I had picked up this book 2 years back at the annual Strand book festival, and got to read it now. Tarun Tejpal is someone I had a curiosity to read. The first sentence of the book, made me raise an eye brow and doubt what was in the offering. First 150 pages or so, I was lost and now after completing the book, I think that part of the book could have been shortened. It was repetition of unnamed protagonist’s obsession with his wife and her body, and his inability to think beyond her.
But after about 200 pages the story picks up and that is when you find it difficult to keep the book down. The story travels from one plane to another, from one era to another, from one continent to another, from emotions to reality, from curiosity to mystery and finally lands up with truth. Author has divided the book in five parts: Prema or love, Karma or action, Artha or money, Kama or desire, Satya or truth. And the chapters pretty much revolve around these broader themes.
It is a story of a writer, who makes several attempts at writing a great novel, but finally lives through one and realizes that you have to live a story to be able to tell it. By some stroke of destiny, he buys a house in lower Himalayas, and the house has a mysterious history and a story that no one is willing to tell. The author gets obsessed by his desire to unearth the story so much that he looses interest in his original obsession, his wife. Finally after following the story and my joining all the facts that he collects from all possible people, he feels a sense of relief and that is when he goes back in search of his wife, content that he, at last has a story.
The story has been woven very intricately by the author, it keeps moving back and forth in time and space. The descriptions of the places, events and people are excellent. I could specifically relate to it as half the story is set in the city that I grew up in and the author describes the city from all angles, including calling it a city with no past and no visible future. He talks about the city in such a way that you can almost smell the city and feel it. He describes the emotions also with equal ease, and you can feel what the protagonist is going through. He describes his house in Himalayas, and the visuals from its various angles in such a way that you can visualize the whole valley. He describes people in such a way that you would think of someone that resembles the character.
The story touches the all aspects that touch a usual human life, childhood, politics, history, mystery, relationships, love, lust, famous and common people, chance encounters, weird people and events, cross cultures, religion, lack and abundance of money, free spirits, traditional living etc. All this is neatly woven together in a web that may entangle you. You would enjoy reading this intense and bold story, which is definitely different and original, especially if you are an intense person and like to lead an adventurous life.
I and a few fellow couchsurfers have been planning this trip for almost a year now, but like books I read when their time comes, the time for this trip was now and probably with people whom I was yet to meet. Badami is about 500 km northwest of Bangalore in Bijapur district. It was the capital of Chalukyas and would have been at its best in 6th century. All the three places Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal tell you the stories through it’s sculptures and temples that have lived through the centuries,
Badami’s attractions are more or less clustered around the AgastyaTirthaLake, a huge lake which was once supposed to have medicinal powers that could cure skin diseases. Though, now they say it can give you the some diseases if you step in. As you go from the main road, on the right hand side of the lake are cave temples, chiseled out of the single huge monolithic rock, which is reddish brown in color, resembling the color of almonds and hence giving the place its name: Badami. There are 4 caves, first three are Hindu caves and the fourth one is a Jain cave. First cave is dedicated to Shiva, second and third are dedicated to Vishnu and the fourth one to Jain thirthankaras. There is also an unfinished cave in between the second and third cave which was probably being carved by Buddhists. There are many carvings on the walls of all the caves which give you a peep into the religious and at times social inclinations of the society in times of Chalukyas. There are unusual poses of Shiva like the one with 18 arms to depict the 81 different dance postures. There are various instances of Ardhnarishwara with Shiva and Parvati depicted in single representation. There is a similar depiction of Harihara, which is half Shiva and half Vishnu. What is interesting is that besides religious symbols, Gods and Goddesses and stories from the mythology there are quite a few puzzles that have been carved and some of them are still unsolved and some of them have the solutions etched right besides them. There is also a fort that was built by Tipu and you can see the wall of the fort and the stairs leading to the fort, but it is closed to public as of now.
