New books by post!

Howdy y'all!

I mean...namaskar!

I'm very excited at the moment because two books have just arrived in the mail: Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russel Rich and How Much Should a Person Consume?: Environmentalism in India and the United States by Ramachandra Guha.

Oh my goodness. First of all, these books are just so beautiful - smooth, unfurled pages, colorful, unstained covers, and just the right weight and thickness to prop my eyelids open on a rainy (or snowy, as the case may be these days) afternoon. I bought them new, which I rarely ever do with books. My knowledge of the Indian subcontinent, up until this very moment, has come from outdated National Geographics, scuffed-up copies of the Mahabharata, and snippets of Al-Jazeera on CNN (which is, of course, the most enthralling news channel on the planet.)

Hey, I suppose it's one step closer to a plane ticket.

Awhile back I read (and reviewed) Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. I was so disappointed in that book. Gilbert had traveled to India on a whimsical soul search, but everything about her spiritual journey smacked of ethnocentric mockery and slack-jawed gaping at Indian "weirdness" (though to be fair, I believe it was unintentional - and I am probably biased). Though Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russel Rich is yet another American travel experience, I have a good feeling about this one. Rather than imitating Gilbert's desire to escape from worldly concerns and commune with God, Rich throws herself into a frighteningly foreign throng in order to understand the most rudimentary building block of human experience: language. In a "rash" moment, Rich moves to Udaipur to learn Hindi, and her memoir details the unexpected lessons she learns through it. I am really excited to delve into this one, mainly because my own experiences in learning Hindi so far have been incredibly transformative.

What started out as an innocent curiosity has tried my patience more times than I can count - but I always remind myself that the joy of learning Hindi is that it isn't easy. Every new word is so abstract from the limitations of my English-speaking mind, sometimes even one new sound, one new arrangement of a sentence, can open up a whole new world inside my mind. To me, these are not just words. These are Lilliputian victories; the foundational blocks of a seemingly alternate universe. And through this foreign lens I have come to understand my own language, my own country, and my own people better. That's why I'm always eager to share what I'm learning about India with the people that I meet.

I once met a man from Ethiopia while traveling on a bus from Boston to New York City. He was just CRAZY for America. He told me a great and epic love story, from his beginnings on a small farm growing up with eleven brothers and sisters in Ethiopia to his struggle to survive on the streets of New York City. He had fought for America in such a way that I had never heard before. He was proud of where he came from, where he was going, and where he was. He was simply happy to be alive. After he got off the bus and we went our separate ways, I never looked at life in quite the same way again.

So maybe I'm a little crazy too, but I really can't wait to review this book for you guys. Maybe I can't convince you to start learning Hindi, but I want you to know how much joy there is to be had in the experience if you're willing to seize it.

Oh, boy. I'm beginning to sound like a high school math teacher. Moving on.

How Much Should a Person Consume?: Environmentalism in India and the United States by Ramachandra Guha jumped out at me from its, er, "shelf" at Amazon.com because of its obviously unique approach to this hot-button issue. In some of my previous posts I explored the differences in agriculture between India and the United States, and what the water crisis really means to a country in which half of its hospital patients typically suffer from water-borne diseases on any given day. Based on research conducted over two decades, Guha's book plunges into the differences between environmental philosophies in India and America and arrives at a new "social ecology" approach to conservation, critically important to the relationship between these two great democracies and to the future of the world. It seems to be written in a friendly lilt, an approachable read for anyone interested.

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll post my reviews soon enough.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

We women all know it but hate to admit it: Oprah Winfrey is the American goddess.
I confess: I read her book club recommendations verbatim. And they’re usually excellent reading. But not this one.

After a sticky divorce (aren’t they all?), writer Elizabeth Gilbert sets sail across the world to re-discover herself and achieve spiritual epiphany, including a several-month stint at an ashram in India.

I don’t see why she bothered to be in India, anyway, as she befriended a Texan and bemoaned all her crises to him the whole time she was there. And it’s not like you can’t wake up at 3AM and practice yoga in the States, if you really had any willful inclination to “find God”, or whatever Gilbert prattled on about ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent was her sobbing and occasionally shouting to the heavens at the injustice of it all. Oh, and there were some little bits about “seeing a blue light” and being filled with “blue energy”, which apparently cannot be found in America, because, you know, God isn’t here. Or maybe he/she/it is, but he/she/it is green. Or yellow. Or pink. Or something.

To be marketed as a ‘travel’ book is an utter lie. Rarely does the reader get to stop and enjoy the scenery. Rather, one is subjected to the endless nauseating rants and raucous outbursts of the author.

