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Middle path Light Strokes Darshan Singh Maini insists on calling his middles ‘short-distance runners’. I liken them to women’s skirts – they are long enough to cover all the vital points and short enough to arouse attention. This collection of short prose pieces (mostly middles), handpicked from his writings spread over more than half a century, goes a long way in pushing back the boundaries of this genre. The writer, in all his globe-trotting years, has gleaned rich experiences through contact with a variety of peoples and places. His pieces, therefore, reflect his views on people as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru and J.K Galbraith; on places as far apart as Amritsar and America and on subjects like women (especially their loquaciousness), marriage and miserliness. It is said that ‘middles’ were invented to give a break to the reader from the grey intellectual density of the edit page. Here, too, they unfailingly amuse the reader. The writer, however, has not been naïve enough to give in to the clichéd formula that ‘lightness is all’. Some of his pieces like Those Pelican Sons and Daughters or The City Beautiful have the rare reflective quality found in essays of Charles Lamb. The variety of these
pieces is indeed the spice of the book. So if you don’t mind the
arcane style, it is a good read. |
