Noida Online Book Reviews
In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
‘Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century’ by Nandan Nilekani
Five Point Someone : Soon to be a movie : 3 Idiots
About the Author and the book
Chetan Bhagat graduated from IIT Delhi in 1995. Post IIT he did an MBA from IIM-A from where he graduated in 1997. He is an investment banker with Deutche Bank and lives in Mumbai, with his wife Anusha and their twin sons. He has a keen interest in spirituality and Yoga.
Chetan Bhagat’s captivating, hilarious and breezy debut novel ‘Five Point Someone’ about life on a college campus, has not only garnered rave reviews but also become a national bestseller. In March 2008, New York Times called him the ‘biggest selling English author in India’s history”.
Astronomical sales of a combined million copies of this and succeeding novel ‘One Night @ The Call Center’ is a testament of the popularity of the novels. The novel, written in simple, lucid prose with deft humor, set in hallowed IIT, Delhi campus about three below-average students, Hari,the narrator and his bosom friends Ryan and Alok, living and studying together for four years, wishing to graduate as well as have ample fun along the way is gripping. “With the pace of an autobiographical account, the characters are simple people with whom one can identify with almost instantaneously.” Comments Times of India. “In his first novel, a former IITian gives us a glimpse into the eccentric, elitist world of India’s most prestigious engineering institutes” adds India Express.
The comedic plot is simple. Hari, Ryan and Alok spend four years in Kumaon hostel. Alok is short, and portly with thick glasses. He comes from a poor family. His mother is a teacher and a breadwinner for the family as his father is paralyzed and bed-ridden. He is desperate to graduate, find a good job to maintain his family and also financially help his elder sister get married. Ryan is handsome, and well off financially. He has spent most of his life in a boarding school and hates his parents. He is more creative of the three and is more fun-loving. He is soon fed up with strict IIT's academic regimen of lectures, tutorials, quizzes, vivas and tests that leave little time for fun. A C2D (Cooperate to dominate) plan is hatched, whereby they take turns to attend classes and share notes, etc. Ryan gets a kinetic Honda which they use for sightseeing, going to movies, restaurants, and visits to Alok’s home. They also frequent a roadside food joint for butter-paranthas, lemonade and cigarettes. But the most enjoyable and relaxing place for them is the roof of the eight –storey Insti building. Here they drink vodka; smoke joints and listen to Pink Floyd music. Blossoming love between Hari and Neha is also amusing and heartwarming. Cute-looking, fashion-design student Neha, daughter of strict IIT Professor Cherian, while driving in her car, knocks down Hari who is out jogging. And they become friends. They call each other once-a-month,
meet in ice-cream parlors and share ice-creamy kisses! The scene where Hari, with Ryan and Alok’s help climbs the roof of Neha’s home at midnight and then sneaks into her bedroom to wish her a happy birthday and offer her flowers (that too plucked from her garden!) is hilarious. How hard they try, and despite trying various stratagems, they just cannot improve their grades. Hari always gets tongue-tied in vivas (even after downing vodka!). In the final year, Ryan thinks of Operation Pendulum-a Mission Impossible type plan-to steal the Test Paper from Prof. Cherian’s office. Hari manages to borrow the bunch of keys from Neha, and gets a duplicate of the key to Cherian’s office. They get caught red-handed and are punished by the Disco (Disciplinary Committee). But US educated Prof. Veera who is impressed by Ryan’s lube project, rescues them from harsh punishment.Hari,Ryan and Alok work very hard in the final semester, graduate and find good jobs. Chetan is driven by passion to write and he is a good story teller. The characters are believable and one can easily relate to them. The novel tugs at your heartstrings and has resonated well with young Indian readers,(the can-do generation) and especially with all those who have lived on Indian college campuses, sharing their dreams, aspirations and anxieties with fellow students from diverse backgrounds. Chetan does not moralize in his novels. Admittedly prestigious institutions like IITs are highly competitive but the ‘mice race’ to get top grades, and high-salaried jobs needs to be debated. Creativity, thinking out-of-the-box needs to be encouraged.
Raj Kumar Hirani has already started a Project based on this. And with Aamir Khan, Madhavan and Sharmaan already in the lead with Kareena Kapoor, the movie becomes one of the most eagerly avaited adaptation of this wonderful book.In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir
About the Author and the book
In 1998, when I first decided to write a book on Kashmir, I thought I was a Kashmir expert but realised as research for this book progressed how little I knew.” This is how former journalist David Devadas starts his debut book , “In Search of a Future – The Story of Kashmir”, published by Penguin India.
