Book Review: Beautiful Thing

If ever I was a man looking for a nymph to satiate my carnal desires I would have looked for Leela. She is all that a man would want from a woman. Incredibly sensuous, feisty and fiery in every way, a go getter, a no nonsense bar dancer who titillates and makes you fall in love with her in a jiffy!

Yes, Leela is a bar dancer. And I am surprised that I found myself drawn to Leela and her story. Not just as a reader or a former television producer looking for great real stories, but as a woman. I must admit that at some level I wanted to be like Leela. Not for Leela’s past or the future that she heads to at the end of the book, but the present that the author so brilliantly portrays.

 

Sonia Faleiro was a reporter in search of a story when she met Leela – a beautiful and charismatic  19 year old bar dancer with a story to tell.  And it is in the quest for a story that Sonia gets drawn into the world of bar dancers. A world of gorgeous women, stories filled with sex, incest, crime, passion, gangsters, pimps, eunuchs, sex workers and politicians.

When Sonia meets Leela she is 19 years old and is the highest paid bar dancer at Night Lovers in Mumbai. She tells the author, “Challenge me…any man, any time. A hi-fi man, your kind of a man. I’ll snap him up , like a fisherman does a pomfret.” She has a lover in the owner of the bar Purushottam Shetty and nurses a desire of being the legitimate consort to her lover. But she knows that he would never leave his family for her. 

With Sonia, Leela takes you into the sordid world of bar dancers, women who were considered higher than sex workers, but then the side lines often merged. Some of the accounts of bar dancers shocked me. For instance, the story of  the woman who was raped by her own son. Most of the stories had the same beginning. Of women exploited at the hands of their families, especially fathers and painful childhood. Leela who ran away from home at 13 makes Mumbai her home. She demands a certain amount of  money, has an independence that marriage and domesticity would never have given her. It also becomes a reason why she chooses to be exploited by her family still, but is reluctant to break away completely. She tolerates her mother who lives off Leela’s earnings, but when she leaves her behind the mother quite predictably opens up her own brothel for her sustenance.

Leela takes you into the world of bar dancers, where disease, love, dreams, disappointment, fear and passion cohabit. The narrative flows seamlessly and you are pulled into the quagmire of storytelling where you have to remind yourself that what you are reading is a piece of non-fiction. It’s real. The stories are real. The shock is real. 

The language is real too. The author hasn’t refrained from putting colourful profanities in the dialogues, much like they would be in real life. Equally interesting are particular nuances in dialect, for instance ‘bijniss’, ‘kalass’ and ‘kustomer’, these are words that are to be pronounced in a  certain way. Even writing them as ‘business’, ‘class’ and ‘customer’ won’t have the same effect.

Pretty early in life Leela decides that “..if this was going to keep happening to me, then at least I should profit from it, I should eat from it.” And she does exactly that. Ferociously independent Leela however is aware that she is liberated in a different sense of the word. Leela tells Sonia, “When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours… she implores. “Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road.”

Leela’s fairly tale life is of course snubbed at the end. The dance bars close down and Leela meanders into prostitution. She finds her way to Dubai as a gangster’s moll and Sonia loses her in the melee of humanity.

And just like her I wanted to find her. To seek her out of her present and know that she is fine. That her spirit isn’t lost. That she hasn’t given up.

I was sad to finish the book, for there was no closure here. I’ll recommend it highly, as a piece of riveting journalistic story telling Beautiful Thing will not disappoint you.

Book Review: The Forest of Stories by Ashok K. Banker

Now there is a little story about Ashok Banker’s writing and me . Last year when I got pregnant a lot many elders advised me to read religious texts. Given my impatience for spirituality and anything close to religion, I was ready to skip this advisory when Ashok Banker’s literature jumped out of the bookshelf! I picked up the first of the Ramayana series, expecting very little. Personally between the two greatest works of Indian mythology I love the Mahabharata unconditionally and to me Ramayana until AB’s version meant a plastic, robotic Arun Govil as Ram! Like the unexpected AB’s narrative caught me unaware and I found myself falling in love with his story telling. A fine example of colour writing, reading Banker was like watching a 3D film with tinted glasses and reclined seats.

With Mahabharata my expectations and excitement grew manifold. It is indeed the greatest epics of all times and like they say  you can find almost any situation in the Mahabharata replicated in the real world, I too have had a long term association with the text and its characters.

