Michele Baron's Review of my book "Wrighteings...In Media Res:

HITCH-HACKER’S GUIDE TO THE LEARNIVERSE: A REVIEW OF THE “WRIGHTEINGS” OF DR A.V.KOSHY

By Michele Baron

Beginning to read Wrighteings – 1. … in media res… by Dr. A. V. Koshy (& his brother, A.V. Varghese, in one paper) is like cross-training for an intellectual decathlon. A self-proclaimed autodidact of multifaceted interests, Dr. Koshy has put together the best samples of his writings from the last 12 years of his “pilgrimage” through life, work, the works of man, doubt, learning, identity, sense of self and nature of the Other.
Raised bilingually in Malayalam and English, Dr. Koshy was, is, a voracious reader, afficionado of the arts, online technologies, teacher by profession, and student by inclination. Wrighteings is a true labor of love. Dr. Koshy essentially formatted the book by hand, compiled the bibliographies and URL links, and edited it himself, and sent it to LAP Lambert Academic Publishing to bring the distillation of his thoughts to us, the readers fortunate enough to find, and peruse, his “writings.”
While you may have pulled up a comfortable chair to begin reading the fascinating compendium of essays, in essence, you should instead prepare for a brisk run on a track peopled with Rimbaud, and Heidegger, T.S. Eliot, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Adamov, with Charles Dickens and his “other,” Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, the title-tome of Dr. Koshy’s first essay.
“I is an other,” wrote Arthur Rimbaud. Viewing man’s situation, Dr. Koshy postulates that “Man knows himself as an Other without having chosen, willed or acted…” in contrast to Lucifer, who, “having alienated himself… became Satan (the adversary), an Other.” Exploring the relationship between Raskolnikov and Sonia in Dostoevsky’s classic, Dr. Koshy brings the incomprehensible universe of the tragic and hopeful into closer focus, interrelating it with Roland Barthes’ concept of “jouissance,” and the Sanskrit “satchitananda.” And then, expanding once again the kaleidoscopic universe of ‘otherness,’ Dr. Koshy explores recent and current events, asking whether minorities, the “ultimate test to man’s unproved claims of humanity” are to be constantly identified as dangerous, hunted, haunted, or allowed to survive… “Will the majority silence their voices, ignorantly mistaking one Other for another?”
In considering the gaps between Design and Art, between technological, theoretical, ideological and aesthetic matrices in East and West, between global scales, cultural melting pots, “clashes of civilization” and individual/community sustainability and needs, A.V. Varghese, Dr. Koshy’s brother and co-writer of this article, begins by quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer-- “If you board the wrong train, there’s no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction”
Running through a de-cryption of the etymology of the word “Design,” we are treated to a consideration of art, literature, Persian carpets, and the mystery and awe of creation, “aestheticized” to activate understanding, to negate reality, or to set up a transcendent “other” scene in opposition or alternative to the reality facing us today. Dr. Koshy and his brother, A.V. Varghese look to design as more than personal expression, more than an idiosyncratic commentary on the “condition humaine,” to become, perhaps, a discipline enabling conditions of humanity, sustainability, development that is more than a brand, buzzword or a leveraged option for profit.
Design aficionados will recognize Dr. Koshy’s and A.V. Varghese’s consideration of thinkers including Baudrillard, Bruinsma and Steven Heller; laymen can construct a greater appreciation for the words, images and products that have powerful effects on our lives as consumers and informed participants in a shared civil, local/global society. In a discussion of art and artists from the classical to the surreal, concrete to indeterminate, of paintings and sculpture, of the contrasts between poetry, literature, the material and the spiritual (viz Martin Buber’s I-It and I-Thou relationships), the challenge is raised. Can design become natural, universalized to the extent that it ceases to be reactive, prey to and dependent upon the immediate, upon profit and popularity? Hearkening to the writings of Mustafa K. Tolba, A.V. Varghese and Dr. Koshy write of post-modern unity and disintegration in the wake of 9-11, searching for a concept of “healthy interactive design that can at least build fraternity, if not yet equality and liberty.”
