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(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2006/09/24/brave-new-world/)

Brave New World and 1984 are 2 books which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. One is in an Utopian world and the other in dystopia. I finally got around to reading Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley. This sci-fi work is set in an Utopian future of Earth in the 26th century.

Family as an entity no longer exists. All babies are decanted artificially by fusing ovules and sperms and growing them. Eugenics is used to create 5 castes of humans known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, ranging respectively from intelligent beings to morons. Each class is imbibed with the characteristics required for their future work by conditioning them (thinking for the Alphas, manual labour for the Epsilons and so on). Hypnopædia (sleep-learning) is extensively used while rearing children to ensure that they think in a predestined way all their life. Since they’re all artificially grown, the concept of parents or siblings doesn’t exist. Every person is a cell in the social body. Everyone takes artificial agents to ensure youthful beauty until their dying breath. Everyone belongs to everyone else, i.e. sex is promiscuous. Living with a single person for life is unheard of. There are no politics, war, family, literature or religions. Soma (a drug) is used by everyone to stay blissful all day. Everyone is happy.

In this world is Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is dating a beautiful Beta named Lenina. He is tired of the artificial life and takes her on a trip to a savage reservation in New Mexico. These are inhospitable parts of the planet where uncivilized people have been allowed to stay as they had centuries ago. Here, Marx runs into a savage child named John, who is actually a child of a civilized mom. He takes him back to London. Meanwhile, Lenina is feeling love towards this savage. In the New World, John observes how his life in the forests differs so much from the controlled life in London. He has feelings towards Lenina too, but is turned off by her behaviour. Everything comes to a head when he causes a ruckus at a hospital. He is taken to meet Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller (think Architect from Matrix Reloaded) along with Marx and his fellow thinker Helmholtz. In his office, John and Mond confront each other and it leads to an enthralling discussion about the gains and losses by living like they are in this controlled artificial society. In the end, Marx and Helmholtz are transferred to distant islands and John moves back to a solitary life in the wild.

Written in 1932, Brave New World is a surprisingly good read even today. (The book is available online here.) The pace is quick, the flavour is light. Huxley is brilliant in recreating his Utopian world. The book can be roughly divided into 3 parts. The 1st introduces the new world in rich detail. The 2nd introduces the protagonists and the last part deals with the debate between Mond and John. The last part is what makes delightful reading. The reader finally learns how this world came to be, how humanity slowly gave up its freedom in exchange for happiness. This is a thrilling and brilliant work brimming with ideas.

At a mere 110 pages, this is a collection of 4 short stories by Greene.

In Under The Garden, a man afflicted with cancer returns to his old country home to relive a fantasy involving treasure he had experienced in his childhood. A Visit To Morin is a story where a man meets an old author whose books had impressed him in his young age. Now it turns out that the author has none of those earlier beliefs and the two debate about it over pegs of brandy. In Dream Of A Strange Land, a patient who has discovered that he has leprosy tries to convince his doctor to allow him to continue to work in public. And finally, in A Discovery In The Woods, a bunch of children in an isolated fishing village make a fascinating discovery. I loved this one the best in the book.

This is the first book by Greene I've read. I had only heard about him whenever R K Narayan was mentioned. The short stories certainly have a bit of that Narayan flavour and a lot of the quaint old English taste too. If you liked RKN, it's hard to not like this one. Excellently suited for an afternoon read.

This book by Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker. Set in the 1980s in Kalimpong (this is distant Himalayan India, where India blurs into Bhutan and Sikkim) the story is mainly about 3 eccentric characters -- a retired judge, his granddaughter Sai and his servile cook. While Desai goes about deliciously setting the life stories of these characters and their friends in breathtakingly beautiful Kalimpong through flashbacks and forwards, the region itself slowly falls into chaos due to the Nepalese-Indian demand for a separate nation/state of Gorkhaland. And this movement rips apart their bucolic lives revealing how gray and vulnerable they all are.

The book is lovely, the setting is beautiful and the characters remain etched forever. The prose strongly reminds me of R K Narayan and Enid Blyton. In describing the idyllic setting of Cho Oyu (the judge's home which overlooks the mighty Kanchenjunga) and Kalimpong, I'm strongly reminded of Blyton (even Ruskin Bond) and her rustic settings. In the characters and their confusing mess of lives (like most of us), it is Narayan who shows through. I can't help but feel that Kalimpong and it's residents share a lot with Malgudi. It feels nostalgic of a time gone by in our childhood.

The narrative is not linear, it keeps going backward and forward. Desai takes her time in revealing the details about the 3 interesting characters in the book. It's one of the reasons the books really pulled me in, titillating all the time, to know one more bit about the judge or Sai, to understand why they are what they are in the current time. There's this whole parallel narrative about Biju, the cook's son who's an illegal immigrant in NYC. IMO the book could've done without this entire arc.

The story takes a whole plethora of tones: British Raj, nationalism, love, hate, economic/social disparities, nature and so on. The characters seem innocent at first, but as more about their past is revealed and their lives become affected by the Gorkhaland movement, we discover they're mortal too, with all kinds of gray. Full marks to Desai for bringing this about well. All the main characters have lost something in the past, and the sad part is that (this novel doesn't have much of a happy ending) they won't gain it back. I almost felt a bit of hate for Desai, for she slowly pulls apart their happy lives into a tragic puddle.

Terrific prose and setting, unforgettable characters, but a bit tragic. Recommended read.

Corridor written and drawn by Sarnath Banerjee claims to be India's first graphic novel. Corridor is all urban, and mostly male. All the characters in its social network are connected to one central person, Jehangir Rangoonwalla, who is more of a philosophy dispenser than a second hand book seller which is his profession. Brighu is an obsessive collector of things and is currently pondering whether to settle down with his girlfriend Kali. Digital Dutta thinks about his H1-B visa during the day while at night Karl Marx advises him to use his knowledge to help the poor. Shintu is newly married and is on the search for an aphrodisiac to enhance his pleasure at night. There are no beginnings, no conclusions, life continues through the corridors of Delhi.

Sarnath doesn't say it, but the novel is semi-autobiographical. Brighu's story is definitely that of the author himself, and the ending pages confirm that. Corridor required 2 readings for complete satisfaction. At the first read you notice the characters, the clever puns all over the place and above all the complete Indian urbanity in the strips. But due to the non-linear storytelling, a second read was needed to get in order the jigsaw pieces of the characters' lives. Though Corridor disappoints a little with the way plots are tied together, Sarnath blows the reader's mind with the details. He's got everything spot on, the urban landscape of Delhi and Kolkata, the characters, the language and the weather. Humour of the sarcastic/ironic kind is all over the place. The novel reeks with an unique Indianness I've never seen used before in comics (not like there are many books in this genre anyway). Moral science charts from our youth (How to be an ideal boy), clichéd Bollywood scenes, bound volumes of Phantom comics, the healing power of Gelusil and the quintessential autorickshaw driver dozing the noon away in his back-seat, all find a way to unobtrusively lodge themselves into the strips and story. The art and letters are all hand drawn, looks like computers have never touched it during the process. This is actually good since it has that rough, amateur taste. A few pages in the book are colored in, the rest is black-n-white. The book is 112 pages long. I was surprised it took a couple of hours to read through this tiny book of comic strips. That is a testament to the amount of detail Sarnath has squeezed into each box. I call this a must read for any Indian who was city bred.