by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Saket Suman,
Book: The Disobedient Indian; Author: Ramin Jahanbegloo; Publisher: Speaking Tiger; Price: Rs 499; Pages: 169
Iconic as he was, the life and times of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi continue to attract scholars and researchers for relevant lessons in contemporary times even some seven decades after his assassination. The latest attempt comes from philosopher and academic Ramin Jahanbegloo, who has attempted to highlight a lesser explored facet of the Mahatma — the dissenter.
Setting the record straight in his introduction to the offering, Jahanbegloo points out that disobedience is far from being “an invitation to chaos and violence”; instead, he notes, it is “a constructive and creative attitude” that can go a long way in the pursuit of, what he calls, “a self-reflecting and non-conformist community”.
“In a deeper sense, it is a serious and conscientious commitment to explore new vistas of change and exchange for our common life, in a time when populism and mass immaturity are holding each other in a sway,” notes the Iranian-Canadian philosopher, who has authored 28 books till date and is currently the Executive Director of Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace at the Jindal Global University here.
The first part of the book explores the formulation of disobedience throughout history by looking at and critically examining works by scholars and thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau, who was himself one of the greatest influences on Gandhi’s practise of nonviolence and disobedience; George Woodlock, who declared that humanity would not be enslaved so long as men continued to disobey; and, among others, Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, best known for authoring “The Imaginary Institution of Society”.
In this section, the idea of dissent and the practise of disobedience is minutely observed, and then dissected, point by point, from the pages of history. Separating protest from dissent, the acclaimed author narrates the journey that disobedience, both as a principle and as a political tool, has travelled so far.
In doing this, fortunately, Jahanbegloo does not ignore that first-time reader — who may not have been introduced to the writings on the subject — and provides background on what dissent and disobedience mean, and how they have been interpreted and propagated by academics and scholars, as also their use as a political tool over the course of history.
“This is where a look back at the Gandhian philosophy of resistance becomes a call to political wisdom,” he asserts.
Jahanbegloo reminds the readers, by quoting Gandhi extensively, of his firm belief in the fact that every citizen is ultimately responsible for every act of the state. “This,” the author notes, “is the most extreme act of disloyalty in modern politics. It destroys our habits of willing obedience to the state, but it also changes the whole definition of a law-abiding citizen”.
So is a disobedient Indian a law abiding citizen?
The answer is not revealed, at least openly, but this particular section of the book makes elaborate references to Gandhian beliefs and principles, before dwelling on Bapu’s civil disobedience movement. Readers are bound to ask: What else was Gandhi if not a disobedient Indian?
Jahanbegloo then explores the Gandhian philosophy of dissent in the context of present times. Contending that Bapu was the arch dissenter of the 20th century, he points out that Gandhi never accepted “the idea of consent as a common justification of political obligation” and quotes him on “legitimation of the state” to establish his point.
The author maintains that the idea of disobedience was an innovative one for Gandhi. According to Jahanbegloo, Gandhi’s idea of dissent and Gandhi as a disobedient Indian, were not merely a critique of authorities but also a revolution of values.
As Ashok Vajpeyi notes in the foreword: “For him (Gandhi), ‘disobedience, as a spirit and as an act has an ethical significance more than just a tactical value in non-violent struggle’.”
The book will remind readers of the inherent fragility of human existence and the frailty of the human political condition while also serving as a reference point for future studies on Gandhi, particularly in the context of his positions on dissent and the law abiding citizen.
Written with extensive research and backed by a notes and reference section, the book makes its evidences available for the reader to cross-check the facts and quotes used by the author. Even as it deals with a heavy subject as this, it has been written in simple language and will be accessible for most readers.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Hungry Gods; Author: Richa Lakhera; Publisher: Rupa Publications India; Pages: 205; Price: Rs 295
What is the most captivating ‘drug’ for humans? Fame, greed, lust, and so on are beguiling in their own ways but pale before another intense motivation, which may only increase in potency and desire in time until it achieves its goal. This is revenge.
And it is this overpowering ‘drug’ fuelling the protagonist of this dark tale by senior NDTV journalist Richa Lakhera, where a heinous crime decades back is repaid on its perpetrators in the present.
