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Tag: Excerpt

The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Cyrus Schayegh in ‘The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World’ traces how a Eurocentric world economy and European imperialism molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
“I dreamed I was in Jerusalem.” Thus start dozens of entries in the diary of Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator and intellectual born 1878 in Jerusalem, during his stay from the fall of 1907 to the summer of 1908 in New York City and Maine. By day he works in America; he barely makes ends meet, translating Arabic texts for a Columbia University professor, proofreading for a local Arabic journal, sweating in a paper mill. By night he crosses the ocean; he visits his extended family, including his best friend, Dawud Saidawi, other friends and neighbors. Particularly after Dawud’s death in January 1908 his longing is dark; his dreams often plummet into anxiety, horror even. And almost without fail the place that gives his dreams their shape is his hometown.
The family house is center stage. In April 1908 Sakakini dreams that “I entered the house and asked about my mother and was told she had died, then I asked about my brother Ya‘cub and was told he had died, then I asked about Shafiq and was told he had died and about Na’ifa and was told she had died, and I started to slap my face in despair, shouting oh mother, oh brother, oh Shafiq, oh Na’ifa.” Around the house twist and turn the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City. Soon after hearing of Dawud’s death Sakakini writes that “I was in Jerusalem, walking in the Christian Quarter, opposite our shop, . . . When I got to the steps of Dayr al-Rum, women descended in a procession ordered in rows, in the first row girls wrapped in a white shawl, but their cloths and headscarves black and their forearms bare, behind them four rows of elderly women, all of them drowning in black.” Beyond the Old City stretch new neighborhoods and buildings. Shortly before Dawud’ death, Sakakini dreams that  

I was walking from place to place looking for Dawud, on my way I met the teacher Ya‘qub Andria, then I suddenly met [Dawud] and anxiously greeted him and he greeted back. He carried a bolero on his shoulder and wore glasses. We walked together, I asked how he was and he answered me: like shit. We walked a bit further until we reached the train station and he said: hurry before the train leaves, and started to dance as fast as lightning and jumped onto one of the roofless wagons and before I got to [it] the train moved, tearing through the land with tremendous speed and I almost succeeded in jumping on the wagon but could not and I waved at him and bode him farewell and told him wait for me at the next train.

There is no way to ascertain one true interpretation of these dreams, a fact compounded by our inability to tell Sakakini’s dreams from his accounts thereof. Take the last dream. At its start, is Sakakini walking through a vague dream-world- Jerusalem or is he in particular places but does not care telling? And why does he meet the teacher just before seeing Dawud? We cannot know. Besides, are not these Dreams unexceptional, timeless even, and hence useless to the historian?
Not quite. Sakakini’s dream accounts are part of diary entries; in return, these form part of a larger range of texts like letters; hence they have contexts and in this sense are open to interpretation. Many letters are for Sultana—a neighbor’s daughter, beautiful, and an educator and Greek Orthodox like him—with whom Sakakini fell madly in love the summer of his departure. They are always emotive and often come with more than one tear. (Sultana is more down-to- earth: “What’s this, Khalil?! Do not make crying all-consuming business!”) And in these letters as in Sakakini’s dreams, Jerusalem is the arena. At its center is, again, the family’s house. In the last letter that Sakakini gives Sultana before leaving, he implores her “remember me when you visit the house, stand in your window that overlooks our house and say ‘peace be upon you, oh Khalil.’” And beyond the house extend, again, the city and its environs. Sakakini asks Sultana “to visit as often as you can our beloved rock” in the Shaikh Jarrah neighborhood, and recalls the day “we . . . with my sister Milia walked on the road of the Mount of Olives and I felt like gaily striding on the peak of my happiness.”
Was the geography of Jerusalem that of Sakakini’s longing, then? Put awkwardly, was “the local” all that mattered to the emotions of somebody who crossed an ocean and “went global,” as it were?
Yes and no. “The local” was key to Sakakini’s emotions; it grounded them. But just like the “real” Jerusalem of bricks and stones started spilling beyond its old walls by the mid-nineteenth century, the Jerusalem of Sakakini’s dreams and love was not walled in. It was not simply local.
And the way it was not simply local was neither indistinguishably commonplace nor sakakinesquely idiosyncratic, but specific enough to tell us a thing or two about the time and place the writer lived in.
By the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Jerusalem started interacting with the world in ways both new and transformative. (Outside worlds had of course been present in this city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia.) While the center of the Ottoman Empire—Istanbul— was not very present in its provinces from the late 1600s, from the mid-nineteenth century a new era of state formation bound center and provinces closer together. European powers, too, became more active. Interacting with these changes, Jerusalem’s ties with its rural surroundings grew stronger. All these changes found reflection in Sakakini’s Jerusalem, including that of his dreams. He may have dreamed of Dawud racing away on a train not simply because he was afraid to lose him but because Dawud—his very best friend—had moved from Jerusalem to Jaffa. From here, a French company had built a railway to Jerusalem in 1892. And it was here that Sakakini met Dawud for the last time, as it was in this port city that he commenced his maritime journey to America.

