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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. After Tim Schwab’s takedown of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and billionaire philanthropist, in The Bill Gates Problem (Penguin), veteran Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher’s memoir, Burn Book (Hachette), exposes the perilous road the tech giants have undertaken and how a technological calamity can be averted, if at all. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and others have all been taken off the pedestal. As AP reported, “Ms. Swisher skewers many of the once-idealistic tech moguls who, when she met them as entrepreneurs decades ago, promised to change the world for the better but often chose a path of destructive disruption instead. And along the way, they amassed staggering fortunes that have disconnected them from reality.” In her 300-page book, she writes, “If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing.” Ms. Swisher, who tracked Silicon Valley entrepreneurs since the 1990s, moved to Washington, D.C., a few years ago, “feeling a need to escape what had become an increasingly toxic and insular place.” In the HBO series, ‘Silicon Valley’, Ms. Swisher was cast as herself, an influential tech reporter. She is worried about the accelerating rise of artificial intelligence and its potential for causing even more damage than she thinks has already been done by social media, smartphones and other products that haven’t been tightly regulated. “Don’t get fooled a second time,” she tells AP.
In reviews, we read Chipko warrior Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s memoir, learn more about Bonnie Garmus’ best-selling book Lessons in Chemistry, read an excerpt from Sobhana K. Nair’s new biography of Ram Vilas Paswan and more. We also talk to Colin Thubron about travel and writing.
Books of the week
Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s memoir, Gentle Resistance (Permanent Black), says the reviewer Mahesh Rangarajan, is a remarkable book, by a man no less unique. Bhatt came to public prominence in the wake of the Alaknanda floods of 1970. Over the next few years he concluded that the “self-reliance and self-respect” of hill communities in Garhwal and Kumaon were tied to the fate of the forests. By 1970, for him, the loss of forest cover and the wrath of the rivers gave it urgency. The historic women’s protest in Reni, Chamoli in March 1973 or the Chipko movement questioned not only a contract for a specific company but the very approach to control and exploitation of the forest with industry and forest revenue as priority. “This is what makes for a fascinating read: it is both a chronicle of a life and the times of the author and a record of his long years of service in the Bhoodan movement under Vinoba Bhave and subsequently in forest-related initiatives.” The book has been translated to English by Samir Banerjee from the original in Hindi published in 2021.
No one can quite recall how Ram Vilas Paswan came to be known as ‘mausam vaigyanik’ or the “weathervane of Indian politics.” In the Introduction to her book, Ram Vilas Paswan: The Weathervane of Indian Politics (Roli Books), Sobhana K. Nair writes that political commentator Abhay Kumar credits Lalu Prasad Yadav for coming up with this descriptor for his political adversary from Bihar, who would become the face of Dalits. Paswan used his ideological agnosticism to cross many political lines. In the late 1990s, “Paswan was of the view that the ‘corruption of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the threat to national security posed by a foreign prime ministerial candidate [Sonia Gandhi] is greater than the threat of communalism. The very man who used to hector the BJP standing from the pulpit of secularism, now claimed that the BJP had changed. It is no longer pursuing contentious issues such as the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the enforcement of a uniform civil code and the abrogation of Article 370, he claimed. When pointed out that the leaders of the Sangh Parivar, which included the BJP, had made no statement to this effect, Paswan said that there was a tacit understanding with the BJP on these issues.”
Lessons in Chemistry by debut novelist Bonnie Garmus has been a best-seller ever since publication. Sharing her journey with her first book, Garmus, 66, tells Swati Daftuar that she channelled her anger at a work meeting “fuelled the impetus for the book” as what had happened was a classic example of sexism. “I think anger is valuable, but in women, it is often described as rage. Men are assertive, women are aggressive — a classic example of sexism. When I left the meeting, I was pretty angry. I began to wonder how many other women around the world were having the same day I was. Five minutes later, I started writing Lessons in Chemistry. She says she chose the 1950s and early ’60s because it was such a wildly sexist time period — the time of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. “I wanted to reassure myself that we had moved forward as women in the world since that time period. And we have — but not nearly enough. I could hear [protagonist] Elizabeth Zott’s voice very clearly. I was writing my role model; a woman I could respect. She was not fully formed when I started, but she became consistent to me quickly. Her stoicism shines through: she’s smart, responsible, rational, and has incredible heart. Elizabeth Zott is not a victim. She doesn’t whine; she doesn’t pout. She acts. She stands up for what she believes is right and does not waver.”
In The Sufi’s Nightingale (Speaking Tiger), writer, playwright and podcaster Sarbpreet Singh presents a fictionalised retelling of the love story of Hazrat Shah Hussain, the 16th century Punjabi Muslim Sufi poet, and Madho Lal, a Hindu boy from Shahdara (Pakistan). The reviewer Saurabh Sharma says it’s a heartwarming read, for peppered throughout this braided narrative told from the perspectives of Hussain and his “bulbul” (nightingale) and mureed (devotee), Maqbool, are Hussain’s verses, translated into English by the author. “The deft use of Persian and Urdu words in select places adds charm to this lyrical novel. Further, through this book, one can trace back the history of queerness in South Asia to an age and time about which nothing, besides the fact that trans people used to be decorated members of the harem, has been established.”
Spotlight
Colin Thubron, a sprightly 84, is forever trying to get away from a haunting ghost — that single white males should not be travelling to poor countries and write about it. But unwilling to be burdened by the legacy of colonialism, he has ventured out to places, the more remote the better, in Russia, China, and also to West and East Asia, hoping it will be seen as an avenue of discovery. “Travel writing at its best is an act of empathy,” he says, at the recently-concluded Samsung Tab S9 Series Jaipur Literature Festival, while discussing his work, like In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road, and particularly his 2021 book, The Amur River. “The world may have shrunk, but countries are closing down and it is becoming harder to move around like I used to in my younger days, and I am not talking about my age alone. I don’t know if I will be able to travel to countries in West Asia or Afghanistan for that matter any more. I have extensively travelled in Russia and wrote about it, but I wanted to see what the situation was on the ground and how these two countries, Russia and China, reacted to each other. Also, very little is known about the Amur, which is the tenth largest river in the world; Russia had once dreamed that it would be the equivalent of America’s Mississippi River, but it was not to be for various reasons.”
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- Ebrahim Alkazi’s biography, Holding Time Captive (Penguin) by Amal Allana, is an account of the life, work and times of her father, one of the giants of 20th century theatre and a key promoter of the visual arts movement in India. She shares anecdotes about her parents’ relationship, and also how Alkazi strove to bring about an inclusive, intercultural and interdisciplinary theatre movement in India.
- In Circles of Freedom (Juggernaut), T.C.A. Raghavan shifts the focus of the freedom struggle to five people – Asaf Ali, Aruna Ali, Sarojini Naidu, Syud Hossain and Syed Mahmud. Through their stories, Raghavan explores two themes: stories of women of the Independence movement and the “difficulties a moderate Muslim faced, in carving out a political career during the period, even within the secular Congress.”
- The Thief’s Funeral (Aleph), edited by Sucharita Sengupta, Chandra Chari and Uma Iyengar, presents 19 stories, including the winning entry, that came out of the Book Review Literary Trust’s short story competition announced in the midst of the COVID pandemic. It showcases fresh voices which explore every aspect of India and its people.
- Durgacharan Rakshit’s Journeys Across India (Speaking Tiger), translated from Bengali by Sarbani Putatunda, is a travel journal that documents the cultural and social landscape of India in the early 20th century. It was first published in 1903, and is still in print.
