Freedom at Midnight

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There would have been no problem had we been dealing solely with the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The vermeil teapot set upon it gave off the delicious fragrance of the mixture flown twice a month from London by Fortnum and Mason. It opens with a full description of all the scriptural and other sacred referents involved in a Brahmin man heading out to the fields to take a dump in the early morning. He developed interests in travelling, writing and cars and later traveled across the United States as a young man. The enormous success of the international writing partnership of Collins and Lapierre is based on the phenomenal non-fiction bestsellers OR I’LL DRESS YOU IN MOURNING, IS PARIS BURNING?

This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. On 14 August 1947 one-fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen. Independence of India was the defining moment in modern India and this book by the author duo Dominique Lappierre and Larry Collins on the before and after-math of the same is the defining book in my life.After one year in a tank regiment, he was transferred to SHAPE headquarters to serve as an interpreter. When it is not engaging however, it is not so because bad narration but because the subject becomes so brutal and horrifying. The wholly intransigeant skeleton at the feast was, of course, Mohammed Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, inflexibly demanding the separatist theocratic State of Pakistan, he who “had a difficulty of Pakista for every solution. A superb introduction to events which lead to the modern nation of India, but one should read other histories for some contradictory accounts. Very rarely comes a defining moment that changes history to the extent of being un-recognizable and very rarely comes a book that changes your life, perceptions and everything that you presumed to be true once and for all.

At the age of thirteen, he travelled to America with his father who was a diplomat (Consul General of France). Above all, it renders one of the bloodiest mismanagements in the history of mankind in such sepia-tinted prose that things look really romantic, or atmost tragic. It was all new to me, it was fascinating, fun and relevant - after all at that time Indira Ghandi was prime minister of India (she had no connection with Ghandi but was the daughter of Nehru - I wonder is that all meaningless to anyone reading this, it is amazing as you get older how so many events and people that seemed important have dwindled into obscurity) the world created by the events of 1947 was still very much with us. All this gives an especial poignancy, and perhaps even importance, to the hook in question, whose very title now has unintentionally sad undertones of mockery. In Freedom at Midnight they do this superbly: the back story is filled in with just enough detail for comprehension, the focus is on just five key players, and the narrative pacing is nothing short of breathtaking.Because the authors have perfectly struck a balance between both of them, the book wasn’t in favor of anybody, it was balanced and the history was written as it was. The lives of the young British officials stands as an example, enduring the harsh weather, and the problems of the "poor country".

Jack Loveridge’s reviews of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,” “Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,” “The Decline, Fall, and Revival of the British Empire,” and “The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. An hour out of Rawalpindi, the train bearing the Sikhs and Hindus of the 2nd Cavalry was ambushed by Moslem League National Guardsmen.The narrative style of the book immerses readers in the visual landscape of the falling Raj and allows them to step into the minds of the great actors of this time. Cruelty and dimension; a land of past accomplishment and present concern, whose future was compromised by problems more taxing than those confronting any other assembly of humans on earth. Amber Abbas’ review of “Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan. More recently Lapierre wrote CITY OF JOY (about Calcutta) and Larry Collins has written a number of thrillers published by HarperCollins (FALL FROM GRACE, MAZE and BLACK EAGLES). They had done so with the simple objective of ensuring that the place they leave remain perpetually cancerous.

This portion is the most gut-wrenching one and you are left to wonder in amazement at the sheer magnitude of craziness and horror of the whole episode.But they reproduce history in a style that some might find irritating, as though the real and terrible drama of the time were not enough and had to be embellished with journalistic tricks (and who of us can cast the first stone?