Book Launch- This Place

“As a writer, I feel come, let me take you somewhere and you feel it, feel this place — you may never go there or care about it — but you feel it as you are reading the story,” says Amitabha Bagchi at the launch of his book ‘This Place’.

In ‘This Place’, Bagchi takes us to Baltimore. The story is about a man named Jeevan who manages accounts of his landlord, Shabbir, in return for a rent-free accommodation. Kay and Mathew are his neighbours. The city authorities decide to demolish a few buildings including the one in which Jeevan is staying and thus begins a conflict. In the meantime, a woman named Savita enters Jeevan’s life, making his life more complex. The book deals with various questions around morality, fidelity, masculinity, loneliness and the central theme — displacement.

Bagchi says he knew he had to write about his US experience, especially Baltimore — he has stayed there for around six years; he needed to get a few things off his chest. He had started writing his first novel in Baltimore and finished it while still in the US and he wrote ‘This Place’ before ‘The Householder’. He had gone back to Baltimore to research before writing the book, but it was more about “how the city feels” to him rather than physical research.

“Baltimore is like a child gone wrong. There is crime, drugs, prostitution... it is the inner city of America without the glamour of New York. People had been left to rot. No one cared. This book is to show that look someone cares. You can’t live in a city without getting attached to it in some way.”

Bagchi has tried to capture various hues of American life through his characters. Kay, for example, has a problem with fidelity — a common thing in the US — and she has to deal with the pressures of morality. Mathew is a failed computer science PhD student. He finds out that a problem that he had been working on has been solved by people in IBM. He gets this idea that he can improve their solution and goes on a wild goose chase. Meeting several people who had achieved more than him instils in him a sense of failure.

“Among educated middle class Americans, there are steep pyramids of achievement. While some people are extremely successful, some fall on the side. In MIT computer department, for example, only one out five joins the faculty while the other four are made to leave with a feeling that they are a failure, which is not always justified. It is true for all professions. The society is unforgiving even of its talented and educated people,” elaborates Bagchi.

Another character, a real life one, that appears in the book is Cal Ripken, a basketball player from Baltimore. That Cal would be a part of the story, says Baghchi, was something that he had decided at the inception, though it was much later that he figured out how.

“Cal was a loved figure, a high achiever; he was like Rahul Dravid. Dravid has qualities of being a man... For me, there is nothing more manly than Dravid on the field, killing balls, no boundaries... getting the job done. Someone has to take the responsibility... Cal was that kind of a figure— taking no injury breaks, went to work every day and dealing with the pressures that come with masculinity.”
Baltimore, according to Bagchi, is a working man’s town. With the moving away of industries and disappearance of jobs, the city has become a shell of what it was and it has become difficult for men to provide for their families, which, in turn, undermines their masculinity.

Bagchi was inspired by painter Edward Hopper and the influence is seen in some sentence constructions like ‘chair where the paper was read’. Speaking about the way Hopper’s paintings—landscapes – are arranged (around a slanted quadrilateral made by light), Bagchi says, “I see in Hopper the tension between humans and space. If the human is removed, the paintings still work which makes the presence of the human in that space extremely fragile. In the book, space exists independent of the character. It shows fragility of life. Hopper’s paintings try to capture that there is so much space but not enough people to fill it with; completely different from Delhi,” he laughs.

And while descriptions were inspired by Hopper, the story itself was inspired by Medha Patkar’s speeches and documentaries on Narmada Bachao Andolan and the problems related to displacement it brought forth.

“Novelists are the keepers of a species morality,” says Bagchi and adds, “I know it is naive, but I feel that novels are a moralist’s medium. You can be a moralist without moralising.”

The book was launched at MoonRiver on Saturday.

Man with a vision

Found this in my notes. This profile is an assignment I did in college.

Man with a visionFebruary 17, 2011

He sat cross-legged on a red sofa, his hands on the handles and head held-up high. His black hair had retreated to the sides and back of his head, revealing a large portion of his brown scalp, not an uncommon phenomenon among young. His brown eyes looked amused and a smile played up on his lips showing white teeth beneath thicket of black moustache. He had just asked me to guess his age. 35?

35, he heard the voice. He laughed as he looked at the blob of mass from where the sound had come. “My wife should hear this,” he said aloud. He called out to his manager, “Ranjit! Did you hear that?”

“Yes sir,” he heard a familiar voice. He looked to his left at the source of the sound. A new blob of mass of nondescript colour had appeared. He did not know how far it was as everything was two dimensional. But he could judge the distance to the voice. He got up and walked towards the blob. Putting his hands on where the blob’s shoulder should be he said, “And you say that I look old!”
“Sir, there is not much difference between 35 and 40.”