In her third novel, after debut crime novel “Item Girl”, and entertainment industry satire “Garbage Beat, Lakhera brings big business, showbiz, sex (including its fetish and bondage aspect) and investigative reporting together into a whirling vortex of passion, scandal and violence that may not spare anyone who is even near it – involved or not, innocent or guilty.
Beginning in the recent past with an act of unsettling brutality, where the unnamed and unidentified narrator sees mother being tortured and murdered by fellow villagers egged on by a rather greedy corporate, and has to run and hide to avoid the same fate, the story comes to the present with an equally disquieting triptych.
We see a hot-shot director being eliminated artistically by someone he is familiar by being driven to frenzied suicide, a rather sleazy top company executive of a rather sinister pharmaceutical company is indulging in his criminal vice and a movie superstar, who is willing to endorse anything for a price, faces some uncomfortable questions about his latest tie-up from a determined journalist, before the PR team kicks in.
Alongside, there is a young upcoming actress who is determined to break into the top league by hook or crook and after some embarrassing situations, has no other options but to take a role in a TV serial being made by the same company.
Rounding up the rather motley crew is the aforesaid director’s daughter and another aspiring actress, shown in a rather intense but private role with the superstar, the superstar’s nasty but efficient factotum, an assistant director on the TV serial who had seen his now late boss take all the credit, and a prostitute who has to contend with her demented mother and a strange “uncle”.
All of them come into involuntary contact after the director’s half-decomposed body’s found and the police come in, led by an efficient but jaded officer, to investigate.
As tensions rise between the various characters as the police investigations threaten to bring out long-buried skeletons (figuratively), vested interests take prominence, and someone is deliberately leaking secrets to the journalist, the scene is set for an explosive finale. But how many of the characters will be around with us till then?
That is the question that drives on Lakhera’s story through a series of unnerving and disconcerting episodes dealing with various characters till all collapses in a welter of blood, gore, and even insanity for most of the (rather despicable) characters – though a couple do get chance for redemption.
But while the writing is terse, tense and gritty, there are a couple of small issues that bedevil the narrative – especially a little too much sex (graphic) and profanity. Also sometimes the continuity is not as smooth in segueing of the various episodes into a composite seamless whole, and some vital issues don’t get as much play – especially the big, evil pharmaceutical company, whose role is not fleshed out sufficiently beyond its sleazy legal affairs chief.
On the other end, Lakhera manages to instill a distinct motif of foreboding and menace, the characterisation is vivid and the sense of place of the “Dune”, as the setting is called, is evocative. And then the police officer and the journalist are too good to remain confined to a one-off.
Overall, it is a compelling, though much disturbing, tale about the less than prepossessing relationship between corporate greed, celebrity culture (including of endorsements) and a rather complaisant media, but in a largely subtle manner.
It may not be a very comforting read, but it is an essential read.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, Markets, Technology
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Gravitational Waves; Author: Brian Clegg; Publisher: Icon Hot Science; Pages: 176; Price: Rs 399
Recording the occurrence of a celestial event, far away across deep space and eons after it happened, may not seem a pathbreaking scientific achievement, even if happened almost a century after a great scientist had set out its possibility. But the ‘observation’ of gravitational waves as a faint, brief sound is important, even if it doesn’t affect us directly.
Hailed as the scientific breakthrough of the century, LIGO’s (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) validation of existence of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in a 1916 as an outcome of his general theory of relativity, was said to eclipse the successful search for the elusive Higgs boson (the “god particle”).
But headlines apart – and wrong ones at that as well as other wrong perceptions about LIGO’s achievement, as this book shows, the discovery was a paradigm shift in both scientific knowledge and scientific method, contends author and science populariser Brian Clegg.
However before we come to these, he says we need to do some basic groundwork to understand the discovery, from how Einstein “predicted the existence of gravitational waves almost exactly a century before the discovery (a coincidence that would itself make some wonder if the whole thing was a hoax)”.
Then, there is the “controversy surrounding early attempts to detect gravitational waves using massive metal bars”, the “brave step into the dark that led to LIGO despite, rather than thanks to its management”, and a look into “remarkable cosmological events involving black holes and neutron stars” that made these waves’ detection possible.
But, first of all, says Clegg, for all those who had a poor relation/ or have fallen out of touch with physics, we need to understand what a wave is. And it’s not just the ripples on water when a stone is dropped into it or the foamy water crashing on beaches, but what happens “under” the phenomenon.
