No comments about Traveller's Literary Companion: Indian Subcontinent (Indian Subcontinent (Passport Books)).

5 comments about Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution.

1. Edith Mirante's travel goals are pretty much similar to mine - see and report honestly, ignore travel hype, live as the locals, learn about political constraints, try to be sensitive to my gigantic country's effect on people in places where there are few American eyes. Are the people I meet in danger? Are they happy? Are they above the level of survival? Are they threatened by officials? For the reader who routinely asks such questions, Edith Mirante is the ideal travel guide. She rewrites the definition of "intrepid." She goes where no Americans are allowed, walking for days on blisters to visit Karen tribespeople, traveling clandestinely in hill country for the chance to meet a famous druglord and understand how the "Myanmar" army thugs have forced hill tribes to grow opium in place of crops. She braves Thai jail in order to push the envelope, sensing the most profound truths may lie just beyond those travel restrictions. They often do. Everywhere she manages to go, she tells us whom she sees, and what she hears. Everything Edith does stems from relationships. Edith brings gifts to her hosts. She is polite. She is properly outraged when she discovers mistreatment of the people she visits. And most of all, she goes the extra distance to return and hold her own American government responsible for mishandling the regional situation to the point of destruction. Most of us will never be able to travel to the places Edith takes us. If we did, there would be still fewer of us who could understand what we found when we got there. Since I read this book a year ago I have been surprised by how often I hear news items about Burma. What I hear often echoes the book. There are the accounts of farmers enslaved by the Burmese government to dig a pipeline for an American oil company - the farmers are now suing the oil company for enslavement in American court. Two young Karen brothers have had their pictures on the cover of a large-circulation American magazine for their desperate attempts to win back their lands and safety from the "Myanmar" army, which demands the complete destruction of all hill tribes. A much-beloved Burmese leader remains under house arrest. And, of course, American citizens are regularly requested to boycott American firms doing business with the brutal Burmese government. Burma may be half a world from the West. But it is no longer sufficient for westerners to rely on ignorance. It may be argued that increased worldwide communication allows us to be compassionate in new ways. We cannot all go to Burma to find out what is happening there. That is why a book like this is so valuable. Edith Mirante has already been there. She has done some of the preliminary footwork for the rest of us.



2. Edith Mirante's travel goals are pretty much similar to mine - see and report honestly, ignore travel hype, live as the locals, learn about political constraints, try to be sensitive to my gigantic country's effect on people in places where there are few American eyes. Are the people I meet in danger? Are they happy? Are they above the level of survival? Are they threatened by officials? For the reader who routinely asks such questions, Edith Mirante is the ideal travel guide. She rewrites the definition of "intrepid." She goes where no Americans are allowed, walking for days on blisters to visit Karen tribespeople, traveling clandestinely in hill country for the chance to meet a famous druglord and understand how the "Myanmar" army thugs have forced hill tribes to grow opium in place of crops. She braves Thai jail in order to push the envelope, sensing the most profound truths may lie just beyond those travel restrictions. They often do. Everywhere she manages to go, she tells us whom she sees, and what she hears. Everything Edith does stems from relationships. Edith brings gifts to her hosts. She is polite. She is properly outraged when she discovers mistreatment of the people she visits. And most of all, she goes the extra distance to return and hold her own American government responsible for mishandling the regional situation to the point of destruction. Most of us will never be able to travel to the places Edith takes us. If we did, there would be still fewer of us who could understand what we found when we got there. Since I read this book a year ago I have been surprised by how often I hear news items about Burma. What I hear often echoes the book. There are the accounts of farmers enslaved by the Burmese government to dig a pipeline for an American oil company - the farmers are now suing the oil company for enslavement in American court. Two young Karen brothers have had their pictures on the cover of a large-circulation American magazine for their desperate attempts to win back their lands and safety from the "Myanmar" army, which demands the complete destruction of all hill tribes. A much-beloved Burmese leader remains under house arrest. And, of course, American citizens are regularly requested to boycott American firms doing business with the brutal Burmese government. Burma may be half a world from the West. But it is no longer sufficient for westerners to rely on ignorance. It may be argued that increased worldwide communication allows us to be compassionate in new ways. We cannot all go to Burma to find out what is happening there. That is why a book like this is so valuable. Edith Mirante has already been there. She has done some of the preliminary footwork for the rest of us.



