Words From Vaish

The Billion Dollar Spy David E Hoffman Icon Books 2015                                                      391 Pages          19 th January 1991: The third day of the first Gulf War. Four McDonnell-Douglas F-15C Eagle fighters of the US Air Force’s 58 th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 33 rd Tactical Fighter Wing, were refuelling in the skies over Saudi Arabia when the call to combat finally came.  A Boeing E-3A Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning & Control System) aircraft on patrol vectored the quartet of Eagles on four “bogies” – unidentified aircraft - over Iraqi airspace. As the Eagles closed in at slightly over the speed of sound, the bogies were positively identified as “bandits” -  enemy Iraqi fighters  - two MiG-29s “Fulcrums” and two MiG-25 “Foxbats”. The more agile Fulcrums veered away, but the Foxbats came barrelling straight tow ards Captain Rick Tollini and his wingman, Captain Larry Pitts.   Suddenly, the Foxbats turned at “beam” or a 90-

THE IMPROBABLE THEORY OF ANA & ZAK Brian Katcher Katherine Tegen Books 2015              328 Pages There’s a gap wider than the entire breadth of the alphabet between  A (Ana) and Z (Zak), the high school protagonists of this Young Adult comedy of escalating errors. A type A personality, driven overachiever and straight-A student Ana Watson resembles a proto-Margaret Thatcher. The product of  a strict upbringing, repressed Ana is meekly subservient to parental diktats while coming across as arrogant and aloof to everyone else.   Happy-go-lucky slacker Zakory “Duke” Duquette, on the other hand, has no clear goals in life and is happy to drift along; indulging his fondness for such geeky pastimes as role-playing games, comic books, science fiction movies and other such manifestations of American pop culture. Both characters are humanly flawed, somewhat irritating and fairly well-rounded. Not very likable initially, A and Z are reluctantly thrown together f

Jane Steele Lyndsay Faye Headline Review 2016                                                420 Pages The Gothic romance novel as practiced by Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Susan Howatch et al had a more respectable literary ancestor; Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. This landmark novel established the basic tropes of the genre – the much put-upon virtuous orphan-turned-governess who falls in love with her tall, dark and brooding employer whose gloomy, isolated estate harbors a mysterious dark secret. Much misadventure and travail usually culminates in the requisite happily-ever-after, with the lovers finally married. Reading the Charlotte Bronte original, I often experienced extreme irritation at the eponymous heroine’s unrivalled ability to self-sabotage her own happiness based on pious notions of propriety and morality, besides the prevailing Victorian conventions of the times. Her patiently suffering Griselda act wore thin pretty quickly. Jane

BORN A CRIME Stories From A South African Childhood Trevor Noah John Murray 2016       288 Pages “Racism is a problem everywhere else in the world, in South Africa it is the law”. Under that law (now happily defunct) the birth of comedian Trevor Noah to a black Xhosa woman and white Swiss father was nothing less than a crime; an act punishable by a five-year prison sentence. But people being people, and the pull of individual personal attraction being too strong, even the stringent enforcement of Apartheid failed to prevent widespread race-mixing. This is something our caste panchayats , moral police and anti-“love jihad” activists should also seriously consider. Despite the best efforts of these sundry worthies, inter-religious, inter-regional and inter-caste marriages DO take place. And that’s besides the many Indians with spouses who are foreign nationals... The best way to puncture the absurdities of this essentially untenable stand against consent

A well-made popular is not to be sneered at. The problem is that there aren’t all that many. A cursory trawl through the display racks of many an airport and railway station book stall reveals the usual suspects; the Dan Browns , John Grishams, J amesPattersons , Jeffrey Archers, et al. The best you can say about many of these prose potboilers is the writing style is pedestrian, the plotting perfunctory, the characters cardboard, the dialogue dully banal. Some, particularly the works of Dan Brown and Eric Van Lustbader, also suffer from laboured Germanic sentence formation that appears to indicate that English is the second language of these authors. You might have ploughed through the kind I’m talking about; with single sentences the size of an average paragraph, packed with subordinate clauses like an overloaded freight train so that the narrative chugs along sluggishly. If simple entertainment is the aim, most fail dismally. Take that doyen of the spy stor

The Queen Of Attolia Megan Whalen Turner Greenwillow Books 2017                                                                                            359 Pages “I wonder why it is so dull, when so much of it must be untrue.” -           -   Catherine Morland on the subject of history,            in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen History, for far too many long-suffering students, is a boringly stupefying recitation of dates and dynasties – with all the racy bits thoughtfully excised by education boards. That’s where historical fiction and much of fantasy literature come in, proving that history in the right hands can really rock and roll.  Such as George R R Martin’s Song Of Ice And Fire fantasy sequence (now famously televised as HBO’s Game Of Thrones ) for instance. These works liberally borrow characters and situations from England’s War of the Roses (1455-85) and other real-life medieval European machinations. They’re also full of interesting stuff

Judging Dredd As a child, I didn’t much care for the few British comic books we did get in India . The condescendingly simplistic stories, burdened with a lot of explanatory exposition, talked down to us and seemed to be mostly about schoolboy football heroes or jingoistic World War 2 action (I found the histories of the actual conflict far more interesting). The art was usually a dreary black-and-white and pretty static, too.  The British comic strips’ art lacked the quality, color and fluid dynamism of the American imp orts. Honorable exceptions were the comic book adaptations of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV shows; Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5… The optimistic 1960s view of the future that those TV Century 21 comic strips had, with all their glamorous high technology, has now dated somewhat. Ironically, what was once futuristic has now become nostalgic.  The Anderson stable did serve to get me hooked on science fiction, though. A lot of thi