On the other side of the lake is the fort that has been built around the 52 natural rocks that lie close to each other separated by narrow ridges. The place seems to be used by the film production units a lot. There are various temples on the way to the top on this fort and at the top you can get a good view of the Badami town and its surroundings, especially when you stand on the watch tower. At the bottom of the hill is the ASI museum where some of the excavated sculptures are kept. I wish there was better documentation available at the museum so that it could have been more informative for people. Across the lake is the Bhootnath temple, which gives a very picturesque look through the lake. As you reach the temple, you would find that it is actually a small complex containing many temples. The main temple is a Shiva temple. There is also a Vishnu temple and then there is a huge rock which was probably used by the students or trainee artists to learn the art of carving the stone. You can see the unfinished pieces of work and also the probable learning stages. There is a path from here that leads to Mahakoota.
The lake itself is used to wash clothes by the locals now. The town of Badami almost lives in between all the old structures. From lot of points you can see the past and the present co-existing. To walk from one side of the lake to another you have to go through the current day labyrinth of the town. The tour guides will give you good stories about the place. Some modern day sculptures have been put on one side of the lake very recently, which are supposed to depict the life as it used to be, but really takes away the natural beauty of the place. They stand no where close to what was left in the place centuries ago, and almost look like an eye sore. Take a picture of the lake from any side and you will get a beautiful picture with a good backdrop. Be aware of monkeys that inhabit the place and jump on you for any food that you may be carrying in your hands.
Ailhole is town about 40 kms from Badami, and you can take an auto or a bus to reach there. There are 3 main complexes in Aihole that you can see, though there are supposed to be more than 100 temples in this town. Now this place was supposed to be the training ground for all the artists who would go and write the stories in stone for the future. The temples here were probably never worshipped as they were used only as training ground for the learning artists. The most notable temple in the complex is Durga temple which is not dedicated to Goddess Durga, but refers to fort, as durga is also the Hindi word for fort. The temple will invariably remind you of Parliament building in New Delhi and you would wonder if this was the inspiration for that, though the guide would tell you that there is no documented evidence for the same. Then there is Ladkhan temple, named after a muslim, which does not actually resemble any temple that you would have seen. It looks like a colonial villa with wooden roof, but this wooden look has been carved in stone. There are temples at various levels from the ground and the complex also houses a museum, where interestingly you can buy books by ASI.
Pattadakal is the world heritage site and is a huge complex with multiple temples. This place was primarily used for the coronation of the kings is what the guide would tell you, but as the complex exists today; it is difficult to see how they did it, as all the temples are pretty close to each other. It was definitely an experimental ground for temple architecture, specially the upper stupas or the gumbaj of the temple. There are a few temples in north Indian style like the ones you find in Orrisa and a few in south India style like ones that Pallavs built mostly in Tamil Nadu. Then you see a fusion of both the style and that is the style that Chalukyas created and is their contribution to the world of temple architecture. Since the Chalukyan kingdom had its spread from north to south, it could have been a need to evolve a style that combined the two ends of kingdom, or they could have been in born experimenters to mix and match styles to create a new one. There is only one temple which is a practicing temple, the virupaksha temple, all others are khandit or destroyed and hence are not worshipped anymore. This was the last spot we visited, so we found a lot of repetition of sculptures on the walls as well as the guide stories. This complex is on the side of the river Malprabha, and you can see it from the Papanatha temple. This complex is a visual treat, and your camera would just love it.
There are some other structures scattered around in the region and if you have ample time, the signboards on the road would guide you to them. We visited one such structure called Mahakoota, which is hot water spring, with a tank built around it, surrounded by Shivalingas and even the one below in the tank. Sage Agastya is supposed to have lived here. This place is probably the most untouched place of all the places we visited, and hence carries that air of old soul living as it is. Then there is Banashankari temple and a few other temples.
Every guide in all the three places will tie up all these places by saying that Aihole is the primary school with fundamentals of carvings and temple design, Badami is the high school, Pattadakal a college and temples in Belur and Halibied a university of the art form. By the end you would be tempted to ask the guides, if they all studied in the same school to utter the same words. All the three places have been the capital of Chalukyas at various points in time during their reign. Guides would also tell you that till about 60-70 years back, all these monuments were actually used by people to live, so there were villages that lived completely inside these structures. They would show you the signs of their living, by way of lot of board games carved on the floors, small grooves in the floor that were used as grinders for the kitchen.
