Mother Teresa the untold story
Book review
Non Fiction
Rating 4/5
No spoilers!….
First of get some details about the author who is a true blue Calcutta born Bengali in love with his city of birth and a physician settled in UK…. He has a research of more than 30 years into the life of Mother Teresa and is a virtual encyclopaedia on her life!!
Now this book review is purely a viewpoint of the author and as you can very well see it goes against the tide in a big big way!
From the first word he makes his position very clear that this is a book to demystify desaint and debrief anything and everything about the mother….
So starting from her setting up of the first centre, or her supposedly selfless nature, or her feeling for the poorest of the poor, or her spending anything on the ill or her deserving the Nobel or nobility and everything else has been quite convincingly argued by a practitioner of evidence based modern medicine like Dr Chatterjee…..
Some controversy like the conversion and not spending on treatment (mother believed that in suffering you are closer to God!!) were known at least in bits and pieces while the author had opened them wide and bare!…
Some of the rarer and unknown controversies are also mentioned with letters, correspondence, interviews, photograph and audio recordings so all in all it seems to be a patient well researched and well presented argument….. Whether you do believe the author is left to the reader since the sides have already been chosen…. The book will not change much!!
What it may do is maybe widen your perspective to understand that sometimes even seeing is not believing!… Though his treatment of Mother as a not so innocent and politically shrewd and opportunistic nun is sure to ruffle many feathers!!…
Am surprised though that this book and author have not been creating much controversy though!…..
After going through all her activity and actions one by one and dissecting it into human pieces the author then concludes by two glaring chapters on her Saint status and her Nobel prize….. Expectedly he decimates even these by crisp arguments and relevant points which are sure to raise many a frown and not the smile upside down kind!!…
The whole exercise seems to stem from the fact that the author is heartbroken because of the stereotypical treatment of India and Calcutta… Think Calcutta and these have made sure that the world will only imagine slums, beggars, lepers and what not!…..
He has gone one step ahead and even decimated the book City of Joy which he feels is equally responsible for the poor opinion of India and Calcutta!..
The fact of the matter is that at the end of it all legends are man made and one day everyone must realise that after all everyone is finally Mortal…. Nothing more, nothing less….
Read it to get a treasure house of controversy!!….
ramadocblog 