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Tag: Excerpt

A reckoning with humanity: The Homecoming and Other Stories

Posted on by ashmita

Sri M’s writings are not concerned with doctrinal teaching; instead, they explore the core of humanity, looking at the nurturing dimension of spirituality. Get a glimpse into his captivating new book The Homecoming and Other Stories with this excerpt.

 

~

 

The well-built, curly haired young man of medium height, dressed in blue jeans, red T-shirt and brown ankle boots, carried only one piece of luggage—a small-sized, glossy black Ecolac briefcase.

Krishna, with his twenty years of experience as a licensed porter at the Bengaluru City railway station and given to watching all kinds of people with all kinds of luggage, noticed that not once since he had entered the platform had the young man put down the briefcase. Unusual, because from the way he carried it there was little doubt in Krishna’s mind that the briefcase, though small, might be heavy.

‘Gold ornaments, may be even gold biscuits,’ Krishna said to himself. He had carried what he guessed was gold many times. Bangaru Chetty, the well-known jeweller, always engaged him to carry his luggage. Chetty trusted him.

Trust. A lot of people trusted him but what had he gained? Nothing.

He rubbed his fingers across the brass badge pinned to his red T-shirt which proclaimed that he was a licensed porter, licensed to carry other people’s luggage all his life, while he himself possessed nothing other than life’s burdens: a heavy load which he knew no one else would care to share. So much for trust and honesty.

Krishna wasn’t the type who coveted someone else’s property but under the prevailing circumstances, in sheer desperation, he was willing to deviate from the principled life he had led thus far. What had his high principles given him, as his wife once said, ‘except poverty, misfortune and eternal sorrow?’

Excerpt from The Homecoming and Other Stories
The Homecoming and Other Stories||Sri M

‘Just this once,’ he said to himself. ‘Let me give it a try. Must be a smuggler. The loss would be nothing to him.’

The station was crowded. Armed policemen stood outside a special coach of the Chennai Mail, guarding some politician, an ex-minister of Tamil Nadu who, for some strange reason, had decided not to spend the taxpayer’s money flying and go by train.

Krishna steadied his nerves with great effort and walked up to the young man with the  briefcase who was standing outside the second-class sleeper coach adjoining the minister’s VIP coach. Hardly ten minutes left for the train to start and he was still outside. Perhaps waiting for someone.

‘Porter, sir?’ said Krishna and gestured towards the briefcase.

The young man said, ‘No,’ and turned his face away.

Under normal circumstances, Krishna would have gone and found another traveller but that day he just stood beside the news-stand nearby absorbed in his own thoughts.

‘Krishna,’ he said to himself ‘You are not made out for that kind of stuff, see? You certainly can’t snatch the briefcase and run. Crime is not your cup of tea. You can’t do it. So, suffer. Be an honest man . . .’

…By now the train had gathered speed and had moved out of the platform. The ticket collector was at the other end and no one else seemed to give any serious attention to his movements. Taking advantage, Krishna jumped out of the train, adjusting his gait to avoid falling…He stood still for a while, briefcase in his hand, taking stock of the situation. It was clear that he couldn’t walk out of there or go home carrying an elegant, new briefcase. He would have to transfer the contents into his old worn-out airbag in which he carried his uniform and lunch-box every morning when he came to the station…He collected the bag from the shelf and walked back to the shed to collect the briefcase, which was locked, just as he had expected it to be. He decided to break it open after going

home, if it could somehow be fitted into the bag.

…He pushed open the door and went in. Apart from the tiny kitchen there were only two rooms. In one of them was an old hand-operating sewing machine his nineteen-yearold daughter used to earn a few rupees doing simple stitching and mending jobs for the neighbours. She had fallen asleep on a floor mat, waiting for him. Beside her was his dinner: Ragi balls, beans curry and tamarind chutney. Meenakshi was smiling in her sleep. Her dream world was perhaps happier than the real world he had brought her into. Tears came rolling down his eyes as he saw her torn skirt, plastic bangles and imitation gold earrings. Perhaps it would all change now. How lovely she would look with real gold ornaments! He was hungry but decided to eat later. First, he had to open the briefcase and he had better do it without waking them up. There was no light in the other room where Ambuja, his wife, seemed to be sleeping soundly, thanks to the sleeping tablets he had managed to get her in the morning. Carrying the briefcase, he tiptoed into the tiny kitchen. The electric light wasn’t working because the bulb had popped. He lit the kerosene lamp, softly pushed the door shut and sat on the floor. Holding the briefcase in his lap he examined the locks, trying to figure out the best way to pry them open with the least noise. That was when he heard the peculiar ticking sound coming from inside the briefcase. What happened next took only a split second. A fire-orange, dazzling flash, followed by an ear-splitting blast! Krishna couldn’t complete the scream that rose in his throat.

