Modern-Day Rishyasringas!

Those who have a fair idea of Hindu Mythology and Puranas would have definitely known about the sage Rishyasringa. Brought up only by his father Vibhandaka, a sage who hated the entire womenfolk due to the treatment meted out to him by the celestial dancer Urvashi, he never knew the presence of the opposite gender. He grew up without even knowing about the existence of women and the pull of the primal instincts. Having been brought up as a perfectly chaste and unique celibate, he fell face down at the first sign of 'trouble'. He was very easily seduced by a courtesan from the kingdom of Angha, whose mere sight unleashed all the unfelt desires deep inside his mind and he was very easily conquered by the lure of physique.

These days, I am feeling that all of us are being turned into Rishyasringas of a different kind. Have you ever noticed the increasing amount of advertisements for sanitisers and washes - ranging from face to body to 'intimate'?! Now there is even a special sanitiser for use after cutting vegetables!

Where is all this senseless and hedonistic hygiene headed?! What are we trying to protect ourselves from? Are we growing so insensible to the fact that the more we keep ourselves hidden from something the less immune we become towards it? And, any person with a very basic idea about the human body will be very much aware of the fact that this whole human body is teeming with micro-organisms of varied kinds, that having a 'clean' body without the proverbial 99.99% 'germs' is impossible. While basic hygiene is essential and a good thing for our own sakes, as for the sake of those around us, splashing the chemicals on our bodies and splurging on such cleansers and sanitisers is definitely not the right thing to do. It may be good for those companies that make such products, but for us mere mortals, such hedonistic indulgences in personal 'hygiene' will end up only in our turning more flimsy, fragile and vulnerable to the first signs of 'trouble'. After all evolution and immunity work by facing the challenges and overcoming them, not in such superficial measures and methods!

Book Review - Nationalism, Rabindranath Tagore

What a bore! Rabindranath Thakur might have been a great poet and philosopher, but he seems to have known little about the art of conveying the ideas succinctly so that they can reach their target audience.

Nationalism is another sick form of vile separatism that keeps the humans away from one another. While writing about such a critical concept shouldn't he consider the vast majority of laymen that might benefit by reading and contemplating on such topics?!

Agreed, these were lectures delivered by him for an elite audience at the West and the East, but I doubt that even those 'elite audience' would have kept rapt attention on his words. Once you cross some 20 lines you lose track of what you're reading about. I couldn't read it more than two pages at a time. Too wordy and tiresome.

Wish Thakur had known that no idea, however great it might be, would be driven home clearly, when presented using words that are too poetic and too abstract for attention!

Book Review – Rajmohan’s Wife, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

One of the resolutions that I had taken for this year was to improve my reading habits and expand the range of topics and authors. Bengali literature was one of the targets that I had kept for myself. Though I have already dabbled a bit with Tagore’s writings, this book of Bankim Chandra is my first proper foray into this much romanticized portion of Indian literature. I am happy in the end for having taken up this book.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is one of the leading names in Bengali Classical literary stage and this novel ‘Rajmohan’s Wife’ is his only work in English. There are quite a lot of debates about why he didn’t continue writing in English choosing instead to write only in his mother tongue, Bengali. Let’s leave the debate for others and get into knowing about this much-acclaimed work of his.

Matangini, the character that lends the title to the book, is the wife of Rajmohan, a good-for-nothing brute, incapable of earning a living in honest and proper ways. Matangini, being a woman of virtues, bears his oppressive nature silently. Madhav Ghose, the heir of a rich family, is the husband of Matangini’s sister Hemangini. Caring for Matangini’s family, he takes them with him to his native place where he offers a job to Rajmohan, thus providing for his family. Rajmohan is paranoid, unethical, and of the nature that can bite the very hands that feed him. One day when Rajmohan conspires against Madhav, joining with some other forces that want to grab the wealth of Madhav, Matangini makes an uncharacteristic journey alone in the dark and dangerous night to Madhav’s place to warn him, thus warding off the calamity that could have befallen Madhav. It turns out also to be the night when her love and pent up passions for her brother-in-law Madhav are expressed for the first time. What happens after these two events is what the novel is all about.

As for the quality of writing, there was never a dull moment in the book. Starting from the portrayal of the characters to the climax, it is an absolute roller-coaster of a book. Emotions, virtues, melodrama, peeks into the culture of bygone days, thrill, humor, sarcasm – it is all there in this book. But there are some occasional grammatical errors, which, when pointed out by English readers, could have been a cause in Bankim’s dropping his attempts to write in English. Remember, this book was written in 1864, more than 150 years ago, when it was a thing of astonishment to see an Indian using the language of his rulers to express his ideas and opinions, let alone attempt a full-length novel.