Paralleling the understanding of cultures and values in West and East, and divisions of prosperity in “North/South” debates, and setting their homeland of India as an example of a nation at the crossroads of development, Dr. Koshy and A.V. Varghese write that “Design must discover its ideology or ideological bias if it seeks to engage with or enable the process of development, become a discipline and make a meaningful contribution to mankind’s endeavors to end unjust privileging.” Eschewing top-down design, reactive to a “culturally sanctioned elite” while excluding the “dalit/broken” (the Other), Koshy and Varghese envision the collectivity of effort that could open a “door of perception” for Design, and achieve a contiguous, peaceful, sustainable community. Cognizant Design would become effective in development, a shared endeavor that would “benefit recipients at the concrete level of sustainable development. Transformed, universalized to the extent that it “feeds the body/bodies of men all over the world as much as poetry and sculpture feed the spirit.” As ageless as the Golden Rule and admonitions to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” the design-development equation cannot be sidestepped, to “ensure development by design, and enable design to create concrete objects in space and time to tackle the vast task of innovative, sustained, sustainable development.”
In many ways, Dr. Koshy writes as if he were creating the mythical Emperor’s new clothes, and, in fact, field-testing the outfit himself before bestowing it upon the Emperor, lest he be unaware of some aspect of its affect and effect. His assessment of the prolific writings and translations of Ram Mohun Roy could, in a sense, serve as a decryption for much of Koshy’s own walk through life, writings, and ‘rightings’ of inequalities and inconsistencies. Tackling gender issues, women’s rights, theological matters, concepts of politics and nationalism which crosses borders, blends East and West, North and South into a synthesis of reason and humanism, Dr. Koshy provides what might be a glimpse into his concepts of “the author.”
“Emersonian in a sense, Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1833) reveals to us through his works a multi-faceted chameleon of a personality that thrived on many things at the same time without ever actually feeling the need to define himself as this or that specifically.” Child marriage, gender-based infanticide and exploitation and the two-edged sword of “sati” (translated alternatively as “good woman” and “widow burning”), segregation, caste systems, discrimination based in differences of race, religion and origin were and are at a philosophically explosive center of a “resurgence of interest in the ancient lore of India...” and here are again brought into focus through the lens of present-day issues and events.
In delving into the life and works of Mohun Roy as social and religious reformer, translator and author, Dr. Koshy reviews and reiterates history himself, as concomitant to what might be a current version of the periodic “renaissance, revitalization and revival” that herald a cessation of fear and alienation/eradication of “Others”and the (female) “Advocate” by the (male) “Opponent” of historic and contemporary societies. Roy, Tagore, Pandita Ramabai are included in the review of writings of brave men and women “weighing the pros and cons of justice based on articles of common sense, reason, trust and conscience, applicable to all men and women;” bringing tolerance and expansion of those best qualities of human kind and the humane, here viewed through the many-hued prism of life in India.
Considering the history and future of humanity, and, more specifically, women, in India and beyond, Dr. Koshy assesses the polyphony of Raja Ram Mohun Roy’s works, translations, postulations, and looks forward to a happy, symbiotic future “where liberty and equality flourish because justice has been more than partially implemented regarding women’s issues, rights, studies and initiatives.” Lest we become mired in a zero-sum game of winners and losers, of clothed and unclothed, of the blissful, separate ignorance of extreme privilege and extreme privation, an awareness of history, viewed from our perch on the shoulders of those who preceded us, is a gift incomparable. Otherwise, we might find that we are the blithely unclothed in the presence of a local, and global, community of the needy, the underservered but deserving, the assessing, and the aware.
In “The Politics of Dissent,” his review of On Communalism and Globalization/Offensives of the Far Right by Aijaz Ahmed, Dr. Koshy calls forth again the challenge to “fight for the hearts and minds of our children… that they may grow up as people who will have the freedom to ‘choose’ their ideology and consciousness and not have it thrust on them through violence or ‘cultural’ brainwashing done through misuse of the vast political, economic, technical and technological machinery available to those in power.”