He disagreed, “Of course there is!” In his life every year counts. He let go of the mass and made his way to the sofa. He knew where it was.

For C. Gopalakrishnan, or Gopi as he is fondly called, struggle defines life.  As he sits in his comfortable office in Nethrodaya, a hostel for visually and physically challenged people that he founded in 2002, he recollects how his lifelong fight for the rights of visually challenged started.

The year was 1988. It was an early November morning in Chennai and the weather was moderately hot. A group of 150 college students assembled in front of the Central Government office at Shastri Bhavan. They were from College Students Graduate Association for Blind (CSGAB). At 8.45 a.m., they started shouting slogans and in less than an hour proceeded to block the road.

Gopi, then a first year student of English literature in Pachiyappa College, was one of them. The demands were simple. Allow the visually challenged to study all the subjects in college and not just English, Tamil and History. The police watched with disinterest. Such protests were a routine affair.

Two hours later the traffic situation had become worse. The police, after receiving orders from their seniors, arrested the students and took them to Nungambakkam Railway Station. From there the students were stuffed in police vans and sent to Nungambakkam Police Station. They were left off in the evening at half past six. A few days later government accepted their demand and opened up more courses for the blind.

“There was no looking back,” he says. Over the years he protested for various rights of visually challenged. He was imprisoned 16 times, once -- chained and beaten.

“The important part is not that I was hurt but that we won. We are like tea bags. Unless put in hot water we would not know how strong we are.”

He is aware that rights are not served on platter. One has to fight for it. But his fight against social prejudices has proved to be a tough one.

Nethrodaya was born of a similar fight. While doing a project in second semester of PG Diploma course in Social Entrepreneurship, he found that the blind beggars in suburban metro stations were not allowed to be vendors. They did not bribe the police as the ‘normal’ vendors did and hence they were reduced to begging. Surprisingly, most of the blind beggars were graduates who could not afford the cost of living in the city. Nethrodaya was started to provide free accommodation to visually challenged and later extended to include physically challenged. However, what had enraged Gopi, more than the living conditions, was the discrimination against the visually challenged.

“What right does anyone has to judge our capability? We can do what ‘normal’ people can,” he says. Gopi has never believed that he was blind and at times he has fooled others into thinking the same.

Last year in October, Akhil Ajit, a final year student of Bachelors of Social Work went to ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) to apply for CSR grant for a certain college function. He entered the lift with Gopi on the ground floor. He overheard Gopi speaking about Murali, the person in-charge for giving CSR grants. “Sir, are you applying for CSR grant too?” Akhil asked. Gopi said yes and told him about Nethrodaya. It was 15 minutes later, when someone in ONGC office told him, that Akhil realised that Gopi had only partial vision. “I was shocked. I could not guess from his walk or anything that he could not see.”


Gopi was six years old when he was detected with Retinitis Pigmentosa. It is a genetic disorder in which the vision depletes with time. It is commonly found in communities that have inter-relation marriages. Gopi’s parents were Nairs from Kerala who practice endogamy in order to keep the property within the family. They had migrated to Chennai after marriage.

They were dejected when series of eye check-ups and consultations with doctors revealed that their son’s ailment could not be corrected. Only cornea related eye problems can be corrected. Mocking at the irony he says, “My cornea are in perfect condition. Believe it or not, I can donate my eyes.”

With blindness comes social untouchability which is more prevalent in the elite culture than anywhere else.

In 2006, Gopi decided to shift the Nethrodaya building as larger accommodation was required. The state government allotted them a land in an elite area in Mogappair where number of bureaucrats live. When the residents found out about the allotment there launched numerous protests filing 16 cases, which they won in municipal court and lost in High Court. They tried preventing the construction at every level by obtaining various stay orders. Their reasons ranged on degree of ridiculousness, from “seeing a blind person in the morning is a bad omen” to “we have invested lot of money in these houses, if you come the land prices will dip.” They said that seeing a blind person will lead them to depression.

“Education has not given them wisdom” says Gopi. “If they cannot be of any help they should not become hindrance in other people’s life. I don’t see why they can’t go about their work instead of cribbing about other people’s business.”

The new building was inaugurated in 2009. Since then Gopi has found many sympathisers. The vegetable vendor provides them free vegetables. There are others who support them, but were unwilling to stand-up against the bureaucrats.

In Nethrodaya, Gopi attempts to blur the line between ‘normal’ and ‘challenged’. Things are provided according to the needs. The residents are given classes in computer, music and yoga.