Banker calls the Mahabharata his MBA, a crafty take on the exercise of writing this book. His introduction takes you by surprise and its only there that you see and hear Ashok Banker the author of the book. He clearly puts it, it is a simple retelling of Vyasa’s Mahabharata. A retelling of the Sanskrit shlokas, with the sole purpose of making available this massive epic to his reader. My mother picked up the book the moment it arrived saying, “Oh! So this is the Mahabharata! How far has he covered in this part?”  The answer lies in its nine ‘pakshas’. Banker in his own words, says he has stuck to Vyasa’s text as close as possible in structure and actuals. There is very little imagination or deviation from the original, something that I had expected  after the Ramayana series. But then with the Mahabharata, the lesser you play around with it, the better it is!

The book gets its name from the title from the first Paksha, Sauti’s Tale. Set deep into the Naimishavan, at the ashram of Kulapati Shaunaka arrives a dusty traveller with sad tidings: Maharishi Krishna Dweipayana has passed on. Yet the great collator of the Vedas has left behind a fabulous legacy, the epic narrative poem called Maha Bharata. The traveller is the renowned Kusalavya, Ugrasrava, son of Lomarasana, fondly called Sauti. Sauti like the patient, trained, well informed narrator takes the ashramites and acolytes through the magnanimous tale of Maha Bharata and with them he hand holds the reader. As Sauti navigates through what is like the preamble to the text he sets up characters, explains their genealogy, their lives and predicaments. Most of the characters he paints before us are crucial to the text of Mahabharata and have a significance in the great narrative. One of the principle points being the role and importance of Krishna Dweipayana in  the lineage of the Kurus. I had quite forgotten that Vyasa sired Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura!

Equally enchanting are the myriad other tales retold in the book. The Tale of Parashuram is the finest as Banker in his typically descriptive writing takes us through the story of Jamadagni and his son Parashuram who takes on the mighty Kshatriya King to bring back Indra’s calf. In this early action packed chapter the reader can actually ‘see’ the action unfold before his eyes. Thereafter the narrative more or less simply accounts the tales of the other characters – from charting the lineage of the Bhrigu, the story of Chyavana and Ruru, to the story behind King Janmajaya’s sarpa yagna, Ugrasrava takes his listeners (and us) through the stories of Amrit Manthan, Garuda, the great Naaga Vasuki and Shesha. The story of Satyavati and the birth of Krishna Dweipayana is narrated, for it is from there that the legend of the Kauravas and Pandavas originate. The ninth Paksha is dedicated to the Dushayant and Shaktuntala. Way back, almost a decade ago this love story was part of my curriculum in college. Re-reading it in Banker’s words brought back the memories.

The original Mahbharata as Vyasa wrote it was composed in 8800 shlokas, known as Jaya that covered the history of the war between the Kauravas and Pandavas. With further retelling, Vyasa expanded it to 24,000 shlokas, making it the original text and narrative of the great Bharata.  After a point the names come and go, leaving the reader a wee-bit dizzy but then it is hardly Banker’s fault! Vyasa’s book was never up for review, and recounting every little alphabet of that text with such minute precision is a momentous task! This is just the first book, there are seventeen more to go! Going by Banker’s commitment and penchant for mythology I am certain my bookshelf will be soon filling up.

A word about the publisher too – I am loving the fact that Westland is picking up innovative story tellers. After Amish and Ashwin, Ashok is a great addition!

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!

Book Review: The Newsroom Mafia

It’s been years since my Dad and I switched our reading habits and moved on to different genres. My first book from BookChums however had both of us fighting over it! Thank God, I had a review to do and he relented.

