Ramayana

Ramayana by Maharishi Valmiki, adapted by Roger James Elsgood

This retelling of the classic Indian story was hard to follow. The version in the movie A Little Princess is much better.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel by Kiran Desai

Two South Asian Indians knew each other at a young age. Their lives diverge as they go about many things, however, they end up back together. They spend much time in America where they have experiences straddling the two cultures. They have different relationships and have excitement in newness, even if it means walking around naked. However, they also need to occasionally hide from others in part to adhere to some classical standards. The book seemed to go on forever, with similar things repeating themselves over and over.

The Night Diary

The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

This historical fiction book tells this experiences of a family during the partition of India. They lived in what is now Pakistan. Their father was Hindu and their mother was Muslim. Their father is a doctor, but their mother died a while ago. Since they are Hindu, they must travel to the other side of the line. Despite originally being wealthy, they are now struggling like others. They had to walk in the heat. Water became a valued commodity. Muslims and Hindus would kill each other to avenge past deaths. Even train rides could be dangerous. At the midpoint, they stay at an uncle's house. They spy a little girl and talk with her. This spooks the father and they immediately flee. This time they take a train due to Grandma's poor condition. They witness attacks and deaths on the train. They eventually make it to new India and gradually build up a new life. This does bring to life the personal experiences that people had struggled through during the time period.

Aru Shah and the End of Time: A Pandava Novel, Book 1

Aru Shah and the End of Time: A Pandava Novel, Book 1 by Roshani Chokshi

Aru Shah lives in an Indian museum with her mother. She goes to a rich kid's school, and tells many lies to try to fit in. Her friends come once and see her, and she activates a magic artifact to try to "save" herself. Alas, she really does activate it and finds she is one of the 7 "brothers" that will save time. She runs into others who are also small girls. They find out more about their position and go on their quest to save time and avoid the sleeper. There are bits of the Indian legends that I do recognize, though this book takes a "girl child" spin on some of the masculine parts. There is a lot of adventure, but it can get confusing.

A Little Princess

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

While listening to the audiobook, I couldn't help but hearing Patrick Doyle's soundtrack to the 1995 movie. It seemed to do a great job capturing the emotions in this tear-jerker. In the book, Sara's has her move from India to boarding school in England. He spares no expenses from his vast fortune for her. She also has a smart intellect, kind heart and a great imagination, making her popular with the other students. Alas, one day his solicitor arrives to tell the headmistress that the father has died and lost his entire fortune in a failed diamond mine. She is now reduced to being a servant girl.

She accepts her fate and works hard. She still tries to keep her dignity and manners. She observes the families nearby. One day a little boy gives her a coin, thinking she is a beggar girl. She wanted to return it, but accepted it because she knew it meant a lot for him. Another day, she found a coin on the ground near a bakery. When the baker said she could keep it, she bought buns - and gave most of them to a beggar child that was worse off than her.

In addition to running errands, she would continue to work at the school. She would officially help younger girls with their lessons. Unofficially, she would help friends and tell stories. She also got along well with the servant girl.

Some people from India move next door. She is able to communicate with the native Indian servant in his language when his monkey escapes. He later secretly returns the favor by making things better for her in her servants quarter. Later we learn that the person that moved in next door was her father's friend. His diamond business had succeeded magnificently, but not after giving him health problems. This neighbor had heard that his friend's daughter was at a boarding school and was eager to find her so that he could give her half the fortune. He was looking in France and Russia, not knowing that she lived next door. They finally do connect when Sara returns the monkey (again). Sara is now able to leave the boarding school and assume her great wealth. Some of her first actions are to hire the fellow servant away from the boarding school and to give money to the baker to feed any child-beggars that ask. (And her she finds that the first child she helped is now employed by the school.)

The book is a riches-to-rags-to-riches story with plenty of tear-jerker moments. A person's character can be shown with how they deal with different circumstances. Despite being destitute, she continued to work hard to help others. However, even with optimism, there is still a limit to how much pain can be endured.