Marvellous Thieves, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Paulo Lomas Horta in ‘Marvellous Thieves’ introduces the poets, scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made unacknowledged contributions to Arabian Nights.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
On March 25, 1709, a visit by Antoine Galland to the Paris apartment of his friend Paul Lucas yielded a discovery that would shape the literary legacy of the first French translator of the Thousand and One
Nights. Lucas, a collector of treasures for the court of Louis XIV, was well known for his travels in the Middle East, and his apartment was recognized as one of the marvels of the French capital. Listed in early eighteenth- century guidebooks as a place to view antiquities and other rare objects from Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor, it drew scholars, collectors, and curiosity seekers of all kinds. Over the course of his journeys in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire, Lucas had amassed enough medallions, coins, engraved stones, and gems to fill six rooms.
The herbier in his apartment contained some 3,000 varieties of plants taken from foreign locations, and the droguier was equally impressive. One visitor to the apartment in the 1730s described a remarkable sculpture of the goddess Ceres that Lucas had acquired in Athens forty years earlier. Ten feet tall, the figure was made of Oriental jasper and plated with bronze, and in Paris she enjoyed the company of many other bronzes from Greece, Macedonia, and the Levant, as well as two Persian sculptures of nude sages at prayer. Among such historically valuable pieces, stranger artifacts were scattered: petrified mushrooms, seahorses, and mummified birds encased in bronze.
Arriving at this cabinet of curiosities in 1709, Galland found an even greater treasure awaiting him: a young Maronite traveller from Aleppo by the name of Hanna Diyab who, he reported, “[knew] some very beautiful Arabic tales.” While Lucas may have viewed Diyab as just another Oriental curiosity to be displayed at the French court, Galland saw in him a solution to a frustrating predicament. After translating all the stories in his incomplete Arabic manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights, Galland was in need of more, and he had now found a storyteller who could fill the gap. In a sequence of twelve meetings between May 5 and June 2, 1709, Diyab related sixteen fantastic stories to Galland, who chose to add ten of these to the final three volumes of his French version of the Arabian Nights. Th ese storytelling sessions were the origin of some of the most famous of the Arabian Nights tales— including “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peri- Banu”— and represent a lasting contribution to a story collection that has taken its place in the canons of world literature.
It was not the first time that Galland had benefitted from the curiosities collected by Lucas. Despite his lack of respect for Lucas’s abilities as a scholar, Galland found his collection of coins very useful in his own numismatic research, and he tried to gain access to lists or drawings of these from common acquaintances when his younger colleague was unwilling to share. Just as Galland borrowed coins to add entries to his numismatic dictionary, he would borrow Diyab to add stories to his version of the Arabian Nights. Considering his impact on the first French edition of the Arabic story collection, the Syrian storyteller could be judged the most valuable curiosity Lucas ever brought back from the Levant.
Since the publication of Les mille et une nuits, Galland’s French version of the Arabian Nights, in twelve volumes from 1704 to 1717, Galland has been credited as the first “author” of the collection in European letters, and as a crucial contributor to the emergence of the “Oriental tale” in French. Not only did he translate the 282 nights of stories in his Arabic manuscript in elegant Parisian prose, but he is credited with making a more substantial contribution to the story collection by lovingly adopting and adapting the tales that he heard from Diyab in 1709.
These stories, called the “orphan tales” because (with one exception) they have no known Arabic manuscript source, are seen as central to Galland’s achievement as a translator of the Arabian Nights. In this portion of his story collection, Galland’s work was no longer simply translation or adaptation; it represented “creation.”
Jean- Paul Sermain, one of the editors of the most recent edition of Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (2004), states the case most persuasively. He argues that Galland, working from his sparse notes on Diyab’s oral per for mances, created tales of ordinary characters caught up in extraordinary predicaments. Drawing on French literary conventions, he invented dialogues and descriptions and gave narrative coherence to the tales. Characters were developed with more sympathy, and moral lessons were highlighted. In the hands of Galland, the orphan tales of Diyab spoke of the superiority of the hero of humble origins and the need to behave decently in difficult circumstances. To fill out his meager notes, the French translator drew on his scholarly knowledge and his own travels of the Orient to imagine the fabulous details of voyages, palaces, and magical objects. Sermain argues that these orphan
tales teach the reader how to read the Arabian Nights as a whole. In the space between the French fairy tale and the Arabic story cycle, Galland seemed to fashion a new genre— that of the “Oriental tale.”