Gopi finds respite in his family. His wife, Usha, pampers him. Theirs was a love marriage. He dotes on his ten-years-old daughter Sethulaxmi, who chirps around the house. To him she is his sunshine. Sethulaxmi remembers the time when her father invited her favourite actor Surya to Nethrodaya. “I love Surya! He came and he hugged me. I was four then. He said nice things about my daddy,” she rattles her fondest memory.

Each year there are a number of things that Gopi learns and a lot of things he prefers to forget. It helps him win his daily fight with frustration. For now, he plans to start a high school for visually challenged girls. Gopi proves that vision has many definitions.

Book Review: Inferno

Inferno
~ Dan Brown
[SPOILER ALERT]
Dan Brown has been accused of writing the same novel again and again in different settings. The accusation limits to his Robert Langdon series, the latest of which was released this month with much fanfare. While the plot remains the same – Harvard symbologist Langdon running out of time to save the world and the only way to do it is to decrypt secret symbols, messages or puzzles. You do learn a lot about art history, though it is rather difficult to segregate fact from fiction. Anyway, I like the Langdon series for precisely that. I like the build-up, the use of symbols and history to solve a puzzle. However, the magic Brown created in ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has not been replicated either by ‘The Lost Symbol’ or his latest ‘Inferno’.
The story starts with Langdon waking up with a head wound and retrograde amnesia in a hospital in Florence and seeing his doctor being shot while trying to stop an assassin from entering his room. With help of the assistant doctor, he manages to escape. He finds a strange device in his jacket, which turns out to be a projector that shows an altered version of ‘The Map of Hell’ by Sandro Botticelli. The painting was inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He also has hallucinations about a woman with silver ringlets and an amulet asking him to “seek and find”. With no memory of the last two days, he tries to solve the puzzle of the altered ‘Map of Hell’. It turns out that an eminent scientist, Bertrand Zobrist, had created a plague to kill a large portion of the population thereby “saving the world” from the ills of overpopulation. Following clues related to Dante and his Divine Comedy, he has to reach the place where the plague would be released and somehow contain it. For a change, Langdon fails and in some ways so does Brown.

The debate on overpopulation, substantiated by graphics (presumably real), does present a compelling case for a scientist taking a drastic step to obliterate a good percentage of the world population. The chase and parallel stories help build up for the climax and once you reach there, the storyline just drops. You don’t feel like reading anymore, to follow up on the characters. It is just not good enough and it’s Brown’s fault as he set the standard really high with ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci code’ in which even the epilogue was interesting.
I guess that is a problem with series, it is really hard to keep up with the reader’s expectations. If I were to rate the book till chapter 76, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars; till chapter 100, 3 out of 5; the whole book – just 2 or may be 1-and-a-half stars. Yet, I will buy his next Robert Langdon book (I read somewhere that he has 12 great ideas for the Langdon series), and pray it holds candle to the first two books.
PS: [Not to be read if you haven’t read the book already] Till chapter 76, the build-up and the story is wonderful, though repetitions of Zobrist’s video are irritating and I wish he had just described the entire video in one go and not repeated it. But when you find out that whatever you have read so far is a farce, you feel cheated. You travel with Langdon and pray that he escapes his foes and saves the world only to realize that all of that was staged! Really!! Still, you read on hoping for a good explanation for the farce, only to be let down again. The assassin that tries to kill Langdon in the opening scene is in fact a professional who specialises in “pretending to kill people”! Really Mr Brown, I have better expectations.

