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2.92 AVERAGE
2.92 AVERAGE
Like many others here, i picked up this book after I fell in love with the author's previous work. But i did not have high expectations from the book and i was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be an interesting read. But with one glaring problem i realized halfway through.
Here's everything good about this book.
The writing style is vividly descriptive and it has a poetic quality that i really enjoyed. His description of the quaint little village on the Nilgiris made me want to visit the place someday. Even the way he fondly reminisces about good times in Bombay in the 90's made me nostalgic for a time i never even experienced. The story starts with an enigmatic character and he stays an enigma until the very end, keeping us guessing what he's thinking. As a storyteller, the author does a fine job.
My only problem is that it's a man's story through and through, set in a society that very much includes women. Where are all the women?
There's not a single female character with more than two lines of dialogue. A couple of women appear solely as love interests and objects of pleasure, while enigmatic and conflicted men try to save the country. And the absence of women is so seamlessly believable that if i were a man and not a fundamentalist, i would never have noticed. It is disturbing how easy it is to eliminate women from the main narrative.
The story scours through history to find ideals our country must emulate, and comes up with three men - all famous enough that their ideals are already taught to us young girls when we are told not to be like them, but to find someone like them to protect us. The entire story made me feel like i exist to be protected and not to fight. It reminded me how it's still a man's world out there.
But other than that, the ideologies about secularism are articulated well and easy to follow for anyone with basic GK and awareness about society.
Here's everything good about this book.
The writing style is vividly descriptive and it has a poetic quality that i really enjoyed. His description of the quaint little village on the Nilgiris made me want to visit the place someday. Even the way he fondly reminisces about good times in Bombay in the 90's made me nostalgic for a time i never even experienced. The story starts with an enigmatic character and he stays an enigma until the very end, keeping us guessing what he's thinking. As a storyteller, the author does a fine job.
My only problem is that it's a man's story through and through, set in a society that very much includes women. Where are all the women?
There's not a single female character with more than two lines of dialogue. A couple of women appear solely as love interests and objects of pleasure, while enigmatic and conflicted men try to save the country. And the absence of women is so seamlessly believable that if i were a man and not a fundamentalist, i would never have noticed. It is disturbing how easy it is to eliminate women from the main narrative.
The story scours through history to find ideals our country must emulate, and comes up with three men - all famous enough that their ideals are already taught to us young girls when we are told not to be like them, but to find someone like them to protect us. The entire story made me feel like i exist to be protected and not to fight. It reminded me how it's still a man's world out there.
But other than that, the ideologies about secularism are articulated well and easy to follow for anyone with basic GK and awareness about society.
Watching a person whom you have known for a long time turning into a monster is how a lot of survivors talk about riots. The neighbors you thought you know, the people who you see every day they may all turn out to be slobbering, drooling maniacs when the rage virus catches hold of them. Especially when the riot takes on the hues of religion, the carnage is unbelievable and India has been a witness to this right from the next day of its independence. Having read Khushwant Singh, Sasi Tharoor, Collins & LaPierre and O.V. Vijayan, I was keen on getting to this book which seemed to talk about riots and how it influences lives. The back jacket blurb talked about how the lives of Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi influences one man who bore the scars of the Mumbai riots to change the future of a sleepy little town in south India. The overall idea of this book is brilliant but the execution is to lifeless that finishing this was a chore.
In the late 70’s and 80’s, a lot of Malayalam novels followed a certain set structure. From a small town somewhere in Kerala a young man escapes poverty and unemployment to join the teeming masses in Mumbai or Delhi and grows up into manhood there. He undergoes many a test of mettle there and discovers love, sex, politics, drugs and alcohol and depending on the authors ideas his future life is sketched out for us. Authors like M.T. Vasudevan Nair, M. Mukundan and O.V. Vijayan have explored this bildungsroman in their works which are landmarks for any reader of Malayalam literature. This book follows the same pattern but was a tasteless and bland rehash of the masters ! Its more than a day since I finished reading this book and I still have no idea what was the objective of this book. The characters, their motivations, their circumstances none of these makes any sense. It was just a book filled with a lot of words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters that aimlessly wandered over a lot of landscapes in north and south India.
Not recommended !
In the late 70’s and 80’s, a lot of Malayalam novels followed a certain set structure. From a small town somewhere in Kerala a young man escapes poverty and unemployment to join the teeming masses in Mumbai or Delhi and grows up into manhood there. He undergoes many a test of mettle there and discovers love, sex, politics, drugs and alcohol and depending on the authors ideas his future life is sketched out for us. Authors like M.T. Vasudevan Nair, M. Mukundan and O.V. Vijayan have explored this bildungsroman in their works which are landmarks for any reader of Malayalam literature. This book follows the same pattern but was a tasteless and bland rehash of the masters ! Its more than a day since I finished reading this book and I still have no idea what was the objective of this book. The characters, their motivations, their circumstances none of these makes any sense. It was just a book filled with a lot of words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters that aimlessly wandered over a lot of landscapes in north and south India.
Not recommended !