A Reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
– George R. R. Martin
If I was asked to write an epithet for 2020, I would like to say- “Here lies the year of multiple mutinies”. But this year gave some extra time to ‘read more and ‘read new’.
If I had to pick up one best book, I read this year, it is Prashant Kidambi’s ‘Cricket Country: The Untold History of the First All Indian Team’. It is the most delightful non-fiction work I have ever come across. Ashis Nandy once said cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. But before a century, Cricket was an English summer game and was believed that Indians can never understand it. This book traces the story of this great transformation. I got interested in knowing more about Cricket only after reading this book. To all the cricket lovers and those who don’t, this book would make a wonderful read.
I always love to read biographies. Two biographies that stood out are about the most underrated individuals: Rajmohan Gandhi’s ‘Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns’ and Vinay Sitapati’s ‘Half – Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India’. Personally, I feel that Badshah Khan is the most underrated freedom fighter about whom India has forgotten. It is noted that when he met Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, he told her, “Your father and Patel, behind Gandhiji’s back, threw me and my Pakthuns to the wolves”. This statement resonates the sense of betrayal that was inflicted on him by India’s founding fathers. Narasimha Roa is the most underrated Prime Minister, whose legacy is dismantled by the same people who were led by him. The least we can do for these individuals is to remember them.
Turning to fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Shadow Lines’ is the best one. I decided to read after reading what Khushwant Singh said about this work: ‘This is how the language should be used… This is how a novel should be written’. In this Sahitya Academy winning novel, Amitav Ghosh sets out to narrate ‘a complex web of memories relationships and images’ in a very provocative style which almost forces the reader to pause at times, reread what he read and close his eyes to introspect about it for a while to comprehend Ghosh’s narrative and the images he creates with them. This novel exposes the ‘idea of the nation-state as an illusion and arbitrary dissection of people’. It compels its reader to realise about the boundaries we created around ourselves, knowingly or unknowingly and the violence that follows because of those narrow boundaries. We will realise this only when we have the real desire, not greed or lust, ‘a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror’, a real desire to ‘invent’. We could not see without inventing what we saw, and if we don’t invent, we would never be free of other people’s inventions. To be free is to be free of boundaries of mind, to invent and to imagine. Until and unless we free ourselves from boundaries and limits of thought, mankind is bound to inflict violence on itself, explicitly or implicitly. A story of love, exhilaration, separation, memory, violence, longing, desire.
I was always enthralled by short stories. Few that stood out for are: ‘Stories on Caste’ by Premchand (Edited by M, Asaduddin), ‘Shut Up!’ by Volga, and ‘A Disgraceful Night of the Age Gone by’ by Manmohan Jha. Some of the articles I read this year helped me to have a more nuanced sense of everything around: Verdicts on Nehru: Rise and Fall of a Reputationby Ramachandra Guha, A Theory of Association: Social Status, Prices and Markets by Kaushik Basu, Why I’m Losing Hope in India: A socialist, secular, democratic reflection by Kiran Kumbhar, Amartya Sen’s hopes and Fears for Indian Democracy by Isaac Chotiner, Dancing into Modernity: Multiple Narratives of India’s Kathak Dance by Pallabi Chakravorty, Memory, Death, Friendship by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, and New Divisions: The cruel virtual interior by Saikat Majumdar.
A friend of mine introduced me to the medium of podcasts and I started listing to them for the first time since the burning the national wide lockdown and now, they have become constant companions. Here are the five best conversations I enjoyed listening to:
- Dealing with a Chaotic World, Open Spaces
- Friends in High Places, Open Spaces
- The Art of Translation, The Seen and The Unseen
- The Art of Narrative Nonfiction (+ JBS Haldane), The Seen and The Unseen
- For regular updates on Cricket, Never on the Backfoot: A Podcast
To this list, I would also like to add 17th Dr Amitabh Chowdhury Memorial Trust Annual Lecture delivered by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, which captures the entire socio-political position of contemporary India.
Stepping into a new year with a hope to ‘read more and ‘read new’.
First published in Vrittanta blog: https://vrittantacu-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/vrittantacu.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/wrapping-up-2020/amp/
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