The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minou (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Every day another headline cascades through social media. Another photo fills a screen and with one click, a new one takes its place. With so many disasters flaring across the world, Attention Deficit Disorder outranks Covid-19 as the leading malady of our time. “The world is too much with us;” turning away seems to be the only possible response.

When Delphine Minoui, an Istanbul-based journalist for Le Figaro, finds an image of Syria “without a trace of blood or bullets” while she’s browsing a Facebook page called Humans of Syria, she can’t turn away. The photo of two young men in a room full of books, one of them reading, the other examining a bookshelf, is captioned “The secret library of Daraya.” 

Minoui knows about Daraya. It’s a city that once had a population of 250,000 and now holds less than half that number, 12,000 rebels against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Since 2012, Darya has been under siege, a place less than 1000 miles away from Istanbul but completely out of reach. A seasoned journalist, Minoui wants the story and she has the skills to uncover it. Through social media, she makes contact with the man who took the photograph, a co-founder of the library.

An active protestor since 2011, Ahmad Muaddamani and his compatriots see themselves as a third force: not jihadists, nor soldiers in the Free Syrian Army. Daraya is an unyielding center of active and peaceful dissent and by chance these dissenters find their primary means of defense.

One of them had walked into a destroyed house and found its floor was covered with books. At first his comrades thought he was mad for wanting to save these volumes, but they came to realize the books were a means of escape from the horror they live with. They understood Daraya needed these books; it needed a library.

They clean and paint a basement in a deserted building. They construct bookshelves. They scour the city for abandoned books in empty houses. Before these are put on the shelves, each one is numbered and inscribed with its owner’s name. “We’re not thieves,” Ahmad says, “Our revolution was meant to build, not destroy.”

The library they build is open six days a week from 9-5, It serves a daily average of 25 readers, who come in spite of a continuing deluge of barrel bombs filled with explosives and scrap metal, as many as 600 in a single month. They borrow The Alchemist, The Little Prince, Les Miserables, printed in languages that are not their own. When the library begins to offer classes in English, the readers come to learn. When it brings the outside world within its walls through videoconferences on Skype, discussion groups are born. The librarians publish a bi-monthly magazine, printed on a rescued photocopier; it holds tips on how to manage daily living during the siege, poems, news garnered from the internet, crossword puzzles with clues that hold grim humor. Ahmad finds a pdf of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He shrinks the text to fit four pages on a single sheet of paper and prints two copies. It becomes so popular readers fight to read it. It’s a mental survival guide in a city that’s been assaulted with chemical warfare while the world looked away, where a small UN convoy finally brings flour to people who have had no bread in years. The supply lasts less than a month and future convoys are barred from bringing more. Assad’s forces firebomb the fields that fed the city and Darya eats only vegetables grown in people’s yards and bulgur wheat that’s the last of the municipal reserves.

Then after 1350 days of siege, Assad drops four barrels of napalm on Daraya’s hospital. The city begins to die. Negotiations with the government ensure that its inhabitants will be safely transported to another city. 

Once it’s empty, Assad walks through Daraya’s ruins, “the deserted streets of a ghost city,” claiming to have restored “true freedom.” His soldiers strip the library and sell its books in the flea markets of Damascus. “Four years of saving Daraya’s heritage, swapped for a few coins.”

“So it’s over?” When Minoui asks Ahmad this question, he replies, “Of course not! You can destroy a city. Not ideas!” He and the other residents of Daraya hold tight to the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, “We nurse hope.” The rest of us need to stop turning away from hope as we click through to the next post on Facebook.~Janet Brown

I Love You So Mochi by Sarah Kuhn (Scholastic)

Sarah Kuhn is a third generation Japanese-American living in Los Angeles. She brings to light a problem facing many children who are considered hafu, a coin termed in the seventies describing people who are the offspring of a Japanese and an American parent. It’s a question of identity. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, hafu is not a derogatory term. I proudly call myself a hafu as my mother is Japanese and my father is American. Your Japanese relatives will consider you a gaijin or foreigner and your American side will sometimes say you’re not American enough. 

I Love You So Mochi explores this theme in a light-hearted and humorous way. Kimiko, Kimi-chan for short, is a senior in high school. Her mother is Japanese and is a successful artist. Her father is a fourth generation Japanese-American. They live in Culver City, California. Kimiko had just been accepted to the Liu Academy, a prestigious art institute but Kimiko had not informed her mother that she had dropped out of her Advanced Fine Art class. Her friend tells her, “The longer it takes to tell your mom you dropped the class, the more she’s gonna blow like a full-on rage volcano. It’s Asian Mom Math”. 

