Scorched Earth: A Political Novel Based on Science

Although the title of the novel, পোড়া বাড়ি (Pora Bari), which literally translates into “Burnt House”, is rather uninspiring, I bought the book because of its subtitle: “A Political Novel Based on Science”. It made me imagine that the novel would be a combination of political thriller and sci-fi, not a usual mixture. After reading the book, I was partly disappointed, but I also found the story significant, disturbing, and thought-provoking. I will tell you what I found disappointing in a moment, but first, let me tell you what is fascinating about the slim Bangla novel. But even before that, I must say a few words about the author and the style in which the novel has been written. Setting the context, as they say!

The author Rajarshi Raychaudhuri, who is a physician based in England, has garnished his narrative with interesting scientific insights into the incidents and processes he describes. (For example, why the leeches’ bite doesn’t sting.) Because of the scientific inquisitiveness and rigour of the author, while I read the novel, I knew I was reading science, not hocus pocus. (If I may take a short detour, even an author of Amitav Ghosh’s calibre wrote in Ghost Eye that once, the fish in a small glass aquarium jumped around so violently that the aquarium fell and shattered into pieces. Ghosh’s editors ought to have told him that Sir Isac Newton stopped the fish from doing such stupid acts about 350 years ago, when he published his Laws of Motion, the third of which says that when a fish hits the wall of an aquarium, its glass wall it hits back with an equal force; the two forces neutralise each other.)

A point to note is that the novel is a collection of more than 50 brief chapters, each one of which is either a report, a document, a speech, or events in the lives of the central characters. All these often-unconnected narratives are held together with the string of an ongoing disaster we are living through, the climate crisis. So it’s cli-fi, not sci-fi. I didn’t know what a novel constructed in this manner is called. (A minor disadvantage of not doing literature major at college.) Well, they are called docufiction or docu-novel, I have just found out.

Initially, the disjointed chapters didn’t create much curiosity in me to read on because I knew the following chapter would be on an entirely different topic. But slowly, the story gripped me and I had to read the book in a day, which says something about the writing skills of the author.

My Collin’s Dictionary says dystopia is “an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be”. Sadly, the term no longer refers to anything IMAGINARY. We live in an oxymoron, a dystopic reality, where the climate crisis might already have gone beyond the tipping point; the human race might actually be hurtling towards obliteration as you read this. Yet, the movers and shakers of the world, who seem unmovable about the impending crisis, are continuing in their relentless pursuit of wealth and power at any cost. This has led to an asymmetric battle between the coalition of big money and state power on one side and a group of scientists and climate activists on the other. Scorched Earth is a fictionalised account of that conflict taking place in the United Kingdom under a Labour government.

In India, the problem doesn’t matter much because of two reasons. First, our capacity to absorb incremental pain is infinite, and second, we are far too busy with the basic issues of roti-kapda-makaan to worry about the future. But it’s a different story in Europe, which has been suffering hot summers like never-before in recent years, leading to frequent heat strokes among Europeans, some of whom go out in sweltering heat wearing suits. Also, given the heightened summer, tropical mosquitos Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti have reached parts of Europe and have begun spreading dengue and encephalitis there, though in a limited scale so far. The problem isn’t as telegenic as say, the glacier collapse and avalanche in Nepal on 26 August 2026, but is an equally dangerous facet of the same problem. The author, being a practicing emergency physician in England, writes about these issues with an authenticity that only a background in science can offer. I have learned a lot from the novel.

Let me now tell you the disappointing part: It is linear. After the problem has been described, every chapter carries some good news that tells you that the underdog is going to win the battle, although the bigger picture of the war remains unchanged. The bad guy gets caught by sheer chance. Nothing happens to tilt the balance and make you worry about the outcome. Although there is not much thrill in this thriller, it is eminently readable because of the treasure of scientific information it presents in the common man’s language.