Arya Khanna's Bollywood Moment

Arya Khanna's Bollywood Moment by Arushi Avachat

Arya's older sister returns home to begin wedding preparations. Arya has a little resentment with this. She also is discouraged with the experiences in school. The student body president seems to put her in a lower position. Then a bunch of conflicts come up. Relationships get flipped around. Friends get mad at each other. They also have a goal to get a big school event planned. She eventually finds the boy that she like (who has been near her all this time.) The kids get into college and the family begins the process of reconciliation. The book was structured like a Bollywood movie. However, it would really need some music to keep the effect. Instead, it came across as a more typical teen romance, with the protagonistic and Indian in America. 

Midnight's Children

People that were born right at the time of India's independence were special. The closer to midnight, the more extreme the powers. This book chronicles the history of India together with that of the people. One kid had the ability to read other people's minds. He would have to endure hearing all the "adult" thoughts of people around him. People didn't believe the powers. Eventually kids banded together.

Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) 2nd Edition

Zoroastrians were once one of the major religions of the world. Today they are just a minor sect. I was curious to know how big they were and what became of them. What do they believe? How did they lose stature in the world? This book provided some limited answers, though I found it most accessible towards the end.

The early history in the book has a focus on our current historical understanding of the roots of Zoroaster and Zoroastrianism. This helps give context, but also distracts from the religious history. It would be more interesting to have a focus on what Zoroastrians accept as their history and then bring out areas that can't be verified. This is especially important with a religion that is as old as narrowly practiced as this one. I also struggled understanding the beliefs and locations that were described.

Things started to become more clear after the rise of Islam. The religion was mostly relegated to rural backwaters. The story of the Parsi in India is the one major exception. The exodus allowed the Zoroastrians to flourish. They have come to economically dominate the Indian economy, but are also fading in population.

The beliefs of the Zoroastrians is a little less clear. Fire is important. They are often accused of being fire worshipers. However, they also have a form of monotheistic dualism.  There seems to be a good deal of Zoroastrian doctrines that have been adopted by Judaism. 

Save Me A Seat

Being the new kid at school is never easy. It is especially difficult when you are coming from a different culture. It can be even worse when you think you understand people only to have that understanding flipper around. In Save Me a Seat, a bright elementary student moves from India to the United States. He speaks the same language, but people cannot understand him well. He also struggles with the different customs of the school. He sees one other Indian in the class, and seeks to befriend him, thinking he will understand. However, this other Indian is a born-in-America class bully. The new boy (Ravi) is upset when he is asked to go to the special ed teacher to help with his English. He also meets the American boy there (Joe). Ravi looks down on Joe because he is there. However, they end up becoming good friends.
The portrayal of Indian-American culture show many aspects (both good and bad) that I have seen. The struggles of kids to understand each other is real. Having the kleptomaniac bully get stuck with leeches in his pants may be over the top, but does feel satisfying.

Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown starts out as boring romance, but gradually works its way into a well written story. The namesake Shalimar is a Kashmiri circus performer who see his livelihood fade away with the coming of television. To make matters worse, his fiance decides to go off to perform in the city. There she has an affair with an American diplomat and bears a child. He vows revenge, and seeks to destroy the fiance, the American and their illegitimate child. He is caught after murdering the diplomat, but escapes the prison using his tightrope walking skills and later tries to kill the daughter. The novel ends with the attempt (though it strongly implies that he is the one that dies.)
Most of the novel is spent in flashbacks developing the history of the characters. The American diplomat was a European Jew who had a daring escape from Nazi controlled France. He had a history of difficulty controlling his amorous passions. He later immigrated to the United States and became a minor celebrity before rising up the diplomatic ranks to became ambassador and counter-terrorism specialist. Shalimar's fiance was a dancer. She was disowned by her community after the affair, but gradually started to work her way back into their graces. Her daughter was taken by the ambassador's wife. She was not a great parent, and the daughter lived a troubled youth, only really developing skills at fighting. The flashbacks help to build the characters but leave the story moving along at a plodding pace. At times it feels like it is just a contrast between Nazi Europe and modern separatist fighting in Kashmir. However, it later becomes clear that these are just the backdrop of a story of love, lust and revenge.