Something just resonates with me about her friend’s use of “Asian Mom Math”. Perhaps it’s not true for all Asian Mom’s but you know when they call you by your full name, you’re in big trouble or else they will scold you in their native language. Many hafu kids feel pressured to live up to their mother’s high expectations and when you let them down, the look of disappointment is sometimes worse than just being yelled at. After Kimiko’s mom finds out about her daughter dropping the class, they have a big fight and mom gives that look of disappointment followed by the silent treatment.

Before Kimiko has her big fight with her mother, she receives a letter from her estranged grandfather. Kimiko’s mother hasn’t spoken to her parents in years and Kimiko has never met them. The grandfather has invited Kimiko to spend her spring break at their home in Japan which is located outside of Kyoto. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get away from her mother and also to “find herself” and learn more about her Japanese heritage. 

Kimiko’s impression of her first day in Japan - “Crap. Did I really just travel halfway around the world on a whim to a place I know nothing about?”. On her journey of self-discovery, Kimiko meets Akira. A cute boy she sees dressed as a giant mochi mascot. 

Mochi are “rice cakes”, they are not to be confused with “rice balls” which are onigiri. Kimiko came to Japan not only to meet her grandparents but also to discover what it is she’s really passionate about. Now she is distracted by her feelings for a boy who seems to like her as well. 

Will Kimiko find the answers she’s looking for? Is her time spent with Akira just a spring-break fling? And what will she say to her mother when she flies back home? This story will take you back to those awkward years when you’re no longer a child but not quite an adult and have to learn responsibility and make your own decisions, right or wrong. You may even find yourself having a craving for love and mochi! ~Ernie Hoyt

You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker (PublicAffairs)

“Go! Go! Go!” The command echoed through the cargo plane as soldiers jumped from an open door in the first offensive airborne assault of the Vietnam War. Among all who leaped into the sky, perhaps only one of them had already completed 84 jumps, a French photographer named Catherine LeRoy.

Someone took her picture as she stood in line, waiting for her turn. Her eyes were wide, excited, and completely alive, her jaw was set, two cameras were draped around her neck. As she fell, she photographed the bodies in parachutes, hundreds of them, and she was one of the guys.

This is what LeRoy wanted. The only woman photographer for two years In a world of men, she proudly announced “They forget I’m a gal.” In fact, she was so little that often the troops forgot she was there at all. “Timid, skinny, very fragile,” her mentor Horst Faas described her after their first meeting. She was young too, arriving in Saigon on a one-way ticket soon after she turned 21. 

Her goal was to become “a man amongst men,” although she was able to personify French female chic when she chose to. Told by other photographers, “This is for boys,” she almost lost her press credentials because she became “too loud, too coarse.” But her photographs were what saved her, along with her unflagging courage. From the hills of Khe Sanh, she took intimate battle portraits of the troops. “Where were you,” one of them asked her when he saw his face in the papers, “I didn’t even see you.” But she saw them. She loved them, and she stuck with them.

When she left Vietnam after almost three years,  she was exhausted. She’d been captured by North Vietnamese troops during the battle of Hue, was allowed to take their photographs, and was released in a matter of hours. She had been hit by mortar fire, was carried off in a stretcher with 35 holes in her body, and came back to take more photos. “I follow this profession out of love,” she said.

She returned to Vietnam to witness the fall of Saigon, photographing the rising of North Vietnam’s flag in the Presidential Palace. She died of cancer before she was forty, leaving a book as her legacy, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam. 

Frances Fitzgerald arrived in Saigon when she was 25, in the same month of the same year as Cathy Leroy, although the two of them might never have met. The daughter of a CIA deputy director, Fitzgerald had money and connections, as well as a burnished beauty. She flew in on a round-trip ticket and planned to move on to Singapore but soon after her arrival she met the Washington Post reporter, Ward Just.  The two of them immediately embarked on a relationship that would last for years, one that gave Fitzgerald instant access to information and a shield from the sort of gossip that had tried to demolish Catherine Leroy. 

