One raced through the book, finishing it in two sittings on the two segments of a two-hour flight. The characters initially were engrossing and the East-West amalgam held one really tight for some time. The book, in three sections, is about Samar, the representative of a lost generation and his times in Benares, Pondicherry and Dharamsala and his eventual return to Benares. The first two build up Samar's stay in Benares and Pondicherry but the third hurtles through his stay in Dharamsala and return to Benares, giving an impression that Mishra was probably running out of time to meet the deadline for the book's publication.

In Benares, Samar comes across Miss West and Catherine, a Britisher and Frenchwoman respectively, and their friends, who have been living for some time in Benares, trying to find themselves. At this level, Mishra tries to compare Western and Indian problems and values; the problems of the pain of adulthood, of love and longing (or the lack of) and draws parallels between the problems that Miss West and Catherine have with the problems that Samar and his Indian friends have. Samar's "Indian" connection is mainly sketched through his interactions with Rajesh, a college Union ganglord and his cronies.

Along the way, Mishra flirts with the concept of "detachment" as a Hindu way out of problems, only to denounce it eventually. Samar's father retires to the Aurobindo Ashram after his wife passes away and eventually Samar hides himself in Dharamsala to get away from memories of Benares and Catherine, with whom he had spent a memorable holiday in Kalpi. Yet, a chance meeting in Dharamsala with Mark, seven years after leading what seems to be a good, comfortable life suddenly makes Samar doubt his own choices. From this point onwards though, the book takes a downhill course.

Samar in any case comes across as a "detached" individual, probably because he is also the character through whom Mishra views the rest of the cast and in that sense seems to represent a part of Mishra's own personality. This "detached" approach makes Samar an extremely wishy-washy character who just seems to blunder along life's by-lanes, going where his destiny takes him, with minimal dissent. The only time he seems to have emotions, is when he experiences a high during and after his tryst with Catherine.

One reason one found the book interesting in parts was because the problems described in Samar's part of the world are different from those one is used to. Different parts of India sometimes are as dissimilar as different parts of the world. The city of Benares, which one has never visited, the problems in the Universities in Benares and Allahabad, the concept of everyone reading and trying for the Civil Service examinations, are situations as alien to one as they might be to a Westerner, having led one's whole life in Mumbai, not knowing any student who studied for the Civil Service examinations, or kept pistols in his room in college, or threw a grenade on a policeman. But people from the states of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar or other parts of the country would probably find all this commonplace and boring.

At the end of it all though, the book left one with a sense of dissatisfaction. What was Mishra trying to say? If it is just a story about an individual and his travails and soul-searching, then the end is too abrupt. If it is a commentary on India, its poverty, filth, middle-class amorality and the travesties of religion, it works well, but up to a point. Book after book dwells on this subject and Mishra says nothing new. If it is about the similarities between Western and Indian problems of the soul, but the different approaches adopted by the two, it works for sometime and then falters, leaving us confused.

And the "Indian" motifs pandering to the West are alive and kicking. Like the passage describing the making of "dal", spelt "dhal" where the process of making "tadka" is explained in half a page "...after the onion and garlic turned a deep golden-brown, he would tremulously lift the bowl with a steel pincer and gently pour it into the brass tureen, where, after a brief noisy protest, the "ghee" would tamely spread across the watery surfaces of the dhal."

The problem in the end is the sense of "giving up" that seems to pervade every Indian character in the book. Just as in "Fasting, Feasting" and "The Blue Bedspread", every character has a problem and is unhappy and troubled. When will someone write a book about normal middle and upper middle class life in India, about the fun you have in school, in college, in professional situations, and sometimes even at work? That there are people who are content and successful and not criminal and fat and paunchy with beaded eyes and greasy hands. And though you can never wipe away the backdrop of poverty and disaster, not everyone leads these lives.

Do poverty, filth and decay have to be our only export?

When history is no more a deduction of facts, but a speculative exercise, however fantastic it may seem, the result is what you have in the quasi-fictional 'What If'. Robert Cowley, the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, expanded the idea of a compilation of counterfactual essays from tenth anniversary issue of the magazine. Lending their weight to Cowley's collection of conjectural articles is an array of historians from James McPherson and John Keegan to Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

What if the Spanish Armada had avoided Francis Drake's fire ships and linked up with the Duke of Parma's invasion barges in Calais roads in 1588? Geoffrey Parker says it was not implausible that a near-bankrupt and thinly held England could have been successfully invaded in the 16th century (which would have resulted in the virtual extirpation of Protestantism from Europe). But Spanish king Philip II's insistence on total victory might have resulted in a military stalemate. Even if the conquest had been completed, the endogamy practised by Spanish Habsburgs would not have allowed them to enjoy their hegemony for long.

