Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World

Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World by Ramachandra Guha
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I finished the book, the struggle was to how to write about it and where to start. Gandhi lived a very crowded and active life and it is difficult to find what to write about it all as there is a sense of missing out on a lot of detail. The 900+ pages of the book amount to Guha's dilemma about the same. How to account for all the events of his life and those lives he touched upon and the events he shaped must have been a daunting task to set for oneself.

Guha's narrative encompasses the political events of the day, the personal life of Mahatma and how the world looked at him. The problem with all that is that Gandhi lived his life in full public glare and didn't bother to hide away anything. Hence most of what he wanted to say and do, he did in the public leaving nothing much of interest for an enterprising biographer writing 70 years later.

There are some new material from the archives which are interesting to read about and the correspondences but was a little disappointed by the non-judgemental tone of the entire book which even Gandhi would've found unacceptable.

A self-proclaimed 'Philosophical Anarchist', Gandhi's life was what he called his autobiography - his experiments with truth. He was one who was experimenting with the truth always - trying to change his perception of it if the results are not to his liking. He was open about it, wrote about it, keep talking about it and changed his views if he was convinced.

However, his basic principles of non-violence or civil disobedience did not get to change. He experimented the methods in which they can be taken to the masses (which experiments were mostly completed during his time in South Africa) but never changed the basic principle underlying them. However he was ready to talk about them to everyone, wrote tons of articles about them and practiced till his death.

So, the political part of the book has to tell the story which was well-known to everyone. To me, Gandhi's relationships with Rajaji or M.A.Ansari are the new. The movements he spearheaded, the reasons he pulled back the agitations are all well-documented and known. So Guha takes the path of showing the responses to these events from the press and the outer world. While that adds to the story, it does not alter it in anyway.

What I would've preferred is probably for Guha to place the events of Mahatma's life in a frame of the events of the day and try to make sense out of it. But sadly, the biographer stops at telling the story without a larger concept or a viewpoint of what happened. The latter part may have been a conscious decision but the former one was a missed chance.

Two personalities stand out in the book as important - one politically and the other on a more personal front.

Gandhi, Ambedkar and Jinnah

Dr B.R. Ambedkar comes out as a churlish, petty politician at the start of the book but seem to have had a change in status by the end. That I think, is doing injustice to him. Ambedkar's life took a different arc than the ones by the brahmins and banias of the day and probably Gandhi was the only person in that time who understood that and treated Ambedkar as more of an equal when others tend to look at him as a small time politician from the hinterland. Mahatma understood the significance of what Ambedkar is standing for and the truth of it - the injustices done to the untouchables - made him turn tack and focus on the reformation after the Poona pact than any other politician in those days.

The impetus given by Ambedkar's stand helped in the opening of the temples and wells for the lower castes and helped in moving forward the reformation needed in the Hindu religion as a whole. This is a relationship and issue that resonates more in the current India - which is still struggling to move forward on these reforms and has to handle the resurgent backward castes along with the rest of the Brahminical hierarchy and the Dalit identification has made it more difficult to implement any now. A deeper analysis of these chapters would've made a lot more sense as a book for the modern India.

Saraladevi

The episode of Gandhi's romantic liaison with Saraladevi Chaudarani is something that was new to me. I never heard or read about it before now. So it was interesting to read about this part of Gandhi's life but as Guha admits there is little material available - their correspondences seem to have been destroyed with only a few letters left and so a lot of the story seems to be surmises from the references to their relations in other people's letters and writings. So while it is interesting, it is also the part where there is not much data. However, based on what I read, the affair lasted about a couple of years with no physical consummation but Mahatma keep referring to the episode in later years as when he came close to physical lust (though without any direct reference to the lady). But how important it is in the overall life of Mahatma is a question that never gets asked or answered.

Surprisingly, Nehru gets a minuscule part in the book (less than Patel or Bose), but Jinnah gets his share but the nuances of the discussions and dissent in Congress with Mahatma over partition are glossed over.

Overall, I was left a little dissatisfied with the book as I would've expected Guha to tell a little about the relevance of Gandhi's life in the modern India with the resurgent Hindutva in power and the Hindu-Muslim harmony is in more danger than any other period of the free India. That would've made the book a little more than a biography but made a lot of sense .

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Bleak landscapes and the morbid story lines are nothing new to the Coen Brothers. I remember the night I watched 'Fargo' exactly for the same reason. Cooped up in a downtown apartment in Omaha with a few feet of snow making it impossible to go out, the movie pretty much summed up the mood of that night in 1999.

