Lockdown diary: Books they are re-reading and why- Accounts for our times

I believe the most memorable genre of our age is travel- ogues. They seem even more relevant especially now, especially during the infamous, unsolicited unilaterally imposed COVID curfew.

I re-read the great Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War, which was published in 1978 but first published in English translation in 1990 by Granta. Kapuscinski reported from Africa and Latin America and the title of the book is derived from the actual war that erupted between Hondurus and El Salvador over, yes, a foot- ball match. This one’s a part diary, part documentation of two decades recounting events in various troubled zones in the world.

It has tales from Nigeria, Ghana at their spookiest, the vast theatre of Congo under siege, and unbelievable conflicts in Latin America in 1969 over their common passion, soccer. Memorable portraits follow: Patrice Lumumba, the expat Uncle Walley in Hotel Metropole at Accra drinking himself to death, the heroes of Harlem, Algerian leaders and the lonely Chilean ladies in furnished and cluttered apartments in vacant lodgings.

In the Mexican desert,the portrait of a cranky old man with his gramophone, playing the same old record about a river.

When told there was no river, he tells the traveller, “Son I am the river and I cannot cross myself”. Another book I’ve read again and again these last few months, is Love Thy Neighbor, A Story of War, an uncon- ventional reportage on wars by the New York-based Jewish American reporter Peter Maass (Published by Knopf). It covers bifurcation of nations and unseen ethnic tensions that run like faultlines all over the globe.

Maass went to the Balkans at the height of the nightmar- ish Serbo-Croatian war and provided rare glimpses of how ordinary law-abiding folks woke up one day as beasts and began to pillage, murder and rape their neighbours. The unutterable misery of minority communities caught in a political warfare aiming at ethnic cleansing, and the lies and deceit that marks international diplomacy and bodies like the United Nations.

“The gap between reality and science fiction has nar- rowed,” he writes, “I am now more aware of the fragility of human relations, and more aware of what being a Jew can mean. I learnt this from Muslims of Bosnia...there are so many seams along which a society can be torn apart by manipulators...” (Mrinal Pande, New-Delhi based writer and commentator, is Group Editorial Advisor of The National Herald)