Although Dr. Koshy finds the book “a bit dated,” he enjoys the challenge of meeting philosophers like Hegel, Croce, Kant and Lenin, and setting them up in a test of strength against ‘romantic thinkers’ like Herder, Fichte and Nietzsche, and “early RSS giants” like Savarkar and Moonje… In a race for relevance to our times, when national ID cards carry rights to education, to economic security, to voting for political freedoms, when access to technological assets is almost a sine qua non of informed, participatory living, but large percentages of the world’s peoples still have little/no opportunity to learn of, let alone afford to purchase, power and connect internet or other media/connective devices, reading this distillation of political and philosophical thought is certainly more challenging than a typical ‘read’ of summer fiction, especially considering that “we” have evolved, at least a bit, beyond the political nascence described (decried) in its pages, cloaking contemporary intolerances/exclusions in different guise. Dr. Koshy closes this chapter noting, “however, it reminds us that, even in these troubled times, the right to speak out has not yet been entirely stifled in India…”
The “Roger Waters and Waking Born Tribute to 9/11 victims Music Video on Youtube” next receives consideration in Wrighteings. The Internet and broadband communications have enabled whole new groups of sharers, literate and “illiterate,” into a community of people who have never met, might never meet. This new, connected society works outside previously measured concepts, tout exchange and access rather than profit, and fosters millions of subcultures of those interested in a commonality of values and interest rather than political/economic/heritage-based selectors for affiliation and inclusion.
Our proclivity for exclusion and discrimination, for marginalizing whole groups of people has been cited, at least in part, for the unsustainable social structures which led to the tragedies of 9/11 and beyond. Against this somber background, in the harsh glare of the lyrics and music of Roger Waters, references to the fallible/failed images of Stanley Kubrick’s portrayals of human(un)kind, and postulations that Darwin might have gotten the theory of evolution upside down, Dr. Koshy takes the entertainment/escape view of the music video, and evaluates it instead through a “composite conglomerate of issues.” Life is at a crisis point. Music Videos are for Slackers. Games are for Escapists. Serious problems require Serious Solutions. “Should we spend our time reading technical manuals instead? That is the modern equivalent of Nero fiddling.”
“Are we finally finding a parallel to reality, in the realm of human expression that can somehow subtly say what we actually wanted to say and mean what we hope to mean? Or is this just another mirage, the reality being that we finally have at our disposal only one more means to create an art that is forever freed from its referent… a multiverse that keeps breeding but never contains any trace” of the historical inadequacies and realities which prompted its creation? Is this just a depiction, but not a departure from the inadequacies of a Man-defined-God, poised uneasily on a man-made Babel’s Tower of oil, power, dehumanizing violence, isolating cultural exclusivity? The cover image on the book makes sense here.
Is 9/11 a subject for art? The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, America’s counter-attack, the attack on the World Trade Center and other US sites—appropriate themes for casting with Kubrick’s monkey and a postulation that “man may actually be an inferior rather than an evolved form of life, if he is to be judged by his acts in history”?
We have an uneasy relationship with the technologies of connection, speed, transfer, accessibility and power which we ourselves are developing; those with access do not always exercise restraint in their own wielding of power, but, rather, exclusion of all others seeking equality. We have arrived at a juncture where destruction is again possible, if not imminent. But, with freely-shared information, art, values, we can meet at this crossroads, without conflict, and perhaps change the decisions/actions/future of the social juggernauts which have arrived with us here, from the past. Taking up the flame, voicing onward the clarion call, Dr. Koshy closes this essay on Roger Waters and the (9/11) music video/Youtube by stating that the “race of human beings require chroniclers who will keep alive the memories of past wrongs man has done to other men and to himself so that history intelligently documented as it is done in this video will not be a discipline for fools but will teach all men everywhere to hope for a better tomorrow and dream of a future where all men will live at peace with each other…”
In “Democratizing Teaching English Language and Literature in India,” Dr. Koshy reads Jane Sahi, who borrows from Gandhi his metaphor for education—something, in turn, which Gandhi took from Nature, of plants nurtured by a loving gardener. The gardener and garden carefully tended represent a metaphor recurrent throughout our history of tribes and cultures of a scattered mankind repeatedly faced with imbalances of expansion, depletion and challenges to establish and sustain food security, peace, and all the variables in between.
For Dr. Koshy, the metaphor concerning teaching and learning lies also in the parable of the Sower and the Seed in the Gospel of Luke. Not all “gardens” provide the nurturing or the resources necessary for students, for the future decision-makers of our interdependent planet, to survive, let alone prosper, and take up, in turn, their responsibilities to teach, lead, nurture.
