Monday Cup Of Links #65 - Books about Bawas, Badminton and Bone-chilling Horror
And a prayer to the Goddess of Gandhara
Happy Monday!
How’s everyone been? I used to think I knew what being busy and tired was like, and then a ton of work hit me, along with a baby who crawls her way into trouble while asleep, and clings to me all the time while awake because she’s figuring out I’m a separate entity from her who can disappear independently. I have so many books to read on my list, and each time I start reading, I wake up because my Kindle fell on my nose.
Hopefully I figure out how to manage my energy better.
Onto our links!
Happy Nowroz! It’s the Parsee New Year today. This fast-shrinking community is where some of the most consequential Indians are from, including Madame Cama, a pivotal figure in my book. But there’s so many more! Read Coomi Kapoor’s enticingly titled The Tatas, Freddie Mercury, and Other Bawas - An Intimate History of the Parsis for an eminently readable history of this incredibly influential micro-minority. I’ve just started it, and I love it already!
RL Stine is releasing a new YA Horror Graphic Novel titled Just Beyond - Monstrosity. This link has the first few pages of the graphic novel, and it is pretty fun to see RL Stine’s signature style in a totally new format. It’s coming out on Halloween, so right now, you can only preorder the book here.
I’d not been able to catch Olympic badminton live, but I watched the matches later. Then I went down the whole rabbit hole of the Indian badminton scene and the medal machine that Pullela Gopichand’s academy is. I watched all the interviews with the stars from there, like PV Sindhu (of course), Saina Nehwal, Parupalli Kashyap (what a cute couple they make), Gurusaidutt, Kidambi Srikanth, Sikki and Sumeeth Reddy, and of course Jwala Gutta and her attempts at rebelling against Gopichand Academy and starting her own thing.
I watched all six episodes of The Academy, a series about the Gopichand Academy, that was on the official Olympics Youtube channel. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted the whole picture after Jwala Gutta’s accusations that Gopichand doesn’t leave room for anyone not from his academy in competitive badminton.
So now on my list I haveThe Gopichand Factor - The Rise And Rise of Badminton In India, which seems to focus heavily on Gopichand.
SMASH! The Rise Of Indian Badminton: Stories of Grit And Triumph, which seems to tie together a bunch of profiles of badminton players into a narrative. It has a bunch of saucy statements by Gopichand about how Prakash Padukone and SM Arif didn’t believe in him, and how they encouraged some of his star players to leave him. I imagine those statements will be a total nothingburger, but it’s got a draw.
Dreams Of A Billion - India And The Olympic Games, seems to be by Boria Majumdar who is a sports journalist I have heard about despite my not following sports, so I imagine the book will be substantial. And I’d like to see badminton and other sports put into perspective in the larger scheme of the Olympics.
Artefact of the week: This large statue of Goddess Hariti, the protector of children and pregnant women, which was found in Gandhara (present day Kandahar, Afghanistan), presumably from the 2nd century. This statue is one of the largest, and has the Goddess with happy children playing at her feet, one even playing an instrument on her shoulder, and another on her lap trying to suckle. She has a bunch of grapes in one hand, and her arms seem to be full of bangles. Her hairstyle seemed Greek to me, but the descriptions say the style is more Palmyran (Syrian). Back in the day, Goddess Hariti was the most important Goddess in Gandhara. Sculptures of her were all over the place, especially in Buddhist monasteries.
Given the horrors the Taliban is and will be inflicting on women and children in Afghanistan now, and how depiction of women in art or images is now punishable by whatever barbaric sentence, and how no world power seems to be standing against the Taliban, I say a prayer to Goddess Hariti to protect the women and children there.