Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. Embedded in the book covers and post will also be links to buy the books on Amazon India. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter.
In today’s Book Post 17 included are some of the titles I received in the past few weeks and are worth mentioning and not necessarily confined to parcels received last week.
Enjoy reading!
5 November 2018
Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. Embedded in the book covers and post will also be links to buy the books on Amazon India. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter.
In today’s Book Post 18 included are some of the titles I received in the past few weeks and are worth mentioning and not necessarily confined to parcels received last week.
Enjoy reading!
12 November 2018
Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. Embedded in the book covers and post will also be links to buy the books on Amazon India. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter.
In today’s Book Post 16 included are some of the titles I received in the past few weeks and are worth mentioning and not necessarily confined to parcels received last week.
Enjoy reading!
29 October 2018
Nihilistic resistance is the worst kind of enemy; it was all the rage, we were taught in our Cultural Sensitivity 101. Colonel Slatter had laid out the foundations: We used to have art for art’s sake; now we have war for the sake of war. No lands captured, no slaves taken, no mass rapes, fuck their oil wells, ignore their mineral deposits. You can outsource mass rape. War has been condensed to carpet-bombing followed by dry rations and craft classes for the refugees. People who had not left their little hamlets for centuries, goatherds who belived in nothing but grassy fields and folk music, women who had never walked beyond the village well, not they could all go and live in UN tents, eat exotic food donated by USAID and burp after drinking fizzy drinks.
Mohammed Hanif’s third novel Red Birds is a brilliant political satire using primarily three narrators — Momo, a teenager who dreams of becoming a millionaire after having read Fortune 500; Ellie, a US fighter pilot who ejected out of his burning plane in to the desert and Mutt, Momo’s dog, who has been anthropomorphised by the novelist. The three sections of the book are the three locations where the story is set — the desert, the camp and the hangar. These are in a geographical location that is never very clear where it exists but many readers will recognise it to be an amalgamation of many conflict zones around the world. For the first two sections of the book the women characters of Mother Dear and Lady Flowerbody are present and contribute to the conversations but it is reported speech. Mother Dear is Momo’s mother and absolutely furious with her husband for having taken away their elder son, Bro Ali. Father Dear introduces Lady Flowerbody as his co-worker. Lady Flowerbody is the new Coordinating Officer for the Families Rehabilitation Programme who “works with the families affected by raids and is conducting a survey on post-conflict conflict resolution strategies that involve histories and folklore”. Whereas Lady Flowerbody claims she is writing her “PhD thesis on the Teenage Muslim Mind, their hopes, their desires; it might come out as a book called The Children of the Desert“. It is only in the third section of the novel, “In the Hangar”, that the women characters speak and when they do it is powerfully and lucidly.
If the story can be encapsulated in a nutshell it would be about the family in the refugee camp whose elder son went off to the hangar but never returned. Dear Father is suspected by his family of having sold off his elder son. Dear Mother who is mostly confined to the kitchen cooking is given to ranting but she is mostly “off stage”. The male characters — her husband and son, later to be joined by the pilot and a nomad-turned-doctor — mostly hear her out with the husband being the most dismissive of her angry monologues particularly when he cannot understand her obsessiveness with the lack of salt and her inability to cook a decent meal. Ellie is a participant and a spectator to this, more like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, but he has his own concerns to worry about. Ellie worries about his wife and his job.
Former Pakistan Air Force pilot-turned-journalist Mohammed Hanif scathing political satire Red Birds is reminiscent of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Apparently cadet Hanif discovered Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 in the Air Force Academy library. In an interview with BBC journalist Razia Iqbal in 2014, Hanif said he loved Heller’s novel and read it “at least 22 times”. He said he found the book funny but their lives were not unfunny. Hanif adds that Heller certainly changed Hanif’s outlook on the world he was living in.
