Coming from a small town in North india, I have been badly disappointed by this book. Pankaj Mishra supposedly is writing about his travels and travails as he trips thru the country. Yet the glasses he puts on are that of a foreigner who finds fault with everything Indian. This is funny too, for Mishra tries to poke fun at the way Indians speak English. This presumes that Mishras own prose is exemplery. In fact it is not. At times it does get tiresome,repitative and dated. Another thing strange is that Mishra rarely finds anything positive in the tremendous development taking place in all these small towns. Hailing from Ludhiana, the town after this book is titled, I can swear that our town is booming. So if we cannot speak great English, should we feel inferior? Anyway all Indians in the book have been made out to be inadequate characters. Maybe Mishra wanted a good foreign review. Still as a travel book this is a failure. In fact Lonely Planet's India Guide gives you more insight in far witter form. So my advice-- avoid reading this one. Unless you want to be bored.

I started this book one night just before going to bed,fairly certain that it will be some heavy stuff whose arcane language and endless descriptions will surely put me to sleep quickly. I ended up without getting a wink, even though the next day was a working day. I simply could not resist turning page after page. Midway, I started slowing down, savouring each sentence because I didn't want it to end.

Frequently, I was just stunned. By the author's sharp insight into the minds of the people he met, especially in the first half, when he is in the north. The people he describes are not unusual or quirky. They are just everyday people. The kind Indians meet all the time in markets, bus stations and of course while in the train.(I can bet no one has described Indian train travel conversations as accurately as Pankaj Mishra has.)

What Mishra does is point out with amazing sharpness, their quirks, their petty concerns, the conditioning of their minds, what's touching about their lives,and why these typical Indians are so so funny, when you step back and look at them,as if you were meeting them the first time.

There is definitely something happening in Indian society. A huge undercurrent of social and economic change which in turn is changing the quality of people's values, customs, hopes and dreams.There's a lot of talk about the big city part of it, but no one's looking at the small towns. Mishra's focus on them is therefore topical, relevant and important.

I have gone back several times to Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. Just to read my favourite portions, chuckle to myself and marvel at how real it is.

That's the kind of book it is.

I personally think this book is amazing. I have travelled all over India myself and his description fits best to every little place he talks about. Extremely humourous and very informative. I would recommend this book to any person who wants to read about the true taste of India, its flavour and have a great laugh. I think Pankaj Mishra is a brilliant writer. I know I have read this book a number of times and will surely read it over and over again. Well Done. Kind regards, Siraj

What can one say about V.S. Naipaul the essayist? This collection contains most of the shorter pieces that have made his reputation. There are the beginning pieces on India, and there are the well-known essays on Michael X, on Mobutu, on the collapse of Argentina in the 1970s. There are also the later pieces on the failed Grenadian revolution and on Cheddi Jagan, the Marxist Guyanan politician who was kept out of power by American and British electoral skullduggery. There are also several essays on America, including ones on Steinbeck, a surprisingly uncontemptuous piece on Norman Mailer's 1969 mayoralty campaign and a particularly perceptive piece on the 1984 Republican convention. And finally there is the concluding essay "Our Universal Civilization."

Surely there is much to support the opinion of Naipaul's enthusiastic followers who at the same time have praised him for refuting liberal sentimentalities. There is the fine readable prose and the cutting observation. One notes this in the essay about the election campaign in India where the conservative candidate spouts pseudo-Gandhian rhetoric about the purity of agriculture in a land of desperate poverty. The candidate even says that piped water would only make the women who spend several hours going back and forth to wells lazy. There is the theme of a lethal sentimentality: On the Jan Singh party "Like parties of the extreme right elsewhere, the Jan Singh dealt in anger, simplified scholarship and, above all, sentimentality." On Steinbeck: "His sentimentality, when prompted by anger and conscience, was part of his strength as a writer. Without anger or the cause of anger he writes fairy-tales." On Republican Party Ideology: "Americanism had become the conservative cause, and Americanism was most easily grasped, most ideal and most sentimental (sentimentality being important to any cause of the right) in comic books...and the lesser cinema." In the essay on the return of Peronism there are many caustic remarks against Jorge Luis Borges, about Borges' failure to critically analyze his country's past, the theme of racial degeneration in his work, and his tasteless jokes about the systematically slaughtered Argentinean Indians. Likewise, there is some truth when Naipaul says of Argentina that "...to be European in Argentina was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic. It was to claim...the achievements and authority of Europe as one's own", even if it is more true of, say, Canada. And certainly many of the essays are very powerful: such as the essay on Michael X, a self-serving thug and hustler who prattled "Black Power" rhetoric in Trinidad before murdering two followers and being hanged for them.

