Patriots and Partisans

Author - Ramachandra Guha
Genre - Politics, Society, Academic, Research, Media, Magazine, Congress, RSS, Communist Parties, BJP, Nehru, Gandhi, Mahatma, MK Gandhi, Press.
Source - Print
Rating - 4
Read - July 2015

The gift of Ramachandra Guha is to present serious academic discussions to us, reasonably well-read non-academics, in a tone that is neither academic nor over-simplistic. It is to his great credit that the reasonably well-read non-academic can actually read his points-of-view, and digest them well enough to create a coherent opposing view. Reading Ramachandra Guha is a gift - even if one disagrees vehemently. I was about to point out a few chapters that are must-reads, but there are way too many. Buy it. Read it.

Prothom Alo (First Light)

Author: Sunil Gangopadhyay

Genre: Historical Fiction, Bengali

Source: Print

Rating: 4

May 2015

Done with it. Have been struggling with this one for the last 5 months - started reading it on Jan 1st of this year. But 1000 pages of intricate story-line takes its toll. Was really tempted to do a Part 1 and Part 2 to ensure I do not fall back in the reading challenge. But I will desist.

Anyway, about the book now. For better or for worse, Sunil Gangopadhyay, who had been a trendsetter of a poet, will be remembered as the chronicler of Kolkata, the city. The time between 1850-1930 'odd, is a favorite of the Bengali - this was the time of the Bengali Renaissance; a magical, mysterious time. Characters, larger than life, brilliant, iconoclastic, innovative, abounded. And all this was done while the society was slowly moving away from stifling orthodoxy (and orthodoxy was not letting go without a fight!). 'Shei Shomoy' was the first book of Sunil Gangopadhyay's chronicling the time, and I have reviewed it here in this blog. Prothom Alo is the second. And it will forever stay in the shadows of the former. It shouldn't - the characters that inhabit this book are the more well known - Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar, Aurobindo Ghose and the Anushilan Samity, even the Mahatma. It's just that the base on which the stories of these great lives are built, the doomed love story of Bharat and Bhumisuta, is not a comparison to the magnificence of Nabin Chandra Singha in the former.
But standalone, this is a fantastic book. You can see the expert hand of the writer chronicling the time, treating the characters, famous, known, and unknown, with extreme felicity. For a huge, huge book, this is extremely readable. 

India After Gandhi

Author - Ramachandra Guha

Genre - History, Politics, Society, Non-fiction

Source - Print

Rating - 5

November 2013

Re-read. This should be re-read once every year. Masterful. A page-turner, it reads like a thriller. Even on the second read.