Shadow Men: Where nightmare and dreams go hand-in-hand

Gracy Samjetsabam reviews Bijaya Sawian’s latest novel, Shadow Men (Speaking Tiger Books,10 December 2019) introducing us to the ‘Angry Young Men’ of Shillong

Bijoya Sawian is a writer and translator who resides in Shillong and Dehradun. She did her schooling from Seng Khasi High School and Loreto Convent in Shillong, graduated in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College and has a Masters in English Literature from Miranda House, University of Delhi. Her contributions include writings on the life and culture of the Khasi community of North East India. The Sahitya Akademi and the Institute of Folklore Studies, Bhopal, are some of the institutes of repute that have published her short stories and critical essays. Some of her prominent translated works include The Teachings of Elders, Khasi Myths, Legends and Folktales and About One God. Her original works in English include A Family Secret and Other Stories. Shadow men, A Novel and Two Stories is her latest novel. It has three stories in which two take place in Shillong and one is set in Aizawl.

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Earthquake Boy: A story of the Gujarat disaster

Book Review by Gracy Samjetsabam

Earthquake Boy

Title: Earthquake Boy

Author: Leela Gour Broome

Publisher and date of publication: Speaking Tiger, 2019.

Earthquake Boy is the latest novel by Leela Gour Broome, a Western classical music and English Literature teacher. She is also an environmentalist. She has contributed to children’s literature by writing numerous short stories, series of pun cartoons, and cartoon strips for a children’s newspaper and magazine. Three of her other books include Flute in the Forest, Red Kite Adventure, and The Anaishola Chronicle. She conducts story-telling and reading sessions for school children and, language-and-literature-related events and workshops for young readers at literature festivals.

Broome’s Earthquake Boy is a historical fiction, a novel based on the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, with 26 January as the fateful day and Bhuj as its epi centre. UNICEF in its report on India (Gujarat) Earthquake 2001 estimated that more than 8,000 children were orphaned and more than 1,000 were left unaccompanied. Binna, a shortened form of the Hindi word Bey Naam, which translates to “the boy without a name” in the novel is the protagonist of Broome’s story and through Binna, she also tells the story of the many “Binnas” who were left desolate, homeless and with little hope from the quake.

Natural disasters come unwarned, often violent, furious, calamitous and woeful. Children fall in the vulnerable section of the community in times of natural disaster. Historical fiction on natural calamities for children such as this one, can help create awareness about the hardships that children go through in such times but to shed light on realities that one might have or not experienced, thus broadening the horizons and diversity of thought among the readers. Such stories while painting the harshness of life and disasters, also communicates the beauty of profundity in human spirit.

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Koonar’s Paper Lions: How ‘frailties of human desire and triumph of human spirit’ fare against the turmoils of history

Book review by Gracy Samjetsabam

Title: Paper Lions

Author: Sohan S. Koonar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger (2019)

Sohan S. Koonar is a physiotherapist by training but his love for story-telling has bagged him the Judges Choice Award in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest and the first Burlington Library Literary Excellence Award. His self-published novel Karam’s Kismet got mentioned in sixteen dailies and periodicals in the US. He is a founder of a multi-clinic company and an inventor of international patents too. Koonar has lived in four continents — Asia, Africa, Europe and North America — and spends the year in his family homes in Canada, Italy and India. Paper Lions, published by Mawenzi House in Canada and Speaking Tiger in India, is a novel that explores the rich culture and history of Punjab and its role in the coming of age of India as a nation.

Paper Lions is an epic multi-generational saga of Punjab. Koonar draws on a vast canvas to present a picture in pre- and post-independent India. The novel is a five-part story of what transpires in the inchoate state of Punjab from 1937to 1965. Raikot, located a few kilometres from Ludhiana, is the locale. While the narrative revolves around three main characters — Brikram, Basanti and Ajit — and their families, it also weaves a yarn of rural Punjab in those times.

The book explores a myriad of characters — some from nomadic tribes, such as the Bajigars and some are just villagers — the dairyman, the matchmaker, the astrologer, the Giyani (Sikh wise men), the politicians, the publicists, the head of the cattle yard, the bootlegger, the snake-catcher, the Brahmins, the school headmaster and more. The characters reveal the customs and mindset of the people based on caste and clan, their religion, and the trials and tribulations that time and history brought forth.