Shobhaa De talks about risks and her pretty exhilarating life, An Excerpt

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Shobhaa De’s writing exudes an empathy that has turned several of her books into life manuals for generations of Indians. Her keen wit spears and spares none, least of all herself.  Her book ‘Seventy and to hell with it’, she says is a gift to herself for entering into the seventh decade of life.
Here’s an excerpt from the book where she talks about risks and her experiences with them.
Here I am, looking back on seven decades of a life that has been pretty exhilarating. Yes, of course I have messed up. But even those mess-ups have taught me vital lessons—in survival, coping, collapsing, undoing, rejoicing. Most of these lessons have come from allowing myself to be open to everything life is throwing my way—good stuff, bad stuff, indifferent stuff. This is what I frequently tell my children when they are despairing. If you remain yourself and stay receptive to what’s happening around you, you will pickup signals that will provide most of the answers you seek.
Perhaps not instantly, but the answers will come.
When I was a teenager, I used to take every aspect of my life for granted, without questioning what was going on around me. In a way, this attitude protected me and spurred me on to take crazy chances, often with my life. I thought nothing of jumping in and out of rapidly moving local trains which I took to and from school. Of course, I was showing off my daredevilry, since there was always a crowd at Churchgate station. But those adrenaline-fuelled seconds when I tried to
make it inside the compartment without losing my footing gave me such a rush it made that lunatic risk very attractive. Today, I can ask myself, ‘What on earth were you thinking? Or proving?’ I still don’t have an answer that satisfies me. Perhaps I was testing myself. All I know is, danger and dangerous situations still attract me. I have never opted for ‘safe’ when there was ‘risky’ staring at me. It’s a personality trait, or a character flaw. God knows. Show me two scenarios, one that is controlled and the other that’s insane, and I’ll instinctively opt for the latter. This worries my husband and children, but deep within, even I know half of this is nothing more than posturing. Confronting fear is just a part of it.
I am in the process of identifying my biggest fears as I key this in. What do most human beings fear the most? I’d say it is loss. Loss of a loved one, loss of face, loss of security, loss of health, loss of identity, loss of mental and physical faculties. Loss of one’s own life. From this abbreviated list, I would say, for a wife and mother, there can be no greater loss than the loss of a child and spouse. Nothing prepares you for it. Nothing can. Sages advise us to start gearing ourselves up for such an eventuality from the time marriage vows are taken to that dreaded moment you are forced to come face-to-face with tragedy. Meditate, they tell you. Pray. Ask God to provide succour. Does any of this help you to deal with a wound that can never be healed? I don’t know. I hope I am never tested. But it is this fear of losing a beloved that is at the root of all other fears. As a child, you fear losing your parents. As a grown-up, you fear losing your child. Conquering this fundamental fear is what drives us to face other fears.
When I think of all those reckless stunts I performed in school and college (most of which were unknown to my trusting parents), did I stop to think what the repercussions would have been on so many lives had something terrible happened to me as I hung out of a fast train, tempting fate
every second day? I continued to ride racing bikes down crowded roads, clinging on to the handle of a public transport bus for additional speed. I crashed cars that didn’t belong to me when I was grossly underage, after persuading the children of the owners to steal the car keys. I lied about my adventures in local trains (ticketless travel being the more innocent one) to my mother, who believed I was at a school picnic when I was actually bunking school and loitering on distant beaches. What if any of these silly jaunts had backfired? Point is, they didn’t. I was fortunate.
Risk-taking is something I enjoy immensely. It comes naturally to me. I like stepping into the unknown and seeing where those steps take me. This is true whether it involves love and romance in my youth or professional choices later in life. My decisions were mainly impetuous (‘immature’ is how my father described them) and spontaneous. Where did this behaviour pattern come from? Certainly not from my home environment, which was conservative, conformist and solidly, comfortingly middle class. I appreciated anarchy and chaos far more than control and comfort. This troubled my parents a great deal, and I must have given them countless sleepless nights during those restless years when I couldn’t wait to get out into the big, wicked world, the one beyond my traditional Maharashtrian home, and taste the myriad exotic flavours waiting to consume me, in Turkey, Brazil, Japan, just about anywhere. But where was I stuck? At home!

Three Exhausting Weeks, An Excerpt from ‘Uncommon Type’

