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Title: Interesting tales, but a third-hand view of India
Review: Paine tells engaging stories about Curzon, Besant, Forster, Naipaul, Isherwood, Mirra Richard. But these are 2nd hand stories, and they are stories that reflect India another step removed. In itself the book is fine, but it fails to live up to the promise in the title. Paine should have looked at Thoreau, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger for more direct influences. Or even if he chose this frame, the least he needed was to understand `Father India' for himself. If he had, a lot of rhetorical questions he asks in the book from time to time would have yielded their answers. Where is the tiger in the jungle? to repeat Hesse's old question. Since Paine doesn't know, his stories rank at the level of an English professor spinning yarns not about a subject directly, but about the lives of various people who dealt with it!
