Ruskin Bond’s How to Be a Writer Is the Ideal Comfort Book to Sign off 2020!

Vidisha Ghosh1 Comment

Humour. Compassion. Perseverance. A zest for life. Choose anything written by Ruskin Bond and you’ll find enchanting themes interwoven in his musings on love, survival, nature, childhood and adolescence, romance and even the ghosts that quietly haunt the hills of Mussoorie. Bond is the master of conveying complexity through simplicity, his writings liberally seasoned with dry wit and tossed in a wok of comfort. The emotions that one experiences after reading a piece written by the author are feelings otherwise experienced only in the purest of circumstances; like a cosy nap on a winter afternoon, your favourite food, a lover’s embrace, laughter with friends, mountain trails fragrant with fallen flowers and the smell of old bookstores.

How to be a Writer is a chip off the old block; another loveable addition to Bond’s corpus of heart-warming novellas. Although topical in its approach, the book is a delight! From the beautiful language and distinctive jocularity and down to the adorable illustrations (courtesy of the supremely talented team of Shamika Chavez and Chaaya Prabhat), every little detail is perfect. The aesthetics and interplay of word and drawing will remind you of Roald Dahl’s collaborations with Quentin Blake. Even if you are not interested in writing but have a soft corner for Ruskin Bond, this deserves to be on your bookshelf solely because of the familiarity and warmth it oozes.

Before delving into the nuances of the book, it’s important to know that the book has been marketed as a guide for young readers (some websites have labelled it as a book for children) who want to write and need a few pearls of wisdom on where to start and how to sustain. However, as a 23-year-old, I thoroughly enjoyed the content and learnt quite a bit about the trade and how to keep afloat if one is considering earning a living solely through words. So, don’t be dissuaded by the “childish” appearance or the big font and drawings. It is deeply insightful! Plus, there can never be a Ruskin Bond book that doesn’t teach you a thing or two.

How To Be A Writer takes the reader through the entire spectrum of writing; the qualities that a budding author must inculcate and exhibit, understanding what to write, how to improve that writing, popular themes, building memorable characters and finally, how to approach publishers and commercialize your work. According to Ruskin Bond, there are four building blocks of the process:

  1. To keep writing
  2. Observing
  3. Listening
  4. Paying attention to the beauty of words and their arrangement.

To sit down at your desk and pen your thoughts must be a daily activity. The key is to strike a balance between disciplining your mind to write and knowing when you are done. Bond himself does not write for more than an hour or two daily for any duration beyond that and words tend to lose their freshness. He likens the movement of words to “a stream of clear water-preferably a mountain stream.” The source of the brook is where thoughts are in their purest form and as they flow, one must learn to move around the boulders.

The tonality of the book is graceful yet informal. It isn’t a Do-It-Yourself manual where a leading author shares precise pointers on how to achieve big success. Think of How To Be Writer as an intelligent conversation with a kind individual who has beautiful experiences to share and does so in the friendliest manner possible. At no point does it feel that Ruskin Bond is there to deliver a sermon where he is the higher authority and the readers are supposed to look up to him with dewy-eyes and make furious notes (although he constantly stresses on the importance of jotting notes in a designated notepad when writing a story). He only discusses the insights he has accumulated in an illustrious career spanning seven decades and multiple accolades.

Ruskin Bond shares multiple lessons. Some minor, tucked away in a little sentence; some major – being the focus of an entire chapter. I will attempt to touch upon the latter.

A love for books is imperative. Every renowned author is greatly influenced by the books he/she has enjoyed. Bond says, “Books are essential for the creative mind, and good readers become good writers.” If you are new to extensive reading and not a seasoned bookworm, the author’s recommendations at the end are the perfect start.

Finding a familiar setting is the cornerstone of establishing authenticity. One of the most oft-repeated mistakes that beginners tend to commit is being carried away by the glitz and glamour of places they don’t know and basing their story in an unfamiliar destination. Ruskin Bond believes that one must write about the places you are intimately connected with. Like London for Dickens, rural Bengal for Tagore and the Yorkshire Moors for Emily Bronte. Even fantasy worlds are contextualized in the culture and language of the countries in which they are conceived. For example, Wonderland is very British and Pinocchio is very Italian.

