Blind Faith - Softcover

Sagarika Ghose went to St Stephens College in New Delhi before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where she gained an MA and M Phil degree in History. She has been a journalist for fourteen years, reporting extensively on Indian elections, politics and society as well as traveling and reporting in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Her first novel The Gin Drinkers was published to critical acclaim in 2000.

In the second novel from Ghose (The Gin Drinkers), Mia Bhagat is a 28-year-old London-based Bengali reeling from the inexplicable suicide of her Marxist-turned-Mystic father. Her job as a TV reporter introduces her to Karna, an initiate of the conservative, utopian Purification Journey Brotherhood (men should fight the female ego) who's also the spitting image of a figure from her late father's painting of the Kumbh Mela, or Ganga River Festival of the Pitcher. Mia falls for him hard, but her mother arranges a marriage to a kind cosmetics entrepreneur named Vik Ray, with whom Mia moves to New Delhi. There, she enters the whirlwind of her husband's extravagant parties and secretly waits for Karna. A subplot follows the character arc of Vik's brilliant, beautiful and blind mother, Indi, from her childhood in Delhi to retirement in Goa. Ghose evokes the Indian settings with a wonderful tactility, and she hones in cuttingly on the sparring desires for love, independence and transcendence. Though the fractured plot's threads weave together too neatly, Ghose, who is an anchor on CNN's Indian affiliate, offers convincing meditations on mysticism vs. rationality and commercial wealth vs. spiritual poverty as they play out for her conflicted lead. (Mar.)
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