Chronic insomnia? Here's your cure

Five-hundred-and-fifty-six pages should provide enough reading to help one stay awake at a critical time like the children's exams (when they need you around, provided you're unobtrusive).

Alas, Mr Bakshi's tome failed in this worthy endeavour, putting this reviewer to sleep every few pages or so.

In the end, it became a tie, the inability to stay awake on the one hand, and the effort to put a few more pages behind on the other.

Through the ordeal, and particularly given one's critical faculties in full throttle, it became obvious that Mr Bakshi had been allowed free rein when he should have been pulled up short and the text edited with ferocious savagery.

Had Mr Bakshi extended himself to the luxury of a professional editor or, failing which, a professional publishing house, this is what he might have been told:

"Mr Bakshi, you need to improve your spellings." Computers can do the task for you, but within limitations. They cannot help you, should you tend to loose your way, such as on a journey you hope will prevent gun-totting militants, or leaders ""loosers all "" from becoming peaceniks.

"Mr Bakshi, you need to avoid sweeping generalisations." The rulers [of South Asia] have an inborn proclivity to steal. Not something your NGO Hands Across The Borders would want to promote, surely? And considering you've worked with Indian Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao (as you keep pointing out), it's hardly a tactical admission.

"Mr Bakshi, your style sucks." Granted, style is something that every book, or author, strives for. But aren't you overdoing the fly-on-the-wall impressions a bit? A mother breastfed her baby; the cow nuzzled for garbage; an old man sat engrossed in his newspaper; a policeman scratched his head; the monkey peeled a banana... fortunately for them all, the observant Mr Bakshi with his handy handbook passed by to record their monumental efforts for posterity.

"Must we be subjected to PJs masquerading as wry humour, Mr Bakshi?" Gautam Buddha was a free bird... He freed himself from all bonds and never wore a chain, a ring, a necklace "" or even a watch... He would have liked to call himself an ornithologist or a naturalist "" rather than a Buddhist. Yet, from Central Asia to China, from Tibet to India and Sri Lanka and in all Buddha-loving countries, his images, statues and paintings are holed up in dark, stuffy caves. Living in these damp caves must have given him rheumatism and that is the reason, perhaps, why he is mostly seen in a reclining position.
Puhleeaze.

One could go on in this vein, but that would be to discredit Mr Bakshi's effort that, in the main, is fairly creditable.

His endeavour, to spread the message of peace through people-to-people contacts while driving through the countries of the subcontinent, while perhaps a little gimmicky, can hardly be faulted for its aspiration.

Journeying across 18,000 km of the most populated, most wretched and most ancient parts of the world "" a journey that took him and a team of activists through Sri Lanka, India, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh "" with government and NGO help, he could have packed in a travelogue of rare sensitivity or insight.

Instead, Mr Bakshi chooses to serve up a mixed medley of ideas of which the most unpalatable are, often, his own observations and insights.

As a result, the writing is neither wry narrative nor irreverent humour; it is neither political idealogue nor social commentary; it feeds bits of history laced with legend and fact, but they fall flat for lack of consistency.

Mr Bakshi's broth, alas, has all the right ingredients, but the recipe is biased in favour of the seasoning. In the end, Mr Bakshi serves up a lopsided view of subcontinental history, mythology and culture, none of which offer either a complete paradigm or part analysis.

Reading through the book is like being inside a kaleidoscope: each fragment is part of an elusive whole, a jigsaw puzzle that is greater than the sum of its parts, and none of them match.

Several things irk. Mr Bakshi begins his mammoth narrative with a particularly bad joke about General Zia ul Haq, and calls it "an auspicious start" to the expedition.

For a journey that was to be rooted in peace, such cavalier observations can hardly be a good start; at least in the case of the book, it proves only too true, Mr Bakshi revealing far more himself in his search for the profane than he might himself realise.

His criticism of the leadership in south Asia "" perhaps well intentioned "" seems hypocritical, considering he uses government-aided bureaucracy to aid his mammoth journey, and endorsements of letters from the premiers of the country both for reference along his trip, and to begin each sub-section of this book.

While belittling the efforts of the leadership in all countries, Mr Bakshi considers his own endeavour a heroic one.

That may well have been, but for his own over-riding sense of self-importance that makes him believe that the expedition's achievement lay in leaving "a mark upon the physical word [sic], a trace upon history".

To my mind, Mr Bakshi's most exemplary achievement is an unrecognised one. To him alone, credit must be given for writing a sure-fire cure for insomniacs. Try and read the book, and I guarantee you'll sleep through it.

Between Heaven and Hell
Travels Through South Asia

Akhil Bakshi
Odyssey Books
Pages: 556
Price: Rs 495