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‘Uncommon Type’ marks the debut as a writer of the award-winning actor Tom Hanks. This delightful collection of seventeen short stories dissects with great affection, humour and insight, the human condition and all its foibles. 
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash— the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater. Before HBO, Netflix, and the 107 other entertainment outlets bankrupted the Lux, I sat for many hours in that once- splendid cinema palace and watched movies. Now it’s stall after stall of what passes for antiques. Anna and I looked into every one of them.
MDash was about to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, which was as big a deal for us as it was for him. Steve Wong’s grandparents were naturalized in the forties. My dad had escaped the low- grade thugs that were East European Communists in the 1970s, and, way back when, Anna’s ancestors rowed boats across the North Atlantic, seeking to pillage whatever was pillage-able in the New World. The Anna family legend is that they found Martha’s Vineyard.
Mohammed Dayax- Abdo was soon to be as American as Abdo Pie, so we wanted to get him something vintage, an objet d’patriotic that would carry the heritage and humor of his new country. I thought the old Radio Flyer wagon in the second warehouse stall was perfect. “When he has American kids, he’ll pass that wagon on to them,” I said.
But Anna was not about to purchase the first antique we came across. So we kept on hunting. I bought a forty- eight-star American flag, from the 1940s. The flag would remind MDash that his adoptive nation is never finished building itself— that good citizens have a place somewhere in her fruited plain just as more stars can fi t in the blue field above those red and white stripes. Anna approved, but kept searching, seeking a present that would be far more special. She wanted unique, nothing less than one of a kind. After three hours, she decided the Radio Flyer was a good idea after all.
Rain started falling just as we were pulling out of the parking lot in my VW Bus. We had to drive slowly back to my house because my wiper blades are so old they left streaks on the windshield. The storm went on well into the evening, so rather than drive home, Anna hung around, played my mother’s old mixtapes (which I’d converted to CDs), cracking up over Mom’s eclectic taste, in the segues from the Pretenders to the O’Jays to Taj Mahal.
When Iggy Pop’s “Real Wild Child” came on, she asked, “Do you have any music from the last twenty years?”
I made pulled- pork burritos. She drank wine. I drank beer. She started a fire in my Franklin stove, saying she felt like a pioneer woman on the prairie. We sat on my couch as night fell, the only lights being the fire and the audio levels on my sound system bounding from green to orange and, occasionally, red. Distant sheet lightning fl ashed in the storm miles and miles away.
“You know what?” she said to me. “It’s Sunday.”
“I do know that,” I told her. “I live in the moment.”
“I admire that about you. Smart. Caring. Easygoing to the point of sloth.”
“You’ve gone from compliments to insults.”
“Change sloth to languorousness,” she said, sipping wine.
“Point is I like you.”
“I like you, too.” I wondered if this conversation was going someplace. “Are you flirting with me?”
“No,” Anna said. “I’m propositioning you. Totally different thing. Flirting is fishing. Maybe you hook up, maybe you don’t. Propositioning is the first step in closing a deal.”
Understand that Anna and I have known each other since high school (St. Anthony Country Day! Go, Crusaders!). We didn’t date, but hung out in the same crowd, and liked each other. After a few years of college, and a few more of taking care of my mom, I got my license and pretended to make a living in real estate for a while. One day she walked into my office because she needed to rent a space for her graphics business and I was the only agent she could trust because I once dated a friend of hers and was not a jerk when we broke up.
Anna was still very pretty. She never lost her lean, rope-taut body of a triathlete, which, in fact, she had been. For a day, I showed her some available spaces, none of which she wanted for reasons that made little sense to me.

‘We That Are Young’, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Preti Taneja in ‘We That Are Young’ recasts ‘King Lear’ in fresh, eviscerating prose that bursts with energy and fierce, beautifully measured rage. The novel revolves around Devraj, founder of India’s most important company, who on retiring demands daughterly love in exchange for shares.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
It’s not about land, it’s about money. He whispers his mantra as the world drops away, swinging like a pendulum around the plane. The glittering ribbon of the Thames, the official stamps of the Royal parks, a bald white dome spiked with a yellow crown, are swallowed by summer’s deep twilight. The plane lifts, the clouds quilt beneath it, tucking England into bed to dream of better times. It is still yesterday, according to his watch. He winds the dial forwards. Now it is tomorrow, only eight hours to go.
He’s landed the window seat with the broken touchscreen: it’s either in-flight information or Slumdog Millionaire, the last movie he ever took Ma to. They went on release weekend. The entire line of people had been brown so for once Ma didn’t hunch in his shadow as if his jeans and camel coat would protect her, explain her. Instead they had the same old fight about Iris, and as he bought toffee popcorn she began to sniff: she said she was catching a chill. She kept up the sniffing as the credits rolled over the entire cast line-dancing on the set of an Indian train station. When they got outside he thought she’d been crying. He put his arms around her: her head was the perfect place for his chin to rest. He asked her if she liked the movie, she said she didn’t at all. It was not real India, except for the songs.
It’s been a long haul from JFK to the LHR stopover. He’s half shot with the comfort of Johnnie Walker, knows it’s not the best but he appreciates the label. It feels bespoke to him, like a child in a gift shop who finds a mug with his own name on it. No gift shop in America has a JIVAN mug so he borrowed JON, and that’s been it since he did this trip the other way. Thirteen-years-old: sold on leaving India by the promise of his first time in the air.
Forward, forward, he wills the plane, drumming his hands on his tray-table, earning himself a sideways glance from the woman wedged into the seat next to him. She’s using her iPhone (4) to photograph the back page of the in-flight magazine: Ambika Gupta: offering you the miracle of advanced Numerology: a digit for your future. She pokes the man on her other side: Sardarji in a blue turban, matching jersey stretched over his belly, stitched with a white Number 5. Dude looks like he’s birthing quintuplets under there. She smiles at him, sits back in her seat. There are thin red lines traced all over her hands in fading bridal henna as if she’s been turned inside out, painful, beautiful, the pattern of her is all paisleys. Her ring is a platinum band with a square cut white diamond and her bag is Longchamp like all the pretty-pretty girls have; navy waterproof with brown leather trim, but small, the cheapest. Don’t you know, pretty girl, that no bag is better than trying too hard? She’s flicking through the magazine: ads for Marc Jacobs, Charlize Theron, flicks to the gadgets, flicks to the movies, clink-chimeclink go the red glass bangles stacked up her wrists.
It sounds like the overture to Ma’s practice music. Played for her to dance Kathak, with precision, while Jivan kept time. Fist thumping into palm, Dha-din-din-dha. His memories are coloured by her last months – Ma, fading from brown to yellow, a bruise that would not heal against the hospital white. Dha-din-din-dha became her fingers beating lightly on his temples – blurring into the rattle of her breath towards the end – the background hum of the plane’s engine in his ears. They are cruising high over the mountains of who knows where.
He pulls out his own magazine. The cover is a cartoon illustration – a tiny brown body topped with an oversized head. Under a halo of white hair, two puffed cheeks blow out candles on a vast birthday cake the shape of an udder. India, sprouting with the turrets of heritage hotels, factory chimneys. Cars race off its surface, bolts of cloth unfurl, tigers hunt goats through spurting oil rigs. The orange headline shouts: Happy 75th Birthday Devraj Bapuji! The spotlight falls on the wily old face. This man, on this cover, on this flight – this is what Ma would have called a sign.