 

The same night, just as the train moved out of the station, the young man emerged from the canteen, walked up to the public telephone booth and dialled his boss’s number. ‘Okay sir, all done. Too much security for the minister, sir. Didn’t want to risk getting caught, so planted the briefcase in the next compartment. Range more than enough, sir.’ ‘Thank you, goodbye,’ said the man on the other side and hung up. Then with a smile on his lips, he poured himself a peg of Old Monk rum and drank it up straight, celebrating in advance the death of Enemy Number One.

 

~

 

The Homecoming and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Sri M that explore the impact of human behaviour and the nuances of spirituality.

Ashta Siddhis and the extraordinary powers of Goddess Durga

Posted on by ashmita

Do you know what the Ashta Siddhis, or the eight kinds of supernatural powers are? Read an excerpt to find out more about Nalini Ramachandran’s Nava Durga and the extraordinary powers that Goddess Durga can bestow on other gods!

 

~

 

The goddess, in each of her forms, grants different kinds of blessings to her devotees. But Siddhidatri, the goddess worshipped on the ninth day of Navaratri, is special. In Sanskrit, ‘siddhi’ means ‘supernatural power’ and datri means ‘giver’. So, Siddhidatri is ‘the giver of supernatural powers’.

After Adi Shakti, in the form of Kushmanda, had created the universe and the new gods and goddesses, Shiva prayed to her, ‘O Supreme Goddess, grant me all the siddhis to make me a perfect god.’

He meditated for thousands of years so that Adi Shakti would listen to him. Impressed by Shiva’s devotion, the goddess appeared in the avatar of Siddhidatri from Kushmanda’s japa mala, which the smiling goddess used to bless people with the ashta siddhis and the nava niddhis. Almost immediately, Siddhidatri also emerged from the left side of Shiva’s body. So the right half of Shiva’s body was his own, and the left half was in the form of Siddhidatri. This half-man, half-woman form of Shiva is known as Ardhanarishwara, ‘the lord who is half woman’.

Just as she lives within humans, she began living within Shiva too as his shakti. And in this unique way, she bestowed supernatural powers on him and made him a perfect god.

…Those who truly worship Siddhidatri can get some or all of these abilities (but it’s easier said than done!):

 

 

Mahima

To make your body huge in size
(It can help when you suddenly come face to face with a mighty asura.)

 

 

Anima

Front cover Nava Durga
Nava Durga||Nalini Ramachandran

To make your body as tiny as an atom
(It can help when you play hide-and-seek with friends.)

 

Garima

To become very, very heavy
(You can face a storm like a mountain.)

 

 

Laghima

To be nearly weightless
(You can levitate or even float in the air.)

 

 

Prapti

To travel to or be present in any place you wish
(You can time-travel, whenever and wherever you want.)

 

 

Prakamya

To get or be able to give whatever one desires
(You can gift your mother the very thing she has been secretly wishing for!)

 

 

Ishitva

To be in control of nature, like a god
(You can make the sun listen to you in summer and make the rain obey you in monsoon.)

 

 

Vashitva

To be able to control other beings.
(You can turn bullies into friends.)

 

~

Nalini Ramachandran’s Nava Durga tells us about the rich mythology of Durga Puja and what makes each day special!

A queen in an unfamiliar kingdom

Posted on by ashmita

Prithvimahadevi’s journey is uphill. Having been married off to her father’s enemy in a peace-making gesture, she finds herself betrayed by those closest to her, and ends up alone in an unknown kingdom, alienated among people who are disdainful towards her. Yet her resolve only strengthens. Read an excerpt for a glimpse into Devika Rangachari’s powerful protagonist:

 

A carriage sent by the Bhaumakara king waits for me in the palace courtyard. It is plain and square with none of the embellishments that my father’s royal carriages routinely bear. Its horses, too, have clearly been selected more for their hardiness than their beauty.

It is hot and bright, and the entire court has assembled to see me off. The silence all around deafens me—this is a parting that signifies defeat and submission. And this is the silence of anger and grief.

The Bhaumakara attendants wait by the carriage, impassive.

I have already bid farewell in private to my father and brother. Yayati does not say much but clings to me as if he is remembering a time when we meant so much more to each other. The ties of blood are the strongest of all bonds, after all, and who are we to gainsay it?

‘Will you come to see me soon?’ I ask, my voice rough with unspilled tears.

front cover of Queen of Earth
Queen of Earth||Devika Rangachari

He nods but glances towards our father as if seeking permission from him. He is increasingly afraid to hold a single original thought or opinion in his head—and this is what has driven a wedge between us.

My father holds me close. ‘Be well. And do not lose hope. I will make it worth your while.’

I am puzzled. What can he possibly mean? I search his face for an answer and open my mouth to frame a question. He silences me with a look.

I am drawn away into a round of weeping goodbyes with my attendants.

His words will eventually make sense to me but for now, I let them slip and walk towards the carriage, resolute. Whatever happens, I will face the future with courage and fortitude. I will be true to my name.

