A real traveller´s book

Hello blogmates. I know I should be writing a film review but this is going to be a book review instead. I hope you do not mind. Ok Anne? The point is that, now that I have just finished reading this book, I take it as a must for me to recommend it to you all.

The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple is a panorama of the Indian subcontinent, poised in between chaos, westernisation and immemorial tradition. To put it into Dalrymple´s own words:"This book is a collection of peripatetic essays, a distillation of ten years´travel ... My travels took me from the fortresses of the drug barons of the North-West Frontier to the jungle lairs of the Tamil Tigers; from flashy Bombay drinks parties to murderous Bihari blood feuds; from the decaying palaces of Lucknow to the Keralan exrorcist temple of the bloodthirsty goddess of Parashakti".

Diverse as it is, The Age of Kali has the effect of engaging, making its author such an attractive companion you don´t want the journey to end. Dalrymple has an extraordinary ability to set a scene and conjure an atmosphere. His description of goddess Parashakti´s seizure of possessed persons at the Chottanikkara Temple is simply breathtaking.

But Dalrymple´book is also informative and, at times, funny in its tone. When visiting the Tamil region in Sri Lanka, he is given permission -the first time for a foreign journalist- to meet the "Freedom Birds", probably the most upright of all guerrillas, formed only with girls. As the author puts it in his book:

"It is easy to se why the Freedom Birds are kept away from the public eye, strictly segregated in their own barracks. They are stuff of Bond movies: a regiment of beautiful Tamil amazones dressed in tight-fitting khaki fatigues, with carbines strapped across their waists. But they were far from the Bond model in at least one respect, as I soon discovered: they had all taken a vow of chastity, and were as buttoned-up as an order of cloistered nuns".

Dalrymple´s The Age of Kali is simply fascinating.