Bond’s take on creating memorable characters is especially interesting. Create immortal characters. Does this mean that characters must defy death? No! What Bond implies is that “some of the most successful characters in fiction are ageless, unchanging.” Think about Poirot, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Byomkesh Bakshi and of course, Rusty himself! Year after year, volume after volume, they have remained the same! To be able to keep the essence intact is a duty that needs to be upheld at all costs.

To remain committed to your writing is a difficult task. There is nothing as exasperating as stumbling upon the ill-fated Writer’s Block. Bond admits to not having faced this issue too often because most of his works are on the shorter side. This honesty is comforting. But he does share guidance on the matter. For Ruskin Bond, some of his most famed stories such as The Night Train at Deoli and The Eyes Have It was written in his head and then transferred to the paper. Certainly, this process is difficult to replicate for a lengthier novel. In that case, he suggests taking a break and writing something else to revitalize the grey cells- “A fresh mind will do wonders for a stalled masterpiece.” Finally, if that doesn’t work and you’re sure that your work is useless, choose the dustbin. In his distinctive humour, Bond concludes by saying, “Waste-paper baskets were invented by frustrated authors. And I use one too.“

Writing is about expressing your originality, developing a distinct style, telling the right stories and in the end, keeping the faith alive. Patience is a mandatory virtue for people who plan to rely on words to get them through life. Ruskin Bond cautions us about multiple rejections. They will come and don’t signify the end of the world. However, his greater warning is for the lack of persistence and giving up on the very act of writing. The idea is simple, “If you are any good, you will meet with success sooner or later.” How To Be A Writer is old-school, elegant, and mischievous. In other words, worth every second of the holidays, irrespective of whether you’re a writer or just a good ol’ Rusty fan!

You can buy the book here.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved Brings Back the Ghosts of More Than 60 Million Victims of Slavery in America

Khushi AgarwalLeave a comment

B-e-l-o-v-e-d, these were the only seven letters Sethe could get engraved on the tombstone of her two year old daughter, letters she thought would be enough. It is the spirit of this dead baby girl that haunts 124, Bluestone Road- a house that had no visitors- colored or white, newspapermen or preachers, speakers or friends. It’s not simply the house they are avoiding but the people in it.

There is little I can write here that can do justice to the experience of reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The horror that resides in its pages is not the vengeance of the ghost living in this house or the inescapable past of its characters. It is the horror of slavery, its routine separation of families, sexual violence and dehumanization. When you read Beloved, words can sting, laid bare before you is pain of the sort real people suffered. It is not an easy read, yet it is a novel you must read.

Being set after the end of the Civil War when slaves were emancipated, Beloved has most of its characters looking back to a time when slavery was not outlawed. The narrative opens in Cincinnati, the town Sethe, a runaway slave had escaped to 18 years ago, from the Garners’ farm in Kentucky- Sweet Home, which was neither sweet nor a home. It is repressed memories of Sweet Home that come back to her like  blood gushing from an open wound, when she finds Paul D, the last of the five male slaves that ‘belonged to’ Sweet Home, waiting for her at her porch.

The ghost that lives in Sethe’s house, leaving hand-prints on cake and shattering mirrors is not an evil ghost but a sad spirit. This spirit comes back in flesh as the ghost Beloved, she is an embodiment of Sethe’s past that haunts her and feeds on her. It is Morrison’s incredible literary genius that has given a mythic dimension to the historical and psychological suffering of slavery. Beloved is a historical novel dealing with slavery at its best and worse: the Garners’ patronizing ‘principled’ slavery, Sethe’s mother being a survivor of the infamous middle passage, the School teacher’s violent and abusive slavery which goes to the extent of studying African American slaves as animals; and Mr. and Miss Bodwin, abolitionists whose attitude to slavery presents an irony.