Red Birds is a fine novel. The deadpan style of writing reveals the absurd situations of war zones. The absurdity of the scenarios are funny too. But it is chilling to realise that these absurd moments are plausible in a conflict zone. Take for instance Father Dear carting piles and piles of files, the nomad-turned-doctor who is called in to treat Mutt, the teenager Momo who learns to drive and steers while sitting on a pile of cushions or Mother Dear who is worried about the lack of salt ( which is actually not unfunny for many, especially women, who have lived in conflict zones).
Red Birds is a sharply satirical novel that cannot be ignored. It is bound to be on the literary prize lists in the coming year. Perhaps even win a prize or two. Read it!
To buy on Amazon India:
7 November 2018
I love cooking. It is my stress buster. I read recipe books, experiment with dishes and those that come out well, I note in my handwritten recipe book. A collection that has handwritten recipes in it of at least four generations of men and women. It is always challenging to balance nutritious meals with simplicity and within affordable budgets.
The other day my eight-year-old daughter asked me while I was writing down a recipe in my book whether it was essential for everyone to write and consult recipes. This is coming from a kid who prefers to learn cooking by watching me in the kitchen rather than consult recipes. She has been assisting me in the kitchen from before she could walk. This may sound like a tall claim but it is true given that I would plonk her on the kitchen surface and get her to pluck leaves for a salad or help mix cake batter. Soon she was using the rolling pin and stirring dishes on the stove. Of course all under supervision! Anyway, getting back to cooking in the kitchen with beginners.
When I was doing my undergraduation, some of my classmates would proudly claim that they had never set foot in the kitchen and did not even know how to make a cup of tea let alone boil an egg. I was horrified. Not necessarily that these were mostly girls from conservative backgrounds and were soon to be married off, so how would they survive in their new homes? I was truly concerned about their well being as it requires all your wits and more to learn to negotiate spaces in your marital home. But I was also horrified at another level. How could their parents have brought up their children in such a manner so that they did not even know the basic survival skills of cooking? This is not a socially coded gendered preoccupation. It is basic survival skills.
Modern living is very strenuous and is full of stresses. It does begin to prey on one’s health too. Given the shortage of time reliance on fast foods and takeaways is inevitable. The growth of this industry can be gauged by the mushrooming of apps that provide delivery of food packets from various outlets to their customers. It is undoubtedly 
a booming industry. Having said that if with a little planning and stocking up on ingredients putting together a nice dish without too much fuss is easily done. Those with familiar with cooking can easily rustle up something even at the end of a long and tiring day at work but there are many others, first timers to the kitchen, who are unable to proceed without instructions. For such scenarios, easy-to-learn and easy-to-consult recipe books, I came across — Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients and Vikas Khanna’s My First Kitchen— published a few months ago. Both are magnificent hardbacks with full-page colour photographs and extremely easy instructions on putting together dishes. To an experienced eye many of the recipes in the books are fairly balanced nutritionally while to a beginner they seem like easy-to-rustle-up tasty dishes. The plus point for both the recipe books is that there is practically no fancy equipment or ingredient required to create the wonderful creations shown.
Jamie Oliver has been known for many of his recent publications to do full page spreads of every single recipe he mentions. It is a very generous allowance from his publisher but it is understandable given how well his books sell especially at Christmas time. And this is exactly the element that makes his cookery books ever so attractive as every single recipe is well illustrated and thus easy to consult. So even if you miss understanding a particular step of the process, it all comes together upon seeing the picture accompanying the recipe. The food photographs in the book are of excellent quality, a feat that is unfortunately not achieved by most cookery book publishers. His philosophy of
cooking has always been on the quick, easy and nourishing. And it comes through in the recipes collected in this particular book with recipes such as Speedy Steamed Pudding Pots, Chocolate Orange Shortbread, Smoky Mushroom Frittata, Creamy Mustrad Chicken and Peachy Pork Chops. All easy to make as long as the ingredients are handy.
In a similar vein is Vikas Khanna’s My First Kitchen, a collection of basic recipes (mostly Indian) that are easily turned out. For instance Pumpkin Orange Soup, Creamy Beetroot Spine, Roasted Basil-Sesame Chicken, Sprouted Lentils with Coconut and Tamarind and Green Papaya with Clove-Nigella Scent. These are only some of the recipes. Most of them are easy to make but these are most certainly meant for a cook based with easy access to a variety of ingredients.