The whole visit would leave you with a feeling of having visited a piece of history. But the current day infrastructure will leave much to be wanted. There is no good connectivity from Hubli or to move around within these places. At least on weekends, this place attracts a lot of visitors, but there are hardly any amenities. For example, at Pattadakal, you can spend a complete day but there is nothing that you would get to eat in or around the complex. The roads are actually not bad, but there is hardly any public transport to travel between these places. But nonetheless, if you live in India these are not the challenges that stop you from exploring, go ahead and enjoy this marvel from the past.
International Bestseller is what the cover of the copy of the book I have says, so I assume a lot of people would have found this book wonderful. My one line take on the book: Another view of the same data after a bit of slicing and dicing. And I often wonder why such books are so popular, are they really going to change the lives of the businesses or the people who read them.
Book talks about a strategy that instead of fighting in the red ocean of competition, try and create blue oceans of untapped markets or value innovation, and make the competition irrelevant. To me this is common sense which every entrepreneur understands inherently. Authorw have tried to give some tools and frameworks to assess your blue ocean strategy. This assumes that you have a BlueOcean strategy and these tools can help you know if it will work ort not, or they can help you ask some questions that you may not have thought through. To this extent the tools could be useful, but does the book help you actually find out those spaces where the potential blue oceans can be, I doubt.
I would say use the tools mentioned in the book to see if your strategy is different from your competitors or not, is there something new that you are taking to your customers which they would buy or which would make sense for them. But if you are looking for finding the way to find blue oceans for your idea or business, you probably have to do it yourself.
It’s a quick read, you can finish in one or two sittings, written in a pretty simple language that can be understood by anyone, and the examples mentioned are so popular and commonplace that you would want to skip through them, as they are quite predictable.
This is the latest addition to my collection of biographies, and autobiographies to be specific. I have always loved Dev Anand for all the melodious songs that have been screened on him. Having grown in the doordarshan era, have grown on all those black and white numbers, which still keep resonating in the ears. So, when this biography came last year, it was definitely in my list of ‘to be read’ books.
Book moves in an absolute chronological order, except in the beginning where Dev Anand remembers his life before he moves to Bombay while on a train from Gurdaspur to Bombay. He briefly talks about his family and what he felt when he left them to pursue his dreams. Throughout the book Dev Anand comes across as a constant dreamer, who lives in his dreams and then wakes up to make those dreams come true both in his life and his films. His life is all about films and the woman who walked with him in his journey, specially the ones which painted the silver screen with him. At times he met them while being a part of the film and other times, he met them and then went ahead and made films for them. From the early forties to 21st century what has not changed is the age of the women he fancied and romanced, it was less than twenty then and continues to be the same now.
Keeping in line with his image of evergreen, timeless hero, he does not mention the years anywhere, though you can make out the rough timing by the films he mentions and the national events that he mentions here and there. But otherwise he has tried to keep the story more or less timeless. He is a man totally in love with himself; everyone else comes and plays a role in his life and goes. He also comes across as someone who lives only in present, totally in the moment, with the person he is with, feeling the surroundings he is in and weaving out his future dreams from this present moment. He talks very romantically about all the women he romanced on and off screen.
Autobiography also brings out the businessman in Dev Anand. You would admire his networking skills and leveraging his fan following and start status as and when required. The fact that he once tried to launch a political party was a revelation to me. But what I admired about him was his ability to very quickly let go of the failures and move on to the next dream. I was amazed at the care and caution he takes to maintain his image in the minds of his audience, going to the extent of hiding his small disease that he had to suffer, going all the way to England to get a small operation done. All this so that none of his audience see him in a diseased state, something he thinks they can not imagine, their eternal hero can not fall down with a disease.