There are some negative points though. This is not a ‘full-length’ novel, in fact. For all his vivid ways of depicting characters, building up the tempo and portrayal of the emotions, Bankim ends the novel in an abrupt fashion. Just as you start warming up for a more delicious feast, the climax is brought up, as if somebody waved the checkered flag just on the tenth lap of a Formula One race. He finishes the book in a hurry, noting down the fate of the characters in a line or two. Just imagine! Having the chance to dwell on the emotional high-drama of the pure love between Madhav and Matangini, the possibility of setting an example for the womenfolk of those days by letting us know the decision of Matangini about her relationship with the villainous Rajmohan, are just two reasons that could have added at least another couple of interesting chapters to the book.

But the book having come at a time it did, it wouldn’t have been possible for Bankim to portray the heroine as anything less than the highly noble and virtuous female that she is. Not just Matangini, some of the other characters in the book, Kanak and Tara, are also portrayed to be women of virtue and moral courage, who nevertheless abide by the customs of the time, leading silent and submissive lives in the shadows of their unworthy husbands. Also, the way in which the author finishes off his note on the life and future of our lovable Matangini, proves that this was not a book that intended to break a new path for the women of high character stuck in a moral dilemma, but a book that wanted to glorify the oft-praised qualities of women – sacrifice and chastity.

All in all, this book will be a breezy read and a worthy addition to your collection.

Book Review – India’s Struggle For Independence, Bipan Chandra

It is said that history is written by the victors, which means that the facts are often twisted to suit the needs and to the advantage of the writer. While Bipan Chandra does nothing to twist the facts, he has managed to take a partial view of the facts, as always. This is the second book by this same set of authors that I have read and just like the first one – ‘India Since Independence’ – this book also stands as a glaring testimony to the author’s/authors’ parochial attitude towards Congress.

While I am not one of those growing majority who take special pleasure in bashing Gandhi, Nehru and innumerable Congressmen who had given their all for the freedom struggle, what I cannot accept is projecting Congress as the one and only organization that brought freedom to the country. Never!

It is really a good work by the authors. Documenting the history of the freedom struggle of our country spanning a period of almost a century is no easy task. The authors deserve appreciation for even taking up such a big task. But what is not good about the book is the way in which the history is presented.

The efforts of anyone other than Congress is puffed away as puny or not paid as much attention as it deserves. Bhagat Singh, Bismil, Azad and other such daredevil youngsters have all got tagged as ‘terrorists’. Truth it might be, for their having taken up the violent methods to attain freedom, but something is not right about the way in which he belittles the efforts of even people like Bose. To prove my point, the entire episode of INA is given only one page with the overall part of Subhas Chandra Bose being reduced to just another also-ran!

The book should be renamed as ‘Congress’s Struggle for Independence’, because that is all you will ever read in this book. The author’s having a special liking to Nehru is quite apparent from his way of writing.

I would suggest that one can go for much better books than this, if one wants to read about the struggle for Indian independence in an unbiased manner.

Book Review – The Book of Woman, Osho

The one thing that I find disgusting about the publishing industry is that sometimes it tends to behave like music industry. If you are a lover of instrumental music, you might have come across those innumerable CDs and collections named ‘Music of the Earth’, ‘Music of the Water‘, ‘Music for Meditation’, ‘Music for Pregnant Women’ and other such myriad titles. According to many renowned musicians, these are nothing but a sham to sell music that couldn’t otherwise be easily sold. When a CD doesn’t have much prospects of being sold easily, they are bundled as music for this and music for that. Of course, there are some commendable exceptions but a majority of such packages are said to be nothing but a marketing trick.
 

Oftentimes, reading the works of Osho, I have felt similar emotions. No doubt this controversial monk (?) has some truly rebellious ideas and worthy advice for the young minds to follow. But most of the while, I find his words to be repetitive and of single dimension. Only with his eloquence that helped him convey the same idea in a variety of ways did his followers manage to have a flurry of books and CDs published against his name. Speaking of books, there is this fact that most of his ‘books’ are nothing but transcripts of his discourses to his disciples, domestic and international. Now, when you have a question-and-answer mode of conversation between a sage (!) and his followers, it becomes easy for you to pick and choose questions and publish them in various permutations and combinations.
 

