Skimming the Surface

[This review of Dreaming in Hindi, by Katherine Russell Rich, was published with some edits in the Deccan Herald]




Sometime in 2001, Katherine Russell Rich decided to learn a new language. In fact, she decided to leave New York, go to the country where it was spoken and do a year-long course there to learn it. The language was Hindi, and the country was India. This book is partly a chronicle of that one year in India, and partly an exploration of what it feels like to learn a new language.

The book runs on four tracks simultaneously: Her experiences in India; discussions on the Hindi language itself; her views on Indian culture, religion, and so on; and finally, the neurology of learning a language, as understood from several researchers in the domain.

Of these four tracks, the last one is the most successful. Rich’s core theory is that learning a new language changes the way the brain itself works, and probably shapes the way experiences are stored in the brain. She interviews several experts (all of them American) about the latest findings, and explains their theories. At one point she uses the various flavours of sign language – American, Indian, formally structured and informally developed – to explain how the cadence of a language influences communication itself. These are the most interesting parts of the book; these topics have not been covered enough in popular writing, and Rich has created a good overview of the field here. Moreover, the discussion often goes way beyond Hindi itself, into what learning any new language is like, so there is plenty of interest here for Hindi-speaking readers too.

Unfortunately, the other three topics covered by the book fall flat. These sections are written with a very specific reader in mind: a monolingual person who thinks of India as an exotic land of turbaned, old-world maharajas. Neither of these criteria matches the typical English-speaking Indian reader, who speaks at least two languages and thinks of maharajas as belonging to mythological serials on TV.
Rich’s year in India was spent almost entirely in Udaipur, which is described in loving detail, exoticized the way the tourists like it: She lives in havelis, walks past cows on the street, meets traditional housewives who never completed school. And yes, meets the requisite Maharanas. Udaipur, however, is not equivalent to India, and Mewari-accented Hindi is definitely not the only language spoken in the country. So sentences like these jar: "In India, time is circular, a perception that’s shaped by the concept of reincarnation… yesterday and tomorrow are the same word: kal. 'The day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow' are both parson... All the days in the spin are the same: aaj. In the west, in contrast, in English, time is linear..." What about the hundreds of other Indian languages with different words for "yesterday" and "tomorrow"?

At times, Rich attempts the near-impossible task of explaining India to the western reader from her Udaipur vantage point. When she opens up a newspaper, the paper invariably mentions some significant event, such as Godhra, or the Babri Masjid destruction and the resulting riots. A colleague’s idle comment is linked to the massacres on trains during partition. All these incidents are pithily explained away, blame squarely placed, history turned into bite-sized chunks, definitely not intended to give the complete, complex picture.

Then there’s the required quota of exotic-India words, stuffed in at the first possible opportunity: tigers and saffron and saris. In the first chapter of this book, Rich sees a hotel swimming pool, and describes it thus: "The pool was mango-shaped."

The overall form of the book causes a few problems as well. Because she’s using her experiences during her course as the springboard for the scientific theories, Rich needs to shoehorn in some incidents that roughly match the topics of the theories she plans to talk about. So random comments by acquaintances lead Rich to talk about the latest views on Chomsky’s papers, and an invitation to a deaf school leads to a discussion on the "spreading activation network theory". This sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. Also, since we know she did a specific course in India and then came back, there’s no ending or climax to build up. Rich ends her chapters with cliffhangers like "…and now I would be the next one to go down", which don’t really turn the book into a page-turner.

Rich winds up talking of too many things at once, and perhaps because of this, never really goes deep into any of them. The neuroscience sections are probably the only ones that feel authentic, and it would have been a good idea to have an Indian look through the culture sections for glaring errors (The definition of saala given actually means jija in Hindi – the problem probably happened because both words mean brother-in-law in English). But, as mentioned above, the book isn’t written for Indians at all. It is definitely not a guidebook to India, nor does it help in any way in learning Hindi. No, the book is about an American woman’s jaunt to an exotic country, and her subsequent interviews with researchers back home.

