by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Nivedita Singh,
Title: Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In; Author: Anjali Kumar; Publisher: Orion Spring; Pages: 232; Price: Rs 399
The human being is a curious creature and is filled with questions which are yet to be answered by nature and science: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What happens when we die? Is there a God? And many more. Similar questions plagued author Anjali Kumar, who was also a lawyer at Google.
When she started asking questions her search engine couldn’t answer, she embarked on a series of misadventures to find God — or at least some form of enlightenment.
“Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In” is the story of Kumar’s quest to find a spiritual path in the modern world. The journey was filled with wonder, wild and sometimes frightening.
“In 2010, when my daughter Zia was born, I decided that I needed to find God. I told myself that she would eventually ask me questions that I couldn’t answer and that completely unravelled me… I made a firm commitment to myself — and to her — that I would make a valiant effort to find us a comfortable spiritual home,” Kumar writes in the Introduction.
Narrated from the open-minded perspective of a spiritual seeker rather than a religious scholar, the book offers an honest account of some of the less-than-mainstream spiritual practices that are followed by millions of people in the world today as she searched for answers to life’s most universal questions.
Kumar, a part of a rapidly growing population in America that is highly spiritual but religiously uncommitted, was convinced that traditional religions were not a fit for her. She was also aware that she couldn’t simply Google these answers.
She set out on a spiritual pilgrimage, looking for answers. During the quest, she headed to the mountains of Peru to learn from the shamans, attended the techie haunt of Burning Man, practised transcendental meditation, communed with angels and visited saints, goddesses, witches and faith healers. She even hired a medium to commune with the dead.
“As I watched the man burn, and the following day as I watched the Temple of Promise burn, I knew this to be true: We are temporary. And spectacular. In life and in death. There is an irony to the juxtaposition of our extreme importance and our complete irrelevance,” she writes in the book.
Her light-hearted story offers a revealing look at the timeless and vexing issue of spirituality in an era when more and more people are walking away from formal religion.
Before starting her journey, when she raised the issue with her friends and family, she realised that she “was late to the party”.
“Apparently, while I had been negotiating contracts at Google, the rest of the world had been on a quest to find enlightenment, spiritual clarity, and salvation,” she writes.
During the quest, she realised that “virtually everyone asked for essentially the same three things… Health. Happiness. Love”.
Her journey taught her so much more: “What I found was completely unexpected. This book tells that story.”
(Nivedita Singh can be contacted at nivedita.singh@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Ananya Das,
Book: Pull of Pulses Full of Beans; Author: Salma Husain and Vijay Thukral; Publisher: Niyogi Books; Pages: 204 pages; Price: Rs 750
“Looks are deceptive”, as the saying goes, and author Salma Husain, armed with her new book, “Pull of Pulses Full of Beans”, is all set to prove the saying true as she chose lentils as the protagonist.
Lentils or pulses, known as “daal” in Hindi, isn’t something one would like to make the focus of his or her book. But Husain, along with Chef Vijay Thukral, who calls lentils the “mother of Indian cuisine”, has used it as the key ingredient of her recipes in this offering.
The book is in eight sections — soups and salads, snacks and savouries, pulao and rice, daals, favourite and winning flavours, international recipes, breads and rotis, and sweet dishes. The recipes have also been well explained — also what the preparations are called in different states.
The book also has a detailed description of the combining of spices and its results, a glossary of English-Hindi terms for the ingredients, measurement units and oven temperature guides, among several other lists.
However, this is a lot more than just a recipe book. The authors have dived deep into the history of lentils, their use — beginning from the earliest of times down the ages worldwide, including the sway they hold in India.
Each recipe has been carefully handpicked, has a very special background and a unique story. While some are exotic flavours from the mountainous regions of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, several come from different communities like Sindhi, Konkani and Parsi. Dishes from Italy, Morocco, Pakistan, Iran and Nepal also find a place in the book.
Apart from dishes that were the favourites of Mughal emperors — Akbar, Jehangir, Aurangazeb and Bahadur Shah Zafar — the journey touches on the palates of the British during their rule in India. Contrary to popular belief, Mughal Emperors did not only feast on the non-vegetarian dishes; they were connoisseurs of something as basic as lentils.
