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

No comments about A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow.

No comments about Rimo: Mountain on the Silk Road (Charnwood Large Print Library Series).

3 comments about Chasing the Monsoon.

1. I never liked India. Too much confusion, too much humanity. I read this book and now I have an unending desire to visit India; top to bottom. Not during Monsoon, not during the dry season, but sometime in between. Mr. Frater delivers an unblinking look at the beauty and inspiration which lies beneath the clutter and dreck. Damn the weather, look at what's there. I envy you the experience of the first read.



2. I stumbled across this book at the 75% off sale at my university's bookstore; being an Indiophile I purchased it. This book has been hiking, camping & airborne with me. Frater's style is inviting and enveloping. While reading I slip beyond the words to that magical point in which my eyes no longer 'read' and I am there with Frater traveling up the coast of India to meet the rushing Monsoon at its next arrival.
   If you are a lover of travelogues I highly recommend this book to you.



3. I have been meaning to write a review of this particular book for a few years now. This book was recommended by a friend. At first I was first skeptical if I would like the book. You see the monsoons bring mixed feelings for me. Growing up in India, you either like the monsoons, or you learn to live with it. I belonged to the second category, and was never fond of the monsoons, because it meant wading through water logged streets, and the general disruption that accompanied the monsoon season. But, what I liked about the monsoons was an opportunity to sit at home and drink endless cups of tea, and eat hot samosas and pakoras.
   So, it was with some misgivings that I started reading the book, and I was hooked within the first few pages. Alexander Frater does an excellent job of explaining all about the monsoons, and the methodical way in which the weather department in India follows the path of the monsoon. Some of them sound almost loving when the track the progress of the monsoon that starts from the South and travels up North, hits the Himalayas, and retreats back via the South, and showers the Southern state of Tamil Nadu. Chirapunjee in North Eastern India is supposed to receive the heaviest rainfall in the world, a fact that many school children in India will recite dutifully when questioned. But, due to the changing weather and climate conditions the rains have not been heavy of late in this area.
   
   Frater tracks the journey of the monsoon faithfully, and tries to race ahead of the monsoon's next port of calling. Frater literally chases the monsoon, and presents an absorbing, and interesting account of his mission. He spends a couple of months doing this, and travels all over in India, including Chirapunjee. Frater has an amazing eye for detail, and is able to capture the naunces of interacting with the Indian bureaucrats, and others that he interacted while chasing the monsoon.
   
   This is one of the best written books about an imporatant and integral part of India, the monsoons, upon which so many people depend. A good monsoon season spells bountfiful harvest, and a bad monsoon spells disaster. The monsoons still control the fortunes of Indian economy, and it is amazing that no one before Frater thought about writing a book on this subject.

2 comments about Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily.

1. Scoop-Wallah

   Reading Justine Hardy's Scoop-wallah, an alternatively hilarious and pensive account of her hacking days as a features writer for the New Delhi daily the Indian Express for about a year, is to realize that good writing about India keeps coming out regardless of, or perhaps because of, the country's status as "a functioning anarchy," to borrow a famous phrase from Daniel Moynihan, a former U. S. Ambassador to India. Justine Hardy is a clever writer. She does not claim to be writing about all of India. She is writing just about New Delhi. Her portrait of New Delhi has all the anomalies that one expects in such a book. There is a raja's son who has no kingdom to rule and his satrapy in the flophouse where the writer resides. There is a newspaper editor, her boss, who is unable to understand references to April Fool's jokes in spite of his Anglicization. His name, as transliterated in the book is "Sourish," perhaps a version of "Suresh," meaning the god of gods in Sanskrit. Sourish Bhattacharya will consider for publication only such of Hardy's writing as can be considered fictionalized features, not hard news. When Hardy rants about her missing slides, telling him in London a lost or stolen slide fetches up two hundred pounds, he feigns indifference. Then there are the usual gang of culprits: charlatan gurus, rickshaw drivers salivating over the experience of driving a white woman to her destination trying hard to catch a glimpse of her white skin in one of their many mirrors, fops who decry colonialism and hold her responsible for all Britain's crimes without taking into account she hadn't even been born when Nehru's somnolent words announced the birth of India on the midnight of August 15, 1947, dreaming social workers who want to show off their good works. Our writer does not fall in love with New Delhi, but she likes it very much, notwithstanding its unsettling attachment to dust and defeat. She tries to fit in. She wears Indian clothes; she tries to learn to speak Hindi. Of course, her attempt to speak the language always identifies her as a foreigner, a fate she tries hard to avoid. Of course, she speaks Hindi only to those who drive her around or make tea for her. Good intentions don't matter. British administrators also learned regional languages just so that they could tell their servants what to do. Not much goes right for her. Indians are notorious for trying to sharpen their English skills on visiting foreigners. They don't want the visitors to speak the local language, partly because they think it is not polished enough. Thus, it is not surprising that Hardy runs into scores of Indians who want to show her that there remains a British presence in India in the form of English remade in the nuances of native languages. English is the language of power. "English is still the currency of the social establishment. The socialites of Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi may swirl their saris and stand proud in their national dress . . ., careful copies of the sartorially patriotic Nehru, but still they speak English. Their feet are silent speakers too, shod in English shoes, black Oxfords to match the aspirations of language."