One should criticize his view of Islam, starting with his use of the term "Mohammedan." Naipaul argues that the imperial conquests of Islam were especially nasty in the way that the Arab culture simply denounced the pre-existing culture into oblivion. This is an oversimplification for several reasons. First off, the examples he uses, Pakistan and Iran in 1979, are not typical even of those countries' long histories, let alone of other countries like Indonesia or Nigeria. Secondly, one can find equally boneheaded comments in the history of Christianity, whether it is of Augustine and other church fathers dismissing Aristotle and Plato, or the Protestant Reformation's lack of enthusiasm for the Renaissance. Thirdly, what about Christianity and American Indians?

Nevertheless when one looks at the essays on Mobutu's Zaire, now collapsed into brutal civil war, or at the essays on Argentina before the Dirty War or the nervous essay on the Ivory Coast before President Houphouet-Boigny apparently "successful" rule collapsed into disaster. Surely one can only praise Naipaul for his prophetic talents, for the courage of his pessimism? Quite frankly, I have some doubts. If sentimentality is unearned emotion, it should be remembered that pessimism can be unearned as well. Consider the essays, written more than thirty years ago, about Belize and Mauritius. They are just as pessimistic as the others, about mass unemployment, overpopulation and empty politics. Notwithstanding that the two small countries have remained democratic states for the past three decades, not something one would have predicted from Naipaul. The concentration on superstition and magic can be amusing: Naipaul relates a report about an old Indian sage who claimed that he was now able to walk on water, arranged an elaborate demonstration, and promptly sank. But whether it is India, or the Ivory Coast, or Argentina, Naipaul is always looking for something silly or superstitious and this palls. There is much that is depressing about Argentina: but to say that Argentina has produced nothing more than New Zealand is cheap, and Naipaul does not even bother to mention Sabato, Cortazar or Puig, who might challenge this view. It also strikes me as gross oversimplification, to say the least, that the essence of Argentine sexuality is brutal heterosexual sodomy. There is something profoundly unhelpful about all this: professional pessimists too have the luxury of having return tickets in their pockets, and when conservatives praise Naipaul one feels that it is because he grants his subjects just enough freedom to justify their condemnation into hell.

When one reads Naipaul's nonfictional essays, and compares them with his fictional works, one is most certainly not as impressed. In this prolific collection- 550+ pages, Naipaul documents his diverse essays, on diverse topics, from India to Anguilla, from New York, to Algeria. Let me begin with the first essay, which, not surprisingly, regards a visit to the city of Calcutta. There is a slight background material- about Trinidad, and then starts the prophet-of-doomsday attitude. One is almost irked when continually perusing through words like "decaying", "morbid", "ruin". If India would actually be a dying culture, it would have by now been history. But it still persists, flourishes, and exports it culture. Naipaul is relentlessly critical of Indians, deeming them "indifferent", "primitive", etc. He lashes out at Hinduism with a sudden passionate loathing- "The barbaric rituals of Hinduism are barbaric, the idea of the holy cow is absurd." All this gives an impression of a ceaslessly pessimistic man, who is born to extract only the most troubling aspects of Indians, ignoring the democracy, ignoring the culture, ignoring the slow progress, ignoring the values- in short, making a thorn of every petal. But, one must admit, Naipaul's opinions about India are true, and being an Indian myself, it is nothing extraordinary. But of cruelty, and malice, one does not approve- Naipaul's satire on the Indian accent: "Esomerset, Eshelly, Eshakespeare", is almost as if Naipaul is on some evil mission to forever degrade common people. If writing about such extraneous incidents is your idea of humor, Mr. Naipaul, certainly we do not approve it. This attitude of rooting out the utmost filth out of a poor country, reveals how depressed Naipaul is, and how audacious, let go haughty.
But there is something almost magical about Naipaul's words, his interpretations are often profound, and his humor cultivated. The second essay, about the election in Ajmer, is captivating. At the end, you feel as if there lies a novel in the entire essay on the election, and a good revelation on the politics of India. Gradually, the essays become less profound, more documental, and more random. But one question still haunts- if Naipaul glorifies the West, and rubbishes the third world, how come most of his writings are on the third world, or non-western cultures? Why not write about Germany? The reason is that Naipaul finds material to criticize to be absent in the West- it merely serves as a model- a model of perfection, and a useful tool for deriding colonial peoples, though deriding impressively.

