Book Review: Twice in Nalanda

 

A second chance…




Two bus hijacks with more or less the same bunch of passengers involved. How will they react? Have the passengers, who are also neighbours, learnt anything from the burden on their conscience from the first episode? Or they care more about their person, to hell with the consequences? Twice in Nalanda may sound like a classic thriller. But it digs deeper, to find out about people’s equation with death. The choices they make when a pistol is pointed at their temple by the hijacker or the thoughts they harbour about bumping off their neighbour.

Twice in Nalanda talks about the journey that residents of Nalanda housing society undertake every day, in a cream and red minibus, to their workplace in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The journey is omniscient narrator here. It not only details the daily drudge of the commute, but about the transformative passage that the residents of Nalanda undergo within the timespan of the two incidents - November 1998 and November 2024.

Written by two surgeons – Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan – as Kalpish Ratna, Twice in Nalanda is brimming with characters of all shades, political hues and views. Their journey may get overwhelming at time, someone may flounder, some may get lost, while for some it may come as a new lease of life. At its heart, Twice in Nalanda, with its unwieldy plot and several subplots, is an ode to the city of Mumbai. Perhaps more surgical precision was required on part of authors to cut out the flab. However, the novel doesn’t fall short of surprises, when it comes to delving into human psyche and what makes us choose one thing over other.

Name: Twice in Nalanda

Author: Kalpish Ratna

Publisher: Red River

Pages: 218

Price: Rs 399

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: Murder at the Mushaira

Image
Ghalib goes detecting  When presented with 'What if?', the 'scenario' conjures up numerous possibilities making it an interesting proposition to delve in. What if Mirza Ghalib was a detective? Isn't this enough to hook a reader? We bet so. Thus it is with great interest that we began reading Murder at the Mushaira , and we were not disappointed. Raza Mir, the author, toyed with the possibility of envisioning Ghalib as a detective for nearly 15 years. What we get in Murder at the Mushaira is not a racy whodunit, but more than a peek into the life and times of Ghalib, the Mughal court, the nobility and the sepoys who tried to overthrow the East India Company. The novel is set against the backdrop of First War of Independence and it begins at a point when the 'night is too silent' and ends with a gunshot with the horse rider thrown away from his mount. Who is the horse rider and what is his mission? At that time, Shahjahanabad is a city brewing with tension, in...
Read more

ZardoZi-- Stitching a new tale

Image
  In a world that loves labelling and slotting people into categories, the freedom to choose and to speak our minds is not easy. In the graphic novel, ZardoZi- Stitched with Love, 10- year-old Zi thinks he has lost his voice and his parents and friends will never be able to hear his truth. But someone recognises Zi’s innate talent and patience to learn and practise the art of embroidery. It’s Zi’s grandmother -- Rani the Naani – who is unlike the other elders in Zi’s family. Rani the Naani believes in living in the moment and knows that ‘nothing is too girlish or boyish’. Arts is for everyone! She hands over her book of embroidery designs to Zi and the boy feels encouraged to present a zari-work for his school’s annual day. He begins with liquid zari work and boy! He transform a sober black coat into something stunning! In this gently embroidered tale of Zi coming into his own, the author and illustrator Debasmita Dasgupta, addresses the oft quoted, but poorly understood, t...
Read more

"These Tongues That Grow Roots" shows what empathy can do

Image
One Lives on Hope... History is omnipresent, even if we make it a habit of  "moving on with life." It seems easier to keep your head low, buried in sand, and avoid acknowledging conflicts and crisis situations. But history, the socio-political times that we live in, shape us knowingly or unknowingly. It has ways of creeping in, tip-toeing in the form of biases, prejudices that positions us in the social hierarchy and pushes us to take a stand. How many of us are able to stand up for others, how many of us can change the course of river to what it rightfully was and how many of us can come to the aid of those who meant us no harm, and yet ended up paying a heavy price? Is it easier to rise above trauma and heal? It is; if we have empathy. Sucharita Dutta-Asane's collection of short stories, These Tongues that Grow Roots, turns around the subjects of bleak headlines -- of war, naxalism, pandemic, lonely senior citizens, dying lakes, eve-teasing and feeling of being hunted -...
Read more