On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield

On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A collection of entertaining anecdotes. Not particularly mind expanding, not at all knowledge-expanding, unfortunately. One good sample tidbit is that the popular ‘Hic sunt dracones’ (here there be dragons) is just a misrepresentation, those words never permeated medieval maps after all. Another is the origin of the expression ‘orienting oneself’. If the bulk of the anecdotes were similarly obscure or offbeat, the book might have been worth it. The poetical intro by Dava Sobel is the best chapter. Not for Mapheads, this one. Not the right kinda trivia.

Another tidbit for the curious (from the second best chapter in the book): Steinberg’s Manhattanite’s view of the world – the precursor to many of the maps that invade your facebook timelines periodically.

 

“The parody has been parodied many times, but the best modern parallel, and certainly the rudest, is to be found in the work of the much travelled Bulgarian graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov. Tsvetkov, who works under the name Alphadesigner, may well have constructed the most offensive and cynical atlas in the world, all of it stereotypical, some of it funny. His Mercator projection entitled The World According to Americans showed a Russia labelled simply ‘Commies’, and a Canada labelled ‘Vegetarians’. He has also produced the Ultimate Bigot’s Supersize Calendar of the World, which includes Europe According to the Greeks. In this one, the bulk of European citizens live in the ‘Union of Stingy Workaholics’, while the UK is categorised as ‘George Michael’.”

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The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru

The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru

My Rating: ★★★★★

It is but folly for me to attempt to review a book so close to my heart. But, on my third reading of this book, it is time to finally go beyond the beauty of the prose and the elegance of Nehru’s presentation. It is time to see if the book achieves the objectives it sets out to achieve and judge it thus. I will let my earlier one-line review stand. Here goes…

The following passage reflects the objective of the book.

To know and understand India one has to travel far in time and space, to forget for a while her present condition with all its misery and narrowness and horror, and to have glimpses of what she was and what she did. ‘To know my country’, wrote Rabindranath Tagore, ‘one has to travel to that age, when she realized her soul and thus transcended her physical boundaries, when she revealed her being in a radiant magnanimity which illumined the eastern horizon, making her recognized as their own by those in alien shores who were awakened into a surprise of life; and not now when she has withdrawn herself into a narrow barrier of obscurity, into a miserly pride of exclusiveness, into a poverty of mind that dumbly revolves around itself in an unmeaning repetition of a past that has lost its light and has no message for the pilgrims of the future.’

Does it achieve such a grand objective? It sweeps across Indian history on very able wings and the history unfolds with irresistible drama and with the glow of a golden splendor. India of old comes alive for the reader in all its old grandeur. But this is dazzle. Does the expedition go beyond that and ‘discover’ India? It does and it doesn’t. The India glimmers and fades – reappearing every time Nehru takes an unbiased look back and disappearing every time he turns his gaze eagerly to the present.

The second half of the books quickly descends into a political commentary from being a historical study – and in this transition from history to the present, the ‘discovery’ is left incomplete in the urgency to expostulate on current happenings. This is a minor failure and Nehru is quite aware of it. He has to go back to the vagueness he started with to end his quest:

Nearly five months have gone by since I took to this writing and I have covered a thousand hand-written pages with this jumble of ideas in my mind. For five months I have travelled in the past and peeped into the future and sometimes tried to balance myself on that ‘point of intersection of the timeless with time.’ These month have been full of happenings in the world and the war has advanced rapidly towards a triumphant conclusion, so far as military victories go. […] Because of this business of thinking and trying to give some expression to my thoughts, I have drawn myself away from the piercing-edge of the present and moved along the wider expanses of the past and the future. But there must be an end to this wandering. If there was no other sufficient reason for it, there is a very practical consideration which cannot be ignored. I have almost exhausted the supply of paper that I had managed to secure after considerable difficulty and it is not easy to get more of it. The discovery of India — what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is today and what she was in the long past. […] Yet something has bound them together and binds them still. India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. Overwhelmed again and again, her spirit was never conquered, and today when she appears to be the plaything of a proud conqueror, she remains unsubdued and unconquered. About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive. There are terrifying glimpses of dark corridors which seem to lead back to primeval night, but also there is the fullness and warmth of the day about her. Shameful and repellent she is occasionally, perverse and obstinate, sometimes even a little hysteric, this lady with a past. But she is very lovable, and none of her children can forget her wherever they go or whatever strange fate befalls them. For she is part of them in her greatness as well as her failings, and they are mirrored in those deep eyes of hers that have seen so much of life’s passion and joy and folly, and looked down into wisdom’s well. Each one of them is drawn to her, though perhaps each has a different reason for that attraction or can point to no reason at all, and each sees some different aspect of her many-sided personality.

