The beast has many faces

Mantras of Change: Reporting India in a Time of Flux (Penguin, Rs 299) by Daniel Lak happens to be the result of a young student accusing the author of still being stuck in the bullock-carts-and-snake-charmers view of India — the very imagery that Lak claims to have always shunned in his years of reporting India. But Lak does not go to the other extreme of presenting “a grand vision of modern India” either. Writing about the usual experiences of massacres, cyclones, starvation deaths, or the somewhat more unusual encounters with rat-killers, death-squad policemen, lesbian couples, godmen on an environmental mission, the BBC journalist does come through as a man “wondering if it isn’t wrong to be always searching for a single thread that ties together all we’ve seen and experienced”.

Sniper (Penguin, Rs 250) by Shashi Warrier is cut out to fill the void in the genre of thrillers in India. The novel is full of riveting action in the exotic jungles of the Northeast, where gory death comes visiting every few chapters. While the hero, the soldier-turned-vigilante Easwaran, is busy in undercover operations and ambush, the most gruesome tragedy strikes his personal life. At the root of this tragedy is a sexually perverted criminal, the “grey man”, whose thread in the plot provides the essential ingredients of sex (though of a disgusting variant) and drugs that are the must-have seasoning for modern thrillers.

Enslaved: The New Slavery (HarperCollins, Rs 350) by Rahila Gupta comes from the co-author of Provoked who has worked extensively with the Southall Black Sisters in their fight against the violence that expatriate Asian and African women face in their homes. Enslaved has five women and men narrate their own experiences of facing slavery. The five come from different countries — Farhia Nur from Somalia, Natasha Bulova from Russia, Naomi Conté from Sierra Leone, Liu Bao Ren (the only man in the group) from China, and Amber Lobepreet from India. Slavery has worked its way in their lives in a myriad ways, and some of these — such as female genital mutilation in Somalia — have frighteningly deep roots in their societies. The cover of the book, with its detail of an Indian woman in bridal attire, is a bit soft for a hard-hitting book like this, though it is well known that marriage is one of the biggest agents of perpetuating slavery.