As I read The Newsroom Mafia, the one phrase that kept echoing in my mind from start to finish was “Dhanda Hai Par Ganda Hai Yeh”. RGV’s 2002 film ‘Company’ based on Dawood Ibrahim’s life and times kept coming back to me, and like a background score my brain kept humming the song! It is quite a thing that like the film the book is based on an underworld Don Narayan Swamy, but the ‘dhanda’ that the book really refers to is the profession of journalism. And being an insider in the business of news production I know how far a corruptible business this is! Considering the writer is a former journalist (with a name strikingly similar to his star reporter in the novel Oscar Pinto) and is a teacher of journalism, I’d like to ask him a thing or two about how he instructs his students on the ethics of journalism! I wonder what his students would have to say after reading the book. *wicked smile*

The allure of a news scoop is as tempting as a dollop of ice cream. For a newspaper reporter it is about having a headline, like for a television correspondent it translates into higher TRP. The rewards are too immediate and the hunger of bigger, mouthful stories is insatiable. Oscar Pinto’s camaraderie with supercop Donald Fernandes is a fine example of how a journalist befriends a cop for mutual benefit. A Police Commissioner hungry for publicity and a news reporter looking for the next big exclusive are a lethal combination. This mutually beneficial relationship has its own pitfalls though, like Oscar and Donald’s friendship goes through. Twists and turns, exclusives and revelations later, the last page of the novel holds the key to their connection. You cannot dislike them for the deal that they have, but you can’t like them either! You will cluck your tongue, shake your head and read every crime news piece in the newspaper with a sense of doubt.

The novel is set in the late 1980’s when Mumbai wasBombay. I found that very, very interesting. For one it was really the time when the big bad ‘underworld’ was spreading its roots in the city. Illicit liquor joints, bootlegging, smuggling, running prostitution hubs, funding elections and political parties, it was really the precursor to the grey days of crime in the city. Terrorism came in a little later, not too far though. I quite liked the Godfather, Narayan Swamy. A Tamilian living in the city ofBombay(since I am talking about a Don who lived in a city calledBombay, I hope no one will drag me to jail!) rises to the rank of a Godfather and in the wake of his new found status looks at covering up his tracks in the murky world of crime. ‘Sarkar’ anyone? If RGV’s Amitabh Bachchan starrer was a tribute to Mario Puzo’s Godfather, Oswald Pereira’s Narayan Swamy is an amalgamation of the two! I quite like the Don actually. The part where he deals with politician Bhoomipanar is hilarious! He depends on his press triumvirate and when the time is right he coldly eliminates the odd one out. Quite like a Don who doesn’t get his hands dirty, he plays his pawns in a way that his work is done. But really his dark deeds haunt him and he looks at ‘social service’ as a means of cleansing his soul. The drama around his personality works!

Most of the characters around Narayan Swamy’s den are sycophants, except for the journalist turned economical adviser to the Don. He becomes a turncoat and is duly punished for it. Quite the thing that you would expect, right? His men are scared of him, like they revere him and whitewash his crime riddled empire with the social work he does. The lawyer and chief adviser Chandran is an interesting character. The fact that tears sprout his eyes at the mention of his benefactor makes him a likeable chap.

The plot and structure of the book is apt. A crime thriller has to be a page turner. It has to hold your attention with every word. The Newsroom Mafia does all that and more. In parts I could imagine Oscar Pinto’s narration as a voice over in a film. Imagine a Makrand Deshpande reading it…nice! That brings me to the one quality that I think almost everyone will agree to. The Newsroom Mafia is a book waiting to be converted into a film. The city, its tryst with the underworld, a larger than life Don who you cannot totally hate, his army of sycophants, corrupt and upright cops, dirty politicians and  sullied journalists – Oswald Pereira has a story that is screaming for Ram Gopal Varma’s attention. Yes, despite the film makers recent duds at the box office, he is the one man who handles the underworld as an excellent cinematic subject!

This post was written for BookChums. It originally appeared here.

http://www.bookchums.com/bookreview.php?reviewid=5156

Book Review: The Iron Tooth

The one thing that I as a new parent wish for my son is that he grows up to love reading like his Mum. He will one day inherit my kiddie reads that my mother has meticulously stacked at home. But being an indulgent parent I went out shopping at the Jamshedpur Book Fair to buy my son some of his own books. All hoping that one day he’ll read. Today’s kids have Hannah Montana playing and Harry Potter as their bedside reads. I wonder if anyone reads the Famous Five and Mallory Towers anymore? So quite naturally I was eager to see what kids read today. More so, what is my son likely  to read in the years to come.