While that maybe so, this too is pardonable as even the political statements soar to heights sometimes and is amazing: (more in updates section)

The tragedy of Bengal and the famines of Orissa, Malabar, and other places are the final judgment on British rule in India. The British will certainly leave India, and their Indian Empire will become a memory, but what will they leave when they have to go, what human degradation and accumulated sorrow? Tagore saw this picture as he lay dying three years ago: ‘But what kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind them!’

The conclusion is a fitting one (though this passage is not really the conclusion). It was ultimately not about the Discovery of India as India is too diverse and manifold, it was an inquiry into the soul of a generation, a Discovery of their India, of the India then, of that generation, the greatest generation perhaps in our living memory:

My generation has been a troubled one in India and the world. We may carry on for a little while longer, but our day will be over and we shall give place to others, and they will live their lives and carry their burdens to the next stage of the journey. How have we played our part in this brief interlude that draws to a close? I do not know. Others of a later age will judge. By what standards do we measure success or failure? That too I do not know. We can make no complaint that life has treated us harshly, for ours has been a willing choice, and perhaps life has not been so bad to us after all. For only they can sense life who stand often on the verge of it, only they whose lives are not governed by the fear of death. In spite of all the mistakes that we may have made, we have saved ourselves from triviality and an inner shame and cowardice. That, for our individual selves, has been some achievement. ‘Man’s dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once, he must so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past, so live as not to be tortured for years without purpose, so live that dying he can say: “All my life and my strength were given to the first cause of the world — the liberation of mankind.”‘

 

If only we could also figure a path to save ourselves from triviality. If only we too could Discover the moving spirit of our own Generation.

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Krishna: A Journey Within

Krishna: A Journey Within by Abhishek Singh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brilliant artwork, simplicity throughout. A delight to read. Some pages soar to artistic expression that thrills while others seem like a kid playing with his favorite hero models. The text feels almost like an afterthought and I feel that I might just have enjoyed the book more if it was a set of silent stills and graphics with all meaning to be derived from your past readings while the imagery is being supplied by the author/artist.

Hardly anything is given any space in the book and it barely touches on the drama that is latent in it. This adds to the sense of a dreamy retelling that is not meant to amuse or to entertain but simply to lull you into a gentle nodding ascent, like how you used to listen to your grandmother tell these stories – the details never were to be told, they were to be enacted later in your imagination. The story plays out again and again only adding to itself by the dance of repetition and of adumbration. Abhishek has transmitted this sense of reading/listening into his artistry and catches us in that spell. This is certainly a rich successor to his previous works.

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Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Tunzelmann has concocted a very readable and balanced history of the last days of Empire. Tunzelmann avoids demonizing any sect, individual or nation and shows the circuitous routes through which every decision was squeezed out, many tragedies averted and many more inadvertently precipitated.

He shows the human frailties and noble aspirations of all of the major participants and does not shirk away from exploring the controversial bullheadedness of Gandhi or from going into great detail about the relationship between Nehru and the Mountbattens, especially the amorous ones.

This was perhaps the best handled of all the topics by Tunzelmann – he weaves an almost spiritual love story between Nehru and Edwina that borders on the outrageous but always forces the reader to forgive two extraordinarily humane characters who happened to need each other a bit too much. Even Jinnah and Patel (and Churchill – if only he had met Nehru or Gandhi in person a bit earlier than when he did!) who are often slotted as extremists show their emotional sides and it does feel like Tunzelmann gives them their due – enough blame but also enough praise.

