NCP, Sena lock horns over Akhtar book

Worried that the Sharad Pawar-led NCP may steal a march over the Shiv Sena in connection with Shoaib Akhtar's autobiography which reportedly contains controversial remarks about Sachin Tendulkar, Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray asked Dilip Vengsarkar to keep away from the book release function.

Akthar's autobiography was to be released at a function in Mumbai on Saturday. However, the event was cancelled even as the 'Rawalpindi Express' gave interviews to the electronic media about the book.

Akhtar has lashed out against his own team members in the book and is understood to have made remarks about the Indian batting master, who he claimed was afraid of his bowling as the delivery speed was over 150 kph. Uddhav is believed to have sent instructions to Vengsarkar to keep away from the controversial cricketer as Akhtar's remarks against Tendulkar have triggered a global backlash. Former Pakistan captain Wasim Akram has ridiculed the remarks and said it was an attempt to market his book before its official release on Sunday.

Full report here Times of India

Girish Karnad's story, in his own words

The autobiography of Kannada playwright and Jnanpith Award winner Girish Karnad was released here on Sunday by Prajavani editor K.N. Shanth Kumar.

Titled Aadaadtha Ayushya (life moves on while playing), the book is Mr. Karnad's memoirs of the first half of his life. Its title has been inspired by Da.Ra. Bendre's famous lines, a release has said.

The memoirs run into 350 pages, and are divided into 11 chapters named after places where Mr. Karnad spent his life.

On the occasion, the playwright read out a section about his early life in the United Kingdom as a student, and his take on pub culture in Britain. Stating that the number of pubs in Britain was on a decline, he said: “A Britain without pubs is not Britain at all for me.”

Recalling his association with the publishers, Mr. Karnad said: “Manohara Grantha Mala published my first book in 1961 and 50 years later, my autobiography has been published by them.”

Antarangada Mrudanga, a compilation of essays by Narahalli Balasubramanya; Hole Makkalu, a novel by Bidarahalli Narasimhamurthy; and Na Badukalikke Ollepa, a collection of short plays with only two characters penned by Lohit Naiker; were also released by Mr. Kumar.

Full report here Hindu

This will be a shock for elites: Bush

Former US President George W. Bush has said that he is enjoying his life of not being in the limelight at the White House. Speaking at a scholarship benefit for the University of Mobile in Alabama: Bush said: “I loved being your president, but frankly, I’m having the time of my life not being your president.”

The former President also gave a preview of his soon-to-be released memoir Decision Points, and said that writing the book was an “interesting experience”.

“I have written a book. This will come as a shock for some of the elites. They didn’t think I could read a book, much less write one,” The New York Post quoted Bush, as saying.

“Here are the stories, and you can decide what you would have done. It’s not judgmental. It’s a book that tries to describe the environment in which I was honored to be your president,” he added.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Speaker gets his tongue back

Somnath Chatterjee had once lamented that after becoming Speaker he hardly spoke in Parliament: “Now I only use two sentences: ‘Please go back to your seat’ and ‘Please sit down!’”. If you have watched Lok Sabha proceedings, you would understand his exasperation. But like a good headmaster facing unruly schoolkids, Chatterjee spiritedly persisted in his attempts at managing rowdy parliamentarians. Now the distinguished advocate and parliamentarian once famed for his perceptive speeches has got his tongue back and has given us a personal account of his times in his autobiography, Keeping the Faith.

Contaminated by media hype, I expected it to be a tell-all book about his expulsion from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which he had served diligently for four decades. Happily, the book is not about that. He has one chapter on it, 18 pages in an almost 400-page book. Even more happily, that chapter does not disappoint.

This is Chatterjee’s story of the politics of his times. It starts with his father N.C. Chatterjee’s college days, curves through his success as a lawyer and parliamentarian, sweeps through Somnath Chatterjee’s own childhood and youth, his training at the Bar in Cambridge, England, and his joining politics. We get glimpses of his family life in the brief, matter-of-fact way that comrades admit to having families.

Full report here Deccan Chronicle

An 'interloper's' view of diplomacy

Since 2007, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has been implementing a much-needed plan to double the size of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) from its woefully small number of about 620 when this decision was taken. No country with over 100 diplomatic missions around the world functions with less than 1,000 executive or diplomatic rank officials. Mexico, with 80 missions (and 70-odd consulates), has around 1,030 and it is seen as a small service. India has over 120 missions — and more are added each year — besides over 40 consulates.

