Author: Rukun Advani
Publisher: Ravi Dayal
Year: 1994
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0025160052
Description
With its wild mix of social realism and mental anarchism, this work of fiction depicts an unusual modern India, even as it shows that countries are mostly a matter of the mind.
One wintry day, in the year China invades India, a little before Prime Minister Nehru dies of a broken heart, a probably unholy cow comes calling on the two brothers who are the protagonists of this book. Thirty years later, after the destruction of a mosque and the departure of Nehru's spirit from their country, the two brothers embark on a passage through India to see the Taj Mahal, only to have their journey interrupted by another cow.
In between these two episodes the two brothers, always uneasy with reality, seem to invent a country called India in their minds. This is an uncommon India, made up of the fantastic, the visionary and the historically true - of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, Mikhail Gorbachev and Elizabeth Taylor, Mughal emperors and an Egyptian empress, Ludwig van Beethoven and Nostradamus, cricket and politics.
Through this curious hotchpotch, the brothers listen continuously to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, which gives them solace and the serenity they need to face the counterfeit country outside their minds.
Contents
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