A fun thriller inspired by headlines

[This is the unedited version of a review published in the Deccan Herald]

Fun Thriller

[ Review of Blowback, by Mukul Deva]

Early on in Blowback, a mysterious tribal leader assembles all of the tribes fighting for jihad and outlines a radical plan to them. They listen, awestruck by the brutality and originality of the plan, and elect him as their leader. A few months later, the plan is put into action. You the reader wait to see what dastardly ideas the terrorists have. And it turns out that they’re... putting bombs in crowded places in Indian cities. Yes, it is brutal and effective, but your average Indian reader is bound to find this revelation a bit anti-climactic. We know this is happening today, and, due to the hard work of our investigative agencies, we also know some part of the planning. Reading about almost exactly the same thing in a thriller makes it seem like some sort of investigative journalism. Where are the devastating nuclear bombs, the almost-unbelievable terror plots, the top-secret biological weapons?

Once this bit of disappointment is digested, though, the book grows on you. After all, some of the terror attacks of recent times would have been unbelievable a few years back. Some of Frederick Forsyth’s writing doesn’t seem quite so comfortably imaginary any more. Deva’s writing could be looked at as something closer to real life, immediate, something really plausible and right-out-of-the-headlines. The writing style adds its impact – Deva’s big strength is the smoothness of his prose, crisp and fast-moving, and you never get distracted from the story by the writing. It all feels like a good piece of reportage rather than an action thriller.

In addition, the main protagonists are generally well drawn and plausible, if slightly larger-than-life. The different people in Force 22, the elite unit around which the events of this book (and Deva’s previous two books, Lashkar and Salim Must Die) revolve, feel well etched out, with their individual weaknesses, passions, and history, and some of them evolve through the book.

If the character development fails anywhere, it is in the bad guys. Without an exception, all are totally evil and monomaniacal – no trace of doubt and no understandable motivation for their viewpoints. You could substitute the low-level terrorist recruits with the tribal leader mentioned above with no difference to how the story would proceed. The best action thrillers take the time to show how the villains got where they are, and what the world looks like from their viewpoint – this book doesn’t.

Unfortunately, there are a few segments where the storytelling isn’t up to par. The ending takes on a Bollywoodish touch, with true love, maa-ki-mamta (mother’s love) and tragedy taking over the proceedings instead of the expected riveting action sequence, leaving a bit of an off-taste for the reader. Another weak segment is a several-page-long discussion between senior Indian officials and the Prime Minister about the growth of terrorism. Deva uses this scene to list all of his ideas to solve the problem, one after the other, ending the sequence with the comment that things will now improve since the Prime Minister’s heard these ideas. Any smart editor would have cut this sequence, since it is nothing more than a tirade by the author.

Overall, the book succeeds at being a fast-paced, entertaining, genre thriller, in the vein of works by dozens of other western writers. Just like those other books, though, it also disappears from your head after you’re finished, leaving no real impact on you.

The Adventure of the Name-dropper

[The following review of Holmes of the Raj appeared, with some edits, in the Deccan Herald]


Holmes of the Raj, by Vithal Rajan

You have to say this about Vithal Rajan – he gets the language down pat. For anyone who’s been a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes, and can’t get enough of Doyle’s crisp narration, reading Holmes of the Raj will be nostalgic. The book consists of 6 stories of Sherlock Holmes, chronicling an extended visit to British-era India, narrated by the sturdy Dr. Watson, using very similar language to the original.

The language, however, is where the similarities end. It’s fun to read about Holmes travelling to all the popular spots in Raj-era India – Madras, Nainital, Calcutta – but, well, he doesn’t seem to be doing all that much. The core of the Holmes stories are always murders that are just not possible, incredible-sounding mysteries, and in general, puzzles that make us go “Ah!” once we understand the answers. Holmes doesn’t get into any such thing here. At most he’s traipsing through Central India looking for a tribal deity, figuring out a smuggling ring, or stumbling across Jack the Ripper while looking for something else. Where are the speckled bands, the dancing men, the curious incidents of dogs in the night-time? The stories here would have fit on Allan Quatermain or The Saint or maybe even Fleming’s James Bond – any heroic British character, in fact.

