To: Satish C. Shah who wrote (4245 ) 5/10/1999 11:05:00 AM From: Mohan Marette Respond to
Ref:"Father India' by Jeffery Paine.'... A reader from New York , February 12, 1999 Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization. "I think it would be a good idea," he answered. Paine has fashioned a fascinating and eminently readable account of how Western minds have been influenced by India. He devotes time to the British reformers Lord Curzon and Annie Besant; writers E. M. Forster, William Yeats, V. S. Naipaul, Allen Ginsberg, and Christopher Isherwood; and thinker-reformers Carl Jung and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. He even charts Gandhi's interaction with his own country. Once, a trip to India meant "quasi-enchanted travel to the far horizons of the possible." Paine goes beyond the spices and smells to decipher the true attraction of India for these modern figures and how they translated their findings back to the West. In some cases it meant Hinduism, in others it meant a new mix of spirituality and politics, but more often it meant an inner transformation, something far less definable. Paine does a bang-up job of providing the definitions. Highly recommended. David Cline.
