Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Book Review Title: Why do you fear my way so much? Author: G N Saibaba Publisher: Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2022 Pages: 216 G N Saibaba breathed his last on 12 Oct 2024 at the age of 57. It may be more correct to say that he was killed by the government of his country just as Rev Stan Swamy and a lot many others were. Stan Swamy was an octogenarian, suffering from severe Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, when he was arrested under the draconian UAPA. He died in prison at the age of 84 labelled by his government as a traitor. G N Saibaba was a professor of English in Delhi University when he was arrested in 2014 under UAPA for alleged links with treasonous Maoist groups. Polio had rendered him absolutely incapable of free movement right from childhood. The prison authorities deprived him even of his wheelchair, making life incredibly brutal for him in the Anda cell of Nagpur Central Prison. The egg-shaped cell (‘anda’ means egg in India’s putative national language) i...

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv...

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i...

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...

Book Review   Title: Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns Author: M J Akbar Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 Pages: 250 You can love this man or hate him, but you cannot ignore him. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the man, aka the Mahatma. The amount of hatred that is spewed on social media day after day, after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister of India, is simply stounding. Right now there is a social media campaign going on to get Mahatma Gandhi’s picture removed from the country’s currency notes. It is possible that Narendra Modi’s picture will replace the Mahatma’s sooner than any sane Indian would expect. In such a context, yet another biography of the Mahatma is not out of place. This biography is written by a man who was inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by no less a personage than Narendra Modi himself. M J Akbar was an eminent journalist before he chose to join Modi’s cabinet for reasons known only to him. The regal association ended when a charge of sexua...

Book Review Title: Solovyov and Larionov Author: Eugene Vodolazkin Translator: Lisa C Hayden Publisher: OneWorld, London, 2018 Pages: 404 H ow factual is any historical discourse? How much truth do you expect from history books? I live in a country whose government has simply erased the history of a whole era, the three-century long Mughal reign – from the history textbooks given to school students. Some of the heroes of the freedom struggle are being villainised and vice-versa. Whose history will you trust: Ramachandra Guha’s or Hitesh Shankar’s? If the lion and the deer write the history of the same period in the same forest, which history will be credible to you? The subjectivity of history is the most fundamental theme of Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2009 novel [translated into English in 2018], Solovyov and Larionov . History is a compilation of the writer’s perspectives, obscured by time and personal biases. History is like literature to some extent. But lit...

  Book Review Title: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Author: Satoshi Yagisawa Translator: Eric Ozawa Publisher: Manila Press, 2023 Pages: 150 Love is both simple and complex at the same time. As an experience, it is simple. But certain factors such as the relationships it brings and the motives behind the relationships make it quite complex. Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s debut novel about a second-hand bookshop in Jimbocho, Tokyo, and some people associated with it, is as simple and complex as love itself. Reading this short novel is like bathing in a cool, crystal-clear stream. It refreshes you more and more as you immerse yourself in it. I finished reading it in one go yesterday; it enchanted me. The protagonist is 25-year-old Takako whose boyfriend ditches her. She was too naïve to understand that the young man was only taking advantage of her while he was really in love with another woman. “This guy is rotten to the core,” Uncle Satoru tells Takako about t...

Book Review Title: Why do I feel so sad? Your pathway to healing depression Author: Dr Shefali Batra Publisher: Jaico, 2023 Pages: 303 Mental health is as important as physical health, if not more so. Depression is a very common psychological problem all over the world and it requires due attention. By 2030, depression will be the second leading problem worldwide in the health sector, according to various studies. The WHO states that 75% of people with psychological problems do not receive any treatment. For 1.3 billion people, India has only 8,000 psychiatrists, as the Foreword to this book points out. This book is an excellent companion and guide for anyone looking for help in dealing with depression. It gives you the theoretical frameworks related to each of the topics under consideration and then goes on to provide very practical solutions or suggestions. The book is divided into five parts whose titles are self-explanatory. 1.      Know the en...

Book Title: October 1947: Wails of Fallen Autumn Leaves Author: Ankush Sharma Publisher: Notion Press, 2023 Pages: 319 Religion has never ceased to baffle me ever since I said good bye to it in my twenties. On the one hand, we are told that religion is meant to foster goodness in the human heart, while on the other, what we actually witness is incessant brutality perpetrated in its name day after day. Why is there such an appalling gap between the professed objective and the actual reality? I am yet to find a satisfactory answer. Ankush Sharma’s novel, October 1947 , is not about religion. It is about the Poonch Rebellion that followed India’s Independence. What runs throughout the novel, however, is a Hindu-Muslim conflict. Rather a Muslim onslaught on Hindus. The novel projects Muslims, too many of them at any rate, as heartless rapists and bloodthirsty murderers. The Hindus are all their victims in the novel. The initial leader of the Muslim Conference in Poonch is M...

Book  Title: Up Against Darkness Author: Medha Deshmukh Bhaskaran Publisher: Sakal Media, Pune, 2023 Pages: 295 According to an estimate by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), there are over eight lakh women sex workers in India. A good many of them are treated as worse than animals. This book, Up Against Darkness , is a detailed study on the red-light areas of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. The book highlights the phenomenal service rendered by Dr Girish Kulkarni and his wife Prajakta for the sex workers of Ahmednagar. As a boy in school, Girish was restless and full of energy. “He became unruly in class, troubling the teachers and other school children.” The neighbours too had to bear the brunt of his mischiefs. When Girish saw a sex worker smacking her little son in order to get him out of her client’s way, his heart melted. He was a young college student then. He volunteered to take care of the little boy and eventually he became an apostle of the sex workers...

Book Title: Caged Tiger: How too much government is holding Indians back Author: Subhashish Bhadra Publisher: Bloomsbury 2023 Pages: 303 For over two centuries the British held India captive. And then Indian politicians did the same. This book shows you how India’s leaders held their own country captive almost all through – with the exception of the first few decades. 77 years is not too short a period of time for a nation, especially one that is as huge as India, to reclaim itself from the ravages of history. What has India achieved in fact? “Governments have failed to provide the basic needs of life, such as clean air and water. India has 22 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world, with a child dying every 3 minutes from inhaling toxic pollutants. Also, India has failed to translate its remarkable economic gains into better lives for its most vulnerable; 35 percent of children under five are stunted…” Now, even Bangladesh is doing better than India though it “is poo...

Book Title: Assassin Author: K R Meera Translator: J Devika Publisher: HarperCollins, 2023 Pages: 654 There is hardly any goodness in the world of this brilliantly crafted novel. Its world is driven by avarice of all sorts: for wealth, power, status… Halfway through the gripping drama, the protagonist is told rather curtly by a police officer. “You haven’t met good men. That is it.” Satyapriya, the 44-year-old protagonist who has just survived a murder attempt, replies promptly that the Inspector was right. “I have never seen a really good man. Can you show me one?” Leaving aside a couple of characters, every man in this novel is driven by some sort of avarice. The women are the victims of these men and the systems created by them. It may be worth mentioning here that K R Meera is a feminist. Right in the beginning of the novel, we hear Satyapriya telling the investigating police officer that “Luck in love is directly proportional to submissiveness, not beauty.” A few p...