More than the locations, Rajan relies on references to real-life and fictional characters from the era to set in the book in the Raj. Unfortunately, there’s rather too many of these. There are no less than 64 entries in the appendix of Holmes of the Raj, most of them about the real-life people referenced in it. This doesn’t include the dozen or so fictional characters referenced. Considering that the book is 260 pages long, that comes to about one reference every three pages. And these references go all over: Dhyan Chand, Motilal Nehru, Ronald Ross, Kim, Clark Gable, Madam Blavatsky, even Balraj and Parikshit Sahni. It’s as if Rajan was attempting to stuff in as many names as he could think of. And there’s no subtlety about it, each character is named and described and given his dialogues, so you never have to make any effort to spot them, which is no fun.

In addition, Holmes and Watson sometimes seem like the aliens from 2001: A Space Odyssey, teaching the natives all sorts of things that they couldn’t have thought of themselves – how malaria is actually spread, how to bowl the doosra, how Rabindranath Tagore should begin his famous poem. More focus on the mysteries themselves, and less on all these clever hints about India, would have made it worthwhile.

To his credit, Rajan has done a lot of reading on the topic. His descriptions of the railway systems, of the British dwellings of the day, and so on are meticulous and detailed, and the stories use these things as integral elements. The characters making cameo appearances often expound upon their points of view about British Rule and India, and assuming these are historically correct, the book serves as an interesting reference about who said what. And, as mentioned before, the language is very close to Doyle’s language.

But it takes a special kind of writer to create convoluted murder mysteries – to imagine strange circumstances, to think up clues and red herrings, to model the murderer’s and the detective’s mind, and Rajan simply does not belong to that class.

Read this book as an interesting journey through the Raj as narrated by a familiar voice, but not as a series of detective stories.

Anarchist's Agenda

[An edited version of this article appeared in the Deccan Herald on the 14th of February.]

Anarchist’s Agenda

(Review of The Diary Of An Unreasonable Man, by Madhav Mathur)

There’s a certain kind of urban, salaried young man who will instantly understand Madhav Mathur’s message in this book. The man who’s working a white-collar job, finding that the moral compromises he makes in the course of work weren’t on any syllabus in college. Who is beginning to get tired of the rat race for the new car, the new flat and whatever else everyone else wants.

For this reader, Mathur offers a thought-experiment: What if you stopped being part of the system, and instead decided to take on the people taking advantage of it? And what’s more, what if you actually went through with all those vaguely imagined pranks you’ve always thought would serve the villains right? And what if all those prankish plans executed perfectly, and people understood what you were trying to say and made you a folk hero?

The story stars Pranav Kumar, an advertising executive, whose normal state of mind is ‘sickened by hypocrisy’. After several years of working at writing advertising copy, he finally confesses to his boss that he can’t keep doing this job. Advertisers, he says, are the root of all the materialistic rot in society: “We’re building wants. We’re making an entire generation adopt cellphones and motorbikes as their goals. We’re to blame for discontentment. If we don’t get them through television, we always have papers, magazines, and billboards…”

Pranav quits his job and, together with two friends, decides to shock people into realizing the mess that society is in. The story chronicles all their “prove-the-point” practical jokes. For example: they bring over toxic sludge from a chemical factory and use it to prove that the factory owner was hand in glove with the Pollution Control Board. Or use a paint bomb in a local train to remind commuters that life is precious. Or expose all the regulars at a brothel to society.

What exactly Pranav wants to prove with his jokes is not exactly clear – the targets are all over the place, but one can imagine Mathur, at some point, daydreaming of them and going, “It would be so cool if someone did that!” The most consistent message, of course, is the anti-materialism one. Without this message, the book is just a series of practical jokes played on people and practices everyone loves to hate – industrialists, prostitutes’ customers, salesmen, fashion designers. It’s the message that gives some form to the book. In some ways, this is similar to the work of Chuck Palahniuk. But where Palahniuk takes one or two sentences to express his pop-cultural, cynical sentiments, Mathur fills up half a page with clunky ponderings. His forte is the action scenes, not all the philosophy and dialogue.

In fact, one can imagine Mathur playing the scenes in his head and putting them down on paper, the action playing out quickly, the characters’ voices providing the depth to the dialogues. But since we see only the bare words, that depth doesn’t come through. The book’s been blurbed by Anurag Kashyap, and someone like him would probably be able to transfer the book to screen well (as long as the speeches are kept short, of course).