The Romantics is a tale of a young Indian man who goes to live in the holy city of Benares, and the journey of self discovery that he embarks on there. Throughout the story, we follow him through the violent purliue of the city's university all the way to Kalpi, a town at the foothills of the Himilayas. Overall, I really enjoyed this novel, but the reason why I gave it four stars as opposed to five is that I'm somewhat at a loss as to why I liked it so much. You see, if I were a writer and came up with this plot, I doubt that I would write a novel about it. The strength of the book lies not in a compelling, action packed plot, but rather in Mishra's poetic prose. The book is a joy to read, and the characters are quite memorable, but, again, the plot is, well, odd, I supose. The story is basically a chronicle of an Indian man's life for several years, without any momentous climax or intrigue at all. Yet despite this, I repeat that I really liked reading it. I've now decided to read some similar literature, as The Romantics is the first novel of this genre that I have read before, as I tend to gravitate to books like Atlas Shrugged or adventurous things, like Clancy books. On the whole, though, I recomend this book heartily.

The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra is a simple story told with great elegance. Samar is a Brahmin, a young intellectual who meets a group of westerners while studying in Benaras. He is too western (he reads Flaubert and Wilson, listens to Schubert and Sibelius) to mingle with other Indians, and too Indian to mingle with Westerners. He meets a French girl, falls in love, and although they have an affair, it is unsatisfactory. All the chief characters are unhappy doomed people either searching for romance or pursuing doomed relationships. All of them live in their heads, and lack any kind of vitality. Rajesh, Samar's friend, another Brahmin, is a poorly realized character who reads Urdu poetry but cavorts with criminals, and is doomed in his own way.

It is telling that this book is written in English. Indeed, it could not have been written in any other Indian language. English, an outside imposition, makes foreigners of Indians within India, and all those who talk/write in English (me included) are cut off from the real India. It is this loss of rootedness which creates the regret and the nostalgia. The story is told in a limpid over-refined style which oozes nostalgia and regret. All through the reading of this book I was reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro. The same style and tempo, the same over-refined characters in an over-refined culture expressing nostalgia and regret and always lacking in vitality and afraid to commit.

Pankaj Mishra has given voice to this Indian dilemma in beautiful style. He is the Indian answer to Kazuo Ishiguro.

This book amazed me. I was saddened to read that other reviewers found it boring, and I can only surmise that they read through it too quickly, expecting to find a dramatic plot trajectory. Mishra is a gifted writer and subtlety seems to be his forte. He's writing about ideas, not events.
I am not Indian, and I have never been to India. So perhaps it is true that I have only fallen under the spell of the Mythical East, fooled by a packaged product designed to appeal to Westerners. I must say, however, it is rather cynical to suggest that Mishra, who lives in India, labored over this work so that it would sell on the Western publishing market. The writing quality is too high for that. Furthermore, even if the descriptions of India are somewhat stereotypical, the contrasting notions of eastern and western philosophies on life and the pursuit of happiness were intriguing. Do we in the west place to high a premium on our own fulfillment? Some of the western characters (particularly Americans) come across looking like charicatures, and rightly so.
Its an interesting study in the perspective we have on the courses our lives are expected to take, and how our interactions with others inevitable changes these perspectives.
For anyone fed up with Rushie's magic realism and looking for more palatable Indian literature, please do read this book.