Myths behind the Mahatma’s methods
Review by G.V. Gupta
The Great Indian Way — A Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Raja Rao. Vision Books, New Delhi. Pages 480. Rs 595.

Move over ideology; discourse is here
Review by Shelley Walia
Discourse by Sara Mills. Routledge, London. Pages 177. £ 7.99.

A sage voice from Argentina
Review by M.L. Raina
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges and translated from Spanish by Andrew Hurley. Viking, New York. Pages ix+565. $ 40.

Look out, old age is a health trap
Review by Uma Vasudeva
Health Care for Plus Fifty by O.P. Jaggi. Hind Pocket Books, Delhi. Pages 216. Rs 125.

Common Diseases of Women by Renu Gupta. Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi. Pages 193. Rs 75.

Diseases of Respiratory Tract by Nishta. Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi. Pages 200. Rs 75.

Banned book

Myths behind the Mahatma’s methods
by G.V. Gupta

The Great Indian Way — A Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Raja Rao. Vision Books, New Delhi. Pages 480. Rs 595.

SIXTY years ago he wrote “Kanthapura”. E.M.Forster called it the finest novel to come out of India. That was a study of penetration of Gandhism and its application as a way of protest in a slave-like plantation labour village. Raja Rao freed the English language of its colonial constraints by making free use of Sanskrit-Hindi phrases to convey the precise context and thought. This is the study of development of Gandhi, the unfolding of “The Great Indian Way”.

This is the product of 60 more years of delving deep into Indian tradition. Sources are vast and the churning is a veritable “sagar manthan”.

There are many biographies of Gandhi. But they deal with facts and are not true to the meaning. “Facts are shrill. Facts have to flow into events. There has to be ‘rasa’, flavour, to make facts melt into life.” Therefore, for Rao, the story of Gandhi had to be written, so to say, from within.

Gandhi called his own story “My Experiments with Truth”. Rao treats his as an “experiment in honesty”. Are the two different? His honesty is to place the facts of the life of Gandhi against the “pauranic” truth; to search its epic dimensions; to express it in epic style; to look at the “Great Indian Way” in the context of epics, particularly the Mahabharta. It has its eternity and its universality. It was true in Africa and it is true in America. Rao has “dared”, as he puts it, and with fully gratifying results.

“An Indian experience is layer after layer of tradition, myth and custom.... Each gesture is a ritual” and “each act a statement” in terms of philosophy, superstition, historic or linguistic provincialism, caste origins or merely a personal one. And yet it is whole. It is India. Thus to face honesty against an Indian event or Indian life “one’s expression has to be epic in style or to lie.” It is fact against custom; history against time; geography against space. Prose and poetry flow into one another, personal and impersonal making the drama altogether noble and simple.

Raja Rao adds, “Hence the variegation in style... Rama and Krishna run so naturally in the tale... Newspaper articles first treated as reporting and then history, so that finally, when the whole as a chronicle takes on the movement, it rushes as a Gangetic flood down the hills and wide plains... crowd singing the story”.

A “pauranic” story can be told only by a “harikatha man”. And Raja Rao is a perfect one. A “harikatha” man is a poet and a singer; a writer and a narrator, a dramatist and an actor; a mimic and a “sutradhar”, a scholar of “shastras” and a critic; one who can reinterpret the epics in the context of time and space. There are no fixed coordinates in this. “Vani”, speech, is no constraint. It is a slave to be used as the occasion demands.

In any age there are sermonisers galore. Media has reduced everything to a slogan today. Raja Rao takes us back to our origins. It is a lullaby in mother’s lap hearing a “kathavachak” after the evening “aarti”. It is the romance of a village belle hiding behind a tree at dusk hearing her man singing “Alha”. It is Meera’s singing. It is Teejan Bai’s Mahabharata ballad. It is our own.

Rao spoke of “sthala purana” in “Kanthapura”. That Draupadi bathed in the village pond is the inheritance of one. The other is proud of the stream created by Arjuna’s arrow. Every evening a grandmother redeems herself by telling the story of footmarks of Rama on their village stone to her grandchild. This way is passed down “layer after layer of myth, tradition and custom”, each “a statement of philosophy”.

