Tag: action & adventure

A story of eternal friendship between Bholanath and Khudabaksh, regardless of their respective religions, Amit Majmudar’s Soar is set in World War I and is the need of the hour.

We figured this might not be enough to get you to pick up the book, hence, here are 7 reasons why you should read Soar:

Friends who pray together, stay together

‘When it was time for Khudabaksh, a Mussulman, to do namaz, Bholanath’s was the second hand raised before his closed eyes. And when Bholanath, a Hindu, rattled off his Shiva stotras, Khudabaksh pressed his palm in place so his friend prayed with joined hands.’

They spoke pigeon but confidently volunteered as translators

‘…an officer from the Royal Messenger Corps came looking for a translator. Since both of them spoke pigeon, or at least the dialect of pigeon spoken in their native Junagadh, Bholanath and Khudabaksh volunteered.’

Their conversations quite evidently provide a sense of comic relief

‘ “I remembered what the Brahmin told me before I left,” he said. “I lost all caste by crossing the sea. So I am all contamination, through and through—how can soil soil me now?” ‘

There’s a non-communal pet squirrel, Kabira, involved who consumed a balanced diet of shlokas and suras

‘Bholanath dropped the pages and grabbed the rope to steady Khudabaksh. Before the pages (drifting lazily, back and forth) could reach the basket floor, the squirrel darted under them at top speed and caught them. They vanished into her mouth like snowflakes caught on her tongue.’

 They prioritized their friendship & breakfast over discussing a potential partition

‘ “What if, some day, Hindus fall on Mussulmans, and Mussulmans fall on Hindus?” …  Once Hindus and Mussulmans are in two separate places, how will we go out on our feast-day binges? “Maybe Mussulmanistan wasn’t a wise idea after all.” “Do you know what is a good idea?” “What?” Khudabaksh smiled broadly. “Breakfast.” ‘

Through their mindless banter, they were wise enough to propage that a war never ends

‘ “A war doesn’t even end then. After the last soldier finishes screaming, the other soldier can still go on groaning. A war ends only when prime ministers write their names on a piece of paper.” “If prime ministers were as wise as children, all wars would be fought with pistols.” “And they’d be over by sunset, too. Or earlier, if someone brought out a kite.” ‘

Over and above everything, the book highlights the helplessness of the poor to the point where they had to join the military to make ends meet

‘The money is why they had done it, or rather, why the women in their lives had pushed them to do it, Khudabaksh’s wife and Bholanath’s mother. The nawab of Junagadh had promised fifty troops to a proposed 1st Royal Gujarati regiment. As an incentive to his subjects, he announced a bonus of one hundred rupees—more than two good-for-nothings like Bholanath and Khudabaksh would bring home all year.’

Amit Majmudar’s Soar, is a humorous read that has been able to deliver a very important message of friendship soaring above all else through Khudabaksh and Bholanath’s mindless banter. Since it is set in World War I, you will come across scenic depictions and their conversations that are bound to make you realize that war is pointless- no one wins.

Do give it a read and tell us what you think!

By Rajorshi Chakraborti

About two years ago, I found I wanted to write a superhero novel!

I was no doubt influenced by the wave of superhero movies and shows that has been such a dominant trend this past decade. I’m susceptible to influences of that sort: my wife points out that if a character picks up a glass of whisky in a show we’re watching, I often pause it and announce I feel like one too.

But then I encountered resistance, from within! The (mostly) realist writer inside me, who had been looking at the world in certain ways over the past six books, couldn’t so easily make the switch to all-conquering superheroes. So, with some regret, I realised my heroes wouldn’t be all-conquering, that the structures and systems they would battle would be enormously powerful, more entrenched and multifarious than any individual baddie. I also understood, without any regret, that this book – like several others of mine – would take place in locations I knew well rather than anywhere fantastical, beginning with my home city of Calcutta, and in a time period that I genuinely wanted to explore – the present political moment in India.

This is how Shakti was conceived – as a coming together of a part of me that wanted to experience for the first time the boundlessness of unleashing magic and superpowers in a story, and the part held down by gravity, by the boundaries of the plausible and the ‘real’. So, my challenge became – could the book be both? Could Shakti be read and experienced as a gripping ‘supernatural’ mystery thriller, and also work (hopefully) as a complex evocation of what it feels like for a range of different characters to be living in India now – in the India being remade at all levels by the many stunning transformations of the past few years?

