Want to focus on things impacting world: Amitav Ghosh

Zafri Mudasser Nofil

(New Delhi, Jun 16, 2019) Amitav Ghosh, who just won the Jnanpith Award, says he really wants to pay attention to the ways things are changing across the world, including environmental changes, and write about these.

After presenting him the Jnanpith Award on Wednesday, former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi had said Ghosh should consider using his pen to warn Indians about the “inflammability of hatred among communities” in the country.

Gandhi had also urged 62-year-old Ghosh, who became the first English writer to be conferred with Jnanpith Award, to “save the India of Gautam Buddha and Vardhaman Mahavir from hate”.

When asked whether he would consider these issues while writing his next book, Ghosh says right now, what is really needed – not just in India but around the globe – is paying attention to the world and to the ways things are changing, the ways in which the whole world is impacted by all the kind of environmental changes.

“Those are the things I really want to pay attention to. Those are the things I really want to write about,” he told PTI in an interview.

In 2016, he had come out with a non-fiction title “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” in which he examined the inability at the level of literature, history and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

And now his new book “Gun Island” talks of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition.

Ghosh says writers and publishers now face a challenge of finding ways to divert the attention of younger people to books.

“We are now in a world where for younger people especially, consumption of news and stories comes through the phone. In a way they are completely tied to the phone. We have to try and think how to make books part of their lives,” he says.

According to him, people are forgetting that there is a very short attention span while interacting with a phone.

“To read a book you need to concentrate for hours and hours while you can concentrate on a phone for very less time like 20-25 minutes. You could say that people are now forgetting in some ways how to read anything longer than two-three pages.”

On his Jnanpith win, Ghosh says it is an extraordinary feeling.

“When I heard about the award, I couldn’t believe it. If you grow up within a kind of literary world, Jnanpith is something completely unique, something unto itself. I really never could have imagined that I would get it partly because I write in English and also you take for granted that this was not the kind of thing you would expect,” he says.

He was in Colombo having lunch with his friends when he got the call informing him about his win.

“I was so amazed that it could have knocked me down with a feather. It was a completely amazing and wonderful moment,” he says.

Ghosh, a Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi awardee, has authored novels like “Shadow Lines”, “The Glass Palace”, “The Hungry Tide”, and Ibis Trilogy — “Sea of Poppies”, “River of Smoke”, “Flood of Fire”.

In “Gun Island”, published by Penguin, Dinanath aka Deen, a dealer of rare books, is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.

There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey which will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood and about the world around him.

“Gun Island” is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

Sand artiste Pattnaik dedicates work to Michelle Obama

(Puri (Odisha), Jun 12, 2019) Sudarsan Pattnaik is known for creating magic with his installations on sand but on Wednesday he attempted something with a difference – a cover of former First Lady of the US Michelle Obama’s memoir “Becoming”.

Pattnaik and his team created the unique artistic representation of the book cover on a beach here, an effort which took them nearly seven hours.

Four tonnes of sand were used to create the 14-feet-long and seven-feet-high installation.

Pattanaik said Michelle Obama’s story is as “nuanced and beautiful as the granules of sand and much like the ocean, it is everlasting”.

The event was organised by Penguin India to celebrate the book, which it said has sold more than 10 million copies.

“The book has received great response from the Indian market as the nation connected with the story of one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. Penguin India has sold more than 70,000 copies of the book since its release,” the publisher said.

Pattnaik has made many sculptures of former US president Barack Obama but this is the first time that he worked on any installation related to Michelle Obama.

In her memoir, Michelle Obama chronicles the experiences that have shaped her – from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address.

She describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it.

After train incident, ‘timid’ Gandhi became ‘soul force’ warrior: Book

(New Delhi, Jun 9, 2019) Mahatma Gandhi was very timid in his youth but days after being thrown out of a train in South Africa, he expressed no signs of timidity and instead changed into an embryonic ‘soul force’ warrior, says a new book.

Former diplomat Pascal Alan Nazareth, who has written “Gandhi: The Soul Force Warrior, Revolutionised Revolution and Spiritualised It”, says the train incident was Gandhi’s transformational moment.

When he was thrown out of a train going from Durban to Pretoria, at the Pietermaritzburg station for sitting in a first-class compartment, despite the fact that he had a first-class ticket, Gandhi was only 24-years-old.