More than a declaration of ignorance, Devadas’s first line sends across two clear hints to the readers. First, it promises to be a fresh attempt at gauging how and why Kashmir became what it is today. And second, it raises expectations that the book would hold a solution to stop the paradise from burning anymore.
What you do get is people, a lot of them — some known, many unknown, some Muslims, some Pandits, with their anger, hope, hopelessness, their undying spirit and dreams. Then there are politicians, their shifting paradigms vis-À-vis India and Pakistan, their lack of direction at many times. Then of course, the Indian Government’s role and the Army presence in the Valley, the informers and their role, Pakistan’s shifting allegiance from one militant outfit to another, and the influx of too much money into Kashmir lately with its polluting effects.
Divided into three parts plus an epilogue, this former journalist’s book spans from 1931 till 2007. With nine years of research invested in it, it is not a book in hurry.
Says Devadas, “My interest in Kashmir began because of my reporting assignments. I met Kashmiri leaders, militants, people during my many visits to Kashmir and had long, intense discussions with them. I stayed in people’s houses and have made many friends in the process. When in 1998, a publishing house asked me to write a book on Kashmir, I thought why not.” He had no idea then that it would take him so long to turn it into reality. With so many books on Kashmir already on the shelf, there was a pressure on him, from himself, “not to churn out a quickie.” “I am glad I took so long. Because of it, it has far more depth and substance,” says the St. Stephen’s alumnus. Writing on Kashmir often runs the risk of becoming either a victim’s narrative or a Muslim or a Pandit’s version. Devadas says he feared that his book would fall between the cracks. He is glad now that “the book has failed to fall in any of these categories.” He says, “I am not a trained academic, so I have used methods of journalism for my research.” By this he means cross-checking facts. He gives you an instance. “When General Musharraf came to India in 2001, he met Hurriyat leaders at the Pakistan High Commissioner’s study in New Delhi. I interviewed three Hurriyat leaders separately. I got three versions of the meeting. I picked only the common points.” On researching Kashmir’s history, Devadas says he came across “facts like how Sheikh Abdullah was initially for self-rule; that Kashmir had gone through huge land reforms which had a direct effect on the socio-economic life of Kashmiri people.” This he feels divided the society further and remains a part of the problem. He also points out “India’s intelligence failure to note that Hizb-ul-Mujahideen was a favourite of Pakistan since January 1990.”
Devadas’s book doesn’t have a chapter on solutions. He however has a few categorical suggestions. “India should stop making deals. The Army presence has to be somehow lessened, as it is trained only to deal with the enemy. There should be more attempts at empowering people.” The author is confident that “violence in Kashmir will die the day the people of the Valley want it to die.” He asserts, “If the people want a referendum, a plebiscite, it should be allowed. Our Government should have trust in its own people, and if they turn out to be not your people, you have no moral right to rule them.” Meanwhile, to make young Kashmiris talk about their view and experience, he has started a website, www.kashmir-aspects.com.
In Brief
1931. The year Kashmir’s majority community revolted against their maharaja and sharply expressed a Kashmiri Muslim identity. Since then the Kashmiri-speaking community living in the valley has been grappling with ideological paradigms, searching for a common future.
Weaving a complex history with the lives of two ordinary Kashmiris—one a militant-commander-turned-Hurriyat-Conference-leader, the other a rural political worker of an older generation—In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir not only illuminates the socio-economic, geopolitical and ideological causes of violence from 1931 to 2007 but also aspects of Kashmiri reality that are rarely discussed—the impact of land reforms and the apple trade; religion-based political mobilization in both Pakistan and India; Kashmiri caste consciousness; the tendency to put narrow self-interest above action for the common weal; and the insecurity that expresses itself as superiority. In doing so, it brings to life the strong sense of identity of this community and its frustrations; the long-standing sectarian and communal discord; and the insurgency against India, in the process exploring the dichotomy between ethnic aspiration and religious zeal, the influence of Iran’s revolution and the Afghan and global jihad.
The book reveals a wealth of startling new information about the strategies, internal workings, disputes, excesses and failures of Kashmir’s militant movement as well as the governments of India and Pakistan, their armed forces and intelligence agencies. Nearly a decade of painstaking research through interviews conducted with primary players, including prime ministers, governors, generals, militant commanders and secessionist and mainstream politicians has produced this tremendous work of contemporary history.
