The Glass Palace – Cars

 

I first heard about this book in 2007, during my customary weekend visits to Crosswords. I thought of reading this several times but thought better of it, as I always had this impression that Amitav Ghosh might be a Too emotional kind of a writer and I wasn’t very emotional back then. Last year I read “Sea of Poppies” and from that day onwards I became an avid fan of Mr. Gosh’s work. Sea of Poppies had so many characters, their lives, Social environment of those times, and All of them fitted brilliantly in the theme of the book.

Now coming back to Glass Palace, I loved the book till the time I was reading it, but once it got over and I started my usual research for the book, I somehow I got this idea the book has too much of details about the objects, around the Characters rather than about the Characters.

But being a Techy I love these details, be it Cars, Planes or the Scenic beauties of Burma. Most of the stuff which he mentioned in the book, like the Sea Planes or those Vintage cars, I’ve never seen in my life, So I decided to find more about these things. I started with Mandalay, the Kings’s Palace, Pagoda’s, Ratnagiris stay of the King Thebaw and many more.

I’ve just one complaint from the book which is that I wasn’t able to find any Great Thoughts, like the one you get in a “Shanataram” about the Religion, or about the Mediocrity in “Atlas Shrugged” or About Human Nature from “The Joker” in a “Dark Knight”. Nevertheless It’s an interesting read.

My purpose of writing this post is to create a picture gallery for all the avid fans of “The Glass Palace”. I’ll start with the cars, mentioned in the book.

In the next posts I’ll write about King Thebaw, Mandalay, Rangoon and “Burma of Colonial times”.

The Cars

Oldsmobile Defender 1914	Piccard-Pictet
Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8A Berlina	Paige Daytona
1930 Austin Chummy	Jowett
Ford V-8 staff Car	Alvis staff Car
1929 Packard saloon	1954 Czech-built Skoda
Duesenberg

I found few references to Planes which were used around that time, mainly between Calcutta and Rangoon. I’d never read much about Sea planes and I found the descriptions really fascinating (when Manju and Neel travelled to Yangon after their Wedding). With their luxury, they sound like luxury Yachts. There are references to Hollywood movies, in which these planes were shown, ( I was too bored with the research for cars and planes so just ignored them.)

Martin C-130 seaplane : Pan Am (Pan American Airways)

Humphrey Bogart’s plane

Hope this post will help the Readers of Glass Palace, visualize the Book a little better.