Laal paan ki Begum

Read this great story by Phanishwar Nath Renu. Its amazing how Renu depicts his characters and their mental makeup in all his stories. In Laal Paan ki Begum, Renu brings out the feelings of a typical house wife - her jealousies for all neighbourhood ladies, her getting angry upon slight upset in her plans for an outing and its repercussions on her poor husband the kids. Birjoo ki Maa is preparing to go to Balrampur to see naach in her bail-gaadi. Her altercations with Jungi ki putahoo (daughter-in law of Jungi), scolding of her kids and her husband later makes her character very lively.

Also read another great story by Renu, 'Maare Gaye Gulfaam'. Though I had already seen the screen adoptation of this story as Raj Kapoor's Teesri Kasam, I feel reading the story is greater fun. Hiraman, the bail-gaadi driver develops an infatuation for Hirabai, the nautanki waali bai. The side characters are also a joy to read. Like the helper Lahsanwa who washes his Gamcchi in the same water in which Hirabai's saari had been washed because after washing Hirabai's saari, the dirty water beomes 'atar-gulaab'. Renu's mastery at its best.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Finished reading this brilliantly written book by Mahmood Mamdani this week. The book provides an in-depth analysis of how militant Islam has come to haunt the USA who was itself responsible for creating it. Ronald Reagan learnt his lessons well after the Vietnam episode and tried to minimize American personnel casualities in its exercise to "rollback" Soviet Union. Its idea seemed brilliant in 1980s - use militant Islam against Soviet Communism. CIA limited its role to providing logistics and 'training of the trainer' kind of programmes and outsourced everything else to ISI. Saudi Arabia, being increasingly seen in the Muslim world as an US ally who had betrayed the just cause of its fellow-Muslims in Palestine, readily pitched in to redeem its position through Afghanistan. Pakistani and Arabian charitable organizations were used to channel CIA funds for Afghan 'Jihad'. Another major source of funding was drug trade. Opium began to be cultivated on large scale as most Afghan commanders doubled up as drug lords. ISI ran several heroin processing laboratories in Pakistan for processing these. The same trucks that would carry CIA-provided weapons to Afghanistan would return full of opium grown there. CIA, not unaware, would justify it as source to fund the war for 'right' cause. ISI on its part channeled most of the 'war' fund to these hand-picked drug lords and, as Mamdani puts it, some of the bloodiest battles in Afghan war was fought between these drug lords, rather than the Soviets. Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.

Read one more book in the meantime - A Call to Honour : In Service of Emergent India by Jaswant Singh. Decent reading but just one of the books you read for the sake of it but has nothing new to offer.