Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: A Secret History of Compassion by Paul Zacharia

Sending up everything and everyone A scathing look at life. The reader`s first reaction on reading A Secret History of Compassion is to muse over the probability that Paul Zacharia wrote up the story, then dipped it into a vat of caustic soda. Everything is grist for his mill, or rather pen, here: writers,…

Book review: Beyond the Boulevards by Aditi Sriram

Beyond the Boulevards, Aleph Books. A monograph on Pondicherry by Aditi Sriram, this was a nice enough read but all through, it had the reader…well, this reader at least …forever searching between the words for something more, je ne sais quoi. For the ardent Pondyphile, and there are so many of us, it`s all there:…

Book review: Daughters of the Sun by Ira Mukhoty

Behind the zardosi drapes This wonderful book is a detailed riposte to the traditional image of harems as a place of hothouse sex, with special focus on the Mughal harems. In her foreword, the author states that accounts of the Oriental harem are usually a lurid and sometimes fantastical mix of bazaar gossip, stray gleanings…

Book review: Doab Dil by Sarnath Banerjee

Of matters this and that A contemplative graphic novel filled to the brim with dil. The cover of Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil tells a story of its own, well before the reader reaches the part of the book that provides any context for it. The clouds, the woman on top of the rocks with her…

Book review: The Shooting Star by Shivya Nath

The Shooting Star by Shivya Nath. Penguin Books. It`s been just under five years that Shivya Nath has impinged herself on the traveller`s consciousness and made us all compulsive readers of her blog posts. The Shooting Star (Penguin Books) is a lovely travel memoir, exuberantly soaring one moment reflective the next, curious and questioning the…

Book review: The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S Laskar

R is for racism `Where are you really from?` That question, with its inherent prejudice and bias, lies at the heart of Devi S. Laskar’s debut novel, The Atlas Of Blues And Reds. It is not the American Dream but the American nightmare of racism that is centrestage here. At the start of the story,…

Book review: Requiem in Raga Janki by Neelum Saran Gaur

A mellifluous tale, this rich re-telling of a diva`s saga. The unidentified narrator of the tale is an elderly singer pushing 90 from what we can discern, who sings for her supper these days in a new way…she tells the tales of the famous courtesan Jankibai Illahabadi. However, she firmly states, `at my age things crowd…

Book review: A Bend in the River of Life by Marianne de Nazareth

A Bend in the River of Life by Marianne de Nazareth. Leadstart Books. Now here`s a dilemma. Can one label a book that deals with the onset and relentless progress of Parkinsonism in a set of parents, a happy read? Impactful, yes. Informative, very much so. Disturbing, well, that`s a given, dealing as it does…

Book review: Fortune`s Soldier by Alex Rutherford

History as entertainment The story is as much about the two men as it is about the insidious way that the East India Company worked to eventually establish British rule in India. The friendship of two men, the fictional Nicholas Ballantyne and the actual historical figure of Robert Clive, forms the basis of the story…

Book review: Killing Time in Delhi by Ravi Shankar Etteth

A capital send-up Tongue firmly lodged in side of cheek, the author spins a tale about the denizens of Delhi. In this, Ravi Shankar Etteth`s seventh book, he has turned the spotlight mercilessly on the haut monde, the seriously wealthy and even more seriously powerful, the wheelers and dealers, the circles that trade in…