The finer details
Love is complicated. Being a parent sometimes brings out your own parent in you. Families share unspoken codes only their hearts can decipher. And marriage is a strange beast. These are the only-too-real truths that Natasha Badhwar’s latest book 'Immortal for a Moment' mirrors back to you.
As a citizen of 21st-century, wired, enthusiastic India, you’ll need courage to look this book in the eye, to face our truth, to see where we’ve come from. But you’ll also find courage within its pages.
The award-winning Australian novelist appears to have chosen a topic rather raw and personal in the writing of his book. His father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway – which plays the backdrop for the action in the book.
Over the past four hundred years or so, the chasm between spirituality and science has grown wider and wider, so that today, it is considered unscientific to talk about God. One needs to seek 'proof of heaven', as it were, before committing to any belief.
These days, however, a swashbuckling new stream of genetics – epigenetics – has started to display that, in fact, not only can nature be altered by nurture, but that nature actually influences nurture in the first place. One only has to glance at Indian politics to see how, with the stroke of a father’s name on one’s birth certificate, doors open and vice presidencies to ruling parties are handed out – a classic example, if ever, of epigenetical benefits.
What does silence mean to you? And what does it mean to the various keepers of religion, monks, musicians, therapists, mountaineers and actors around the world who delve into it and employ its powers on a daily basis? In this part-memoir, Graham Turner looks at the cultural, spiritual and even physical implications of making peace with silence.
Written with insight, compassion and wit, the interwoven stories in the book grow on you, tugging both your funny bone and your heartstrings, until you find yourself hooked to the end. For those who cannot resist 21st-century urban fairy tales, this one is a clincher.
CORALESQUE 