Porbandar is the “Sudamapuri” of yore, as Rao tells us. The Lord created it for his destitute friend who will not come to see the Lord without some gift, be it even a handful of puffed rice. It is the Lord’s “leela”. “Where do we hide O’ Lord? Every thing is known to you?” cried women on “Chirharan”. “All the rivers of the world are full of the tears of women. Will you be different, Mohania?” intones Putlibai. Porbandar is a statement in compassion. Porbandar is also a statement on living together in peace and harmony. Here lived the Jains and the Vaishnavs in a healthy dialogue. Here prospered the Arab and African traders in healthy competition.

Here lived Narsi singing “Vaishnav jan to”. Here vow was an offering to the God, to truth. It only strengthens the devotee. Mother Putlibai will continue to fast with equanimity for another 24 hours if she could not sight the moon even if all others had sighted it. What is another day’s torture or imprisonment for a “satyagrahi”? Did not Gandhari remain blindfolded all her life for her own truth?

It is not “hatha”. Vows gave Gandhi strength in England as also in Africa and so in India again and again in his purificatory fasts, in his “brahmacharya” and in his concept of service to man and God. Gandhi’s story has a meaning only in the background of “Fabled India” (or India of fables), the title of the first chapter.

The trip to England for studies is a pilgrimage. He came to the edge of finding God, as Rao puts it. London was the centre where ideas and experiences from all directions mingled. Here he learnt of India from Max Mueller and theosophists. He found the Gita more scientific than the Bible which, to him, was more religious. The Portsmouth experience taught him that only God is the strength of the weak — “Nirbala ke bal Rama”. He realised the power of a vow.

“Nobody can understand India unless one knows the Mahabharata, and the Purana is never true except against the background of Truth. That is where the essence of fact shines. Facts are transient. Truth is eternal. Gandhi tastes it in South Africa, his “dharmakshetra”. It is the case of Dada Abdulla. Facts were with the Dada. But Truth will not hurt the other. And here he developed a ritual.

First, facts have to be collected scrupulously. They have to be fully verified. The other’s viewpoint has to be carefully seen and honoured. The best interpretation favouring the other has to be placed on that. Maximum reliance has to be placed on that view to state your own case. It has to be with humility.

A letter has to be written. The correction (and not demand) sought has to be bare minimum. Sufficient time has to be given for a considered response.

Any sign of accommodation has to be appreciated. The approach has to be of a healthy dialogue and accommodation and outcome has to be left to God. Did not the Lord do the utmost to seek accommodation with the Kauravas and went on reducing His demand on behalf of the Pandavas even if He knew the outcome beforehand? The end of the Kauravas was certain. He had promised Arjuna the redemption of Draupadi’s humiliation. A gesture, however, had to be made; a ritual had to be performed. Ritual is thus a necessary drill which automatically takes care of pitfalls. It is a statement in terms of philosophy.

Bhishma knew the outcome of the Mahabharata. Truth was with the Lord. Still a war had to be fought. A gesture had to be made. A ritual had to be performed. Dharmaraja realised the futility of it all at the end and with his faithful dog moved up in search of eternity.

Truth is God, eternal and not history. A satyagrahi is on a perpetual pilgrimage. Every outcome is merely a stage in the quest for Truth. It is neither a victory nor a defeat. Ma phaleshu kadacha na. It is a quest for the ultimate, for self-realisation. Truth cannot be defeated. What is defeated is one’s perception of it. It should spur one for more intense search.

A worldly victory is worthless. It has to be of dharma. Gain of independence was not victory, nor the creation of Pakistan a defeat. “Partition over my dead body” was not a boast or a chauvinistic slogan. It was a sincere offering to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of peace and harmony.

Truth has many ways of revealing itself. Gandhi was attracted by the concept of brotherhood in Islam. It made no distinction on the basis of colour or race or place or status.He had personally seen generous and brotherly conduct of Dada Abdulla Seth. But its imperialism and resort to arms put him off. He believed in the concept of sin and the redeeming power of a confession. He was attracted by the Sermon on the Mount and was once a regular church-goer. Commandments did not interest him as much.

Service of the poor and the diseased was part of his creed. But he could not understand as to why God had only one son and benediction was available only to his followers. He was aware of the defects of Hinduism. Yet there was so much of value in this. Therefore, theoretical debates did not interest him.

For him religion was a living experience and he found true religion in the lives of saints, St Paul, Kabir, Raidas, Raskhan or Meera. All religions thus led to a universal stream as located in these lives. Didn’t the Lord say in the Gita, “All the forms ultimately merge in Me, like various streams in the ocean”? We are face to face with the Mahabharata again, as Raja Rao will say.

