captivated by India Between the Assassinations

This second book by the Man Booker-winning author Aravind Adiga, is written as a travel guide of short stories within a fictional Indian town of Kittur, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Over one week, the reader is taken to all the important areas and introduced to everyday individuals who are trying to eek out a living within the cultural mixing pot of traditional and post-colonial India. At first, the cultural complexity seems to be the key point of difference; the caste system, the blatant corruption, abject poverty and the arrogance of wealth. But slowly each story tells of the eternal human struggle, to be the best person you can, amidst the universal apathy, greed and despair. And in tune, the complex physical surroundings are carefully described as being anything between strikingly beautiful and pungently filthy. Minute details are explained so that it is easy to feel as though you are there in the middle of it all, with an understanding of why things happen the way they do... Kittur symbolises the universal crossroads of our civilisation, between naive enthusiasm and endemic corruption, the brightest, most educated and those unable to read, the downtrodden and greedy, and the crazy rich and unimaginably poor; all within the spiritual and cultural complexity of modern day India. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Each character has their own story which gradually emerges. First of all we meet 12 year old Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Then there is Ramakrishna "Xerox", who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sources products from the underworld to set off a bomb in a Jesuit school to protest against the caste system; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster who desperately tried to keep his favourite student away from the pornographic cinema in the middle of town; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within the forested outskirts of the town and their own circle of social intelligentsia who cannot help mocking them; Keshava, the village boy who achieves his aspiration to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly "looks for the truth"; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who "could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion"; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the sixth daughter for whom her Brahmin father could not afford a dowry, who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellant sprayer who systematically elevates himself to gardener, then chauffeur of a lonely rich Mrs Gomes, before he loses it all by trying to be someone else; and Murali, the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist communist party who falls in love with the poorest young woman in dire circumstances. He cannot afford to marry her and must concentrate on developing his skill for writing stories about real people who want nothing. The book is a compulsive read, if only for a sense of hope at the end. Perhaps the resounding message is the simplest, to appreciate what we have...

travelling with the surreal Passengers

I felt the need to escape reality and chose to see this romantic sci-fi drama of a spaceship full of frozen people heading off to start a new life. It was a combination of a futuristic space machine and a super tech cruise ship, with 5000 passengers in suspended animation for 120 years. As if we could ever get that technical accuracy! But the movie did not disappoint. It was entertaining in every way. The meteor hits and Jim (Chris Pratt) is awakened 90 years too early. Despite using his engineering skills to exploit every luxury on board, he becomes very lonely and bored and he is challenged to wake up the lovely Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). His dilemma is shared with the android and very humanoid barman. There is quite a charming moral story about the fact that we can't always have what we want, and if we do, then we can't recognise or appreciate it until its too late, or almost too late! There are some brilliant visual effects of a swimming pool that bubbles out into space and the idea of a corporation running this scale of tourism is quite quirky.

The myth of Jackie

I was uncertain about seeing the film Jackie; would it be a historical documentary, a piece of american propaganda or something more than that? I should have realised that the Chilean director, Pablo Larrain, would not have grown up in America, surrounded by the Kennedy myth. Instead, he created a visual and emotional masterpiece, that covered the first few days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in November 1963. Jackie Kennedy was being interviewed for her lived experience and we were transported back to key events. She introduced the Camelot myth – in which he was an old-fashioned but tragic hero. But in reality she must have been in shock, some say PTSD, and was trying to honour her husband and country and be a mother to their 2 young children. The film has an amazingly discordant sound track contrasted by beautiful dresses and set design. Natalie Portman plays the emotions honestly and believably, and as she communicates with the priest, played by haunting and elderly John Hurt, she displays both her determination and vulnerability.

magical: All the light we cannot see

This novel offers a brilliant life affirming reading experience. It is a magnificent feat of creativity inspired by research for the multiple award-winning author Anthony Doerr. It is such an intricate weave of 2 young lives in 1940's Europe; a resilient blind French girl and a smart German orphan, whose life paths move towards their fleeting meeting in occupied St Malo at the end of World War II. They are both so amazingly strong and adept at surviving through challenges most of us would never consider possible. Before the war, Marie-Laure lives with her widowed father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master lock smith. She is blinded at six and her father whittles a wooden miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. At twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and she flees with her father to the walled Saint-Malo, to the sanctuary of her reclusive great-uncle. They carry with them what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous diamond; even they do not know if it is real or one of the 3 fakes created to deter the Germans. At the same time, in a northern German mining town, Werner grows up with his younger sister in an isolated orphanage. He seeks escape through his fascination with and skills in repairing radios. While he is excited to earn a place at an elite training academy, his sister has premonitions of its futility. As he tracks the resistance, Werner realises the human cost of his intelligence. The sensitivity of the meeting between Werner and Marie-Laure at the final stages of the war is truly tragically romantic. And in the final few chapters, it is wonderful to read forward to current times and realise the intergenerational beauty of such an amazing connection. There can be goodwill created in the most dire of circumstances.