3. While I enjoyed reading this book, I was continually confused by it. I am one of a few Americans who lived in Burma for several years during the same time period. I found many of the author's descriptions compelling, yet rather sensationalistic. Was she telling a fictional story or a factual one about the tribes and political causes of Burma? Unfortunately, I came away disappointed by this confusion. However, for a reader who has has spent little or no time in Burma, the book would definitely be an exciting read.



4. I read Burmese Looking Glass about one year ago, after I had visited the Thai-Burmese border refugeee camps. I wish I had read it beforehand! This is an immensely informative narrative covering many aspects of the complicated and tragic situation in Burma, from underground pro-Democracy activists to drug lords to jungle warfare and women warriors. Its somewhere between political intrugue, war journalism, and travelogue. Much of what she reports is consistent with what I have learned from Burmese students in exile and pro-democray activists in the US and Thailand. I admire her chutzpah and honesty in painting this portrait of a horrendous and confusing situation as well as of herself. I found it totally readable, exciting, and inspiring.



5. It took we a while to warm up to Ms. Mirante. As the story unfolds, one has cause to suspect a liberal, bleeding-heart hand wringer. But, this isn't any emotive flutterer afraid to mar her pedicure. This is a jungle-tramping, malaria-be-damned, human rights activist commando.

   In the late '80's, Mirante traveled to Thailand to enhance her art career. She soon became aware of the human rights abuses perpertrated in Burma at the hands of the Tatmadaw, the Burmese government army under the control of socialist despot, Ne Win. Putting her art aside, she quickly adopts the cause of the Burmese hill tribes subject to brutal repression and in fear of cultural obliteration. Mirante courageously risks life and limb as she illegally moves among the Burmese tribes recording their stories for disbursal to the outside world. Undaunted, intrepid, unfailingly committed, Mirante catalogs the abuses of Ne Win, offers hope and assistance to the refugees, and battles valiantly to make their story known.

   Though she casts some political aspersions stateside that she fails to adequately defend, Mirante manages to write this story without recourse to the shrill and idle finger pointing one might typically uncover in such a book. In fact, any doubts of this woman's admirable pragmatism are shattered when she admits to loathing the song, "We are the World". One is left thinking that she finds the song a piece of overwrought theater blissfully (and, perhaps, all too conveniently) ignorant of life in the human rights trenches.

   Edith T. Mirante is a remarkable woman deserving the esteem of every lover of liberty. She writes a good book and fights a good fight and, for that, I say more power to her.

5 comments about Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination).

1. Unfortunately, this book, and the review of it offered by Ashutosh Chatterji, is more about defending Calcutta from the western view of it than it is about the "cultural and literary history" that is the title of the book. I bought this book in Calcutta so that I might have a more in-depth history of the place I was visiting. Instead, I got a book full of opinions and one-sided propaganda. This is definitely an Indian's nationalistic view of the city of Calcutta and not an objective history lesson, as the book's title advertises. Whereas Krishna Dutta is indeed a gifter writer, she, or her publishing company, should have come up with a less-misleading title. Next time, pick up the "History of the Republican Party" by Rush Limbaugh or "The Cultural History of Russia" by Josef Stalin - just kidding of course.



2. David Foley's response is typical of the self-important, know-it-all Westerner. Tell any amount of lies about Calcutta to these people (as the charity industry does all the time) and they'll believe it. Some of them will send money to Mother Teresa with tears flowing from their eyes; a few might even pack their bags and go out to save the poor heathens from themselves. (As Foley seems to have done.) But say one good thing about Calcutta and the Foleys of the world will condemn you for being 'nationalistic' or worse. Judge Krishna Dutta's book on its merits, not on the basis of what some self-appointed Western pundit thinks.



3. It was heartening to see C Sengoopta take on David Foley with some uncharacteristic vim - despite the fanciful spelling of his surname I presume he is a Bengali. We have let the world malign our fair city for too long - we are meek and we are reluctant/afraid to challenge the west. Ashutosh Chatterji says falteringly 'perhaps unwittingly' the perpetrators have heaped insult on Calcutta. He knows as well as I do it was Mother Teresa and her extra-ordinary propaganda machinery that caused Calcutta to have become a metaphor for extreme degradation and squalor. It is the likes of David Foley that seek only poverty in Calcutta who are dispppointed to find a book which talks about a different aspect of the city. Shock, Horror! If this book gets to be known what would the Foleys of this world do? What would happen to the billion dollar Catholic charity industry which feeds like vultures on other people's misery - real and supposed?



