Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review Title: Ananta Jeevanam Author: Kolakaluri Enoch Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 308 You can live like a dictator and enjoy the delights of power over other people. You may think you are a great person when you see others cower before you. You think their fear is their respect for you. But when your end is near and you become a helpless person, you will see the people’s colour change. Their fear becomes contempt for you. You will now see with terror the smug smiles on their faces as they watch you die in pain and helplessness. Kolakaluri Enoch’s novel, Ananta Jeevanam , translated from Telugu by the author himself, tells the story of three brothers who lived luxurious lives and enjoyed tremendous powers over people. They were apparently happy too. But their lives did not end quite happily. Though these three brothers play dominant roles in the novel, the book is also the story of Anantapur, a district in Rayalaseema, Andhra Pradesh. This rain shado

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Book Title: A Woman Burnt Author: Imayam Translator: GJV Prasad Publisher: Smon & Schuster, 2023 Pages: 317 Women are victims of many kinds of discrimination and exploitation in India. While patriarchy plays the dominant role in this, caste is an equally potent villain. A Burnt Woman is a novel, written originally in Tamil, about the tragic fate that a young woman faced because she chose to marry the man who apparently loved her more than he loved himself, though he belonged to a lower caste. Revathi is a fresh graduate in computer software and she is offered a covetous job by TCS, the company she longed to join. But her entire life turns topsy-turvy when she chooses to marry Ravi, an autorickshaw driver belonging to a low caste and also to an economically low class. Ravi met her just a couple of times in the local temple and fell madly in love with her. He tattoos her name all over his body and appears too frequently in front of Revathi’s house to proclaim his

Image from Deccan Chronicle “ Doms are the keepers of a sacred flame – supposedly burning for centuries – over which they have sole ownership. Lighting each funeral pyre with the Doms’ fire is considered not only auspicious but also crucial. Without it, it is alleged, a devout Hindu will not receive moksha, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth .” [ Fire on the Ganges ] Doms are an untouchable caste of people living on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, a place dear to Lord Shiva. The Hindus believe that if they die in Varanasi, their souls will attain the ultimate deliverance from the cycle of birth and death. If they cannot die there, at least the corpse should be cremated there. Doms are the corpse-burners in Varanasi. Though these Dalits called Doms are untouchable by caste, they are the gate-keepers of heaven. Radhika Iyengar’s book, Fire on the Ganges [HarperCollins, 2023], tells us the story of the Doms, a story of oppression and exploitation. Obliquely, this is

Book Review Title: The Travelling Cat Chronicles Author: Hiro Arikawa Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2019 Pages: 249 This book will touch the most tender core of your heart. It is a love story with a difference: it is love between a man and his cat. Right from page one to the last page, this novel gives the reader a feeling of tenderness. Reading this novel is like sitting on the side of a beautiful mountain brook and listening to the gurgling of water while feeling the gossamer caress of the cool breeze on your body. I bought this book precisely because I have four pet cats who all have a special place each in my heart. If you love cats, this book will keep you hooked. Even if you don’t have a soft corner for those creatures, you will still love this book for the tenderness it makes you feel. The author, Hiro Arikawa, is a cat-lover, obviously.  Hiro Arikawa with her cat Satoru Miyawaki is a young man who takes care of a

Book Review Title: Dudiya: In Your Burning Land Author: Vishwas Patil Translator: Nadeem Khan Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2023 Pages: 220 According to official data, 25% of India’s land is forest. In reality, only 12% is forest. The rest has been encroached on by the corporate sector with the permission of the government. Even the Modi government which pretends to be corruption-free and idealistic has altered the forest laws in order to hand over certain forest land to some corporate bigwigs under various guises including environment protection! The people who are most affected by these shady deals between the Indian government and the corporate sector are the tribals and Adivasis living in the forests. This novel by Vishwas Patil, written originally in Marathi, is about these shady affairs in the forests of the country, particularly in Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh. Dudiya is a real character, an Adivasi woman whose people were betrayed first by the government

