 |
| A scene from World War Z |
I picked up the book after watching World War Z, eager to read what looked like a grand apocalyptic saga. Just halfway into the book, I came to the following conclusion: There are only two things that the Brad Pitt movie and the Max Brooks novel have in common — a zombie pandemic and the title World War Z.
While the movie is praiseworthy in its own fast-paced world-coming-to-an-end spirit, it pales into insignificance before the book. In fact, the two don’t even merit a comparison!
Max Brook’s An Oral History of the Zombie War (as the tagline goes, Duckworth Overlook, Rs 299) is an intimate and terrifying look at a zombie pandemic that threatens to wipe out the entire population of earth. It’s told in the form of interviews with war survivors — civilians, politicians and militarymen — from across the world 10 years after the war.
The book takes off tracking early cases of re-animated corpses through interviews of a doctor in China, a smuggler in Tibet, a Canadian army veteran in Greece, a “spy” in Israel and more, before moving on to the blame game between countries about who should have taken what course of action. Was it China’s fault or the CIA’s, why were reports on how to take action against the undead not taken seriously, et al.
The section titled Great Panic brings home brutally the chaos caused by war. There are stories of people murdering for food and fuel, struggling to outrun the pandemic by moving to colder climes and provisions becoming scarce, of chaos on the roads as everyone tries to flee, of people trying to swim out to ships to escape the swarm of zombies on the land, only to be attacked underwater. There are accounts of stupidity of celebrities, the media and the army.
 |
The book makes you cheer for all the small victories that helped turn the tide against the zombies. We see people taking a stand — whether it is a filmmaker trying to give people hope by making documentaries of survival stories or of rigorous training paying off to save the life of a pilot caught in a zombie-infested zone in United States or of a blind “hibakusha” in Japan surviving in the wild alone and creating a whole new society.
While the book has many majestic war sequences from across the globe of people fighting to defeat an enemy of seemingly unbeatable undead people, it is the worm’s eye view of these encounters that makes a chilling impact.
The book is written with such authenticity that you almost end up looking over your shoulder every time you are in a crowded place.
Ultimately, World War Z is about individuals coming together to wage a global war against a single enemy and not about a single man’s (Brad Pitt) crusade to save the world! When you read all the material that the directors had to work with, you can’t help feeling sorely disappointed with the movie.
 |
The Safari by Sundeep Bhutoria is best described as a love note... to the most magnificent creature on earth — the Royal Bengal Tiger.
In the winter of 2012, Bhutoria took a trip to Ranthambore and with incredible luck, managed to spot as many as 13 tigers over six days! This is his account of that fascinating trip, replete with the history of the national park, the people he encountered and the places he visited. Accompanying the text are telling pictures, where each tiger is identified by name and number. But Ranthambore is not just about tigers and neither is this book. Owls, langur, crocodiles to parakeets — they all find a mention and photo.
The book, with a foreword written by Victor Banerjee, also contains rare pictures of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip as they embarked upon a shikaar in the 1960s, along with the maharajas of Jaipur. The hunting party included the late Gayatri Devi.
Priced at Rs 599, The Safari is published with the support of the World Federation of United Nations Associations and Siyahi.
The Safari by Sundeep Bhutoria is best described as a love note... to the most magnificent creature on earth — the Royal Bengal Tiger.
In the winter of 2012, Bhutoria took a trip to Ranthambore and with incredible luck, managed to spot as many as 13 tigers over six days! This is his account of that fascinating trip, replete with the history of the national park, the people he encountered and the places he visited. Accompanying the text are telling pictures, where each tiger is identified by name and number. But Ranthambore is not just about tigers and neither is this book. Owls, langur, crocodiles to parakeets — they all find a mention and photo.
The book, with a foreword written by Victor Banerjee, also contains rare pictures of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip as they embarked upon a shikaar in the 1960s, along with the maharajas of Jaipur. The hunting party included the late Gayatri Devi.
