The Pilgrimage- Paulo Coelho

One of Coelho's strange and ambiguous books, The Pilgrimage is the recollections of his spiritual  journey. The trip can be our daily journey. The exercises described seem simple and easy to follow but not sure whether they are safe. A mysterious book full of novel ideas.


''Life teaches us lessons every minute, and the secret is to accept that, only in our daily lives, can we show ourselves, to be as wise as Solomon and as powerful as Alexander the great.''


'' Teaching is the only way to learn. '' 

Lajja - Taslima Nasrin

Lajja means shame. Yes, this book is a shame on humanity. As a novel, it tells the story of a Bangladeshi Hindu family, ripped apart by the riots followed by the demolition of  Babri-Masjid in India on December 6, 1992. As a historical document, it chronicles the history of Bangladesh from 1947-1992. According to the author, the book deals with the persecution of Hindus, a religious minority in Bangladesh, by the Muslims who are in the majority. Taslima is so worked up and passionate about her cause that the story line has been pushed aside and the book is crammed with bullet points, facts and data. But the true, chilling and horrifying account of religious extremism, fanaticism and inhuman brutality hits the reader at the right place. The book has been banned in Bangladesh and parts of India and Taslima has many 'fatwas' to her credit. Excellent publicity. She is still fighting to protect her beautiful country and her rights to live in it. By the by, the cover design of the book is misleading with pictures of women on both sides. 


''Let Another Name for Religion be Humanism.''

Like the Flowing River- Paulo Coelho

A wonderful and inspirational collection of Coelho's thoughts and reflections. The short stories are quite powerful and novel. They can be used to prepare speeches and essays. The messages are moralistic and profound yet not sermonic. They are all related to everyday life and explores what it means to be truly alive. A good read to be kept aside to re-read.

As always Coelho  urges the readers to follow dreams and fulfill our personal legends. If only one could do that.....

The guardian of Fingerprint Pad for messing with my fingers, all five of them !

Our darned papers are ready and we can stay here for the next 2 years.  I'm not a descriptive person and hate to revisit those haunted offices.  The fingerprint office tainted with  trampled dreams and hopes of third world people.  The Bangladeshi middlemen...... the greedy Egyptian translators..... veiled witches.......  the gigantic masri who takes litres of your precious blood...... the unwashed coat with centuries of dirt and sweat in the x-ray room........the fingerprint man who punches all your five fingers.  Barbarious.  You go there as a humble expatriate and out come a pathetic wormling.

I know what happened to Kavya Madhavan.  She must have gone to the Fingerprint office !   Poor thing,  is scarred forever and  ran away clutching her last bit of dignity.  I won't blame you dear.  My sympathies.

The Sandal Trees - Kamala Das

I've read almost all the works of Madhavikutty written in Malayalam. It's totally a new experience to read them in English. The Sandal Trees is an assorted collection of her 23 short stories. Hats off to the editors and translators , they've done a good job. The 'valluvanadan' slang which is the only thing I loath in her works , is lost in transit -  a huge relief.

As usual , the first and the title story is the best one. So, what are sandal trees? According to Kamala Das they are the silences that grow between a husband and wife. Oh ! only silences? What about kids , hatred , jealousy , indifference and  O yes, a flikr of love?


Kamala Das aka Madhavikutty aka Kmala Suraiyya has left this world to join.....Krishna or Allah ? Ooops !

India : From Midnight To The Millennium And Beyond - Shashi Tharoor

A heavily objective and lengthy account of India's first 50 years of independent being. The major part concentrates on India's divided pluralism and the rest is about caste, politics, economics, religion  and the future. The book mainly points out what ails and prevents India from all over development. Quite an engaging read. Here and there Tharoor has tried hard to charm the readers with his witty anecdotes and humorous tales from his childhood and youth. Though the background is urban middle class, those accounts light up and distract him from his games with words temporarily. Comic reliefs?

The book is indeed very informative. One learns a lot about the personal life of many of India's great leaders. Tharoor idolizes Gandhiji, Nehru and even Sonia Gandhi but devotes pages and pages to tarnish Mrs.Indira Gandhi. I learned the following from this book which perhaps should be listed in gossip columns but it's news for me. Let me quote:-

• The British ordered the thumps of whole communities of Indian weavers chopped off so that they could not compete with the products of Lancashire.
• Gandhiji had quixotically called the capital to be shifted to the hot and dusty town of Nagpur, which had the sole merit of being located in the geographical center of the country.
• Gandhi rejected the phrase - Father of the Nation and he detested the term - Mahatma.
• Gandhi had announced his intention to spurn the country he had failed to keep united and to spend the rest of his years in Pakistan, a prospect that had made the government of Pakistan collectively choke.
• Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated at the home of business tycoon G.D.Birla, a major financier of the Congress Party.
• Imprisoned for the first time in 1921, Jawaharlal spent 18 years in British jails.
• On his desk, Nehru kept two totems - a gold statuette of Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort.
• M.F.Husain, 'India's Picasso', painted a triptych depicting Mrs.Indira Gandhi as the Hindu warrior goddess Durga.
• Rajiv Gandhi remains to this day the only Indian prime minister ever to have been photographed in jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt.
• The great 2000 year old epic Mahabharata was supposedly dictated by the sage Vedavyasa to Ganesh.
• The first Indian film star to become the chief minister of a state was a Malayali, Marudur G.Ramachandran.
• Dr.B.R.Ambedkar led his followers in a mass conversion to Buddhism to escape the stigma of Untouchability within Hinduism.
• India maintains the world's third-largest standing army.
• Only 7 people died in the 1996 elections.
• Orthodox do not use porcelain plates who note that animal bones go into its making.
• Arcticle 356 of the Indian Constitution, used just 8 times in the first 14 years of India's independence, was applied on nearly 70 occasions between 1965 and 1987.

Well, written in 1997 this work displays lots of intellectual and political maturity. Where has it gone ? What happened ? Where are you, Mr.Tharoor?

The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories - Shashi Tharoor

 Written around 1978-1981, this book is a collection of his 14 short stories and a two act play. Most of them are written in his late teens and early twenties and are sparkling social satire and observations of life in India. Touching and funny, they project many social issues and display his high level of maturity and understanding. The foreword given at the beginning of each story is very insightful and  interesting.  Most of the stories end with a twisted tail. The best is the first one- 'The Five Dollar Smile'. The two act play is a hilarious metaphor on Indira Gandhi's Emergency. These works show a prolific writer in the making.


You are a great 'interlocutor', Mr.Tharoor...