Constrained by the chicken-pox and trying to deal with it during the summer holidays, Paromita and her fellow chicken-pox afflicted neighbouring teens—Sunidhi, Agastya, Darius, and Nihal—decide to solve the mystery that has scarred all of the denizens of The Orchard.
The story circles around a hidden sandalwood grove near the Sahyadri Range. The sandalwood trees are in the middle of a change of guard with the young Siah taking over from her mentor Bhuja when they come under the shadow of traffickers. To rescue her clan, Siah is willing to go to great lengths and even follow the forbidden paths. The story carries an element of speculative fiction at its core. Who set the fire that left Samr half burnt? What happened to the little girl who died mysteriously? Several parallel narratives seem to be unfolding simultaneously, making the plot pleasantly challenging and complex. All the threads converge in the climactic chapters and the ends are tied up neatly.
Memory is the well from which poets draw inspiration, but poetry is the ‘zazen’ that brings acceptance for loss. Thus in ‘Recognition’ the poet poignantly recalls:
The taste of twin Genoise sponge
baked and partly burnt
for my fourth birthday bash…
…the agency of
As a result of persistent and systematic discrimination by the Sinhala majority, the Tamil resistance movement had by the early 1980s turned militant, led by the well-armed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 1983 the Sinhalese reacted by systematic attacks on the Tamils, which of course further exacerbated violence by the Tamils.
The volume concludes with three important, though controversial organizations—the Police, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA is the newest of the three, which was created following the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. Akshay Mangla and Vineet Kapoor’s chapter analyses the administrative capacity of the police in terms of police/population ratio and other resources at their disposal
Writing on high level decision-making while history is being made is never easy. Woodward has mastered the art of getting principals, including Trump in the past, to speak of what they knew and why they did what they did in near real time. The book is thus fascinating in what it reveals of the working of Biden Presidency on foreign and security policy. War is a blow-by-blow account of Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine and Palestine crises.