Before ending the review, let me recall that Yuval Noah Harari has recently identified the early 21st century,  (specifically the decades before the recent global conflicts) as the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history. Harari says that for many previous decades, large-scale war between superpowers became unlikely, and natural death became far more common than death by violence. He adds that the human race achieved a major milestone when governments collectively spent more money on healthcare (around 10.5%) than on defence (6–7%) for the first time in history. But unfortunately, the happy time seems to have died young. If that hadn’t happened, this post-COVID dystopic novel wouldn’t have been written.

 

Bengaluru / 19-22 September 2026

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

When we come out of our main gate of our residential complex in Bengaluru, a short private road leads us to the main road, on the right side of which is an imposing office building. On the left, on the ground floor of a less imposing structure, is an arcade with eateries and other stores. We call the arcade Arcade.

 As lots of tech workers are employed in the office building, at any time of the day in the arcade, one gets to see a crowd of young men and women with ID cards hanging from their necks having tea, tiffin, or lunch, standing or sitting on the arcade veranda. The youngsters are always cheerful, always in a group, and always chatting. A little of their joie de vivre gets rubbed onto me whenever I pass them.

 It seems owners of the arcade aren’t too fond of them. There are notices limiting the areas where they can eat. There were two concrete benches in front of the eateries on which they used to sit and have food. A few months ago, the benches were removed overnight. Why? The benches troubled nobody. I think they were removed only because the owners of the Arcade wanted to exhibit their meanness and power.

While the tech employees are seen only during the day, there is another group that lives in the arcade: a community of stray dogs. Animal lovers of the area feed them regularly, and the dog-lovers among the knowledge employees overfeed them irregularly. Consequently, the dogs are overweight and mostly sleepy. Contented with their lives, they harm nobody. In fact, they hardly move. Their protectors among my neighbours also get them vaccinated from time to time and get them treated when the need arises.

When I think of these people who do so much for something that has nothing to do with their self-interest, I feel not everything has been lost in our wretched country where reading a newspaper is a fraught exercise.

But the Arcade owners, if they don’t like harmless young people, how can they not hate harmless dogs? There is a history of animosity towards the arcade dogs. The latest act is the case of Bruce, a handsome nine-year old black-and-white male dog who was the quietest of the lot. He hasn’t been seen since 16 August.

When people from our housing complex approached the Arcade management to see their CCTV footage, they were rudely rebuffed. But from our housing complex’s footage, it was seen that at 2:33 AM of 16 August, at least two dog-catchers were trying to lure and catch dogs while they were running away. Our camera had limited reach, but it would be reasonable to infer that the two men abducted Bruce, the quietest, while the rest managed to escape.

When a complaint was lodged, the police came to Arcade, but the arcade management shouted at the people who had complained, while the police stood silently, like the good boys they are. An Arcade manager even went on photographing the protesters in the presence of the police, despite being asked to stop. It was an act of wanton intrusion of privacy and an implicit threat: We have noted who you are.

On 22 August, when eight of our people, including a senior citizen, went to the local police station, they were told there was no space for them to sit. They were made to stand and wait outside for four hours while it rained from time to time.

Let me jot down the central points.

·         Someone—possibly the Arcade management—paid private dog catchers to remove the arcade dogs, but they managed to catch only one.

·         The Arcade management, who are part of a big property developer of Bengaluru, seems to have a good rapport with the local police. This of course is expected. A construction firm would have good rapport with the police by default.

·         Deep pockets usually defeat good sense.

How much hate one must have to pay dog catchers and organise a midnight raid to remove absolutely harmless dogs! Is this a tiny part of the rising wave of hatred in the country in general?

 

Bengaluru

25 August 2026

 

This is a developing story. Please watch this space.

Shonku

 

As I am on the wrong side of 75, information about a friend’s death comes to me almost regularly. A large part of our world is made of friends; with every passing, our personal world shrinks a little: the smile that I won’t see ever again, the phone call that will never come, the bottle of beer that will remain unshared.

