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Godan by Munsi Premchand
Munsi Premchand is the greatest Indian novelist.And Godan shows his ability to produce the realism of Indian society.Any classical become more relevant with time same is the case with Godan.
Godan is a hindi word which can be interpreted as ‘charity of cow’.The cow in the book is symbolic for all Hori’s problems. He believes that the luxury of having a cow will solve everything, but it actually makes it all worse. At first everyone is excited about the cow, but soon problems arise; Hori’s brothers believe he bought the cow instead of helping his family; one of the brothers poisons the cow and it dies. From this moment, the Hori’s life changes. The cow that was suppose to bring goodness separates the family. Hori realizes that he cannot escape the life that has been given to him by birth. The cow equals Hori’s dream, but for a peasant in India the dream is not something achievable.
The caste system is also at work in the book; Hori has a job that he was born with; Gobar disrespects his father by running away and getting a job outside his caste; even when Gobar returns with money, proving that he has made something of himself, Hori’s pride and belief in the caste makes him unwilling to forgive.
Hori believes in the old way of life, but still he wants the cow because he dreams that things can get better. Hori’s son leaves his family in search of a better life; he doesn’t care about abandoning his caste and furthering his heritage. The city equals a very different kind of life for Gobar,it’s a place where Muslim’s and Hindu’s work together and seems at first a place where one can succeed. Gobar, however, eventually realizes like his father that he cannot escape the hardship. Even in the city where dreams seemed achievable, Gobar fails.
There is little hope in future, but there is redemption in a character like Hori who does good, despite the expatiation to do bad. Premchand creates a character with Hori that is like thousands who had the same struggle but survived.
Such a Long Journey – Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry, A master story teller, he grips the reader with easy paced narrative. He uses humour and brilliant characterisation to produce most vibrant characters.
Gustad Noble, a Parsi in his mid-forties. Years after the collapse of his father’s bookselling business and the subsequent loss of nearly all the family’s belongings and after years of sacrifice on his and his wife’s part (especially following his broken hip nine years before), Gustad finally has reason to hope: His elder son, Sohrab, has been accepted at the prestigious India Institute of Technology.
Sohrab, however, has other interests, other plans.As relations between father and son deteriorate, the plot of SUCH A LONG JOURNEY begins to take on the melodramatic shading of a Hindi movie. His son’s ingratitude, his daughter’s worsening illness, friction with his neighbors, and soaring prices are set against the backdrop of the second India-Pakistan war and the transformation of east Pakistan into independent Bangladesh.
Mistry’s able to convey that indeed the longest journeys are the one taken by the mind and one realizes this every time years fall away as Gustad smells the spine of a classic or looks at an old Meccano set in Chor Bazaar.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
A Suitable Boy … interminable book about a rather obscure period of Indian history in the ’50s… without war, without the assassination of prime ministers, without… much in the way of sex… without even a glossary… was successful outside India.
All of Vikram Seth’s books are well-written, his presumption to be a poet first and an author second is demonstrated by his lyrical, simple and eminently readable style that is maintained from the first page to last.
Set in the post-indpendence India in the early 1950’s, it deals with the efforts of a widowed mother looking for a SUITABLE BOY for her daughter…The novel begins with a wedding and closes with a wedding…It is a very colorful novel with accounts of festivals,the exotic food and the rich and flashy lifestyles of the rich Indians and the changing political equations, amidst all this a growing romance between a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy.
At the social satire level the story revolves around four deeply intertwined families, three Hindu and one Muslim. The Kapoors represent the Hindi-speaking elite, gaining their ascendancy as part of a new political elite, while the middle-class, Anglicized Mehras firmly believe in the superiority of convent schools, English literature and proper manners. The Chatterjis, eccentric and rather scandalous members of the Bengali intelligentsia, indulge in rhyming couplets and coddle a manic dog named Cuddles, as the Muslim, landowning Khans face legislation that threatens to dissolve their culture and Urdu language along with all feudal land-holdings.
I leave you with a wonderfully accurate quote:
“A SUITABLE BOY may prove to be the most fecund as well as the most prodigious work of the latter half of this century (20th) – perhaps even the book to restore the serious reading public’s faith in the contemporary novel … You should make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life.”