So to all those wishing to eat at home and perhaps learn a few recipes try these two cookbooks, a good start for your forays in to the kitchen.
To buy on Amazon India
Vikas Khanna ( Hardback and Kindle)
Jamie Oliver ( Hardback and Kindle )
3 November 2018
Vogue India’s food editor Sonal Ved’s Tiffin has just been published by Roli Books. Tiffin is a collection of 500 recipes, dishes that are usually sampled as school children when sharing each other’s tiffins during lunch break, a habit that continues into adulthood when sharing food with colleagues. Tiffin intends on celebrating this incredible richness of India’s regional cuisine and to create a repository of varied culinary traditions.
While most of these [recipes] have been hand-picked by culinary experts from each region, we went beyond, and reached out to the best repositories of traditional recipes — wedding caterers, who are given the responsibility of serving contemporary and traditional spreads. Each of the contributor recipes, which includes those given by grandmothers, mothers, aunts, friends, cookbook authors, and chefs who champion regional Indian cooking… .
Tiffin is a fabulous collection of recipes that cover the length and breadth of India providing a selection of recipes representative to the region. Whether it is the Goshtaba recipe from Kashmir to Pesarattu dosa from Andhra Pradesh or even the Manipuri Iromba from the North East there is a wide variety of recipes included. The beauty of collecting these recipes in one volume is that it enables the learner or an experienced cook to experiment with dishes, even mix and match if need be rather than remain stuck within one regional fare. It is a great way of learning how to put the spices and ingredients to multiple uses while also expanding the menu at the dinner table. In the opening pages of the book there is a description of the basic spices and ingredients used as well as some basic processes on how to make paneer or khoya etc. While the recipes collected within every section can be considered as only a sample of the region, it is the introductory essays to the sections that are worth reading and bookmarking, perhaps even looking up the references on the Internet. For instance, in the essay on Central India there is a reference to Kamar Bhai’s shop in Bhopal that specialises in selling Paya ( Trotters) Soup, loaded with bits of meat.
Every single essay is beautifully presented packed with information but without it being too detailed. It is a great bird’s-eye view of the cuisines to be expected in the forthcoming section. A particularly good example of this is the essay on South India which encompasses the states of Telengana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. This region is famous worldwide for its cuisine such as the dosas, vadas and idlis but the richness in the fare lies in its finer distinctions such as local produce (which is heavily dependant on factors such whether it is in the black soil region or the coast) or even religion as is found in Kerala. The state is known to be a gourmet’s delight 
with its confluence of Christian, Muslim and Hindu culinary expressions and yet there are very distinct cuisines too. It is quite a feat to present these intricacies of the regional culinary mapping of India while not overwhelming the reader/cook.
It is an incredible delight to behold a recipe book with such a sumptuous layout making it very dicey to carry it into
the kitchen to consult while cooking! Nevertheless it is a varied collection which has used recipes from the other marvellous Roli Books publication India by noted recipe columnist and author Pushpesh Pant. Some of the other notable Indian cookery book writers were Madhur Jaffrey, Meera Taneja and Tarla Dalal who paved the way for a new generation of cookery book writers to explore regional distinctions such as presented in Tiffin. In fact Sameena Rushdie’s phenomenal cookery book Indian Cooking ( published in 198) has just been reissued. Her description of collecting recipes is an age-old process whether passed on from generation to generation or exchanged across the dining table but the methodology for collecting recipes is only hinted at in Tiffin’s introductory essay. To describe the process can be quite tedious but here are two snapshots from Sameena Rushdie’s book attempting to note down the “Aloo Goshtaba” recipe from her mother which explain this process beautifully.
