Not a review: 01

“India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed.”

It is ironically painful for me as I sit and ponder about this book. What has changed, really in these 70 something years of independence? People still kill in the name of religion. Political parties still take advantage of the religious intolerance that plagues our nation. Whom are we lying to? We’ve all closely associated with people who still make remarks like “He/she is a Muslim. Don’t go into their house or eat their food.” Haven’t we all?

Train to Pakistan is a book that will transport you back to a time when everything was just one big chaos. And all you will feel with each passing page is this constant remorse because you’ll realize that the book while fictionalizing a period in Indian history is actually a harsh glare of the mirror that shows the reality of today.

This book is a comment on the politics of the nations; it is a living, breathing account of what people went through in the 1940s when the nation, though independent was in a state of unrest. The fear, the uneasiness, the confusion; it is all real even though we’re far removed from it and are only reading it through a fictional description about a fictional village near the Punjab - Pakistan border.

I highly, highly recommend this book because it was a haunting and chilling experience for me, till the very last page. It is a book that is very hard to miss and even harder to forget.