Moving from the Edenic to the Gandhian and the New Testament gardening images, the essay introduces, among others, Anita Rampal, an advocate presumably standing firmly in the forefront of the battle to make education a matter of quality for the students of the rural poor (and, one assumes, the urban poor) in India in this twenty-first century of our modern “sowing” and “growth,” of education and real life. Jane Sahi, Paulo Freire, Jean Piaget, and lauded icons of the development of education balance at yet another forking in the roads examined by Dr. Koshy. Brought to specificity through consideration of major educators and thinkers in India, the essay raises questions spanning a plethora of issues: Nehru (three language formula), Ambedkar (abolition of caste inequality), Tagore (humanism), and Krisnamurti (choiceless awareness). Honing the vast possibilities of democratization of education and curriculum to a narrower line, Dr. Koshy outlines a syllabus and suggestions for guiding student, teacher, and thinker-participant (both) in the process of education.
“Poetry should delight and instruct,” wrote Horace; Dr. Koshy writes that if ‘poetry’ is replaced by ‘education,’ nothing would be lost. Delight in learning, mastery and expression can give rise to a harmony of the learned, the learner, learning itself, mediator and ‘active receptacle’— and the constant improvement of education as our GPS through the challenges of life.
And, beyond the socio-economic and political considerations, Dr. Koshy explores the challenges facing the “sower” – the teacher or facilitator of learning, and the “seeds” – the students/co-investors/movers in the learning process. English as a Second Language (ESL), the democratization of English, “new” dialects and versions (SMS/texting English, “online chat” boxes, ‘new spell’ and icons and acronyms accepted as words) are all considered in the light of literacy, literature, and life.
The teacher/educator in Dr. Koshy is visible through his next phrases: “The only peaceful war ‘we’ facilitators need to constantly wage, therefore, is one whereby there is a ceaseless effort to keep closing the gap between our notions of perfection and our consistently and constantly evolving ways of professionalizing our teaching and facilitating practices and strategies. This has to be done while continuing to sound each other out in the process of learning from each other. This may temporarily create the meeting point between real and constructivist teaching.” Thence, one assumes, to uncharted territories of possible, more-sustainable futures, dependent upon the active participation of participants and colleagues in learning and life.
The frustrated author, the reaching assayer of arts and film rises in “Why Sergei Paradjanov and his Films MATTER.” Breaking his word to write (and publish) an article on “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” “Ashik Kerib,” “The Colour of Pomegranates” and “Legend of Suram Fortress,” Dr. Koshy watched the films (and kept the films sent by the magazine publisher), viewed the paintings, read the images of and influences on Paradjanov’s works and life. He showed sections of the films to audiences young and old, garnered their reactions (appreciative, and negative, respectively). He reveled in the impression that Paradjanov, working in a medium which can appeal only to the eye and ear, fed all five senses, and the heart, mind, and soul of the viewers with his films.
Hearkening back to the “Other,” “I am he whose soul is tortured,” a line from Sayat Nova’s poetry, sounds repeatedly in “The Colour of Pomegranates.” The essay paints the images of the films in the words on his pages, linking them to literature, videos, music icons, the mythologies of our past, the realization of our ever more arduous present. (Except in “Ashik,” where Dr. Koshy states that Paradjanov “enters such a strange realm of excellence that even I don’t have the courage to follow him there by trying to describe in words the curious ‘spectacle’ he serves up…” –although, apparently ever a rebel, Dr. Koshy tries anyway, writing of the scene with “images of driftwood and a desert where tumbleweed flies aimlessly about in the shifting and rollicking sand and wind. I have not yet been able to conjure up a better metaphor for mere meaninglessness.”)
Viewing films of Paradjanov, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Pasolini, Satyajit Ray and others, the author confesses to a “subversive” inclusion of the works of Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Babel, the minimalists poised in contrast to the maximalists in an essay written by a youthful Ampat Koshy. All, especially now Paradjanov, celebrated here again, for the flow of their images, the profusion of symbols and emblems and motifs, in lights and sounds, rather than static words, or music videos… for the stories which allow us to suspend our preoccupations and presuppositions and step into the moments and minutae of lives metamorphosed into celluloid, into digital images/sounds, into 3D and holographic interactives. Folktales brought through the passages of time and culture, now accessible, with internet and other media, to all ages and cultures.
