Books that Got on my Non-fiction 2024 List

From Phansi Yard, My Year with the Women of Yerawada by Sudha Bharadwaj. Juggernaut Books.

An incredibly moving collection of 76 vignettes of women inmates the activist and lawyer met during her stay at Yerawada Jail. These are tales of extreme privation  — of 77 women, because we must include the author – written with much felicity and a remarkable  absence of bitterness. “She is different in the way political prisoners often are; they don’t come with a burden of guilt, they retain their dignity and encourage others to pluck up courage,“ writes Bharadwaj of another prisoner. She could well be describing herself.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury Publishers.

Here,  Dalrymple  posits that India`s connections to both East and West had laid the Golden Road many years before China`s Silk Road became a major trading route. By the time you are done reading of Buddhism`s spread across Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Java, Korea, Japan, all the way into China; how Hinduism cut a swathe through southeast Asia, culminating in the greatest Indic temple in the world, Angkor Wat; how Indian mathematical and astronomical theories made their way westwards to eventually reach Europe, you are not only convinced that we were indeed a trading superpower back in the day, you also feel a swell of pride at how adeptly India used its soft powers to influence people across the world.

 

The many lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit. Juggernaut Books.

Veteran journalist  Neha Dixit`s first book is  an excellent piece of reportage. There is no soft immersion involved here; we meet the protagonist of the book, Syeda,  and are taken along on a roller-coaster ride of her life and times. It is both humbling and shameful to see what little space the Syedas occupy, the social discrimination they face, and how little impact government policies have on them. Dixit`s work is richly sewn together with statistics,  all of which expose the hollowness of claims of inclusivity.

 

The Cobra`s Gaze by Stephen Alter. Aleph Books.

In an intense effort to show us the missing link between animals, birds and humans, how we perceive other species through our sensory bubble, project human expectations on them, and then proceed to exploit and destroy, Stephen Alter`s book is as much travel memoir as conservation textbook. There is much information but absolutely no preaching here on how we are putting the  big squeeze on animal habitats across the country, how overtourism in the wildlife parks cause untold damage to the species who inhabit them, how we need to get our act together vis-à-vis nature protection and conservation.

 

Knife by Salman Rushdie. Penguin Books.

The opening line of Knife is hard to beat: “At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” Grievously wounded in an   attack that lasted 27 seconds, the writer eventually emerged after a slow and   painful recuperation and recovery period having lost one eye, with one hand seriously damaged, a deep cut on his tongue, fluid collecting in one lung, a cancer scare,  and a host of attendant problems. Naturally, the refrain in his head is why,  and  it`s a  cry of despair from one who had a fatwa put on his life 33 years ago, and had only just stopped running and hiding.

 

City on Fire by Zayed Khan. HarperCollins Books.

The political becomes personal in this memoir, in which  journalist Zeyad Khan casts a largely dispassionate eye at his hometown Aligarh, a city of a million people in western UP. He tells  of the mohallas of the city which witness repeated violence expressed on different levels, starting with taunts, loud aggressive protests, stone-throwing, arson, physical attacks, and ending with acts of murder. The author shows how the normalisation of these violent cycles is the only way for Aligarh to move on and his  calls for forgiveness, co-existence, empathy cannot but fail to move readers.

 

H-Pop by Kunal Purohit. HarperCollins Books.

A chilling, compelling read wherein journalist Purohit shines a Klieg light on how the right wing uses pop culture to disseminate the most vicious kind of propaganda. We meet YouTube artistes, comedians, journalists, poets, who push the Hindutva agenda in the crudest, crassest manner possible, and reap gainful harvests, to no one`s real surprise. This is one scary playlist.

The Magical Age of Overthinking : Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell. Atria/One Signal Publishers.

Amanda Montell, linguist, writer, and podcast host delves into the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, and deconstructs the halo effect/ proportionality bias/ confirmation bias/ sunk cost fallacy,  all of which hobble us in our attempt to live a sane life in an  info overload age. Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope and forgiveness for our anxiety- riddled selves.

https://www.deccanherald.com/features/books/2024-a-year-in-books-3333783

This appeared in the Sunday section of the Deccan Herald of 29 December 2024.