The author has even included recipes that were favourites of some of the Mughal emperors — Khasa tilaai (paheet) (plain skinned yellow lentil) was special for Akbar; Lazeezan (Khichdi of green gram and lamb) was enjoyed by Jahangir; Qubooli (Bengal gram pulao) was an all-time favourite of Aurangazeb; and Missi roti (Bengalgram bread) was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s preferred bread.
Amidst the sea of exotic dishes, here are some that caught my attention: A mouth-watering spread of shami kababs (mince meat patties), kabab-e-khasgi (special lentil kabab), and ankurit daal ke kabab (sprouted lentil pattues); khilwan daal (dry white lentil skinned) — a traditional cuisine of the Kashmiri Pandits; a unique dish, manali aru daal (chikpea and unripe peach) and chana madra (chickpea and yoghurt).
A few others that I would like to include: A traditional Multani daal called “saat chhaunke ki daal” (lentil with seven temperings); daal ka dulha (lentil with dumpling); doli ki roti (stuffed fermented bread), and a sweet dish sanathana (combination of lentils, molasses, and coconut dessert).
The dedication behind this book is evident. Husain said that while in Kentucky she got a recipe from a friend at a cafe, another from an Arabian co-passenger during a flight to the US, she found in Iran a recipe from an Iranian chef. Some recipes are from an ashram in Rishikesh, others vary from street delicacies to recipes from festivals, weddings and even a 17th century cookbook “Alwan-e-Nelmat”.
Husain has even selected seven types of lentils — crowned them with the title of “popular jewels” and has spoken about their origin, the rich history, health benefits, nutritional values and how they are made in different states.
And did we know that a lentil festival exists and that too at the national level: The National Lentil Festival which takes place in the US at Pullman in Washington State. The festival, which started in 1989, was originally an after-harvest celebration for the lentil farmers of the state’s fertile Palouse area. Today it attracts 26,000 people to a town of 20,000 – and ends with a lentil cook-off… and the coronation of a little lentil king and queen.
At a time when chefs and authors are trying to churn out innovative dishes using either a non-vegetarian base or exotic vegetarian ingredients, Husain chose a run-of-the-mill subject to work on and has raised the bar of one of the simplest fares of the world.
(Ananya Das can be contacted at ananya.d@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, Markets, Technology
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer; Author: Wendell Berry; Publisher: Penguin Classics; Pages: 64; Price: Rs 50
In this era of high technology, expressing disinclination to use a computer would be tantamount to declaring yourself a fossil. But have the ubiquitous computers — or rather the technological progress they embody — been an unqualified boon for us?
There may be no simple answer; and in any case, it would differ on a generational basis — from those who have practically grown up with computers, and their elders, who can still recall a world where they were not that common.
But there are some — among both sections — well aware that the growing presence of computers in every field of human activity also raises a few concerns. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its consequences is one, but slowly but steadily diminishing human ingenuity, knowledge and endeavour — and even thinking — is a rather bigger, though lesser-known, problem. Take anyone who turns to Google to find a fact, or a spelling — to find, not to cross-check (William Poundstone’s “Head in the Cloud”, 2016, is a worrying read in this regard).
However, it was nearly three decades ago that American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer Wendell Berry invoked these concerns while setting out his reasons for not investing in a computer to help him in his writing. As this book, reproducing his 1987 piece for “Harper’s Weekly”, shows, some of his points are still valid even now. While dealing with the US of the late 1980s, some will also strike a chord across time and space.
Stressing he did not “admire” his reliance on energy corporations and wanted to be “hooked” on them as less as possible, Berry holds this is the primary reason for not acceding to the demand of several people that he get a computer.
Asserting he “did not admire the computer manufacturers a great deal more than I admire the energy industries”, he says he was familiar with the former’s “propaganda campaigns that have put computers into public schools in need of books”.
Berry also argues that the stand that computers are “expected to become as common as TV sets in ‘the future’ does not impress or matter to me” for he does not see them advancing, even a bit, anything that matters — peace, economic justice, ecological health and so on.
