About Me
- Lotus Reads
- Book fiend,culture-vulture, world traveller, daughter of the tropics now living in the Great White North.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Daaku by Ranj Dhaliwal
First off, an apology to those of you who read my book blog, for this post is pretty much a repeat of what I have there (yes, I know, I know, I have been meaning to merge my blogs, but I am having technical issues with the book blog, hence the delay).Living in Toronto as I do, I don't often get to hear of the Indian diaspora on the West coast of Canada, but lately there have been murmors that many young men in Punjabi community are involved in gangs and gang warfare. I didn't pay the rumors too much attention until I heard Ranj Dhaliwal's interview on the CBC.
Ranj Dhaliwal, a first-time author, is himself an Indo-Canadian and lives in Surrey, BC which is home to a large chunk of the Indian disapora in Vancouver. He grew up seeing and hearing of boys involved with gangs, and 5 years ago he sat down to write a book about it, titled "Daaku" which I found to be a real eye-opener. You can see my review here.
You see, I've always been of the opinion that Desis lay great emphasis on academia or business skills, many times to the exclusion of other extra- curricular activities, so it came as a shock to me to discover that there were Indo-Canadian or Desi gangs dealing with drugs, exhortation, smuggling rings, collections and so on. The question I asked myself repeatedly was "why"? Not just that, why is this a phenomenon so peculiar to the Punjabi community and not so much to the other Desi communities ? Ofcourse, the book doesn't have the answers, it is just to make us aware of what is happening in certain communities and to tell us the story of a gangster.
I thought it was an excellent read, I hope you do, too.
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4 comments:
Hi Lotus - This is a great book review, so I was happy to read it twice!!
You're a sweetie, ml, thank you! :)
This is such a melancholy or a major misfortune for the ppl who are a part of these gangs. I'm sure no mother would choose something like this for their kids.
I'll definitely read this book & thanx for the precious review :)
Stay Beautiful...!!
Keep posting .....