This review, thanks to Blog Adda is of book called The Iron Tooth by a 23 year old first time author Prithvin Rajendran. Children’s literature is extremely fascinating, and so I picked this up happily. However, the first few pages disappointed me. To be honest, the book failed to excite me until the end! The mythical world of Goodabaiya replete with mystery, adventure and romance The Iron Tooth held a lot of promise. It has all the ingredients of a children’s fiction – mythical creatures like Medusas,  fairies, vampires, trolls, ghouls, an evil King, a desirable Princess and a Knight in shining armour.

I hate giving away the plot of a book in a review. So if you want to know about the story, here is where you can go.

The plot is typical of a fairy tale. The prologue which is available for a read on Prithvin’s site is teasing and gets the reader and yes even a pre-teen curious about who is the unknown father and what happens to the troll and human baby.  Quite like a story with a hidden message, King Darum is shown as the flawed ruler and together with his vain daughter he brings upon a curse on his kingdom, Dashter. As he is doomed and Nova imprisoned by the evil Faerum, the reader is assured as Princix enters the storyline. The hero of the story is a young, honest man who is the ‘chosen one’ to fight evil. Bravery is lauded. Friendship is held precious. Battles are fought. There is enough drama in this 200 page book that will make you want to go ahead, but the execution is where it falters.

To begin with I wish the author used a more consistent language. In parts there are more complex words used, in some others it feels as if the author was tired of writing intelligently! There is a liberal dose of old English used, so ”thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘ye’ are abundant. There are chunks of verse that characters have either ‘chanted’ or ‘sang’. And there are heavy portions of prose describing what the characters did in passive voice. As I read along I craved for punchy lines, exchange of words between characters. Instead the text is replete with description and more description. Just the thing that made the reading more tedious than usual. Besides there were a couple of sore grammatical errors that cannot be passed off as printing errors!

It’s the author’s mythical world and so I have no authority what so ever to question him on its inhabitants. However,  I felt there were far too many characters with too many similar sounding names. After a while they all became tongue twisters to me. Though Printhvin must be credited for resurrecting an abandoned letter in the English language like ‘x’ and coming up with so many nouns with it – Princix, Ushix, Elnix, Greatix, Lasixx, Enwixx!

The plot meanders to keep the reader’s interest level from ebbing. So from one adventure to another, it is quite a roller coaster ride for Princix and his loyal reader. Some of the sub plots were inevitable and predictable – like how can an adventure end without the death of one of the brave men?

Prithvin has a loving attachment to his writing. Flip to the end of the book and there are the maps of Goodabaiya and the route map to Dashter. A chronology of the Sensatic Calender, and the code to the native language Nivthrip reminded of my school days when we devised a secret code language to write chits between friends!

Prithvin’s introduction says that he has grown up to his mother’s tales of mythical creatures and his father’s gifts of He-Man toys. Quite naturally, this is where the story of Princix and his adventures germinated. There is promise in his imagination, and I won’t insult it by comparing it with JK Rowling’s, but I hope Prithvin and his editors pay a closer look at his writing from now on!

This review is a part of the <a href=”http://blog.blogadda.com/2011/05/04/indian-bloggers-book-reviews” target=”_blank”>Book Reviews Program</a> at  <a href=”http://www.blogadda.com“>BlogAdda.com</a>. Participate now to get free books!

Book Review: Bombay Duck is a Fish

It’s raining ‘authors’ inIndia. And perhaps it is the best time for wanna-be authors to get those manuscripts out in the market. That’s because, my dear friends, there is a reader for almost any book in the market today! Thanks to a few good friends turning authors, free books from a friendly portal and an invite to review a book for a book discussion, I have added some debutante authors to my bookshelf.

The latest addition is Kanika Dhillon and her debut novel Bombay Duck is a Fish

Kanika’s book is a parable for almost every starry-eyed entrant in the world of dreams. The fact that she mentions Shah Rukh Khan as one such erstwhile struggler in tinsel town, is what makes us look for similarities between her protagonist Neki Brar and her favourite actor SRK who is nothing less than a God to Kanika. Of course everything falls in place when you read a little more about the author. She heads the Creative Content Division at SRK’s Red Chillies, has written the screenplay for his most ambitious home project till date and that he launched her debut novel, clearly makes her a writer who has a story worth reading. But is it?