Before he could find himself a job in film industry, he worked for the military censor office and had the job of screening letters written by army officers. He probably got lot of romantic ideas from the letters written by army officers to their wives and girlfriends. He also got the idea of quitting the job from one of the letters, which said ‘just do it’. But wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, he was always a Casanova, trying to charm people and specially women around him, always believing he is the best. This phase also highlights his ability to draw inspiration from just about anywhere.
Dev Anand’s career spans almost the whole lifetime of Indian film industry and hence as he talks about himself, his films and his friends and colleagues in the industry, you also get the feel of how this industry has evolved over the ages, how things have changed. Here and there he also mentions his views on the social and political scenarios in the country and the world, giving a feeling of someone who is very connected to the outside world and its happenings and not just lost in his eccentricities.
Having educated in the British era, he writes in flowery English, you see that wherever I guess the editors have not really changed the text At places you feel that the language of the book could have been a bit better. There is a chapter for each of the films he made under his banner and some of the films he worked in. Though hardbound, the quality of the physical book could have been better along with the cover design. But now having read the book, I realize that the star might not have wanted anything except his picture on the cover. I would have wanted little more depth in the book, as there is so much the author has to share, but I guess in the interest of the length of the book, he has not gone into too much detail and just touched upon what he felt was important to share. He has hardly spoken about the music, which in my opinion is the biggest contributor to his success. Last portion of the book could have been compressed, as he talks about his films which not many people have seen and have starred people whom no one recognizes.
Read the book to see a man completely in love with himself. A star, who thrived on public adulation, who worked towards it, lived amongst the adulation poured on him from all directions and continued to seek more and more of it. An eternal optimist, who looks back at his life as if everything was picture perfect including the heart aches that we went through.
I have had this book for few years now and now that I have read it, I feel I am late in reading it by a decade or so. The concepts and the changes that books talks about have become so much an integral part of our lives by now that the book seems irrelevant. But nonetheless I read it, from first to last page, because I could relate to most of the things being said. It talks about the feeling of not belonging to anywhere co existing with sense of belongingness even in the alien places and with absolute strangers. Unlike the last Pico Iyer book that I read, which talked about places that would not be noticed if they fell off the map, this book talks about places which most of us would have traveled to, lived in,have friends in or least transited by sometime. So the places are very familiar, even if you have not visited them, you would have seen them and heard about them from various media all around you.
He talks about the generation which is so mobile that it does not belong to any one place, and is quite comfortable in unknown settings. He talks about people of one ethnic origin, growing up in another continent, living and making their careers in third and probably having their loved ones in the fourth, leaving the fifth one for vacations and visits. He talks about the jet setters who create a small home for themselves wherever they are on the planet and their actual or base homes actually look like a transit lounge. He talks about airports where you have people from all corners of the world but no one belongs to that place, a perfect microcosm of the world, where people come and stay for a while and then go for their next destinations. He talks about cities which are entirely composed of migrants from various places.
He talks of California, which is home to migrant communities, Atlanta when it was hosting the Olympic games, Toronto which has everyone who has come from somewhere else but have made it their home, Hong Kong and finally Japan. While talking about interior Japan, author becomes very personal and I am not sure if many people would relate to what he says. The book does get repetitive in many places and it is the same point that author keeps repeating through the book and you get a sense of Déjà vu.
There are some interesting quotes that I like in the book, like:
A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community.
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.
To add my own spice, I read this book while I was traveling back and forth between Bangalore and Pune, amidst all kinds of people from across the country, and in Pune where I stayed with a Polish friend who has chosen to live in India. And before this trip this book has traveled with me to various places, but as I always say probably my time to read it had yet not come.
Recommendation: I think you are too late now to read this book…:-)
I had picked up this book 2 years back at the annual Strand book festival, and got to read it now. Tarun Tejpal is someone I had a curiosity to read. The first sentence of the book, made me raise an eye brow and doubt what was in the offering. First 150 pages or so, I was lost and now after completing the book, I think that part of the book could have been shortened. It was repetition of unnamed protagonist’s obsession with his wife and her body, and his inability to think beyond her.