The journey is a nightmare. The carriage has been built more for service than comfort. The wood is hard and digs into my body and the entire frame jolts unbearably. I am repeatedly sick and seem incapable of holding down the smallest morsel of food or even a sip of water.

Both sets of attendants are distressed, mine and the ones that the Bhaumakaras have sent. They can do little to alleviate my discomfort.

I see nothing of the landscape we pass; my eyes are shut tight. I finally huddle down on the hard bench, insensible to the hours that pass, floating in and out of a state of consciousness.

I am dimly aware of someone—my aunt, by
the sound of her voice—coaxing me to suck a slice
of lemon that makes me retch all the more and of someone—her again—stroking my forehead and murmuring soothing words that ultimately lull me into a spell of blessed sleep.

When I eventually wake, it is with the knowledge that the worst has passed. I am weak but whole, and it is a relief to know this. My aunt is by my side, her face full of travel weariness and deep concern in the dim light of approaching darkness.

‘Two days,’ she says in response to my unspoken query. She shakes her head. ‘You have never been this ill before. Perhaps you are not used to the rigours of travel. Or perhaps you have worried yourself into this state.’

A Bhaumakara soldier hastens by to tell us that we are nearing journey’s end.

I look out at the unfamiliar landscape. I have seen nothing of the forests that we have travelled through to reach the coast, but we seem to have emerged from them into an area of tall trees brushing against the sky, palm and coconut by the look of them. A cool breeze blows in, reminding me that we are near the water. A river shimmers by and I can see the dim outlines of boats
on it. This must be the Vaitarani, I think. I know that Viraja nestles between the Mahanadi and the Vaitarani, and that the latter runs closer to the city. My spirits lift slightly and the wind eases the ache in my head.

I see the pallor on my face in the small jewelled mirror that my aunt hands me. There are lines of exhaustion around my eyes and I can taste the sour tang of sickness in my mouth. This is not a propitious time for my new family to view me, but it is not in my hands. Let them know how arduous the journey has been and how much I have endured just to meet their peremptory demands.

When the carriage eventually stops, my head swims. I close my eyes to steady myself.

***

 

Queen of Earth is a complex and beautiful story of a young woman who holds her own in the most hostile of circumstances.

Poems to keep us going

Posted on by ashmita

‘Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.’

― Leonard Cohen

 

Time and again, in many known and unknown ways, poetry has saved the world. Singing in the Dark does the same. We want to share with you some poems that keep us going through the worst of days:

 

Dawn of Darkness – Ngugi wa Thiong’o

I know, I know,
It threatens the common gestures of human bonding
The handshake,
The hug
The shoulders we give each other to cry on
The neighborliness we take for granted
So much that we often beat our breasts
Crowing about rugged individualism,
Disdaining nature, pissing poison on it even, while
Claiming that property has all the legal rights of personhood

Murmuring gratitude for our shares in the gods of capital.
Oh how now I wish I could write poetry in English,
Or in any and every language you speak
So I can share with you, words that
Wanjikũ, my Gĩkũyũ mother, used to tell me:
Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa:
No night is so Dark that,
It will not end in Dawn,
Or simply put,
Every night ends with dawn.
Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa.
This darkness too will pass away
We shall meet again and again
And talk about Darkness and Dawn
Sing and laugh maybe even hug
Nature and nurture locked in a green embrace
Celebrating every pulsation of a common being
Rediscovered and cherished for real
In the light of the Darkness and the new Dawn.

 

Front cover singing in the dark
Singing in the Dark||Nishi Chawla, K. Satchidanandan

 

Apocalypse – Annie Zaidi

Waves do not come dashing against the noontide
They tiptoe in
and out with the smallest dose of pain
taken from the cabinet you left dusty
on purpose
so nobody guesses how much you hoard
The wretched manage to show up
across the shatterproof glass of time
to class office factory godown
boat ocean horizon end time
with a slouch and a glower of expectation
Your eyes are fleet
testing
weighing
catlike
on nights when the tide rises
and rises and the rain quietly falls,
as promised, it comes
It sits
gleaming on the roof
with creature eyes
offering no sign
no pause for breath
no cause or rules
about arks: no ones or twos
it offers no map
A thing
squealing its lack of defence
mouse like, it comes to nibble
the cheese of your world

It arches
head and back
now signals: here
I am
Take me at this flood
or there I go

~

Bumblebees – Amanda Bell

There was no need to fret about the bees—
their fragile nest, unlidded
as I pulled weeds beneath the apple tree,
their squirming larvae naked
to my gaze and to the sun.
They watched me from the border
while I hastily replaced the roof,
before returning to rethread
the fibres of their grassy home.
In the cleared weeds I see
their entrance and their exit,
how their flightpaths sweep
the garden in an arc, stitching up
the canvas of this space, as if
they could remake the world
which lies in shreds around us.
The dome moves, as I watch it,
the stretching of an inchoate form—
when morning comes
it glistens with white dew.