Priced at Rs 599, The Safari is published with the support of the World Federation of United Nations Associations and Siyahi.
 |
| Buddha statues in Bamiyan |
The book cover looks very similar to Khaled Hosseini’s And The Mountains Echoed. The backdrop is the same too — Afghanistan. But Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort of Nine Towers
[Picador, Rs 599] carves its own niche in the reader’s heart as it takes us through a personal journey in the land of gardens, generosity, rubble and restrictions.
The fort of nine towers or Qala-e-Noborja is actually a refuge — albeit a sprawling and beautiful one — that the young author and his huge family sought, to save themselves from the factional wars of the Mujahiddins.
 |
Omar, who hails from a very enlightened and respected family in Kabul, has penned this book as a personal memoir. His mother and grandfather worked in banks, his father was an international boxer, physics teacher in a school and also a carpet dealer. In the initial pages, we get a taste of the grandeur and culture of a modern Pashtun lifestyle.
But the family’s prosperity and ambitions were dashed and the education of Omar (he was barely 10 then, in 1992) and his siblings took a back seat as political turmoil took over their motherland. Omar traces a heart-rending account of death and destruction in the time of Mujahiddins and the Taliban, when the very art of surviving was a feat. His family did not just hide in the fort of nine towers, that had only one tower left, they also travelled extensively from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif and Tashkurghan in the north to Bamiyan in central Afghanistan and several other places on the way to escape death.
At Bamiyan they lived in caves, or in the head of a Buddha carved out of the mountains. At another time they lived in tents with the Kuchi nomads. Their constant companions included a car and the BBC World Service, giving them the latest war updates.
How the family managed to survive such hard times and a series of misfortunes is a surprise. Omar’s accounts may read like a series of adventures — both scary and thrilling — but then we realise with a jolt that this is no fiction, but the life of an ordinary youngster whose childhood and adolescence were robbed by rockets, snipers, fear and human rights violations.
Omar’s tales of escape are horrific, the description of terror scenes enough to keep you away from food for a while, but you can’t keep away from the book.
His narrative is simple and touching, with glimpses of beauty, love, friendship and the famous Afghan hospitality, even in such trying times. War becomes a great teacher for the author. Omar sensitively describes how the Taliban regime brought peace and order in a broken Afghanistan, though it was just a scary lull full of ‘no’s. However, the “peace” prompted the author to go back to formal education and stop running. Once he landed in prison, though. His fault: his head was not covered with a turban!
The most poignant parts are the desperate attempts the family makes to leave the country. Finally they stay put where they have fought so hard to live. The description of the very-Afghan attan dance in every neighbourhood when the Taliban falls remains with the reader. At the end we feel lucky to lead our lives amid music and peace and manage four-square meals a day, a rare privilege for many in the world.
 |
It pains you. It pricks you. It makes your insides curdle. You wonder this too is life. And it empowers you. By the time you finish reading Eve Ensler’s In The Body of the World [Random House India, Rs 199], you are filled with a quiet confidence that no matter what life throws at you at the pace of a 20-20 match, you shall overcome.
Eve Ensler lays her soul bare and leads us through its many journeys. It is almost like you are peeling an onion... the more you peel, the more it hurts. Eve describes the book as a “CAT scan”. You get to know that she’s had a successful combat with uterine cancer. You get to know that the celebrity author of The Vagina Monologues was abused by her father as a kid. You get to know about her troubled relationship with her mother. You get to know that she was addicted to “pot”.
“Never pretty enough, rich enough, thin enough....The ’60s, well, really drugs, freed me. I got stoned and stopped giving a shit” she writes.
You get to know she got beaten up in a “Mafia after-hours club” where she worked. “I was that girl who was supposed to be dead...” These six-and-a-half pages are like whiplashes. But Eve — and you — emerge stronger.
 |
In the Body of the World also talks about Eve’s continuous fight to make the lives of the women of Congo better. “Essentially, the cancer had done exactly what rape had done to so many thousands of women in the Congo.... In the Congo fistulas have been caused by rape... rape with foreign objects like bottles or sticks.”
The book is full of such passages that leave you stunned. Incapable of thinking. For a minute. Till you move on with Eve on her quest.
The book cover has a “V” in gold. What does it stand for? The victory of the vagina? More power to Eve Ensler!