My childhood friend Shankar Bose, fondly called Shonku by friends, passed away yesterday after a few days of final suffering.

The message took me back to 1959, when he and I entered the same classroom and would be classmates for many years to come. Shonku was among the most low-key students in our class. (How painful it is to write about a dear friend in the past tense!) He was shy, would talk in a small voice, and wouldn’t be seen in large groups. He would never shout, nor would he stand in front of the class to deliver a speech. But from close quarters, he was just charming. Close friends knew he was a simple soul with a fine sense of understated humour. As we grew up I came to understand that Shonku believed in the American adage “Don’t take life too seriously, you won’t come out of it alive.” He didn’t take life too seriously. I wouldn’t possibly be wrong if I said that Shonku went through the usual phases of life, college, employment, getting married, having a child, and getting old, almost absent-mindedly.

We lost touch after school as our lives moved along two non-intersecting trajectories. Much later, I met Shonku again at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. Finally, when I left my first job and began my second innings in Kolkata, I reconnected with Shonku properly. His naughty smile hadn’t changed in fifty odd years. His behaviour, the way he talked, hadn’t changed at all. I felt he was still the child that he had been in school. A better way of saying that would be, Shankar had managed to keep his childhood alive within himself, something that only a few can do.

When we met again, I came to know that Shonku and I both suffered from a particularly nasty kind of rheumatoid arthritis which begins in one’s early twenties and for which there was no treatment in India until maybe, 2015. Until then, that is, over forty years, one of the main missions of my life was bearing terrible pain and coping with the debilitating disease. The disease was possibly less virulent in my case. While I have been reasonably mobile despite it, Shonku used to suffer a lot. When we met again, he carried a walking stick, although he would laugh off his illness. I believe true to his carefree nature, he didn’t take his problem seriously and didn’t really take adequate care of himself.

But all that is irrelevant now. Everyone lives their own life and Shonku lived his. A simple soul who would never have had an enemy. Goodbye, dear friend.

Bengaluru / 16 August 2026

 

 

GHOST-EYE: A journey into the unknown

If you really wish to enjoy Amitav Ghosh’s latest and his tenth novel GHOST-EYE, it will help if you believe in reincarnation and brought-forward ancestral memory from one’s past life, because reincarnation is a central theme of the novel. I don’t wish to scare you, but it would be a bonus if you believed in “metempsychosis” too. (If you didn’t know the word, no issues; it would just mean you haven’t read Ghost-Eye). Metempsychosis is migration of the soul from the body of a dead animal to that of a human or the other way round. For example, you were an otter in your last life and are reading this now! (I understand there are many recorded cases when little children accurately describe another place and family where they claim to have lived in their previous life. But I remain a sceptic. As I read Ghost-Eye, I carried the burden of my scepticism.)

Amitav Ghosh, a significant literary voice cautioning us about the climate disaster, has used the delicate ecology of the Sundarbans not just as a background, but as a central character in his novels THE HUNGRY TIDE (2004), THE GUN ISLAND (2019), and GHOST-EYE (2025). All of them carry strong messages about saving our planet. Another interesting aspect of Amitav Ghosh’s novels is the ease with which he moves between the past and the present and between continents! (In The Gun Island, between the Sundarbans, Los Angeles, and Venice.) His craftsmanship as a novelist is awesome; his language, captivating. Despite my scepticism, I got immersed in Ghost-Eye in no time.

Soon, I discovered that the arcane title of the novel comes from a protagonist, a Sundarban-based climate activist Tipu, whose eyes are of different colours. Tipu’s “ghost-eye” gives him the power to clearly see the past, the future, and also, things happening far away. And the phrase ghost-eye becomes the signature of a group of mysterious humans with similar abilities. 