~

Singing in the dark is a beautiful anthology of poetry that comes at a time when we need poetry more than ever.

The turning tides of Indian history

Posted on by ashmita

Indian culture has been greatly marked by foreign arrivals. As trade turned into colonial settlements, India would forever carry the remnants of that imperial history. This excerpt from The Incredible History of The Indian Ocean explores how some of these colonial advents set up European strongholds on Indian lands:

~

In 1580, the English sea captain Francis Drake returned to England after circumnavigating (travelling all the way around) the world. He brought back two things: one, a ship filled with Spanish booty and spices from the Indies, and two, information that the Portuguese hold on trade in the Indian Ocean region was not as secure as widely believed.

The English now decided that it was time to stake a claim on the spice trade. A fleet of three ships was sent out under the command of James Lancaster in 1591. The ships bypassed India and made directly for the Straits of Malacca. The English did not even pretend to trade but simply plundered Portuguese and local ships before heading back. On the way home, however, two of the three ships were wrecked in a storm and all the ill-gotten cargo was lost. The smallest of the three ships somehow limped back with just twenty-five survivors, including Lancaster himself.

In the meantime, the Dutch also sent out a number of fleets, which brought home much valuable cargo. Spurred on by this, English merchants decided to take another shot at sailing eastwards. Queen Elizabeth I was petitioned for a royal charter, a document that granted a right or power to a person or a group. On New Year’s Eve in 1600, the merchants set up as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’; we know this now as the East India Company (EIC). Dutch merchants similarly banded together to form the United East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials, VOC).

Both of these entities would grow to become among the largest and most powerful multinational companies the world

Front cover ofThe Incredible History of the Indian Ocean
The Incredible History of The Indian Ocean||Sanjeev Sanyal

has ever seen.

… The English soon set up modest warehouses in Machilipatnam on the Andhra coast, Hugli in Bengal and Surat in Gujarat. As business grew, the EIC decided that it was necessary to build fortified settlements that could be defended against both Indian rulers as well as European rivals. The first of these was Madras (now Chennai). A small strip of coastline was acquired from the local ruler in 1639 by the EIC agent Francis Day. It was an odd choice as it was neither easily defensible nor did it have a sheltered harbour. Ships had to be anchored far from the shore and boats had to ferry people and goods through heavy surf. It was not uncommon for boats to overturn and cause the loss of life and property. Nonetheless, the English built a fortified warehouse here and christened it Fort St George.

The next major settlement was Bombay, which was acquired from the Portuguese as part of the dowry when King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. The group of small islands was leased to the EIC in 1668 for ten pounds per annum. Unlike Madras, it already had a small but functioning settlement and also a good harbour. As a naval power, the English would have found its island geography easier to defend and a more substantial fort was built on the main island, in the area still known as ‘Fort’. A series of smaller fortifications were also maintained at various strategic points.

The third major EIC settlement was built in Bengal. Yet again, the decision was taken because the English found their position in the old river port of Hugli untenable due to conflicts with the Mughal governor. When peace was finally declared after an abject apology from the English, they were allowed to return and set up a new establishment. In 1690, the EIC’s agent Job Charnock bought the rights to three villages from the local landlords for 1300 rupees. This is how Calcutta (now Kolkata) was founded. The English soon built Fort William—this is not the star-shaped eighteenth- century fort that is used today as the Indian Army’s eastern headquarters but its predecessor, which was built on the site now occupied by the General Post Office. Nonetheless, the proximity of the Mughals and later the Marathas made the EIC directors in London nervous. The humid, swampy terrain, moreover, took a heavy toll on the Europeans and even Job Charnock died within three years of founding the outpost. It is worth mentioning that each of the above EIC settlements soon attracted a sizeable population of Indian merchants, clerks, labourers, sailors, artisans, mercenaries and other service providers. Thus, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta each developed a thriving ‘black town’ where the Indians lived.

The English were not the only Europeans building trading posts during this period. The French East India Company, a relative latecomer, would build a number of outposts including a major settlement in Pondicherry (now Puducherry). This was established right next to the Roman-era port of Arikamedu. Pondicherry would remain a French possession till the 1950s and still retains a strong French flavour.

~

Through The Incredible History of The Indian Ocean, Sanjeev Sanyal has created a comprehensive channel into understanding the maritime history of our country, and the events that have shaped its culture.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: a powerful antidote

Posted on by sanjeeta

A  rich, eye-opening  anthology, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again , dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists and translators from more than thirty countries offer a profound, kaleidoscopic portrait of lives transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.

As COVID-19 has become the defining global experience of our time, writers transcend borders and genres to offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto corners of the world beyond our own.