Of course, I had models, the most incredible, inspiring models. From the great fables, fairy tales and myths that I most adored, to the Ramayana, the Arabian Nights and the Mahabharata, to modern works such as Midnight’s Children, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Handmaid’s Tale, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as sci-fi, horror, ghost stories and some of the more memorable superhero narratives, magical, non-realist elements have been used throughout literary history to shed new, unique light upon the real. In these unsurpassable works, and this was my hope as well on a far humbler scale, a few fantastic ingredients act as keys that allow the writer, and readers, access to richer, deeper, more breath-taking and soul-stirring apprehensions of the actual. How do certain extraordinary experiences feel to people in their impact and their unreality? How might any of us respond if one or other impossible-seeming thing became true tomorrow? What if you found yourself trapped in a body or a society that rendered you completely powerless (as in The Metamorphosis and The Handmaid’s Tale respectively, or perhaps under the regulations of the NRC)? What if all the forests around your town were burning and the sky was an unremitting red (which is true of several places in Victoria, Australia as I write)? What if you were granted powers that ​promised to​ realise your deepest longings, but they came at a terrible, soul-destroying price (the premise of Shakti)?

At the very start, I knew my principal protagonists would be women. It was an instinctive decision that only felt more right when I reflected upon it. First, I hadn’t written a novel before that was entirely narrated by and centred on women protagonists, which seemed like something imaginatively overdue to attempt. But also, when I thought about the most challenging circumstances into which I could plunge my would-be superheroes – to see what would remain, or emerge, of their humanity and heroism – the journeys of several women characters from different backgrounds in an Indian setting offered an incredible range of possibilities. Speaking as a male writer, I await eagerly reactions from readers to this crucial aspect of the book, to the experiences and histories of Arati, Jaya, Malti and Shivani, my principal characters, and whether they feel true and moving to you.

Before concluding, I’ll confess something I’ve felt ever since I completed Shakti, that – proud as I remain of all my other books and the things each one tries to do – it is this novel I have been building up my entire career to write. The one in which I’ve tried to do the most; the one packed with the ingredients I most love. ​The one whose title I was pleased to an embarrassing extent to notice one day had been hidden in my name all along – RAJORSHI CHAKRABORTI – as if waiting for me to arrive at it. ​

There’s always the temptation when using magic in a narrative to make wishes come true – the writer’s as much as a reader’s – of happy endings and fulfilled dreams. I love many such tales myself​; note my showing off how Shakti is ​’concealed’ in my ​​name! I wish one existed that we could all believe in about our present age. For its protagonists too, Shakti dangles precisely such a vision of the future, before reveal​ing​ itself ​to​ ​be ​the other kind of magic story – that involves wicked masters,​ binding conditions, crimes and servitude, and offers no way back. The kind that throws up moral crises no superhero cannot overcome by their powers alone. Collective crises, in the case of Shakti, which no hero can overcome alone.

Here’s what I hope for my book, beyond the wish that people will really enjoy it. That, in a very small way, it’ll offer ​a recognisable reflection of some of the crises millions of ordinary citizens in India – and in other countries around the world that are experiencing comparable political moments – are currently heroically fighting.

Structured as a fantastical, women-driven superhero story, Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti also gives us a scathing social commentary on present-day concerns of feminism, sexism, communal violence and mental health.

Through the characters of Jaya, Arati, and Shivani – three women in Calcutta who are gifted with magical powers – Chakraborti takes us on a journey across a nation that is in the throes of profound transformation. In the process, we get to glimpse a hitherto unseen country that is made up of the secrets, longings, wounds and strengths of many human hearts.

What facets of our times do we get to see in Shakti? We list some below.

Deep-rooted Communal Divides

Throughout the story, we see attempts to instigate communal violence and hatred between Hindus and Muslims; something that relates directly to our current socio-political sphere outside of the book.