Moving on to the story, like The Gun Island, Ghost-Eye too is narrated by Dinu, a middle-aged single man who lives in New York. Dinu tells us the story of Varsha Gupta, a girl slightly younger than him, and who grew up—like him—in Southern Avenue flanking the Dhakuria Lake in Kolkata in the 1960s, although they didn’t know each other. One day, Varsha stubbornly demanded to eat fish and nothing else. She also claimed that in her previous birth, she had lived with her fisherwoman mother in a thatched hut near a river. Both fish and poverty were anathemas for Varsha’s wealthy, strictly vegetarian family. Devastated, they got in touch with Shoma Bose, a clinical psychologist—who happened to be Dinu’s aunt—to counsel Varsha.

A parallel story begins when Dinu is confined in his New York flat during the COVID pandemic. Far away in the Sundarbans, a company is about to set up a large coal-based plant, despite warnings from environmentalists that it would be a disaster for the tidal archipelago. Tipu, who is among the people who are trying to block the project, believes there is a connection between averting the crisis and a former client of Shoma. Through video-calls across unstable connections, Tipu prods Dinu to trace that particular client of Shoma. Digging into his memories of Shoma and bits and pieces of clues, Dinu tries to identify the client like a detective, as Shoma’s professional ethics doesn’t allow her to reveal anything about her clients.

There are two ways of looking at the immensely readable novel. I feel that while Ghosh’s first novel based in the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide, explores the intersection between nature, folklore, human survival, and science, in his latest Sundarban-based novel, while the first three elements remain, “science” has been replaced by the “paranormal”. Given the wiring in my brain, I cannot be happy about the shift personally.

However, you can also say that reincarnation has been used merely as a literary tool here, Amitav Ghosh—through folklores of the people of the Sundarbans—is actually looking at our past, and the disaster that our future is increasingly looking like

Bengaluru / 14 March 2026

Joining the Khan Market Gang

After an insanely sumptuous breakfast at our New Delhi hotel, my son Ritwik and I went to see the samadhi of a frugal eater who would go on fast at the drop of a hat. Rajghat was a few metro stations and a short autorickshaw ride away from our hotel.

Ritwik, who belongs to the cash-rich-time-poor generation of modern India, had come to Delhi for two days’ work, but didn’t have the time to visit home. So we decided I would spend a Saturday with him. Here is a brief note on the exhilarating day.

At the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated in Rajghat, a low rectangular black marble monument has been built. It was designed to be minimalist and simple to reflect the values of the great man. The not-so-great men who killed Bapu are our rulers today. But they haven’t messed with his samadhi, at least not yet, unlike the vandalism they have done in Jallianwala Bagh. Lata Mangeshkar was singing Gandhi’s favourite Gujarati bhajan, "Vaishnava Jana To” when a pleasant breeze blew over the green lawns shining bright under a clear sky in the late-winter morning. Some visitors—Indians and foreigners who incidentally hadn’t come on tourist buses—were sauntering past the memory of the greatest son of modern India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi still draws people. I am waiting for the day when he reclaims his place in the public life of India.

From a sad landmark of modern India to the beginning of the Indian civilisation. The section on the Harappan civilisation in the National Museum was overwhelming. I had no idea that their pottery was so large, in such varied shapes, and with such intricate designs. When their seals with right-to-left writing come out of pages of books and present themselves in three dimensions, it’s an indescribable feeling for the viewer. Unfortunately, the two most relatable artefacts of the period, the dancing woman and the bust of a bearded man, are in Pakistan. But what is in India is no less remarkable.

What bowled me over completely was a woman’s skeleton excavated in Rakhigarhi in Haryana between 1997 and 2000, which is incredibly undamaged. In his book EARLY INDIANS, Tony Joseph has written that only one of the fifty to sixty Rakhigarhi skeletons (c. 2600–2200 BCE, the Mature Harappan phase) offered DNA good enough for genetic analysis. And that skeleton (not the one in National Museum) settled one question finally. The Harappan civilisation happened before the steppe pastoralists migrated into India. the two groups had no shared genes.

