Roots was sent to me by my dear sister who in turn was given this book by her friend Mukta. Just as it happens with every book that knocks at the doors of my existence, it stood outside for a long time before I opened the door.
Roots is one of those books that change your perspective of how you treat life and people, although I firmly believe that every kind of book possesses this monumental ability. That’s why I cannot read books piecemeal; they affect me a lot. There are a very few books that I have read, and almost every book has left its imprints upon my consciousness.
I wouldn’t call Roots a "literary experience"; it’s a journey, it’s a part of life that you spend with people struggling to survive through inhumanity, injustice, and existential void. It’s a story about how you sustain the warmth of life in the icy caverns of hopelessness so that even if individuals perish, generations survive. After having a child, I know what this means.
Roots is a story of a Mandinka warrior named Kunta Kinte from the Gambia, Africa, who is captured by slave traders, shipped to America under the most base conditions you can imagine as a human being, and then sold to further, interminable sufferings. His jungle instinct makes him run again and again and every time he is captured until his hope begins to fade like a twilight star. You can really feel the crushing of the soul. Here’s a human being full of dreams, knowledge and plans. He is sensitive, religious and philosophical. He has great plans for himself, his family and his village. He is healthy and strong and a trained warrior. And then he is captured, kept like a rat in a sewage wallowing in his own excreta and vomit and disease, beaten again and again, and chained in such a manner that he cannot even lie straight. Once bought, he is kept tied to a poll outside the house like a dog.
Slaves were kept like animals and in fact, worse than animals. Their white captors hated them with great severity. They were not supposed to have human feelings and needs. If you were a slave, total surrender was expected of you and even that too was considered your duty. You were to feel thankful if you were not beaten and humiliated even if you were loyal to your master. People were sold just like chicken. Your husband, wife, parent, sibling, child, friend, could be sold away any day and you could do nothing about it. Sometimes children were auctioned even before they were born. Anything could be done to your loved ones in front of your eyes and you could not intervene because if you did, your master could punish you in whatever way he wanted to, according to the law. Baffling? For the American whites it was as normal as eating chicken.
So under these conditions Kunta Kinte survives and gives rise to this epic story spanning many generations.
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Book lovers say that they have an emotional bonding with their books and they don’t prefer digital book readers. I love books; I don’t read them much but I do love them and I am possessive about them. I don’t like people taking away my books and try to get them back if I can. Still, if all the books are taken away from me and instead I am given an e-book reader in which I can digitally store all the books that I have and all the books that I can possibly read or refer to I won’t hesitate even for a single second.
I agree that books have an old world charm and nothing can compare to sitting in a cozy corner reading a beautifully written book. But books waste lots of paper. millions of trees are chopped off everyday to publish books and newspapers and paper, of course. I wouldn’t like so many trees being cut just because you “love” the feel of a real book in your hands.
As far as I know digital e-book readers are not only very easy to use they are also eco-friendly. Right now they are quite costly but I hope very soon their prices will come down. They are constantly working on developing technology that will produce near paper-thin screens so that you will feel like as if you are holding a paper and not a digital appliance. They won’t strain your eyes and you will be able to roll them and put them in your pocket.
So all those great libraries should be emptied of the priceless books they contain? I would say yes. The books begin to rot after a certain period. If they are digitally saved they will be preserved for countless future generations unless an unforeseen catastrophe destroys them. I’m not saying that we should destroy the libraries; they can still be used for reading and researching which is not possible anywhere else.
I haven’t written here for a long time; I want to write but have no idea what to write about so I’ll write about random things that have been happening in the world.
Taslima Nasreen
I’ve been reading the small news snippets for many days that the central government is making an all-out effort to make life hell for the author whose misfortune is that she has decided to take refuge in India. I wonder why she is still here when she can get shelter in some other, more liberal and democratic country. First she was thrown out by the West Bengal government and now the central government is putting pressure on her to keep a very low profile if she wants to remain in the country. She has been in a virtual house arrest — she cannot go anywhere, nobody can visit her, she cannot call anybody, and nobody can call her. Of course she has contacted every newspaper and TV news channel to pour out her heart and our external affairs minister was looking really upset when he talked to the reporters regarding how she is not heeding to the government’s advisory.
What stumps every freethinking person in the country is how the complete government machinery can be cowed down by a handful of fundamentalists? If nothing else then to just prove a point she should have been provided full security and she should have been allowed to move unrestricted. Why should the fundamentalists decide how a person should live in our country? It is utterly shameful for a country as big as India. We want to have the independence of possessing the nuclear warheads but we cannot ensure safety of a single person; isn’t it ironic?