Cleanliness was godliness. Gandhi was much impressed by cleanliness in the house of the lowly untouchables while excreta was flowing in the gutter passing through the living rooms of the upper castes in Ahmedabad which he was visiting to fight an epidemic. For the upper castes only the ritual purity of not touching the dead or excreta was supreme. Who of the two was really untouchable? Everyone must remove one’s excreta. Only the infirm, diseased or the guests could be given extra consideration.

This will also remove the hierarchy of varna. This will establish the value of manual labour. He was so convinced of it that he even ordered his spouse to leave the house on her reluctance to follow his wishes. This is the only instance when one finds him losing his poise and equanimity. It was like Lord threatening to behead Shishupal if he uttered even one more abuse.

He also wanted manual labour to be valued as much as mental labour. In worldly terms, has there been a better agenda for removal of the curse of caste and untouchability?

A satyagrahi has no adversary. There cannot be an enemy of Truth. His search for Truth is also for the redemption of the other. This is an appeal to that small voice. Oppression is the expression of falsehood. The oppressor has to be cleansed of that. This is “dharmakshetra”, for the salvation of all.

To be of service to others one must move away from other attachments. One must continuously give up. “Brahmacharya” is part of that. The Jains describe it beautifully as part of “aparigraha”, non-encirclement. For Gandhi it was not “hatha” or “yoga” to acquire the stage of higher energy. He decided on it with full consent of his wife and when he was past 40. The concept of service he had learnt from Christ. Later it became an experiment in self rule, swa-adheenta.

And ultimately God is always there to help. “Nirbala ke bal Rama”. These are miracles whether visiting a prostitute with a friend in Ahmedabad or facing the guiles of the landlady in Portsmouth or indulging in non-vegetarianism or facing a deadly snake on the farm.

Raja Rao’s story rightly ends in South Africa, “Great Indian Way” had been identified and practised. The rest was an epilogue, the “Uttarkand”. Only the coronation of Rama remained.

Salvation of the empire was ensured the day Gandhi was thrown out of the train at Pietermaritzburg.

Thank you, Raja Rao. Only you could have penned it in English.

Move over ideology; discourse is here
by Shelley Walia

Discourse by Sara Mills. Routledge, London. Pages 177. £ 7.99.

DISCOURSE cannot be pinned down to one meaning. If one were to step out of the linguistic connotations of the now very fashionable term with its relation to the area of pragmatics and semantics, one could say that at any given moment in the history of a nation there will always be a particular discourse, a set of rules or conventions that govern the working of society. The significance of this term across different academic and intellectual fields in recent years is well acknowledged, especially in the analysis of what Foucault calls “strategic possibilities” that lie behind “large groups of statements”.

The fashioning of a discourse is always controlled and organised by disciplines and institutions which act as agencies for the distribution of codes of conduct and other social procedures. Thus, when a linguist talks of the discourse of advertisement he simply means the formal treatment of the subject in speech or writing, but in the hands of a philosopher or a social psychologist the discourse of racism would have entirely different connotations far away from simply the aspect of verbal communication.

Foucault writes: “Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word ‘discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualisable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements”. Here he first takes discourse as all utterances which have some effect on society and then moves on to look at a particular group of utterances which together have a coherence and power to control. Thus there can be a discourse of orientalism, of femininity or race.

Foucault does not stop here; he goes on to look at the structures which lie behind the production of texts or utterances which seemingly are more vital to the understanding of the strategies of knowledge, power and control.

Apart from Foucault’s contribution to the definition of this term, Mikhail Bakhtin goes to the Russian word “slovo” which takes into its semantics the idea of usage of language from the standpoint of exercising authority. We thus see a similarity of the meaning given to this concept by both the theoreticians who give full importance to ideology which embodies beliefs, values and categories, and these “constitute a way of looking at the world, an organisation or representation of experience”.

Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) also emphasises that ideologies lie behind consciousness and that they are “systems of meaning that install everybody in imaginary relations to the real relations in which they live. “This would indicate that “different modes of discourse encode different representations of experience; and the source of these representations is the communicative context within which discourse is embedded”.

