Was watching the farewell speech, and realised the Obama groupie in me is still alive. I'm going to miss him.
I often wonder about how Obama's legacy will age. He didn't really deserve the Nobel prize. He didn't do as much as the heady days of 2008 promised. Gitmo is still on and troops are still in Afghanistan. A lot of his fragile wins, achieved through executive action, may be rolled back by the strange man that succeeds him.
And yet, on so many issues - global warming, same-sex marriage, race relations, universal healthcare - he was, in my opinion, so far on the right side of history, I predict that even though we'll see an undermining of his impact in the short run, the world will come around to giving him his due. Everything else apart, his effortless charm, humour, decency and kindness do have that timelessnesses about them. He may have made those qualities cool again. That part of the legacy may be safe after all. And that may be the only sort of legacy that matters in the end.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Saturday, January 07, 2017
Reading in 2016
The decreased commute time this year that came with moving to an office closer to home had one more benefit; my reading output. World War 2 continued to dominate my reading this year. Each of these books about the subject threw a different light on the crazy war.
If This Is A Man/The Truce - Primo Levi: The first time I heard of Primo Levi was during a visit to Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam. A plaque there carried a quote by Levi 'One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.'. The haunting simplicity of those words had stayed with me, and Levi's name had stayed in my reading wishlist. "If This is a Man/The Truce" lived up to the expectation that those words had created in my head. Bringing a chemist's objectivity to his observations in Auschwitz, Levi manages to make this account heartbreaking even for someone like me who has read dozens on the subject of Holocaust. The Truce, the second part of this twin edition, was a bigger revelation for me. I had always thought of the war as a string of horrors that abruptly ended in 1945. As The Truce reveals, for the survivors, the tragedy continued for the several months more that it took them to find their way back home and to slip into normal (if it could be called that) lives.
Suite française- Irène Némirovsky: Irene Nemirovsky planned for this to be a 5-part novel. Only the first two were discovered and published by her daughters several years after Nemirovsky's death. The novel's jewish author met her end in a concentration camp.
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 - Nicholas Stargardt: Wrote about this in a longer post.
The next two, one a non-fiction and the other a historical fiction, documented the role of my own country in the world war. Most history that we study in Indian schools tend to be flattened out narratives convenient to whatever party is in power at that moment. These two books are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the subcontinent's role in the wartime period better.
ಮರಳಿ ಮಣ್ಣಿಗೆ - ಕೋಟ ಶಿವರಾಮ ಕಾರ೦ತ (Marali Mannige - K Shivarama Karantha): Each year I make an attempt to read at least one book in my native tongue. This year I managed an all-time classic. At the risk of sounding parochial, no English writing does justice to the rhythms of this land as the local masters.
Other top recommendations
The rest that didn't make as much of an impression
From Soup to Superstar: The Story of Sea Turtle Conservation along the Indian Coast - Karthik Shanker (Actually, this one made just enough of an impression to book my travel to the famed turtle hatcheries in Odisha.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)