What if Sennacherib had pressed the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC? William McNeill thinks the nascent, monotheistic Jewish religion might never have taken hold among the people of Judah--and the daughter religions of Christianity and Islam would never have been born. What is Alexander the Great had died at the age of 21 instead of 32? Josiah Ober's answer is that Greece would have been swallowed up by Persia and Rome, and the modern Western world would have a much different sensibility--and probably little idea of democratic government.

Alistair Horne argues that Napoleon might have risked the invasion of Britain in 1805, but, given the Royal Navy's supremacy, "it would have been a gamble with the dice heavily loaded against him". Instead, his best opportunity to consolidate his achievements came during his meeting with a beaten Tsar Alexander at Tilsit in 1807. By "persuasion and diplomacy rather than military coercion", he could have imposed "the uniformity of the admirable administrative aspects" of his system throughout Europe. Yet it was his character "that prevented him from reaching up and grabbing the opportunity".

Adolf Hitler too might have won the Second World War if he had opted to attack the Middle East instead of Russia in 1941, reasons John Keegan. A successful campaign in the Levant would not only have given Hitler possession of most of the world's oil; it would have left him advantageously placed to invade India or Russia (via the Caucasus) later. This remained only a possibility because "fear and hatred of Bolshevism allowed [Hitler] no freedom to choose an alternative to his desire to smash the Soviet Union by direct, frontal assault".

The one inexplicable omission from the list of contributors is that of Niall Ferguson, the high priest of counterfactual history, and editor of 'Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals'. Ferguson's contention, when he wrote that book was that the argument of "We are only concerned with the facts of what happened, and not with things which didn't happen but might have happened" only simplifies history. Elaborate historical philosophies which evolved over the centuries all boiled down to the corollary: what happened, had to happen. A determinist philosophy is self defeating and hence, as Ferguson said in an interview, " What history does show you is that you should approach the future as a series of plausible scenarios--and understanding the past is a chaotic process--so you'll better understand the way that events are likely to go in the future."

Parker, on his part, feels counterfactual history requires both the "minimal rewrite rule" (whereby "only small and plausible changes should be made to the actual sequence of events") and consideration of "second-order counterfactuals" (the assumption that, after a given time, "the previous pattern may reassert itself"). Not all contributors tread this line carefully, though Cowley himself says the "what ifs" can on the one hand "show that small accidents or split-second decisions are as likely to have major repercussions as large ones", while on the other they can eliminate the "hindsight bias" which assumes that certain historical outcomes were inevitable.

In 1990, biologist Maurice Hornocker first visited the desolate and farflung region of Russia with his colleague Howard Quigley. Once the two were taken on an enlivening tour of the Sikhote-Alin wildlife reserve, some 300 miles northeast of Vladivostok on the coast of the Sea of Japan, a project began crystallising. The two Americans and their Russian friends launched the Siberian Tiger Project to study the tiger's habits and devise strategies for its preservation. Hornocker joined hands with Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, to blend the former's scholarly research and dazzling photography with the latter's brilliant narrative to stitch together this masterly effort to save the Panthera tigris altaica, or the Siberian tiger.

The initial results provided a much-needed fillip to their Hornocker and Quigley's cause. Within four years, the tiger population had climbed to an estimated 450 from a mere 170. "Given a little breathing room, tigers know how to survive," Quigley said. Saving the tiger is possible, Hornocker claims. The plan of the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute and the Siberian Tiger Project t to expand the Sikhote-Alin reserve to include critical tiger habitat has been adopted by the Russian government. Inadequate financial resources make enforcement a problem, though. Moreover, local people, says Hornocker, "must be convinced it is in their best interest to conserve rather than to kill tigers." The save-tiger activists have worked with the local community to revive traditional cottage industries for sustainable forest products such as berries and honey.