It is a novel dedicated to the sixty million and more who died because of slavery. It tells you about the personal experience of slaves, their lives, something the history of an institution won’t say. At the heart of Morrisson’s novel are separated families, it is the knowledge of Sethe’s separation from her husband that embitters the sweetness of her love for Halle, a devoted son who worked on Sundays for five years straight to free his mother. Baby Suggs’ eight children are reduced to memory. To Paul D and Sethe, whose loved ones are always vulnerable to slavery, freedom is “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire.” Sethe’s fierce love for her children  gives a new weight to the idea of maternal love. As an enslaved woman, she is willing to go to any extent to protect her children from the inhumanity of slavery.

Slavery is an experience that is different for men and women in a patriarchal society and Morrison represents both in all their complexities. The slavery that devalues maternal care in enslaved women by taking away children, degrades men by denying masculinity. Mr. Garner can call his male slaves ‘my men.’ By presenting both male and female survivors of rape, she foregrounds sexual assault as an act of both gendered and racial domination. To Paul D, his not being a ‘man’ is a source of trauma, his memory of feeling less of a man than a farm rooster is both dehumanizing and emasculating. He is a man whose trauma has forced his memories into a tobacco tin heart. Beloved narrates suffering that no one wants to remember.

However, it is also a novel of resistance laced with a glimmer of hope. Sixo is an embodiment absolute resistance to slavery. He fights the white men even when his hands are tied. An old and drained woman, Baby Suggs, who gives up on living life, still continues to look for colour in the house- blue, yellow, and green. She shows little fear of the ghost living in her house. As she says, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby…” Beloved is representative of this collective experience. The act of recording this experience is in itself an act of resistance, an attempt to restore the historical record, revealing history to be incomplete if not distorted. A Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel prize in Literature later, the significance of Morrison’s writings and its impact on American literature cannot be overstated.

Cover Image: Zarateman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rumble in a Village Underlines Several Unsolved Problems of Indian Villages Through a Murder Mystery

JeevaNayagiLeave a comment

Indian villages are treasure troves of tales. There are a million stories buried within them, that are waiting to be unearthed. But, it is unbelievable that two foreign research scholars who spent only a year in one of those unrecognizable villages of India could spin such a brilliant tale about it. Palanpur, in the words of Jean Dreze, is a “nondescript village” in Moradabad district in Uttar Pradesh. Jean is one of the two authors of the book, ‘Rumble in a Village’, published recently by Aleph Book Company. He along with Luc Leruth documents life as it was in the 1900s in the village of Palanpur where Jean stayed as a part of his research work. Both Jean and Luc are former scholars from the Indian Statistical Institute (New Delhi) and continue to be associated with India in many ways.

The story begins as a murder mystery which compels Anil Singh, a banker in London to return to his father’s village – Palanpur. The murder is only a premise to take the readers to Palanpur. The main plot unravels after you arrive in the village. The story jumps across different timelines as it traces the history of four families over three generations and the dynamics of three castes – the Thakurs, the Muraos, and the Dalits. What is more interesting is most of the characters lived and some still continue to live in Palanpur. The book retained the original name for some of the characters and even has a photograph featuring a few. 

I must credit the authors for their keen eyes which makes the book a very entertaining read starting from Anil’s train journey to Palanpur. Anil’s experience with the Indian railways will stir quite a bit of nostalgia in the readers. The unusual camaraderie, the unnerving questions from fellow travellers, the droplets of spit that hit your face from the window next are just too familiar. I was amused to learn how the railway station in Palanpur came to be named as Jargaon. The book brilliantly chronicles the arrival of the railways and how it changed the lives of the Palanpuris in some unfathomable ways.

The caste politics and the poverty that the book brings out will not surprise you if you are one of those who were raised in an Indian village. But you will be intrigued to learn what changed and what remained unaltered in this ugly game. While the Palanpuris evolved a little when it came to agriculture, they still preferred to have a temple built before fixing the dilapidated school. I can assure you, this mindset hasn’t changed even in 2020 in many of our villages. The worst part, however, was that the Palanpuris seemed to have remained immovable about educating and empowering their women. Like the authors’ rightly point out through Pat’s research, financial independence for women meant a degradation of their stature.