 

UNPRECEDENTED was the ubiquitous term first used to describe the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020, as if the event were unlike any other. The truth is that it has been rather routine in its procedure, part of the eternal cycles of nature. Even in the Bible, similar disasters—earthquakes, deluges, famines, plagues of insects, pestilence of livestock, boils, thunderstorms of hail and fire—are recurrent visitors in the theater of human affairs. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that newcalamities such as this one aren’t extraordinary.

It isn’t surprising that the official approach to the pandemic was initially forensic, with an insistence on numbers: how many deaths and infections per day in a given hospital of a given city in a given country, how long a possible vaccine could take to bring us all out of purgatory, and so on, as if suffering could be quantified, ignoring that each and every person lost was unique and irreplaceable. The Talmud says that death is a kind of sleep and that one person’s sleep is unknowable to others. Although the misfortune arrived at a time when the essential tenets of globalism were being questioned—tariffs imposed, borders closed,immigrants seen with suspicion—the pandemic was planetary, hitting wherever people did what people do. It preyed with distinct fury on the poor and vulnerable, as natural catastrophes always do, especially in countries ruled by tyrants responding with disdain and hubris. Inevitably, the lockdown also forced a new method to everything everywhere. The sound of the kitchen clock suddenly felt new, the warmth of a handshake, the taste of fresh soup. As an antidote to numbers, it was once again left to writers to notice those changes, to chronicle them by interweaving words. That’s what literature does well: it champions nuance while resisting the easy tricks of generalization. This international anthology includes over fifty of those writers representing thirty-five countries and arriving in about a dozen languages. Cumulatively, their accounts are proof of the degree to which COVID-19 brought about the collapse of a hierarchy of principles we had all embraced until then. Call it the end of an era Shenaz Patel, from Mauritius, for instance, realizes that “suddenly, like an octopus disturbed in its sleep, everything kept hidden under the placid surface latched onto us with its many arms and spit its ink into our faces.” She adds: “We are faced with a true ‘civil war’ of speech, echoing through radios and social media, between those who respect the lockdown and those who don’t; those who understand and the ‘cocovids,’ the empty heads who go out anyway; between the ‘true patriots’ and the selfish few who knowingly put others in danger.”

The Brontë Sisters of Urdu Literature

Posted on by Penguin India

In Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard, Aliya lives a life confined to the inner courtyard of her home with her older sister and irritable mother, while the men of the family throw themselves into the political movements of the day. She is tormented by the petty squabbles of the household and dreams of educating herself and venturing into the wider world.
But Aliya must endure many trials before she achieves her goals, though at what personal cost?
Here is an excerpt from the afterword of the book by translator Daisy Rockwell, titled The Brontë Sisters of Urdu Literature.

Khadija Mastur and her sister, Hajira Masroor, have been called the Brontë sisters of Urdu literature. This comparison seems to have been made primarily on a biographical basis— they’d led tragic lives, were meek and unassuming in person, but wrote with conviction. But from a feminist perspective, the comparison is quite apt. Khadija Mastur wrote two novels and five collections of short stories in her fifty-five years, and it is a rare story that does not contain a critique of patriarchy, chauvinism and misogyny. Happy endings are few and far between.
Though the Brontës’ books are often described as romances, they too took a bleak view of male behaviour. The Brontës sometimes came up with a ‘happy’ ending, though it often feels tacked on, for the sake of the formula. ‘Reader, I married him’—Charlotte Brontë’s famous last line in Jane Eyre cannot be seen as a truly happy ending to the brutal tale. After all, our romantic hero is by now old, blind, disabled and semi-homeless. Mr Rochester, as has been explored in countless retellings and analyses, is not a very nice man: one who locked up his mentally ill Creole first wife in the attic, and then lied about her very existence. It is only when Mr Rochester is tragically maimed and reduced in the eyes of society that Jane Eyre can hope for a relationship built on trust and mutual respect. In fact, throughout their works, it is clear that the Brontës did not have a high opinion of male motivations and behaviour—as with Anne Brontë’s description of married life in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which even the supposedly positive character of the male narrator often behaves poorly himself; or the unappealing and disappointing male love interests in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.
Unlike the Brontës, Mastur and Masroor came of age writing at a time when there was a strong progressive writers’ movement. Though they could have chosen to write romances, they were politically engaged, Mastur for a time serving as the head of the Pakistani Progressive Writers’ Association. Because of her political views, shaped in part by a youth marked by poverty and deprivation, Mastur felt no obligation to deliver happy endings to her readers. It is clear from her writings that she saw patriarchy and classism as systemic poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically.
Not that Mastur treated her female characters with unstinting kindness either. Far from it. In characters such as Aliya’s mother and grandmother in The Women’s Courtyard, Mastur paints a detailed and unforgiving portrait of the role that women play in perpetuating the rigid bonds of patriarchy and class hierarchy. Indeed, Aliya’s mother and grandmother play active roles in destroying the lives of those who dare step outside the boundaries of tradition. The behaviour of these women is so brutal at times that they end up looking far worse than the actual patriarchs in the family, whom Aliya regards with love and respect despite their neglect of their families in favour of outside political involvement. Aliya’s mother is by far the most toxic character in the novel; she makes it clear that she considers her mother-in-law a flawed role model, one who ruined the family by failing to poison her own daughter when she was discovered in a romantic liaison with a lowerclass man.
Aliya herself wonders what it is that makes her so forgiving of her father’s and uncle’s neglect of their families’ welfare:

