ‘They are kindly people . . . The face and bearing that indicate a surly spirit and a bad heart seemed rare among Indians,’ he added. The sight of an Indian servant in his hotel being needlessly struck by a European manager reminded him of his childhood in the American South and the stain of slavery on his own country. The ‘thatched group of native houses’ along the Hooghly River took him back to ‘the negro quarters, familiar to me from nearly forty years ago—and so for six hours this has been the sugar coast of the Mississippi’.5 Even Indian religion and spirituality, of which he had had no high opinion, Twain encountered with an open mind. On the massive Hindu religious festival in Allahabad, he wrote, ‘It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that.’ Meeting an Indian saint in Benares, Twain gave him an autographed copy of Huckleberry Finn and noted his admiration for men who ‘went into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate on virtue and holiness and seek to attain them’. Twain had heard of the storied tradition of ‘thuggee’ or ritual strangling as a boy in America and wrote at inordinate length about it in his account of the passage through India. Nevertheless, he also observed, ‘We white people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization.’
All the same, Twain’s views of India were shaped by a sense of civilizational hierarchy. While India was ‘the cradle of human race, birth place of human speech’ and so forth, it was a civilization that had no notion of ‘progress’: ‘repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, age after age, the barren meaningless process’. India had been the ‘first civilization’ and remained stuck there. If this was redolent of Britain’s ideological justification for the conquest of India, Twain more explicitly endorsed the political rationale of the Raj: ‘Where there are eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarrelling must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are impossible.’ The beneficence of British rule flowed logically from these premises. ‘When one considers what India was under her Hindoo and Mohammedan rulers, and what she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the establishment of British supremacy here.’
