Conundrum by Chandrachur GhoseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hooter: We lost Netaji twice - once to history, and once to indifference.
Some mysteries fade with time; others grow louder in silence. Conundrum by Anuj Dhar belongs to the latter, a book that doesn’t just question history but our collective comfort with forgetting.
Dhar and Ghose peel open one of India’s most stubborn secrets, the disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose, with the persistence of someone who refuses to let a nation’s amnesia pass for closure. Their pursuit takes the reader from the wreckage of a supposed plane crash in Taiwan to the dim-lit room of a reclusive saint in Faizabad, known only as Gumnami Baba. Between these worlds, facts blur into faith, and evidence begins to sound eerily like emotion.
What lingers are the small, haunting details. The Japanese doctor who allegedly signed Bose’s death certificate later confessed he had never seen the body. The family who served Gumnami Baba recalled rooms filled with Bose’s letters, INA memorabilia, and even a pair of his trademark round spectacles. A handwriting expert matched the saint’s notes to Bose’s with unsettling precision, while official commissions chose to look away. Each story feels like a whisper from a man history could not fully bury.
What truly grips you isn’t the evidence alone, but the ache beneath it. The idea that perhaps, somewhere, a man who once demanded freedom for millions had to live without it himself. Dhar and Ghose write not as a conspiracy theorists but as men disturbed by how easily we traded curiosity for convenience.
Conundrum isn’t closure; it’s conscience. It reminds us that truth sometimes hides because we stopped looking.
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