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tbr_the_unconquered's review against another edition
1.0
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 !
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