While Tiffin includes some of the well-known dishes like Khandavi ( Gujarat), Murgh Zafrani ( Uttar Pradesh), Haak ( Kashmir), Gatte ki Sabzi ( Rajasthan), Began Bhaja ( West Bengal), and Balushahi ( Bihar) there are many others that have been excluded such as Gulabjamuns or Kofta Curry. It is perhaps understandable given the limitations of space in a printed book. Perhaps a natural progression from having published this magnificent volume would be to begin a discussion forum online of food lovers who can share regional recipes. There are many such existing groups on social media but there is always room for another one especially when it becomes a digital and interactive extension of a printed commodity. It would also provide a platform to discuss variations on how to make a particular dish too. For instance the process described in Tiffin to make ghee (clarified butter) from cream is a tad complicated. While giving sound advice on removing the excess water from the cream before putting it on to cook, the description of a three-day process could instead have been of simply suggesting that the cream is collected regularly from the boiled milk over a period and then cooked on a slow flame till the ghee separates. A footnote added to the recipe could be that in some parts of north India the burnt cream residue left at the bottom of the dish is quickly mixed with sugar and eaten warm. A delicious sweet snack to combat the biting chill of north Indian winter. To prove how popular repository of recipes are take a look at the BBC Food — a phenomenal repository of recipes which went extinct in December 2008 and yet ten years on the archive is kept alive and open for users to browse through!
Given the stiff competition from online videos and recipe banks that are readily accessible it is always heartening to see a new cookery book in print. For an experienced cook these collections are always precious for it always helps to tickle the imagination by reading a few recipes to figure out what to prepare for the next meal or present as a new menu in a restaurant. At the same time Tiffin provides a critical function of taking ownership of the wide variety of regional Indian cuisine and hopefully preserving this knowledge of food systems for future generations as it is now slowly and steadily being eroded by modern lifestyles. Enthusiastic foodies have already begun leaving a digital trail of the variety of regional cuisines such as this article in Scroll about the various kinds of existing Indian cheeses like kalari, chhurpi and churu that have been eclipsed by paneer. Or that a Conde Nast award has been instituted for the best food writing and the shortlisted entries consist of articles on camel milk, bananas, or the food rituals associated with a funeral in Shamsabad.
Tiffin is a delightful addition to one’s cookery book collection. It will over time become a significant part of many household and commercial kitchens for it does provide an insight into a wide variety of processes of preparing even the basic Indian dishes.
To buy on Amazon India:
5 November 2018
This is a great article published in “Publishing, Editing, and Reception”, a collection of essays in honour of the eminent Romantics scholar Donald H. Reiman. This article “Reading Aloud in the Shelley Circle” by Timothy Webb should be quoted widely to all those who say how can you read out aloud to older kids. Reading out aloud is only meant for babies and early learners. Well the Shelleys read out to each other. Mary Shelley read often to women only groups. According to Webb, Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth, via their surviving correspondence, show that it was not uncommon for women to exert some kind of independence by reading aloud.
Even Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, a compulsive reader was fond of reading 
aloud, at least according to Thomas Jefferson Hogg in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley ( as quoted by Webb in his article):
She was fond of reading aloud; and she read remakably well, very correctly, and with a clear, distinct, agreeable voice, and often emphatically. She was never weary of this exercise, never fatigued; she never ceased of her own accord, and left off reading only on some interruption. She has read to me for hours and hours; whenever we were alone together, she took up a book and began to read, or more commonly read aloud from the work, whatever it might be, which she was reading to herself. If anybody entered the room she ceased to read aloud, but recommenced the moment he retired.
It is absolutely delightful to discover this aspect about the Shelleys reading habits.
Edson, Michael (ed.) Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman University of Delaware Press, Maryland, 2015. Hb. pp. 280
3 November 2018
“Refugees can’t be picky. . . .”
Akil Kumaraswamy’s debut Half Gods is a collection of interlinked short stories. These are stories revolving around a father-daughter duo who are Tamil Hindus of Sri Lankan origin and now based in the US. Along the way the daughter, Nalini, a nurse, has married a Punjabi Sikh and has two sons — Arjun and Karan, named after two demigods from the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. They also have a circle of friends, consisting mostly of immigrants. It is a motley bunch that manages to share experiences and find some common ground to have conversations. It is only when their “back stories” are shared that it becomes clear their pasts have been traumatic. For instance, Nalini and her father fled Sri Lanka after their house had been attacked by mobs and her mother and twin brothers had been lynched. It is a horrific past to live with but they do and find a way to get across to the US.