But many like Sara Mills, in her recent book “Discourse” argue that ideology is more of an overtly political term and has some significant distinction from the meaning of discourse. She writes: “For many working with the vulgar Marxist model, ideology implied a simplistic and negative process whereby individuals were duped into using conceptual systems which were not in their own interests”. On the other hand, “discourse, because of its lack of alliance to a clear political agenda, offered a way of thinking about hegemony — people’s compliance in their own oppression — without assuming that individuals are necessarily simply passive victims of systems of thought”.

Nevertheless, behind these practices there is the idea of imposition and exclusion with the main purpose of legitimising the status quo or setting up new projects with the aim to subjugate or dominate. This is sufficiently made clear by Foucault in “Discipline and Punish”, where he maintains that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”.

It must be kept in mind that there are mainly two conceptions of power which have dominated discourse studies: power as a simple quantitative capacity to act, and power as resting on consent, and therefore involving also the right to act. But as John Dunn argues, this is difficult to agree with: “Who is capable of doing something has little reliable connection with who is entitled to do it or justified in doing it. The two senses of power may meet in God; but they diverge extensively lower down.”

But these conceptions need to be examined for a more comprehensive understanding of the implications of exercising power and its nexus with the government.

Sara Mills in her book grapples with these complexities, tackling the latest discussions of the appropriation of the term by feminist, colonial and post-colonial discourse theorists. Apart from explaining the term, she relates discourse to the wider field of cultural politics and representation. The clarity and brevity of it will surely encourage students to further delve into the relevant area and thereby develop an awareness of the larger perspectives essential to literary and cultural theory and the analysis of literary and non-literary texts.

She has shown how varying definitions overlap and are often used interchangeably in cultural, literarary and critical theory for studying the structures of texts and considering their socio-cultural aspects in order to ascertain ways in which meaning is constructed.

Whereas in the Anglo-American world discourse analysis focuses mainly on everyday speech acts or oral communications to study how power and authority operate in verbal exchanges, the French school of discourse mainly concentrates on the written texts in their institutional and socio-political contexts. But the ultimate motive is to understand that “relations of power affect and shape the way we both communicate with each other and create knowledge”.

Here we can see that we have gradually moved away from Ferdinand de Saussure’s interest or Zelig Harris’s work in structures to concern with broader social and institutional phenomena where discourse analysis “contextualises and formalises studies in content analysis and thus generates questions concerning production, reproduction, function, and effect of basic units of discourse within given ideological configurations and socio-historical moments”.

It must be kept in mind that it is not always that only one discourse is looked into. Relationship and exchanges between different discourses will show “all that is said or written in a given state of society... (or rather than) this empirical whole,... the generic systems, the repertories of topics, the enunciate rules which, in a given society, organise the sayable — the narratable and arguable — and ensure the division of discursive labour”.

It thus becomes clear that power is inherently related to the concepts of ideology and discourse. The book under review is very much devoted to recent academic debates and is a largely academic text in itself. By far the most rewarding sections are those on ideology and post-colonial discourse, but the hero of the book remains Foucault whose views on the relations between the rulers and the ruled have inspired many literary and social critics to aspire to answer questions on “who can cause whom to do what”.

Rather than merely academise the results of his highly interesting research, it is of imperative social need to put his ideas to a politically active use in order to raise the political consciousness of at least those who sincerely believe in the idea of democracy. If nothing else, we should at least be able to reflect on our political tastes after imbibing some of the fruits of the inquiries of such a great thinker and educator.

A sage voice from Argentina
by M.L. Raina

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges and translated from Spanish by Andrew Hurley. Viking, New York. Pages ix+565. $ 40.

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986) has been called a writer on the edge. He stands at the intersection of European modernism and its counterpart in his native Argentina. Not only does he enjoy high status as a world class author and sage comparable to Joyce,Faulkner and his fellow fantasist,Italo Calvino, he is also deeply embedded in the tradition and history of his own country’s literature. This gives him an enviable position as both marginal and central to the mainstream of contemporary world literature.

An Argentinian to the core, he is witness to the decline of the liberal patrician order of the 20s and 30s to which he belonged and owed allegiance of a kind. As a world class writer he is remembered among the pioneers of experiment and innovation in contemporary fiction.

With the publication at last of all his major and minor stories in the present collection,we can perceive better his individuality as a writer and as an influence on the younger generation of the Hispanic tradition, particularly Octavio Paz,Vargas Llosa,Garcia Marquez and others. We can also understand the virulence with which his stories were greeted by the native avant-garde which, ironically, he himself helped to create and encourage.

