Ansh Chowdhari
” Books are a uniquely portable magic.” -Stephen King
The year 2022 passed, albeit for me, by a relatively scurrilous pace. The initial fears of another Covid wave were finally alleviated and the world got a chance to start afresh. The seismic changes that accompanied the world in the last two years, however, remained static when it came to books and reading culture. Despite the thraldom that enveloped the globe for the past two years, this year was marked by some scintillating and captivating reads that enamoured the minds of book lovers across the world. Here, I’m mentioning some of my favourite titles from 2022.
The first book that I’d like to mention is ‘The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human’ by an acclaimed author Siddhartha Mukherjee. This treatise is veritable tour de force of cellular biology and its various multifaceted functions in an extremely lucid fashion. The author’s stellar description of the microscopic world to the general readers creates an esoteric imagery for the reader. To make one understand the complex features of physiology in simple language has earned the author the sobriquet of modern Lewis Thomas.
The second book that I’d like to present is ‘The Pashtuns: A contested history’ by Tilak Devasher. The dyed in the wool Pakistani watcher, Devasher has tried to uncover the broad nitty gritties of the Pashtun society, culture and politics. This monumental work is a poignant tribute to the people of those barren lands who have, for times immemorial served as the frontier guards of the Indian subcontinent. It provides the readers with an unrivalled knowledge on a relatively unexplored subject, the Pashtuns. He has, through painstaking research, created a vivid panorama for the readers to understand the present predicaments afflicting the Pashtun society in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The third book that I enjoyed savouring this year was the Booker Prize winning ‘Ret Samadhi’ by Geetanjali Shree. The book aims to devolve the conventional power structures into a diffused landscape where the inherent difference between the fiction and reality ceases to exist, where one gets disabused from the fanciful imaginations while reading a fictional book. The book stands as the epitome of feminine urge to tap that potential which hitherto remained out of her reach.
The book that stands fourth on my list is ‘Friends, Lovers, And the Big Terrible Thing’, an autobiographical account by Mathew Perry, the famed ‘Chandler’ of FRIENDS. He has eloquently described his story, his struggles with substance abuse and some candid confessions. He’s brutally honest, funny with an occasional capitulation to ennui and despondency that surrounded him.
The fifth book on my list is ‘Lords of the Deccan: Southern Indian from the Chalukya to the Cholas’ by a young historian Anirudh Kanisetti. This book is a riveting “story of India between two north Indian ‘imperial moments’, the half millennium or so after the end of the Gupta empire and before the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate”. In addition to navigating the politics, wars, successes and defeats of that era spanning the rule of the Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and Cholas, Kanisetti has vividly expressed the entrenched power dynamics that characterised that period.
The sixth book that deserves an accredited mention is ‘The New BJP’ by Nalin Mehta. This hefty book running for almost 800 pages is a delightful read for anyone aspiring to understand the changed lever of politics post BJP’s rise in 2014. In an exhaustive fashion, the author underlines various factors that have abetted the rise of the BJP and have created a BJP centric polity of the country. The book has strived to make the reader understand how the BJP has constantly reinvented and remodelled its leadership, its brand and communication strategy. Studded with copious amounts of research work, this work is a shot in the arm for the ascent of the political literature in the Indian literary landscape.
The seventh book in my list is India in a New Key: Nehru to Modi: 75 Years of Freedom and Democracy by Narain D Batra. It’s a wonderfully organized book that encapsulates the zephyr that animated the country’s political economy since its independence.It’sthe story of “how Indians have been playing the game of democracy from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi to uphold ‘the India Constant’.”It’s a story of the making of the modern India, and how the economic forces anchoring the nations society have strengthened the democratic fervour of the country.
Two other books that I’d like to mention are ‘Comrades and Mullahs’ by Stanly Johny and Ananth Krishnan and ‘How China sees India and the World’ by Shyam Saran. The former declassifies and elaborates the evolving relationship between the China and the Taliban and its security implications in India. It also gives a peek into the wider geopolitics of the region which is undergoing a massive transformation post-Taliban takeover in Kabul. The latter, however, remains an authoritative and an erudite account of China’s view of India in which Saran’s portrayal of the Chinese Communist Party’s ascent to power over insurmountable odds is particularly fascinating. This view has primarily stemmed from his own experience by being the Foreign Secretary, where he has vivisected a myriad set of scholarship to present before us a big picture of the relationship that India and China share while forebodingly cautioning us regarding its future. He minces no words in claiming that given its tense and deteriorating relations with the US, China is increasingly viewing India through that prism.
And the last book that I’d like to mention is ‘The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward’ by Daniel H Pink. Coming from a category of self-help, it tends to provide a reasoned analyses of the benefit of hindsight in making chiselled decisions in the future. The book has used enough empirical evidence from psychology to demonstrate the importance of regret and remorse in bringing clarity, alertness and an ability to sift through difficult options for an informed decision making.
Last but not the least, I’d like to mention about a book titled ‘Valour and Betrayal’ By Maj Gen Goverdhan Singh Jamwal and Col Ajay Raina. Even though, it’s not released in 2022, this book has shattered some glass ceilings and has been able to challenge some of the prevailing notions regarding the tumultuous month of October 1947 that changed the destiny of J&K for once and for all. This book gathers its relevance because it happens to be an eyewitness account of the author.
All these books serve as a beacon for us, in particular and our society in general. They guide us. They tend to invoke inquisitiveness and a rational thought. Hence, I believe, that if any society ought to progress intellectually, books constitute its mainstay. It becomes even more important in Jammu where reading culture is still at its nascent stages.
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