Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strongly recommend this book, August 5, 2008
If you are from India, you will find this book about a student from the premier Indian Institute of Technology, taking a totally unorthodox route towards activism helping socially downtrodden people. Unlike most of the other students of IITs, he didn't go to US for "greener pastures" or take up a job with multinational companies in India and earning more than a big chunk of population in US. Rather, he took up the cause of adivasis in Madhya Pradesh, a state in India and, also, turned his attention to real greener pastures (environment).
If you are not from India, you will find this book to be an illuminating experience about the lives of socially downtrodden people in India. I strongly urge you to buy this book to learn about the kind of miserable lives they live and how Rahul, unlike many of the Indian techies you have come across in Silicon Valley, have lived a life fighting for socially downtrodden people.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invigorating account of the Bhil indigeneous people of India, August 5, 2008
Rahul Banerjee did not make his millions in the Silicon Valley. In fact, he has never been to the Silicon Valley. He hasn't made his millions either.
Instead he has written a book- and the book has not found a publisher. So he did not make his millions this way either.
But Rahul Banerjee found a wealth of experience and inner satisfaction of having spent a life among the poorest of the poor in the country. He represents that diminishing tribe of middle- class young men and women fired with an empathy for the downtrodden, forsake what could have been more comfortable lives, to work for, and with what Dostoevsky's called the `insulted and the humiliated'.
A life- long activist among the Adivasis in Madhya Pradesh, Rahul was at one time associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, among others.
Recovery of the Lost Tongue is Rahul Banerjee's mid- life autobiographical reflection on his life spent working with and organizing the adivasis in Madhya Pradesh. It is written in the manner of a well read and well- engaged activist, his range of reading is mind boggling, and his experiences as a foot- soldier organizer among the people he chose to work with, fascinating.
But the most exhilarating aspect of the book is is the harmony between thought and action, a constant dialectic between theory and action. Small is the tribe of such people, and fewer still are those who have documented their experience and engagement with some of the poorest of the poor in the country.
The result of this dynamic praxis is very evident in every chapter of the book, with its insights into the life of the poorest- adivasis, women and the Dalits. There are occasional flashes of flamboyance (Love is all you need) and humour. Some of the chapters are treatises in themselves, and each could spawn a book by itself.
What remains in the mind at the end is the constant effervescence of ideas and wisdom gleaned over a quarter of a century.
The themes that the book deals with are the author's own urge that led him to give up a what could have been a comfortable middle class existence after he completed his engineering from IIT, Kharagpur in 1983 (A Mission Found ), his discovery of the life and struggles of the adivasis, his romance with his future wife and via her insights into Dalit life, the double exploitation of adivasi and Dalit women and the travails of organizing the poorest of the poor.
Some of the chapters written with an exceptional sense of adventure are those about the involvement with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and its sad marginalization that continues (Reliving the Myth of Sisyphus).
Parallel to this is his ideological evolution- from Marxism to interactions with Lohiate socialists and to the advocation of what he calls anarcho- environmentalism. One can differ with him on these, indeed as I do, but what is unquestionable is his extreme sincerity to the ideas that he has believed in at various times during the last quarter of a century and the `confident restlessness' that the poet of the reawakening of Asia, Mohammad Iqbal spoke of.
In a very perceptive chapter Reliving the Myth of Siyphus, he analyses the objective conditions that requires Gandhiji's techniques of Satyagraha to succeed.
He considers the environmental challenge- to which even the adivasis have now fallen prey- to the "prisoners' paradox" in which both the beneficiaries and the victims try to outdo each other devouring up increasingly scarce resource of Mother earth.
How mammoth and pointlessly excruciating the task is, is expressed in some of the more cynical chapters like The Exasperating Anarchist and increasingly becomes shrill towards the later chapters. The author has made repeated references to the myth of Sisyphus- made memorable by the Albert Camus, though at places, the experiences of the writer in fighting for justice for the adivasis recall to mind Kafka's Joseph K- in the novel The Trial.
Two of the most passionately written chapters are Time for a Sabbatical and The Treasure of Terra Madre. The former is based on the experience of his wife, Subhadra, who coming from a Dalit family found the distance learning course from Indira Gandhi University to be a challenge. The author's own attempts to get access to get data under the Right to Information Act from a university whose professed goal is `knowledge ... dissemination through sustainable open and distance learning systems seamlessly accessible to all'.
Rahul Banerjee has not been able to give back the tongue to the adivasis. But he has learned their language and spoken for them. And in the process, has etched the ideas and struggles that have defined the sensitivities of our age.
One hopes that he continues to carry forward as a crusading public intellectual of the other India.
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