K.C. Bhatt's Blog

India by Patrick French: A Nation Seen Through Its Fragments

An imagined review by K.C. Bhatt

There are books that attempt to explain India, and there are books that acknowledge that India cannot be explained. Patrick French belongs to the second category. His India: A Portrait is not a map but a mosaic; not a theory but a collection of encounters. The result is one of the most intelligent and readable portraits of contemporary India produced by a foreign observer.

French arrives in India with curiosity rather than certainty. This is perhaps his greatest strength. Too many writers on India arrive armed with conclusions and then spend their books assembling evidence. French proceeds in the opposite fashion. He gathers stories, contradictions, personalities, ambitions, and absurdities, trusting that the country will reveal itself indirectly.

The India that emerges from these pages is neither the mystical civilization beloved by spiritual tourists nor the booming economic superpower celebrated by investment bankers. It is a place where billionaires and peasants inhabit the same political imagination, where information technology coexists with ancient prejudices, and where democracy functions with astonishing energy despite chronic inefficiency.

What distinguishes French from many journalistic observers is his instinct for biography. He understands that India is often best read through people rather than institutions. His sketches of politicians, entrepreneurs, activists, and ordinary citizens accumulate into a national portrait. The individual becomes a lens through which larger historical forces can be seen.

French’s prose is clear, elegant, and free of academic jargon. He possesses that increasingly rare quality among contemporary non-fiction writers: the ability to make complex realities accessible without simplifying them. One senses a writer who has travelled widely, listened carefully, and resisted the temptation to become the protagonist of his own narrative.

Yet the book’s virtues are also the source of its limitations.

A mosaic can illuminate, but it can also fragment. By privileging anecdote and encounter, French sometimes sacrifices structural analysis. The reader comes away with many vivid impressions and memorable personalities, but less understanding of the deeper economic and institutional mechanisms shaping modern India. The country’s long historical continuities occasionally disappear behind the immediacy of contemporary reportage.

There is also a subtle tendency, common among perceptive outsiders, to treat contradiction itself as an explanation. India certainly contains multitudes, but merely cataloguing paradoxes can become a way of avoiding more difficult questions about power, inequality, and historical responsibility. French observes brilliantly; he interprets more cautiously.

Nevertheless, these criticisms are minor compared with the achievement of the book. French avoids both romanticism and condescension. He neither worships India nor lectures it. Instead, he approaches the country as a serious subject deserving serious attention.

What remains after the final page is not a neat conclusion but a sharpened sense of India’s complexity. French understands that modern India is an unfinished argument conducted among more than a billion participants. No single narrative can contain it. No ideology can summarize it. The country’s energy lies precisely in its refusal to fit convenient categories.

In the end, India: A Portrait succeeds because it embraces incompleteness. French gives us not the India of slogans but the India of lived realities. That may be the closest any writer can come to the truth.

Verdict: An insightful, humane, and intellectually honest exploration of contemporary India. Not the last word on the subject, but one of the better conversations available to readers who wish to understand the country beyond clichés.

★★★★☆ (4/5)

The review is entirely fictional but aims to capture the measured, analytical style that K.C. Bhatt might bring to a work of literary and political non-fiction.

Attributed to COPILOT

The River and the Revolution

A hypothetical review by K. C. Bhatt of Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don

Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don is often described as an epic of revolution and civil war. That description is accurate, but insufficient. The novel is more interesting—and more troubling—than an epic in the conventional sense. Beneath its enormous historical canvas lies a persistent question: what happens to a human community when history arrives with the certainty of a doctrine but the violence of an invading army?

The answer Sholokhov gives is devastating. The Cossacks are not waiting for history to liberate them. They already possess a history, a social order, a memory and a fierce attachment to land. The revolution therefore does not simply awaken the oppressed. It enters an existing civilisation and demands that its inhabitants choose sides.

This is the novel’s great strength, and also the source of its political ambiguity.

Sholokhov was writing within the Soviet literary establishment, and the novel could hardly escape the ideological expectations of its age. Yet the life he depicts repeatedly refuses to fit neatly into an ideological framework. The Cossack is expected to become a political category; Sholokhov keeps returning him to being a man, a father, a lover, a soldier, a farmer.