He goes on to list his nine standards for useful technological innovation. However, all this barely covers two (A4) pages — but then there are a selection of letters, mainly critical, his article evoked, especially his quips about his wife’s role in his writings, and his joint rejoinder to them, questioning “technological fundamentalism”.
But what occupies most of this book, among Penguin’s special printing selection from 50 classics, is a longer essay titled “Feminism, the Body and the Machine”.
In this, Berry, expanding on his previous arguments, gives an eloquent and reasoned, yet provocative, pitch on how technological progress, or even the modern economic system that props it up, may not always be very positive, since it may be dehumanising us.
This, he polemically but cogently argues, has made the modern household “the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming” and “nothing productive” — well almost nothing — is done. How the aims of gender equality cannot be served by women submitting to “the same specialisation, degradation, trivialisation and tyrannisation of work” that men have, and the fact that work can be a gift too is overlooked.
Berry also deals with the shortcomings of modern education where “after several generations of ‘technological progress’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important” and goes on to question the very purpose of all this progress, which is not having a too salutary effect on our lives — family or personal — despite its promise of “money and ease”.
There is much more which merits a careful consideration, though many of us will dismiss this as an obscurantist rant. But as Berry, now over 83, says: “My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can.”
Do we need devices for this?
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The Disappearance of Emile Zola – Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case; Author: Michael Rosen; Publisher: Faber & Faber; Pages: 320; Price: Rs 599
It is an over-century-old scandal that may seem familiar today. A country that prided itself on its ideals of liberty and justice uncovers an embarrassing espionage case, but matters are so orchestrated that an innocent, conscientious officer is accused and convicted — just because of his religion. This polarises society, but things come to a head only when an influential author jumps to defend the scapegoat — and suffers for it.
The French Revolution brought the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity into modern political discourse, but the Dreyfus scandal of the 1890s raised the question whether these had permeated into their homeland. As this book tells us, the case exposed faultlines between France’s monarchist, religious and anti-Semitic right and the liberal, republican, and (later) socialist sections — a rift which would haunt the country in the coming century and cripple it in the face of aggression.
If Dreyfus was eventually exonerated and the country remained a liberal democracy — however imperfect — it was in no small measure due to the energetic efforts of Emile Zola. But he didn’t emerge unscathed and may have also lost his life due to it, as Michael Rosen shows in this book.
There were several attempts to persuade authorities hear the Dreyfus matter on the basis of proper evidence, instead of anti-Semitism. Among these was Zola’s famous open letter beginning “J’accuse”, accusing the state of a deliberate miscarriage of justice — which earned him a case for libel (in France then, it was also institutions, not only individuals, that could be libelled).
It was this case’s consequences for the writer, his country and the world — as well as literature — that are revealed here.
Noting that very few people outside France know much about Zola’s life, Rosen says they would have heard little or nothing about this particular but significant episode of his exile in London as the Dreyfus case raged.
“… Strictly speaking, it wasn’t exile, it was flight. The world-renowned novelist — as he was even then — fled from France, having been fined and given a prison sentence. This was not due to any of the usual writer’s transgressions — duels, crimes of passion, dissolution, immorality or indecency in their writing. It was a political offence. On behalf of the disgraced army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Zola took on the highest courts in the land and lost.”
But this was no simple scandal, for “these events split France down the middle, brought the fundamental nature of the French state into question, and have left their marks on France ever since”. And Zola himself was in personal danger, with a rightist newspaper attacking him in terms that seemed, as the author says, an invitation to a lynching, and passions were so inflamed that he could have been shot dead on the street.
But the cost was also personal, as this book shows, for Zola had a uniquely delicate task of balancing the two women in his life — the mother of his children, and his wife — as this book brings out in detail.
Drawing on the author’s correspondence with his family and friends, his own writings about his exile, contemporary newspapers and other accounts, Rosen, otherwise known as a children’s author, poet and broadcaster, uses Zola’s nearly year-long enforced stay in London and around to sketch an unforgettable picture of him at a period of “turmoil, change and stress on three fronts: political, literary and personal”.