Life of Pi

I had watched the Life of Pi moving a while ago, and now am reading the book. It is very well written, and the author manages to sew doubts about what is real and what is fiction. The main character adopts the name Pi to avoid vulgar puns on his real French name. He lives in India where is family owns a zoo. He is extremely interested in religion and is a devout Christian, Muslim and Hindu (all this while living in a secular house.) There are a lot of interesting insights about captive animals and zoos. He compares people's city houses to the animal's zoo houses. If you took some people out of their house and drove them to the country and said they were free, they would think your crazy. Similarly, many animals are perfectly content living in the zoo.
His family decides to immigrate to Canada. They board a boat with all the animals. It is a rather normal voyage until the ship sinks. Then Pi ends up losing his family and finding himself on a lifeboat with a heyena, zebra, orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker. Most of the book deals with his struggles out at sea. He must will himself to survive, while at the same time making peace with the carnivorous tiger.
At the end, he is finally rescued and tells his tale to accident investigators. They do not believe him. He then tells an alternate story with a murderous french chef, his mother and an injured sailor in the boat. We are left to wonder whether he just made up the animal parts to make a better story. Though it doesn't really matter. The story was that of overcoming great adversary through faith in God.

The Last Theorem

I never realized that Arthur C. Clarke lived most of his adult life in Sri Lanka. That explains the setting for The Last Theorem. The book centers around mathematician Ranjit Subramanian. We start with him in college, and later see him achieve great fame after proving Fermat's last theorem. He gets married has kids, becomes a professor, gets involved with the US government and eventually is given a "mechanical" immortality.

He also plays a role in some important events for the future of humanity.

Aliens picked up radio signals from earth. They also noticed the nuclear blasts. The "Grand Galatics" decided that the earth needed to be destroyed, so they sent out a crew of "1.5s" to do the destruction as well as "9 limbs" to communicate. However, a Grand Galactic passing near earth saw that the humans were not all bad, so he called off the invasion. Unfortunately, the other aliens did not have the resources to return home, so they occupied a vacant part of earth. The Americans initially tried to attack them. However, this failed miserably, and they eventually became friends, sharing technology and eventually leading earthlings to be the guardians of the galaxy.

Back on earth, a "peace coalition" uses "EMP" bombs (silent thunder) to disable all electronic activity in rouge states. They deploy this over North Korea and quickly dispose of the "benevolent leader". They also had a humanitarian crew standing by to provide supplies after the attack. Thus they are able to quickly install a peaceful leadership without bloodshed. They later use this on Colombia and Venezuela. (The drug trade had dried up in Colombia after it was legalized in America. However, the kingpins decided to join the trade in another lucrative addiction - oil. This led to a lot of fighting that was finally ended by "silent thunder".)

Earth has also developed greater space exploration technology, with a "space elevator" enabling Moon travel to be easier. Ranjit's daughter competes in the first "space olympics". She also competes in a "solar sail" race. However, in the process, her vehicle is commandeered by the 9 limbs who clone her body to use to interrogate leaders of the earth.

There is a lot of stuff going on. However, most of the narrative is spent talking about the life of Ranjit. While we get little bits of the alien activity throughout the book, actual human-alien contact doesn't happen until the end. Even here, it seems like it will be aborted before it is started. We finally get a quick landing and a paranoid US response. When that fails, they seem to make peace and live together nicely.

I liked the way that the novel started. We get a couple prologues about the life and interest of the authors, and these meld directly into the story of Ranjit. I was left wondering whether this was still a bit of "fact" related to the authors. Then the aliens pop in, and I finally realize it is fiction.

The ending seems to jump up a little suddenly. I was expecting some sort of bang with the aliens, but it is just a little whimper. The earth ends up in a highly optimistic peaceful existence. The US uses its technical warfare superiority to ensure peace. They almost go too far in their quest, but luckily, they are stopped by aliens and the earthlings are able to have a peaceful, educational co-existence.

