Skip to main content

Writer in post-truth world


A few dozen books arrived home the other day through a special arrangement, thanks to a good friend in Delhi. What a way to begin one’s retirement! My job as teacher has another ten days to go. I chose this retirement with due respect to an old saying in Malayalam, my mother tongue: ‘Quit singing when your voice is still good.’ On the verge of completing four decades of teaching, I didn’t want to leave the profession with any sour blood in the heart. The classroom has undergone a sea change. Teaching has been a relationship for me with my students, notwithstanding my inevitable flaws and limitations as a teacher. Relationships have become rather tenuous now, quite as professional as a one-night stand.

I decided to devote all my time to reading, blogging, some travels and a bit of gardening. It is then that the friend from Delhi put up a very unexpected suggestion to which I said yes because I was going to get a few dozen books free in the process whose details cannot be divulged now.

I opened one of the three cartons and picked a book randomly. It happened to be The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary by Amitava Kumar, published by HarperCollins India (2024). I had not heard of the author earlier. I found out that he is a writer, journalist, professor as well as a painter. Born and brought up in India, Kumar is now teaching in a college in New York.

The Yellow Book is a rather strange volume. The narrative is interspersed rather liberally with the author’s paintings which are related to the text. It is a bit difficult to say what the book is really about. We are given suggestions on how to engage time productively in the first chapter and how to write honestly, in the last. In between we get a lot of extracts from the writer’s journals which deal with the places he visited, writers he met and/or read, experiences with his students…

Kumar doesn’t seem to have a high opinion about present India. In the second chapter, we read:

All the drawings I made in response to the news from India [during the Covid] were driven by sorrow and rage. The reports said that the metal in the crematoriums would sometimes melt from the fires burning; that relatives were often unable to even participate in any ritual of farewell; that the Ganga upstream from Patna was choked with bodies and the poor, unable to afford cremations, were burying their dead on the riverbank. I painted in order to feel less helpless. And hiding in this despair was an even greater fear: that those in power, who had organized election rallies and religious gatherings and helped spread the virus were, in the future, going to spin this story of loss into a victory song. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh warned that those talking of shortages of oxygen cylinders would be arrested.

This narrative is accompanied by one of the author’s paintings of that time.

One night on TV the author hears a historian say that authoritarian leaders in power lie all the time. These leaders will also claim that it is their opponents and journalists who lie. People are helpless. They don’t know what the truth is. Those who know the truth and are brave enough to tell it publicly are sent to jails. “Democracy is dead.” So the author decides to keep his sanity intact by writing and drawing. The Yellow Book is a sort of record of what he wrote and painted.

The book ends with a chapter titled ‘Enemy of the People.’ One of Kumar’s protagonists writes a novel titled Enemies of the People. It is a political novel and we can guess who the enemies of the people are. You will find their portraits all over: on billboards, at petrol stations, on ration cards, even on your vaccination certificates – telling you what to believe, which god to pray to, what to eat and wear and…

Kumar reminds us about Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882) and Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of it. Later, in 1989, Satyajit Ray made the film Ganashatru with the same story. Who is the enemy of the people? That is the question raised by all the three. The one who speaks truth to power is the enemy of the people, according to those in power. A doctor who tells the people that the springs which bring them water are dangerously polluted is the enemy of the people in these works. The doctor and his family are made outcasts by those in power. Truth is buried.

Kumar ends this book with the suggestion that an honest writer today cannot be apolitical. When most of your leaders are lying, how apolitical can you be? If you choose to fight for truth, you will be alone, no doubt, like Ibsen’s protagonist. At the end of Ibsen’s play, the doctor declares that he has made a discovery: “it is this, let me tell you – that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

Amitava Kumar has the courage to stand alone. Kudos to him.

 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    How intriguing, this Delhi proposal... Am guessing we'll be getting lots more such excellent reviews?! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I plan to review the books too... But I'm yet to get a response to a query regarding that. I'll tell you about the contract later.

      Delete
  2. Wow! History in the making. This book may be part of history taught in schools decades later, hopefully.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just a picece of advice, one thing that i have noticed among geriatric patients is that they completely tend to become static in their post-retirement phase. This leads to biochemical imbalance in there body and various joints ailments.Therefore, i request you to add physical exercises in your normal routine. It can be anything like brisk walking, Jogging, stretching, the idea is to increase your blood circulation and keep you active.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Didn't you notice gardening in the post? I work with a hoe in my garden which is actually far more intractable than the new gen. I sweat it out much better than the new gen's shortcut gym stuff.
      .

      Delete
  4. I don't like what this world is turning into.

    ReplyDelete
  5. By now your retired life would have begun. Wish you lots of peace and happiness.
    I have one year and 2 months to go. I am looking forward to doing everything that I couldn't find time to do when I was working.
    I am trying to be less cynical of the world around me, and stay positive by looking at the brighter side this world has still aplenty.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All the best, Pradeep, for that pleasant retired life that you visualize.

      I enjoy my life in my own way. The ire in my writing is a kind of sublimation. 👍

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...