IT people in Bangalore
A few months ago the people in Bangalore had a big problem with the poor street dogs and now they have a problem with the people working in the IT industry. The last week’s issue of the Outlook magazine talks about how the Bangaloreans hate the way the outsiders are sullying the original culture of the city. I think they should be left alone and all the other people and dogs should move out of the city. For all you know it could turn out to be a matter of life and death. Is it some city in India or Saudi Arabia/Iraq?
Shooting in Gurgaon
Recently two teenagers shot dead their classmate in a Gudgaon school. They were both I think 14-year-old and the main culprit had stolen his father’s revolver who in turn had been given the revolver by a neighbor who in turn, I think, had obtained the weapon illegally. I’m sure a lot has been written about the gun culture arriving in India and the teenagers emulating their American counterparts. Just like in America, the problem is not with the guns, it is with the society, the screwed up societal fabric that we are weaving. The father of the boy had himself taught him how to use the firearm. Violence is constantly glamorized and justified in the media especially in films and on television. I recently realized how immune we have grown to violence around us when they showed a Sri Lankan woman entering an office and blowing herself up. I wasn’t shocked for even a second. Perhaps I have seen too much blood and gore on TV. But yes in many cases the availability of the weapon makes a big difference; the unfortunate boy would have been alive had the other boy had no access to the gun.
In this particular case the other problem was the bully culture; it is said that the dead boy used to bully the boys who shot him. I think bullying should be taken very seriously both by the school authorities and the parents and the children should be taught how to handle bullies without resorting to catastrophic means because by the end of the day you want a reformed bully and not a dead bully.
The recent movie we watched
A couple of weeks ago we watched “Om Shanti Om”. It is a movie you wouldn’t want to spend your money on, I mean it is not dull but it is not a well-made movie considering who all have acted in it. Deepika Padukone is a stunner as long as she doesn’t act and Shahrukh Khan looks stupid throughout the movie. They have tried to make fun of the stars of the 70s era but they have only succeeded in making a pathetic show of themselves. The script is drab, the acting is boring, and even the direction is immature.
This reminds me — a few days ago I was watching a Rajendra Kumar song and was just wondering how old those actors used to look: he always looked like a hero in his 30s and he often acted like one and that made him look graceful. Watch “Sangam” to know what I mean; the two male heroes and the heroine all look so mature. These days our heroes cross their 40s and still act like demented teenagers. But I would quickly like to add here that actors nowadays are far better than their older counterparts as far as the acting skills go.
My reading
For many months — yes, now it takes not days, not weeks, but months — I have been reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, an exceptional 19th-century French author. It is a big book, I mean, you can easily fit three novels in the amount of paper and text the book has used. In fact, while reading it I switched to another book “The Inheritance of Loss” by Anita Desai, and for a change I read the book almost in a single day. I wonder why “The Inheritance of Loss” got the Booker — it is nowhere near the other Booker books that I have read for instance, “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy and “The Midnight’s Children” by Salam Rushdie. Maybe they didn’t have a better writer this time.
Coming back to “The Count of Monte Cristo”: it’s basically a revenge saga, and I’m not reading it because I’m in love with the protagonist and the plot. I’m simply reading it because the author has written it exceptionally well and with lots of detail. He has turned his protagonist, the Count of Monte Cristo into a preternatural genius who falls into a mammoth fortune by chance. Okay, not completely by chance but still it sounds quite tedious sometimes. The plot moves very fast and the person who has written the introduction has rightly called Dumas the John Grisham of that time.
I haven’t been reading much newspaper these days because after getting up I’m always in a hurry to do my vocal music practice and after that I start working.
Should religious faith be unshakeable? Faith should never be blind, and this implies you cannot have faith without having true knowledge, as Gautam Buddha urged his followers to always ask questions and only believe when you really understand.
In a recent book (consisting of private letters) on Mother Teresa it’s been revealed that she suffered from doubts for long periods and she shared these doubts in her letters to her friends and as confessions. They are termed as periods of darkness where her faith shook and she doubted the existence of God. Of course she was tormented by her thoughts.
In a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.” [ the TIME link ]
But I think these thoughts are normal. She saw so much misery around her and for how long can one see Jesus among people ridden with wounds of leprosy? For how long can you embrace appalling misery to experience God, especially when you love those miserable people? For how long can you condone God? How do you make sense of all this? And sometimes when you cannot make sense of all this, doubts are natural.