How she wished that Amma hadn’t driven anyone from the house; it was Safdar who had divided everyone, and then Abba was so busy with his animosity towards the English that he wouldn’t even turn and look at anyone. He didn’t even acknowledge her love. But she couldn’t say any of this out loud. She herself wondered why, despite Abba’s indifference, she still loved him the most. Abba’s affectionate eyes were so expressive. She’d never been able to say even one word against him (see p. 77).

Aliya sees her father and uncle as brilliant, politically principled men, even as their families are slowly wiped out financially and emotionally by their failure to step into their roles as patriarchs. But Aliya’s love is an intrinsic part of patriarchy as well—she has infinite forgiveness for her male elders, but little sympathy for the shrewish women who work desperately to keep the family and class structure in place.
Still, Aliya knows that the worst thing she can do to perpetuate the system is to step into the role awaiting her as a wife—specifically as wife to her cousin Jameel. Despite her suppressed love for Jameel, and a certain physical attraction to him, she sees capitulation to his advances as a sure way to end up just like her mother and aunt: a whinging housewife with a neglectful and politically active husband. The only way she can see clear to break the cycle is by refusing to marry. Implicit in this choice is the belief that marriage is a tool to perpetuate the system of patriarchy, a notion that is still radical more than fifty years after the publication of the novel.

The Women’s Courtyard cleverly brings into focus the claustrophobic lives of women whose entire existence was circumscribed by the four walls of their homes, and for whom the outside world remained an inaccessible dream. For more posts like this, follow Penguin India on Facebook!

The Republic of Beliefs – an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

In The Republic of Beliefs, Kaushik Basu, one of the world’s leading economists, offers a radically new approach to the economic analysis of the law. He argues that the traditional economic analysis of the law has significant flaws and has failed to answer certain critical questions satisfactorily.
Here is an excerpt from a section of the introduction, titled Practice and Discipline.

Economists and legal scholars have had an abiding interest in the question of why so many laws languish unimplemented. But an even more intriguing and philosophically troubling question is its obverse. Why are so many laws so effective, being both enforced by the functionaries of the state and obeyed by the citizens? After all, a law is nothing but some words on paper. Once one pauses to think, it is indeed puzzling why merely putting some “ink on paper” should change human behavior, why a new speed limit law recorded in a book should prompt drivers to drive more slowly, and the traffic warden to run after the few who do not, in order to ticket them.
Traditional law and economics dealt with these questions by avoiding asking them. The purpose of this book is to take on this conundrum of ink on paper triggering action frontally. In the chapters that follow I spell out and explain the enigma, and then go on to provide a resolution. This forces us to question and in turn reject the standard approach and replace it with a richer and more compelling way of doing law and economics. The new approach, rooted in game-theoretic methods, can vastly enrich our understanding of both why so many laws are effective and why so many laws remain unimplemented, gathering dust. Given the importance of law and economics for a range of practical areas, from competition and collusion, trade and exchange, labor and regulation to climate change and conflict management, the dividend from doing this right can be large. This monograph contributes to this critical space that straddles economics and law, and is thus vital for understanding development and peace, and, equally, stagnation and conflict.
The hinterland between different disciplines in the social sciences is usually a rather barren space. Despite proclamations to the contrary, multidisciplinary research remains sparse, its success hindered by differences in method and ideology, and a touch of obstinacy.
The confluence of law and economics stands out in this arid landscape. Ever since the field came into its own in the 1960s, with the writings of legal scholars and economists showing recognition of the existence of and even need for one another, the discipline of law and economics has been gaining in prominence. The need for this field was so obvious and immense that it did not brook the standard hindrances to interdisciplinary research. Laws are being created and implemented all the time; one does not have to be an economist or a legal scholar to see that a poorly designed law can bring economic activity to a halt or that a well-crafted law can surge it forward. For this reason the confluence of law and economics was an active arena of engagement even before the field had a name. In the United States, for instance, concern about collusion among business groups dates back to the late nineteenth century. The Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 and later the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 were landmarks in the use of the law to regulate market competition and deter collusion.
As so often happens, practice was ahead of precept. While there was no subject called law and economics then, small principles were being discovered and acted upon by policymakers and practitioners. It was, for instance, soon realized by American lawmakers and political leaders that while curbing collusion was good for the American consumer, it handicapped US firms in the global space. In competing against producers in other nations and selling to citizens of other nations, it may be useful to enable your firms to collude, fix prices, and otherwise violate domestic-market antitrust  protections. This gave rise to the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918, which exempted firms from the provisions of laws that ban collusion, as long as they could show that the bulk of their products were being sold abroad. Japan would later learn from this and create exemptions to its Antimonopoly Law, exempting export cartels from some provisions.
The realization of the power of the law to affect markets was in evidence when, soon after the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, the Allied Forces quickly imposed a carefully designed antitrust law on Japan. This was the so-called Antimonopoly Law 1947.
Japan would later modify it to reinvigorate its corporations. Not quite as directly as with the American experience but nevertheless with important implications for everyday life, the practice of law and economics goes much further back into history. Human beings were writing down laws pretty soon after they learned to write anything. The most celebrated early inscription was the Code of Hammurabi. Written in Akkadian, the language of Babylon, these laws were developed and etched on stone during the reign of the sixth king of Babylon, Hammurabi, who died in 1750 BCE. Ideas in this code survive today, such as the importance of evidence and the rights of the accused. It also gave us some of our popular codes of revenge, the best-known being “an eye for an eye.” The codes survived, but not without contestation. It is believed that it was Gandhi who warned us, nearly four thousand years later, “an eye for an eye will make the world blind.”