One expansion method is to step up induction via the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams, and this is underway. From an average annual recruitment of less than 14 in 2000-05, 30 are now being taken and the number will rise to 35 in 2012. Too big a recruitment surge will produce a “bulge” that will be hard to handle as soon as the first set of promotions come up. The other method, tried rarely, is to take in some at mid-career levels. Understandably, the IFS views this with serious reserve, both as a dilution of standards and a threat to promotions for those who entered via the traditional UPSC route.

This book by B S Das, despite its title, is relevant to this discussion, given that he made a singular success of his diplomatic career although many initially saw him as “interloper” from the police service. If such quality of talent is available at mid-career levels, the IFS need not fear. Alas, individuals of the competence plus the integrity and modesty of Das are all too few.

Full report here Business Standard

Anne Frank book unveils letters, photos

More than 6,000 letters, photographs, and documents said to be found recently in the attic of the Frank family home are being transformed into a new book, Treasures from the Attic, set to be released in November 2010.

The Bookseller (bookseller.com) reports the book will include letters from Anne Frank's father, Otto, when he was held in Auschwitz as well as his descriptions of the search for his family after the Second World War and his discovery of Anne's diaries.

"Treasures from the Attic reads like a novel: it's an epic, fateful, family saga, and tells the full story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war," stated Michael Dover, editor-in-chief of the book's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. "It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation, and the concentration camps. And through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary. It's one of those unique documents that portrays innocence and humanity, suffering and survival in the starkest and most moving terms."

Full report here Hindustan Times

A sky of inky tint

When a painterly eye combines with the quill or pen, the outcome is quite striking, particularly in the narration of memoirs. Interestingly, though Indians started writing about their lives by the second half of the 19th century, hardly any appeared to be familiar with the paintbrush or pencil; at best, as a mandatory acceptance of the new visual medium of photography, a studio portrait of the author might appear as the frontispiece. On the other hand, to explore the Indian countryside and its growing urban areas with a paintbrush or early colour-pencils was not unusual for British civil servants, doctors and engineers; several combined this interest with photography, the latter often a requirement of their jobs. A handful of women — often skilled, amateur watercolourists — has left behind a rich legacy of memories brought alive by visual images. While Charlotte Canning inherited a tradition of combining memory with image from Emily Eden and Fanny Parks, she also embellished her writings with photographs. An accomplished photographer (in some of the handful that survives from the thousands she took), she emphasized composition, backdrop and overall effect.

In A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning, the writer of popular history, Charles Allen, has put together engaging gleanings from the first vicereine of India’s paintings, journals and letters about her life in this country. In 1842, Charlotte Canning had been appointed Lady of the Bedchamber by Queen Victoria, an honour that meant that she had to wait upon the woman who was to become Empress of India. When, by the end of 1855, the Cannings were on their way by sea to India, where Charles was to become governor-general, Charlotte initiated a tradition of regular letter-writing to the queen that was to last for over five years.

Full report here Telegraph

Hindujas cleared by Blair book

If I were Srichand (“SP”) Hinduja, I would rush out to buy the entire print run of Tony Blair’s memoirs, A Journey, which effectively gives him a clean chit over the “Hinduja passports scandal”.

The former prime minister reveals that there was really no scandal although the crisis led to the resignation in 2001 of Peter (now Lord) Mandelson — for the second time — from his cabinet.

I bought a copy at W.H. Smith, the newsagents, for £12.50, which is 50 per cent off.

“As it happened there was no reason why S.P. Hinduja should not have been given a passport — he qualified, and as a wealthy and successful businessman, there was no issue about whether he could support himself,” declares Blair.

Full report here Telegraph

First excerpts of Tony Blair memoir

Extracts from Tony Blair's memoir A Journey are set to be posted online, according to an announcement made in The Bookseller. The excerpts will be the first to be made available in advance of the book's September 1 UK publication.

A Journey will cover Blair's  experiences while serving ten years as British prime minister. Blair's UK publisher Cornerstone plans to post excerpts on www.tonyblairjourney.co.uk, a website devoted to the book, just ahead of publication the following morning.

According to The Bookseller, Amazon has said A Journey is "on target to become biggest political memoir of all time on Amazon.co.uk," surpassing presales of Peter Mandelson's The Third Man, the site's current most successful politican memoir, which was released in July.

Blair is making an international tour to promote A Journey, which is due out in the UK on September 1 and in the US a day later. E-book and audio versions will be sold alongside the hardcover edition.

Full report here Hindustan Times

One for the caregiver’s bookshelf

Andrea Gillies’s memoir, Keeper, trails awards and awed reviews, and I can see why. Though I wasn’t looking forward to still another account of life with deepening dementia, I read this one in a day. Gillies’s saga, subtitled One House, Three Generations and a Journey into Alzheimer’s, unfolds on a blustery peninsula in northern Scotland, where she and her husband, their three children and his ailing parents have all moved into a drafty Victorian house miles from anywhere.