If you’re looking for a pat-on-the-back-reassurance that the world is okay, that the universe falls into perfect order, and that everything is going to be just fine, complemented by some one-dimensional sex and so-called ‘friendships’, then this is the book for you.

If you are actually interested in learning about India, then you will learn nothing from Gilbert.

Sadly, you will learn an unfortunate truth about Indo-American relations with regard to the phenomenon of American recreational travel.

I am disappointed by the number of people I meet who have been to India, and then manage to return and know next to nothing about the place. They complain about the music, the food, the poverty, the traffic, on and on. They can’t string two words together of a language other than their own. They have learned nothing new; they have no appreciation for where they’ve just been. They, like Gilbert, traveled to India with their own agendas, with preconceived notions about the way India should be; about the way the world should be. In return, they end up either disappointed or permanently clueless.

Gilbert is in the permanently clueless category.

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

I have a standing joke, if there is such a thing, with one of the customers that comes into the restaurant every Saturday night where I work. He asks if I’ll be in church tomorrow, and I always reply with some stupid one-liner or another. And perhaps, after awhile, I am a little afraid that the roof will collapse if I go.

But several weeks ago I went to a Sunday service. Don’t get the wrong impression; I didn’t pay attention to the sermon, of course. The organ’s tones were deafening and the crowd of people rising and lowering at arrhythmic intervals might have been distracting if the lighting in the balcony hadn’t been so perfectly conducive to getting lost in thought.

Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is a collection of memoirs of his life as a Dalit shortly after India won its independence from Great Britain. Though untouchability was indeed outlawed in the country’s constitution (an untouchable, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, provided the document’s framework), Valmiki demonstrates in heartbreaking detail the prejudice and injustice that still prevails. And yet, up until that day, nothing had very deeply stirred me about this book.
Hunched over the book’s final pages in the last pew of the sanctuary, I discovered it. It was a little sliver of a line, nearly ten pages from the end, that brought the story full circle for me, and it was all hinging on this single, unintentionally poignant axis. It wasn’t even about an event that had happened in the author’s life, but rather a curt blurb about a Maharashtra community of Dalits sacrificing a child in order to persuade the gods to bless them with enough grain to survive another year.

I was suddenly and irrevocably grateful for my little brother sitting next to me, for being born into a country with an (at least supposedly) non-discriminatory public education system, for being able to eat dinner at a table every night. Or every other night. Or, okay, maybe I can’t remember the last time I ate dinner at a table, but it was dinner nonetheless. These things, which I’ve taken for granted on far too many occasions, now came crashing into perspective at once. I was filled with a sort of joy and despair all at once, a ‘malegria’, if you will. I handed my brother a relatively squashed Tootsie Roll from my purse and volunteered for the community CROP Hunger Walk the next week.

Maybe, I think, it’s these small gestures that count the most.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I’m not usually a fan of Booker Prize winners. Originality, I think, does not always equal quality. When I first started getting into it, I thought, if it weren’t for the story taking place in India, I wouldn’t be reading this crap. But then, I couldn’t help it. As you read, the story becomes progressively more and more strange, wild, and darkly enticing, keeping you on the edge of your seat because you can never quite trust Balram Halwai, the “White Tiger”. He’s everything to love and hate about India. He’s corrupt and cynical and clever and cunning. He’s
chaotic and consummate, charismatic and celeritous. All those C’s.

The story is written as a series of seven letters to the Premier Wen Jiabao of China, beginning with the birth of a no-name boy in the small village of Laxmangarh, near Bodh Gaya, where the water buffalo is the head of the family and the townsfolk are forever at the mercy of crooked and dispassionate landlords. The tale progresses as Balram rises to the status of a Bangalorean entrepreneur through methods of eavesdropping, nicknaming, cab-driving, and murder. It is a profound and unapologetic portrait of the political strife of contemporary India, an informal but striking dissertation on poverty and terrorism and sacrifice.

I used to be very judgmental of books like this – books with no righteousness, no morality. And then I read another little book called Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. He said something along the lines of, “Literary critics will have their day, but their opinions are determined by their times. You have to appreciate a writer’s work for what it is, for how it speaks to you.” And this, I think, is completely fair.

By the end of the book, I realized that I had grossly misjudged Adiga. Rarely does an author exhibit such prowess at displaying profound ethical insight without saturating his words with overt sentimentality.

Thank you, Mr. Adiga. Maybe now I will go back to Steinbeck with an open mind.