Tunzelmann does dwell too much on the Mountbattens – almost to the extend that the reader might well start imagining that they were the Empire that the book is meant to talk about and their “secrets” were the “Secret” that the subtitle of the book boasts about. If that is the case, the book does indeed uncover some welcome secrets about the end of “Empire”.

But, from a political and historic standpoint, there were not many secrets that Tunzelmann brings to the fore. He does throw light on some of the most-discussed events such as the drawing of the Kashmir boundary lines, the allocation of Punjab districts, the annexation of Hyderabad etc and how all of these were such intensely personal decisions – different people at the helm might have resulted in drastically different outcomes – they were less politically motivated than emotionally driven.

For these insights, Indian Summer was a thoroughly readable and unbiased book and well worth reading to understand the inscrutable and amazing human actors that populated one of the most dramatic events of the century.

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Review: Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken

Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken

My Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Däniken must have won some mighty awards for this one, right? Right?

I have to admit that it was seriously entertaining though, mostly in imagining who it was who played the practical joke on Däniken each time he sticks his neck out on an imagined ‘fact’.

Just to sum up the book: how can anyone imagine a concept like Time Travel without having experienced/seen it? Surely Victorian England was visited and ruled by the Time Lords who then vanished. leaving us to roil in our longing stories. People who have read the book, please laugh along with me…

This is not to deny that there are mysteries in the past, but then so are there in any field of human study – that does not mean that we have to postulate such excesses based on so little evidence. I can’t resist going off on the same vein again – How can anyone imagine talking animals? Surely ancient India was home to intelligent animals as well as the sporadic aliens, all conspiring to befuddle the poor humans into worshiping them and then mythologizing them.

The mistake is to rigidly try to classify the myths as facts or stories. If only Däniken had taken the time to understand the power of symbolism in myth-making… hell, he could have done that purely by reading a few comic books!

By the way, was it only me or was Däniken’s usage of the word “utopia” just all over the place and far away from the accepted meaning?

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The Unreal Wastelands & Labyrinths – What Memory Keeps and Throws Away; An Exercise in Recollection: in flashes and distortions.

The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Unreal Wastelands & Labyrinths – What Memory Keeps and Throws Away; An Exercise in Recollection: in flashes and distortions.

.

____________________________

You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!

____________________________

Chimes follow the Fire Sermon:

A rat crept softly through the vegetation;
departed. A cold blast at the back, So rudely forc’d, like Philomela.
It was Tiresias’, it was he who doomed all men,
throbbing between two lives, knowing which?

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Excuse my demotic French!

****

Let us go then, him (that carbuncular young man), and you –
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

You may come or go, but speak not
of Michelangelo.

When there is not solitude even in the Mountains,
When even the sound of water could dry your thirst,
Then you can lift your hands and sing of dead pine trees.

Have you yet been led,
through paths of insidious intent,
through every tedious argument,
To that overwhelming question?

****

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Sweet Thames, sweating oil and tar,
Sweet Thames, run on softly till I end my song,
for I speak not loud or long,
for I speak not clear or clean,
for I speak in the hoarse whispers of the last man,
for it was I who murdered you,
and Ganga, right under the nose, of mighty Himavant!

You who were living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying –
With a little patience!

Break The Bough, and hang yourself from it,
Sweeney, Prufrock, The Fisher King and the sterile others,
all will follow first,
like corpses etherised on well-lit tables.

****

Remember me, me – Tiresias, once more, for we are all him,
yet not.

The present will always look at the mirror,
and see only a Wasteland,
The Past is always the heavenly spring,
running dry now.

Perspective,
Thy name is Poetry.

****

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
These fragments you have shored against my ruins.

Why is it impossible to say just what I mean!

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

****

shantih shantih shantih

****

.

.

____________________________

You! Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!

____________________________

.

.

.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

.

.

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