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2 States
-The Story Of My Marriage
Rs. 95
Rupa Publications
A mere mention of Chetan Bhagat can excite the heart of young India. Every school-kid knows his name. His books sell millions of copies in a week only! His name is a common topic among debates over issues regarding modern Indian English and Literary values. Why then we are all so crazy about him? His characters are not over-the-moon, but simple common folks. His plots are filmy (well, most of the time) and he never ends up in tragic debauchery. Then? Its because this guy draws his stories from contemporary lifestyle, where his “you” and “I” characters actually undergo our own daily unacknowledged struggles, say at both social and economic interfaces. What makes them different from us? Well, like all fictional stories, they are slightly different because they never give up and eventually achieve their aims, although perhaps, after going through a lot of tear-shedding and emotional atyachaars!
Like Hari of Five Point Someone, Shyam of One Night@Call Centre or Govind of Three Mistakes of My Life Fame, Two States has Krish Malhotra, the smart, witty and manipulative Young IIMA graduated Punjabi Guy who is highly publicized by his over-emotional mother, and regretted by his over-disciplined and annoying retired army officer dad. Krish has two aims, wait, three actually. He wants to marry his lovely voted best-fresher-of-the-year by lusty IIMA peers South Indian girlfriend, Ananya Swaminathan who has “trapped” him, heart, soul and body; he wants to earn enough to be able to live his dream- to be a writer and write something meaningful (can we sense Chetan speaking through Krish?) and finally, he secretly yet unknowingly wishes to be reunited to his estranged father and be a not so “fucked” up family.
Does he get all this?
Yes!
But after 6 months of trials and tribulations under the reluctant and reserved eyes of Ananya’s over-silent, disciplined and silent-movie un-animated characters like parents. And a comic Delhi episode with Ananya winning over Krish’s mother and a massive showdown at Goa that leads to a temporary breakup between the couple rendering depressive suicidal tendencies into the poor guy’s mind state.
Rescuer?
Krish’s dad, of course, who did it because “my son needed help” and who confesses he has been a “bad” dad but after all is his dad.What else can you expect from Chetan who loves uniting families?!
The biggest selling English -language novelist of India gives you a lot of tips on career, love, family, relationships and blunder. Don’t read the book to find faults in Chetan’s literary skills because you must not expect his language to be anything but witty, sarcastic and lucid.
Two States is, thus, a simple autobiographical story stunningly told. And Krish is definitely a better, more sensible, reasonable and responsible Hari whose meekness and infirmity we liked as well as despised(the book starts where Hari left at IIT). He is perhaps a younger Chetan. And through his eyes, Chetan approaches a unilateral state minus “complexion complex”, minus “Madrasi” idly slaughter by Punjabi Paneer tikka and chicken and drifts towards a modern state of India. The dig at both Punjabis and South Indians is obvious, but its Chetan. So let’s ignore and have fun!! After all, the hero hardly knows the best way to treat a banana leaf: ” I didn’t know whether to wipe my hands or eat with it”
He did goof up at a couple of places like where Radha, Ananya’s mother is allowed to share stage with SP Balasubramanium and Hariharan which needed more dramatization or where protagonists use cliched style to woo prospective in-laws. Also some parts were lengthier although we must remember that when it comes to manipulating parents, we end up taking more than the stipulated time! One more thing that remained incomprehensible was that, why did he include only South Indian “something, something” words and not Punjabi. An answer to this may be that since its Krish who is Punjabi himself, so, he did not bother adding his own language as a part of amusement. But well, digs must be balanced, aint it?
So, the bottom line is, if ever you end up falling in love with someone who does not belong to your state, and intend to bind yourself into a wedlock, you know what you have to do.
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The White Tiger
By Arvind Adiga
Price: $17.16
Rs. 395
Reading just few pages of Arvind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker prize awarded bestseller The White Tiger, written in an “e-epistolary” (novel based on exchanges of letters, here e-mails) framework, a conversation between a young entrepreneur of Indian Balram and an masked throughout the end Chinese Premier, can compel you to make a full frontal assessment of the visage of contemporary India, with its rural and urban societies, modern and traditional lives, and dependence on both ancient lifestyle and cutting-edge technology- the India we all understand and do not. The novel can be accredited as perhaps, one of the best synonyms representing not just the darkness of rural India but also the apparent gloom of a high-profile city life. It makes you witness a whole galore of characters, small and putrid, rich and fat. It shows you not just the narrow-mindedness of villagers but the shallowness of rich craving for money, power and fame. The pride we Indians feel for our motherland is somehow, lost, in the emptiness of the vast stretches of slums, of brothels and of cockroach-infected driver quarters of the capital of India. It makes you wonder how can a tiny little “white tiger” born amidst the depressingly gloomy, dirty and fetid crushing rural poverty claim his place between the self-made and self-proclaimed winners of Bangalore’s sophisticated entrepreneurship.
courtesy independent.co.uk
Taking a dig at the prevalent oppressive Indian Caste System and an appalling state of corruption visible among all the levels of hierarchy in politics and business, Adiga speaks through the mind and eyes of Balram Halwai, the main protagonist of the sinister novel who after a series of plannings, manipulations and finally a murder, finds himself writing an e-autobiography to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, on the eve of the latter’s visit to India.
We find Balram remembering with bitterness, his economic disadvantages and with pride, his moral decrepitude. We are made aware of the smartest boy of Laxmangarh who has won for himself the title of The White Tiger; we are told of his various adventures in the city of Delhi. Although Adiga, unlike Chetan Bhagat, excludes sex as a power-drive from the novel, we are made conscious of the importance it plays in disengaging a man from his daily drudgery.
An enticing figure, the white tiger a.k.a Balram tells us how he had fostered higher ambitions than the rest of his clan, how he had ensured he occupies a junior chauffer’s place at The Stork’s ( village lord) Delhi residence, how he had slowly educated himself from the streets of India and how he had risen up to seal his employer’s confidence on him and finally how he had exchanged his employer’s son, Ashok’s fate with his own. At every step, we are provided with hard-hitting nitty-witty imagery of modern India, rough, rude and disillusioned. Rising India is shown contaminated with lust and self-centric living.
Adiga ensures the book doesn’t end up becoming a sprawling epic. Instead, in a remarkably witty manner, he knits the wide spectrum of the thrilling narration, reiterating the climax of the story with the line “” increasing our palpitation and never letting us breathe in peace for a second. The vicious multitudinous social pre-condition is being snapped at angrily and somehow, we feel sympathetic with the hero and his supposed exploitation and his cumbersome spiral dislocation until he finally comes out of his brooding, ferociously tearing apart his master’s meek greedy throat and slits open the fortunes of his life, to truly become the White Tiger.
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well the WHITE TIGER is an awesome book..read it if u have the guts to confront reality, if u have the sensitivity to understand the problems of our country put forward so authentically by the author. the book, in my opinion does not have any outstanding literary quality. but it is worth reading due to its power of making us think, sit up and feel the energy of the story. the book ends on a note of sinister triumph and makes us sigh once more regarding the future of our country.