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How Subramaniam Swamy Urges for a Reset of the Indian Economy

Book review by Gracy Samjetsabam

RESET S Swamy

Title: RESET Regaining India’s Economic Legacy

Author: Subramanian Swamy

Publisher: Rupa (2019)

Subramanian Swamy is a well-known Indian politician, economist, and statistician. He is a Member of the Parliament in Rajya Sabha. A founding member of the Janata Party, he served as its president till 2013. He has also served as a member of the Planning Commission of India, has been a Cabinet Minister in the PM Chandra Shekhar government, and also been a Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade in the PM Narasimha Rao government. He has made contributions on India’s relations with China, Israel, Sri Lanka, and the USA and is considered as one of the most prominent voices in Indian foreign policy and diplomatic relations. He has a number of books, research papers and journals to his credit. He has written more than 20 books. Some of his most read books include: Economic Growth in China and India 1952–70 (1973), India’s Economic Performance And Reforms: A Perspective for The New Millennium (2000), India’s China Perspective (2001), Financial Architecture and Economic Development in China and India (2006), Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out (2006), Rama Setu: Symbol of National Unity (2008), 2G Spectrum Scam (2011). RESET: Regaining India’s Economic Legacy (2019) is his latest book.

In 1939, Dr. Swamy was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu and brought up in New Delhi, where he completed his graduation in Mathematics from Hindu College, University of Delhi. He attended Harvard University as a Rockefeller Scholar and under the guidance of Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets received a PhD in economics, on the thesis titled “Economic Growth and Income Distribution in a Developing Nation” in 1965. He returned to India to pursue a career in academics. However, his interest in market economy at a time when the government of the day was tilted more towards the Nehru brand of socialism and command economy pushed him to change path and move towards a political career.

Subramanian Swamy was one of the masterminds in presenting a Swadeshi Plan in 1970, amongst other Jan Sangh leaders that included Jagannathrao Joshi and Nanaji Deshmukh. The monograph vocally directed that socialism be replaced with a competitive market economic system to ensure India’s economic growth at 10 per cent to overtake China by 2030, achieve self-reliance, full employment and produce nuclear weaponry. The plan was deemed “dangerous” by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was dismissed. This sets the premises for the book RESET: Regaining India’s Economic Legacy. Fifty years hence, this seminal work provides a fresh look into his pioneering ideas on India-specific economic development.

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How Indigo Girl finds herself in Suzanne Kamata’s new novel

Book Review by Gracy Samjetsabam

Title: Indigo Girl

Author: Suzanne Kamata

Publisher: Gemma Media (2019)

Indigo Girl is a coming-of-age novel by Suzanne Kamata, an award-winning novelist who resides in Japan. A sequel to the young adult novel Gadget Girl, a book that won multiple awards including the APALA (Asia Pacific American Award for Literature) Honor award in 2013-2014, the story centres around the life of the protagonist, Aiko Cassidy.

Aiko is a biracial and a bicultural teenager with cerebral palsy. Raised by a single mother, who now has a new family, she questions her idea of belonging and home. She yearns to know more about her biological father and the many questions that shroud her existence.

Aiko is excited about her summer break and looks forward to the solo trip from Michigan (USA) to Tokushima (Japan). It is her first visit to Japan, the place she describes as “where I belong” as she pictures it as “the land of Ghibli and iced matcha lattes, land of indigo and cat cafes and manga and J-pop”. Although she is 15 and has cerebral palsy, she is independent and confident like any other teen and thinks that she is old enough to speak for herself. The trip that was meant to be a summer getaway — to connect to her biological father and to inspire the book she was working on — ends up opening a whole new window to life for Aiko.

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The Assassination of Indira Gandhi: Upamanyu Chatterjee Plunges into Darkness, Mingles Facts and Fiction with Wry Humour

Book Review by Gracy Samjetsabam

Title: The Assassination of Indira Gandhi

Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee

Publisher: Speaking Tiger, 2019

The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (2019) is a collection of short stories on different themes and motifs by acclaimed writer Upamanyu Chatterjee. Winner of the prestigious Indian Sahitya Akademi Award and the French Officier des Arts et des Lettres, his debut novel, English August: An Indian Story, was made into a highly successful film.

The title of his new book, The Assassination of Indira Gandhi, is at once striking, for it echoes a dark chapter in 20th century history, the assassination of one of India’s most iconic prime ministers and the social tensions that followed within the country. The title aptly sets the tone for the stories that are a tour de force of the trials and tribulations of modern India’s journey. This assortment of twelve short stories covers diverse themes and settings, each one of them, delving into the issues that strike at the heart of the emerging idea of India.

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