“Revolutionaries know that it is dangerous to begin to understand the past. But artists know that the past is the only material we have at hand to work with. No one has worked with the past, whether of these now-war-torn places and their rich cultures… or the past of film itself, as well as Paradjanov… He tried to raise film to the levels of religion, beauty, love, sex and truth and his failure is one of art’s happiest successes.”
Turning again to education, to interactions between the learning self and the world, Dr. Koshy treats us to his essay “Deconstructing Brunerian Constructivism,” which he calls basically sound, but not humanizing enough. He argues that the system of education has been contaminated by ‘entrepreneurial middlemen’ between learners and learning, teachers and taught, upholding old ideals of power, access and appropriate-leveling/theories of learning, and other social, political and economic constructs.
Drawing on his own experience as an educator and facilitator as well as a rich background of textual and vicarious edification, Dr. Koshy outlines the constructivist learner, the process, the spiraling building blocks of knowledge and experience and the world/environment as life-referent, and the role of the facilitator.
The challenge of establishing and maintaining an accessible, equitable system of education/learning/participation in a vast nation like India is confronted—gaps are located, inadequacies identified. Dr. Koshy asks, “what is the price tag on education for rich kids?” Do the children of privilege receive an elite education, augmented by pleasant multi-media diversions and enhancements not available to their less fortunate (‘other’) counterparts? Is the quality of education, the effective implementation of non-inclusive/non-accomodating theories of learning (like Bruner’s) indirectly fostering a new caste system (in India, and by extension, the world at large) reinforcing the “only lesson valued by the ‘strong’ of the world—how to increase in power and wealth and become rulers (of those excluded from such holistic education)?”
The author contends that the cost, the expense of a gap-fraught system of education can become fatal if the learners, the facilitators, the funders of learning, and the leaders of the societies do not strive to reach and maintain a developed awareness and an equality of the interdependence of the living web of life on this earth. The few cannot consider themselves greater than the sum of the parts. “Any theory of learning which ultimately doesn’t send the learner in the direction of truth, and that includes responsibility to all one’s fellow men, is, by inference, incomplete and needs deconstruction so that one may come up with a practice that creates in the signifier the innate drive to ask the age-old question: What is really significant enough to learn in the brief life each human being has on earth?”
Something that Dr. A.V. Koshy has found significant enough to learn, as a teacher/facilitator of learning, ESL and expression, is investigated in “One more ‘Raid on the Inarticulate’…Future of Creative Writing/ {C(o)urses}. Myths, taboos, plagiarism, the labyrinth, self as teacher, self as writer, the non-self (but not “Other”) as contemporary, predecessor, competitor are all explored, counterpoint atop a continuo of self-assessment and literary comparisons.
“Make a tree.” For Plato, the poet is a maker, both divine and dangerous. Like the Revolutionary in a previous essay, the power to understand the past, to synthesize meaning for the present, and direction for the future holds the power of creation, God-head in the demagoguery of human(un)kind.
For Tolkien, the myth-maker is a sub-creator, made in the image of God. Good, evil, faith, doubt are tested again and again in epic journeys and minute realizations. For Dr. Koshy, the poet, myth-maker, author and facilitator is the epitome of hope, of a lifetime of searching for truth, railing against realities, and reaching for something beyond the branded commodities of convenience and obsolescence—for the memorable, the valuable, for that which reminds us there is vastness which exceeds comprehension, even while striving to comprehend, and expressing the realization of it.
And he exercises his utilization of adjectival links at the same time, sarcasm and catharsis blending in a poetic evaluation of his own drive to facilitate learning and the inspiration to learn; to weave that carpet of meaning, perfect save one purposeful weaver’s “error;” to portray, if not make, that mythic tree.
