Books Forgotten, But Worth Reading

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Elizabeth C. Gaskell

THE SOCRATIC concept of true knowledge is the ability to know how little one knows. The world’s greatest scientist, Newton compared all known knowledge to one grain of sand on a beach. These equally apply to books: Those who are regarded as well-read or voracious readers know that they had read a microscopic fraction of all the good books written – even in one genre. And some great books are forgotten and remain almost unknown.

One lifetime is not enough to read all the works (including the critical analyses and interpretations) of the books of only Shakespeare in English or of Kalidasa in Sanskrit.

That was, perhaps, how the sarcastic adage that “Classics are books everyone knows about, but no one reads” came into being. But, though unread, classics are known.

Millions of people go through their entire lives without reading a single book (except class books mugged up to pass exams) and talk derisively of ‘bookish knowledge’ or proud of learning from life as ‘graduates of the school of knocks.’ A few authors are known for one or two of their books but many of their works are lost in history,

Will Durant, the American author and philosopher, is famous for his classic ‘ The Story of Civilisation’. How many know of his ‘The Case for India’? The book moved me so much that I felt the government should have bought millions of its copies to distribute them free to anyone who can read English. Another of his books, Our Oriental Heritage also would have made India proud.

I once toyed with the idea of pirating ‘The Case for India’ and distributing it free to thousands or making it a free e-book.

Some very good books are forgotten and stay unknown, hidden under the dust of history. I (and perhaps most readers) had not heard of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, a contemporary of the great Charles Dickens in the mid-1800s.I would never have known about her if I was not listening to an audiobook of D.H. Lawrence, found it boring and moved on to readers’ comments. One of them said Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ was much more interesting. I had not even heard of her and downloaded that audio book.

Besides Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life” she also wrote A Dark Night’s Work, The Grey Woman, The Life of Charlotte Bronte. My Lady Ludlow, Round the Sofa, North and South, Mr Harrison’s Confession, Wives and Daughters, Ruth, Cousin Phillis, Cranford and the Cage at Cranford, The Moorland Cottage, Sylvia’s Lover and The Pastor’s Wife.

All these books are available on the free audiobook site, Librivox. I would not have known about the book had I not discovered, due to the fear of impending blindness, audiobook sites (I subscribe to several such sites) and Librivox, a site which has most books whose copyright had expired, enabling them to be put ‘in public domain’ with the help of volunteers who read them. Librivox also has an e-book version GuteBooks for those who can read on screen.

ALL the books by Gaskell have received 4, 4.5 or 5-star (out of 5) ratings from the listeners. Some books are available in more than one version, read by a different person.

Here is a writer-up on the book by Martin Geeson, on the Librivox site:

Mary Barton was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first full-length novel. It was published anonymously in that tumultuous year of political change, 1848 – only a few months after the Communist Manifesto co-authored by her fellow Manchester-resident, Friedrich Engels. Engels’s experience as agent in his father’s cotton-spinning factory motivated him to write “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, a classic account of the sufferings of the poor under the factory-system.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s own personal contact with the plight of the poor cotton workers of Lancashire also compelled her to a compassionate examination of their lives; but as a middle-class woman, married to an Unitarian minister, her approach to her subject took on a more emotionally complex significance; influenced by religious faith but also by more personal considerations. In the brief preface to the novel, Mrs Gaskell hints at her initial impulse. The loss of a beloved child in infancy led her to seek a therapeutic outlet, but one which left her uncertain of her capacity to contextualize her public, writerly response to the tragedies occurring in the surrounding society of Manchester’s poorest classes:
“I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade…” She was, however, determined to portray, in novelistic form, the intimate connection between the private experience of her characters and the social forces of her time. The success of the novel led her to proclaim her authorship and move on to further works of fiction, which have secured her in our times a mounting reputation as one of the leading novelists of the mid-Victorian period.
Certainly, the novel features numerous death-scenes, all conveyed with a depth of sympathy that contrasts with the queasy iambics with which Dickens orchestrated the notorious demise of Little Nell. Mrs Gaskell was not, like Dickens, a London-based novelist observing the sufferings of the provincial poor with a journalistic detachment – as evidenced in his own admirable, Lancashire-based novel “Hard Times”. Gaskell lived among the people whose attenuated lives she chronicled – and however hesitantly, as a début novelist, she rendered their experience in literary terms, her writing presents us with a true insight into the sufferings of individuals at a point in history when the mass of human beings fell casualty to the forms of economic progress following upon the Industrial Revolution. Most impressively she called into question the political and social cost of creating a resentful proletariat despairing of survival in (to quote Karl Marx) a “heartless world”.
Our reader Tony Foster is a resident of Manchester and a near-neighbour of Mrs Gaskell (allowing for their separation in time). His superb narration renders the native speech of her characters with an authenticity which ideally conveys the spirit of this book. A truly moving experience awaits everyone who gives ear to this ‘Tale of Manchester Life’.