Unlike other women journalists in Vietnam, Fitzgerald had no need to scurry after work. She came to Vietnam with highly placed publishers as her friends. “Every article she sent was published: in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly.” With a mother whose closest friend was Adlai Stevenson and a father who was a man with political clout, Fitzgerald had been given 100,000 dollars when she graduated from Radcliffe (a sum worth 830,000 dollars in 2019). She had the luxury of writing whatever she wanted. As Just said, “She was looking at things in a completely different optic,” not soldiers on the battlefield but the logistics of the war, “the aid missions that didn’t work,” the destruction of villages. Her focus was one that which Just would adopt himself, years later, in his novel A Dangerous Friend.

Fitzgerald’s landmark book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for history, remaining a classic of its time.

She would return to Vietnam in 1974, reporting from Hanoi in a twenty-three-page New Yorker article, still wrapped in the privilege that allowed her to exercise her brilliant talent. Of the three journalists profiled in this book, she’s the only one who’s still alive.

Kate Webb also came to Saigon in 1966, eight months after Fitzgerald and LeRoy, when she was 23. Like LeRoy, she arrived on a one-way ticket with no assurance of a job. Even though she’d left Australia as a reporter with Rupert Murdoch’s Mirror, her offer to serve as a Vietnam correspondent for that paper was greeted with “general laughter.” She freelanced for her first year in Saigon until she made a name for herself with her report on the Tet Offensive which she described as  “a butcher’s shop in Eden.” After first rejecting her earlier with “What the hell would I want a girl for,” UPI finally hired her to report on “second tier” stories, not the battles but the “political machinations” of the South Vietnamese government and military. Like Fitzgerald, Webb looked for the “context,” the historical and political movements behind the drama of the war. When she was sent into the field, she wasn’t afraid to use “strong personal narrative,” her own and those of the soldiers. Webb ‘s goal was to replace the “impersonal language of an Army war report,” which she did with precision and without sentiment. 

Perhaps because of what had been done to Catherine LeRoy, Webb became a loner. In the competitive world she worked in she had “no enemies,” and was known as the kind of person who drank whiskey in opium dens. She hated being called a “girl reporter,” as much as she disdained women’s liberation. She was a journalist, pure and simple.

Then this journalist who believed in keeping a low profile became the story. Captured with colleagues in Cambodia, Webb marched with her North Vietnamese captors for 23 days and discovered when she was released that her obituary had appeared in the New York Times. The first words she heard as a free woman were “Miss Webb, you’re supposed to be dead.”

Suddenly the journalist who had always maintained her distance was a media star--and she was deathly ill.  Diagnosed with cerebral malaria, Webb was put into a coma and submersed in an ice bath, becoming, as she said later, a “living martini” for weeks.

In crucial ways, Webb never recovered. Her nerves were shattered and her drinking increased. UPI sent her to Hong Kong, where she was on the desk typing messages back and forth with a Khmer reporter the night Phnom Penh fell. When he told her he had to sign off because the Khmer Rouge had found him, Webb began drinking martinis without stopping until she was carried out of the bar at four the next morning. 

She filed stories from the USS Blue Ridge navy command ship when “more than 6,000 people, including about 900 Americans were flown out of Saigon,” as she wrote in her last report from Vietnam. She died when she was 64, of cancer, on an Australian farm, with the knowledge that she told her own story in her own words, with her own facts, in On the Other Side, ending it with the wish that she could have a beer someday with the men who had captured her. 

LeRoy, Fitzgerald, and Webb eclipse the author who wrote about them while inserting herself prominently in the opening and closing pages of You Don’t Belong Here. Although her writing is flat and mediocre, Elizabeth Becker deserves thanks for bringing the work of these journalists back into public attention. With luck LeRoy’s and Webb’s books may come back into print, joining Fitzgerald’s as an illumination of a time and place that we need to remember.~Janet Brown

The Stone Council by Jean-Christophe Grange (Vintage)

Jean-Christophe Grange is a French mystery writer. His novel The Stone Council was published in English by Vintage and translated by Ian Monk. It is a mystery and a thriller and also involves telekinesis, hypnotism, clairvoyance and other elements of the paranormal. The book was also adapted into a feature-length film in 2006 and was a joint production between France, Germany, and Italy. 

As a child, Diane Thiberge suffered a traumatic experience which made her adverse to being touched by anyone.  She is a single woman who works as an ethnologist living in France. Her specialty is studying the habits of predatory animals. She is also an avid practitioner of martial arts. 

