clairewords's review
3.0
An example of important fiction that crosses between cultures and provides us with insights into other worlds and perspectives, lessening our ignorance of events which often account for the unspoken attitudes and undercurrents present in countries that visitors, travellers and outsiders rarely gain access to.
Helium centres around Raj, a scientist who was an only child; we learn he left India 25 years before and will discover the reason why, along with his continuous fascination for science, the periodic table and memories. One memory in particular influences his journey and decisions, the attack of his college professor, a Sikh, who along with thousands of others in 1984 are targeted and killed in revenge for the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (daughter of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru), in what was believed to be a government assisted genocide.
My full review here at Word by Word.
Helium centres around Raj, a scientist who was an only child; we learn he left India 25 years before and will discover the reason why, along with his continuous fascination for science, the periodic table and memories. One memory in particular influences his journey and decisions, the attack of his college professor, a Sikh, who along with thousands of others in 1984 are targeted and killed in revenge for the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (daughter of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru), in what was believed to be a government assisted genocide.
My full review here at Word by Word.
coronaurora's review
3.0
Considering that most art that matters (Does it, really? Why most? Doesn't all art matter? Anyways!) is a creatively articulate individual's response to the surrounding world, what does one do as a passive reader when the dirty particulars of the parent subject also creep their way into it? Other than elasticising my empathy and knowledge, I am somewhat troubled when I am bombarded with page after page of incriminating documents and testimonies, like I am in Singh's Helium. I went through something similar while reading Bolano's interminable 2666. Maybe I should consider the literary, semi-fictive work designed around it as the trojan horse for a dispossessed individual or faction's need for an enduring written document to emerge from complete oblivion. Does the imprint on the chatterati's or a reviewer like mine's consciousness change the general order of things at grassroots? Borrowing a meditation from Kundera, one would hope that the incessant cycle of communal genocide and machinery of denial that repeats itself in weekly, monthly and yearly cycles would somehow give the atrocities a certain "weight", some critical mass after which a moral and political revolution would transpire. The large font genocides keep accumulating: the anti-Sikh riots in the 80s, the continuing torture and dispossession of Kashmiris and Naxalites, the anti-Muslim 2002 pogrom in Gujarat; talking nothing of the casual, spontaneous bursts of deranged, licensed violence on religious or poltiical lines that continues to decimate families, neighbourhoods and whole tribes. But maybe every reader is part of those grassroots, and one day after such meditation and contemplation has been done by a critical mass of people, the tolerance thresholds will be reset and the aforementioned revolution would come that would bring forth a new era with space for rights, equality, fair trials, remorse and justice. Aren't we familiar with this train of thought too? How many times in history and current state of affairs have we seen idealism bow down to corruption and short-term gains for people seeking favours, money and "power"?
So purely as a cautionary tale then and a reminder of the depravity and Evil humanity is capable of, let's balk, gawp and sigh over just an example revisit of an epic miscarriage of justice and morality in a land where governing and judicial institutions being infested with cronies having zero moral radar and zilch intellectual rigour at every level is the norm. Where Establishment backed butchery and dispossession of minorities en-masse with paid-mobs despatched and organised by the ready machinery of the colluding police-army guilds is a sorry parallel narrative. Where mass amnesia and apathy has become the way to move on with the day as attention spans worsen, the atrocities pile up, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International warnings are given and retracted, victims get morphed into distant numbers and statistics, farcical committees are formed and disbanded, perpetrators go on to govern even larger constituencies and, no mean feat, lead the whole country. From this regrettably fallen land comes one such distillation of an epic tragedy into a personal, individual realm.
Existing in that troublesome twilight zone between fiction and non-fiction, Singh's Helium is in equal measure a cathartic and metaphorical exercise that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. It's easily one of the most high-profile literary reactions to the 1984 pogroms and coupled with Tavleen Singh's Darbar which gave an insider's view of the gradual but definite corrosion of the power corridors under the Gandhi family in the 80s and the 90s, makes for a necessary companion piece.
An Establishment backed genocide transpired on the streets in India following the assassination of its lady prime minister, Indira Gandhi. The ruling pan-national Congress party, spearheaded by her son, exercised every muscle he could in the power gym corridors of all the corroded four estates and managed to not just exonerate the perpetrators but erode and re-frame the memory of the whole pogrom. Naming and shaming the key perpetrators in the governing party , the seething directness with which Singh writes the setpieces in the second half certainly does the memory of those who perish everyday some comeuppance. It's probably negligible relief for those perishing in the negazone of family and justice deprived limbo, but as a cautionary tale for the future this has value. As the way Singh has designed his book, his ambitious juxtapositions with inorganic chemistry and geophysics notwithstanding, he wants the focus squarely on the castigation of those who got scotfree in the 1984 riots against the Sikhs, and this admirable mission of his almost overwhelms the fiction and an attempt to critique it.
