Snakes and Ladders - Hardcover

Gita Mehta is a keen critic of her homeland. In her brilliantly satirical Karma Cola she skewered the guru business and the marketing of Eastern spiritualism. In Snakes and Ladders Gita widens her net to include politics, economics, religion, and so much more. The 35 essays contained in this collection are wholly personal accounts of national events; recalling Gandhi's funeral, Gita finds her humble memories of the actual event quite different from the scenes depicted in Richard Attenborough's film, Gandhi: when she asks one of Gandhi's grandsons whether the Mahatma did indeed receive a huge military funeral as the film showed, he replies that such a ceremony did briefly take place, invented by Nehru and Mountbatten "for the record." "What record?" Gita wonders. "Soldiers? Gun carriages? For the disciple of nonviolence? ... He did not even reach his funeral pyre before his luck ran out."

Gita Mehta's lively, informative, and witty essays are an excellent introduction to the subcontinent for readers who may not be familiar with India's culture or history. Gita explains her title choice by comparing the country's fortunes with the ancient game of Snakes and Ladders: " ... it seems we Indians have vaulted over the painful stages experienced by other countries, lifted by ladders we had no right to expect. At other times we have been swallowed by the snakes of past nightmares ... " Readers of Snakes and Ladders will find themselves eagerly scaling the ladders, then sliding down the snakes' gullets in happy pursuit of Gita Mehta's perceptive portrait of India as she knows it.

Short essays about the ``alarming speed with which India is changing,'' by an admired novelist (A River Sutra, 1993, etc.). Mehta, born in India before her country gained independence, lived through that period with a child's alert imagination and has been passionately studying the place ever since--although, as she makes plain here, her identity is as much cosmopolitan (with moorings in London and Manhattan) as Indian. While some of these pieces seem too hectic, possessing a heady, dashed-off quality, Mehta's quickness of mind and pen is also her strength. She can plunge us into the intensely remembered girlhood pleasures of reading Nabokov and Kerouac and ``Archie'' comics in Calcutta's impromptu lending libraries. She can precisely catch the differences between a concert audience in India and another in America: ``Art is not just something displayed by the talented to a passive audience,'' she writes, observing an Indian singer, ``but, rather, that moment when the artist, the audience, the subject, the discipline--all combine to become something approaching religious experience, a moment of mutual creation.'' Mehta also tells spirited personal stories of her adventures and researches, such as seeking out ragpickers to find out how they live. She's very good on the ethics of power: ``The most interesting evolution in independent India is the change from individual fearlessness in the face of social and political injustice to craven courting of those who possess social and political power.'' Shrewdly, she avoids generalizing about India, concentrating instead on a wide range of quite specific topics- -e.g., the spiritual meaning of trees to Indians; interior design as a clue to the country's character; the coming of high-tech and shopping malls to the land of Gandhi. Pugnacious in tone and irreverent in critique, Mehta clearly loves her home and is maddened by it. (First serial to Vogue; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.