Insects, by and large, are reckoned to be such repulsive creatures, that not many would contemplate even once about reading a book on them. Books about insects are, needless to say, by and for teachers and students of entomology. At least, that is what common sense would make one believe. If, however, one happens to perforce read the writings about insects assorted by award-winning nature and science writer Erich Hoyt and Smithsonian entomologist and former 'Whole Earth Review' editor Ted Schultz, one might well voluntarily change one's mind about it. The Hoyt-Schultz anthology brings together the most unusual, fascinating and enlightening writings about insects, ranging through time from the Bible and Aristotle to Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth.

The compilation includes insect fiction, excerpts from insect horror films, an advertisement for Mexican jumping beans (actually moth larvae), the odd Hunkin and Far side cartoon and dozens of rare and beautiful insect illustrations. Each selection in ten-section anthology is introduced and annotated with fascinating anecdotes and additional information about the writer and subject of the piece. In a modern world in which insects are largely ignored and avoided, this book reminds one of the special place that insects have always held in the human interaction with nature. For one, they have been around for 400 million years; humans only for 100 million.

The objective, say Hoyt and Schultz, is to "give enlightening pause to the steppers, swatters, and screamers who live in fear or dread of six legs -- that would be reason enough. But we also hope that this book will illuminate insect lives in such a way that it transports and frees the curious general reader from the constraints of being human -- for at least a mayfly's brief lifetime or two -- in suspended appreciation of that other, hidden world beneath our feet and beyond our rolled-up newspapers". It would not be an understatement to say that the authors more than succeeded in their novel endeavour. Insects do not appear to be those repulsive creatures one would have perceived them to be at the onset. Though scientists and science writers hold the marginal numerical sway over poets and novelists in the book, what is also revealed is that many of the former ilk are skilled storytellers themselves. Writers are not the only ones who can write.

True poets are not necessarily scientists or science writers either, but they cannot, for that reason, be stopped from taking an entomological point of view in celebrating life. English poet William Wordsworth's "To a Butterfly," evokes the delight of having one's own garden where butterflies come to alight and spend time and provide metaphors for the full yet ephemeral nature of summer:

I've watched you now a full half-hour,
Self-poised upon that yellow flower;
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless!- not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!
This plot of orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers;
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We'll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

Wordsworth's words would have come out spontaneously in praise of the butterflies, beautiful creatures that they are. British poet William Cowper, on the other hand, wrote "Ode to the Cricket" alluding at a close rapport possible between humans and insects; the verses seem to sing with the rhythm of crickets:

Little inmate, full of mirth,
Chirping on my kitchen hearth,
Whereso'er be thine abode
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.
Thus thy praise shall be expressed
Inoffensive, welcome guest! . . .
Frisking thus before the fire,
Thou hast all thine heart's desire . . .
Wretched man, whose years are spent
In repining discontent,
Lives not, aged though he be,
Half a span, compared to thee.

The next time one gets the sadistic impulse to stamp on a cricket, one would in all likelihood decide in favour of that insect.

One might expect a book subtitled "The Dynamics of Torture" to be rather lurid. John Conroy's thoughtful, reportorial analysis of how and why ordinary people are capable of inflicting extraordinary pain on others is anything but. He acknowledges in his preface that this book is not a full treatment of the subject. He elects, instead, to focus on three specific cases for which he was able to interview relevant subjects and obtain additional information that was part of the public record (all three cases resulted in trials or investigations). The three cases examined are all quite different and each instructive in its own right. He restricted his analysis of contemporary torture to a case that occurred in Palestine, a situation in Northern Ireland and one in Chicago. The Israeli/Palestine case concerned an overzealous army officer who, during the early days of the Intifada, ordered his men on two separate occasions to round up Palestinian suspects whose names were provided by Israeli intelligence as potential trouble makers and beat them with the intent of breaking their bones as a warning to others. The Irish case was more complex; here a group of men detained individually by the British Army, are hooded, taken to an unknown location and forced to stand, leaning into a wall with their legs spread, for days at a time while a disorienting background noise makes any talking (and normal thought) impossible. Any attempt to lower the arms resulted in a beating. The Chicago case involved a highly decorated police officer who subjected a prisoner to torture with electric shock and other intimidation in order to produce a confession.