4. One of the best aspects of this book, in my opinion, is that it is definitely not a celebration of the city and its ways. In fact, at times, Dutta is blatantly unsympathetic towards what has been - but by and large, it is an unbiased work, grand in its scope, addresses intangibles like culture, and threads together events, perhaps inconsequential in terms of political history, but definitely meaningful in making the city a little bit more than the sum of its history and people.
   
   The book is well organized, and the text is lucid. The book spans the history of the city since it was a small village to Satyajit Ray - the Oscar winning film maker from the city. And though, throughout, the book is about people and events that shaped the city into what it is today, the author never losses sight of the fact that the book is not about any of them in particular, but what they meant to the city they lived in.
   
   It is also a book of strife and struggle, of fascination with a foreign culture, of assimilation, of unlikely but not untimely great men. It is a book of nuances, of idiosyncrasies and of little forgotten by lanes in a big city. It is a book, too, of cowardice and indifference, and of hatred.
   
   The details that the book captures can definitely be captured about any other place in any other part of of the world. However, the particular combination and degree to which these commonalities apply in the context of a place make that place a differentiated, not necessarily special - for that requires a personal identification - place, & this book, in my opinion, captures the 'flavour' of the city.
   
   And, just by the way, I do not like the city myself so much, fascinated as I was by its cultural and literary history.
   
   S!



5. The book starts off with a short but very enjoyable foreward by Anita Desai. And then Ms. Dutta takes over. It is obvious Ms. Dutta, does not live in Calcutta any more (she is a resident of London). For she has that detached enjoyment given to those who look back and decide what is enjoyable while the unpleasant parts fade into memory.
   She has done extensive research and the results are gratifying. Her writing is erudite as well as down to earth. That is not surprising, as we read when Macaulay introduced English as the official language, it was embraced the City's intelligentsia. Calcutta also produced some of the most virulent opposition to the British Raj as spirit of Independence took hold of the country. Of course the City is famous for its Literary figures and of the Performance Artistes. The author gives us a good review of those. A book worthy of being read by Indians and non-Indians but it will be specially cherished by Bengalis. For them, I would make it a must read.

No comments about Lonely Planet Citiescape Mumbai (Lonely Planet Citiescape. Mumbai).

5 comments about A Slender Thread: Escaping Disaster in the Himalaya (Adrenaline).

1. Overall, I found this book to be a good look into Himilayan climbing. My only complaint was that it was written in British English and is a little difficult to read. The climbing terms are a little techincal as well. Being a non-climber, I sometimes can't picture what the author is describing when using climbing lingo.

   Beyond that, it seems like a good book, not quite like Karkauer's or Boukreev's books.




2. I am not sorry I read ths book. Venables is a fine writer--one of the best in his genre working today. Having read one too many accounts of the Everest region (and a number of books on the west, K2, region), I appreciate Venables's description of the less-written-about middle Himalaya. The writer's account of the Panch Chuli climb itself is also fine.

   Unfortunately, after Venables's accident, there is little left to sustain the narrative. He simply sits around in his tent with his two partners, discussing food and British lit., waiting for the helicopter to come rescue him. In reality, I'm glad his rescue was easier than, say, Joe Simpson's was in Peru, but it makes for some rather boring reading.

   To sum, the book is well worth reading, but expect a let down around two-thirds of the way through.




3. This is one of the most cliche-ridden, naval-gazing climbing stories I've read in a long, long time. I didn't even know an audience still existed for this kind of well-worn mountaineering pablum. The story is right out of a computer format: Stephen Venables goes on a climb, gets hurt, misses his wife and kids, and needs to be rescued so he can get back and see them. [...]I think I've read this story about a hundred times before, usually by more honest observers.



4. This book is well written, but much of it is decidedly dull. The author writes with all the passion of a dead fish. There are, however, some interesting passages about the history of a remote section of the Himalayas known as the Pancha Chuli massif which are actually five peaks close to India's border with western Nepal.

   It is to this region that the author went in 1992 as part of an expedition led by world reknowned British climber, Chris Bonnington. Quite frankly, the author makes himself out to be a less than ideal climbing partner. He apparently had choice words for everyone, including Chris Bonnington. He is lucky that they are apparently better men than he, or he would never have survived his accident, a three hundred foot fall 19,000 feet up the mountain. But for his fellow expeditioners, the author would still be up there, a silent, frozen reminder to other climbers of the peril that may sometimes await one while climbing.