Much has been written about India’s poverty and books or films (like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali) which portray it have a big market (and win awards) in the West where the common man still thinks Indians live on trees. But the picture of utter poverty of the working class in 19th century England is startling.

Most of the readers must have read Mulk Raj Anand’s classic ‘The Untouchable’, at least as a prescribed reading for examinations if not out of concern for an oppressed class of the country and a reflection of India’s greatest evil, the caste system.

However, in my reading for 70 years, I had not come across any mention of the Cagots of western France. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of them in a story ‘An Accursed Race’ included in book of stories ‘Round the Sofa’. Her portrayal of the inhuman way the Cagot tribe was treated all over Europe and even by the Church is not just appalling; it shows the Indian ‘Dalits’ were not treated half as badly. The other stories expose how the aristocracy discriminated against the ‘commoners’ and even denied them education.

And yet the world knows of only the Indian untouchables and caste. The same Church used that oppression and deprivation to convert millions, adding only to its numbers without improving their social status in any way. Other religions followed the same technique besides coercion. All that came of the conversions was creation of vote banks and politics of hatred.

It is significant that fiction and literature took up the social issues of discrimination, poverty and inequality, strengthening the efforts to set right the system. Very little of such use of literature and fiction is seen in India. True some films and books did come out against economic inequality, corruption and caste system, but they were very few or executed badly. I am not aware of any literary works that exposed the crimes against Kashmiri pandits or victims of caste reservations, sexual harassment or other evils.

With smart phone usage going up day by day in India, it is time a free audio and electronic book site of Indian books comes into being. On one of the audiobook sites I borrow books from the Toronto Public Library in Canada.

Is there a single public library in India which has such a facility?

Do People Read….

 

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For reading or just decoration?

WHEN I WROTE A BOOK for those in a particular profession and not a single  (except the friend who edited it and, out of sheer kindness alone said  it was very good)  person from that profession reacted even after they got it,  I thought people have stopped reading.

And they were all people whose profession was to read and write.

It was only then it occurred to me that it must have been so bad that people (knowing that without reading) just rejected it and my editor-friend praised it only to make me feel good. They again were being kind to not say how bad it was.

After all that is what friends are for.  The 5,430 ‘online’ contacts, the 485 FB ‘friends’ and the thousands of colleagues in 14 jobs and over 500 students in my 10 years of teaching were not real friends and  didn’t care.

Then I resumed blogging after gap of a few years just to keep the mind off  negative thoughts that followed a bereavement. One or two likes and ‘follow’s came for every blog, but it seemed they were clicked on ONLY  for me to reciprocate and add to their ‘stats’. (No offence meant to those who really liked).

When I decided to drop writing a third book, an online friend told me long back I should not care about not being read. Writing to express was one thing, writing to be read quite another and writing for people to buy your book yet another. Ond should decide, when writing, which of the three one aims at.

That very few or none read is established. I posted a ‘solution’ to the vexing problem of Ayodhya and not one reaction or ‘like’ came. On March 16 I mentioned the Union Civil Aviation Minister as  Anand Gajapati Raju though it was Ashok. The mistake occurred because I KNEW Anand and Ashok are brothers and in different parties and that one was mistaken for the others by people who did not know. Thinking about that led to inadvertently mentioning one for the other.

And no Indian reader noticed it. Perhaps there were no Indian readers. Perhaps only foreigners read and it meant nothing to them.

Then, yesterday, I damned the Indian National Congress as being ready to instal a dog of the Indira Gandhi family as India’s prime minister. I could have been condemned by the dynasty devotees as a ‘Bhakt’ (devotee) of Narendra Modi, a stooge of the ruling BJP or a paid propagandist for the party. I am not (I worked for one BJP newspaper and three Congress dailies and felt all were equally bad).