Highlighting the limits and capacities of law and economics, The Republic of Beliefs proposes a fresh way of thinking that will enable more effective laws and a fairer society. For more posts like this, follow Penguin India on Facebook!

Kabul under the Taliban Regime – an Eyewitness Account from Chasing the Monk's Shadow

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In 627 AD, the Chinese monk Xuanzang set off on an epic journey along the Silk Road to India to study Buddhist philosophy with the Indian masters. Records of his journey remain a valuable historical source. Fourteen hundred years later, Mishi Saran follows in Xuanzang’s footsteps to the fabled oasis cities of China and Central Asia, now vanished kingdoms in Pakistan and Afghanistan and India’s Buddhist centres. She chronicles her journey in the book Chasing the Monk’s Shadow.
This path breaking travelogue includes an extraordinary eyewitness account of Kabul under the Taliban regime, just one month before 9/11.
Here is an excerpt about this from the book:

Ashraf gave me a few survival tips. ‘At around 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., the ministry to fight vice and promote virtue patrols the city,’ he said. ‘That’s the time to be careful.’’
That was what kept Kabulis cowed, their eyes filled with fear, men and women. This old and gracious city stank of fear.
‘My barber trimmed my beard, but too much. I told him, you idiot, I’m too scared to go out now.’ Men as much as women felt the pressure of strictures imposed by the Taliban.
Tolibohn.
A semblance of calm drifted back into my head, but in thin layers. The Taliban brought peace, Ashraf said. Kabul was so divided among the fighters, divided by ethnic rule. We sipped our tea and chatted, but soon I wanted to take his leave and lie in my bed with the sheets over my head. It was a lot to digest.
‘Come,’ Ashraf said kindly. ‘Let me drop you back, I will show you around Kabul. We’ll say I’m a taxi driver. Actually, I did used to drive a taxi. You sit in the back so they don’t stop us, because men and women don’t sit together.’
As the afternoon faded into evening, we drove around Kabul. Ashraf pointed out from the front seat of his battered yellow car the old Indian embassy, the fortified Iranian one, the Turkish—all gone, all emptied out, locked up behind high walls. We drove by the Kabul Hotel where a bomb had, two weeks ago, smashed a wall in, so that a pile of rubble descended onto the pavement. Was it the opposition? A discontented Taliban faction? Nobody knew. The front line was once again just forty kilometers north of Kabul.
Ashraf harked back to 1994–5, when the two sides fought over Kabul, when shells rang across the city and the inhabitants crumpled in their homes.
‘Here is the office of the justice minister, he’s a hardliner,’ Ashraf lowered his voice. ‘Here’s the office of the finance minister, he’s also a hardliner.’
As we drew up at the Ariana Hotel gate, he pointed to the traffic circle ahead: ‘That’s where Najibullah was hanged from.’ My stomach lurched. There was so much I did not know, but I did know that in 1996 the world saw images of a mutilated President Najibullah hanging from a traffic post, that Najibullah’s widow had fled to New Delhi and still lived there. I tried not to look at the traffic circle, though it was empty and perfectly innocuous. It’s as though places where violence happened bore their traces. Nothing much, only that at dusk that spot was a darker shade of grey. The weekend trickled by. Ensconced in the Ariana, one afternoon, I simply decided not to be afraid. It was crippling me. I had come to Kabul pulling a truckload of inherited fear up the mountains with me. I had come in full mental armour, my mind clogged with walls of it. It was as though, expecting the worst, I had found a few butterflies, a rose garden and some bird droppings.
‘I need to telephone,’ I said to the man in the lobby, mimicking a phone, holding a fist to my ear with thumb and pinkie held out. In Urdu, we made arrangements to go to the public phone booth in the market. One of the Afghans from the hotel would escort me.
I phoned S. in Hong Kong. His voice quickened with worry.
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I’m in Kabul. I’m staying at the Ariana Hotel.’ I got used to broken-down, beaten-up Kabul. I could banish the fear, but not the sadness. I felt wretched all the time, for this country, for the Afghan children who came up, fair, with pointed chins and clear eyes, to beg. They were tiny, their hair mussed and caked. The children, old men and women and sometimes a woman in a burkha lurched towards me, hands held out, whispering. I couldn’t see their eyes, dark behind the lilac net. But I could sense the desperation.
Unlike the Indians, who imbue their begging with a certain professionalism, even humour, these were not people used to supplication. An old woman hobbled up to me, palm held out. I handed her a bag of apples I had bought. She gestured, no.
‘What is she saying?’ I asked the driver.
‘She has no teeth, she says she can’t eat the apples.’
‘Oh.’ I took the apples back and gave her the peaches instead.