Conroy tries to weave all of these stories into a thematic whole. He first recounts the torture itself in separate chapters devoted to the three situations. Then he considers the public reaction and follow up in each situation. He leavens his reporting of the events and their consequences with chapters considering the psychological effects of torture, the results of studies that attempt to understand the psychology of torturers, and studies of the long term consequences for both those that inflict and those that suffer torture. Nothing that he reports is surprising. The torturers are basically supported by their governments and the public. They, themselves, feel that they have acted in the public interest and according to their responsibility. Like the defendants at the Nuremberg War Crimes trial, they were all just "following orders" or, as is the case with the Chicago police officer, feel that they have a mandate to do whatever it takes in certain situations - such as coercing a confession out of a cop-killer. The perpetrators of this evil are normal people. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her book on Eichman, there is a banality in their approach to the evil they commit. Far from being psychotic or essentially evil people, they do what they think is necessary in their jobs, and, as Conroy makes plain, are not always comfortable with it. Still, they do it - and are supported by their superiors. Conroy cites Stanley Milgram's studies on the impact of authority and the inflicting of pain on strangers to show that most people are capable, at least to some degree, of torturing others when they think it is required.

This book reminds us of a number of serious issues, but it offers no answers and does not even raise much of an emotional response. This is unfortunate because we need to be not only reminded of man's inhumanity to man, we need to be inspired to do something about it. Conroy's choice of examples, while appropriate for a reporter's needs, seem remote and tame when compared to the ongoing reality of ethnic cleansing, the ferocity of hate crimes where violent torture frequently precedes murder, or situations where female prisoners are repeatedly raped. It is hard to apply Conroy's argument that torturers are normal people who just think they are doing their jobs to situations such as these, fuelled as they are by extreme negative emotions and behaviour that can only be described as bestial. So his book really only addresses a certain limited type of institutional torture where the object is pragmatic and the roles are officially assigned. As Conroy makes clear, this is a serious and wide-spread problem, but it's the tip of the iceberg.

For someone who graduated in science a decade-and-a-half back in time and stayed away from it for as long, this book comes as a immeasurable shock. The forewarning had come in the preface itself: "Research in physics seems to accelerate each year, with new discoveries and inventions being reported at a staggering rate." So when one leafed through the pages and fished out a worn out edition of a dictionary of science as old to find interpretations of terms one did not have a clue about, one drew a blank. The space-time continuum appears infinite. The word "archaic" begins to make sense.

This book is not meant for scientists or today's students of science, but for those, like this reviewer, who pursued science for some time, but opted for other avenues because of some compulsion, commitment or otherwise. According to Albert Einstein, all spinning objects have a tendency to drag the space-time continuum in which they are situated around with them. True, Einstein's Theory of Relativity makes as much sense today as it did when he announced it in 1905. For those like this reviewer looking for a starting point to make up for lost time in one sitting, this book would serve the purpose.

Yet, it is not the strides taken by physics during this interregnum that leaves one fascinated, but the fact that the discoveries waiting to be made are going to be even more fascinating. As one tries to break free from the ossified realm of electrons, protons and neutrons one grew up in, the new world of the two fundamental particles of quarks and leptons seems fathomless. One does not have to delve deep; a cursory reading will leave one convinced that there is no end to the variety of subatomic particles. The hypotheses of yesterday, are fundamental truths of today. What was thought to be, for instance, a figment of Enrico Fermi's imagination in 1930, was the "most exciting news in particle physics" in the 1990s -- neutrinos.

Progress in particle physics would have a cascading effect on astrophysics, one would have conjectured. Right and wrong. New discoveries have created new problems. As Newton says, "Astrophysicists are faced with the question of whether some of the massive quantity of data they are receiving is incorrect, or whether theoretical explanations on which they have come to depend or wrong." But then, this dialectical quandary is the essence of science. A truth is not a truth till it is proven to be the truth. The inflation theory about the Big Bang origin of the universe would make sense perhaps if scientists could know where to look for the missing dark matter. Proof of effects of antigravity and antimatter in deep space rather than the confines of high-tech laboratories too might either boost contemporary theories or force scientists to modify their theories to suit the results.

It would be a heretical absurdity to predict what a discovery, or even a presupposition, today might trigger off in the future. When Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted the Bose-Einstein condensates in the 1920s, one would never have guessed that their's (the BEC) would not only come to be recognised as the fifth form of matter (after solid, liquid, gas, and plasma -- for those who have come in anachronistically late), but would fetch the Nobel Prize for three physicists who were to perfect the theory. Teleportation, too, is more than only a sci-fi lift-off from a potboiler; the phenomenon has been observed in labs. The beam-ups of Star Trek are still as much a fantasy, but if the (dis)entanglement theories were to be unravelled. . .

