Review: Childhood's End
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Review: Anandamath
Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews
Review: Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death
Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars Billy Pilgrim is someone unstuck from time, and experiences it non-linearly, all the same time, travelling back and forth to his past and future, and is aware of all that has been and will be. He is indifferent to his actual life, with a successful career and family, and chooses to instead sleepwalk through it in daze of his past trauma. Billy was a soldier who fought in the second world war. But he and many of his compatriots were essentially infants playing at a ‘children’s crusade’. That war, much like those before, was planned and orchestrated by the whims of old men, who sent out inexperienced young men to die. Much like the 12th century monks who gathered impressionable orphans off the street, trained them to be soldiers, and sold them for wars to be fought far away in Africa. Or in the current day, a generic African warlord, who t...
Review: Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It
Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher My rating: 4 of 5 stars It had be only a couple of years, since I'd reconnected with the pursuit of recreational reading, as well as reading as a means of self improvement. But recently there was a disturbing realization. While my Goodreads reading challenge showed that I had finished a few hundred books, the amount that I was able to retain and remember was very less. It was almost as if, despite all the time and effort I put into it, the stuff just didn't stuck. So I began searching means of better reading and retention, and quite serendipitously came across Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher As esoteric as it may sound, reading a book about reading, I was up for new horizons. I was mostly not disappointed. For the most part the book focuses on reading, in context of the US educational system. O...
Review: An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
Review: Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
Review: The Calcutta Chromosome
The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews The Calcutta Chromosome; Detailed Review Review In most Colonial era fiction which I’ve read, Indians are usually portrayed as belonging to one of two categories. Either the heroic freedom fighters who engage the British in a symbolic but futile struggle, and martyr themselves. Or, the subservient serfs, who excel in cronyism and would sell their own mother for praise from their White masters. Sort of pigeon holed both. Hence it was a breath of fresh air to see a tale, where the snooty, bigoted overlords are being led by the nose by those whom they consider virtually nonexistent. The Calcutta Chromosome follows a narrative across multiple time periods and characters; all of whom have brushes with a mysterious secretive cult centered around a seemingly immortal demigod Mangala didi. A tale bordering on convoluted, science fiction mystery, with a pervasive colonial presence and smudges...