Saturday, January 23, 2016

Read at tandem

It was serendipitous that I started reading two books together - so similar and so different. One is Fatima Bhutto's Songs of Blood & Sword and the other is Ramchandra Guha's India After Gandhi. One is about Pakistan's journey so far and the other is about India. Both are as biased as possible - one against Benazir Bhutto and the other towards Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet the accounts are fascinating.

We know so little about post-independence era. India and Pakistan took different paths and while the roots lie in how they were created way back in 1940s, there were events later on which tested both the countries and both took further detours.

My advise - buy both the books and read them at tandem.