A couple of gems sparkled: Chokher Bali by Tagore (Tagore adorns the posters of The Takshashila Institution), Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

Lakshmi spoke about the unputdownable Chokher Bali (translated as eyesore), a powerfully written emotional narrative. This fast-paced love triangle captures the protagonist Mahendra’s quandary as he is besotted with his wife Ashalata but Binodini, a young widow, also captivates him. Tagore is a master of depicting human emotion and the complicated structures of human relationships. There’s a version on the Epic channel in Netflix too though Lakshmi emphasizes that nothing can beat the book as Tagore’s writing is subtle and more focused on undercurrents than any melodrama or stereotype. Farewell my friend is another book by Tagore that was rated highly during this BYOB party.

Indira Vijaysimha was enamored by Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup. This series of lyrical love stories brings together geologists, clairvoyants, turtles and a yeti and spans across the emotional and geographical faultlines of the Andamans, Myanmar and the Himalayas. “The book feels like a response to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and it reminds me of Dorris Lessing’s trilogy in terms of the scale of things. Life is so fragile, one moment a mountain stands tall and the next moment, it falls into the sea,” she said.

Click on this link to read a very interesting interview with the author.

You can read an excerpt of the story here.

Sajal Raj Gautam talked about the classic quest novel Siddhartha. The book talks about how Siddhartha leaves a life of privilege to discover himself – the classic enlightenment story. More about Herman Hesse, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1946 here: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1946/hesse/auto-biography/

More books in Part 7.