Modi Mandate 2019: Dispatches from Ground Zero by Pradeep Bhandari
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5/5

What worked for me:
1. The length of the book : Thankfully the author kept the book short and all the chapters were precise and too the point.
2. Academic : If you are looking for juicy tidbits on inner workings of any political party then you wont get it here. This is much more about constituencies, their caste combinations, the vote transfers etc.
3. Reach : If the author is to be believed, then he and his team had surely reached out to almost all the constituencies in the country, and ended up predicting the numbers quite accurately.

What didn't work for me:
1. Boring : This feels like an academic work, with no view into the inner mechanisms of the parties. We don't get to know about the strategies or the logistical challenges faced by them.
2. Weak writing style : The book feels repetitive. The phrases are repetitive, it feels that if you have read about one state you know all the other states.
3. Bengal : The author wants me to believe that everyone he managed to interview spoke Hindi in West Bengal. That's pretty unbelievable for me.

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Brushing Up The Years: A Cartoonist's History Of India, 1947 2004 by R.K. Laxman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have always felt that the so called "INTELLECTUAL BRIGADE" of India chooses to see only those which doesnt hurt their eyes. In the process a certain political group, or a certain section, or a stray incident gets the big Headline bashing whereas points requiring close scrutiny goes scot free.
Recently, I bought a book called "Brushing Up the Years: A Cartoonist's History of India" which is a collection of the cartoons drawn by the legendary cartoonist R.K. Laxman. In this book he actually "PORTRAYS" what a Common man goes through in his bid for just living his life. His brush left no party, be it left or the centre, unscathed, no incident, which hurt the common man, go unnoticed. A true common man, he felt the need to portray every common man’s trouble without seeing the color or the creed, or the amount of vote the issue might fetch. No wonder his HERO(if we may call the dhoti clad old gentleman appearing in his slides as one) was called a Common Man.
I wish the media, or the intellectuals of this country stop being selective in their criticism, and for once actually come down to the pedestal of a common man to see how fast a 100 rupee earned gets spent leaving a man empty handed with a head full of worries.
My point : If you want to criticise, speak out against everything you see thats bad like Mr. Laxman did. If you want to be selective, better keep your mouth shut.


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