Grigory Melekhov is the clearest example.

He is not a political thinker in the conventional sense. His tragedy is that history insists upon making him one. Red, White, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary—these labels pursue him while his own loyalties remain stubbornly personal. He wants to belong to something, but every available political camp demands that he surrender some part of himself.

This makes Grigory a particularly uncomfortable hero for ideological literature.

He cannot be comfortably claimed by either side.

And perhaps that is precisely why he remains memorable.

The revolution in And Quiet Flows the Don is not presented primarily through political speeches. It is measured through corpses, requisitions, executions, deserted homes and broken families. Political programmes may promise a new society; Sholokhov shows us the bill that ordinary people are asked to pay for it.

This does not make the novel an anti-revolutionary tract. That would be too simple. The old Cossack order is hardly presented as an idyllic paradise. Violence, patriarchy, inequality and brutality are deeply embedded in it. Sholokhov’s achievement is that he refuses to replace one mythology with another.

The old world is compromised.

The new world is violent.

And the individual is trapped between them.

This is why the women of the novel are so important. Aksinya, Natalia and the other women do not merely decorate the historical narrative with romance. They reveal what political history looks like when it enters domestic life. Men can march away under banners; women remain with the consequences. Love, marriage, childbirth, jealousy and bereavement continue while governments collapse.

Aksinya’s relationship with Grigory is therefore not simply a love story. It is an alternative form of loyalty. Political allegiance is proclaimed publicly; erotic and familial allegiance is lived privately. The conflict between the two gives the novel much of its emotional force.

And over everything flows the Don.

The river is perhaps the most subversive presence in the book. Political systems are temporary; the landscape is not. Armies cross it, governments claim the land around it, revolutionaries announce a new age beside it—and the river continues its indifferent movement.

The Don consequently becomes more than scenery. It is memory.

It represents a continuity that ideology cannot entirely destroy.

This is also why the novel’s enormous length is justified. Sholokhov wants us to feel the weight of a civilisation rather than merely observe the mechanics of a revolution. Villages, horses, fields, marriages, feasts, military campaigns and funerals accumulate until history itself seems to become a physical landscape.

Yet the book should not be treated uncritically as a transparent historical document. Sholokhov’s position within Soviet literary culture inevitably complicates our reading of it. The question of authorship, political circumstance and the novel’s relationship to Soviet ideology has itself been the subject of controversy. One must therefore distinguish between the historical Russia represented in the novel and the political circumstances under which the novel was produced and received.

But literature sometimes escapes the intentions of its circumstances.

That is what happens here.

Whatever ideological framework surrounded Sholokhov, the human beings he created repeatedly resist becoming illustrations of political theory. Grigory’s indecision, Aksinya’s desire, Natalia’s suffering and the Cossacks’ attachment to their land possess a stubbornness that no party programme can entirely absorb.

That may explain the novel’s longevity.

A purely political novel ages when its political vocabulary becomes obsolete. And Quiet Flows the Don survives because its deepest subject is not Bolshevism, counter-revolution or even civil war.

Its subject is divided loyalty.

What does a man do when his country, his class, his family, his lover and his conscience demand different things from him?

There is no comfortable answer.

Grigory never finds one.

The Cossack world never finds one.

Perhaps nations never do.

The Don, meanwhile, asks no questions. It simply flows.

That quietness is the final irony. Men construct ideologies because they believe history belongs to them. The river offers a different lesson. Human beings may fight over the meaning of history, but the landscape remembers without taking sides.

And when the banners have rotted, the soldiers have disappeared and the political slogans have become footnotes, the Don will still be there.

Quietly flowing.

Indifferent to victory.

Faithful only to time.

COURTESY CHATGPT.