From this, we come to the debates and experiments on the nature of light, and from that to another fundamental force of nature – gravity, via Galileo and Newton, and its effect on “spacetime” but more specifically to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And it was from this “brilliant mathematical model of the phenomenon”, gravitational waves were predicted.
We also learn what gravitational waves actually are – as far as their manifestation is concerned, given that some descriptions in mass media are misleading.
Clegg, who actually begins with a terse account of LIGO finally recording the proof, returns to the theme from the third chapter, where he brings out the challenge of detecting them experimentally .This is vividly brought out by a scale table proposed by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne.
Take the familiar centimetre, says Thorne, a long-time researcher on gravitational waves and one of the LIGO founders, and then keep dividing by powers of 10 multiple times till you get to 10 to the power of minus 17, which is “the magnitude of the largest motion we may expect to see in the separation between the mirrors of a gravitational wave detector with arms a few km long”.
This sets the stage for recounting all the difficulties in the equipment needed to detect gravitational waves since the effort began in the 1960s, the several false starts, the advances in astronomical sciences that helped, the genesis of LIGO, its teething problems – internal and external, till that evening in September 2015, where its purpose was vindicated. But as we see, the story doesn’t end there.
While all this can also be found in Janna Levin’s “Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space”, where Clegg scores, apart from a detailed look at the scientific rigour LIGO followed, is chronicling the shift in scientific method the search for gravitational waves represented, right from its early days.
This was in moving the observation from something that actually happened to “a statistical observation, something that had good probability of not being a random occurrence but couldn’t be definitively said to have happened” (also followed in the case of Higgs boson, says Clegg.
And while proving the “dance” of neutrino stars, and the existence of black holes, it is this new technique that physics provides astronomy which might help us find the definitive origin of our universe – and its future.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Missing, Presumed Dead; Author: Kiran Manral; Publisher: Amaryllis Books; Pages: 268; Price: Rs 350
With all the duplicity, self-interest, hidden motives and betrayals — both big and small — we face in our lives, the thin line separating us from insanity can be closer than we know, and may not need a chemical imbalance or genetic inheritance to cross. And once transgressed, the fallout may rarely remain confined to the victim.
Given the complex set of relations — family, friendly and professional — our contemporary selves have, the consequences of psychological disorders may spread their disruptive ripples much further than we can imagine: Among those waiting to derive benefit from it, and those whose entire world unravels irredeemably.
These are motifs that form the unsettling backdrop of the latest novel by the irrepressibly imaginative Kiran Manral, who, after the urban second-chance romance of “Saving Maya”, returns to the familiar geographical setting of isolated and subtly menacing mountains, where majestic nature frequently has a hostile side.
In her second foray into “Himalayan Gothic” after dealing with it masterfully in “The Face at the Window” (2016) about an old widow, Manral now shows us the slow dissolution of a dysfunctional relationship on a bigger family, through the perspective of beauteous but fragile Aisha Thakur, whose life has long been in turmoil.
Not only has her marriage been reduced to a sham despite two children, she has reasons to suspects her husband Prithvi, who remains at work as much as he can, has designs on her ancestral property — and the demons that plagued her mother seem to be firmly entrenched in her mind too.
And then one rainy afternoon, comes an unexpected visitor who shakes her already unstable world beyond measure. A woman, who seems eerily familiar, turns up at her doorstep of their rather isolated house and announces that she is Heer, her half-sister — the daughter of the woman for whom her father had abandoned them years back.
Despite her reluctance, Aisha yields to her unspoken entreaties and allows her in, though her children, who soon return from school, are curious about the guest. And then a chain of environmental causes, her children’s impetuous actions and a certain disinclination to send off a guest — no matter how unwelcome — into treacherous weather, leaves her no alternative but to allow her newly-found sibling to stay on. The stay becomes a bit indefinite.
And then Aisha goes on an errand into the town, but the hostile weather makes her unable to return home. Rather fortuitously, she meets a rather helpful and handsome stranger and they enjoy some days of bliss before ulterior motives and real intentions bring her down in a resounding crash.
As her family comes to know she has committed suicide, the dislocation is minimised as Heer steps into her role, including in Prithvi’s bed, and soon takes over his life, even convincing him to send the children to boarding school.