With his having given thousands of such discourses, it becomes easier for his followers to publish ‘books’ on various topics with different combinations of such questions and answers. ‘The Book of Woman’ comes across as another such publication that helps the publisher mint money using that ever-attractive name of Osho. ‘The Book of Woman’ is just not what it claims to be. It is a bunch of questions by disciples and Osho’s answers to the same, gathered under various titles like Female, Sexuality, Family, Motherhood and such. But honestly, except for a chapter or two, the book  doesn’t directly deal with the woman or her uniqueness. The book doesn’t do justice to its title. Adding to the woes will be Osho’s now boring repetitions about women’s having multiple orgasms and men’s having only one and thus men having developed a sense of ‘inferiority complex’! Really?!
 

The book is filled with the same old ideas of Osho, about having an open mind about relationships (bordering on promiscuity), about both genders being unequal but unique, not repressing one’s emotions, sex being a brief glimpse into the vast awareness, women’s libbers being incorrect and the glory of meditation. If you haven’t read any book of Osho, this book can give you an idea about his way of thinking. If you’ve already, then this is a book that you can skip with much ease, without losing anything new at all. This is just old wine in an old bottle with a new label!

Book Review - The Absent Traveller, Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala

All amidst our mundane lives, we humans find pleasure and seek succor in two ways. We either indulge in beliefs, hopes and dreams of lofty kinds, think of the afterlife and believe in a divine scheme of things that handholds us all through our lives. Or, on the other hand, we celebrate our basic carnality by diving deep into pleasures of the senses. Art, music and poetry have been three channels through which we try to bridge the gap between our carnal and ethereal selves. While the spiritual aspect of life has been left for a few of us to lead with a fair degree of success, the rest and the most of us face and celebrate our carnality on a day-to-day basis. This book is an example of such unabashed celebration and it celebrates our concupiscent nature with candor.

Lovemaking had never been a thing that people shied away from discussing in ancient India. For ancient India, sex was not just an act for procreation but was one of deep pleasure too, no matter how short-lived the pleasure may be. Our paintings portrayed it with élan, our sculptures depicted the various ways of copulation and the standards of beauty for men and women. And, who can forget that the much-talked about treatise on love, the Kamasutra, emanated from this land? Or, Kokkogam? Not to forget the greatest gallery of the art of lovemaking as hewed on stone in Khajuraho. All that was before the Victorian mores of a hypocritical nature invaded our land, but let me not digress.

Talking about poetry, this book is an example of how even banal topics like adultery can be presented with unparalleled aesthetics that even the most self-righteous mind would relish reading for the sheer poetic value, without any sense of judgement and aversion. The love and the lust, the blissful and the banal, the surreal and the venereal have all been arrayed here in this collection of poems and poetic excerpts from Prakrit literature. Extracted from the works of various poets - both men and women - and peoples from across ages, they prove that love and lust have both been topics of equally pleasurable pursuit for us Indians. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, said to be a renowned poet on his own, has done a commendable job in selecting and translating the works for the benefit of poetry lovers.

This book is a glimpse into that lost age, when people were candid about their physical passions and unpretentious in embracing their animality without the modern-day hypocrisy of finding cheap titillation in 'wardrobe malfunctions', all the while pretending to have risen above the lesser physical nature. And all this, centuries before 'Lolitas' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lovers' caused furore in the 'civilized world'!

This is a very worthy read that one can enjoy for the aesthetically presented amorous themes!

Book Review - On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti

I picked up this book with a lot of hopes, since this was the treatise that was said to have influenced the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. However, the much lesser mortal that I am, I couldn't gain much out of reading this book. Though Leon is said to be a Renaissance master himself, modesty seems not to be one of his virtues. Ego oozes out of his words in many pages. He seems to have believed that he could do nothing wrong and people can all start painting in a much better way by merely following his techniques. And, those with alternative view points are simply brushed aside. Such a egoistic attitude leaves a poor taste behind!

As for the book, it comprises of three chapters, or, as he calls them, three 'books'. The first one is mostly about geometrical patterns and viewpoints. Though it begins easily, soon it devolves into genius-talks. Only the second and third 'book' speak in a normal tone and are easily comprehensible and useful. The second and third chapters indeed make for a breezy read. But, as already said, his egoistic attitude shines throughout the book. Don't read this book just because it is called a 'classic' and don't read this book, if you are hoping to learn much about painting. This is a very casual work that you can do without!