The way colonialism damaged its subjects fills one with a deep sense of loss and sadness. Remaining ever engaged in the affairs of the family in a transplanted Indian Hindu society half a world away from home, with no ambition even tacit to politically interfere in the world they have in their hands–the characters strive for excelling in academics or business.
Often their hard work brings result–as the colonialism was fair too, in giving the subjects equal opportunity amongst them–once they are with the system.
There are many coming-of-age stories of different generations of the same family–breaking the heart for the lack of political ambitions in them all–due to a total lack of a hope about the possibilities of a world more just.
And migrating to the land of colonials is the only possibility which could liberate one from the squalid life around. There is a humour present in almost every scene–a brave thing to maintain in the cruel world the writer presents. But at times it looks the most tragic aspect of the story.
The characters have fabulous and endearing eccentricities at times–which make them continue their lives with not many misgivings.
So reading a part of the book again and again brings to a reader a delight every time, for sharing the positivity of the characters in spite of the hardship they bear.
The cruelty and the kindness of the family members to each other in different situations underscores the hysteria that pervades their psyche. It makes them complicated to understand and the story the book presents more so. It might take an immense amount of empathy and patience for a reader to see how the author might have suffered to bring out such a marvelous book.
Thankfully a unique freedom struggle in India led by a very well educated leadership ended that world in a certain manner, also for the Indians transplanted elsewhere or others–not to mention the revolutions in certain part of the world and the devastating world wars in their aftermath, which reduced the resources and motivation of the colonials to hold on to their colonies.
So it became possible to reach a reconciliation for both the colonials and their subjects–and look ahead to life with less acrimony and more hope.
Therefore this story has a lesson on keeping faith and hope–in spite of the adversity–in the possibilities of human nature to see the opportunity to strive for creating conditions less conflicting and more peaceful.

“Like the Oxford educated Pico Ayer who has the ability to describe every shimmy that he comes by when he travels, Bhatt too says that Thamel District is all discotheques and massage parlours in the story A Meeting of Cultures, in which the author meets two former East Germans and one of them thinks people in Germany are lazy. Did she mean the Ossies or the Wessies?”

https://victorschwartzman.ca/stories-from-krishan-bhatta/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS9QiBwZG9mA2ZkaWQWUKQ2Aj4Icv7frK7KNeUv1JbVpRvJeWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR6YxEZcH7VuWu77ALSPeLfroChJjVy07keHPz2fbapJn83B7d5leDodEq-nVg_aem_JPpIT47WJO3BXCFAoIix9w

In order to shun a point of view multitude of the people are working tirelessly in social media. In order to do it they have to keep on shouting continuously to keep the public attention only focused on what they say.

It may so happen that in such a cacophony what people could not focus on was actually more important than what has been talked about.

So before long the world may enter in a post-social media age where those ignored topics come to light and the world regrets what it had missed out due to its own lack of efforts to go extra miles to discover the reality.

Hopefully that would be not too long, as the people following social media are feeling a fatigue which comes from following a meretricious lead which turns out to be a waste of time repeatedly and leaves the world in a cul de sac.

So to look for something which is not much talked about could balance the world to save the disappointment at a later date, which comes from realizing one was kept in dark all the way.

It only comes from consuming the things offered in social media or media in general as junk food, sparingly–and always look for more organic things to consume. It needs never lowering one’s guards–and be vigilant to what is going on.

Intelecual laziness exacts a far higher cost than one can imagine.

It is difficult not to feel fraudulent while reading an autobiography, more so the one of a politician. If the politician was a British who was mostly considered the second powerful man in the cabinet of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who ruled a country like Britain for nearly a dozen years as a conservative Prime Minister, beginning from a humble family which ran a grocery store – the story of Sir Geoffrey Howe cannot be ignored either.

The time she took over was a turbulent one with inflation touching twenty percent and the GDP growth rate was a quarter of it.

The oil price was at one hundred forty dollars a barrel.

As her Secretary of the exchequer, Sir Howe worked on the privatization drive which sold the public properties to the private companies and did away with most of the lucrative social benefits of the people to reduce the escalating budget deficit.

The ensuing unpopularity was averted when Britain also undertook the Falkland war nearly simultaneously and came out victorious. But the issue of the Hong Kong handover was in the waiting. Somehow the deal was made after many lengthy discussions with the Chinese, who have flatly declined to extend the lease.

