This time, the group claiming responsibility for the blasts is one from Bangladesh. The Prime Minister has just returned from a trip to the country, and of course several pacts would have been signed. Who loves their neighbours better than we do? The sharing of the waters of the river Teesta was the point of contention between the PM and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee; it was cited as the reason for her withdrawal from the Bangladesh trip. But she isn’t the only unhappy person. The agreement on the waiver of tax duties on the import of certain kinds of textiles from Bangladesh has small-scale clothing manufacturers in India up in arms. They worry that goods from Bangladesh will flood the Indian market, and the costs of their production being lower than those here spell tough times for small Indian manufacturers.

While we persist in our efforts to appease our neighbours, why can’t we simultaneously adopt a tough stance on issues of national security? The lack of CCTVs and functioning metal detectors is just one visible lapse; using the excuse of the blast having taken place in a public area and not on the premises of the High Court is a sign of weakness. Is security supposed to be restricted only to the anointed? The verbal slugfests that immediately follow any major incident only worsen the situation, and VIPs ought to know that people are no longer taken in by the hand-holding and sympathising. Patience is running low. That no lessons have been learnt from recent incidents is extremely evident; we continue to worry about our image on the world stage and the signals we send out in the way we treat the accused. The damning statements in Wikileaks on how David Coleman Headley’s extradition was viewed only as an attempt to placate the Indian public show just how serious we are about bringing criminals to book.

India needs a drastic image change. This will not come from mere speeches condemning terrorism, but from action that accompanies and justifies the words. It’s high time we stopped being just impressive orators.

The novel opens with the killing of one of Pinkie’s accomplices, Hale, who tries to run away from the gang but ends up in its clutches despite his efforts. He spends the last few hours of his life in the company of a seemingly happy, unruffled forty-year-old woman, Ida Arnold, who drinks Guinness with abandon and spends her time in the company of men, blissful in the knowledge that her actions don’t harm anyone else.

Coming from perhaps the scruffiest areas of town, all Pinkie has to fall back on is his raw confidence; Kite’s coterie is beginning to dismantle, drawn by the maturity and tremendous influence of rival mob-leader Colleoni, and Pinkie uncomfortably finds himself challenged, his age playing havoc with his ambitions. The murders don’t help his case, and he finds himself drawn into a quagmire that increasingly threatens to refuse him the freedom he craves.

Pinkie, with his revulsion of all that marriage entails, of ‘the game’ as he calls it, is forced to marry a sixteen-year-old waitress to protect his secrets. Rose, a devout Catholic, grapples with the idea of the ‘mortal sin’ that a civil wedding entails, and decides that damnation is to be her and Pinkie’s way of life. Their troubles are compounded when Ida Arnold refuses to accept the verdict of natural death at Hale’s inquest. An oversight by Spicer, one of the gang, and Pinkie’s attempt to smooth it over, set her firmly on the trail, her only interest in seeking out the men who led to Hale’s death being the pursuit of justice. She tries to convince Rose of Pinkie’s duplicity but fails to make the young, blinded girl see the truth. Ida Arnold pursues the truth relentlessly, and finally lays a trap for Pinkie and his gang.

Pinkie is incredibly cold and distant; only occasionally does an iota of feeling rise in his breast. To him, human desires are despicable, a sign of the weakness that all men more or less fumble into, and find growing upon themselves as a habit. He doesn’t have friends, but strives to emulate Kite, the man who brought him into the fold, in little mannerisms. Young and fiercely protective of his independence, he has to learn to share his life with the girl who has walked into it. Love doesn’t find a place in his relationship with her, even as she passionately devotes herself to him. He looks at the years he has to spend with her with distaste, finding a reflection of his future in his lawyer Prewitt’s life.

Graham Greene succeeds, as ever, in creating strong, haunting characters, unnervingly familiar in certain ways. He deals with the struggles of Catholicism and changing perceptions. Rose isn’t a heroine in the traditional sense, weak-willed and docile, but with an intuition of her own. Brighton Rock is a brilliant novel, testimony to Greene’s skills as he confesses in the introduction that the streets he describes are imaginary, that he has only ever spent one night with a man who can be said to even remotely resemble a gangster of the sort that Pinkie might have worked with. Do the mobs exist in present-day Brighton? Do the crowds still gather by the piers and have their photographs put up in the exalted company of actors and royals? Much must have changed; the News of the World, a copy of which Rose wants for her mother, for instance, has recently been consigned to the growing pile of history. It is time to move on.

