Tag Archives: Non Fiction

In My Hands Today…

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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.

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Nine Lives – William Dalrymple

A mesmerizing book that explores how traditional religions are observed in today’s India, revealing ways of life that we might otherwise never have known.

A middle-class woman from Calcutta finds unexpected fulfillment living as a Tantric in an isolated, skull-filled cremation ground . . . A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for two months of every year . . . A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death . . . The twenty-third in a centuries-old line of idol makers struggles to reconcile with his son’s wish to study computer engineering . . . An illiterate goatherd keeps alive in his memory an ancient 200,000-stanza sacred epic . . . A temple prostitute, who resisted her own initiation into sex work, pushes her daughters into the trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling.

William Dalrymple tells these stories, among others, with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of remarkable circumstance, giving us a dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit

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A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East – Tiziano Terzani

Warned by a Hong Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, Tiziano Terzani — a vastly experienced Asia correspondent — took what he called “the first step into an unknown world. . . . It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn.”

Traveling by foot, boat, bus, car, and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Geography expanded under his feet. He consulted soothsayers, sorcerers, and shamans and received much advice — some wise, some otherwise — about his future. With time to think, he learned to understand, respect, and fear for older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity. He rediscovered a place he had been reporting on for decades. And it reinvigorated him.