In a fabulous interview with Sara Novic, Akil Kumaraswamy discussed Half Gods. In it Akil Kumaraswamy says she has never been to Sri Lanka but “the war has inhabited such a vast part of my consciousness growing up”. She agrees with Sara Novic when the latter says “I worry about most is how the war is being taught to this new generation of children who weren’t alive during the conflict or in its immediate aftermath. It’s such a complex tangle of money and power and hatreds, and it’s easy to flatten or try and ignore completely”. This is also Akil Kumaraswamy’s preoccupation with histories of conflict especially in South Asia, where many of the countries experienced horrific violence at the time of their establishment or subsequently too such as the Partition of the Indian subcontinent or the 1984 riots in Delhi upon the assassination of the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi.
The author’s rationale for writing Half Gods as interlinked stories is that “War messes with any conception of chronology, and the past can feel more lived-in than the present. Also, since the work deals with displacement, I knew it would not be fixed by one geographic location. I eventually found that the interlinked short story form allowed me both expansiveness and a tight construction for the work.” Interestingly enough Half Gods began life as “a play and it only focused on the family and the story of the Mahabharata ran tangentially to it. I had these large monologues where Gods in their full regalia talked about their lives on earth. It was strange but it opened up the book in my mind. There is a scene in Half Gods where Karna shows his class a picture of his family and one of the drawings is of the sun dressed up in a suit. I am interested in how the mystical or divine brush up against the ordinary—something that often happens when the pressure is building, when reality becomes unbearable.”
Every story is powerful and it is difficult to choose a particular favourite. But if one were to then it would be the hauntingly powerful “The Office of Missing Persons” ( LitHub, 5 July 2018) which is about the entomologist whose son suddenly disappears. It is eerie for it does not seem like fiction as such stories are constantly being repeated in conflict zones and often reported in the morning newspapers. Two of her other stories that can be read online are “At the Birthplace of Sound” ( Boston Review, 21 April 2015) and “Shade” ( Guernica, 1 June 2016) .
Akil Kumaraswamy is a promising new voice in the literary landscape. As with most debut writers it is always fascinating to know what will be their next piece of work — will it be fiction in a similar vein to their first book or will it be a leap of faith in to narrative non-fiction? Whatever it is to be, will be worth looking forward to since once a writer has waded into conflict literature there is no looking back.
To buy on Amazon India
3 November 2018
When people move they inevitably bring certain things with them, leave a few things behind, and acquire new possessions. My parents had asked me to choose what I wanted to take with me to Boston. I was allotted a single suitcase. Everything else was to be sold, given to relatives, or thrown away. This is what I chose to bring in my suitcase:
Red plastic View-Master with four reels (Disney World, Japan, Baby Animals, and Mecca)
Four Bengali books –Raj Kahini ( Royal Tales) by Abanindranath Tagore; Aam Antir Bhepu ( The Song of the Road) by Bibhutibhushan Bandhyopadhyay; Shishu ( Child), a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore; and gopal Bhand ( Stories of Gopal the Royal Fool)
My report cards from my old school, attesting to my grades from 1974 to 1982
My beloved collection of miniature plastic animals that came free with the purchase of Binaca brand toothpaste in India during the 1970s
A Misha commemorative pin from the 1980 Moscow Olympics
A couple of dresses made of printed cotton
A pair of gray denim pants, the closest thing I owned to the coveted American blue jeans
A pair of blue canvas shoes from Bata, the most popular shoe company in India
None of these items were going to be of much practical use, as I soon found out. The tools and weapons I needed to survive and flourish in the New World were waiting for me elsewhere. I would find them in the hallways of my new school. And on the small screen of our black-and-white TV.