Forever is True: Prologue

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It has been six months since Prisha was pushed to death by the person she loved the most, Saveer. Novoneel Chakraborty is back with a riveting finale to his bestseller ‘Forever is a lie’.
Here’s an excerpt from the prologue of the book.
Fortis Hospital, Bengaluru
Private cabin, 10.35 p.m.
‘I’m sorry, Prisha, but I had no other option,’ the person said, standing close to the hospital bed on
which Prisha was lying with her eyes closed. Beneath a blanket that covered her till her bosom, she was wearing a sky-blue patient’s uniform. Her forehead was freshly bandaged. Her right hand, with a drip, was placed on her belly while the left one was by her side, a pulse-monitoring clip attached to the index finger. There was a saline water stand beside the bed. Her left leg was plastered and her face bruised. It was quiet except for the occasional beeping of the monitor that was keeping a track of her heartbeats. The room was bathed in an eerie green-coloured light.
‘Just like I had no other option with Ishanvi. She was a good girl. So were you. But you both fell for the wrong person, bad person. And sometimes, even when you aren’t at fault, life still holds you guilty and makes you pay for it. But how do you atone for something you haven’t done?’ Silence. The person grasped Prisha’s left hand. It was cold.
‘Not that I expected you to be alive but now I can at least talk to you, unlike Ishanvi.’
After a deep sigh, the person added, ‘I had tried warning you like I had tried warning Ishanvi but neither of you paid heed. Why? You were in love. Love! I hate that emotion because it is the most customizable emotion a human can feel. Its definition changes the way one thinks. Its syntax changes the way one feels. It is not like sadness or happiness. It is not absolute. Though we think it is. I hate it. In fact, hate is a soft word. I abhor love, loathe it. If you had been in your senses, I’m sure you would have asked what makes me so anti love. Well, it is a long story but I carry the moral in my heart every day. And will do so till I turn into ashes.’
There was silence. The person caressed Prisha’s forehead.
‘Unfortunately, nobody will ever know my story. But that doesn’t bother me. The only thing that bothers me is that the person who mattered the most to me will also never get to hear my story. You tell me, Prisha, is it fair to live someone else’s story all your life? But . . .’ The person leaned close to her left ear and whispered, ‘If you can listen, then listen well. Chances are you will die soon on this bed. But in case you survive, don’t push me into killing you again. Next time, there won’t be any passerby to bring you to any hospital on time. One last request: don’t test me for I’ve been killing people for a long time now. You are my only failure. And failing is something which doesn’t go down well with me.’ After staring at Prisha for a while, the person said, ‘May your soul rest in peace, Prisha. Next life, choose someone better. Choose someone who’s worth it.’
The person stopped caressing her forehead and tiptoed out of the room. Prisha had opened her eyes by then. She had been in her senses throughout. Or was she? She didn’t see the person’s face but she did feel the person’s touch. Contrary to the person’s words, the touch wasn’t threatening. The last statement had made her hair stand on its end.
This was the first time Saveer had visited her in the hospital since she had regained consciousness. Why would he want to kill her? she wondered. Or for that matter Ishanvi?
These, however, were the least of her concerns at that moment. There was something she noticed that was extremely disturbing. Prisha saw the person leaving the room. But in a woman’s attire.
What’s wrong with Saveer? she wondered. Then she thought to herself: was she hallucinating because of the heavy sedatives she had been taking for some time now? Prisha couldn’t tell. She dozed off.