As I looked at the woman wearing shell bangles on her left wrist, she opened a window to my distant past. She reminded me that we are descendants of an incredibly brilliant, peace-loving, mathematically gifted people. If young Indians are a force in the world of technology today, maybe, 5,000 years ago, the woman lying before me had passed on some of the genes that made it possible?

It was lunchtime and after walking many miles, the breakfast was almost forgotten! We weren’t far from Khan Market, where we went up a narrow staircase to reach Khan Chacha’s eatery. I am sure I had done a few good deeds in my previous life which entitled me to savour such a delectable combination of rumali roti and mutton at Khan Chacha’s. Must visit the place again because I doubt if there is a comparable place in heaven, which anyway is an unlikely destination for me.

Khan market, named after Gandhi’s friend Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was set up in 1951 to rehabilitate Punjabi refugees from West Pakistan. Over time, thanks to their enterprise, it has evolved into a first-class commercial hub frequented by politicians, journalists, diplomats, and other well-heeled Delhiites. For this reason, the Sanghi types coined the derogatory term “Khan Market Gang” to describe people who wear Western clothes but not a tilak, who read books, speak English, and are generally unaware of the original phase of the acche din two millennia ago. I noticed that the incorrigible Khan-Market crowd is yet to soak in the “sanskari” vibes and many of them still enjoy meat and reading. (Also, women’s clothes showed a distinct lack of disinclination towards the decadent West.)

To cater to readers among them, there are wo terrific bookshops in Khan Market: Bahrisons and Faqir Chand. We happened to walk into Bahrisons, which had books stacked from floor to ceiling, where Ritwik and I got exactly the books we were looking for. (Faqir Chand, a few blocks away, looked almost identical.) On top of that, there were copies of Amitava Ghosh’s latest novel _Ghost Eyes_ signed by the author. Ritwik grabbed two copies, one for a friend.

By then, I was quite tired and wanted to retire. But fortunately, I remembered that the National Gallery of Modern Arts (NGMA in short) which we had crossed in the morning wasn’t far away. For a long time, I had wanted to see Tyeb Mehta’s Human Landscape once again. And a Hemen Majumdar painting of a woman who was startled and embarrassed, presumably because someone had seen her while she was undressing.

Ritwik hadn’t visited NGMA, which has the finest collection of modern Indian art from Rabindranath Tagore to Bikash Bhattacharya. For the following three hours, Tagore, Abanindranath, Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Binode Behari Mukhopadhyay, Amrita Sherghil, Maqbul Fida Hussein et al took us to another world. I saw Tyeb Mehta’s painting again and was as amazed as I was the first time, but I couldn’t find Hemen Mazumdar or the large canvas of Jogen Chowdhury. (Why?) I was transfixed as I stood before a simple FN Souza drawing of a man in a few strokes. His haunting eyes gobbled me up for a while. It is a shame that NGMA doesn’t allow photography and hence I cannot show you the picture.

While our taxi went through a tree-lined avenue with embassies on either side of the road, I thought the areas we covered yesterday, i.e., a triangle with Aerocity, Rajghat, and Khan Market at its vertices, was possibly one of the finest urban landscapes of our time.

To wrap up, let me not forget say that contrary to popular belief, the Delhi people we met were almost epitomes of politeness. None of the three autorickshaw drivers we met tried to fleece us. Rather, they asked for modest amounts. Once, when we had to travel much longer than what the auto driver had initially anticipated, he didn’t grumble. And he was visibly pleased when I paid him for the extra distance without his asking for it. The oldest among the three, sixty plus Suresh Pandit, a proud brahmin and a true vegetarian, drives 20+ kilo metres from his East Delhi home to the Khan Market auto stand. Pandit said he was struggling to make ends meet because the app-based taxies were driving auto rickshaws out of Delhi roads. I was tempted to ask him if he realised that the political party he supports is doing exactly the opposite of what Gandhi prescribed, they are making life more difficult for the people who are already vulnerable.

 
I didn't ask him the question and he smiled warmly when we parted.

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 Bengaluru / 08 February 2026