Does this mitigate Mother Teresa’s aura as a spiritual, saintly person? I don’t think so. She could have easily kept her “darkness” wrapped inside her but she didn’t. She shared it with people. She sought answers, and I think that’s what real religion means: to seek answers. Religion doesn’t mean parroting hymns and prayers without understanding them. When you have doubts it means you actively think about your faith and you take it seriously, you respect it and you are concerned about it. Well-meaning doubt makes you a greater person, not a lesser person. In fact most of the religious fanaticism and fundamentalism surfaces when you cease to have religious doubts.
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As they say, if one door closes, many open. At least there will be some relief for him now. The Salman Rushdie - Padma Laxmi divorce was bound to happen, sooner or later. She always looked like a pile-on and Rushdie always looked bored in her company. Although some say that Rushdie is being dumped by Padma Laxmi, I think this is a good thing happening to him. Just imagine all the cockroaches fleeing away without you having to do anything.
She married him purely to use him as a career ladder and he did in fact help her at every stage. But if there is no talent, if there is no ability, no power in the world can help you succeed. I think finally she realized that he has done all he could have done and now there is no utility value in staying with him, fame and all. And she doesn’t seem to be losing much time.
If Salam Rushdie is feeling sad, he should use this sadness as an inspiration for his next book, write it, and get on with life.
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Update [June 19, 2007]: Rushdie knighthood ‘justifies suicide attacks’:
The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.
“This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ’sir’ title.”
Someone should kick their ass and tell these assholes that nothing justifies suicide attacks. If they are so much repulsed by Salman Rushdie or what he has written in his book, they should come up with a counter book. They should write their own version of The Satanic Verses and let the world know what was wrong with the original book. But then that’s a tougher task than blowing up people. Any moron can blow himself or the others up.
Update ends
Salman Rushdie has been knighted. And Iran obviously has a problem with that. Ah! The Muslims of the world have been downright insulted.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to grant Britain’s highest honor to Rushdie, who wrote the controversial novel “The Satanic Verses,” was an insult to the Muslim world.
“Awarding a person who is among the most detested characters in the Islamic society is obvious proof of anti-Islamism by ranking British officials,” said Hosseini during his weekly press conference.
Read the rest of this entry »
Not much. Well, the only difference is that Bal Thackeray doesn’t exhort his lampoons to kill authors: he only tells them to burn their books. Khomeini on the other hand asked for the head of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.
So what should the normal citizen do? Burn the copies of Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece Samna in which he has asked his “boys” to destroy the copies of Shivaji - The Hindu King in Muslim India, a book written by James Laine? I know this is not going to happen.
The best reply would be, read the book. The book should be read by as many people as possible. In fact, if possible, the book should be available for free for sometime. It should be gifted for all occasions: let it be a birthday gift, an anniversary gift, or just-for-the-heck-of-it gift.
And what is the government doing? I mean, you can just barge into any shop and pick up the copies and then burn them? A pathetic statement on our law and order situation.
It’s good that HC lifted the ban, but it reeks of dirty politics. If ban on this book can be lifted, then why not on The Satanic Verses too? It seems the government can antagonize the Hindus but not the Muslims. This is double standards.
Still, as a country, it’s shameful that people like Bal Thackeray exist amidst us and are considered respected figures. What moral ground do we have then to criticize the Taliban?
Sidney Sheldon, at the age of 89, died of pneumonia yesterday. I just read one book of his and I don’t remember its title. The book was gifted to me by a cousin who had found the book lying on the road somewhere. He couldn’t read English but he knew I could (back then, among the cousins, I think I was the only one reading English books). It was an obscure book and I neither liked the writing style nor the story so I never again read Sidney Sheldon.
But he was one of the most prolific writers of the century especially in the suspense genre. He was obviously not the Booker or Pulitzer types but he wrote the proverbial page turners and I think that’s what matters. Readers should like what they are reading and publishers should be able to make money off that writing. If you do these two things, you’re a successful author. He remarked:
“I try to write my books so the reader can’t put them down. I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It’s the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: Leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter.”
Touché.
Some of his notable novels included Rage of Angels, The Other Side of Midnight, and If Tomorrow Comes. Oh, I remember, I’ve read If Tomorrow Comes.
It was sad to read in today’s newspaper about the demise of Kamleshwar, one of the last respected, and considerably known Hindi authors. Personally I don’t like Hindi authors for their perpetually grim view of the world in general, Kamleshwar was among the few who are not always writing about the dying farmers of rural India (I’m not underplaying the severity). He was also distinct in the sense that people actually knew him.
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