January 2026

It was a dismal month, this January, colder than i'm used to. And in the very first week of the new year, i was struck by a slight fever, followed by a bout of food poisoning the very week after. I'd recovered by the beginning of the third week, more or less, so it was only the biting cold that bothered me. Now, i should specify, i live in a tropical climate, so the threshold for what i consider cold is very, very low. The temperature only dropped to 10°C, but the coldest winter i've ever experienced in this city was 9°C, so it's been a cold one.

Besides that, it was rather uneventful. Working from home is slow in the beginning of the year, though that might be specific to my current occupation. I'm not complaining, of course, i was able to take time off while i stewed in my ailments. The food poisoning was particularly miserable, i was spewing from both ends, so to speak, which is uncomfortable at the best of times, and the chill only aggravated it.

The fever on the other hand, was oddly pleasant, since there was no throat or lung infection in accompaniment. Fevers have grown to resemble a pleasant disorientation from some mellowing substance, sometimes i don't notice them at all. I think i got used to fevers in my early twenties, when working while sick seemed the only way to hold down my job. I worked with fevers up to 102° at times, and simply eased into the discomfort, until it felt like nothing at all.

Open Veins of Latin America
Eduardo Galeano

"The system speaks a surrealist language. In lands that are empty it proposes to avoid births; in countries where capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital lacking; it describes as "aid" the deforming orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that that results from foreign investment; it calls upon big landowners to carry out agragarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice social justice." (p.8)

Review:

I'm not quite sure why i decided to pick Open Veins up again, i think it might have been some of the novels i read at the beginning of last year, Clean by Alia Trabuco Zeran, which is set in Argentina, and Crooked Plow by Itamar Viera Junior, which is set in Brazil. That, and the fact that i finally got around to reading Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method in the middle of the year.

Open Veins is a book of context, in that it provides substantial context to the past and present of Latin America, but also in that it requires some context for its words to take root in the reader. For me, having read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, in addition to The Jakarta Method, provided some context for the events of the independence movements of Latin American nations, as well as to the history of the United States' political violence in the 20th century. As for the colonial and imperialist resource exploitation, well, that's a fact of life across the third world.

The reason i mention the matter of context, is because i found Open Veins of Latin America to be a difficult book to read, in that it presents the reader with a forest of facts, with subtle relations drawn between. It's easy to get lost. When i'm able to relate a fact to something outside the forest, i feel better equipped to navigate the text.

An African in Greenland
Tete-Michel Kpomassie,

"But if I were to live out my life in the Arctic, what use would it be to my fellow countrymen, to my native land? Having tried and succeeded in this polar venture, was it not my duty to return to my brothers in Africa and become the "storyteller" of this glacial land of midnight sun and endless night? After the degradation of colonization and the struggle for independence, wasn't it the task of educators to open their continent to fresh horizons? Should I not play my small part in that task and help the youth of Africa open their minds to the outside worid?" (p. 261)

Review:

I don't know if An African in Greenland is a book i'd have stumbled upon all by myself, it was curated by Katja for Reading the Globe 2026, and i'm very glad to have read it. Travelouges are rarely a genre i seek out, but this one stands apart from the tales of a European traveller setting foot in a distant land.

Of course, it isn't utterly untouched by the discourses of colonialism and imperialism, for one thing, the preface is written by Jean Malaurie, a French anthropologist, who claims to have been the one who encouraged Kpomassie to write of his travels in the first place. This is a little farfetched; Kpomassie mentions writing in his diary several times over the course of the narrative, sometimes devoting entire evenings to writing.

But it isn't just Malaurie's preface, Kpomassie, over the course of his narration is a colonial subject who becomes a post-colonial subject, following Togo's independence from France in 1960. He educates himself in French as well as in English, and this in turn facilitates his journey, long in both distance and duration, to Greenland, and frames his experiences within colonial and post-colonial discourse. The author's epistemic frame is most visible when he describes the traditions of the Inuit; the text's style in these moments seems familiar, it reminded me of the observations Claude-Levi Strauss made in Tristes Tropiques, another travelouge, this time written by a trained French anthropologist.

