Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi
“Do we need a government at all?” That was my introductory question in a class on Vikram Seth’s poem The Tale of Melon City . I intended to provoke my self-conceited students into some shape of wokeness. The only time their consciousness seems to awake is when they can detect some error in my pronunciation because a few of these students lived in some English-speaking country including America for a brief period and hence think they know English better than anyone in India. Interestingly, every time they question my pronunciation, I google it and prove to them that I am right. My ego! The class becomes a battleground of egos in spite of my age. I am a middling sexagenarian. So, one day I decided to put an end to the ego battle and apologised to my students for being their teacher. I didn’t deserve to be their teacher, I told them. Forgive me for the grave error of having accepted the offer from the school management to teach you. Just a few more weeks. I cannot dishonour the contra