   His account of what happens both before and after his accident, and upon his return home, as well as what occurs on his next expedition, gives the reader a measure of the author as a person. There are certainly those who may find him wanting. Yet, notwithstanding his readily apparent, personal shortcomings, his dispassionate account of his travail high up on a remote Himalayan peak is still a worthwhile read, if you are a devotee of mountaineering literature. If you are not, deduct one star from my rating.




5. On one level 'A Slender Thread: Escaping Disaster in the Himalayas' is a standard mountain expedition book, with the focus on Steven Venables' own experience. But throughout there is a dark undercurrent of premonition and doubt. Venables has a bad feeling about the expedition from the start : "there was a sense of unease, even doom when I set off for India". There is also a sense of futility, that the golden age of mountain exploration is long past, as he implicitly compares past expeditions to the area (the Panch Chuli group near the border of India and Nepal) with the one he is on. Gone is the conviction of purpose and the "gentlemanly camaraderie" of earlier times. In fact Venables shows himself to be anything but gentlemanly on this trip. Often out of sorts, half-wishing he were back home with his wife and child, Venables indulges in tantrums and verbally attacks Chris Bonington, the team leader, when Bonington suggests retreat..

   As for the accident, it is the breaking of the Slender Thread that all mountaineers depend on at many time during a climb. A well-tested anchor pulls out below the top of Panch Chuli V, sending Venables on a steep fall that breaks both his legs and which he is lucky just to survive. This combination of bad and good luck, and his utter dependence on his companions for making it down the mountain, is the real story of this expedition for Venables as he recognizes that in climbing he is gambling with more than just his own life.

   This is my least favorite of the three book by Venables I've read, though I did enjoy it. There is little of the excitement and freshness of 'Painted Mountains' or the combination of great accomplishment and fascinating route finding in 'Everest: Alone at the Summit'. However, it raises troubling questions about mountain climbing and faces them directly, and these questions, along with the detailed description of a remote and rarely climbed range, make this a book worth reading.

5 comments about A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu.

1. I made the overland trip to Kathmandu in 1974 when I was 16. This book is the closest I've ever read to explaining what was going on and some of the crazy trips we got into in India and elsewhere,getting there through Afghanistan and other wild places. Tomory writes with his usual wit and insight. This book should also appeal to the younger generation of travellers now hanging out in the sub-continent.



2. Although uneven, this book is nevertheless a good accounting of the great adventure of the 60s and early 70s, the trek to India. If you made this trip, as I did in 1972, it will flashback the hardships, the highs, and the attitudes. If you didn't, this book will let you taste what you missed.

   Travelling through Asia and the Middle East was for the hippies what road travel was for the beatniks. And just as there is a masterpiece of that experience of the beats, Kerouac's "On The Road," there is a masterpiece of the hippie experience, Cleo Odzer's "Goa Freaks." Read Cleo's book now!




3. "A season in Heaven" is a collection of true stories told by the hippies of the late sixties and early seventies, who embarked on the Hippy trail from Istanbul to Katmandu.
   If one wants to learn how it all begun, how the hippies financed their trips, how they survive long term on the road and the things they've learnt along the way, this book explains it all.
   The writing is simple and easy to follow. The approach is straightforward: David Tomory, a hippy traveler himself, combined these short interviews in order of the towns and places visited along the trail.
   The hippies, as we all know, were the people who wanted everything free. They'll leave their hometown with little money in their pockets and survived years on the road. How they did it? The answer is simple: begging, dealing drugs, opening small businesses, doing small chores for other people or staying for free in ashrams or in caves with the sadhus.
   "If you were really hip - it was like being the first to wear a minidress - you went to India. India was seriously fashionable." "In 1968 the Indian Prime Minister herself called the hippies "the children of India". Later she wanted to throw them out." These two quotes explain exactly how the hippies felt about India and vice versa.
   They traveled with no guidebooks: "Didn't I have a guidebook? Guidebook, what effing guidebook? No, I had the best guidebook in the world, word of mouth;" and they called their journey: "A spiritual quest? For sure."
   "In the early seventies, after his missionary period, Harry Deissing begun to drive `freak busses' to India. The passengers boarding his Istanbul-to-Delhi bus asked "How much?" and that was all. But in later years, he says, the question changed to "How long?"
   The ride from Istanbul to India turned into a long one, full of obstacles: the bus breaking down several times, problems crossing the borders and passengers falling ill.
   Once in India, the mystical and country welcomed them all and offered a home for a long while.
   Being a traveler myself and having traveled to some of those places talked about in the book, makes me want to pack my bag and return there. Not only I can relate to their stories, but I also learn about the places I have missed and the stories I never heard along the way. If you are amongst the ones who never been in any of the places described in the book, I can only imagine that you would learn a great deal of the hippy trail.
   I loved the book as it takes me to another world, a world free of laws and expectations, where you can just be a freak and a drop-out and that is ok with everybody else around you.