Indigenous to Asia, even a century ago some 100,000 tigers roamed throughout the continent, from the sub-Arctic north to the equatorial tropics. Today, only an estimated 5,000 or so remain - a 95 per cent population drop over seven generations. Of the eight known subspecies of the tiger, three had been extinct by 1979. Three more are condemned achieve extinction soon. The Royal Bengal tiger of India and the Siberian tiger of the Russian Far East stand any chance of survival. The tiger's adaptability has proven no match in losing its habitat to logging, agriculture, mining and war, and its prey -- deer, rabbits and other ungulates that comprise the bulk of their diet -- to hunters. The habitat with the best chance of remaining hospitable to tigers may be the Russian Far East, feel Hornocker and Matthiessen.

In their fervent appeal to save the tiger from extinction, Matthiessen and Hornocker do not indulge in meaningless, maudlin pleas. Many of Matthiessen's accounts of the tiger's adaptability are not what one happens to know merely by seeing one in a zoo. Do these visitors know that the marking above each tiger's eye is as unique as a human fingerprint? Or that the tiger "is a mighty swimmer, known to have travelled up to eighteen miles across rivers and deltas and nine miles in the sea"? Or that tigers are "the subject of more varied myths and endowed with more fanciful attributes than any other creature known to man"? Or that tigers are "exceptionally resilient, adapting to a range of habitats perhaps unmatched by any other large mammal except man"?

Matthiessen talks about how they tracked tigers in sub-freezing weather, shot them with tranquilliser darts, fitted them with radio collars and accumulated an extensive body of information on their breeding frequency, diet and habitat needs. There are triumphs and disappointments; it's an especially poignant moment when the men discover the discarded collar of tigress Lena, victim of poachers who left her four cubs to die in the snow.

"Until the lion has a voice, the tales of the hunt will be only those of the hunter." -- Eritrean proverb

Edited jointly by Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, African Theatre in Development is a valuable resource material for anyone interested in issues pertaining to theatre and development in Africa. The book is in four sections. The first section contains 10 essays on workshops, seminars and reflections of theatre in development in certain African countries.

South African playwright Zakes Mda's choice of the middle path in the dramatic reconceptualisation of South African political history is analysed by Carolyn Duggan. In preferring the voice of reason over the voice of emotion, Mda finds a connection between the mix of traditional practices among Africans and the eclecticism of modern African thinking. Mda combines the tempered 'okunjengokwabelungu' (the light that "shines from the white man") with traditional lores and experiences as a concept to dramatise the difference between reality and illusion in his people's lives. Mda wants change and this he does by stimulating his audience not only to "change his own thinking but be encouraged to intervene".

James Gibbs writes about the trailblazing work of Alec Dickson in the erstwhile Gold Coast (now Ghana) which triggered off the country's social welfare department's community development programmes. Dickson was an educationist who used theatre techniques despite being ignorant of theatrical concepts in his mass education programmes with the sole aim of changing the social conditions and empowering the local communities. Roshni Mooneeram describes the emergence and subsequent establishment of Creole language and theatre as the symbol of multi-cultural identity in the Mauritius. Mauritian theatre has broken the barriers between archetypal Western theatre and traditional theatre. Jane Plastow talks about a collective report by students of the Tigre/Bilen theatre training course on community-based theatre projects conducted in 1997 based on concepts developed by Augusto Boal. She also dwells at length on Alemseged Tesfai who was influenced by the systematic 'ethnic cleansing' practice of the Ethiopian soldiers among the Somalis to make the latter lose their identity.

Tales of frustration surface in the report of Chuck Mike's Performance Studio Workshop in 1996 which strived hard to raise awareness and campaign against the ghastly practice of female genital mutilation practised among certain groups in Nigeria. Other reports find a place in the book too. David Kerr's account of a seminar organised in Harare in 1997 says the NGO-oriented efforts only advise " people how to improve their lives within fairly narrow sectoral domains". Jumai Ewu experiences of a seminar in 1998 regret that the movement has remained confined to academic environs, while the use of non-local languages has not made things easier either. Frances Harding essay based on two workshops too emphasise the need for workshops involving local people.

The second section is a 'Noticeboard' of recent researches and publications dealing with theatre in development in Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan and Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and a comment on the bridging attempt between the Anglophone and Francophone theatre in Africa. The third section is a playscript by Agbo Sikuade titled 'Babalawo: Mystery-Master'. Recorded by the BBC Africa Service, the short radio play is about a charlatan, corrupt police officials, domestic squabbles between a jealous wife and her husband, childlessness and surrounding myths. The fourth section contains 17 reviews of books on and relating to African theatre and drama, published between 1994 and 1998.