THUBTEN SAMPHEL

In Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic account of the Great Game played out between an expanding Tsarist Russian empire and the British Raj, Sarat Chandra Das makes a cameo appearance as Hurree Chunder Mukherjee, a spy for the British Raj. His mission was to gather intelligence about the isolated kingdom located beyond the Himalayas. Sarat Chandra Das’s reports of his two clandestine journeys to Tibet in 1879 and 1881-1882 was published in 1902 as Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet. It has now been re-published by Speaking Tiger as

Journey to Lhasa: The Diary of a Spy

which provides for those interested in Tibet a detailed and fascinating account of a lost world and a way of life. Sarat Chandra Das was more than a spy. He was a linguist, scholar and traveller. His espionage work in Tibet for the British Raj led to his scholarship on the country. He became a spy who fell in love with his prey. His two for-your-eyes-only reports on Tibet informed the diplomacy behind the British invasion of Tibet in 1903. His mastery of the Tibetan language and scholarship on Tibet threw up one of the great Tibetan-English dictionaries that paved the way for new generations of Tibet scholars a helpful entry into the world of Tibetan Buddhism and culture. A little known aspect of Sarat Chandra Das was his friendship with another great traveler, Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese Zen monk who became Das’s student in Tibetan language and Buddhism. The Diary of a Spy comes as a breath of fresh air and I recommend it to all who are interested in travel, travel writing and adventure. Spies.

TDirector, Tibet Policy Institute, Dharamshala

rees feel lonely, love society, can be bullies, nurse an ailing neighbour and even have conversations, warning each other of danger and such like through a fungal network, or the ‘wood wide web! It is with such startling revelations that I began 2017, reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Wohlleben’s language is chatty and the book has become an unlikely international best seller -- telling of our yearning to be reconnected with nature. It’s been a ‘tree year’, with my second — and strong–recommendation being Sumana

Roy’s

This beautifully crafted collection of essays is impossible to classify. One imagines Roy among trees, watching, understanding, absorbing, and then assimilating her relation and empathy to trees through her own self. It is at once botany and science, philosophy and poetry, and a deeply personal memoir. This book is a work of art, it’s meditative, staying with you much after the last leaf… err… page is turned. Another important book this year was Jairam Ramesh’s

Nature, because it shows the importance of political leadership in environment at a time when the country is suffering the consequences of Climate Change, pollution, deforestation and extinction. It chronicles Indira Gandhi’s contribution to saving our natural and cultural heritage. All three books are special because they led to a reimagining of my own sense of self.

Hidden Life of Trees. How I became a Tree. Indira Gandhi: A Life in

My reading this year was eclectic, something “old”, something new, and here are three books I would particularly recommend.

Billy Collins: Sailing Alone Around the Room; New and Selected Poems

(2002) celebrates one of America’s best-loved poets. In Black Water Lilies (Michel Bussi, 2016), the French village of Giverny, once home to Claude Monet, becomes the centre of a gripping murder mystery. Art, Monet’s luminous landscapes, and human folly dominate this dark narrative of love and betrayal. 13 days uncover events that span two generations, keeping us on edge and jolting us with the unexpected denouement. Finally, every book lover should read

BOB by Pamela Paul, editor of The

NYT Review of Books, my only pick among this year’s releases. The salacious-minded should note that BOB is no male hunk but an acronym for “The Book of Books” – Paul’s record of books read over nearly three decades, and a throwback to the kind of endearing, hand-written journals one kept in a time before tablets and e-readers. My Life with BOB maps Paul’s own inner odyssey, connecting her reading with different phases in her life. Paul has commented on literary pretension (her own included) with refreshing self-deprecation: at Brown University, eg, “You didn’t talk about liking a book: you ripped it to pieces”. Books one knows leap out of chapters but the many unknowns are a humbling reminder of how much remains unread.

IMy Life with

began the year by resolving to counter its pace by cultivating slowness. Reading, therefore, was done primarily to slow the pace of time and to reflect upon the times. In Tadeusz Borowski’s

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

(1967), one glimpses a world stripped of all humanity. ‘We have figured out a new way to burn people,’ says an inmate put in charge of a crematorium in a death camp by the Nazis. Then,

Primo Levi’s (1979) destroyed me. ‘For us, history has stopped,’ says Levi. George Saunders’ Booker-winning ingenious novel, Lincoln

taught me a thing or two about craft. The sentence — The moon shone down brightly, allowing me a first good look at his face. And what a face it was — is possibly the best literary sentence of the year.

In Arvind Gigoo’s Gulliver travels to Kashmir and sees ‘the dual nature of man, the marriage of opposites and contradictions, the proximity of love and hate, the distance between old compassion and new callousness.’ Gulliver gets to meet the Buddha and hear a retelling of the Fire Sermon. ‘And some among them wrote books which nobody read,’ observes Gulliver.

Mir Khalid’s Jaffna Street, a haunting memoir of growing up in downtown Srinagar in the 1990s, explores the irreconcilable paradoxes of human existence in Kashmir. The book profiles the old city and its residents with their infallible capacity to rise from the ashes. Tikuli’s poetry collection, Wayfaring, sheds light on what it means to not abandone the will to create beauty even in despair. Hang Kang’s The Vegetarian is keeping me engrossed these days.

If This Is a Man in the Bardo Gulliver in Kashmir