“What poor unknown ailing aging unfortunate randomness-spouting pointless poet doesn’t like being treated like a rockstar, even if it’s only once in a lifetime, for a brief flash of a second? ... I keep writing. To write something that will survive only if God or others ‘won’t willingly let’ it ‘die,’ that is my goal. I pass this philosophy on to my students unwittingly and as a result I am perhaps destroying them. Perhaps not.”
Ever questioning, Dr. Koshy returns again to learning, asking if it is “Time for Education to Die?” The autodidact and his GPS for erudition and commonsense, wondering if one could “construct his own path of learning or better still design it, or forego learning itself entirely and be found able to navigate life…” Present-day technologies enable a new learning space, populated not only with the directly-identifiable participants, but with the problem-solving interactivity of crowd sourcing and “swarming.”
If it is possible, now, to posit an open, accessible, win-win learning process, interactive and interest-driven, rather than profit-derived and exclusionary, perhaps the ‘gaps’ of presentation, retention and achievement can be eradicated, equity of accommodation, application and accomplishment made ‘multiversal.’
Concepts and styles of literacy, learning and location are, again, expanded, deconstructed, and tested on these pages. “Education is not monolithic. It is protean.” Educators around the world are celebrating online and multi-media connectivity and interactivity, some taking every opportunity to test the boundaries and viability of educational mores, class-room evaluations, national ranking systems. Walking, working, writing among these, Dr. Koshy informs his evaluation of current practices in education with realities in India today.
Praising mentor and key Indian eduationist Geetha Narayanan’s “brilliant idea of enactive design,” and Geetanjali Sachdev’s developing (and recognizable) idea of looking at subjectivities behind systems, Dr. Koshy, arguing for summative assessment to be dismissed entirely from the tier of assessment, ever the instigator, re-introduces an arguable note of gender specificity into his writing… “These women are interesting and intriguing innovators, but like mothers they are only starting with clearing the ground carefully. It is for the sons to raze the prisons to the ground so that no stone is left on stone of the shrine or temple of learning.”
Dr. Koshy grounds his positions in his own experiences and ongoing vita as teacher, facilitator, generalist and specialist, informs the dialog with awareness of the work/works of others, testing himself, others, process, procedure, and results, recognition and “nameless” striving for a better, inclusive future—tasks of bringing equity to education, flavor to learning, understanding to sight, sound, meaning, love and plurality and inclusion to philosophy. “Immersed in living and multiplicity and plurality… [Dr. Koshy sums his journey temporarily with] what was once said long ago by an other: ‘Disenchanted, he become dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is depleted, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’ (Fire Sermon)”
This is not “light summer reading” by any means. It represents some twelve years, encapsulated from an ongoing lifetime of thinking, and selected writings. While it may be cross-training for the thinking polyglot and student alike, it is not a book one can digest in a day. However, like all good exercise programs, repetition and follow-up improve skill, understanding, mastery and capacity.
Long summer days and lighted winter evenings might be well-companioned by the thoughts and thinkers populating the pages of Wrighteings, however, and even as a sort of ‘hitchhiker’s guide’ to the fires of meaning, learning, expression and life, Dr. Koshy’s collection of essays provides multiple levels for contemplation and reference. And the personal style and generous quotes and references salting the work lend much to savor, and, like any good cross-training program, make reading the collection of writings in Wrighteings good literary fun.

On the author of the review: Michele Baron is a Fulbright scholar on local/indigenous arts and Master-class, Teacher, Project Developer/Volunteer (Hajj for Humanity), Concert and Performance Soloist/Artist and an URGENT EVOKE/WB Social Innovator of the Class of 2010. She is a thinker, soprano, writer and artist of extraordinary ability.
http://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/MicheleBaron


Book Details:
Wrighteings
In Media Res
LAP Lambert Academic Publishing ( 2011-05-27 )
ISBN-13: 978-3-8443-9731-4
ISBN-10: 3844397310
EAN: 9783844397314

By (author) : Ampat V. Koshy
Ampat V. Varghese
Number of pages: 116
Published at: 2011-05-27
Category: Pedagogy
https://www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details/store/gb/book/978-3-8443-9731-4/wrighteings
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Michele Baron's Page - Urgent Evoke

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+2 by You, Ampat Varghese

Ampat Varghese - A brilliant review of a book that few in India will dare read carefully.
11:06 AM +1