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Some charming characters

Book Review Deepti Menon’s e-book, Literary Characters with Character , presents 26 illustrious characters from literature. This book is a compilation of what the author wrote for the A-to-Z Challenge of Blogchatter and hence a few characters may be here by the sheer practical demand of the alphabet. The witches in Macbeth, for example, who take the place of the letter W under the title ‘The Weird Sisters’. [‘Witches’ would have been as good a title, I guess.] But it must be added hastily that the author has made a judicious selection of characters notwithstanding the alphabetic diktat. From Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s unforgettable classic, To Kill a Mockingbird , to Dr Zhivago of an even greater classic, we have a treasure house of illustrious characters here. The paramount service this book does is to remind you of certain characters you shouldn’t forget. Those who know these characters will, hence, find this book a refreshing whiff of some sweet past. Those who are not so

Happy Endings – Review

  Book Review Title: Happy Endings Author: Suchita Agarwal   There is no rainbow without clouds and rains. Joys and sorrows are inextricably intertwined in human life. Are there more sorrows than joys? I know people who have endured the most terrible things in their life without much consolation, not even that of an occasional comic relief, in between. Their tragedy becomes more intense when we realise that most of their sorrows are created by forces that are beyond their control. Since I don’t believe in Karma, the consolations of that dogma are denied to me. I choose to believe in destiny. And I also believe that destiny is a blind force that is guided by none of the benign principles of justice or dharma. The sole redeeming factor in many cases is the resilience that springs eternal in the human breast, to paraphrase Alexander Pope. Suchita Agarwal’s stories in this collection are suffused with that resilience. There are five stories and each one of them is titled after t

Restless ghosts of India’s past

  I, Me, Myself In his latest book, Modi’s India , Christophe Jaffrelot identifies majoritarian inferiority complex as the driving force of India’s ethnic nationalism. The collective ego of the Hindus is marked by a painful lack of self-esteem engendered by the many conquests or colonisation by people like the Mughals and the British. Coupled with this subjugation was the dread of the declining population. The Hindu population declined from 74.3% in 1881 to 68.2% in 1931. This obviously gave rise to a fear that the Hindus would eventually be overrun by the others, especially the Muslims. Though the population ceased to be a problem later with significant increases in Hindu population (84.1%in 1951), lack of self-esteem continued to haunt the nation’s majoritarian psyche. V D Savarkar was driven to describe Hindus as a “mighty race” because of this national inferiority complex. Savarkar was not much of a Hindu. He hardly practised that religion. He was a racist. But he inspired the

Inflation can kill

Media Watch This week’s Media Watch is entirely dedicated to the Frontline because its latest issue deals with a burning topic as honestly as only the Frontline can. Inflation. While the Modi government is spending thousands of crores of rupees on building temples, statues and the Central Vista for himself, millions of Indians are being driven to the brink of starvation. India isn’t shining at all except in the grand advertisements put up by Modi’s propaganda system on all sorts of media channels. More and more Indians are being pushed to the margins of existence, deprived of education, clothing, housing, healthcare, all of which have become luxuries that are out of the reach of many Indians today, says the Frontline boldly. Modi came with big schemes like bank accounts for the poor and cooking gas connections too. The bank accounts went dormant long ago and cooking gas is beyond people’s dreams now. Forget gas, even kerosene is unaffordable. The magazine quotes a man saying,

Profiting from Pain

Wealth has no heart; it has much greed. This is the central message of the latest Oxfam Report. Titled Profiting from Pain , the report says bluntly, right in the beginning itself, that during the two years of the Covid pandemic, “the mountain of wealth” of the billionaires in the world reached “unprecedented and dizzying heights.” While the pandemic was a long and horrible nightmare for most of humanity, it has been “one of the best times in recorded history for the billionaire class.” The ordinary people of the world were affected immensely by price rise . From New York to New Delhi, says the report, no one except the privileged billionaires escaped this evil. The cost-of-living shot through the ceiling. The pandemic period witnessed the biggest increase in extreme poverty in over 20 years. The report is particularly worried about inequality in wealth distribution. The sort of inequality belched out during the pandemic period killed one person every 4 seconds. While this glar

Country of Hatred

  In a poem titled ‘Love of Country,’ Malayalam poet Balachandran Chullikkadu wrote:             In the beginning there were no countries.             In the beginning was the word.             Then water, and then life.             Then countries came             And love vanished. A few lines later, the poet asks:             Where are the borders of solitude?             Where the soul’s lines of control?             What I seek is not love of country,             But a country of love.             An empire of life. I happened to read an interview of this poet in the latest issue of Deshabhimani weekly published by CPI(M). He says that writers are really helpless in shaping people’s thoughts and attitudes. He cites an example from the time of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Many writers including him questioned Emergency and Indira’s dictatorship in their poems and other writings. But people elected her to power again. Writers make little impact on ordinary

Shahjahan’s Hindu Blood

Media Watch  From holy cows, Hindu India’s obsessions seems to have shifted to old mosques. India Today’s cover story this time [June 13] is on this new fad of Hindu nationalism. Titled ‘The Mandir Wapsi Movement,’ the story warns us of “a new phase of Hindu revivalism.” Sunil Menon begins the lead story with Shah Jahan’s Hindu ancestry. “Shah Jahan’s mother was Rajput,” writes Menon, “and his father was half-Rajput. His son, Aurangzeb, had Rajput blood from his father and Persian from his mother.” The metaphor that is currently vitiating the country’s air – the Muslim as foreign invader – deserves a harder look. “The fact that the last three of the six ‘Great Mughals’ were products of intermarriage complicates that simplistic trope.” However, the writer knows that facts hardly matter nowadays in India. The stories we tell ourselves matter. And we are fabricating a lot of false narratives these days by which many mosques are metamorphosing into temples. Modi’s government pretend