Different writers have their own ways of placing their characters and story in recognized contexts. Stephen King uses common American brand names and advertising jingles. Palahniuk uses phrases from current slang and street talk. Vikram Chandra used Hindi curse words and Mumbai place names to set Sacred Games. Mathur, however, doesn’t do a very strong place setting of his people. The characters listen to Metal and Rock music (no bollywood?), and their conversation sounds generically current-desi. There are mentions of local trains and of contract killers, but very little else that places the book in Mumbai. It may have been deliberate, an attempt to make the book applicable to all white-collar-dominated cities in India, but the book would have benefited from setting it more strongly.

However, Mathur does have a distinctive voice, a hip attitude, and an interesting subject and approach. If he had revised it through a couple more drafts, or read it out loud to friends, it would have smoothened out the flow and removed clunky elements. Too many paragraphs feel like a first draft, and there are phrases and words that jar. In the most glaring example, the word ‘anarchist’ is used throughout the book as if it’s commonplace: by reporters, by police constables, by contract killers. It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that the word could be used as commonly as, say, terrorists – couldn’t it have been introduced more naturally?

It will be interesting to see what Mathur does next. If he can hone his voice, and channel the sentiments of upwardly mobile India, his books will be a much-needed gritty alternative to the current college-campus-set crop of writing.

What the cyclist did

[This is the unedited version of my review of The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules, by Manohar Shyam Joshi , published a few days back in Deccan Herald. They changed the title to "A man's gradual descent into insanity". I think I like my title better :) ]


What the cyclist did

It takes a while for you to realize that there’s no one narrator in The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules. The narrator of the story is the collective we, the entire clan that Hariya belongs to, the family who talks about him and the events surrounding him. There is no truth, no untruth, nothing marked believable or incredible – all you hear is what the family talks about and how it interprets what it knows. The whole cacophony of the family is captured here – the superstitious uncle, the greedy, alcoholic nephew, the doctor in the family, the press reporter cousin, the know-it-all teenager.

The plot is simple on the surface, but difficult to categorize. Harihar Dutt Tiwari, better known as Hariya Hercules, lives with and cares for his paralyzed, blind father, “Rai Saip” Girvan Dutt Tiwari. It’s a miserable life – Rai Saip is temperamental and difficult to care for, and Hariya has a low-paying job. Their social life consists of Hariya cycling over to relatives’ homes on weekends on his Hercules bicycle (hence the nickname), reporting about his father’s health to them in excruciating detail (“Today I couldn’t get all [his shit] out even with my hand.”), and getting updates from them to report back. When his father dies suddenly, Hariya looks through his belongings and finds evidence of his father getting “cursed” by a priest. He decides to set off to find this priest and temple, and never returns. An aunt who accompanied him reports a strange sequence of events that transpired, which don’t exactly match other witnesses’ versions.
But this is only the basic plot. Hariya’s story can be looked at as a man’s gradual descent into insanity. Or it’s a spiritual tale revolving around a curse. Or it could be about a simpleton bilked by greedy relatives. It all depends on who in the family is telling the story. And the family itself recognizes the multitude of meanings, and is conscious that it should select the version that makes it feel good about itself. In the broader sense, the story is about how a family creates and assimilates its own folklore.

Joshi has given us a family that talks sort of like ours, but still has that little strangeness to it. The modes of address are different – “Ija”, “Kainja”, “Bhinju”. It is some time before we figure out that this is a Kumaoni family, with their own dialect. One feels sort of like a non-Hindi speaker reading a book with the normal Hindi addresses – “Chacha”, “Bapu”, etc. – we have the same experience when we read it as Indians of a different community.

It’s also nice to see that there’s no glossary or other attempt to translate the unfamiliar words into English – whatever you understand, you understand through context. There’s also no attempt to use exotic or unfamiliar words in the translation just because it’s an Indian book. The language comes across as very earthy and day-to-day, the rhythms of Hindi are captured and made to feel a part of the English text.

Manohar Shyam Joshi is probably best known as the writer of the TV serial Hum Log. I was too young to appreciate the serial when it first aired, but this book demonstrates anew that Joshi knew how Indian families behave, and I felt an urge to go back and watch the serial. The brief introduction to Joshi’s other books on the flap reveals a very interesting repertoire. This, perhaps, is the biggest success of this book – introducing the English reader to a multi-faceted literary personality and making him want to read more.