With its riveting mix of lively reportage, high adventure, historical inquiry and personal memoir, Chasing The Monk’s Shadow is a path-breaking travelogue. For more posts like this, follow Penguin India on Facebook!

Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich by Radhakrishnan Pillai- An Excerpt

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Chanakya’s Arthashastra is an unrivalled political treatise that has been used by scholars, academics and leaders across the world. In Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich, Radhakrishnan Pillai brings out the inherent lessons from Arthashastra to present a strategic and practical way of wealth creation. This is a holistic study, written for anyone and everyone.
Here is an excerpt from the Stages of Wealth:
There are all types of wealthy people: educated, not so educated, large-hearted, miserly, first-generation wealthy, those who inherited their wealth, those who became wealthy at a young age, those who became wealthy after years of struggle, from rags to riches, from rich to very, very rich . . .
The best part about wealth is that there is no one group of wealthy people. They come from all backgrounds, from rich countries and poor countries, they are males and females, they make their money in various fields and industries: food, fashion, books, cinema, science, sports, medicine, real estate, automobiles, computers, technology, art . . . You will find more than one rich and successful person in every field.
There are some patterns common to every rich person’s life. If we understand those patterns, we can identify the principles that are common to the approach of all these wealthy people.
That one underlying rule is: they all loved their work and committed themselves to their work for years before they became rich. They had a long-term approach. Even after they became rich, they continued to work. All wealthy people have enough money to not worry about paying their monthly bills. They might even be able to afford to buy a fleet of limousines with just their leftover pocket money. They can sit by the seashore, sip on a drink and do nothing till the end of their lives. Yet, you will find these people working hard. They enjoy their work and are busy with their teams creating more, better things than what they created in the past. Many can afford large mansions but continue staying in the small apartments they owned even when they were not rich. They have a different mindset, which ordinary people miss to note.
Warren Buffet continued to stay in his hometown of Omaha while he could have moved to a plush penthouse in New York. Steve Jobs continued to wear the black turtleneck T-shirt and jeans till his death when he could have had the best fashion designers at his disposal. Sam Walton continued to drive a simple car though he was among the richest men in the United States of America. Narayana Murthy of Infosys and his wife Sudha Murthy continue to create jobs and distribute wealth the same way they did years ago. The simplicity of their lifestyle has not changed with the fortunes they have earned. The other founders of Infosys sport the same attitude and continue to work in fields they love.
If the owners of Tata group decide to convert their trust’s wealth into personal wealth, they would become the richest people on earth. Yet their commitment to social work and philanthropy continues with the same attitude with which they started over a century ago. They continue to build hospitals, factories, centres of research, along with countless new companies.
The Ford foundation still contributes to unknown areas of education and research. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates give away fortunes in charity and make donations in projects they love. Some rich people donate as individuals, while some donate through their companies and foundations. Yet they give as lavishly as they earn. A study of the lives and the mindset of rich people gives us insights into many such habits, usually not known to others. Once we understand their world, we too can create our world of richness—different, yet similar.
As we read and think about Chanakya, one needs to understand that the world has changed a lot from his days. The world we live in, the twenty-first century, is very different from the world of the fourth century BC.  So even the definition of being rich has changed.
During those days the wealth was concentrated with the kings and royal families. Then there could be a few merchants and traders. The occupations were limited and opportunities were few. For someone of the working classes to become rich, he had to fight against established systems of society. The rich and powerful saw this as a threat to their ‘blue blood’ status and would not let others rise. There were many limitations and becoming rich would often end up being just a dream that you would die with—an unfulfilled wish.
Yet all of us living in this generation are lucky. Anyone can become rich. In fact, all of us can become rich. Today wealth is not limited to a particular family or a group of people. You need not be qualified with only a specific set of skills to become rich.
 

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