Book Review: The Shiva Trilogy

The Shiva Trilogy ~ Amish Tripathy
*Spoiler alert*
Tired of being at constant war with another tribe, Shiva, chief of a Gunas (a Tibetan tribe) decides to cross the Himalaya and relocate to the Suryavanshi kingdom – Meluha. Nandi and other Meluhan soldiers lead the way. On reaching Meluha, the tribe members are given somras, a drink that kills anti-oxidants in the body thereby increasing longevity (most Meluhans are over a hundred years of age). When Shiva takes it, his throat turns blue and the Meluhans believe that he is Neelkanth, the saviour of whom prophecy spoke of. Daksha, the emperor, Kanakhala, the prime minister and many others proclaim him as God and entrust him the task to destroy ‘evil’. However, there are others like military chief Parvateshwar, who do not immediately accept him as God.
        Meluha is a highly organized society. The people love rules and hold very high moral values. The citizens are divided into four castes based on their abilities and interests. While the Brahmins are men of science, Kshatrias are soldiers, Vaishyas are traders and Shudras are labourers. There are sub-castes which denote the rank like Nandi is a bull, which is a high rank in Kshatriya but not as high as a tiger. It is an egalitarian society where no work is considered small and women, too, are free to choose their profession. The rules and the system were put in place by a charismatic king Ram and hence it is called Ram rajya.
        There are attacks on villagers by masked men. According to the Meluhans, they are Nagas – a tribe of deformed people. They believe because of bad karma, some children are born with deformities, like extra limbs or deformed nose, and such children are sent to the Naga-land across Narmada. They also believe that Chandravanshis, their rival kingdom, has joined hands with Nagas and is mounting attack on Meluha and hence they are ‘evil’.
       Meanwhile, Shiva falls in love with Sati, Daksha’s daughter. Romance, which is not epic, follows and eventually they marry.
       Meluhans attack Swadeep, the Chandravanshi kingdom, and take their king as hostage. The Swadeepan princess Anandmayi (who is really hot, wears revealing clothes and takes milk bath once a week) is angry at Shiva because they too have a legend of Neelkanth who was to save them from the ‘evil’ Meluhans.
       Shiva is confused. Chandravanshis are stark opposite of Suryavanshis. There are numerous poor in Swadeep, there is economic, social and political inequality in the society. There are bureaucrats who sit on files and take bribes, there are labour unions that go on strike if their demands are not met, there is a lot of poverty and the system is irritatingly inefficient. Yet, Shiva realizes, they are not ‘evil’.
      Shiva turns his attention to Nagas, wondering if they were ‘evil’. Later, it turns out that they, too, are not ‘evil’ but victims of the great ‘evil’. Shiva, thus, embarks on the journey to find what is evil and how to destroy it. He is helped by Vasudevs (a group of people who, like IAS officers, are selected through a tough competitive process), Nagas (including Ganesh who has elephant ears and a trunk-like-nose and Kali, who has several hands), some Meluhans and Swadeepans.
       The book is racy and keeps the reader engrossed. However, it is not a literary piece that one would like to re-read. It would not make its place among the classics. It’s something one would read on a train journey.
       I read Immortals of Meluha when it was released and honestly didn’t think much of it at first. What intrigued me was the trailer I saw on Youtube and the idea that Lord Shiva may have been a human before he became a legend and a God.
        I liked the plot, but found many dialogues (especially ones between Shiva and Sati) really corny. It is like a TV soaps not much logic but high on entertainment value (I’ve seen girls go gaga over really corny dialogues that RK – of Madhubala—says).  There is so much PDA, endless flirting between sensuous Anandmayi and uptight Parvateshwar and touchy family moments like Ganesh protecting his younger brother Kartik. Amish Tripathy has covered most of the mythology and legends associated with Lord Shiva.
       Where the story fails miserably is covering the journey Shiva makes from being a tribal leader to being a God. Meluha is a highly rational society, where a person earns his or her place in the society through talent and merit. Yet, when Daksha, who had ulterior motives, proclaims Shiva as Neelkanth, everyone starts treating him as God. There are some who take time like Parvateshwar, who starts admiring Shiva for his military acumen and is overwhelmed when he joins the Melhuan fleet. But it’s just not enough reason to treat him as God. Moreover, it is hard to see eye-to-eye with Parvateshwar because Shiva’s military innovations – like the turtle formation and trident—were neither original nor out-of-the-box. We have seen them in movies and serials. Though one may argue that these might have been an innovation when we see the time the story has been set, but it does not impress me as a reader and certainly does not convince me how he was suddenly accepted as God.
       Although numerous philosophical questions have been discussed and debated in the three books, there is no particular philosophy that Shiva endorses. He does not fight against an evil dictator or for a certain cause (he starts fight against somras in book three). When you look at history and how Budhdhism, Jainism and Christianity came into being and how Budhdha, Mahavir or Jesus came to be revered as God, the plot seems weak. Shiva was put on the pedestal because of his blue-throat.
There are other discrepancies too like in Meluha, which depicts epitome of a rational society, there are age old traditions that are followed without questions.  
        Even though the last book, ‘The Oath of the Vayuputras’, answered all the questions and tied loose ends, it seemed that a little less effort was put in the book as compared to its predecessors. It could have been a little tighter and some parts could have been rewritten. I presume this book had lesser number of drafts.
        If you like Bollywood movies and watch TV soaps, if you are looking for entertainment and not literary satisfaction, if you are ready to overlook inconsistencies and logic, if all you want is something for light reading, then this is the series for you.