Things I've been reading

Here are some of the things I've been reading recently.

A beautiful long essay After the Fall by Ramachandra Guha is seriously worth a read and definitely worth thinking. If you are a communist, you might initially be vengeful towards Mr. Guha, but at the end of the essay, you would end up liking Mr. Guha, because nevertheless, Guha likes communists from the bottom of his heart. And if you are a communist sympathiser, you would like this marvelous essay more. And if you are none of the above but belong to other multiple political parties of India, you would disregard this essay as trash, simply because Mr. Guha disregards the alternate political parties as being in proximity to 'crooks and moneybags'. Nevertheless, as I said,  Mr. Guha has well narrated the rise and fall of CPI and CPI(M) in India.

Khushwant Singh is one major Indian writer I haven't read till recent past. All of my friends read his Train to Pakistan  in university itself and one of them wrote a dissertation on partition referring to Train to Partition alongside other books grounded on the tragic events of human movement from India to Pakistan and the other way round in the wake and aftermath of independence of India. Throughout the novel, Mr. Singh upheld the fact that different world religions can live with each other under the same roof, while the same very religions try to oust each other on the streets. I don’t want to simplify his novel into a one-line but having read Khushwant Singh for the first time, he appears to me a difficult writer, a writer with a strong past which is indomitable and casts a dark, but a fairly large and humanly influence on Mr. Singh’s writings. His writing is very typical of him; he chooses his words very carefully but there are enough frictions, that is, his writing is definitely not poetic. 

After watching the movie in Kolkata with my dear friends and being captured by the idea of taking a break for a year and travelling to three countries just to unwind and explore yourself, I couldn't resist reading up every line of Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert with an untamed curiosity about the experiences of such a pleasurable journey. Like me, people who are confused, indecisive, uncommitted, don't know what to say, when to say and how to say it, who are equally unsure of what they are doing and will do in near future, those adorable but good-for-nothing people would be able to enjoy reading this book. It's a great tale of rediscovery of self when everything around you is falling apart.  The best part of this book is that it's not a  fiction, but a true story, as true as your own tale is. Yes, this shall pass too.