Diane is fast approaching thirty and believes this may be the last chance for her to become a mother. “Turning thirty reminded her symbolically of one of her biggest secrets: never would she have a child. For the simple reason that she would never have a lover.” However, she was not giving up on becoming a mother. 

Diane considers artificial insemination but this “meant doctors penetrating inside her with their cold, pointed, jagged instruments”. In her mind, “this would have been a sort of clinical rape.” She also thought about in vitro fertilization, but this still meant the doctors would have to invade her body in some way. Diane becomes depressed and nearly has a breakdown but after resting at her mother’s husband’s villa she decides to take a different approach and considers adoption. 

Diane adopts a five-year-old boy from an orphanage in rural Thailand. The people running the orphanage have no idea where he is from and have only heard him say “Lu” and “Sian” so they called him “Lu-Sian”. Diane decides to call him Lucien.  Once she’s back in her homeland of France, she gets into an auto accident and her little boy is left in a coma. The doctors tell her that his chance of survival is slim to none. However, one single doctor, Dr. Rolf van Kaen, says the boy can still be saved by using acupuncture and Eastern medicine. 

The boy is saved but Dr. van Kaen is later found dead. The cause of death - his heart inexplicably exploded. The police trace the unusual method of death to a tribe in northern Mongolia. The police also discovered that Dr. van Kaen was an East German and worked in the former Soviet Union at a nuclear power plant located in Siberia near the Mongolian border. 

Diane, with the help of an anthropologist, discovers that her son Lucien is not from Thailand. In fact, he’s not from Southeast Asia. The words he uses were determined to be Mongolian and used by a certain tribe called the Tsevens who also lived near the nuclear power plant and were victims of an atrocious accident. This confirms Diane’s suspicions that all the deaths are somehow related to this nuclear power plant, the Mongolian tribe, and her adopted son. 

The story takes you on a roller-coaster ride starting from a flight to Thailand, back to France, then Germany, Russia, and finally to Mongolia where the mystery reaches its conclusion. Fast-paced and absorbing, you will not want to set down the novel until you reach its end. You cannot help but root for Diane as she travels all over the country to save her son. I’m sure any mother would do the same. ~Ernie Hoyt

Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City by Ben Davies (River Books)

Perhaps because it’s a metropolis that sinks farther below sea level every year or maybe because it’s where “the ordinary has little cultural value,” Bangkok sees little reason to preserve any building that isn’t a temple or a royal palace. Within its central business district, old neighborhoods have been decimated to make way for palatial shopping malls and towers of glass and steel that look as though they emerged from a scene in Blade Runner. Modern is already out of date; cutting-edge architecture is what Thailand’s capital yearns for. Every year the skyline grows higher, obliterating this city’s history.

But beneath the high gloss of 21st century Bangkok is a deeper layer that is difficult to find yet worth the search. It’s an underlying shadow city, ghostly but still alive, beautiful but disregarded, threatened by rampant development.

This is the face of Bangkok that Ben Davies reveals in Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City. A photographer who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades, he began to explore hidden corners of Bangkok in 2014, launching a quest that would last for five years. In his search to capture the images of old buildings, he turned to a photographer from the mid-19th century for inspiration, a Scot named John Thomson, whose “pin sharp, carefully composed” images reminded Davies of still life paintings. This mood is what he wanted in his own work and to attain it, he found a camera that was reminiscent of Thomson’s time, one that used film and a variety of different lenses. His process of photography evoked old movie scenes, with his camera perched on a tall tripod and his head covered by a black cloth, helping him to focus on his subject. “Just to set up this unwieldy camera in a tripod could take ten minutes,” Davies says, “frequently exposures lasted for up to thirty minutes.” 

The results of his painstaking efforts are works of art. Each photograph fills an entire page in crisp black and white, with startling detail and clarity. His images are haunting and compelling, beautiful and sad. He shows the Art Deco splendor of Hualamphong Railway Station in its final days, before its vibrancy was dimmed by its new incarnation as a museum. Mansions that housed the aristocracy of another era are now devoured by vines and the twisted roots of banyan trees, surrounded by debris or tilting menacingly toward the waters of a canal. A perfect replica of an English country house stands on stilts above the Chao Phraya River, incongruous in its British elegance but not an anomaly. The wealthy of Bangkok happily adopted architectural styles from England, France, and Italy and incorporated elements from China and Portugal in more plebeian structures, which oddly are the buildings that most remain in use today.