The Naked Blogger of Cairo, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Marwan M. Kraidy in ‘The Naked Blogger of Cairo’ uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings that took place in the Arab world from 2010 to 2012. Fueled by a desire of sovereignty, protestors flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
The Naked Blogger of Cairo taps the human body as an organizing principle to understand creative insurgency. Th e body was a common thread in the massive trove of images and jo, essays and songs, videos and conversations I gathered while living in the Arab world between June 2011 and August 2012, during shorter research trips to Amsterdam, Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Copenhagen, and Istanbul, and in protracted expeditions on the Internet. Bodies, burning with anger and defiance, throbbing with pain and hope, brazenly violating social taboos and political red lines, haunted my primary materials. A stencil graffiti to I photographed in November 2011 in Zamalek, an affluent Cairo neighborhood, features a television set with a headshot of a Pinocchio with a nose so overgrown it bursts through the screen. Here was a brief, compelling message that television is a liar, based on the body’s ability to betray falsity. It echoed fists, hands, and fingers in graffiti of the Syrian revolution I tracked in Beirut. Watching satirical videos, I wondered whom they skewered most: Was it Ben Ali, trapped on an airplane and unable to land in the jocular Journal du Zaba? Or Assad, downsized to a pathetic finger puppet in Top Goon— Diaries of a Little Dictator? Or maybe Mubarak, diminished by the splendid Laughing Cow trope to dumb, regurgitating cattle? Spectacular body acts that underlay pivotal events of the Arab uprisings take center stage in this book: Mohamed Bouazizi, the Burning Man of Tunisia; Aliaa al- Mahdy, the Naked Blogger of Cairo; Assala, the Rebellious Singer of Damascus. Regimes responded with body mutilation: hand breaking, eye sniping, virginity testing, as street art commemorated heroic bodies of martyrs pitted against repressive bodies of despots.
Why is the body fundamental to the Arab uprisings?
History tells us that corporeal metaphor is central to political power: from before Louis XIV to after Bashar al- Assad, the sovereign’s figure is the body of the realm. Writing in Baghdad and Damascus during the tenth century, the Islamic Golden Age philosopher and translator Abu Nasr alFarabi cast the ideal polity as a healthy body, and he described in The Perfect State different parts of the state as limbs, ruled by a commanding organ, the heart, that unifies their efforts toward achieving the contentment of the community. In The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, the German- American historian Ernst Kantorowicz traced a concept of “body politic” that envisions a kingdom as a human body, the king as its head and his subjects as organs and limbs. Developing fully in Elizabethan England, this notion recurred for centuries in European political thought and popular culture, from Rousseau’s essays to Shakespeare’s plays, and became influential in France in the sixteenth century. During the French Revolution, corporeal symbolism focused on separating the king’s biological body natural from his symbolic body politic.
In medieval Europe, God was considered the greatest good, and from him the body politic flowed as a unified organism. In contrast, in the months beginning with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation on December 17, 2010, the three Arab countries that we are most concerned with— Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia— were thoroughly secular autocracies. In all three, political leaders subjected clerics to their dominion and manipulated religion for political ends, but none of them derived his power from the divine, ruled in the name of God, or based foreign policy on religious grounds. Whereas in thirteenth- century Eu rope the body politic belonged to the sacred, in early twenty-first-century Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia the body politic was resolutely worldly. Body imagery is important to modern, secular absolutism, with its image of “the omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent” leader who “defies the laws of nature by his super- male energy.” As you read The Naked Blogger of Cairo, you will encounter the same language in encomia to Assad, Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Sisi. Creative insurgencies against these rulers subvert the imagery propagated by cults centered on the leader’s figure. The body is as foundational to the fall of dictators as it is essential to their rise. Over time, the notion of the body politic evolved to balance hierarchy with interdependence, leading to political pacts that preserved stability but, if broken, invited rebellion. By confirming “the irreplaceable and irreducible moral dignity and spiritual worth of individual man” and insisting that the king was an integral part of the body politic, not standing above it, the medieval notion succumbed to ideological manipulation by politicians leading the rise of new secular states. Emerging lay conceptions of the body politic pilfered at will from Christian theology, Roman law, and canon law, diluting monarchical power. By the late 1300s, bodily metaphor was moving away from the absolute concentration of power in the body of the king, as a conception of a “composite” body of authority including courts, councils, or parliaments gained ground. In the notion of distributive justice that arose to balance these different constituents, one can hear echoes, however faint, of bread- for- stability social contracts that since the 1950s have propped up Arab dictatorships. Because these bargains were fickle, bread riots occurred frequently. Since the 1980s, a combination of economic liberalization, political predation, and rising food staple prices has stretched the bargain to a breaking point.