Where Kpomassie's work differs somewhat is in the comparisons he makes of Inuk traditions to Togolese traditions, the ones her grew up with, themselves a subject of the anthropological gaze. This imparts Kpomassie's narrative a degree of alterity from the strictly European perspective, without liberating it completely from the literary field which it inhabits. Regardless of these considerations, i did really enjoy reading the book.

घुसपैठिये
ओमप्रकाश वाल्मीकि

"इस फैसले से किसन और मंगलू अवाक रह गए थे। किसन ने विरोध किया। लेकिन उसे बोलने से रोका गया। पंचों का फैसला परमेश्वर का फैसला कहकर बात खत्म करने की कोशिश की गई।

किसन लगातार बोलने की कोशिश करता रहा। लेकिन कुछ लोगों ने उसे धकिया कर बाहर निकाल दिया। तेजभान के लोग उठकर खड़े हो गए थे। लाठियाँ फिर से लंबी होने लगी थीं।

किसन हताश होकर लौटा था। पीछे-पीछे मंगलू भी आ गई थी। बिरमा ने उनके उतरे चेहरे देखे तो सब कुछ समझ गई। घर में मातम-सा छा गया था।" (p. 28)

Review:

घुसपैठिये can be translated into English as Infiltrators and it was written by Omprakash Valmiki, a luminary of Dalit literature in Hindi. This is perhaps the first Hindi book i've read through in half a decade, and I think it may have single-handedly reignited my interest in Hindi literature.

You see, in the excerpt quoted above, which has been drawn from the second story in the collection यह अंत नहीं (This is Not the End) there is a line that refers directly to पंच परमेश्वर, a short story by Munshi Premchand, which every child that studies Hindi in school is tortured with at least twice over the course of their education. That line is a direct jibe at Premchand, and upon reading it, my ears have perked up, for Valmiki's story, calls into question the Gandhian idealism of Premchand's realist storytelling.

I won't go into too much detail, but Premchand's story is one that seeks to inspire Hindu-Muslim unity, in it, two old friends who differ in their faith and have had a falling out, are reunited in the justice meted out by the village panchayat. The reality of village panchayats is very different; Valmiki explicates this in This is Not the End where a young girl from a lower caste is attacked by an upper-caste man on her way home from working in the fields. The man's intent was unsurprisingly, sexual assault, but Manglu, the girl, fights Sachinder off and runs home to tell her parents.

On hearing Manglu's story, her parents wish to suppress the issue, they are aware of the violence that a fight for justice will bring upon them, and the lower caste community at large. Manglu's older brother Kisan on the other hand is home at the moment, on holiday from university, and his education has instilled a strong sense of justice, and he stands by his sister. Kisan fights to bring the case before the village panchayat.

This is where it all goes south; unsurprisingly, the panchayat, in its trenchant casteism, sides with the dominant caste Sachinder, indicting him, but letting him off with no more than a slap on the wrist. Kisan is nonplussed, the values he has learned in the city seem inoperable in his own village (they're also inoperable in the city, but that's a different story, in this collection, in fact), but Manglu remains resolute, "This is not the end," she says, as the story concludes.

And that's just one story in a collection of twelve.

A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid

"For almost not a day goes by that I don't hear about some dictator, some tyrant from somewhere in the the world, who has robbed his country's treasury, stolen the aid from foreign governments, and placed it in his own personal and secret Swiss bank account; not a day goes by that i don't hear of some criminal kingpin, some investor who has a secret Swiss bank account. But maybe there is no connection between the wonderful life that the Swiss lead and the ill-gotten money that is resting in Swiss bank vaults; maybe it's a coincidence. The Swiss are famous for their banking system and for making superior timepieces. Switzerland is a neutral country, money is a neutral commodity, and time is neutral, too, being neither here nor there, one thing or another." (.epub)

Review:

A Small Place is a book that feels extremely intimate to me. Jamaica Kincaid writes in anger, dissecting the imperialist exploitation of Antigua and Barbuda, she names every party responsible, both external to the miniscule island nation, and internal. She draws out the relations between the wealth of Europe and a select few on Antigua, and the poverty and disposession that ails the isle. And in that anger, humour weaves its way in, bitter irony at the state of the world, relentless goading directed to those who fail to apprehend the politcal and economic constitution of the world, or refuse to. Levity in rage is an entanglemant i am closely acquainted with.