While we prepared to board our train at Howrah, the arrival of the Howrah-Kalka-Delhi Mail was announced. Did a shudder run through the crowds thronging the station? Did their minds linger on the photographs of mangled compartments and the stories of the search for survivors of the accident that befell the Kalka Mail on Sunday? The papers in West Bengal are full of quotes from the Bengal-based relatives of those on board that ill-fated train, people trying frantically to ascertain if their friends/families were aboard it, which compartments they were travelling in, searching desperately for any information at all. Two Swedish nationals were among the 67 people killed in the accident, and a third was seriously injured. Reparation will be offered, of course, in the form of the usual monetary packages. What makes this accident a matter of immediate concern is that it wasn’t a one-off mishap; a bomb blast on the tracks caused the Guwahati-Puri Express to derail on Sunday, injuring over a hundred people, and a collision between a train and a bus on July 7 at an unmanned crossing in Kanshiram Nagar, Uttar Pradesh killed 38 people and injured 31. However, life goes on as the trains continue to make mammoth journeys across the country, caution and safety left resting in the hands of the powers that be, because not everyone has the means to choose an alternative mode of travel. For the people coming from the rural hinterlands of the country, travelling far and wide for work, trains, specifically the lower-priced classes, provide about the only means of transport.

The cause of the Kalka Mail accident is still not clear, responsibility isn’t being pinned on any one party yet. The MoS for Railways, Mukul Roy, expected to make a visit to the site of the Assam incident, chose to go to Jangalmahal with Mamata Banerjee instead, claiming that the situation there was under control and his presence wasn’t needed. Dinesh Trivedi, on his first day as Railway Minister, is going through perhaps one of his toughest challenges. How do you answer the families of the deceased, what explanation do you give for three accidents in a row, all of which could possibly have been averted? Safety has to come first on any list; admittedly, there are endless kilometres of tracks stretching out all over the country, but that is why we also have a body committed to maintaining it and ensuring that people reach their destinations safely.

The blueprint for the High-Speed railway system to be in place in China by 2015 presents a study in contrast. The new Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, equipped to deal with the snowstorms that play havoc with the system during the peak festival periods, which is also when large numbers of people travel home, covers the distance of 1318 km at 300 kmph, making a round trip possible in a single day. Empty trains travel in the morning from each direction to ensure the safety of the line, a task made imperative by the fact that these trains reach a top speed of 350 kmph. Proper and fast connectivity seems to be the top priorities of Chinese railway authorities, but in no way do they compromise on safety. They handle massive amounts of traffic, just like the Indian railways; but were a major accident to take place, would it take this long to find out the root cause of the problem and make sure it doesn’t repeat itself? Lessons aren’t learnt easily in India, though: a fault was detected in the axle of the pantry car of the Bhubaneswar- New Delhi Rajdhani Express, and a major accident was averted, but this inspection took place only at Tatanagar. The blame for the lapse was laid on the East Coast Railway.

That the different zones of the railways should work in conjunction with one another shouldn’t be too much to ask. The horrific casualties of three different accidents in one week should serve as a massive jolt to the slumber that seems to have set in. Importantly, the people concerned should accept responsibility for their areas and work towards enforcing the necessary regulations. It isn’t difficult; it just requires systematic and honest work.

On my second visit here, the first thing I did was to open the Foursquare app and find out what this place was best known for. The most popular was coffee. Mutton cutlet and various preparations of scrambled egg followed. By the time I had salivated over all that, ten glasses of lime juice had already been ordered. Lime juice was not worth the sugar that was put in it, if at all there was any. Masala dosa came in when my ratings for this place was at the lowest. The chutney looked ignorable  but when the first bit of dosa, with the lightly flavored mashed potato filling touched down on the tongue, I closed my eyes in relish. I grew ignorant of the table side conversation and the fingers were licked clean each time they delivered a morsel. There was very little oil on the dosa when you compare it to what the MTR kitchens roll out.

Scrambled eggs couldn’t have been better. Recommend saving this place for the end of the month, when you are close to pauper-hood. And, before you troop down there you may want to check out their swanky website.

Calcutta, at its best, is very sticky; on a day when the rainclouds were gathering fast and thick, the weather was almost unbearably humid. Throngs of people waited at the terminus, wiping grime away with red cotton towels or nipping in for quick baths at the not-so-clean facilities available there. Train travel in India is an arduous task, with innumerable delays, unscheduled stops and disturbances involved- you almost need an intrepid heart to embark on a train journey that lasts longer than twenty-four hours. You have to pray for good company on the train: no wailing babies or snotty children or snoring men or people who insist on eating everything that emerges from the pantry and displaying the masticated contents of their mouths during their incessant conversations with friends/family. Train journeys were fun once, when you knew endless hours of play and ice cream with cousins waited at the other end- the years have swallowed up the thrill and now present an unattractive picture of practical concerns.