   Much as I enjoyed the book, I am not able to formulate its readableness in anything other than its fictionality. I believe that the book reads like fiction because everything novel that the writer experiences turns into interesting. In her moments when she stops pretending to be amused by New Delhi's transmogrification by globalization Hardy writes passages which indicate that she can indeed free herself from her self-imposed obligation to remain unsettled by her Indian experiences. Hardy turns from being an entertainer into a Blakean observer when she lets her pen rip the calm surface of her humorous meditation and speak of the mimic men and women, living an opulent life style which is more a parody of life in New York or London than one truly free of sexism as exemplified in arranged marriages and dowry extortions. Her Kiplingesque analysis of the horror of AIDS in India, often brought home to well provided-for wives by ambitious, much-traveled entrepreneurial husbands, the government's denial that the disease is widespread, the government doctor's refusal to treat AIDS patients are perhaps the best part of the book.




2. Justine Hardy is a British journalist who decided to take the plunge and work on a Delhi newspaper. Her book covers diverse topics such as a visit to the Dalai Lama, toilets (or the lack-thereof), Slum education, organic farming and polo.

   The prose is easy to read, and both funny and sad. This is essentialy a travel book. It won't change your life, but if you have any misconceptions about the Raj still being alive in India, this might cure you. A great book to take on holidays, about ordinary people and how they live int in India today - a world away from western Europe and America.

No comments about My road to India.

No comments about Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab.

No comments about Portrait of Kerala: Portrait Of Series (Portrait of Series).

1 comments about Village India.

1. The focus in the book is definitely not on the cities of India.
   
   A detailed visit to some village in India is described in the Prologue. It isn't clear, however, what village that is or in what general area it is. The annotations to the photographs in this prologue say they are from different regions and so don't seem to provide a clue as to where the village in the Prologue is. The book jacket refers to opening with a "typical" Indian village, although the book itself presents enough diversity that one wouldn't think there was a "typical" Indian village.
   
   I had expected, given an author who had traveled extensively in India, that this book would consist of similar up-close descriptions of villages from all over India. Instead the book appears to be a survey organized by Indian state, making general remarks about the villages within each state. The lack of intimacy seems compensated, to a small degreee, by the annotated photographs.
   
   I did not find a single footnote in the 250+ pages of this book. So how and where on his travels did the author learn and verify that "Man has inhabited India continuously for more than three hundred thousand years"? How to tell what is due to the author's original research and what relies on other sources? The bibliography is only 2 pages long and unannotated. So how would one check any of the facts or assertions presented by the author? However, much of the book lacks the first-hand feeling of someone who has traveled in India over many years. Perhaps a decision to present a survey makes this encyclopedia feeling unavoidable.
   
   The bulk of the book is organized by state (the jacket refers to a "state-by-state odyssey") and these within the south, east or west. But the only map I found covers less than one page (page 8) and is consequently quite cluttered. Nowhere in the discussion of the villages of any state did I find any map to situate that state (apart from it having been in a south, east, or west region). It's possible to find a covered state on the map on page 8 but because that map covers all of India it doesn't provide detail on each of the states. Perhaps detail was thought not to matter, since even discussion of the villages seems to be, except for the anonymous village of the Prologue, at the general level of the villages of this or that state.

No comments about An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler 1828-1858.