“Gandhi was very timid in his youth and continued to be so even after he returned to India with his British legal degree. He had failed miserably in arguing his first case in a Bombay court in early 1893,” the book says.

But after the train incident, he expressed no signs of timidity, it says.

Instead, there was firm determination to fight the “deep disease of colour prejudice” despite the temptation to return to India forthwith, according to the author.

Gandhi had also admitted many times that the Pietermaritzburg episode changed the course of his life and his “active non-violence began from that date”.

The book, published by Wisdom Tree, talks how the essence of Gandhi’s ideology was a rare and distinctive combination of truth and non-violence-a pro-active, passionate and path-breaking approach, rather than a passive absence of violence.

It has a foreword by the Dalai Lama, who says he has put into practice Gandhi’s principles in his own efforts to “restore the fundamental human rights and freedom of the Tibetan people”.

Nazareth, who has served in India’s diplomatic missions in Tokyo, Rangoon, Lima, London, Chicago and New York and as India’s High Commissioner to Ghana and Ambassador to Egypt and Mexico among other assignments, also says Gandhi’s approach to all religions including his own was unorthodox and eclectic.

“He believed that all of them embodied substantial elements of truth but none was infallible. Besides, all of them had acquired some irrational and inequitable social practices during the course of their long histories, which need to be purged. Most importantly, the great need was to transcend each other’s religion and bind oneself totally to the truth and be purified by it.”

By urging this approach, the author says, Gandhi raised religious practice to the realm of spirituality and succeeded in gestating a new religious ecumenism and in attracting people of diverse religious faiths to himself and the movements he gestated.

Nazareth has also authored the book “Gandhi’s Outstanding Leadership”, which has been published in 12 Indian and 20 foreign languages.

News article related to India gave Filipina author idea of debut novel

Zafri Mudasser Nofil

(New Delhi, May 31, 2019) At 40, Joanne Ramos was looking for her debut novel a compelling story that could hold her ideas and allow them to flourish until she read about a surrogacy facility in India and her book began to take root.

The Philippines-born Joanne Ramos has just come out with “The Farm”, which is about race, class, family and power, as she is being heralded as the new age Margaret Atwood.

The book, published by Bloomsbury India, talks of an ambitious businesswoman named Mae Yu who runs Golden Oaks, a luxury retreat transforming the fertility industry, where women get the very best of everything, so long as they play by the rules.

Jane is a young immigrant in search of a better future. Stuck living in a cramped dorm with her baby daughter and her shrewd aunt Ate, she sees an unmissable chance to change her life but at what cost.

“The Farm” explores the role of luck and merit, class, ambition and sacrifice and is a story about how we live and who truly holds power.

When Ramos started writing “The Farm”, the themes she wanted to tackle were already apparent to her – ideas that had consumed her for decades, rooted in her experiences, and the people she’d come to know, as a Filipina immigrant in Wisconsin, a financial-aid student at Princeton University, a woman in the male-dominated world of high finance, and a mother of three in the era of intensive “helicopter” parenting.

“The challenge was to find a compelling story that could hold all these different ideas and allow them to flourish. I wasn’t interested in writing a screed but in telling a good story that made readers think,” she says.

Then, about a year and a half into her daily routine of writing while her children were in school, she read a short article in the Wall Street Journal about a surrogacy facility in India.

“The what-ifs began pouring onto the page: What if I moved the surrogacy facility to America? What if I made it a luxury one that catered to the richest people in the world? What would people like that want? The book began to take root,” Ramos told PTI.

She is flattered by comparisons with Atwood.

“My older sister gave me a copy of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when I was in high school in the late 1980s. I had never read anything like it, and it opened my eyes – not only to issues of female agency, the commodification of women’s bodies and the patriarchy, but to how capacious and flexible and radical fiction can be. I’d never read writing like Atwood’s. I was blown away by how she put together words as much as by the ideas suffusing her book.”

According to the author, she didn’t put much conscious thought into the title.

“From the outset, when I saved my day’s writing onto my laptop, I labelled the file ‘The Farm’, differentiating each day only by its date. I suppose this is because, when I started imagining the world of Golden Oaks, I immediately envisioned a very wholesome, pastoral setting – rolling hills, pristine lakes, acres of lush farmland. Unwittingly, I’d already thought of Golden Oaks as a ‘baby farm’,” she says.

