For me, this is the book of
the year, and undoubtedly the best book written about contemporary India. If I
were still in the habit of recommending books I would say read this book. If
you’ve ever read the words India’s growth story then this is the story of the
people who are fueling India’s growth: The sweat and bones on which India’s
growth pyramid will be built.
A couple of days back, a
young Indian journalist, on twitter: Finally read Katherine Boo's Behind the
Beautiful Forevers. So well written but its just another 'life in an indian
slum' plot. What next?
That in a way encapsulates
the popular attitude towards not just the people living in the slums, but also
good writing. Both are transient. We need to quickly move away and onto
whatever’s next.
Two reasons (for sake of
brevity) why this tweet caught my attention.
Firstly, “the plot” is the
real life of people (some living, some now dead) of Annawadi, the slum that
everyone who flies into Mumbai can see from the airplane window. It maybe
far-removed from what we’d like to consider reality, but it isn’t make-belief.
All the events, people and their names in the book are real.
Secondly, what next? Well,
how about instead of tweeting inanities spend time on a ‘story’ with dedication
and tremendous humanity as exemplified by Katherine Boo. Or, perhaps show a
little empathy, if humility and kindness are hard to muster.
In passing, I’d like to quote
the last few lines from the Author’s note:
“In places where government
priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a
neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your
own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished.
The poor blame one another for the choices of the governments and market, and
we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.
It is easy, from a safe
distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption,
where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blistering
hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many
people try to be–…
If the house is crooked and
crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make
anything lie straight?”
That’s a question we need to
ask more often. Read the book, not just for the people in it but also for the
person who wrote it.
Here is an interview with Katherine Boo where she talks about, among other things, the dilemma of writing
about poverty.
The Marriage Plot – Jeffery
Eugenides
Firstly, I am grateful to be
in a city with great public libraries. In a perfect world books would be freely
available to anyone who desires to read them and one would never need to buy a
book, until and unless, one really loves it or wants too. Also the books that
get over-hyped in the media are generally not worth their attention or our
money. If you combine the two facts you’ll understand why governments are so
eager to shut down public libraries.
Secondly, now it’s crystal
clear why American adaptations of ‘great British novels’ are, as they’d say in
this part of the world, a complete cock-up.
Thirdly, were Jane Austen’s
books simply about the ‘marriage plot’? W.H. Auden in his “Letters to Lord
Byron” summed it up the best:
"You could not shock her
more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems
innocent as grass.
It makes me most
uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the
middle class
Describe the amorous effects
of 'brass*,'
Reveal so frankly and with
such sobriety
The economic basis of
society."
How much has the economic
basis of society changed since the times of Auden and Austen? Even in this age
of feminist-era heroines, despite the availability of separation and divorce as
an option, have our expectations from relationships or basic desires undergone
seismic transformation? For many women, in many parts of the world, marriage
still remains a high-stakes game.
Most importantly, Jane
Austen's heroines, for example, are such well articulated characters, they
display real emotional and moral depth that makes us care about what happens to them,
despite the differences in our circumstance. That's something Jeffery
Eugenides seems to have overlooked in his limited reading of 19th century
literature.
(Re-)Read Austen or Auden
instead. Their complete works are available in a library near you. Did I tell
you I am so grateful for public libraries?
*Brass in informal English
means money or cash.
Afterthoughts on Books: part 17
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