It was an embarrassment soon after the Falkland war. Lackadaisically thing kept going and the inflation came down to nearly half of the growth. Never mind the desperate protests from the trade unions opposing the privatization campaign of the ‘Iron-Lady’, the name given to Mrs Thatcher after the Falkland war.

The occurrence of scandals like the Westland helicopter deal or a sex scandal saw the departure of the contemporaries of Sir Howe, from the Thatcher’s cabinet, fortifying his second position in it. Mrs Thatcher considered him a socialist in her cabinet and had a strong dislike for his better half for her being an ardent feminist.

She often reminded Mr Howe that, for her, he and his office was quite dispensable. By this time he was the Foreign Secretary.

He was uncomfortable with the cozy relations the Iron-lady had with US President Regan.

He found it unreasonable that before seeking the British opinions on an issue like using its air bases to bomb Tripoli or maybe to also finish Col. Kaddafi, the decision had been already made by the Pentagon.

It was done to uphold the unique relations the USA had with Great Britain apparently. For such flights, France declined to allow its airspace, however.

There were other differences between Sir Howe with Mrs Thatcher as well. Like on the issue of apartheid, which was becoming a big embarrassment for Britain in the changing world and Mrs Thatcher continued to call the jailed Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Likewise, she assiduously also worked to make any EU deal unlikely, despite Sir Howe trying tenaciously to make it otherwise.

In the meanwhile the Conservative party went on to win elections after elections in a row, defying the Labour party time and again.

Once in Dublin, the hotel the Iron Lady and many of her ministers and other senior officials were occupying was bombed by the Irish Republican Army.

A few of them were killed but all the others including Mrs Thatcher and Sir Howe survived. Now George Bush the senior was the US President and he made some major departures from the Regan legacy.

He no more saw West Germany as the chief US rival in Europe and also did not consider IRA a terrorist organization either.

It had some lasting effects on world politics with the apartheid getting closer to it closer and the Irish deal being made a possibility.

These developments Mrs Thatcher did not find pleasing. But the Berlin wall was also about to collapse now and the Mikhail Gorbachev led USSR was about to disintegrate. Europe and the West have quietly scored a victory in the stultifying and suffocating cold war, avoiding an allout military confrontation, though many small battles kept on going everywhere in the world ever since the second world war ended, military or diplomatic.

It at times resulted in bringing down civilian airliners in a tit for tat missile attack.

The lives of ordinary civilians were almost costless when it came to the power equation of the world powers. This victory of diplomacy is possibly the most obvious example of how much it can succeed if there are competent people in charge of it. Sir Geoffry Howe was one of them. Besides China has not arrived yet as a player in the power balance of the world, and the USSR was overstretched to its limits. Possibly Mr Gorbachev too was not able to hold the situation he inherited after a few of his predecessors died as soon as they took over the power — in the USSR — despite their questionable health.

The disintegration of the USSR has an ongoing impact on world politics till today. Sir Howe comes across as a quiet and easy-going strategist, who worked tirelessly on his projects. His eye to see the humour in the incidents and people he came across, like the disappearing hands of an African head of the state he was meeting, in his traditional gown enveloping him; or the mistaken dropping off — of the coffin of a USSR’s President, whose funereal he was attending, looks as an endearing trait of a conservative British politician.

He never fails to mention that almost every decision he took about his next political move, he did in consultation with his wife. By this time he had developed several differences with Mrs Thatcher and his position in her cabinet was looking increasingly shaky. When she called him to inform him that he will be shifted from the foreign office and gave her the choice of becoming the home secretary after their lingering differences over the issue of the European Union become unbridgeable he was a little shocked. His wife wanted him to resign outright and challenge the leadership of Mrs Thatcher in the party by claiming it for himself. Mr Howe decides instead to write a lengthy resignation letter which he never presented, but leaked it to reach Mrs Thatcher through her confidents.

