It's been a fairly long time since my last entry. I've been a little 'tied up' as they say in corporate circles. In the in-between times I've been doing a bit of reading. The last one I put down only last night and it continues to haunt me into the working day!
I must say that I've come across this book quite a few times and have somehow chosen not to pick it up. This time I'm glad I did. It's a unique combination of a fiction work, almost bordering on real-life and supported by some vivid, albeit gut-wrenching, images from the sub-continent's inglorious past. I'm referring to the old-wine-in-new-bottle edition of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan which has Margaret Bourke-White's tell-tale photographs of the partitition. The story is well-known; three communities senselessly murdering each other for political ends, which most of them had nothing to do with. In fact, the author points out that freedom is only for the fortunate few who are moneyed; for the rest, it's merely a move from one master to another and a continuation of misery. The story, however, comes across as a well-packaged, poignant tale that touches several human chords. Even Hukum Singh, the Government's personification, is badly shaken by the turn of events and a train load of corpses sent from Pakistan. Shortage of wood and fuel to burn the corpses led to use of the bulldozer to grind them to the earth. If one hoped this was some unpalatable work of fiction, there're are the photographs from Margaret's camera that etches it in memory. How the hell did she take so many pictures from such close quarters and still retained sanity to bring it to the world! Such madness on such a large scale is perhaps a thing of the past, but every now and then one is reminded that being inhuman is definitely part of being humans!
Well, I've moved onto Mulk Raj Anand's 'Untouchables' - another from around the same era. Promises to be equally brutal in the revelation of our society's darkest sides.
