A Twisted Cue

Another book review? Yep! Prompted by a literary discussion I attended yesterday at India Habitat Centre where Roshan Seth, Sabina Mehta Jaitly, Partha Chatterjee and Dr. Vijay Sharma discussed A Twisted Cue by Rohit Handa [Published by Ravi Dayal].

Unlike most fiction novels which I finish in about 4-5 days, I took over a month to finish this book. I had what you call in automotive language "starting trouble" and I was tempted to leave the book unfinished, when it suddenly occured to me this is no ordinary fiction novel to cruise through.

It was rather a docu-philosophy-biography of the lives and times before I was born [1968]. It was literature as Roshan Seth put it aptly "thick like condensed milk".

While most of the people at this discussion empathised with the narrative, for me it was an eye opener to the people and days of my father's times - including the much misunderstood Anglos in particular!

It gave me an interesting perspective to the thinking of all the parties involved in the Indo-Pak conflict way back then - from the Indian political parties, to the Americans, the British and the soldiers facing each other in the bunkers on both sides of the LoC.

Plus if you scratch below the surface, you will come up with an analysis of the reasons behind the apathy that envelopes Indians in general, putting into perspective a lot of what's happening in our society today.

I liked the book. Check it out... but be prepared to spend a lot of "open mind" time on it!