Gillies’s father-in-law can barely walk; her mother-in-law, Nancy, is already paranoid and obstreperous. As the author, a journalist, lays out her plan to restore the overgrown garden and take lovely walks by the sea while working at home, caring for old and young and running a bed and breakfast, I could feel my anxiety rising.

How, exactly, was one mortal supposed to manage all that?
As readers here have reason to suspect, unhappy surprises lie ahead. But I kept reading because Gillies is such a gorgeous writer, because Nancy is so compelling in her ferocity, and because their relationship — part dance, part duel — is hard to look away from.

‘I am Bhutto too'

Dynasty seems to rest easy on her shoulders. Fatima Bhutto, in Delhi recently for the launch of her book, is out to prove that while lives can be erased easily in a politically volatile country like Pakistan, memories cannot. Her attempt to get at the truth behind her father Murtaza's death takes her through some of the most explosive incidents in Pakistan's dynasty politics and contemporary history...

No conceit, not a trace of arrogance. Her speech is clear, and for a large part, bright; her eyes, though a shade sad, are luminous. Hope has not died young. Sitting at New Delhi's Taj Mahal hotel, every now and then she pauses to adjust those curly locks so defiant as to cast a shadow over her well-lined eyes. One look at her pearly smile and you could almost think of her as another sprightly young woman from across the border. Appearances, however, beautiful, can be deceptive. But really, dynasty seems to rests easy on Fatima Bhutto's slender shoulders. With a name like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in her family chart, not to forget her papa Murtaza or wadi bua Benazir Bhutto, really, life must be a series of luxuries for Fatima, now beginning to be known as Fatima, the writer, but equally comfortable with being Bhutto too. But hey, dynasty is no guarantee of peace and contentment. Forget luxuries of life, in her family, life itself has been a luxury, with all her near and dear ones — Zulfiqar and Murtaza — and those near without being dear — Benazir — dying young.

Full report here Hindu

There's blood in Fatima Bhutto's ink

Fatima Bhutto’s first book Songs of Blood and Sword, a saga of Pakistan’s most famous family and an insider’s account of the violent events that rocked it from time to time, is making waves across the world.

In Bangalore to talk about her book, the 28-year-old author reveals that she is loving the fact that she is the Indian media’s current darling.

“I’ve got overwhelming support in India,” she says, her voice a cultured burr with a distinct American twang, easily explained by her long sojourn in the West – she studied at Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. “I think a large part of this support comes from the fact that I represent the antithesis to power. People are fascinated by power, but they are also suspicious of it,” she says.

It is a fascination that is easily understood. Her genealogy – boldly printed on the cover of her book – explains it all. While you wait to delve into the blood-splattered history of her famous family, you get a taste of things to come when Fatima is described as ‘granddaughter to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, executed 1979’, ‘daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, assassinated 1996’ and ‘niece to Benazir Bhutto, assassinated 2007’. It is very clear who is telling this story, and why.

Full report here DNA

‘Benazir thought Pakistanis owed her a blood debt’

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s granddaughter, and Benazir Bhutto’s niece, writer Fatima Bhutto has an uneasy relationship with her political pedigree. Estranged from her aunt uptill her 2007 assassination, the 27-year-old keeps a distance from political involvement. Her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword, traces the Bhuttos’ history, returning to the day her father Murtaza was gunned down by Karachi police in 1996. From Karachi, in a phone interview with ANIRUDDHA SHANKAR, she speaks candidly on Benazir and Pakistan’s political prospects. Excerpts:

The tale of your father Murtaza Bhutto’s killing has been recounted so often in the press. In interview after interview and even now, in Songs of Blood and Sword  you have returned to that fateful day. What effect has this had on you? How has this whole history shaped you -- are there aspects of your personality you can directly attribute to this? 
I think that at a very young age, you come to realise that such incidents are far more common than once one thought. Whether it’s the killing of Amadou Diallo in New York, who was shot 19 times or Jean Charles de Menezes in London after 7/11, you come to realise that people in power can commit acts of terrible violence with little repercussion. I think that retelling his story and setting out to discover his life really opened my eyes.

When you were growing up, what did being a Bhutto mean to you?
Not very much, really. I grew up outside Pakistan in Damascus, Syria and being a Bhutto meant nothing to the people there. They could barely pronounce the name. (laughs) When I did come back to Karachi, I encountered a bit of curiosity from schoolmates but that’s about it. We were never made to feel like we were special or different children.