Filled with detail and drama, In Search of a Future is a candid and insightful portrait of the moral crisis that has created one of the world’s most knotty and dangerous flashpoints through the twentieth century.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
In May this year, the murder of the 14-year-old school girl Aarushi Talwar as well as the man who was a servant in her household, Hemraj, took centre-stage in the media. All through the summer, I followed the story from a distance, from my home in up state New York. Then, in mid-June, I read an article in a British newspaper about the case, in which there was mention of a popular novel that had already been written about the fear that the Indian middle class had about domestic servants. The novel, the article said, “tells the story of a bitter and disenchanted chauffeur in Delhi who slits his employer’s throat.”
In Short
The White Tiger takes the form of seven letters from Bangalore businessman Balram Halwai to the Chinese premier who is scheduled to visit India. In these letters, he tells his rags-to-riches story, how he overcame the poverty of the poor village in the countryside to being a success in the New India. Part of his journey involved being a driver to a rich family in New Delhi, where he learned that success often involves corruption, cruelty, and a different set of rules than those that apply to the impoverished who work for them. Balram is convinced that the miracle economies of India and China mean the end of the era of the white men. At the same time, he exposes the seamier aspects that will leave many of their populace behind. Aravind Adiga's debut novel has received positive reviews with The Independent saying, "The truth, as it begins to emerge, is as shocking as it is fantastic. It's a rich subject, and Adiga mines all its darkly comic possibilities. Halwai's voice – wised-up, mordant, sardonic, self-mocking and utterly without illusions – is as compelling as it is persuasive, and one of the triumphs of the book."
From the Book
Indian novelist Aravind Adiga was named the winner of UK's prestigious £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Over and above his prize of £50,000, Adiga may expect a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book. The judging panel for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comprised: Michael Portillo, former MP and Cabinet Minister; Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar's bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.
In his book, Adiga not only peels back the gloss of the economic miracle to expose the rot beneath, he instructs us in the means by which a small minority of the population are able to subjugate the majority.
A white tiger is the rarest creature in the jungle, only coming along once in every generation. When Balram Halwai was still able to attend the excuse for a school in his village, he was singled out by a school inspector as being the white tiger of his contemporaries for being able to read and write when nobody else could. The inspector promised that Balram would be given a scholarship to attend a proper school so he could fulfill his potential. Unfortunately, fate had other plans. His family were forced to pull him out of school to help pay off their debt to their landlord.
We learn Balram's life story courtesy of letters he has taken upon himself to write to the premier of China. He wrote these letters to educate the premier so that he wouldn't be fooled by any of the false pictures the politicians he meets might paint about life in India when he comes for his official state visit. Balram decides the best way for the premier to understand what life in India is like is by telling him the story of his, Balram's, life.
The first lesson Balram has for us is the reality of rural life in India. In his small village everybody is beholden to one of four landlords. If you want to grow anything you have to pay money to one person. If you want to graze animals you have to pay money to another. If you want to use the roads to make money as a rickshaw driver, you pay 10% of everything you earn to a third. Finally, the fourth one owns the waters. If you want to fish or use the water to transport goods, you pay him.
It's after Balram's family is forced to borrow money from one of the landlords to pay for a cousin's dowry that he has to leave school and start working in teahouses. Balram is destined for greater things, though, and his grandmother comes up with 600 rupees so he may learn to drive and get a job driving for a wealthy man. Through blind luck he happens to show up at his landlord's compound on the day the youngest son has returned from America and needs his own driver. This begins his long climb out of the darkness of poverty.
Balram is not just a driver. It turns out he's expected to cook, clean, and do whatever else his new master needs him to do. When his master moves to New Delhi, Balram moves with him and drives him around the capital as he greases the palms of all the various political fixers and parliamentarians that need greasing in order to ensure the family business survives. One hundred thousand rupees here, two hundred thousand there, and Balram sits in the front seat seeing nothing, but witnessing it all.
At one point Balram asks the premier why he thinks servants are so loyal to their masters. Why don't they demand a cut or threaten them with the police, or at the very least stand up to the masters who they outnumber by at least a thousand to one?
They are so busy fighting among each other for the chance to breathe that they will never be able to escape their cages.
The threat of violence against their families if they misbehave is a factor as well. Balram recounts how a servant of one of the landlords in his home village did something wrong, and the landlord had his entire family killed in retaliation. Balram says it would take a unique individual, a White Tiger even, to be depraved enough to risk the lives of his entire family to steal the seven hundred thousand rupees his employer is carrying in a red leather bag to bribe a politician.