An instance in the book illustrates the resulting violence due to such manipulation, where the narrator Jaya receives a Times of India link from Shivani:

“It turned out to be just a Times of India story, four paragraphs long. There had been violence in a village in Bardhaman district, about a hundred kilometres from Calcutta, where Hindus and Muslims had clashed because a Hindu boy had been found dead a few days earlier, and the belief grew that he had been punished for his sister’s friendship with a Muslim boy. Three Muslims and another Hindu had since died, including, especially sadly, two brothers of the boy, who was now in hiding. An evening curfew had been imposed on the village, and extra police had been sent from other parts of West Bengal to all likely flashpoints in the district. The final paragraph was a quote from a local opposition leader, alleging another example of a state-wide breakdown of law and order.”

School, Learning and Education

One of the narrative arcs for Jaya – the narrator of the story – also highlights some ingrained attitudes towards the syllabus and the content being taught in schools, which is expected to be restrictive and ‘nationalistic’. Jaya tells us how and why Mrs Dhanuka, the Principal of the school she teaches History in, disapproves of Jaya’s teaching:

“The [only] surprise Dhanuka threw in near the end of her tirade [was the additional charge of being ‘anti-national’! Apparently, she’d been planning to haul me in ‘even before this morning’, because of ‘the number of unhappy parents’ who’d emailed her about some of the content of our class conversations, in which, instead of ‘sticking to the syllabus’, I supposedly spent a great deal of time ‘undermining our present Prime Minister’ and also — again, to use Dhanuka’s words — ‘devaluing the heritage of our Hindu myths and epics by repeatedly insisting they couldn’t be seen as history or science’.”

Class Divides

In a fleeting but poignant incident in the book, the responses of some of Jaya’s colleagues also expose the larger lack of empathy and compassion towards the economically less privileged classes in the urban milieu.

“My shock must have been obvious, because two colleagues sitting across from me at the table asked almost immediately if something had happened. I couldn’t speak at school about how I knew Shivani (only my three closest friends knew about the column, and none of them was in the staff room), so I merely said my domestic help has been going through a wrenching personal tragedy and I can’t do anything useful. And that dissipated my questioners’ compassion even more quickly than I’d anticipated. Oh well, if it’s only something to do with your help . . .”

Struggles of the Youth

Jaya works as a columnist for an agony column to help teenagers and young adults struggling with mental health or familial issues.  The narrator provides glimpses of some of her correspondences which bring to light some deep-rooted struggles that this demographic faces in the real world. Rising mental health concerns amongst the youth in India have become an important topic of discussion in the country today; and Jaya’s columns and her correspondents reflect this.

A crucial incident that speaks to this concern is Shivani’s refusal to share her emotional trauma with her family, which is why she is compelled to turn to Jaya’s column. As a fifteen-year-old, Shivani’s situation, on a microcosmic level, speaks to the pervasiveness of the lack of familial support-system and understanding that teenagers and young people face today.

Shivani writes in one of her responses to Jaya:

‘So all your concern is only from a distance. As long as you can reply by email, you care.

If you knew my parents, if you spent just half an hour in our house, you would take back the suggestion of sharing my secret with them. And without parents behind me, show me the psychiatrist who would take me seriously.’

The Power of Social Media

Social media has become a norm in the society today – especially when it comes to rebellion and mobilization. A particularly memorable incident in the story gives us a glimpse into the power of social media in (re)defining public opinion.

In one instance, Jaya – who had been writing her agony column under a male pseudonym, ‘Chandra Sir’, in an attempt to hide her true identity – is outed by a vengeful mother on Twitter. Jaya appeals to her readers to give her honest feedback about how her column impacted them. The response is overwhelmingly positive, which helps her bring back her column under her real name.

‘‘@ChandraSir is always worth reading. When the advice is good, who cares about the name? #KeepChandraSir

Police Forces

Another fleeting but poignant moment in the story makes the reader reflect on police procedures and processes. Arati – Jaya’s friend and domestic help who is also gifted with powers – attempts to confront her husband Ramesh for selling their nine-month-old daughter sixteen years ago. When he is arrested, the ease with which his bail is arranged and granted shocks Jaya:

‘‘Even greater than my amazement that a man who’d confessed to selling his own nine-month-old child could be eligible for bail was that of learning how quickly the money had been arranged.”

As a feminist superhero(ine) story we all needed, Shaktiis a highly relevant and compelling narrative for our times.