Looking at the book closely, the key refrain that emerged for me was that of an inchoate polyphonia of a troubled soul struggling to come to terms with gratuitous violence in his past on his homecoming journey. He is chronicled here travelling within a completely transformed cityscape scenting out the trail of the Event and his mindscape is seen drawing metaphors and stringing symmetries with concepts from his (and author's) professional worlds. From metallurgy to ornithology, some wild and idiosyncratic relationships are made, and while not all successful, they are endearing and made me revel in the capacity, beauty and refuge of Imagination. I have to confess that the homecoming bit, especially in the first half, sagged every few pages as pastoral descriptions and short adjective-laden phrases of static scenes accumulated, but with some wide-ranging solipsism, these were tempered with. There was a thread of an unrequited semi-romance that veered between frustrating vagueness and literary pretentiousness that neither convinced nor moved me. The protagonist's drive to his home country derived much traction from this unresolved, unspoken space but Singh mired most of the emotion in literary smokes and mirrors building it up to Hellenic proportions, for not much.
What surprised me most was the sudden burst of confrontation, incident and revelations that sprouted and completely took over the second half. The author almost transformed into a rigorous documentarian sparing no words, naming and shaming with utmost certainty and almost toppling the whole meditative, distant, quietly brutal trance he had begun with. This lavaburst of activity on the written page left me in a perpetual state of agitation, and while his gifted turn of phrase did not make the whole exercise unwieldy, the book somehow did not become more than a sum of its parts as the characters and their journeys became completely incidental. I do recommended it, but with caution.
So purely as a cautionary tale then and a reminder of the depravity and Evil humanity is capable of, let's balk, gawp and sigh over just an example revisit of an epic miscarriage of justice and morality in a land where governing and judicial institutions being infested with cronies having zero moral radar and zilch intellectual rigour at every level is the norm. Where Establishment backed butchery and dispossession of minorities en-masse with paid-mobs despatched and organised by the ready machinery of the colluding police-army guilds is a sorry parallel narrative. Where mass amnesia and apathy has become the way to move on with the day as attention spans worsen, the atrocities pile up, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International warnings are given and retracted, victims get morphed into distant numbers and statistics, farcical committees are formed and disbanded, perpetrators go on to govern even larger constituencies and, no mean feat, lead the whole country. From this regrettably fallen land comes one such distillation of an epic tragedy into a personal, individual realm.
Existing in that troublesome twilight zone between fiction and non-fiction, Singh's Helium is in equal measure a cathartic and metaphorical exercise that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. It's easily one of the most high-profile literary reactions to the 1984 pogroms and coupled with Tavleen Singh's Darbar which gave an insider's view of the gradual but definite corrosion of the power corridors under the Gandhi family in the 80s and the 90s, makes for a necessary companion piece.
An Establishment backed genocide transpired on the streets in India following the assassination of its lady prime minister, Indira Gandhi. The ruling pan-national Congress party, spearheaded by her son, exercised every muscle he could in the power gym corridors of all the corroded four estates and managed to not just exonerate the perpetrators but erode and re-frame the memory of the whole pogrom. Naming and shaming the key perpetrators in the governing party , the seething directness with which Singh writes the setpieces in the second half certainly does the memory of those who perish everyday some comeuppance. It's probably negligible relief for those perishing in the negazone of family and justice deprived limbo, but as a cautionary tale for the future this has value. As the way Singh has designed his book, his ambitious juxtapositions with inorganic chemistry and geophysics notwithstanding, he wants the focus squarely on the castigation of those who got scotfree in the 1984 riots against the Sikhs, and this admirable mission of his almost overwhelms the fiction and an attempt to critique it.
Looking at the book closely, the key refrain that emerged for me was that of an inchoate polyphonia of a troubled soul struggling to come to terms with gratuitous violence in his past on his homecoming journey. He is chronicled here travelling within a completely transformed cityscape scenting out the trail of the Event and his mindscape is seen drawing metaphors and stringing symmetries with concepts from his (and author's) professional worlds. From metallurgy to ornithology, some wild and idiosyncratic relationships are made, and while not all successful, they are endearing and made me revel in the capacity, beauty and refuge of Imagination. I have to confess that the homecoming bit, especially in the first half, sagged every few pages as pastoral descriptions and short adjective-laden phrases of static scenes accumulated, but with some wide-ranging solipsism, these were tempered with. There was a thread of an unrequited semi-romance that veered between frustrating vagueness and literary pretentiousness that neither convinced nor moved me. The protagonist's drive to his home country derived much traction from this unresolved, unspoken space but Singh mired most of the emotion in literary smokes and mirrors building it up to Hellenic proportions, for not much.
What surprised me most was the sudden burst of confrontation, incident and revelations that sprouted and completely took over the second half. The author almost transformed into a rigorous documentarian sparing no words, naming and shaming with utmost certainty and almost toppling the whole meditative, distant, quietly brutal trance he had begun with. This lavaburst of activity on the written page left me in a perpetual state of agitation, and while his gifted turn of phrase did not make the whole exercise unwieldy, the book somehow did not become more than a sum of its parts as the characters and their journeys became completely incidental. I do recommended it, but with caution.
poetryrose's review
4.0
Not a light read, but very rewarding. The characters were strong enough that I still feel their burdens, even that of the antagonist - therefore the book to me is a success. Singh showed the macro events effecting the micro environments without holding back. A topic well covered from the political, to the personal.
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