I found this  blog intended to be posted 2 years back was never posted. Since it is not anything contemporary, I decided to post it now.
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My holiday trip in May 2009 was to Utharakand  to spend time with my old friend and erstwhile colleague at IIMB, Bharat Junjunwala, who has chosen to settle down near a village called Lakshmoli -120 km north of Haridwar – having built a home on the banks of Alakananda . Besides doing rafting in Alakaananda and visiting Chopta to see snow in May,  I managed to finish reading Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppy and John Grisham’s Playing for Pitzza.

Of course Ghosh’s work as I I usually find is an education in history at lest for me. I had vague notions of the “Opium War” and Parsee merchants’ – including Tatas – involvement in opium trade to China. But I had no clear notion of the ravage done to Bihar peasantry on account of the British avarice to sell opium to China. Similarly, while I had read Ghosh’s account of the travails of indentured labour transported to Burma in his book Glass Palace, the brutality with which the indentured labour from Bihar transported to Mauritius were treated during the voyage is quite disturbing even though you have read so much of the slaves of the Americas!

I can not but contemptuously smile at the irony of the US and other Western nations now going to war with several opium producing small nations in order to stop cultivating narcotic plants because they don’t want their society becoming addicts. The English manufacturers and merchants of opium justified war China to preserve “free trade” for opium then!

Sometimes I wonder whether the ravages by the colonialists can ever be redressed and the majority of the third world would ever be capable of a level of development enjoyed at least by the bottom 20% of the developed nations in terms of basics of life.

I did find the character of the Goomastha a bit outlandish but then a master story teller like Ghosh has no problem in making him a credible character. It is indeed amazing Ghosh manages to weave together a plot with such disparate characters and sub-plots.