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| Sunday, December 7, 2003 |
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| Sunday, December 7, 2003 |
|
Writeview Streets that smell of
dying roses
Although, a story's readability depends upon individual tastes, there are some constants like well-delineated characters, lucid language and fluent narrative. But here the main character's identity is vague. Is he from a middle class family - as indicated by references to television, table, juicy cactus etc - or a street urchin born out of wedlock, as suggested in the succeeding paragraphs? Somewhere in the maze of adjectives you conjecture that he is a school going fourteen-year-old boy, or is he? The imagery is problematic too. Juicy cactus can be a metaphor for golden-hearted gruff individuals, potentially good but abrasive persons, or those who are deliberately harsh to hide their vulnerability; but it hardly evokes images of emaciated children as sought to be depicted here. Kona is unable to make up his mind about what to make of the street named Bazaar Ghat in Hyderabad. Is it a lustful snake, nurturing "this feeling of a true sodomite`85", or an entity as frigid as "a bag of potatoes"? While one is struggling with the bafflingly obscure images the narrative stagnates. Like a putrid pond it interminably assaults one's senses with varied odors, keeping the scenario unchanged till eternity. The abstruse prose accentuates the reader's misery, sample these, "`85it was the same snake ready to strike some sense into my bones" (p. 10); or, "But during late nights I was walking on the body of a person breathing so quietly that I could hear it"; or this gem, "I saw them with the blind eyes of mild despair on the verge of turning into a fever" (p. 11). Abstract, irrelevant and daunting verbiage combine with a mish-mash of strokes to create a confusing, disfigured portrait. I wonder whether Derrida would have succeeded in deconstructing this one. I gave up reading it midway. Can't afford psychiatrists' services. Kona doesn't attempt to communicate with the reader, entertain, or involve him in the unfolding narrative; but crudely bids to awe him with wordy pyrotechnics. I suspect that the publishers gave the nod to this novel precisely because they couldn't make sense of its contents. Or, was it some sadistic streak? by James Kellock. Rupa, New Delhi. Pages vi+172. Rs 150.
Later on he took up various jobs under the British. Soon he became Administrator of the State of Akalkot, and in 1867 was designated a Judge in the Kolhapur State. In 1868, he became a Professor at the Elphinstone College. In 1871, the Bombay Government appointed him a judge. After reading the various anecdotes and incidents narrated in this book one realises that Ranade was a multifaceted personality with a modern outlook. An admirer of Ram Mohun Roy, he introduced an apparently moribund, orthodox society to neoteric thought processes and values. Kellock has served us a slice of history that illustrates the thoughts and deeds of Ranade, a trailblazer. Useful for students of history. by Gyan Prakash. JM Jena & Bros., Delhi. Pages viii+114. Rs 125. This age of mass produced goods has made direct producer-consumer interface improbable, rendering the buyer vulnerable to frauds, scams and other forms of exploitation. In a village economy the producer of goods and services had to deal with consumers without the benefit of intermediaries. Thus he was instantaneously accountable to his clients for the quality of goods and services. In order to protect Indian consumers against the machinations of inaccessible, powerful and unscrupulous producers, the MRTP Act of 1969, the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1954 and the Consumer Protection Act of 1986 have come into force. The National Commission and various consumer protection councils at district, state and central levels deal with different aspects of protecting the rights of consumers. This book provides information on various relevant laws and case studies that would be of great use to practitioners of law and lay readers alike. |
ON
a pleasant November morning this book hits me in the solar plexus with
this opening line, "I must dilute the essences of my body in order
to tell a story." Somehow I survive and soldier on. Immediately
after, still gasping, one gets entangled in the dense prose of about 180
words long single-sentence-paragraph wedged with phrases like "when
needles of ecstasy penetrate the flesh, in each encounter the body
declaring its rights over the cosmos`85bourgeois women lay protected in
the arms of their fathers and husbands`85" phew, talk of turgidly
opaque prose! A person, who has done a comparative study of Chomsky,
Derrida and Wittgenstein in the US, and taught English Literature
abroad, treats you to passe pretentious pulp.
A
Maharashtrian Chitpawan Brahmin, Mahadev Govind Ranade was a descendant
of Bhaskar Appa - a pious, upright soldier in the Peshwas' army. Ranade
was a social reformer, historian, educationist, theologian, economist
and politician. After studying in a school at Kolhapur he was sent to
Elphinstone High School, Bombay, to learn English. There he flowered
into what one of his professors described as "the only student in
the college who can think".