It is exactly for the same reason that I love the Coen brothers as well. They can show a ray of sunshine now and then like they did in 'O Brother, Where art thou?' but then it is when telling sordid tales coupled with desolate landscapes that they actually shine.

So it was with that expectation that I started watching 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' which I have to say is probably the grimmest of the tales told by the Coens and the most frivolous as well. There are no happy endings but just a reminder of how most of the tales end in real life.

The film is structured as an anthology of six different stories happening in the American west of the yore and is told as chapters of a book. All six stories handle different parts of the hard life in the west  the wagon trains, the saloon fights, the coach travels, the gold rush but all are held together by dark humor and dark drama.

The film opens with a cheery note nevertheless with the story of the quick draw Buster Scruggs a.k.a San Saba Songbird , making light work of the outlaws in a bar and a saloon before unwittingly killed by another young gun. As Buster in his whites with a angels wings and a lyre bursts into a duet with his killer admitting that he cannot be the top gun forever - the whimsical notion of death and the life in the west itself comes to the fore.

However, to me the best of the six stores have to be the one called 'The girl who got rattled' which combined a bit of everything and threaded a story which just have to end in tragedy. Zoe Kazan, as the sweet Ms. Alice Longabaugh who loses her brother while on the Oregon trail and was looking forward to a marriage with the trail hand before everything ends in a misjudged fight with the Indians. The reaction of Zoe when marriage was proposed is a delight to watch and the life they start imagining in Oregon before everything crashes down is a reminder of how lives are lived.

The final story of the anthology is also the one which tries to make sense of all the other tales by some philosophical discussion and it is interesting to follow the discussion which goes from being silly at the start to a discussion about love into the inevitable death as they stage coach riders reach their destination. As Rene, one of the riders, tries to explain the dichotomy of the life away and define the way love is perceived by different people, the conversation ends with the inevitable dichotomy of those living and dead.

The exceptional beauty of the landscape is contrasted with the lives of the people who try to make it there. The loving thing about any movie by the Coen brothers is the witty wordplay combined with sleek edits to tell  the stories. The whole thing is attenuated by the beautiful Prairie landscape and the never ending lands of the west.

In the 'Meal ticket' this beauty of the land and the brutality of life itself is brought out through the repeated talk on the Ozymandias and the story of Kane and Abel. There is no moral scale here but only a question of surviving the rugged life.

The movie eventually take one look at the life and the morbid ending awaiting everyone and laughs at the whole charade of living it.

Persepolis

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

'The Complete Persepolis' tracks the life of Marjane from about 10 years till 24 years. Thats about the most conservative way of saying it. This is a book which tells her story just like the way she is in real life - loud, opinionated and doesn't give a damn about anyone.

That is the reason to love and hate the book. The book is actually in a graphic novel format - while I've read more comics in that format - reading a real-life story in the format was novel. But the drawings, though in black and white, convey clearly a lot more than mere words ever do. That is probably the reason to read it as well.

This coming-of-age of Marjane happens to be from about 1979 till about 1993 - in Iran and Europe - crossing over the tumultuous period of the nations history - first the Islamic revolution and then the war with Iraq. It is also the period Marjane is continuously in a rebellious mode both in Iran and in Europe where she is sent for schooling.

In a way, the book also documents the life of the upper Iranian middle class as they try to survive through the religious persecutions and the war and also try to live the life. Marjane's family is prosperous at the start of the revolution and though they go through the difficult times of the revolution and the economic despair of the later times, they are comparatively well-to-do in comparison with the others in the story.

However, this is strictly the story of Marjane as she tries to make sense of the sudden religious restrictions like the veil being applied everywhere and the punishments they have to go through for non-compliance and she picks up trouble wherever she was asked to conform.

To me, the book at least broke some of the perceptions we've about the people in these countries. Other than a few Iranian movies, there is very little documentation around about the people of the country. Thus it is interesting to read about the liberal views of the middle class and still that excludes how the rest of the country - the majority - lived through these times.

Marjane's personal experiences are reflective of the way the country was governed - she loses uncles and friends to the war and they joke about the disabled to overcome the sickening scenario of the country. For a while, she tries living in Austria but ends up hating it and comes back.

Marries a guy - with the whole family expecting her to get a divorce - and dutifully fulfills that expectation in a couple of years. She doesn't grieve over that episode rather dissects why that marriage was a failure in a rather curiously detached way. Like a mistake we make and then realizing it.

There are moments I thought it would be better if I have some backstory but overall a superlative read..