Who's reading what,when & the experience

tstan

I'm re-reading Rabindranath Tagore's short stories - great since I will be in West Bengal in a fortnight (gloat,gloat)

vistet

The most comprehensive book on the subject is still Derek Waller´s The Pundits, sadly it has not been reprinted in India and is expensive in the west , being published by a university.

Charles Allen has short sections on the pundits in A mountain in Tibet, Peter Hopkirk has also touched the subject.

You may have noticed I´ve started to reference to books in a new way , via Librarything.
I think it is one of the best ideas since momos : you can make a link to your own virtual bookshelf , you get access to others reviews , you can tag books etc . At the moment the site has problem with one of the cool features , showing the the book covers , but I hope they´ll sort it out soon.

(Some of my books are at www.librarything.com/catalog/vistet)

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high road to ..

dhans

Ahh, I didn't think that holy cow was that bad, just a bit culturally bi-assed.

I loved "Taxi to Kalighat", same transplant to India, but written with much more love.

Hans

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Tips for trips to India with (young) children: India with kids
Stories about our travels in India: Journal

amyl

Wow! Vistet you seem to have a really cool collection. Not surprised tho. Simply reading the titles with these sleepy eyes is exciting in itself

But about books like 'Escape from Kathmandu' I would prefer them to be real than fiction. I do not feel the thrill, excitement while reading fiction.

And I will surely look for that Pundits book you recommended in that gigantic National Library here. Will be nice to get to read more about these classic explorers of that time. Nevertheless following my earlier link I found some more stuff on the internet. Eager to read thru those pages tomorrow.

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a'mar kono chinta nei

nyraghu

Thanks, amyl, for the pointer. There is a dangling link in that page to Harini Nagendra's `Current Science' article on Nain Singh; the correct URL is http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/sep10/articles5.htm The story of the Pundits is indeed fascinating. My first exposure to it came through Rudyard Kipling's novel `Kim.' There is some information on the Pundits of Johar Valley in the Lonely Planet guide to `Trekking in the Indian Himalaya,' in the section on Milam glacier. Peter Hopkirk's book, `The Great Game' (1991, Oxford Univ. Press) also has a brief discussion of the Pundits. Another important book on the subject seems to be Indra Singh Rawat's `Indian Explorers of the 19th Century' (2002, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India). Its preface and contents are available on the Web. I haven't read the book, but have been intending to get it.

While passing through Dehradun a few days ago, I dropped in at the English Book Depot and got Sarat Chandra Das's `Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet' (reissued 2007, Rupa). Still have to read it. Das was a scholar of Buddhism and a British spy, and apparently provided Kipling the model for Kim's Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, agent R.17 of the Ethnological Survey, whose passion in life was to become an FRS.

Yes, published by the University of Kentucky Press. I've been planning to order it through my supplier of academic books, but haven't yet got down to it. A review would be welcome. Nice to meet other people with similar interests :-)

Raghu.

sam371

Jivan, Into Thin Air was amazingly well detailed for a book which describes a place that the common man has never been to.

Casey, I am about a fourth of the way into Inheritance of Loss and despite the excellence of details, I fail to understand why this book was so well reviewed. Guess, to each his own.

vistet

The Tibetans discovery of Das real , full role was what triggered the hermetical sealing of the border that everyone takes for granted when thinking of the pre-50´s Tibet. Das moved to Villa Lhasa , named by him, to create the great Tibetan-English dictionary and work as a headmaster of the Bhutia Boarding School that was a recruitment ground for the pundits. He also met and tried to keep Ekai Kawaguchi out of Tibet , when this didn´t succeed he outed him by sending a courier with a letter to him at Nepal-Tibet border who told everyone that he was carrying an important letter to Kawaguchi from the famous spy.