My favourite part of the book, however, was when Kincaid spoke of stealing books from the library. Now, i would never have had the courage to steal from a library myself, but i do remember my expeditions to the annual book fair, where a few of my friends and i would surreptitiously ransack the place, competing to find out who could steal the most. For myself, i remember, in 2018, i stole twenty, it was a windfall! Enough to last at least four months. I think i've read those books to absolute shreds, they still live on my shelves, their pages covered in caterpillars of notes and annotations.

It is rare for me to find elements of my worldview so sharply reflected in a book, though, of course, Kincaid and i do have our differences, subtle though they may be.

In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency
Bipan Chandra

"The main justification given by JP for his movement was that it aimed at ending corruption in day-to-day life and politics, whose fountainhead was Mrs Gandhi, and to defend democracy which was threatened by her authoritarian personality, policies and style of politics. Her continuation in office, he said, was 'incompatible with the survival of democracy in India'. Mrs Gandhi's primary defence of the Emergency and her main criticism of the JP movement was that its disruptive character endangered India's stability, security, integrity and democracy. 'In the name of democracy it has been sought to negate the very functioning of democracy,'" (.epub)

Review:

I really don't have much to say about this one, i read it in order to learn more about the Bihar Movement, having perused Anand Patwardhan's early filmography, and found myself intrigued. The author has also been on my radar since i read Aijaz Ahmad's book, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, where Ahmad mentioned Bipan Chandra among a number of Marxist historians. There's really not much more to say, it is quite an informative text, i learned a lot from it, and it mentions Patwardhan a few times, tying it directly to the source of my curiosity. This is not to say that i believe that the book is above criticism, but i will not be taking up that criticism here, it would be too flippant.

Not to Disturb 🐛
Muriel Spark

"'I'll see the Baron in the morning, I have to talk to him,' says Mr. Mcguire.

'Too late,' says Lister. 'The Baron is no more.'

'I can hear his voice. What d'you mean?'

'Let us not strain after some vulgar chronology,' says Lister. 'I have work for you.'" (.epub)

Review:

Not to Disturb is an odd little duck of a book, it ends almost as soon as it begins, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's short, barely a hundred pages long, and for another, all is revealed at the outset. And in complete contradiction to that last statement, nothing is revealed over course of the book. But that's alright, the murder mystery that constitutes the book's dramatic core is utterly inconsequential to its sequence of events. The book is about something else entirely — it's about the organising principle of aristocracy: incest.

From what i've gathered in my rather rushed reading, this is how it goes: the Baron Klopstock is a serial philanderer and he has most likely impregnated his young maid, Heloise, who is most likely his own daughter, and the latter, on hearing of the fortune to be inherited on the Baron's forgone demise, promptly agrees to marry what is presumably her very disabled half brother, the Baron's legitimate heir. It is in the nature of the dialogue heavy narration that each of these facts is up for debate, as none of the speakers appear particularly reliable, but the intent is clear: eveything is sex, including sex.

But that's only one of the long drawn out jokes that comprise the text, the Baron and Baroness have a knack for hiring servants who share their incestuous proclivities. Lister, the butler, is entangled with his aunt Eleanor, a fellow servant and a woman at least a decade his junior, in a tryst that stretches back to their childhood. It would appear that incest is not simply a dalliance for the wealthy.

Amidst this ribaldry, of course, one prohibition remains; one must not speak of sex, it's far too degraded for persons of such distinguished character. Good old fashioned repression, and the inevitable return of the repressed. It's a very silly little book really, good for a few laughs, but not too much investigation, for it is filled with cans and cans of worms, that i'd rather not explicate at length right now.