AN ASYNCHRONOUS HISTORY SCRAPBOOK....WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK : Aditya K Roy

AN ASYNCHRONOUS HISTORY SCRAPBOOK

WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK 

Aditya K Roy

This book and the collection of topics in it, the content and the style, the pursuit and the comfort in the disparity / diversity (call it what you please) is a reflection of life as lived by the author (also my father). It has been an intellectual pursuit of the unknown and the unthinkable, paused occasionally, only by the accomplishment of significant milestones, only to restart afresh, in pursuit of many more.

I have physically and emotionally been a part of the history of the creation of these chapters; having seen my father painstakingly type on his laptop, these over the years; chapters which can be argued to be an asynchronous and haphazard history scrapbook. That specific nature of this collection, unintentional as it may be, is the first reason you should read this. The human intellect has got conditioned to pursuing knowledge sequentially, but lives and pursuits are, in reality, experienced and enjoyed in a random yet, meaningful and fruitful way. Only the acceptance of such a pursuit can make you truly enjoy a chapter 44 on Athirathram, a timeless Vedic Ritual, in the same breath of the (in) famous ‘Obama care’(chapter 25), Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sadat, Hosni Mubarak (Chapter 27), the Kennedy’s (Chapter 21), Angkor Wat (Chapter 77) and Panini’s Sanskrit (Chapter 87), to highlight a few.

The other reason, which , on the face may sound paradoxical, is that the topics in this book range from those that have been written over and over about,  to topics that have really no known precedent of the written word. Why then read a book about, as a matter of speaking, the Kennedy’s, what else is left to read? That is exactly why you should read it, because the view of a person, who sees a possibility of speaking about Hinduism in the same breath as Marxism, is worth reading, just for that very paradox coming to life.

Read it because it is true to what it intends to accomplish, the writer’s authentic outlet in the written word, in response to all the stimuli that a socially aware, citizen of the world is subjected to. Read it because it can be read in parts, each distinct enough for you to not yearn for continuity, yet because it gives you the feel of there being an invisible thread that binds the different parts...and read it because, as Aristotle said thousands of years ago, this is definitely an instance of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts!

Aditya K Roy

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