4. Sometimes I think it was all a dream - is it possible we once lived so free? I loved this book because it allowed me to relive that era, but I also found it an exercise in frustration because it could have been so much better. This book captures the history in bits and pieces, and left me longing for a more cohesive, comprehensive account. Among the interviews I found masterpieces of insight that brought me to tears, mixed in with trivial nonsequiturs.
   
   I joined the sub-culture of travelers (as opposed to tourists) in 1969, towed along by my restless, unconventional mother. When I was fifteen we reached Istanbul and there encountered the freaks returning from India. After having a vision of myself in a white robe I stole $50 from my mother and caught a ride east in VW bus with a dead battery to Kandahar, where we left the broken-down bus with a note on the windshield gifting it to the "people of Afghanistan. (The following week we saw it as a taxi in Kabul). My mother caught up with me in Kabul and on we went eastwards to Kathmandu and India, where I broke free of family ties for good and joined an ashram. It would be seven years before I returned to my native California, shattered and disillusioned, and yet I will always hold those crazy years close to my heart.
   
   Mr Tomory, I urge to revisit this project with a new publisher and editor. This was a unique time in history, one deserving of documentation for the benefit of future generations. Instead of just names and initials give us a better idea of who these people were, and what became of them. Please consider the possibility of a well edited, fleshed out version of this book, including photographs, although I know there aren't many from that time because it was so uncool, so not in the moment, to have a camera.
   
   This book is recommended reading for anyone who was there or wished they had been, though I'm still waiting for THE book about the Hippie Trail.



5. The overland trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu brought thousands of idealistic young Americans and Europeans into the Indian subcontinent between around 1965 and 1975. These travelers, who often wandered East on little to no money, sought spiritual enlightenment, a more open and understanding society, or just loads of marijuana and LSD. By the mid-1970s, however, the phenomenon was over as more and people just flew into India, and political changes made the overland route increasingly difficult. In A SEASON IN HEAVEN David Tomory, himself a veteran of the trail, has collected reminisces by 37 others who had wild times in this golden era.
   
   These oral histories touch on many aspects of the India experience. Of course, drug use plays a major part and there's hardly a page without mention of it. But some of the stories treat more substantial themes, and show how within the same milieu people could have vastly different experiences. Take, for example, religion. Stephen Batchelor, a contemporary Buddhist and author of the provocative Buddhism without Beliefs, tells of how he was so enchanted by Eastern spirituality that he decided to stay in India and dedicate himself to constant study. Other writers, on the other hand, found the holy men that they fell in with to be outright charlatans and left India disappointed.
   
   Since the contributors passed along the route at different times over its ten-year span, this collection helps to show how India changed under the onslaught of Western freaks, tourists, and pilgrims. In Tomory's book, Goa and Sri Lanka pass from a beach paradise with no electricity and understanding locals to impersonal thronged resorts.
   
   Though I found Tomory's collection interesting as a frequent wanderer myself, I was unsatisfied with the editing. The focus is almost entirely on India and Nepal, with the bulk of the overland trail getting little attention (Iran almost none), and indeed some of the contributors didn't even take the trail. The sequence of the stories in one part is out of whack, with a history of adventures in Nepal coming long before the Nepal chapter. Finally, I wish the editing of these oral histories had been done to the standards of ethnological research as published by university presses.
   
   Nonetheless, for all its faults, I would highly recommend this book to those who like to travel slowly overland, get in touch with local cultures, and maybe even find themselves.

No comments about India (Eyewitness Travel Guides).

No comments about Glimpses of Bengal - Selected From the Letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore 1885-1895.

No comments about Passage Through India: An Expanded and Illustrated Edition.

No comments about Land of Milk and Honey: Travels in the History of Indian Food.