Full report here Tehelka

‘Benazir always kept aloof from her family’

At what point do the personal and public meet? How is objectivity even possible when your dearest Papa is killed and you are not even allowed to file an FIR? Can you combat the president of the country, whom you suspect of having a role in the act? Her columns are about the denial of human rights and the like. Her poems, written from when she was 12, are about violence, a cry for justice. If the world ever needed documentation of the lawlessness that pervades Pakistan, Fatima Bhutto almost epitomises the daily travesties. Her just released memoir to her father is called Songs of Blood and Sword. So nothing prepares you for the cheerful, almost effervescent, and diminutive, not to forget vegan author with a strong sense of hope in her land’s future that you encounter over soup and dimsums. Suman Tarafdar came away with quite a few notions demolished. Excerpts:

Given that you learned a lot more about your father while rese arching the book, somethings even hurtful, was it as much a catharsis as a reigniting of wounds?
It was a very important journey for me to go on, not just to bring out the truth behind my father’s murder, but also other murders, which you don’t hear about. Also for my brother Zulfikar, who was six when my father was killed. I was 14 and lucky to have all those years. I wanted to uncover things for him. I met all these people he had known. I made a lot of discoveries and thought of him as alive when I was working on the book.

The idea of the book came in 2004 as the tenth anniversary of my father’s death was going to come up in 2006. Ten years and no justice, no safety, nothing. Despite telling my father just before he died that I would write about him, earlier I had never felt ready. By 2006 I had started interviewing, and started writing in 2008. The writing process took two years.

Full interview here Financial Express

Fatima Bhutto says her blood froze twice

Fatima Bhutto says in her recently published book that her blood froze the day when Asif Ali Zardari was elected president of the country and her blood again froze when Asif Ali Zardari, during his address to the joint session of parliament, paused and asked for a moment of silence in honour of death of his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto.

She said that Zardari’s election to president prompted to send her younger brother Zulfi abroad, fearing for his safety.

She says that inspite of the violence her family has suffered, including the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto, she “could never leave” the country.

“Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away,” she writes in her just-published memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan born poetess and writer. She studied at the Columbia University in the United States, and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She currently writes columns for some newspapers. Fatima is every inch a staunch Pakistani. Her book has appeared just a week before the death anniversary of her grandfather.

Full report here News

Bhutto scion takes on America on Indian soil

Fiercely critical of the continuing American drone attacks on the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, prominent political commentator and Bhutto family scion Fatima Bhutto has blamed US interference for the continuance of India-Pakistan problems as well as the dropping of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project.

“The history of American involvement in Pakistan involves playing Pakistan against India. They give both of us money, they take away money from one, and threaten the other. First we had British, who divided and ruled us, and now we have the Americans,” Fatima Bhutto told Deccan Herald in an exclusive interview here on Saturday.

In the country on a multi-city tour to launch and promote Songs of Blood and Sword, a book which explores the Bhutto family saga, particularly the assassination of her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto during the prime ministership of her aunt Benazir Bhutto, the author-columnist is of the view that the gas pipeline could have been a major catalyst in bringing peace.

Full report here Deccan Herald

Fatima claims aunt Benazir had a split personality

At 27, Fatima Bhutto isn't busy typing out status updates on Facebook, which she insists she loathes. Instead, she has spent the last six years writing a "love letter" to her father in which she has resurrected him, 14 years after his assassination, and held her aunt and uncle responsible for his tragic end.

In the Capital for the launch of her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin), Fatima made it clear that she has no love lost for her aunt, Pakistan's slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, the country's President.

On a day when a constitutional reforms package striking at Zardari's powers was tabled in Pakistan's National Assembly, Fatima said, "We don't need a President like Zardari. We need someone who is clean and honest, committed to public service, whose qualifications for ruling 180 million people is more than the fact that his wife was once the Prime Minister." Fatima's father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, brother of Benazir Bhutto, who was then Prime Minister of Pakistan, was killed by the police in a burst of gunfire just outside his Karachi home on September 20, 1996. Mir Murtaza, who was then a member of Pakistan's National Assembly, died along with six others.

Full report here India Today

Zardari tried to bribe my father: Fatima Bhutto

Asif Ali Zardari attempted to bribe his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto to swing a deal in the Middle East at a time when his estranged sister Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan's prime minister but was roundly rebuffed, Murtaza's daughter Fatima Bhutto writes in her just released memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword.

Zardari was accused of plotting Murtaza's murder but had been acquitted of the charge.

The book, published by Penguin, comes at a time when Zardari is set to be deprived of his sweeping powers through a constitution amendment being tabled in parliament on Friday to transfer to the prime minister major powers like the appointment of armed forces chiefs and reduce the president to a titular head of state.