The book effortlessly documents the many little things that truly captures the spirit of Palanpur. The Thakurs and their love for guns, the obsession and the pride that came with becoming a soldier, their marriages and illicit affairs, the village council meetings and corruption that happens at various levels, child mortality and more. The story doesn’t do much about solving a murder mystery but it does in educating you about Indian bureaucracy. While the truth is rather disturbing, Jean and Luc get us through with a little humour. The whole episode of ADO, BDO, CDO, DDO, EDO and more is absolutely hilarious. And then there is Babu and his goat. The innocence and ignorance of these villagers offer you a hearty laugh, but you know that they aren’t as meek as you imagine them to be. Given the opportunity, they are quite capable of crime and treachery.

After a few chapters, I was confused with who is who thanks to the non-linear narration and characters from three different generations. I also did not see any value in the character of the Captain who is shrouded with mystery. But I didn’t need to bother too much about these difficulties because they didn’t matter. What mattered was Luc and Jean transported you to Palanpur and let you live among the Palanpuris and witness it all for real. I didn’t feel the urge to rush through the pages as one would do with murder stories. Instead, I soaked myself in every page, with every detail and the experience that the book had to offer. To me, it felt and read like a bright morning in a beautiful village.

Did Nehru Reject Permanent Membership of the UN Security Council? Rajiv Dogra’s India’s World Answers Many Such Questions

JeevaNayagiLeave a comment

I had never read any of Rajiv Dogra’s works until last week, not even his critically acclaimed Durand’s Curse. However, a few days ago, when I began reading his latest book, India’s World, published by Rupa Publications. I only regret having not read him until then. My reasons are many. I will start with the thing that struck me first – the language. Even for non-fiction, the words are mellifluous. One might as well call the book a ‘poetic’ account of the foreign policy choices of India’s prime ministers. How can one ever put down something that is written so beautifully? I cannot wait to read his other books.

Coming back to ‘India’s World’, Rajiv Dogra talks about how eight out of the fourteen Indian Prime Ministers shaped the foreign policy of India. In the prologue of the book, Rajiv states that his book doesn’t intend “to airbrush the warts of these eight leaders or to exaggerate their abilities. It is to present the leaders as they were and to reflect on their policies as they affected the country.” That is precisely what he does in the chapters that follow. Starting from India’s first prime minister Nehru to the current Prime Minister Modi, he discusses the successes and failures of each of these leaders and their policies with much candour. He credits Nehru for his statesmanship that guided India towards a secular democratic set up, unlike Pakistan. However, he doesn’t mince his words when he explains how Nehru ignored the advice of Vallabhbhai Patel and Ambedkar to only complicate the Kashmir issue for decades to come.

Rajiv acknowledges that all these leaders were handed over a country that had a plethora of socio-economic problems. Add to it the unstable power dynamics across the various groups of countries and the mistakes of their predecessors. While some learnt from the mistakes of their predecessor and tried to fix it, they then made mistakes of their own. Each one had their distinguished style when it came to foreign policy. While Nehru was a man of ideals, Shashtri was a more practical leader. Indira was the Goddess and Modi, the Rule Maker. This also meant that India lacked a “well-drafted long term approach” towards foreign policy which leads to the next question. Did our leaders ever have a shared vision of India’s role in the world’s affairs?

Rajiv picks some of the most commonly debated decisions of these leaders and critiques them. This is not merely based on his rich experience and expert opinion, but is also supported with archival documents, quotes from direct sources, books, articles and more.

The book traces the foreign policy decisions of India from the time of Independence to date. That way the book is a good starter to anyone who wants to understand the history and evolution of some of the most significant topics like the Kashmir Issue, India’s relationship with the USA, China and Russia, Non-alignment movement, Bangladesh war, India’s relationship with South-East Asia and more.