The bottom floors of Bangkok’s old shophouses are grim-looking with their doors locked behind forbidding gates, but their upper floors hold the grace notes of Palladian windows and elaborate wood carvings. They still house businesses and families who have owned them for generations but know they may be the last to work and live within those anachronisms.

These photographs are poignant, showing a way of life that will probably soon disappear from sight and memory. A shrine to Kwan Yin that is one of the oldest in the city, where the faithful still bring their offerings and prayers; a grinding machine for traditional medicine that’s supplied a pharmacy for fifty years; an eighty-year-old welding shop where the owner tells Davies, “This is the house where I was born. I love everything about it; a barbershop on the banks of a canal where customers have come to sit in old leather chairs for one hundred years--all are still in use and all are doomed by progress.

And yet maybe not. In the heart of Bangkok, beneath one of the city’s busiest Skytrain stations, are two low-lying wooden buildings, their walls bordered by a wild ganglia of utility wires, their doors wide open to the street. Surrounded by gleaming shopping centers that sell imported luxuries from all over the world, these anomalies survive, bringing a vital reminder of Bangkok’s history to the fashionable, trend-ridden glaze that too often characterizes this city. Perhaps the beauty of Davies’ photographs will bring strength to the battle for preservation that has recently emerged in Thailand. Certainly the artistry of his work will claim the attention of historians and photography collectors for years to come.~Janet Brown

Ivan Ramen : Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo's Most Unlikely Noodle Joint by Ivan Orkin (Ten Speed Press)

Ivan Orkin was the first foreigner to run and own a successful ramen shop in Tokyo, (home to over 5000 little ramen shops). Not only was he successful, but he did this mostly on his own. He didn’t do any apprenticeships at other ramen shops, he didn’t take any Japanese food courses on how to make ramen. In fact, he didn't even know how to make ramen when he started, but he does have a background in fine foods and is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. Celebrity chef and self-proclaimed bad boy, Anthony Bourdain had this to say about Ivan, “What Ivan Orkin does not know about noodles is not worth knowing.”

He opened his first ramen shop, "Ivan Ramen" in 2007 in Roka Koen, which is a little off the beaten path, away from the major tourist areas of Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Tokyo station. His first shop was so successful that a few years later he opened a second shop in Kyodo in Setagaya Ward called "Ivan Plus". He also managed to get a book deal in Japan and his book アイバンのラーメン (Ivan’s Ramen) was published in 2008 by Little More. 

Ivan moved back to his hometown of New York and opened an "Ivan Ramen" shop in Manhattan in 2012. Ivan Ramen : Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo’s Most Unlikely Noodle Joint is his first book to be published in English and is his story.  The book opens with his humble beginnings working part time at a Japanese restaurant in his teens to becoming the success he is today. He even provides the original recipe for his Shio Ramen that he serves at "Ivan Ramen". You can follow his easy step-by-step instructions to make the ramen he serves in the comforts of your own home. 

I was fortunate enough to visit the first Ivan Ramen shop and have talked to Ivan Orkin in person. He was a very pleasant and friendly person and creates a homey atmosphere which makes it quite an enjoyable eating experience. His ramen shop is probably the only ramen shop that has ice cream on its menu as well. There are forty-three other recipes included in his book featuring different variations of ramen. However, one of my favorite dishes at his shop and a popular item on the side menu is his pulled-pork with roast tomatoes rice bowl.

Ramen in the U.S. has come a long way since the introduction of instant ramen and Cup Noodles. If you wanted a delicious bowl of ramen, you would have to travel across the ocean and satisfy your desire in Japan. But thanks to people like Ivan Orkin and other Japanese shops expanding into the American market such as Ippudo, Ichiran, Santouka, and Menya Jiro, you no longer have to plan a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun for a delicious bowl of ramen.

But beware, if you read this book on an empty stomach, you're going to have a craving for a nice bowl of ramen (and not the instant or cup noodles type)! ~Ernie Hoyt

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

The Old West of the United States is a familiar icon. From childhood, Americans learn about the beauty of its desert canyons and grasslands, the gold that lay within its rivers, the uninhabited spaces that drew those who fit in nowhere else, who wanted the opportunity for reinvention, to find a place that would fit their definitions of home. Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, the Donner Party--these are the figures who haunt the West--the ones who made it, the ones who died trying, the ones who hammered the Golden Spike into the last piece of rail that connected East to West. 