On the characters and situations, she says these were made-up in her head. “The book is a work of fiction, but through some sort of organic, maybe even alchemical process, certain pieces of yourself and your experiences end up – altered – in fiction, too.”

The book has often been called “dystopian” by readers and some reviewers. But Ramos says she didn’t set out to write a dystopian novel.

“I tried to create a world that was only a few inches ahead of ours. It was crucial to me that the world of Golden Oaks was plausible, because I didn’t want to give my readers the ‘out’ of dismissing ‘The Farm’ as futuristic, or unrealistic, or too extreme to every really occur.  I wanted the reader to recognise the world of ‘The Farm’, and in recognising it, maybe see our own reality through a new lens,” she says.

As far as the luxury elements in the novel, it seemed to Ramos that a very rich client with limitless resources would want her surrogate to live in comfort, without any sources of stress, since studies have shown that stress is bad for babies in utero.

“I also think the comforts of Golden Oaks allow its clients to feel good about outsourcing their pregnancies. The marketing pitch for Golden Oaks – the narrative that Mae Yu tells herself and the clients in order to justify it – is that the farm is a ‘win-win’: good for both the clients and the surrogate mothers.”

One of the notions Ramos explores in “The Farm” is the concept of free trade, which underlies the capitalist system.

“One of the basic tenets of free trade is that it – a trade voluntarily reached by two parties – is ‘mutually beneficial’. If it were not, so the theory goes, one party to the trade wouldn’t agree to the deal. But how free is ‘free’, how voluntary is voluntary, when one party to the trade has extremely limited choices?”

Nabaneeta Sen’s 1978 book on Naxal movement in Bengal now in English

(New Delhi, May 29, 2019) Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s book on the Naxal movement in West Bengal, first published in Bengali in 1978, is now available in English.

Some prominent persons of West Bengal had played a strange two-faced role in this political movement. They encouraged and led the youth, who put their lives at stake and fought for the cause.

However, most of these personalities failed to take responsibility later on when they were needed the most.

“I, Anupam” (“Ami Anupam”) is a sharp depiction of those turbulent times and is about one such betrayal. The central character of the novel is Anupam Roy, a newspaper columnist, commentator and academician.

The book deals with a conflict between integrity and expediency.

It has been translated from the original by Paulami Sengupta, Tias Basu and the author and is published by Niyogi Books’ imprint Thornbird.

Sen is regarded as one of the prominent Bengali litterateurs of present times with more than 80 books to her name. She recently retired as Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University.

Collection brings together sub-continent’s accomplished voices in sci-fi

(New Delhi, May 29, 2019) A new anthology stitches together previously unpublished science fiction and speculative writing by well-known and debutant writers of sub-continental origin.

Edited by Tarun K Saint, “The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction” has stories and poems that offer imaginative perspectives on a hyper-global, often alienating and even paranoid world, but one in which humanity and love may yet triumph.

Published by Hachette India, this collection is billed as a must-have for hardcore science fiction (SF) fans as well as those who wish to be introduced to the genre. It has a foreword by Manjula Padmanabhan.

Among the tales are citizens of Karachi waking up one morning to find the sea missing from their shores; a family visiting a Partition-themed park gets more entertainment than they bargained for; and Mahatma Gandhi appearing in contemporary times under rather unusual circumstances.

The contributors, who include the likes of Keki N Daruwalla, Padmanabhan, Syed Saeed Naqvi and Saint, are from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

According to Saint, the future of subcontinental SF, as evidenced by this volume, seems promising indeed, even in the face of grim portents in the sociocultural domain in the subcontinent and seemingly inexorable transformations of the ecological basis for life that are threatening the very existence of the most vulnerable, not just in South Asia.

“Taken together, these stories and poems may indicate the direction of alternative South Asian futures to come, as well as the emergence of a subcontinental SF sensibility attuned to sociocultural nuances and issues that are local as well as global,” he says.

The genesis of this collection, according to Saint, was not so much the imperative to anthologise the work of earlier writers, or to further explore the antinomies of post-colonial discourse.

“Rather, a sense of disturbance with the situation in contemporary South Asia lead to the composition of a concept note which was sent out to both established and younger subcontinental writers in English.”

If not quite a competition to write a ghost story, the idea was to impel contemporary writers to engage with the present and the future, using an SF lens, in this 72nd year of Independence and Partition, he says.