Musing over his career in the later part of his life, this wizened old magus, blinded and read to by friends and visitors, confessed that he wrote neither for the elite nor for the masses, but “for myself and for my friends, and ... to ease the passing of time”. This spartan statement,as spartan perhaps as the flat in which he lived in Buenos Aires, speaks of his modesty towards his own achievements.

Let us recall Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, particularly Section II in which Master Pedro is supervising a puppet show given by his assistant. In the course of the show the assistant draws upon a mosaic of ballads,songs,burlesques, and mixes them pell mell. At this point Pedro gets angry and shouts at the boy, “Come straight,don’t go through twistings and twinings of thy tale”.

Twistings and twinings,or “labyrinths” as Borges was to call his fictional world, constitute his themes and techniques. Trickster-philosopher like his unquestioned master Cervantes (Borges also acknowledged debts to English and American writers), he fashions a world which cuts across fact and fiction and is always suspended in between.

Again, like Cervantes, he thinks that all reality is a mere transcript of other equally valid representations. At the same time all writing is read against a cultural background which gives pattern to fleeting meanings.

In fact in one of the best stories in the Borges canon, “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, the hero is trying to retell through parable and pastische the story that Cervantes was writing. Indeed he is re-enacting the role of Cid Hammet’s Benangali in Ceravantes’s text who retells the story of Don Quixote and makes the author a participant in the retelling.

This story is a fair index of Borge’s method. It destroys Cervantes’s text by questioning its identity,just as the Arab writer in the second part of “Don Quixote” is questioning the authenticity of the Knight of La Mancha, undermining his solidity as an individual and, at the same time, presenting him as a product of his own idealism.

Borges is, in spite of himself, the forerunner of post-modernism, though he would have found such labelling too embarrassing for his fundamental classicist instincts.

A loyal practitioner of Cervantes’s ruses, Borges claims that there are no original texts and that all texts are transcriptions and paraphrases of other texts. Menard illustrates the paradox of the writing process by taking Cervantes’s text to its absurd lengths of impossibility and, at the same time, making this absurdity the very theme of his story. This practice is in keeping with his belief,as spelt out elsewhere by Borges, that “historical truth is not... what has happened;it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases — exemplar and adviser ... and the future’s counseller—are brazenly pragmatic.” (“Homeric Versions”)

In another sense the Menard story allows the writer to make a free choice without “devotions”, which in Borges’s work means respect for the hierarchical order dictated by the originals. It also implies that only reading counts and that the originary meaning is not uncontestable. It gives the Argentine writer freedom from bondage to the metropolitan model. In the post-modernist debate about the centre and the periphery,this story could be a good illustrative text

A fruitful way of getting to know Borges is to remember that the author and narrator are different people. Just as the Cervantes who wrote the first part of his novel differs from the one who becomes a character in Cid Hammet’s narrative of the second part (itself a chance find in a bazaar), Borges kept the author and narrator as separate, possibly to denote the fictional nature of all experience, mediated as it always is through language.

In a characteristic piece called “Borges and I”, he makes a statement: “It is to the other,to Borges that things occur...I am willing to confess that he has brought off a few worthwhile pages...Little by little everything is yielding to him...Thus my life is in flight, and I lose everything to the other. I do not know which of the two is writing this page.”

A statement like this alerts us to the fact that there is no author in the real sense, a fact Barthes was later to celebrate in his famous essay, “Death of the Author”. Since all the world is a book, the model of the universe visualised by Borges is the library where all authors jostle together in unembarrassing anonymity. Look at the way he is obsessed with encyclopaedias (does he remind us of Dorothea Brook’s husband in “Middlemarch”?), synopticons, maps and other evidence of comprehensiveness and inclusion.

In stories such as “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “The Library of Babel” and “The Lottery in Babylon”, there are no recognisable geographical spaces, and the presence of borderless sequences derives straight from the imaginary museum he constructs out of mythical encylopaedias and almanacs. In a disarming way he tells us that he discovered these spaces in “a conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia”. The stories become multiple images as reflected in a mirror reflecting a mirror.

The perpetual delight of reading Borges is that one enters his work through open-and-shut spaces and wanders through maps and almanacs in search of clues to the centre which always eludes. The search for clues becomes all the more tantalising in the face of Borges’s disclaimer from the essay,”Borges & I”: ‘I do not know which of the two is writing this page.” The ideal Borges holds out for us is repeated telling.