The name of the Coromandel Express conjures up serene visions of a palm tree-lined island, idyllic and pristine, with the grey-blue waters of the Bay of Bengal indolently lapping the beaches. The train never passes along the coast, but courses through lush, verdant valleys watered by the Godavari and the Krishna and the thin ribbon of the Mahanadi, past emerald fields and rolling, sharply rising hills. It covers four states in its journey, travelling through Orissa and Andhra Pradesh on its journey from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu, a route that is quite a treat for the eye.

The train pulled into Chennai Central on a surprisingly pleasant, breezy evening (which made me wonder what all the fuss about the horrid Chennai weather was all about- hasty judgement!), just about 30 minutes late; almost no delay in the mammoth Indian Railways’ system. We had a few hours before we took the train to Madurai, so we stepped into the city to be welcomed by the typically southern fragrance of jasmine flowers in the air. A short distance away rose the structure that houses Moore Market, a sort of flea-market that sells about everything from books to parakeets. Not finding much of interest, though, partly owing to our fatigue, we returned to the railway station to wander amidst another multitude of waiting people and munch on murukku. People slept on the floor on newspapers and thin sheets, oblivious of the noise, or drank innumerable cups of coffee. The train to Madurai arrived on time- a ‘special’ train for the vacations- and we were rather glad when we were finally on the last leg of the journey, coasting towards our destination.

Lisa stepped off the escalator and sat down on the nearest steel bench, sitting down with her back arching uncomfortably against the odd angular curve of the cold chair. She smoothed her brown uniform skirt over her knees and fished in her large, square handbag for one of her newly-bought paperbacks. These were about the only books she read now, fresh off the press but then gathering dust in supermarkets, spines cracked and pages thumbed by various uninterested fingers. She almost felt a sort of pity for these neglected books, lovingly sent into the world by writers who thought their fortune was made at last, but then trashed and denigrated by harsh criticism, ensuring the author was never heard of again. They were books with stereotypical covers, raised gold letters and extravagant blurbs; they didn’t make any demands on her intellect at that unearthly hour, when all she wanted to do was stumble into bed, too tired even to dream.

You read far too much, said her friends at work, when she had burst upon them, bespectacled and glowing with the pride of her newly obtained college degree. The timing wasn’t too good for her, though- she wasn’t wanted where she wished to go, so off she went disconsolately to assist at one of the numerous fashionable shops dotting the island. There may not have been enough jobs, but there still was plenty of money. The rich continued to buy diamond-encrusted watches for their lovers, and she waited on them. She would meet some interesting people this way, she thought, and write about them. She would be discovered. All she needed was patience.

So when her slightly bemused, vaguely respectful colleagues had accused her of reading too much, she initially waved an autocratic hand at them. Reading feeds the imagination, she had said, thinking of the worlds she fled into when the demons of reality bore down heavily upon her. The idealism she worshipped was the stuff of legend, the halo she imbued herself with existed only in the world she had imagined into existence, piece by piece.

Sadly though, Lisa missed the bus when adulthood beckoned. She forgot to grow up, and realized too late that the companions of her childhood had gone ahead, leaving her behind with her own fairy dust, a grown-up Disney princess swathed in pink gauze and wearing ribbons in her hair.

The transition had been difficult, but almost complete. Realising that she was capable of love surprised her pleasantly; knowing that she could have her heart broken made life seem worthless for a while. She thought a lot, and she thought deeply. The names she assumed changed- she was no longer a Bathsheba or an Irawati, but plain Lisa. Two syllables, rolling easily off the tongue, with no quirks of pronunciation. She was getting herself a new identity, becoming a new individual. She didn’t want a sparkly tiara on her greying hair. The veneer of refinement faded as she settled into her role of working girl, imagining, in moments of romantic weakness, that she was living the life of Lily Bart without the suitors. Those who had started the journey with her had struck out on their own, going their own separate ways, meeting occasionally to celebrate spouses and jobs; she had- by some stroke of misfortune?- kept her hermetic life intact. The real and the presumed still confused her, but she was getting better at sieving the ideas presented to her, learning that the inner child that had to be guarded wasn’t physical, but purely platonic.

