Smoke on the water

In the second of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy, Ghosh is at the pinnacle of his prowess. It’s a triumph, a truly global novel

We’re just halfway into the year, but if there’s one novel in 2011 that will make the pulse race and the mind wonder with sweep, scale, power and a riveting, multi-threaded story, it is Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke. Coming three years after Sea of Poppies, which was the first volume in the Ibis trilogy, the middle panel of the triptych is even vaster, denser with action and richer in backdrop.

Poppies was set primarily in the Calcutta of 1838—the fulcrum of the British empire in the east, where trade was the lubricating agent of colonization—and on board the Ibis, transporting indentured workers to Mauritius, along with convicts. But River of Smoke abandons this centre, for the most part, stretching its action from Mauritius in the West to Canton in the East, with passing cameos by other parts of the world, such as the island of St Helena where Napoleon is exiled after losing the Battle of Waterloo, which puts in an appearance in the novel.

Much of the action continues to take place on board merchant ships—either in mid-voyage, or anchored off the coast of China, as events come to a slow boil in the world’s largest market for the opium that British and Indian traders make a killing on. The line from the poppy fields of eastern India is thus drawn all the way to Canton. Here, local opium dealers supplying a willing population of addicts not only help reverse the trade deficit of the British empire with China—while adding to the wealth of individual opium traders from all countries who’ve joined the gold rush—they also lead the Chinese empire to clamp down on opium imports. The outcome, of course, will be the Opium Wars, in not one but two editions.

Full review here Mint 

Memories of Mother

The Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, a pictorial biography of Mother Teresa, was released at the Oxford Bookstore on earlier this month. The book has 124 photographs of Mother in various moods as she went about her daily life.

“None is a formal photograph. I wanted to show what Mother was like,” said Sunita Kumar, who collected the photographs and wrote the text.

The photographs have been procured from across the world. “The proceeds from the book sales will go to the Missionaries of Charity,” added Kumar, who was closely associated with Mother for 32 years.

Full report here Telegraph

Tagore: The dream of a child

Celebrating the 150th year of Rabindranath Tagore, we take a look at his writings, his poems and movies.

In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1915, he was awarded a knighthood by the British, but he returned it four years later to mark his protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He was a writer, poet, novelist, educator and an early advocate of Indian Independence. This year we celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Born in Calcutta, Tagore was the son of a religious reformer and scholar. His most important works have been written in Bengali, but he often translated them into English. When he was 70-years-old, he began to paint. He was a composer too, and set his poems to music.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls…….
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

These immortal words were written by an Indian who stood tall in the world of literature. His writings were translated and read all over the world. He wrote poems, plays, essays, stories and novels. He wrote and tuned songs. He was also an artist and a patriot.

We are talking of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Full report here Hindu

Amish Tripathi talks about life at IIM-C

MBAUniverse.com brings to you exclusive interview with IIM Calcutta alumnus, leading finance and marketing professional and author Mr. Amish Tripathi. Mr. Tripathi’s debut book The Immortals of Meluha  has recently been published and is rocking the bestselling charts across leading bookstores in India. In this interview Mr. Tripathi talks about his life at IIM Calcutta, key issues confronting Indian management education sector and what MBA aspirants should focus on to achieve success in life. Excerpts from the interview:

First of all, please tell us what inspired you to write a book on Lord Shiva?
Actually, I started the book as a philosophy book. The key philosophy in it was the nature of evil. But I got some good advice from my brother and sis-in-law that a pure philosophy book would have a narrower audience. The suggestion was that I should write a thriller/adventure and let the philosophy come across with the story. This would have a mainstream appeal. Now if I have to write an adventure on the nature of evil, who better to be the hero than the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva.

Tell us about your life as a MBA student, as a marketing head of a big insurance company, and now as a writer? What all have been the learning at each of the aforementioned stages of your life till now?
Well, the MBA stage and my early career was quite different from what it is now. I guess we are trained to be competitive - maybe even slightly insecure. That is good for the career no doubt. But it is not good for our personal happiness. Writing the book has been transformational for me in that sense. I have become more balanced. I still work hard - but I am not obsessed with my position & status in the corporate world. I used to be a non-believer, but I have become a shiv bhakt now. I am much more appreciative of how kind fate has been to me, what a wonderful family I have. The book has been a blessing.

Full report here MBAUniverse

Creating a Classical Indian Canon

In the library sales from the crumbling houses of Calcutta, or Delhi, or the hill-station homes, the keen-eyed book-buyer would often come across sets of bound classics. These were usually in the printer’s binding — vellum, blue leather and gold — or occasionally bound in red with the owner’s initials stamped on the spine or on the frontispiece.

Over the decades, the contents of these classics changed. Everyman’s Library of classic works was a favourite, as was the Modern Library set; but depending on the owner’s tastes, you might have complete sets of histories, or the World’s Greatest Short Stories, or Masterpieces of World Literature, or a complete set of Greek mythology. You would very rarely find a similar set of Indian classics — individual books, almost always the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and perhaps the great poets or favourite Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali writers.

Full report here Business Standard 

Wayward city

Will Nimtala Ghat turn into Rabindra Ghat? If it does, it will be part of a great Calcutta tradition

Union minister of shipping Mukul Roy has expressed a desire to rename Nimtala Ghat as Rabindra Ghat. Some feel it would be apt, not as an honour to Rabindranath, but symbolically. A burning ghat named after Tagore would, with the right touch of morbidity, announce the final departure of Bengal’s greatest culture icon from contemporary life, which is happening unchecked anyway, irrespective of the number of Rabindrasangeets being remixed for the audience of multiplex Bong films.

But many more object to the idea, for many reasons.

Says writer Sunil Ganguly, one of the most vocal critics of the proposal: “Rabindranath was cremated at Nimtala Ghat. But that does not mean that the ghat’s name has to be changed.” Professor Swapan Chakraborty, who teaches English at Jadavpur University, agrees that the change is uncalled for. “If a change has to be made it should be to the name of some benefactor, such as with Kashi Mitrer Ghat, not of a celeb cremated there. Could one name a burial ground after someone buried there?” he asks.

Full report here Telegraph

A second shot

Back to one of his favourite subjects for a second time, Raghu Rai discovers how Calcutta has changed in 21 years

Twenty-one years after photo grapher Raghu Rai’s first book on the city, most jingle-jangle tin buses have made way for air-suspension, even air-conditioned, public transport. Glass-topped trams ply on concretized tram lines while swankier cars swish past the Ambassador. Post-plasma viewing experiences have replaced Uptron TV and terry-cotton bell-bottoms have been swapped for frayed denim. Even communism—a constant fellow traveller in the city’s contemporary life and a motif in Rai’s earlier book—has got some serious competition.

In the interregnum between Rai’s Calcutta, released in 1989, and his forthcoming Calcutta, Kolkata: It Never Begins… Never Ends…, to be released in September, it is not insignificant that Calcutta has become Kolkata—a city that is forcefully re-emerging from the debris and hubris of its colonial past. For the much-feted photojournalist though, the city’s present is decidedly about the continuation of its past.