Like Cervantes standing foursquare over his work,Borges’s stories give an adventuresome touch to an art turned inward and irremediably bookish.They are constructed around minimal clues (hence his closeness to Calvino, Edgar Alan Poe and Stevenson) and designed for the attention of one who distrusts appearances and searches for the revealing detail that can never invert the meaning of a work in an instant. His stories are more like critical commentaries on imaginary works than actual representations of reality “out there”.

In the 20th century it was Freud who gave voice to mistrust and suspicion of the outward facade, to the inexplicit undertone of all representation,especially fictional representation. Borges is relevant in relation to this specific tendency of our age. Here he becomes a wilful creator deriving ironic delights from the overturn of our customary expectations.

Borges’s stories are constructed out of what I should like to call the structure of desire,meaning that they are conceived as if the world were a library (“The Library of Babel”), or a chance happening (“The Lottery in Babylon”). It is this structure that builds infinite versions of reality. What he suggests here is that fiction need not be made out of only representable material; it can be made out of intangible ideas,systems as well as philosophical abstractions.

The library of Babel is endless and all the shelves are of the same shape and contain books that bear the same numbers. Foucault would have called the library a prison (I avoid the more forbidding “panopticon”) which allows total surveillance of all the sections and denies privacy to any. Since all the books in this library are the same as to page numbers, the library itself is one big public Book.

This Book is composed of other books and expands to become something of a constructional marvel. The languages of these other books and realities do not mirror the world itself but rather the idea of the world. The imaginary language has the other advantage of accommodating the chaos of experience that can threaten the language of a demographic mixture like that of Latin America where the native Spanish tongue is overridden by immigration and dispersal. In this way the imaginary symbolic language acts as a solvent of social chaos.

In the story,”The Lottery in Babylon” the chance lottery has the effect of establishing an authoritarian as well as equitable order. Since individual fates are decided by the lottery, everything depends on whimsical draws. This potentially interminable activity leads to the philosophical conclusion that where everything is determined by chance, the latter indeed becomes a necessity. One can read this story politically as the way authoritarian societies exercise control, a possibility increased by sly detective work: the discovery of Kafka in Arabic phonetic variation of his name, Quaphqa, in a stray remark the author makes about Babylonians.

Borges’s saturation in world writing is not a mere pedantry, but an obsession designed to read reality as a heaving expanse of textualites, an imaginary universe connected through infinite filiations, an ever-expanding thought that captures all that has been and will be.

In “Dr Brodie’s Report”, an unsettling mixture of reportage and philosophical commentary, Borges’s concern for social order takes the form of a philosophical voyage after “Gulliver’s Travels”, in which the Yahoos have the dual attributes of bestiality and civilised modernity, depending upon who is judging them. For themselves they have created an absolute order, but for outsiders like Brodie they may still be noble savages. Borges’s description varies from hesitant acceptance of differences to unequivocal search for similarities, something that dyed-in-the-wool post-modernists would find extremely disconcerting.

In “Don Quixote”, Sancho Panza changes position from servant to governor and back again. The reader in Borges, as in “Quixote”, is like Sancho, alternating between sympathy and distance. Borges challenges our own identities as readers of his fiction. Embattled, we engage this radical-conservative writer who jolts our laid-back perches and, tongue-in-cheek, scrambles the styles of his performance.

Look out, old age is a health trap
by Uma Vasudeva

Health Care for Plus Fifty by O.P. Jaggi. Hind Pocket Books, Delhi. Pages 216. Rs 125.

OLD age does not cause pain and is not hence bemoaned or dreaded, as long as one remains in good health, free from diseases. One should grow old with grace and respect nature. There are certain exercises which are meant for the youth, and a certain type of food is only fit for the younger generation. Hence the elderly should avoid them.

Many changes occur in the body in old age. The author has divided these changes into three categories: external changes, internal changes and changes in sense perceptions. External changes affect the face, skin, hair, subcutaneous fat, stature and posture, bones and joints, and also mobility.

In internal changes, the main systems that get affected are the gastrointestinal tract, liver, pancreas, cardiovascular system, lungs, kidneys, and the nervous and reproductive systems.

The sense organ perceptions of vision, hearing, smell and taste, touch and pain and response time all get impaired, but the degree varies from man to man.