C. Pam Zhang has taken this myth--of outsiders on their own, making their way through a landscape that is stark and sere, living on what they can hunt, and working their way toward the lives they hope to make that are beyond anything they’ve yet experienced. But these fugitives are orphans who were born to Chinese parents, traveling by themselves on a stolen horse, in the only world they’ve ever known.

Lucy and Sam each have been shaped by a different parent who has given them different dreams. Lucy learned from her mother the weapon that beauty can provide, the value of an education, the fragments of a distant culture found in a trunk that Ma had carried from an unnamed country. Sam has absorbed the essential attributes of being male, taught by a man who never knew his own parents, who was found by Native Americans when he was an infant, lying beside a dead Chinese couple. Ba needs a boy and he turns Sam from being his youngest daughter into his only son.

Lucy longs to reach Sweetwater, a town she’s only heard of, where she can live in the cleanliness and order that her mother had worked unsuccessfully to attain. Sam wants to keep going, far from anyone who might recognize the girl who hides beneath a boy’s tough exterior. But first they have to find a place where they can bury their father’s body that rots to pieces in their mother’s old trunk, waiting to be placed in the ground, anchored by two stolen silver dollars.

As they search, Lucy clandestinely buries the fragments of her father’s body that drop from cracks in the trunk. Even after she and Sam put the unrecognizable carcass within the grave they’ve dug, along with the stolen silver, Ba haunts her. At night his ghost tells Lucy the true story of who her parents had been and why each of them, in cruel and separate ways, had abandoned their children.

“What makes a home a home?” “What makes a family a family?” These are questions Lucy and Sam ask each other long before they ride off to find the answers for themselves. Each child finds what they thought they wanted; each ends up far from where they had dreamed of being, aching for what they’ve lost.

C. Pam Zhang has wriitten a novel that’s built upon the lives and bodies of the Chinese in America. Within the poetry of the Western landscape, she has placed two children who will live there forever, as legends and as revealed history.~Janet Brown

Lanterns on Their Horns by Radhika Jha (Beautiful Books)

“Gau'' is the Sanskrit word for cow. It is also the word for the first ray of light, the eldest child of dawn. The nature of light is to move. That may be how the cow got included in the family of words rooted in the verb “gam”, for “gam” means to go. Like its ancestor, the first ray of light, the nature of the cow was to move and therefore it had to go somewhere. But the “somewhere” is what it forgot and in time there grew to be a difference between simply “going” and “going somewhere”.

So begins the introduction of Lanterns on Their Horns. The second novel by Indian writer Radhika Jha. It is the story of four main characters whose lives are intertwined because of a solitary cow. 

The story is set in the fictitious rural town of Nandgaon, a place that is cut off from most modern conveniences. There is no road leading to the town, there is no electricity, and the community must rely on one another to survive. It is located near the real town of Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh which is located in central India. The bond keeping the village together is their patel or Headman. He has authority over every aspect of village life. One of the rules of the village is, if you leave, you are not allowed to return.

A cow is found in the forest by Ramu, a poor farmer, who believes the cow is a gift from the gods. It also makes him happy as he will be able to give the cow as a gift to his modern and university educated wife, Laxmi. 

Laxmi is an outsider and is shunned by most of the people in the village as they know she is the daughter of a man who committed suicide. They believe that associating with her will only bring bad luck. It is the Headman who gives permission for Ramu to marry Laxmi because he felt Ramu had enough bad luck in his life already. 

The Headman is a strict traditionalist. He is also the proud owner of the town’s herd of cows.It was he who went against the government and blocked them from making a road to the simple town. He is adamant in keeping the status quo of the village. 

The person who brings change to life is Manoj Mishra, an idealist who believes he has the answer to eradicate India’s poverty. His plan is to inseminate cows in rural towns with sperm from a superior breed whose offspring will be able to produce larger volumes of milk and will lead the poor farmers to riches beyond their dreams. 

When Manoj manages to get permission from Laxmi to inseminate her “junglee” cow, it leads to confrontation between tradition and growth. It leads to a modern day conundrum. Should small rural towns and villages stick with tradition and forego modern conveniences or should they embrace growth, development and progress which as Nandgaon’s Headman believes will only lead to greed, theft, jealousy and no sense of community? ~Ernie Hoyt