What Health Risks Will You Be Taking on Your Trip to Mars

Posted on by Penguin India

In ‘Science(ish)’, Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks dwell on all the questions that your favourite sci-fi movies provoke. Inspired by their award-winning podcast, this popular science book dedicates each chapter to a different sci-fi classic, and wittily explores the fascinating issues that arise.
Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on the movie ‘The Martian’ which chalks out the health risk that come with a trip to Mars.
Even real astronauts, who are selected and trained to be as mission-focused as possible, can behave badly under the pressures of life in space. In 1973, some of the astronauts on the Skylab space station went on strike for a day because they felt they were being overworked. Then there was the case of the silent cosmonauts: in 1982, two of them went almost seven months on Salyut 7 without talking. Why? They didn’t like each other. If you want to know the other health risks you’ll be taking on your trip to Mars, we’ve compiled a handy list:
Space flu
Your body did not evolve to cope with microgravity. Your heart is designed to pump against gravity, so on the way to Mars, blood and other fluids will accumulate more in your upper body. The result will be a puffy face, headaches, nasal congestion (in space, everyone will hear you sniff) and skinny little chicken legs. Your diaphragm will float upwards too, making it a little more difficult to breathe. Your back will ache because your vertebrae will float apart without gravity. (On the plus side, you could grow a couple of inches in height.)
Muscle loss
You’ll lose muscle mass because you just don’t need to work as hard in microgravity. That means fewer calories are being burned, though. It’s lucky the food is going to be so terrible, because if you don’t exercise whenever possible, you are going to go to seed. And nobody wants a fat, smelly Martian.
B.O.
Yes, you will smell. Washing is difficult in space. Not only because a shower is surprisingly gravity-dependent, but because water is a precious resource.
Nausea
That shift of fluids affects the inner ear, making you nauseous in the first few days. You’re very likely to be spacesick. Just under half of all astronauts are, and they’ve all been chosen because they’ve got the ‘right stuff’. So be prepared to vomit, suffer headaches and dizziness, and generally want to lie down. Except there is no down. Which, as it happens, will also add to your general confusion and disorientation.
Insomnia
Your sleep patterns are going to change radically. It’s often noisy on a spacecraft, and you’ll struggle to fall asleep. Your daily sleep/wake cycles are toast, because there is no pattern of darkness and light to give your body the necessary cues. Fatigue is going to hit you like a late-running train. As well as leaving you tired, disoriented and fuzzy-brained, the lack of sleep will also affect your immune system. You’re going to catch colds and other viral infections if fellow astronauts are carrying any, and you’ll succumb more easily to bacterial infection. Antivirals and antibiotics degrade after a few months, so you’ll be mixing your own medicines from dry ingredients. If you’re awake enough.
Bone loss
Eventually, you’ll suffer bone loss equivalent to a pensioner, because in microgravity astronauts excrete calcium and phosphorus. That means your bones will fracture more easily, and you might have to pass stones through your urinary tract.
Psychosis
Psychological effects of the journey include depression, anxiety, insomnia (ha! and you’re already so tired!) and, in extreme cases, psychosis.
Malformed cells
Oh and your cells, especially your blood cells, may not grow and function properly in the long term, because the lack of gravity will change their shape. We don’t yet know what the effects of this will be, but come on – it’s unlikely to be good.