The last train whooshed into the station and Lisa looked up with a start. In three quarters of an hour, she would be walking home past the restaurant with its little cluster of smoking men, their cigarettes creating single points of light amidst the silhouettes of the ornamental plants that lined its front. Their beer cans would be crushed and discarded on the pavement in due course, and she would pick her way through them distastefully, muttering at their capacity for idleness, then pull up short as she remembered her own situation. Maybe they were stragglers, and perhaps she belonged with them, too. She’d know in a few years

For those fifteen minutes, we felt every pebble that the tires crushed, and all of that ended in a smooth 360 degree stop. If I had had a driving license or a fair amount of experience behind the wheel, I may have had a chance at that car.

That short trip down memory lane was a result of watching the Fast Five at the theatre yesterday. The grunt of the GT40 would be wasted on you if you don’t have theatrical sound. Boy, that was the beginning of a parade of muscle and beauty. The only places where better choices could have been made were the monster SUVs which The Rock arrived with and the silvery sissy looking car standing beside Vin Diesel’s beast towards the end. The SUVs seemed ill-designed and bulked up to match Rock’s physique. The rest of the cars have my approval.

Fast five is years ahead of Tokyo Drift (the third of the sequel) in entertainment value. That said, do not fly to the theatre if you sniff a good story here. If that’s what you are after, the trailer is enough. To put it in short, this could be the work of a director who has a Michael Bay’s craziness for trashing good lookin’ cars (but has a much better idea of how to) and a fetish for the Tarantino-Rodriguez style of bringing things down with a machete. I sometimes wish director Justin Lin would rope in an intelligent script writer suggested by Chris Nolan and then continue stealing vaults the way he did this time. I would love him for it.

It’s a must-watch if you don’t have a fast car or a car at all. Those who do can learn to drive during the movie. The best way to rob a bank is to rip out its vaults:

He is perhaps most well known for his Empire trilogy, which consisted of Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip- novels about British colonialism and its effects on the colonies.

I read his Booker Prize winning Troubles a few months ago and found it extremely riveting. Though I had only a basic idea of Ireland’s problems with Britain, the lack of a proper background wasn’t a problem as I read Farrell’s excellent novel about the Troubles of Northern Ireland. One thing that I’d definitely vouch for is Farrell’s ability to entrance and keep the reader engrossed; not for one moment did I feel my attention waver, and finishing one of his books always makes me feel as if I were being torn away from a world I’ve learnt to know and love, despite all its faults.

I have just finished The Siege of Krishnapur. It was a strange coincidence that I read it during the week which, 154 years ago, marked the start of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (only realising it later). The trouble started on 10 May, 1857, when a group of sepoys rebelled against the army of the British East India Company in Meerut. Discontent had long been simmering for various reasons, and the last straw came in the form of the new Enfield rifles whose paper cartridges had to be bitten off before use; the paper was supposedly greased with animal fat, which was an affront to religious sentiments. The unrest as Meerut spread gradually to various areas, including Lucknow, Kanpur and other parts of northern and central India. Farrell writes an account of the defence at a town called Krishnapur (is it the Krishnapur of West Bengal’s Hooghly district?)- as I have always viewed the Great Rebellion from an Indian perspective, it was interesting, for a change, to see it with British (or Irish, to be more apt) eyes.

The Collector of Krishnapur senses trouble, and he begins setting up fortifications around the Residency in the form of much laughed-at ‘mud walls’; the British population in Calcutta is amused at his caution as he goes visiting various important people to advise them of the brewing trouble. His warnings are not taken seriously, but he perseveres with the fortification of the Residency, thus dividing the British in the area into two groups, those who are for caution and those for assault.

Gradually, though, in the face of the mounting attack from the Indian sepoys, the Britishers are forced into shelter at the Residency, turning the place upside down with their various possessions scattered about amidst the Collector’s prized trophies from the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park. The women are herded into the once-serene billiard room, while the others occupy various other nooks and corners. That the situation outside the walls of the Residency is delicate and there will be a paucity of food and water does not bother its refugees; they persist in maintaining their class distinctions. Petty fights break out among the women over the use of the one maid available; they persist in ostracising the ‘fallen woman’ who has been talked out of committing suicide and been persuaded to take shelter in the Residency.

Farrell’s skill is evident in the strength of the characters, each of them being endowed with just the right attributes that serve to make them what they are, leading to their glory or doom. No one is absolutely good or bad, but in fact possesses the mixture of qualities so apparent in people all around. The Collector, struggling with the need to stay composed in the face of adversity, maintains a tenuous relationship with the cynical Magistrate. The doctors Dunstaple and McNab are diametrically opposite in nature; the one happily kind and comforting, the other a dour Scotsman, the tension between them reaching a climax as one of them goes into decline. Louise Dunstaple and newly-widowed Miriam Fleury forge a friendship based on necessity, grudgingly accepting the ‘fallen’ Lucy Hopkins and fearing the attraction she exerts on the men of the cantonment. Harry Dunstaple, young and eager to find himself in the middle of action, finds his lot thrown in with the poetic George Fleury, to whom everything must take the shape of words, and who tries to demonstrate his love for Louise as well as he can in the rather constrained circumstances.