The book ends with an unusual epilogue featuring Narendra Modi as its protagonist. The title of the epilogue says it all – The More it changes the more it remains the same. Rajiv warns us of the grim realities like the never-ending Pakistan troubles and the increasing Chinese aggression in our neighbourhood. He adds that India must set its internal affairs in order if it aspires to be a stabilising power in world affairs.

While the earlier chapters of the books are very exhaustive, I find the latter ones rushed and lacking specifics in comparison. Yet, the book answers many questions and busts many myths with factual evidence. The books also feature several interesting tidbits like how P.V. Narasimha Rao was packing for a life of retirement when he was called on to become the Prime Minister and why Atal Bihari Vajpayee called him the true father of Shakti Nuclear Test. So if you are wondering if India rejected a permanent seat in the UNSC, or why Indira did not attack West Pakistan while our troops were already winning, or if the many international trips that our current Prime Minister undertook strengthened India’s place in the world, pick this book up.  

The House That Spoke by Zuni Chopra Is Different From Your Usual YA Fantasy Novel

Aakanksha SinghLeave a comment


Imagine living in a house as old as time, with a living and breathing library at your disposal, an ornate fireplace, and an armchair to sit back for hours and read. No, I am not talking about the library from Beauty and the Beast. But yes, this could easily be a dream for all book lovers, especially when cooped up indoors during the pandemic. Who would not want a beautiful house where you could while away hours on an end, as time passes slowly by?

Soon to turn 15, Zoon Razdan, luckily has exactly that in Zuni Chopra’s YA novel, The House That Spoke. She lives with her mother, Shanti, in Srinagar in their ancestral house. Her grandma lives close by, down the street. Zoon loves her home. Her favourite place in the house is the library where she loves spending her mornings and having some noon chai. Thus, when one day Zoon finds a realtor, Mr. Qureishi in her house, all hell breaks loose and strains her relationship with her mother. Zoon then embarks on an adventure to stop her mother from selling the house. To help out, she has a bunch of curious and unlikely friends along with her shy and newly found friend, Altaf. Altaf is Shanti’s friend, Lameeya’s son.

The House That Spoke is suffused with a fairy tale atmosphere that is a cross between Beauty and the Beast and the Chronicles of Narnia because her own historic house is a portal to both adventure and danger. Despite this magical element, Zoon’s adventures and life are tangled with the dangers that anyone living in Srinagar might face from acts of terrorism to government and army excesses. Chopra portrays the ‘normal’ in Kashmir through Zoon’s eyes: from stray shooting to a bomb blast. The fact that even a 15 year old knows how to navigate through this terror and thinks of it every time she crosses the street to see her grandma, her tathi, manifests the way in which the state has been paralysed with violence and how successive governments have failed it. Hence, the magic evoked in The House That Spoke is fraught with the realities of everyday life, of the darkness that engulfs the state and how Zoon, in trying to save her house, must also save her home from this inexplicable darkness.

This makes The House That Spoke different from your usual YA fantasy novel. It is one that allows teenagers to not just read a fast paced, fun adventure tale but also learn about the different facets of Kashmir: from its syncretic culture to its beauty of passing seasons. The fact that a 15 year old girl is the protagonist makes the story even more delightful. For a change, it is not a male protagonist venturing out to save the world.

Zuni Chopra’s prose is rich and evocative, perfectly mirroring Zoon’s opulent house and her surreal natural surroundings. Each sentence is laden with beautiful and layered descriptions that bring Zoon’s house and Kashmir alive in the minds of the readers. Zuni’s writing makes the novel superbly visual and lets our imagination paint vivid pictures from her words.

The House That Spoke is a great novel to get the kids to read after the usual TV and internet simulations reach a saturation point. The novel can also pave the way to start conversations with youngsters about Kashmir and its condition, particularly given that it is always in the news. Also, you get to support some homegrown YA genre novels that are only now getting the praise and support they need. Cheers to that, always!

You can buy this book here.