Jinnah: India- Partition Independence – Jaswant Singh
Jinnah: India- Partition Independence – Jaswant Singh
Jaswant Singh has written a most exciting book, on a subject that should have been a dry, scholarly, tome. I only bought this book because I was following the story on the BBC web site. Mr. Singh was thrown out of the BJP for writing it.
Mr. Singh makes clear that the British tried to keep India together, and opposed Partition, and believed that Pakistan was almost indefensible against the Russians and Hindustan, which were the most likely enemies. They decided that they would cut Hindustan loose, and keep Pakistan in the Commonwealth as a defensive move to other Commonwealth countries.
Until the late 1930’s, Jinnah was opposed to Partition, and fought against it. That was until Congress turned all its agreements with Muslims on their head, and made it impossible for them to stay in India under their rules. But rules can change, and Jinnah was open to change, and did not entirely give up. His main demand was for one third of the Parliament, though Muslims were one forth of the population. They would still be a minority party, two to one. He also asked that, when a law impinged on one group of people, that group had the right to veto it. When it came to staying in India, those were his minimum demands to begin with. When these were refused, Jinnah became more stiffened.
In the end, Congress Party decided to change the meaning of an agreement that they, the Muslim League (Jinnah) and the Raj had come to, that changed the relationship of Muslims within India, and made it absolutely impossible for Muslims to stay in India. It was Gandhi who delivered the final blow, not as a peace maker, but as a member of Congress. That is not the Gandhi we hear about in school, but that is the Gandhi who is real. It was the British who made the last attempt to get Gandhi and Congress to go back to the original agreement, but they failed in that attempt. Prime Minister Attley removed that Viceroy, Wavell, and there was no further attempt.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah died 13 months after Partition. Had he lived, Pakistan would be a different place. But there was nobody like him to give it the kind of direction it needed. That was the flaw in the plan. It is as if the “Founding Fathers” died after the revolution. Mr. Singh seems to see that as a flaw too.
While Jinnah is not blameless, Mr. Singh sees Congress as mostly to blame for Partition, even more than the British, who in the end, “scuttled”, as they did in Palestine. That was the fear that Viceroy Wavell had, and he was right. He believed that Partition could be done over a period of time, carefully, with little loss of life. But His Majesties’ Government was not very interested in that.
The British either did not understand, or did not believe that there would be the riotous bloodshed that there was before and during Partition. Congress thought that it would not happen, or that Pakistan would come back. Jinnah thought Pakistan and India would work as brothers. They were all wrong.
You cannot understand Pakistan without reading this book. You cannot understand the relationship between India and Pakistan without reading this book.
Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh
Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh, one of India’s most widely read and celebrated AUTHORs, makes his readers share the individual problems of loyalty and responsibility faced by the principal figures in a little village on the frontier between India and Pakistan where the action takes place.
In the summer of 1947, a train full of dead Sikhs stirs up a battlefield in the peaceful atmosphere of love and loyalty between the Muslims and the Sikhs. It is then left to Juggat Singh-the village gangster who is in love with a Muslim girl- to redeem himself by saving many Muslim lives in a stirring climax.
Don’t Sprint the Marathon by V. Raghunathan
Running the marathon of life is about rebounding from failures
A self help guide which prepares us to start preparing for run in life marathon.In today’s world when every one want to be faster and want to achieve everything in least time so this way life has been converted into a 100m sprint race in which one must has to break every record to be a champion but life is not all about running fast it’s all about enjoying the journey,it’s about prepare yourself and enjoying your own company.That’s the flavor of this book.You will become what you want to be just give yourself time and never dis hearted by failures.
“Don’t want to run down a good start” but drive home the message that “those who don’t have it are not write offs”. Parents should build on child’s strengths and teach them how to deal with failure. Promote excellence born out of passion and they will do an outstanding job of it.
The book draws inspiring stories of personalities — Dr. Kallam Anji Reddy, T.N.Rao, Ashwini Nachappa, Ila Bhatt and G.M. Rao — less celebrated names, who started off being average and went on to make it big
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