Bribery and corruption are what grease the wheels of the great economic miracle of India, wheels that are still being turned by slave labour. Underneath the statues of Gandhi and behind the pictures of the beautiful temples is corruption so ingrained that it's taken for granted as being the way things are and always will be.
The picture Aravind Adiga paints of India in The White Tiger is of a nearly feudal society disguised as a democracy. If even a tenth of what Balram describes as normal operating business is actual, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, then India's economic miracle is as much a lie as China's. The country might have gained its independence from the British at the end of the 1940's, but the majority of people in India are still trapped in servitude.
In the end, what makes the events in the book so believable is the character of Balram. He is the perfect servant. He worries whether his master is eating enough, takes pride in him when he behaves honourably, and is disappointed with him when he is weak. For all his protestations about the system, he is still as much a part of it as anybody else, and it takes an enormous amount of strength and luck for him to live up to his name of white tiger.
An easy but intense read, I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in India and its politics, social system and beliefs. And its funny and entertaining too. You may find the author extremely cynical of India sometimes, but as someone who grew up there for 25 years this novel truly reflects the Indian system. Adiga does not mince words or flinch away from portraying these malignancies. If your view of India is of an emerging power, an exotic spiritual civilization, read this book! This is what Indian Society and Living in India is about.
‘Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century’ by Nandan Nilekani
Since the early 1990s, India has witnessed great social, political and cultural change. As the world’s largest democracy, its most diverse nation and one of its fastest growing economies, India is now, sixty years after Independence, universally regarded as an emerging superpower. In this sweeping and comprehensive book, one the country’s finest and most dynamic minds examines the central ideas that have shaped modern India, and offers an original perspective on our past, present and future. Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who has been a key player in India’s growth story and was chosen by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, points out that the country’s future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Looking closely at our recent history, he examines the ideas and attitudes that have evolved with the times and contributed to our progress, as also those that keep us shackled to old, unproductive and fundamentally undemocratic ways. He discusses how, despite good intentions and astonishing idealism, our early socialist policies stifled growth and weakened our democracy; how, contrary to received wisdom, India’s large and overwhelmingly young population has now become our greatest strength; how information technology is revolutionizing not just business but also governance in the everyday life of a vast majority of Indians; and how rapid urbanization is transforming both our society and our politics.
He also gets to the heart of charged debates about caste politics, labour reform, infrastructure, higher education, the English language in India and the role of the state in a globalized world where the wealth of big corporations exceeds that of some nations. And as he does this, he asks the key questions of the future: how will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? Will further access to the open market continue to stimulate such extraordinary growth? And how will this growth affect – and be shaped by – the country’s young people?
India is in the middle of a huge transformational process, Nilekani argues, and only a safety net of ideas—from genuinely inclusive democracy to social security, from public health to sustainable energy—can transcend political agendas and safeguard the country’s future.
The book, a Penguin Allen Lane publication, is the outcome of what Mr. Nilekani describes as a voyage of self discovery in understanding why India is the way it is, how we have got here and what the future holds.
This discovery was not charted through “adjectives, slogans and substandard discussions.” Instead, he relied on the power of ideas. Only when an idea got embedded in people’s minds, could a traction develop to make a system believe in the idea, leading to change, he said.
The book is organised into four sets of ideas. Six ideas helped to shape the India of today, said Mr. Nilekani. The idea that population is not a burden but human capital, which is referred to as “demographic dividend,” is the first. The development of the entrepreneurial spirit, the effect of the English language, technology as a tool for empowerment, the attitude to globalisation and deepening of democracy are the other ideas that lie in the first set. “The combination of these six factors is unique. No other country in the world has this,” he said.
Explaining these ideas in economic terms, he said these first six ideas drove the real growth today. The next four ideas were needed to maintain the growth. These were universal primary education, adequate infrastructure, urbanisation, and the idea of India as a single market — ideas which found acceptance among everyone, but were yet to be implemented fully. Some challenges that needed to be overcome were the “ideas that are debated upon today”— reservation, improvement in higher education and labour reforms, he said. Looking towards the future, a sustainable model emerges if we address “the challenges of prosperity,” he said. Modern technology has to be used as an instrument of governance to achieve a dramatic increase in transparency. Also, the challenges of health, pension, environment and energy have to be addressed in a framework that is meaningful to India, he said. Today, politics operates through ‘vertical divides, where caste, religious and other differences are played upon, whereas there are ‘horizontal aspirations,’ in which people across different strata look towards a different future, Mr. Nilekani said. This book is an attempt to “capture those aspirations and put them in an idea framework,” to provide a “safety net of ideas.”