I spent some time in Darjeeling and in the Tibetan Works & Archives trying to find out more about Das . The librarians at the LTWA were unfamiliar with his historical role or even existence , in spite of the fact that the dictionary was in use on the table next to us. Similar reaction in Darjeeling ( "Who told you this, Sir ?) , also in the area now called Villa Lhasa. Myself I often make the comparison with Hiram Bingham : if Das had been an European I´m sure he also would have been transformed in to an adventure fiction figure.



Das has been revived , in the form of Mookerjee , recently by the exile Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu in The Missing Years / The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes .

amyl

Raghu and Vistet, that is AMAZING! Am sure this will be a very nice day reading thru the links you two have provided!

And there goes those books in my list to grab and there goes that book on 'reincarnation', I had just started, back to shelf.

With such books I feel like retiring right away, read their work and then actually follow their footsteps.

vinayverma

a general question: is it okay for an Indian/ anyone living in India to buy books at amzon.com. does it gets delivered in India and do they attract any custom duties making it costlier than alocal bookstore purchase? any experiences would be very helpful as I get to see some cool deals at amazon but I'm reluctant to take the plunge for the feat of Unknown.

thanks

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If Life is a journey....travel on...and on..on..on.....

Aishah

Vinay - good question - I would like to know the answer to that too. Also, Vedams Books has a website, I emailed them and asked if there was a shopfront in Delhi - no answer. If their email and delivery service is good, there are some titles there I would like to order.

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"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

nyraghu

Vinay, I once ordered and received a book from Amazon, when I was living in Hyderabad. It got misplaced in the mail, but when I told Amazon about it, they shipped a fresh copy from their store in Germany. Needless to say, the original copy reached me a few days after the replacement did. Again I contacted Amazon, and they generously said that this sometimes happens, that there is no point in trying to return it, and said that I could donate it to a local library or something like that. (Since the book was very technical, I later gave it to an interested graduate student, rather than donate it to a local library which would have no use for it.) So, yes, buying from Amazon works.

However, the point is that Amazon's shipping rates are very high, so in most cases it works out cheaper to order books through a local dealer. Even in a small city like Allahabad (okay, there is one bookshop here which is much better than most I have seen in big cities), I manage to get the books I want by ordering through a local bookshop and through dealers in Lucknow. Invariably, they give a discount of from 10 to 15 per cent on all books, so I am happy getting books this way.

Sometimes, I get books from Indiaplaza, and that is reasonable because their shipping rates are not high, but they don't give discounts on specialized books. I have been told by someone in Allahabad that he had a bad experience with firstandsecond.com.

Aishah, no experience of online shopping at Vedams, but a local bookshop here is able to supply me books by similar publishers, and told me that they can do the same if I need a book published by Vedams. So, if Vedams online store is not efficient, it may be better to work out a regular arrangement with some bookshop or supplier in, e.g., Delhi, for getting Vedams titles.

Raghu.

Aishah

Raghu and Vistet - Your posts are very interesting. I read 'The Missing Years' about a year ago, thought it very good. I had no idea Mukherjee was based on Das.
Good suggestion re Vedams and online buying while living in India - I always go to Oxford Book Store when in Delhi and browse around, so that might be the place to establish an ordering relationship (I hesitate with the word 'relationship' because Nick makes jokes with this word!!! however I can't think of any other..)

Earthling

Wild Fire - Nelson DeMille - Fiction - Good so far, may dwindle into shite.

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kidsan

have just read 3 of the booker prize shortlist (though avoided the winner as it sounds rather dreary!)

Animal's People by Indra Shah was my favourite and i would highly recommend it to people on IM. If you dont know of it, it is set in a fictionalised version of Bhopal (called Khaufpur in the book) and is based around the effexcts that the Union Carbide disaster had on that town and the attempts to get some sort of justice for its victims.

I certainly learnt a lot about this event that i didnt know before and a lot of it does indeed make for rather grim reading. But it also has a lot of humour and positivity which helps to lift it and i personally would have voted for it!

Anyone else read it?

Aishah

Sounds good, Kidsan, what are the other 2?