Tag Archives: Non Fiction

In My Hands Today…

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A South Indian Journey: The Smile of Murugan – Michael Wood

Some time in the future you will come back here to Chindambaram and you will make a pilgrimage, said the astrologer to Michael Wood as they sat in a small airless house in Tamil Nadu. It is the most important thing you will do. Four years later Michael found himself on a pilgrim bus heading southwards on a journey of more than a thousand miles through the temples and holy shrines of Southern India. The bone-shaking bus, its aisle crammed with passengers on folding chairs and its video showing glimpses of old films through a blaring snowstorm of white static, would transport him into another world and time where the rituals at the spiritual heart of India are still observed as they were a thousand years ago, existing side by side with all the trappings of the modern world. As his many admirers know, Michael Wood is the perfect travelling companion, eyes and ears wide open, knowledgeable yet eager to learn. His touching and humorous account of this inner and outer journey captures both the life-enhancing spirit of Hinduism and the essence of India itself.

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Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews – Marilyn Hagerty

A legendary 86-year-old food critic brings together a collection of the best down-home, no-nonsense restaurant reviews-from Red Lobster to Le Bernadin-culled from her fifty year career

Writing for her local North Dakota newspaper, the Grand Forks Herald since 1957, Marilyn Hagerty went from obscurity to overnight sensation in 2012 when her earnest, admiring review of a local Olive Garden went viral. Among the denizens of the food world-obsessive gastronomes who celebrate Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, revere all things artisanal, and have made kale salad a staple on upscale urban menus-Hagerty’s review ignited a fiery debate over the state of American culture. Anthony Bourdain defended Hagerty as an authentic voice of the larger American culture-one that is not dictated by the biases of the food snobbery that define the coasts.

In this refreshing, unpretentious collection that includes more than 200 reviews culled from a voluminous archive spanning over fifty years, Hagerty reveals how most Americans experience the pleasure of eating out. Bourdain hails Grand Forks as, “a history of American dining-in the vast spaces between the jaded palates and professional snarkologists of the privileged coasts-as told by one hard working small city journalist. . . . We watch American dining change over time, in baby steps. Traditional regional Scandinavian giving way to big chains, first iterations of sushi, early efforts at hipster chic. Part Fargo, part Lake Woebegone. It’s the antidote to snark. This book kills cynics dead.”

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The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah – Tim Mackintosh-Smith and Martin Yeoman

All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth century were no exception: for them there were lies. Damned lies and Ibn Battutah’s India.Born in 1304 . Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. Here Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan’s journey – the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of his Indian career as a judge and a hermit. courtier and prisoner. ambassador and castaway. From the plains of Hindustan to the plateaux of the Deccan and the lost ports of Malabar. the author reveals an India far off the beaten path of Taj and Raj.Ibn Battutah left India on a snake. stripped to his underpants by pirates; but he took away a treasure of tales as rich…

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Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India – Pankaj Mishra

In Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra captures an India which has shrugged off its sleepy, socialist air and has become instead kitschy, clamorous and ostentatious. From a convent educated beauty pageant aspirant to small shopkeepers planning their vacation in London, Pankaj Mishra paints a vivid picture of a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. An absolute classic, this is a witty and insightful account of India’s aspirational middle class.

Small and short conversations with different people about their mindset and living style are described in this book. The people includes young women from Jhansi, with dreams of winning a beauty pageant, and naxalites in Bihar trying to initiate a revolution, and a young man from Gujarat speaking of killing Muslims in public. The author has shared all his experiences through this book. Butter Chicken In Ludhiana: Travels In Small Town India is an interesting read with a rich variety of languages and cultures. The stories in this book are full of irony, humour, and violence. There are so many characters portrayed in this book, and Mr Sharma from Ambala stands out.

The lifestyles of both village and city folk are depicted by the author, in this book which narrates the differences between the dreams and psychology of these people. In Butter Chicken In Ludhiana, the author talks about the reason of unemployment, which is caused by small fast food chains in small towns.

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From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East – William Dalrymple

In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam.

Using Moscho’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elgy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rice and scholarly, moving and courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical insights into the history, spirituality and fractured politics of the Middle East.