Where Some Things are Remembered: Profiles and Conversations

by Dom Moraes, Sarayu Srivatsa (Editor)

'...the greatest Indian prose stylist, with the most beautiful sentences.'--Amitav Ghosh, Hindustan Times
Dom Moraes was not only one of India's greatest poets, he was also an extraordinary journalist and essayist. He could capture effortlessly the essence of the people he met, and in every single profile in this sparkling collection he shows how it is done.
The Dalai Lama laughs with him and Mother Teresa teaches him a lesson in empathy. Moraes could make himself at home with Laloo Prasad Yadav, the man who invented the self-fulfilling controversy, and exchange writerly notes with Sunil Gangopadhyaya. He was Indira Gandhi's biographer--painting her in defeat, post Emergency, and in triumph, when she returned to power. He tried to fathom the mind of a mysterious 'super cop'--K.P.S. Gill--and also of Naxalites, dacoits and ganglords.
This collection is literary journalism at its finest--from an observer who saw people and places with the eye of a poet and wrote about them with the precision of a surgeon.

208 pages, Paperback

Published December 10, 2018

About the author

Dominic Francis Moraes (19 July 1938 – 2 June 2004) was an Indian writer and poet who published nearly 30 books in English. He is widely seen as a foundational figure in Indian English literature. His poems are a meaningful and substantial contribution to Indian and World literature.

Reviews

[Sandeep · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where some things are remembered - Dom Moraes
Rating 3.5/5

I took an instant liking to Dom's writing after reading "Gone Away". Somehow then, I had felt it afresh and entertaining, considering it was travel writing plus some interesting conversations together put with a bunch of escapades and history.

Two more books down the line, I find his writing to be pretty okayish, nothing extra ordinary. Some of the descriptions are indeed charming but for the most part they appear ordinary.

I picked this book primarily because it was small under 200 pages and I was hopeful of a quick completion. Dom writes about his conversations with various people, which includes his father Frank Moraes, Indira Gandhi, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyaya, Sankar, KPS Gill, RP Goenka and few more. Many of the conversations he had with people bring about a variety of social issues plaguing the country.

Encounters with common men are also written about. A former member of a dacoit gang who was successfully rehabilitated, a former naxal group member, victims of riot in Bihar, Mumbai comprise of the stories which are sympathetically narrated.

Dom Moraes has cleverly disguised the conversations or descriptions to bring about the socio political issues. The only caveat is the issues are too broad and to get an in depth picture of all of the issues one has to do a good amount of reading into the causes and effects before one can thoroughly appreciate the concise information put together by Dom.

I found the book to be okayish, nothing extraordinary compared to the heaps of praise written about Dom's prose style. Dom himself has had a very controversial presence through the decades and when he writes about others' and their controversies, I can only chuckle thinking in my mind - "What goes around comes around".

Cheers.

[kapil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the author's ability to describe people and situations in a few words, of post-colonial India. The author had interesting encounters with famous and not so famous people.