In the process, he also focuses on some of Zola’s considerable corpus of work — not well received by all sections due to its “naturalness”, or frank explorations of sex as well as descriptions of childbirth among other things — as well as the era’s social, literary and journalistic mores, and the Dreyfus case itself.
But this book is more than a tragi-comic account of Zola’s stay in London — initially hampered by the fear of discovery given his triumphant visit five years ago and his lack of English, as well as his measures to get his “wives” and his family to him. It is also a signal recognition of how literary creativity can flow even in unfamiliar climes and of a writer’s bravery in going against entrenched, unreasonable, yet popular, attitudes and prevailing over them — eventually.
As such, it is a must read for these illiberal times too.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: A Murder on Malabar Hill; Author: Sujata Massey; Publisher: Penguin Random House India; Pages: 440; Price: Rs 399
India is modernising in the 1920s, but at its own pace. Even in Bombay, which, as one of the British Empire’s greatest ports, is open to outside influences, change is slow. Some professions are still not fully open to women, and there are situations where the law must tread carefully — especially in the brutal murder in a house full of “purdahnasheen” Muslim women.
But there is someone who can operate in such a tricky situation — due to her profession and her background. And while for feisty Parsi lawyer Perveen Mistry, Sujata Massey draws from Indian legal history, she matches it with her thorough research and a compelling plot to create a mesmerising mystery set in Raj-era Bombay, against contemporary Japan and colonial Bengal that have served in her other books.
It is February 1921, and Perveen, the city’s first woman solicitor, has been raring to show her skills after six months in her father’s law firm — the only one that will employ her. Since she cannot yet practice in court, she handles the legal paperwork for the firm – – wills, contracts and so on.
Among them is a recently-deceased Muslim businessman’s will pending for execution, but now the estate’s trustee sends a letter from his three widows, who want to donate their “mehr” (wife’s settlement agreed at the wedding time) to the family “wakf”. An intrigued and concerned — we learn why later — Perveen wonders if the women, in their cloistered existence, fully understand the consequences of their decision and obtains permission to go and ask them.
When she goes to their secluded Malabar Hill mansion, her concerns are not assuaged, rather they are exacerbated. Not only do the three wives have some secrets from each other, they also seem unaware what the estate trustee has in mind. This man also turns out to be an unpleasant character who is dominating the household with threats — express or implied.
While Perveen tries to counsel the women against leaving themselves vulnerable by signing away their wealth, she is overheard by the trustee, who turns on her and she has to leave to avoid an unpleasant and even untoward scene. However, she forgets her briefcase and when she returns to pick it as it contains some important documents, she finds him stabbed to death.
Perveen is determined to aid the women by helping catch the murderer. But even with her connections — her recently-arrived Oxford college-mate happens to be the daughter of a senior aide to the Governor — there is only so much that a woman in India then can do on her own or convince the authorities to do.
But as our heroine tries, there is danger for her personally. Will she be able to survive to unravel the mystery?
Meanwhile, a parallel story, occasioned by the sight of a strange gentleman who appears to be Bengali by his garb, and evokes in her memories of Calcutta — a city of happiness, humiliation and heartbreak — gives her background and her stress on women’s rights.
While the mystery set nearly a century back in a time with a different pace of life and governance — the colonial rulers more keen to maintain order and avoid antagonising any touchy community – – is captivating, it is the skilful evocation of an era of political and social churning that sets this far above a mere “whodunnit”, no matter how exotic in time and space.
The freedom struggle is yet to pick up pace among professional classes, but Massey intertwines it subtly into her narrative with episodes like Perveen’s telling-off of some neighbourhood activists, her father’s legal defence of a “subversive” client and an Indian policeman in a crucial role. The social aspect is more marked — though some points may surprise those who think her community largely Westernised.
Along with the range of memorably drawn characters — ranging from the widows to the policemen, British and Indian — it is an engaging read with enough matters left unresolved to create interest and anticipation for the next installment. For Massey promises it will be a series.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