The Birth of Prithviraj Chauhan, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Prithviraj Chauhan was destiny’s chosen one, singled out for glory and greatness. Anuja Chandramouli is back with an endearing tale of the legendary warrior who lives on in the hearts of those who remember his unmatched valour and timeless heroism.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
The queen tossed and turned; her sweat-streaked body caused the soft sheets to cling to her contours as she stifled a scream that fought to burst from her lips. A good girl must be seen not heard, she had been taught since childhood.
Silently she pleaded with she knew not whom, begging to escape the terror that was engulfing her. When that failed, she tried to wake up. Her efforts were entirely futile. No matter how much she tried, a force she could not withstand tore her apart, dragging her along the serpentine alleys of her simmering subconscious.
Propelled along a rocky slope, she felt the flesh scraped off her delicate feet, which were decorated with intricate henna patterns, leaving them battered and bloodied. Dragged along sandy plains, under a blazing sun, her skin, softened with milk and honey, caught fire. She wrapped her burning arms protectively around her tender belly and snarled savagely at the elements.
Then she was swimming against the currents of a raging river as predators with serrated teeth and spiked tails pursued her ruthlessly. The wind snatched her from their jaws as they were about to swallow her and lifted her high up in the air. Shrieking its terrible intent into her ears, it ripped off her garments before releasing her in endless space.
As she plunged into the depths below, she could not hold back the primeval screams of agony from bursting out in a shrill cacophony. Then she was falling through emptiness, plummeting towards certain death. Shutting her eyes tight, her arms flailing, she forced her leaden legs to move, desperate to arrest her fall.
Then with a suddenness that made her dizzy, everything went still. Holding her swollen belly in her arms, she opened her eyes. She was standing at the threshold of a stone temple. Before her, was an altar where a smokeless fire was burning. Vigorous and strong, it was brighter than her eyes could bear.
Shining with divine vehemence, it beckoned her forward. Helpless in front of the hypnotic pull of those ancient flames, she stood before it, so close that the heat scoured her clean even as her heart grew hot. And yet, she could not draw back.
Enraptured, she stared into its depths. She watched the mesmerizing dance of the flames as they swayed in discord to the crackling cadence of the age-old rhythms, orchestrated by the divine father out of his deep love for the sacred mother. The sky and the earth—always together; forever apart.
Tears sprang into her eyes and she clasped her hands in prayer as the earth mother addressed her throbbing heart.
What is it that you would know of me?
‘Tell me of the child I bear in my womb.’
A mother always knows. A mother must.
‘My boy will be the greatest of kings. A mighty warrior. A lion among men and as such will be entitled to the king’s share of success, prosperity and happiness. He will shine with the brilliance of a thousand suns. His name will live forever.’
So it shall be. The flame in his soul is destined to burn for as long as his lion’s heart can bear it. Blessed as he is with the tejas of the divine, he will shine brightest when he makes the ascent to the pinnacle of glory, just before his swift descent to darkness and the depths of abject failure. For so it must be.
‘Never! I will never allow such fate to befall my son.’
A mother is a fool! He was never yours alone. And never will be. Prepare yourself for the reign of the king of the earth. For fame and fortune, love and death, glory and grief!
The flames rose higher and higher, oblivious to the mother who wailed in misery. Blinded by the all-encompassing radiance, magnified by the strength of her tears, she was ill-prepared for the darkness that descended without warning, snuffing out every trace of the sacred fire.
The silence was broken only by infernal howls of abject sorrow—a mother’s terrible lament—amid the hushed murmur of a premonition, repeated over and over.
Prithviraj! Prithviraj! Prithviraj! King of the earth!
All around there was nothing but darkness. And the memory of light.

“An entire year without school! What more could an eight-year-old boy ask for?”: ‘Looking for the Rainbow’ — An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Ruskin Bond ran away from his prison-like boarding school in the hills to go and live with his father in Delhi. In ‘Looking for the Rainbows’, Ruskin Bond regales in his past and revisits the beautiful days he spent with his father going to the cinema, singing songs, reading books and taking long walks.
Here’s a short glimpse from ‘Looking for the Rainbow’, holding Ruskin’s hand and going back to where it all started.
An entire year without school! What more could an eight-year-old boy ask for? Not what his parents would ask for, certainly; but after serving a two-year sentence in a fun-less convent school in the hills, I was more than happy to take a long, enforced break from gloomy classrooms, smelly dormitories, an overcrowded playing field and a diet of cabbage soup and boiled meat.
That was the sort of school I’d escaped from— or rather, been plucked out of by my father in the middle of the summer term.
It was 1942, the middle of World War II, and my parents too had been at war with each other. They had, in fact, separated, and my mother was about to marry again. My father was serving in the Royal Air Force, and was living on his own in an Air Force hutment in New Delhi, working in the Codes and Cyphers section at Air Headquarters. I was particularly close to my father, and I insisted on going to live with him rather than to a new and unknown home.
My mother took me out of the hill school near her home in Dehradun and put me on the train to Delhi.
My father was on the station platform in Delhi, looking very smart in his RAF uniform. He hugged me, took me by the hand and led me to the station restaurant, where we had a healthy breakfast. Even a railway breakfast was better than the fare we had at school!
We were joined by my uncle Fred, who was then the station superintendent at the Old Delhi station. He had a bungalow nearby. But my father’s quarters, or hutments as they were called, were at the other end of Delhi, on Humayun Road, where the new capital of India had been created.
We must remember that up until then, Calcutta had been the capital of British-ruled India, and Simla, the summer capital. Now the capital was New Delhi, still very new and still coming up, and Simla, of course, was much nearer.
The hutment was a bit of a surprise. It consisted of two brick-walled rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. And it was in the middle of nowhere.
Humayun Road, in those far-off days, was simply a lane running through a scrub forest. It had been cleared in places so that these wartime hutments could come up. But there were more jackals than people in the area. And snakes too.
As Ruskin prepared to spend some of the most wonderful days of his life with his father in ‘Looking for the Rainbow’, let’s gear up for the next part in the enchanting series where Ruskin’s life is about to take a drastic turn! Pre-order your copy of ‘Till the Clouds Roll by’ today!

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