Book Review   Title: Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Murder and the Birth of the FBI Author: David Grann Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017 Pages: 339 Human greed has no limits. Worse, greed can make people inhuman. David Grann’s book which is classified as ‘history’ reads more like a crime thriller. It tells us the bloodcurdling history of how almost an entire tribe of people, the Osage Indians of Oklahoma, were killed with meticulous planning by a few individuals whose greed overwhelmed their humanity. A few hundred people were killed and many of those deaths were passed off as natural. The author of this book quotes the Osage historian Louis F Burns, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the head rights.” The head rights refer to the legal grants given to the Osage people for selling the oil in their lands. The whites in North America perpetrated many atrocities on the original inhabitants of those lands. E

Book Review Title: Conversations with Aurangzeb Author: Charu Nivedita Translated from Tamil by Nandini Krishnan Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 335 History claims to give us truths and fiction really gives us glimpses into truths. Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb is in fact history masquerading as a novel. It is fiction inasmuch as Aurangzeb makes an apparition through a medium to the narrator who is a writer doing some research for his next novel. But it is not a novel because there is nothing that can be called a plot. It’s all conversation between the narrator and the spirit of the Mughal emperor. Occasionally a few other characters make their appearances, but they don’t add anything to the plot. How much can we trust history? This is the question that the writer explores in this novel. It is a cliché that history is written by the winners. It gets rewritten when new winners emerge. For example, India’s history is being rewritt

Book Review Title: A Thousand Cuts: An innocent question and deadly answers Author: T J Joseph Translator: Nandakumar K Having read the Malayalam original of this book, I turned to my mobile phone to catch up with the latest news. The first headline that Google gave me is: Darul Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala . This book is written by a college professor whose palm was chopped off with a hatchet in 2010 by a group of young Muslim terrorists. He was attacked brutally while he was returning from Sunday church service. He was stabbed in many places and some of the wounds were near-fatal. His palm was chopped off and thrown away. This book, written originally in Malayalam, tells us why the professor was attacked so inhumanly and how it changed his life quite radically. What provoked the terrorists was a particular question that the professor had set in the Malayalam question paper for the undergraduates of his college. It was an internal

Book Review Title: All the light we cannot see Author: Anthony Doerr Publisher: Fourth Estate, London, 2014 Pages: 531 What we call light is just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most part of the electromagnetic spectrum remains beyond ordinary human perception. Such is human life too: so many of its shades remain beyond our ordinary perception and understanding. Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the light we cannot see , unravels for us some of the mysterious shades of human life. Marie-Laure LeBlanc leaves Paris with her father Daniel who is entrusted with the task of carrying a rare diamond, Sea of Flames , to safe custody when the second world war breaks out. The National Museum of Natural History, Paris, has made three counterfeit diamonds of the Sea of Flames. Four men are assigned the task of carrying each of these diamonds to four different destinations. None of them knows whether they are carrying the original diamond or the counterfeit. Marie-Laure a

  Book Review Title: Gods and Ends Author: Lindsay Pereira Publisher: Penguin Vintage, 2021 Pages: 205 This is a book which presents characters taken from real life. You will think, as you read the novel, that you know this character and this and this too. Only the names sound different, even exotic: Vaz, D’Souza, Sequeira, and so on. All the characters are Goan Catholics living in Orlem, Mumbai. All the major characters are tenants of Obrigado Mansion, a rundown building belonging to aged Francisco Fernandez who lives with his daughter-in-law, occupying two of the rooms in the mansion. All other rooms are occupied by families that are grappling with quite a few problems. There are five families plus one widow who lives alone in one of the rooms. Each one of these characters catches our attention with their unique earthiness. The Sequeira family in Room 108, for example, is headed by Jude Sequeira who is little more than an alcoholic. He has a job in a factory. But since hi

  Book Review Title: Quarterlife Author: Devika Rege Publisher: HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2023 Pages: 403 This novel left me quite puzzled. So I returned to it with a staunch determination to read it again because I read some of the rave reviews it had received. What did I miss? I didn’t read it again entirely. I just couldn’t. It didn’t make that sort of appeal to me. I went through certain parts again. It didn’t create any better impression on me. But it had been long-listed for the Booker and many reviewers of good journals found it excellent. Something within me agreed with those reviews too. The Hindu said that “every page you turn, the book’s universe mirrors our everyday reality, the hyperfused gaze magnifying the cracks.” The Hindu ’s fortnightly publication, Frontline , said that the novel is “thickly packed with ideas that threaten to clog its flow until the narrative changes gear towards the end, saving the day.” The Hindustan Times thought that the author