Book Review of "The Sense of an Ending"

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” - says Tony Webster, your average-working-joe protagonist of Julian Barnes' extraordinarily perceptive novel, "The Sense of an Ending". The novel which appears like a simple, mundane, everyday story of an average working class British person's kind of a boring life, takes a brilliant turn in the last 10% of the book, leaving you awestruck and making you appreciate every single clue deviously planted by the author throughout the story. This is a short book - barely 150 pages or so. Told to us by Tony Webster himself, who as it turns out is an "unreliable narrator". The author, Julian Barnes, sprinkles the story with some amazing gems of quotations and remarks about memory, its fickleness and how the age affects what we remember.

Recommended - 5/5 from me.

Book Review of "Sceptical Patriot"

"Sceptical Patriot", if nothing else, makes us question the bias we all carry in our hearts for our motherland. This book by Sidin Vadukut has a simple structure - take some of the most commonly held and the most widely believed "India" facts and methodically investigate their veracity. Did India really invent the zero ? Was India really THE richest country in the World ? Was Takshashila the first University of the ancient world ? We have all heard these factoids before - either via email and WhtsApp forwards or sometimes even perpetrated by pop culture and the media. What Sceptical Patriot tries to do is, instead of blindly accepting these factoids at face value, it subjects them to a "litmus test" of checking historical records, searching for real, verifiable and evidential proof and as far as possible arriving at an "informed" conclusion - you know, the sort of thing we all should be doing always - before "accepting" anything as truth.

The effort is definitely commendable here. The author wants to debunk the commonly held India myths - and while doing so the conclusions that he arrives at do appear logical and convincing.

That being said, the book is not without its faults. The big put off for me was the unnecessary humor ! Just when things get interesting and it looks like we are

getting at some inconvenient truths, the author takes it all away by cracking a silly joke. And this is a recurring pattern. In all honesty, it felt to me that the author didn't want to appear too sceptical ! Secondly, with all the talk of being detail oriented and scientific when getting to the roots of something, the author chooses a hand-wavy explanation sometimes. An example of this is the Chola invasions on Myanmar chapter.

But these things aside, "Sceptical Patriot" is a breezy and an entertaining read - a mixture of some new historical details about ancient India coupled with some insightful anecdotes. A definite 4/5 from me.