What does Heer want and what has happened to Aisha — with her son insisting she is not dead — are questions dealt with in the second part of this engrossing but disturbing story as Manral deftly turns the narrative from her female protagonist to the male to show how mental illness — and the lack of trust and the vulnerabilities it engenders — may send even the sane into an equally lethal labyrinth.
In one way, the book seems as a conspiracy thriller down to its rather shocking but unresolved end — but like life mostly is, the versatile author, who has everything from frothy romances to spine-chillers, gives it a wider canvas.
This she manages in everything from lifestyles of dissolute landlords of yore, some evocative descriptions of paranoia, some steamy sex, and some vivid descriptions of characters who show they are not what they seem, and the rather oleaginous police inspector and the sceptical lawyer with his unpalatable life lessons lend heft.
And the “50 Shades of Grey” and Harry Potter references are an inspired touch.
But overall, what marks Manral’s work is her judicious handling of a key issue, without taking sides, while focussing on how identity, trust and support are key to relationships, not lust or benefits.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Mohammed Shafeeq,
Title: Humans on the Run; Author: Kumar M. Tiku; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Pages: 280; Price: Rs 650
For millions of people displaced around the world, “Home is where the heart is”. Each one of them has a story to tell. The stories of injustice, persecution, war and killings in their homelands, to stories of determination, resilience, hope and survival during migration — and then the stories of the daily struggle in alien lands, human misery, helplessness and the longing to return to their home.
With the problem of displacement reaching unprecedented proportions across the world, these stories often get buried in the debate over the cause of conflicts, the resulting large-scale migration and the response or lack of it by different countries to the problem of refugees.
Collecting stories from victims of displacement in different conflict hotspots and compiling them in a book is a challenge, for every story demands a different treatment and it has to be told in the larger context of the politico-religious conflicts.
This book is a compendium of stories of human displacement caused by conflicts both within and outside their countries
From India to Afghanistan, from Myanmar to Sri Lanka and from Tibet to Syria, the stories are so different. They also vary from person to person. Yet, all are bound by a common element — human misery.
As someone who served the United Nations in conflict-ridden countries for over 15 years, Kumar M. Tiku has seen from close quarters the sufferings of the displaced.
The book has stories by 25 exiles, refugees and asylum seekers across more than 10 countries who spoke to the author and his fellow contributors.
As the author says, the stories, mostly first-person accounts, highlight how their once calm and orderly lives changed and the hard choices they faced when they decided in favour of survival and self-preservation over threats to their lives, honour and the most primeval of all human needs — freedom. The migrants narrate their hardships after they were uprooted from the ecosystem called home.
Kumar also served the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) in Syria, where more than a third and close to half of the population is without a home. “The sheer scale of human tragedy that has visited this once beautiful and historically rich land is beyond all human imagination,” he writes.
“Life as a refugee is dehumanising. I cannot take the daily slurs,” the author quotes Odai, a Syrian refugee whom he met in Turkey, as saying. “I want to go back and die in my homeland. But I know my children will never let me take them back. It’s been a year since we left and they still get nightmares thinking of the bombs that rained in our neighbourhoods,” says the refugee.
The author quotes a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report of 2016 that said an unprecedented 65 million people were displaced around the world due to war and persecution. Syria, Yemen and Iraq account for over half of the total conflict-induced displacements.
What makes this book special is the author himself is a displaced person in India. “This book of stories stems from my own tattered identity as a Kashmiri,” writes Kumar, who belongs to Kashmiri Pandit community.
“The loss of the land into which my forebears and I were born is a stab whose pain refuses to be dulled even after a full quarter century in displacement,” he writes.
“Millions of forced migrants around the globe nurture the same dream that I dream — of returning to their home one day, when injustice, violence and terror will give way to reason, sobriety and fair play,” he adds.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that there are at least 796,000 people internally displaced as a result of conflict and violence in India, as of 2016.
The stories in the book include two from 1990 migration of Kashmiri Hindus. One of the stories is by author’s wife Sudha, who recounts how love and inter-communal bonhomie in Kashmir of her birth and the exemplary peaceful land of her forefathers was overtaken by a vicious cycle of distance, distrust and destruction.
(Mohammed Shafeeq can be contacted at m.shafeeq@ians.in)
—IANS