Let’s begin by saying that Bombay Duck is a Fish is a book that I would write if I were in Kanika’s place. She shares my roots, that is of being a small town girl, goes on to study in one of the most premier colleges of the country and that’s where the similarities end. She has a degree from LSE and then chooses to work in filmdom, whereas I decided to get a degree in ‘non fiction’ and chose the idiot box as my medium. But there is an inherent desire to work in a feature film, to dapple in the supposedly magical world of cinema, live my little Bollywood dream and see my name scroll by at the bottom of a long-winded credit roll at the end of a film. And yes, if I have SRK as my mentor, who knows I may have my name in the opening credit too!

The opening of the book is promising. A drunken girl perched at the ledge of her house’s parapet, flipping through her diary and contemplating the best way to make a defining jump! Neki Brar hooks you at the word go! Kanika’s heroine is a tragedienne, a comedian, a satirist, a fighter, an observer within her world. Playing to the stereotype of a newbie in Mumbai, she fights as long as it is in her to fight…and then gives it up! It takes a lot for this Amritsar kudi to convince her authoritarian father and almost senile mother that she is not made for an MNC job, that film making is her passion. And once the game of persuasion is played, she packs her bag and jets off to Mumbai. It is here that the first impressions of a small towner help Kanika write Neki’s character. Consider her very first post in her diary:

“…In my mind, Mumbai is beautiful; in reality is stinks. Thankfully memories don’t smell, so when I read this a few years from now I will be able to forget the musty smell and re-live this moment stench-free!”

Neki reaches Rose Mahal and standing at the threshold of her new home she is welcomed by the fabled Mumbai monsoons…who wouldn’t love this beautiful welcome? Her room mates, Shikha, Rosh and Zoya intimidate her and the reader, but leave you with a promise that they are likeable characters. Which they turn out to be! Neki’s professional life as it begins sweeps away a maximum part of the book. Considering Kanika started her filmy career with Farah Khan on the sets of Om Shanti Om, it is little surprise then that Neki is selected to work for Fiza Kareem and her magnum opus is called Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Little connections work and help you read the novel better. While I have never worked as an AD on a film set, I know for a fact that it isn’t one of the easiest places to work in. Being the 5^th AD is definitely not a celebratory position and definitely does not paint the rosy picture that Neki does for her mother in her letters. But the struggles that Neki keeps away from her mother are true! Karan, Shivani, PJ, Sam and Kriti are for real – they are stereotypes easily identified in familiar circles of Ads. The hostility, the competition, the blame game is for real and Neki’s trials are believable. While Neki moves a lifetime within the span of one film, she also loses herself in the journey. Why do small towners in an author’s world have to fall in love with the wrong man, get bumped and pushed to the edge of nadir? What makes their tragedy truly unsympathetic is that they are aware of their mistakes, and despite their ‘know all’ helplessness they let themselves become victims! So, on the one hand, Neki’s mistakes as a novice on the film make you smile and empathize with her, on the other, her doomed love affair with an actor makes you cringe in every line! She is stupid…and in that is her tragedy.

Neki works hard to make friends. She loses some, earns some others. She learns the ropes of Bollywood. Paints a rosy picture for her mother, but remains honest to her diary. But in all of this she loses her battle too soon. Neki is predictable; some of the other characters too and in this familiarity lay the very filmy formula of this film writer! In parts the book is a good read, especially the parts when Neki muses over her life’s experiences; in some others the familiarity breeds contempt. I wish Kanika had worked a little more to tighten the nuts and bolts.

The writing is simple, conversational and pacy enough. The constant juggle between what Neki thinks at the moment and what she had written in her diary make for an interesting time travel motif. The length and titles of the chapters are catchy, good to push you to turn those pages.

Pick up the book if you are an SRK fan like Kanika. Pick it up if you love Bollywood. Pick it up if you are awestruck by the world of film making. Pick it up if you are an outsider in Mumbai and look up at the city as the place that will fulfill your dreams. But don’t pick it up if you are easily discouraged. Don’t pick up the book if you don’t have the mettle to fight every roadblock that comes before you and your dream. Don’t pick up the book if you are a small towner and believe that your fight is only worth a little! And definitely don’t let your parents read it if you like Neki look at film making as a dream job!

This review is a part of the <a href=”http://blog.blogadda.com/2011/05/04/indian-bloggers-book-reviews” target=”_blank”>Book Reviews Program</a> at  <a href=”http://www.blogadda.com“>BlogAdda.com</a>. Participate now to get free books!