Problems remain unsolved. For if large amounts of dark matter were to exist, a higher density of the universe would mean someday it would stop expanding and begin to contract into the Big Crunch. While newer fundamental particles of matter keep getting discovered, scientists still face the challenge of accounting for the best known property of matter: mass. The Higgs boson might be of help; it might not. Developments in particle physics could be faster still if the development of particle accelerators (machines that provide an energy level that cannot be achieved by any other means ion Earth) could keep pace with theories. "No sooner does construction begin o the newest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world than physicists begin to think about, design, and look for funds for its successor -- almost by definition a more powerful machine than the one that has not yet begun operation."

PS: Just as this review was being written, a group of scientists somewhere in the United States claimed to have made light to travel 300 times faster than its known speed. Light might exist at two places at the same time. In other words, Einstein's Theory of Relativity might stand debunked. These are claims as yet, but by the time this issue makes it to the archives of this journal, new discoveries might have been made and older theories discarded.

'On the Banks of the Mayyazhi' comes to the readers with a string of awards. The original Malayalam version ('Mayyazhi Puzhayude Theerangalil') won in 1998 the award for the best novel published in the last 25 years. For her English translation, Gita Krishnankutty won the 1999 Crossword book award for the best translation from Indian language fiction.

In a career spanning over 35 years, M Mukundan, another award winning writer from Kerala, has written over 25 fictional works. Mukundan's birthplace Mahe provides the background to most of his work. Mayyazhi - the mouth of the black river - was renamed Mahe by the French when it came under their rule about 300 years ago. After India attained independence in 1947 largescale demonstrations were staged in Mahe in 1948. The demonstrators raided government offices, and hoisted the Indian National flag on the administrative building. But this euphoria met a quick death with the arrival of the French Navy. The fight for freedom got a fresh lease of life again in 1954 when the French finally agreed to hand over Mahe to India.

This past history of his birth place forms the back bone of Mukundan's 'On the Banks of the Mayyazhi'. The novel is like a miniature painting full of minute details that are lucid and succeed in telling a very human story. The grand old grandmother, Kurambi Amma, is the main thread that runs through the entire novel, setting the tone to the story, making the reader participate in the lives of the various people who are affected by the historical developments of Mayyazhi. It is Kurambi Amma's stories that paint the relationship between the half-French population of the town and its Indian inhabitants, that describe the many characters of Mayyazhi, that show how poverty does not necessarily rob human dignity.

Mayyazhi has rich sons. Like Leslie Sayiv, who wears a hat, coat and trousers instead of a mundu, drives the best horse carriage of the town, stops by every evening to share a pinch of snuff with Kurambi Amma, and whose memory will haunt Kurambi Amma's nights for many years following his death. Of course life is poor for most of the inhabitants of Mayyazhi. There is Kurambi Amma's own son, Damu, who earns his living as a writer of deeds in the law court. There are sorcerers like Malayan Kunhuraman who has the power to make a dead fowl flutter its wings or bring bank a snake that had struck and make it suck out its own venom from the victim's body. The people have great faith in their power. There is Master Kunhanandan, who has been sick all his life, but still has enough energy to instil the feeling of nationalism in his students.

All these many lives are nothing but commas on Mayyazhi's time line. Normally they flutter like dragonflies over the Velliyan Rock, a silvery island, a cluster of rocks in the sea where souls rest between births and which guards in its womb the secrets of the lives and births of the folk of Mayyazhi.

The story begins before Dasan was born, and ends with the observation that "the place where Dasan used to sit was empty. Across the water, Velliyan Rock could be seen like a large teardrop. Souls fluttered over it like dragonflies. One of them was Dasan." Thus Dasan is the second hero of this novel. He could have enjoyed a very privileged life, could have joined the government service, or could have even gone to France at the expense of the government. But he decides to forego all these temptations to fight for the freedom of Mayyazhi. It is the kind of freedom which is not understood or needed by many people around Dasan. 'Freedom, what does that mean?' asks Dasan's father, Damu. People like Kurambi Amma do not understand why the French have to be driven out of Mayyazhi. In her opinion the French have brought glory to Mayyazhi. The place belongs to the French as much as it belongs to the others.

The struggle for freedom is the refrain of the book but this theme remains mainly in the background. It is life as it is lived by the common man, as it is affected by the ideals of national freedom that is important in the novel. The language is extremely sparse but rich in associations it evokes, the style restrained yet delicate. The translation is simply superb. On the Banks of Mayyazhi richly deserves all the awards that it has got, and leaves the reader eager for more from the pen of Mukundan and Gita Krishnankutty.