Waiting at the hotel lobby, a soft-spoken gentleman began talking with me – the normal small talk, where you going and isn’t it cold! It turns out that he is a writer and researching a book on WWII in Moscow. That’s where he was headed. He and a co-author are going to research on the red army and the people in Russia. Two cigarettes later (not me!) I had learnt that his technique was different. He would interview just the common people and learn from them. Unlike a lot of British authors, who rely on archives and gazettes, he found this more suitable. I couldn’t agree more! It appears, he has written a book on some Indian tribe that lived in the Michigan-Ontario area and the oral-history is significantly different from what was known earlier. He was also well-read and was aware of the burgeoning middle-class of India – how the dynamics and economics were changing.
As the luck may have it, our seats were just beside each other, but both of us were trying to catch-up on sleep and couldn’t talk more. I asked for some book recommendations and he did make a list for me! Now, only I have to motivate myself enough to actually read them!
My question about good books resulted in a very long winded answer. At last, he confessed – when you ask a question to an Irish man (his origin), you have to be prepared for a long answer. His father spent time in Burma and China during WWII in the International Red Cross and it was a similar sense of adventure that was now driving him to research this book. He was more interested in the social history of the common man, a sticky point with the publisher, since the publisher wanted him to concentrate only on the red army!
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