The focus of this anthology is writings from the partitioned three – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The collection also includes selected sample stories in translation from some major regional languages, written during the 20th century. There is Arunava Sinha’s translation from Bengali of Adrish Bardhan’s “Planet of Terror”, written in the style reminiscent of Golden Era SF, and Harishankar Parsai’s “Inspector Matadeen on the Moon”, a satirical oddity with SF elements, in a revised translation from Hindi by C M Naim.

Book takes a culinary journey across the Islamic world

(New Delhi, May 29, 2019) What is common among these food items: Mkate Wa Ufuta, Tharid, Gulai Kambing Aceh, Kabab Hommus and Haleem?

These are some typical items considered staple during Ramzan among Muslims across the world.

While Mkate Wa Ufuta is a Zanzibari sesame bread served at Iftar with stews or drizzled with honey for a sweet snack, Tharid is a composite dish made of layers of dry bread topped with a stew of meat and vegetables.

Tharid is said to have been one of Prophet Muhammad’s favourite dishes, and is an essential part of the Iftar meal.

Gulai Kambing Aceh is a goat curry and a speciality of Aceh, a province at the northern end of Sumatra with the largest concentration of Muslims in Indonesia. It is cooked for Iftar.

Kabab hommus is another essential Iftar food popular in Qatar and the UAE and is basically fritters made with chickpea flour and with pureed tomatoes for a more intense flavour, not to mention the herbs and seasonings.

Haleem is yet another popular dish during Ramzan, with the Hyderabadi version arguably the most famous of the lot.

These are among the more than 300 recipes included in “Feast: Food of the Islamic World”, which is a comprehensive and dazzling mosaic of Islamic food culture across the globe.

The book, authored by London-based chef-food writer Anissa Helou, represents an extraordinary journey through place and time, travelling from Senegal to Indonesia via the Arab, Persian, Mughal or North African heritage of so many dishes.

This exploration of the foods of Islam begins with bread and its myriad variations, from pita and chapatti to Turkish boreks and Lebanese fatayer. From humble grains and pulses come slow-cooked biryanis, Saudi Arabia’s national dish of lamb kabsa and jewelled rice dishes from Iran and Pakistan.

There are also instructions for preparing a whole lamb or camel hump alongside recipes for traditional dips, fresh salads and sharp pickles. And there are sugary sweet treats suitable for births, weddings, morning coffee and after dinner.

The Muslim world whose recipes the author has included in the book, published by Bloomsbury, follows the same arc more or less as that of the conquests during the expansion of Islam: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt in North Africa, finishing in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India in South Asia, and Xinjiang province and Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

In between are Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey and Iran in the Levant; the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Arabian Gulf. On the fringes are countries where the influences are more diffuse, such as Zanzibar, Somalia, Senegal, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia.

According to the author, it wasn’t until the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 and 1261-1517), when Muslims started to develop a rich culinary tradition.

“The Abbasid caliphs favoured Persian chefs – the Persians already had splendid courts and a rich culinary tradition – and these chefs brought a whole new culinary knowledge with them, which they then adapted to the taste of their new masters,” she writes.

She says the next great Muslim empire was that of the Ottomans (1299-1922/1923) who established Istanbul as the capital and with them, a new culinary influence was born.

“Their cooks introduced many innovations and were among the first to quickly adopt new world ingredients.”

Helou says that the Mughals founded a refined dynasty that owed a debt to Persian culture. “This was evident in their art and literature and in their cooking, which they made their own by using local ingredients and techniques, and using an impressive number of spices, which they almost always toasted before use.”

The recipes Helou has included in her book are mostly from countries where these three culinary traditions have developed.

She says from the birth of a child to the circumcision of boys to marriage to burying the dead, every occasion in Islam is marked with special dishes that celebrate, commemorate or comfort, as the case may be.

On food during Ramzan, she says the menu changes according to where one is.

“In the Arabian Gulf, the fast is first broken with dates and water before moving on to the main meal,” she says.

“Then people pray before sitting at the table to partake of their first meal of the day. In the Levant, people break their fast with apricot leather juice, fattoush (a mixed herb and bread salad) and/or lentil soup. In the Maghreb, soup is the first thing people eat after sunset, whereas in Indonesia they break their fast with sweet snacks and drinks known as takjil.”