He did it to bargain for the position of the leader of the Conservative party in the parliament. So Sir Howe had a reputation by now in public, which the Iron Lady could not dismiss like in earlier times. But after she promotes him as the leader of the parliamentary party, this unprecedented resignation letter finds its way to the press and does major damage to both: Mr Howe and the Iron Lady.

The former held the latter responsible for the leak. Mrs Howe was not amused by this move by her husband and went to France on a holiday, where the press described her as a strategist on par with Napoleon. By this time the general situation in the country was going back to where it all began.

There was widespread unemployment and a sulking electorate at the truncated social benefits was hard to please.

The inflation was higher than fifteen percent and the growth in GDP below five percent. So the money generated by the privatization drive has been consumed within a decade and things were back to the square again.

The differences between Sir Howe and Mrs Thatcher kept widening on the EU issue.

After she humiliated him in a meeting on a minor matter Mr Howe quits with an emotional resignation letter. Though, apparently, she wanted to negotiate a deal and retain him in her cabinet as well. His departure resulted in the resignation of the Iron Lady also, within a few weeks. So, thus, arguably, Mr Howe made sure the end of her career as well – with his.

And, consequently, the Conservative party won one more election but could not complete its term and afterwards remained out of power for more than a decade. Besides, nearly two decades later, like many other European and American ones, in Britain too, the privatized banks and other financial organizations failed spectacularly and the government had to pump in one and a half trillion pounds of the public money to save them from sinking altogether. So this is how politics lurches forward, even in a country like Britain. Never mind the incredulous ordinary people — who feel ever at a loss; or the loud-mouthed, rhetorical politicians, who do strange things like having multiple children at a late age or marrying again at a retirement-age, in order to give the impression that they mean to effect the change.

It gets uglier when they flirt with the idea of starting a war elsewhere, to look away from the problems at home.

The book is written in lucid language and can serve as a lesson for aspiring writers if one manages to not take its content very seriously, though it lasts nearly eight hundred pages.

Or it could be a defense only against the boredom a long Covid-19 lockdown induces. For you get going through the book not much inspired. Even less inspired, when you finish it, to actually think what you think of it and put the same in words, dulled by the sultry summer days and the inertia of the lockdown and the lengthy details of the book.

The limited and depressing world of the cold war years seems to linger on. Till this day the corruption in the affairs of the states persists, and, in an age of information, the politicians do networking to steal public money to give it to the people they favour.

They are working for a common cause like a mafia: very ardently and in great solidarity. This autobiography of Sir Howe also betrays that world and how its actors operate.

They are more global than most people in this respect. Though, conversely, the information age has brought their shoddy business in the public space like never before. So, despite being so well organized and so well resourced, this kind of enterprise may not go unchallenged always.

khol diya jal damru,

bahne laga tel.

Aur thodi der karte,

ho jati economy fail.

A total literary loss

“A Glass of Yak’s Blood” is a 2015 novel by the author Vumika V.. The story explores themes of middle-age crisis, corporate culture, and sexual insecurities through the lives of Rajib and a younger woman named Gitu. [image error]Amazon.in +2

Plot Overview

The Protagonist: Rajib is a middle-aged man facing health, job, and family issues. Feeling unappreciated by his family, he seeks connection and security through an affair with Gitu, a much younger woman.The Conflict: Their relationship is marked by secret weekend escapes to hill stations until Gitu abruptly leaves him to marry an older, wealthier man.Gitu’s Background: Gitu is portrayed as an unwanted child whose family was displaced by the Maoist war in Nepal. Her life is filled with further tragedy, including her mother’s death and her sister’s mental illness.The Reunion: Years later, after Gitu has experienced her own hardships and the loss of her husband, she and Rajib reconnect, though both have been deeply changed by time and trauma. [image error]Amazon.in +2

Book Details

Publication Date: February 21, 2015.Length: Approximately 416–418 pages.Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.Availability: You can find the eBook and paperback editions on Amazon. 

While the title likely references the  held in regions like Mustang, Nepal—where fresh yak blood is consumed for supposed medicinal properties—the book itself is a work of contemporary fiction centered on human relationships. [image error]Amazon.in +2