Factors that influence ageing and life span are heredity and environment. In environment, the factors that impinge on old age are climate, altitude, ionising radiation, air pollution, diet, physical exercise and psychosocial factors.

After carrying out extensive research, the author found that life span can be increased through different systems of medicine. Some of these systems enumerated by him are ayurveda, naturopathy, yoga, unani, homeopathy, mantra-tantra and modern medicine. All these medicines have to be prescribed by a doctor or a teacher who is an expert in the field. Self-medication is very dangerous and should be avoided.

The author has described certain common features of illness in old age. These are: multiple pathology, tendency to be confused, lesser sensibility to pain, diminished temperature regulation, reaction to drugs, fatigue, sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, breathlessness, vertigo and fainting fits.

Other hazards in old age are constipation, incontinence of faeces and urine, pressure sores, thrombo-embolism and contracture. Older people need extra care as does a child. Drug administration in old age is not simple as the patient needs constant care.

Nutritional problems in old age are many because the digestive system has become weak. Surgery in old age carries a number of risk factors, which need special risk management techniques.

The author has enumerated a large number of peculiar disorders in old age. These are digestive disorders, heart and circulatory disorders, respiratory disorders, nervous disorders, urinary disorders bone and joint disorders, endocrine disorders, sexual and reproductive disorders, skin disorders and so on.

Preventive health care is, therefore, very important in old age. The author has explained three kinds of prevention which are primary prevention, secondary prevention and tertiary prevention.

This is a very useful book for every human being, especially those who are nearing old age.

* * *

Common Diseases of Women by Renu Gupta. Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi. Pages 193. Rs 75.

Anatomy of a female is more complicated than that of a male. A female undergoes much more stress than her male counterpart. Hence it could be said that female is mentally and physically more robust than male. No female disorder should ever be viewed in isolation, and all attendant systems and factors should also be accorded due importance. A woman, unlike a man, has to undergo and pass through multiple mental and physical upheavals during her lifetime.

Diseases of women are too many to spell out. The author has tried to deal with almost each and every facet of these diseases, to which most fall prey. She has tried to make women understand the symptoms of chronic or impending disorders in simple and concise language.

The author has suggested cost-effective and easy methods to offset high-cost treatment. She has laid tremendous importance on the avoidance of self-medication, or use of domestic recipes and formulations.

The book also gives details of diseases relating to female organs and the causes of anaemia, leucorrhoea, hysteria and hytreralgia, nymphomania, backache, sterility, infertility, frigidity and so on. She has talked about the diseases of pregnancy, abortion and their treatment in a simple manner. She has devoted a chapter to yoga and pranayam for peace of mind and comfortable living without the use of medicine.

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Diseases of Respiratory Tract by Nishta. Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi. Pages 200. Rs 75.

Most of the diseases prevalent in these days owe their origin to various types of pollution. Environmental pollution is still understood, but pollution of the mind is difficult to understand, although it causes various physical and psychic disorders, commonly known as psychosomatic disorders, which have immense power to upset our balance.

The author says that when air, water, vegetables, fruits and other items of human consumption are polluted, human body cannot remain unaffected. The fallout of such polluting factors has resulted in specific disorders such as cold, cough, asthma, bronchitis, tuberculosis, multiple allergies and so on. Skin diseases, cancer, etc. are also due to environmental pollution.

Respiration is a vital force to let our body exist, apart from other factors, as there cannot be life without breathing. But breathing fresh air has become rare these days. The author says that we cannot ignore the fact that our respiratory problems stem from and are precipitated by various forms of allergies whose etiology, in many cases, has yet to be unmasked. When the healing process is not very encouraging, we have no choice but to carve out a suitable way ourselves by sheer self-discipline and self-management.

The author has explained the causes of various respiratory disorders, which torment all age groups and sexes. Emphasis has been laid mostly on preventive measures, natural ways, cost-effective treatment, and patient compliance. There are curative systems like homeopathy, ayurved, yoga and so on which promise effective treatment in their own individual ways.

The book is very useful for the prevention of respiratory diseases and should be in the collection of every library.

Banned book

I reviewed the book “What ails the Indian Army” by Brigadier Manmohan Sharma (June 6). I now understand that the Army Headquarters has banned this book. Hence no Army unit can keep this book in its library.

I thought I should share this with you.

P.K. VASUDEVA
Chandigarh