Monisha Rajesh - Around India in 80 trains

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Chennai girl by origin and a British girl by nationality and upbringing, Monisha Rajesh seeks to examine her roots by opting for a journey around India in 80 trains.

The title is a nice salaam to Jules Verne.

Monisha's Phileas Fogg has a Passepartout of her own.  A photographer who is looking to improve his resume.  They are not ideal companions, but they manage to stick together through thick and thin.

As we know, taking trains in India is not an easy task.  More than anything else, you have to fight Grime.  Even a 'clean' train like a Shatabdi or a Rajdhani makes you look dusty and covered in a stink straight from an overused lavatory that just cannot be kept clean.

Then, you have to fight the awkward booking system.  Oh ok, we do have the irctc.com now to aid us in booking our journeys.  But even so, booking journeys at a pinch is not easy.  For Monisha and P. it is the grim faced Anusha who helps book them into trains across India.

Next comes grappling with food.  Getting clean food to eat and clean water to drink can be a struggle when marooned at smaller stations.  Our train food is quite inedible at times and the local station food can be dodgy.

Monisha and P manage to overcome all these and survive to bring us this book.

To vow and keep up the promise to travel to as many parts of India as possible in 80 trains is a humungous task on its own.  To turn it into an entertaining book is another major task.

The book falls into that sweet spot between informative and entertaining.  It is full of witty anecdotes that keep you chuckling as you turn the pages.

I wish there was a chronological information about the trains taken.  It would have made it easy to refer to various journeys.  Also, some of the anecdotes end abruptly, making you feel something is missing.

This is a unique book.  It is about trains.  It is about diversity that is India.  It is about life.


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Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro



You get a feeling that there is something different about the world you are reading about when you are already a few pages into the book.




It is not a usual coming-of-age book. Kathy reminiscences about her childhood, about her days at Hailsham, a premium boarding school that she went to.




Ruth, Tommy and the narrator of this story, Kathy were together in that school. There was a bit of a mystery hanging over the school. Although their teachers, called "Guardians" are as rigid as any teacher found in any boarding school, there is one Guardian who seems to treat them differently.




From her, the children get some ominous hints about their future.




We learn the story through the narrator Kathy, who reveals the story mostly chronologically.




This facility, Hailsham is not a school. It is a place where human clones are reared for their organs. The children are cared for because a healthy child will be able to yield healthy organs.




Will the children, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, be able to chart a different life?




Are human beings capable of mercy? Can human beings deal fairly as far as other species are concerned? I think we know the answer to that already.




Kazuo Ishiguro treats this tale, which could easily drip with horror, with gentleness. The shocking facts of the fate of the children are revealed gradually and with a sparse and a deft touch.




The novel is immensely readable. Years ago, I picked up a book called Curious case of the dog in the nighttime, and found it un-putdownable. This book was the only novel I read from cover to cover at a stretch after that.


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Cap Lesesne - Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon

Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon by Cap Lesesne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked the book.  It is a memoire of a plastic surgeon.  There are not too many 'revelations' about celebrity clients.  They are merely hinted at.

There are times when the book reads like a documentary.  He lists the steps a person seeking plastic surgery should go through, the ways in which a client should assess a surgeon.  There is a chapter titled "Failures (and what to ask a surgeon)".

He even had a section in which he mentions skin-care.

"Some of the best skin I've ever seen belongs to women who cleanse with cold water and soap, then apply a mild moisturizer on the dry spots."

He recommends use of sunscreen lotion with SPF greater than 20, and re-application every two hours.

Exfoliate the skin regularly, he says.  He even recommends microdermabrasion - spraying of fine crystals at the skin to loosen dead tissue.

Hmm.. I confess, I found this part of the book quite interesting.

As for the rest, he writes about his education, how he got into plastic surgery.  He has some interesting anecdotes to narrate.



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Marie Desplechin -Sans Moi

Sans Moi by Marie Desplechin


It was a wonderful book.  So different from the usual "stories".  It was about a year in the life of Anna, a writer and a single mother.  She hires a young girl Olivia as a babysitter.  Olivia is a recovering drug addict with several other issues as well.  On the face of it, Olivia is highly unsuitable as a babysitter, but yet she is a person with a lot of promise.

Anna and Olivia help each other out and develop a friendship.

It was likened to a novel by Colette, but it wasn't.  Do not look for anything naughty in here.

The book was about faith and trust and healing.  Excellent!


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Rupa Gulab - The Great Depression of the 40s

The book is about 4 women, Mantra, Anjali, Reshma and Samira.

Mantra is married happily to Vir.  They have an easy relationship, no children, lots of banter, no sex.  Mantra has lost her mojo and Vir is begining to be pissed by it.  She has just left her job and wants to write a book and/or freelance.  Vir is having troubles of his own at work.

Vir's sister, Anjali has a perfect marriage.  She has a dream husband and a teenaged boy.  But she finds herself getting attracted to the ex-boyfriend who has just come back into her life.

Reshma is Mantra's maid.  She is a terrible cook but can speak flawless English.  She is carrying on with the driver, Makrand.  Not a wise idea as Makrand is already married.

Samira is Mantra's upstairs neighbour.  She is being beaten black and blue by her rich husband.  She refuses to lodge a complaint as she seems to think she will be able to reform her man.

Here is a perfect book for light reading. It is not about someone's college issues, or a maudlin love story.  It is a perfectly crafted book about an eventful year in the life of Mantra.

Mantra is a smart, thinking, affectionate woman.  She is her own person.  She is a modern Indian woman who does not care to conform to the stereotype of either Bharatiya Nari or Firangi Vamp.  She smokes, drinks and lets her house go to the dogs if she feels like it.

She is just the kind of girl I would like to have as a friend.

The book is not sweet, it is kind of spicy and crispy like a well made plate of chaat.  There were SO many times that I broke out in chuckles over something.  Quite like I would if I were reading Wodehouse.  Ole PG also wrote about light happenings in lives of young wastrels! 

The editing is excellent and the language is, thankfully, perfect.  This quality is rather difficult to come by in Indian-English fiction.  The author credits the good editing to her sister Kushalrani Gulab.

Rupa Gulab has written several books.  I remember not liking Girl Alone much.  I read that years ago.  I should give it another shot.  Maybe I was not in the right frame of mind at the time. I liked Chip of the old Blockhead, but it was more YA fiction.  I will pick up I Kissed a Frog as well and see if it is as good as this book.

Sid Bahri - The Homing Pigeons

This is a story of Aditya and Radhika.  The way the story goes, one chapter narrated from the perspective of Aditya and another from Radhika’s, you know that these two people are going to end up together.  The title of the book leaves no doubt as to the outcome.

Aditya is out of a job, as the book starts.  He is well on his way to being an alcoholic.  He passes out in the bar of a fancy hotel.  Divya, a traveling professional woman, rescues him.  She has a proposal for him, an indecent one.

In the meantime, Radhika is on the brink of marrying off her step-daughter.  She is a rich widow and looking forward to an independent life finally.

Aditya and Radhika have a common past, but do they have a future together?

The story moves forward in a very controlled manner.  One chapter is by Radhika and another by Aditya.  They are forever going into flashbacks and coming back into the present.  The story could have become very confusing if the author had lost his hold on it. But he does not.  The story is strung together very well.

Most of the action takes place in Chandigarh and Delhi, which are two of my favorite places.

The language is adequate, but could have been better.  There were a few shoddy sentences in there.  The story lagged a bit in the middle before picking up pace towards the end.  The end was wrapped up rather suddenly.  It seemed abrupt.

Despite being a romance, it does not read like a typical maudlin love story.

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