The most haunting character, the one that really lingered on in my head, was that of the Padre: walking around distributing tracts, protesting against the heathenism of the natives as he saw the religion he couldn’t comprehend (living in Krishnapur, as he said to himself, named after a heathen god himself), spouting theology viciously at the Collector as he tried to grapple with more earthly issues in the offal-strewn lawns of the Residency. He dug graves for the dead before they began to be dumped into a well, and grudgingly granted Father O’Hara a plot for his Catholic dead; spectre-like, he walked around in the early hours of dawn, praying for deliverance and marvelling at the magnitude of the sin around himself.

Honest, earthy and moving in its depiction of human nature, The Siege of Krishnapur definitely ranks among the best books I’ve ever read.

Little can compete with the atrocities of the Indian summer.

Endless kilometres of land lie parched in the sweltering heat; where there once was verdant greenery now grow straggly brown plants, struggling out of the crevices on hard brown ground, choking in heat-induced suffocation. Cows forage for food in the tiny patches of green that have braved the merciless rays of the white-hot sun blazing in colourless skies. The normally hardy, mange-infected stray dogs are now docile and acquiescent- they seek the relative coolness of tree shade, their usual numerous ferocious scrums restricted to situations where absolutely necessary- it is just too hot to scratch or fight. Enervated birds chirp listlessly at noon, sequestered in their leafy canopies till the sun begins its descent and they can go grubbing again. The butterflies flit out only when they cannot help it any longer; where do they get their nourishment from, now that flowers are only sadly faded, drooping shadows of their former healthy selves?

In the little market across the road, the one-roomed shops have their shutters firmly drawn down against the heat. Even the small Hanuman and Shani temples in the vicinity have been closed and locked up- god or insect, the summer is uniformly unsparing in its ferocity. The area will begin to buzz again about six in the evening, when the owner of the tea stall puts out four rickety stools on the pockmarked remains of the road in front of his shop. His regular customers settle down with their kulhads of cha in one hand, cigarette in the other, dressed in cotton shirts and kurtas, and gossip the evening away, even as the mound of discarded earthen cups nearby piles up steadily.

The evening might bring respite from the sullen, dead hush that lies over the quietly sleeping town, saved from being sepulchral only by the vast, wide, dusty yellowness that pervades the thick languor. The stir of life, the only fresh breath that billows through comes from hope and anticipation, from the collective sigh of the owners of the keen eyes that look towards the horizon, divining or actually sighting that elusive grey rim.

The search for the missing helicopter carrying Arunachal Pradesh CM Dorjee Khandu was forgotten, as was the Air India pilots’ strike. The political hysteria that would normally have looked forward to the election today in Singur and Nandigram- two important cogs in the West Bengal wheel- was conspicuous by its absence. The IPL has taken a backseat, as have Kate-and-William’s honeymoon plans and the Canadian elections- if they were ever in the picture.

Who really decides what should actually be on the radar of news channels and other media outlets? While it is true that bin Laden’s death is major news that will have wide repercussions, was it entirely right to shut out all domestic news in favour of debate and discussion on Operation Geronimo? That India has a lot to worry about in terms of security is nothing new, and analysing the aftermath of the American operations in Pakistan is indeed imperative considering India’s geographical and ideological situation. This, however, doesn’t mean that life will not go on as usual.

News channels tend to go on an overdrive whenever things remotely of note happen; they have of course upped the sensation levels now that the nearly ten-year-old struggle following the terrorist attacks of September 11 has reached its climax. This still doesn’t warrant the blinkered news coverage that was on offer on every single news channel. What happened to unbiased reporting and global coverage? The British media went crazy over the royal wedding, but the BBC did manage to squeeze in a few minutes of international news even as Mishal Husain wielded the mike for hours with the wedding pomp and pageantry for a backdrop.

The constant coverage of the operation leading to bin Laden’s death had its moments of bloopers- newscasters kept confusing Osama with Obama. (I admit it must have been a pretty hard day at work for them, repeating the words ‘in fact’ and ‘actually’ everytime the camera panned on something they didn’t have a script for.) The quality of news broadcasting is determined not just by the people who host the shows, but also by the content. Judging from yesterday’s hoopla and the evident lack of original content, our news channels have a very long way to go.