But no one either attacked or praised it.

Do people read at all? Do people read only what they themselves write? Is writing a tool of communication or just an unburdening of one own mind?

Should one, as the online ‘friend’ suggested, just write for the sake of writing? Will anyone answer these questions?

I doubt.

 

 

Waning Press Freedom in India

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 May 1 march  to Ranchi  planned  to seek Majithia Wage Board implementation

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN INDIA is reported to have slipped three places to the 136th place among 180 countries in the 2017 World Press Freedom Rankings, released by an international organisation ‘Reporters Without Borders‘.

India is placed three places above Pakistan and a rank below Palestine. The organisation attributed the fall to ‘rise of Hindu nationalists’, self-censorship by mainstream media and the threat of sedition charges.

Strangely, it blames ‘Hindu nationalism’ but not internationally financed  Islamic terrorism. Obviously a  ‘liberal, secular’  influence.

Whenever press freedom is mentioned, it is normal to see threats to it as coming only from the government. The present NDA government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is supposed to be not very close to the media. The earlier Congress government had developed a system of crony media by bestowing invisible favours on some.My Books_1

As a result, even after it imposed of the 21-month Emergency in 1975, some media still back the Congress, mostly out of hatred for ‘communal’  BJP. They are trying to bring the dynasty back to power, even by partisan reporting and interpretation, They lost their credibility in the process. Continue reading Waning Press Freedom in India

Are You Retired But Not Tired?

not-tiredWhen you are over 70  ( unstoppable or not), old age and death never cease to be on your horizon. Your eyes drift to the obituary column involuntarily. Some put up a cheery facade and hide those thoughts. Others like me plan a book like ‘THE OUTHOUSE ON THE FIRST FLOOR – Coming of (Old)Age in India‘ only to abandon it as no one takes it seriously.
imagesThe first confrontation a working person has with old age is retirement.

Retirement is traumatic. When 59 years, 11 months and 29 days old, you are an earning member doing your duties diligently. The very next day you are considered useless. From a contributor to the economy, you become a human parasite, a burden on the society and on your own family.  In the USA Continue reading Are You Retired But Not Tired?

Coming of (Old) Age in India

blog-imagesSometimes people start believing the fiction they create about  old_age_themselves. Having written two books on journalism I pretended to be an author. It did not matter that the books were rejected by all journalists, including those I trained (not one was ready to read and those who did refused to give even a few lines of feedback) I decided not to ever write about journalism. How the books proved to be duds is  another Continue reading Coming of (Old) Age in India

‘Desi’ Angadias, ‘Angrez’ Couriers

courier2A rose by any other name, Shakespeare said, would smell as sweet, implying that there was nothing in a name. The Bard, nearly 500 years ago, could not have known that a name is all that matters in India. A Indian-language name is scorned and an English name applauded, even if the product or service is much worse.
Those who did business in Western India a few decades ago cannot be unaware of angadias. An angadia in a Gujarat town or in Mumbai (then Bombay) could be entrusted with huge amounts of money, gold or diamonds to be delivered in another town and would faithfully do so within 24 hours. The angadias would not load the material into a truck, train or plane but personally take it. The money would be delivered by hand following a message passed on to an associate – in the days before STD, when a booked ‘trunk call’ was costlhy and took hours to materialise.
It is said several crores of rupees used to be transferrered thus daily, mostly between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Any amount, jewellery or diamonds handed over to anangadia was presumed to have been received. Angadias were reputed to have risked their lives and travelled thousadns of miles every month to execute the job. Hundreds of train or even air tickets were booked for them on almost every day of the month.

A Pune newspaper which did a feature on angadias in 2013 was flooded with responses, asking how to get a job with an angadia or start such a business. The respondents included senior bank managers who took voluntary retirement.
The institution grew so strong that Angadia became a surname in Gujarat’s Kathiawad region. The unorganised, unofficial transfer route was popular with traders not only because the money was mostly unaccounted (read ‘black’) but also for its reliability, in sharp contrast with what is now derisively called the ‘snail mail’ – the Postal Department (then called P&T – Post and Telegraph). Continue reading ‘Desi’ Angadias, ‘Angrez’ Couriers