Indian-born American Sharmila Sen’s memoir Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America is an absorbing account of her trying to negotiate her way through her new life in USA while her ties were still strong with India. She was twelve years old when her parents decided to move from Calcutta to the US. Having been born in a bhadralok ( cultured and well-respected) Bengali family she took certain privileges for granted. These were mostly of respect accorded to her cultural inheritance and the family she belonged to. She was not necessarily exposed to the rough and tumble ways of existence. Whereas in America the mere shade of her skin immediately put her in a different category. Her first experience of the classrooms where segregation was not visible as students had no choice in their seating arrangements was small consolation when it came to lunch time or other breaks for then the students promptly clustered in racially segregated groups.
Not Quite Not White is fascinating while moving account of Sharmila Sen negotiating her way through a new culture. She arrived as a young girl bewildered by the customs and social rules of engagement. By social standards of acceptance she did very well for herself as a non-white immigrant, primarily by learning to smile always. She taught herself to learn the rules. Ultimately she found herself being accepted by everyone so much so she heard remarks like “I always forget you are Indian” or “But I see you as white”. Sharmila Sen was educated in the public schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied in Harvard and Yale. She taught at Harvard for a few years too. Currently, she is the executive editor-at-large at Harvard University Press. Yet her memoir brings out the painful negotiations she has learned to make on a regular basis, imbibing much of it, so as to survive.
To buy on Amazon India
2 November 2018
For there are devils in the deep,
but worse are the ones
we make.
Award-winning writer Patrick Ness’s latest novel is a retelling of Moby Dick and it is called And The Ocean Was Our Sky. It is a tale about Bathsheba, an apprentice whale, who lives in her all-female pod, led by the wise and much experienced Captain Alexandra. It begins with the opening line “Call Me Bathsheba” echoing the legendary opening of Moby Dick “Call me Ishmael”. It is a slim novella acconpanied by Australian illustrator Rovina Cai’s stunning illustrations.
Bathsheba and her pod are out on a hunt with a specific mission. They are in search of Toby Wick, a human being, a whale hunter and their arch enemy. Bathsheba is particularly keen to find him as he is responsible for embedding the harpoon in her when she was still an apprentice. Along the way they find an abandoned ship in which they discover a man, tied to a pole, and he is still alive. Apparently kept alive so that he could pass on a message to Captain Alexandra and her pod.
And The Ocean Was Our Sky is a coming-of-age story about Bathsheba who has to learn to be a killer in order to survive in the open sea. She has to learn to obey, follow instructions and not offer an opinion, as she is constantly being reminded by Captain Alexandra. She learns very soon what it means to grieve when she watches her mother hunted but also realises that along with her grandmother, Captain Alexandra, she has to persevere and remain focused on their mission.
Whether you are familiar with Moby Dick or not is immaterial to reading And The Ocean Was Our Sky. It is a powerful story that leaves you feeling caught in a swirl — it is not just with the constant swimming of the whales and sharks feeding upon the dead sailors or carcasses of whales thrown back in to the water after being stripped of their blubber but it is also the fluidity with which the story is narrated that can leave the reader feeling rather giddy. It is a curious heady feeling that develops from reading the very horrific descriptions of violence, the pure rage and thirst for revenge coupled with the magnificently hypnotic double-page spread illustrations of Rovina Cai. It is an experience reading like no other. It is a retelling combined with very real twenty-first century environmental concerns such as modern day whale hunts and the so much unnecessary terror that man unleashes upon wild life. Mahvesh Murad in her review calls it “a book about prejudices that lead to generations of hate and death; about who monsters are, and what makes them so; about loyalty and single minded, determined violent obsessions that can never end well for most, but make a great story for the ones who survive to tell.” But I have to agree with Tony Bradman when he wrote in his review that “This is a book for all ages, although some scenes contain graphic violence, so it might be a little too strong for children under 10.”
And The Ocean Was Our Sky is another lyrcial masterpiece by Patrick Ness even though it is so full of sorrow and heartache. It will definitely be on a few literary prize shortlists in the coming months.
To buy on Amazon India:
29 Oct 2018
