July 01, 2008

The female fanatic

While I take something of a break from posting here ... I should catch up with some book reviews. In the last month or so, all of a sudden I've had four books to review. The third to see print is my review of Atreyee Sen's Shiv Sena Women, in Tehelka this week.

Your thoughts welcome.

I'll put up the others soon.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

offtopic excuse. dcubed, can you pl respond one-time to this??

Sidhusaaheb said...

When people like these fall ill, they go to a doctor who prescribes them medicine, which they then ingest, in order to get cured.

I wonder if they check the label first, to find out whether it actually is 'Hindu medicine' or 'Muslim medicine' or 'Sikh medicine' or 'Christian medicine' and so on.

Quite obviously, the chemical composition of a person's body must be determined by his or her religion and so the diseases must also differ in accordance with religion and so must the medicines required to treat these, going by their logic and reasoning.

:D

Locomotive_breath said...

Wrapping oneself in the flag is a universal trait of the right-wing types everywhere in the world. The Shiv Sena does it. As does the BJP and the Republicans in the US are masters at it.

Anonymous said...

Warped. But in terms of insight and strategy, sharp.

Anonymous said...

I fail to understand from your review why the book was about the female fanatic Why is there a difference between the male and female fanatic?

Anonymous said...

Bad title. If the book had been named "Arundhati Roy!" it would have conveyed volumes just through its title.

Anonymous said...

As a middle-of-the-roader like Jai Choorakkot, I do not think Arundhati Roy is a female fanatic. Which is not to say that she is male fanatic. She just happens to be on the far side of the Left, and her books sell. Some people say that she is all pretence, even her leftwing activism is, so does pretence make one a female fanatic? If so, Bipasha Basu would be female fanatic. Let us be reasonable.

Anonymous said...

Agree with Kuruvilla. Roy is no fanatic. She is just fluff. She plagiarizes articles from USA (and Noam Chomsky), replaces Blacks by Muslims or untouchables and makes whacko claims.

I think she lost all credibility when she made up the claim about a woman's stomach being ripped apart and a fetus being killed. The reason is that it wasn't just a made-up claim, but lifted from other reports written in the West.

Dilip got it right in one of his old articles that the fundamental reality is caste. Once someone exaggerates and calls others a fascist (whether Bush or BJP) without getting arrested, it makes them look silly.

Similarly, calling a riot in which both Hindus and Muslims lost their lives as a pogrom in which ONLY Muslims lost their lives makes her lose her credibility.

Dilip D'Souza said...

I fail to understand from your review why the book was about the female fanatic...

Because Atreyee Sen chose to live with and write about Shiv Sena women, as opposed to the men.

Anonymous said...

Because Atreyee Sen chose to live with and write about Shiv Sena women, as opposed to the men.

What interests me Dilip and what I was looking for in the review was if there was a gender specific motivation when they choose to join the sena.

AmOK said...

Listen