After this seeming peace, another bit seems tacked on where Ranjit's wife dies in a Scuba accident. Her mind is saved in an "electronic" body, with her husband joining her. This seems to only allow the narrative to come back to them a few thousand years later after the Grand Galactics have returned and decided that earthlings should take over their role.

There is a lot of interesting content in this story, and a nice narrative style. The ending seems rushed, but manages to serve its purpose in spite of leaving out a lot that we were expecting.

Life of Pi

Life of Pi is a masterpiece of quality production. The movie starts out great, giving the background of a boy that grows up in French India. His name means "swimming pool" in French, but people make fun of him, so he tries to go by "Pi". One day, he writes a huge number of digits of pi on the board and the name sticks. Growing up, he tries just about every religion, being secular, Hindu, Christian and Muslim. His family has a zoo, but they eventually fall on hard times and decide to take a boat with the animals to Canada.

There is a big storm on the boat trip. Pi is exited and happens to be outside when the storm hits. He eventually ends up as the lone person on a lifeboat that has a bunch of animals - including a tiger. At this point the movie starts starts to slow down. I wouldn't have minded if about 30 minutes of lifeboat time were cut out. You can get the point that he is struggling, yet the character just doesn't seem to grow.

At the end he is finally found as the lone survivor and the tiger scampers off in to the wild. The shipping company comes to ask him about it, but they don't believe the first story, so he tells a different story where the animals are people and he is the tiger. Was he with a tiger? Was it imaginary? Does it even matter? The end result is he survived but lost everything. There was some force that helped motivate him to survive.

A Passage to India

Passage to India feels like "Jane Austen goes to India". Some Brits are concerned about their manners and society. There is a wedding planned, but the girl is not too enthusiastic. Then some women go on a trip to some caves, an Indian is unjustly accused of accosting a woman. He is later set free, and Indians take that as an opportunity to be more Indian.

It is clearly India from a British perspective. The pacing is rather slow, with a tone of condescending respect for the Indians. For fans of the Bronte/Jane Austen type of stuff, this would probably be a good book. For me, however, it was not my cup of tea.

Q & A (Slumdog Millionaire)

A kid from the slums wins a billion rupees on a game show. The game show's producers don't want to pay out so soon and thus they seek to dig up dirt on him to declare him a cheat. Luckily, an attorney shows up to take him out. He shares his entire story with her, and eventually gets his money. It turns out, he just happened to have life events that led him to know the answers to the questions.

It all seems like a pretty good story. The "life events" are even spun out well - he doesn't just happen to experience a key historical event, but it just happens that some aspect of his experience relates to the question. (He happens to live with a cricket nut, and thus knows the answers to the cricket questions.)

The catch, however, is that the events are just a little too "exceptional". He manages to work for espionage agents, movie stars, hit men, and others that seem a little too far fetched.

The story paints a bleak picture of life in the Indian slums. However, in spite of it, it shows optimism in the spate of adversity. (The "pessimistic" running away from seemingly bad events often ends up being positive in the long run.) Alas, the extremeness of the events and forced melodrama (A gun fight with the game show host?) distract from the story.

Siddhartha

Siddhartha is a tale of an Indian who finds his inner peace within nature itself. He spends almost all of his life in the quest for personal enlightenment. In the process, he suffers through many of the ups and downs of life. He becomes addicted to high stakes gambling as a result of trying to show that money has no value. He is such a caring, loving father that his son runs away (because he wanted more 'discipline') He spends time in pursuit of pleasure, while at other times eschewing it all. In the end, he finds much insight from the simple people. He decides that talk and thought are hindrances to his enlightenment as he finally reaches old age truly happy.

The book is fairly short and readable. The main message that Siddhartha has in the end is that the knowledge and enlightenment is best found when one is not looking for it. By looking, one puts on blinders that put the focus on certain things. By being open to everything around, the happiness can be found in what really exists.