"During a state trip to Syria during Benazir's first government and while we were still in exile there, Zardari had gone so far as to ask Papa to facilitate a deal he was considering in the Middle East, offering him a cut of the profits," Fatima writes.

Full report here Hindustan Times

REVIEW: Songs of Blood and Sword

REVIEW

Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir
Fatima Bhutto
Viking
Rs 699
Pp 480
ISBN: 9780670082803
Hardback

Blurb
In September 1996 a fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father, Murtaza, was murdered along with six of his associates.

In December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, Fatima’s aunt, and the woman she had publicly accused of ordering her father’s murder, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world’s best known political dynasties.

Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of the Bhuttos, a family of rich feudal landlords who became powerbrokers in the newly created state of Pakistan; the epic tale of four generations of a family and the political violence that would destroy them. It is the history of a family and nation riven by murder, corruption, conspiracy and division, written by one who has lived it, in the heart of the storm,

The history of this extraordinary family mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself, and the quest to find the truth behind her father’s murder has led Fatima to the heart of her country’s volatile political establishment. Finally Songs of Blood and Sword is about a daughter’s love for her father and her search to uncover, and to understand, the truth of his life and death.

Reviews
Bloodline Indian Express
Among the few common features shared by South Asian nations are dynastic power and political violence. The friction between the two is marked by frequent political assassinations in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. And nowhere has the intersection been bloodier than in what Pakistan’s Bhuttos had to bear. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto founded the political dynasty and gave it a powerful populist platform, the Pakistan People’s Party. More than three decades after his assassination, the PPP remains the only mass party with a following in all the provinces of Pakistan.

After he took charge as prime minister following the loss of Bangladesh in 1971, Bhutto helped promulgate a democratic constitution for Pakistan and founded its nuclear weapons programme. As ambition got the better of him, Bhutto was ousted in a coup, incarcerated and hanged by General Zia ul Haq in 1979. That was only the beginning of the Bhutto story, which is so much part of Pakistan’s larger tragedy.

In the name of the father Mint
Of all the stories available to human beings, none is as instantly fascinating as that of a powerful family riven down the middle, feuding in public view and throwing the entire world out of shape with its might. This storyline is central to our epics, and is often reprised by contemporary events, especially in feudal societies. In such cases, the testimony of any one participant inevitably turns the story into one of good versus evil—the stakes are too high for it to be anything else, but the thrill of receiving the inside story more than compensates for the lack of detachment in perspective.

Just such a story—long-awaited since the first metaphorical gunshots were fired in recent years—is served up by Songs of Blood and Sword, 28-year-old Fatima Bhutto’s angry and sometimes incoherent retelling of the macabre lives and internecine warrings of the first family of Pakistani politics, the Bhuttos of Sindh.

Fatima Bhutto bares her famous, jinxed family Financial Express
In the September of 1996, the day her father turned 42, Fatima Bhutto said to him: “Write a book about your life, Papa. It would be so interesting.” He laughed and then said quietly, “You’ll do it for me.” His eyes were sad. A growing nervousness had been rumbling inside her for days. Two days later, Mir Murtaza Bhutto was dead. On the 12th anniversary of Murtaza’s death, Asif Zardari was sworn in as President of Pakistan. He had been acquitted of Murtaza’s murder in the build-up to the presidency.

Daughter of dynasty  TOI  Crest
Though supposed to be a daughter's memories of her father, the book is actually the tragedy-filled story of the Bhuttos, "the ill-starred dynasty" that has dominated the political scene in Pakistan for four decades. Like a good investigative journalist, Fatima has put together an interesting, gripping story, though there are very few new revelations in the book. Almost everything, including Zardari's "role" in Murtaza's death, has been reported and written about earlier.

In fact, the book is an attack on Zardari whom Fatima blames for everything wrong with Pakistan today. And that's the problem with the book. Fatima fails to see anything wrong with the Bhuttos. They are presented as martyrs who died for Pakistan. The fact that all of them died in either pursuit of power or during internal power struggles has been ignored by the writer. With their feudal, arrogant attitude, the Bhuttos have been part of the problem and not the solution. But the writer fails to address this issue.

I can never leave Pakistan: Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto, the niece of slain former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, says that in spite of the violence her family has suffered, including the killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto, she “could never leave” the country.
“Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away,” she writes in her just-published memoir Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin/Rs.699).

“Sometimes, when it’s this late at night (she writes in the Epilogue dated April 2009), I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does.

“But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of mynah birds. And I know I could never leave,” Fatima writes.

Full report here Thaindian