Review of "The White Tiger"
More than winning the Booker Prize, I believe, the main achievement of the book is that it has reintroduced and reignited the debate in the mainstream about the underprivileged India. The India which was drowned in the din of India Shining, the India which was successfully wished away by Ad&PR blitz, so convincingly that the "haves" class of Indians in metro now find the real India fictional.
True enough we have had major developmental landmarks in the past decade, in Information Technology to name one and the effect has trickeld down, fairly down. Even rickshaw pullers can be seen carrying mobile phones. But is that enough or is that the only thing required? A mobile set connects you to the wider world, but it doesn't disconnect you from the "Rooster Coop" to use Adiga's analogy. You are very much rooted there and have to live with its evils.
To borrow another analogy, this time from our national passion, the game of cricket : economic development in the past decade has gathered a swinging momentum which has propelled the middle class to hitherto unexperienced levels of prosperity. But what about the other side, the rougher one. It has got roughed up more and it is a matter of time when the reverse swing will come into play and shatter the stumps, catching the batsman unwares, the way the protagonists' employer was on the Ridge Road.
Having said that, the book itself isn't great by any yardstick, neither in the choice of content nor in the treatment of the subject. If at all it is too real for me to adequately term it as a work of top class fiction. Since I myself belong to the Darkness of the Gangetic Plain, I am acutely aware that the plot of the story is mundane, to the extent banal for the people living there. Not many would even raise an eyebrow if the story were to be narrated to them.
This to me captures the chasm, the divide between the two Indias, more clearly than anything else. One India would not find any literary merit in the work as it is a everyday tale for them. The second India has been seduced into percieving the whole of India as something entirely different and it is responding with shock and unbelievable awe...is this still happenning in India...we thought we left that with the 20th century....and heaping prizes on the book for being an eye opener.
For someone like me, who has escaped from the Darkness into the Light, all I can give is a Sphinx like smile, having seen both the sides of the coin, knowing fully well that the two classes of India have been flowing together for millenia, will continue to flow for more millenia but like the sides of the same river, from the source to the mouth, will never meet.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Escape Routes
Everyone in my immediate circle is all too familiar with a Monday to Friday routine, with different timings of course, depending on the timezone in which our interactions with customers take place. Fridays offer more relief than hope, of having seen through, lived through another tedious week. The anticipation of a free weekend is palpable, almost tangible.
After one has exhausted the list of weekend activities that the most critical existential crises play themselves out. The many options that weekends offer are - get togethers at friends place, movies, pubbing/discs, hobby cultivation (books, photography, music) etc more or less in the same order as one starts graduating to the adult from the youthful phase of life. By the time one starts approachng 30, this routine is hardly exciting and there comes a phase when all that we mention under "hobbies/interests" in our profiles actually become revulsive. That is when the masks that we wear to delude ourselves slip off, the charades that we perform week on week to assure ourselves of our interesting/happenning lives expose the hollowness within.
What follows is complete emptiness, a sense of ever increasing void within ourselves and we having exhausted our quota of activities long ago. An all pervading sense of ennui engulfs our lives. We start spending more time in the technology enabled virtual world (chatrooms, networking sites, blogs) with our backs to the real world, feeling let down by its inabilty to fill the gaps in our lives.
That is where weekend getaways come into the picture, the leisure tourism as we know it now. Although it is not a panacea, it definitely helps us to break the monotony, recharge ourselves and feel revitalised. Slowly this has develpoed into a full fledged industry finding many obliged buyers like us.
The idea has its appeal for two reasons: one being versatility and the other being novelty.
There is something for everyone. Rafting, paragliding and outdoor activities for adventure freaks, walk in the moonlight in the woods, bird watching and candle lit dinners on cliff tops for the serious minded folks, or just a pleasant stay at exotic locales with sauna, spa and jacuzzi thrown in. Whatever be your taste, there is good chance that someone has already thought of it, if not, would be more than willing to customise.
Since this is a relatively new phenomenon, we generally do not find things getting repititive. A little bit of creative tour planning goes a long way in capturing as well as retaining the interests of the clientele, who get their money worth. Most of us in the highly competitive sector don't mind such welcome interruptions in our normal routine. Almost all of us look forward to and carry vivid reminisces of the time spend in a Nainital, a Mussoorie, a Kasauli and for our colleagues down south, Goa, Munnar, Ooty.
Obviously we can't have these every weekend. An honest question: what is right frequency? Once in four months at least... definitely once in six months. That brings me to the second question: how many of us have actually had the chance to plan a weekend get away of our own choice (not the corporate spoansored, pseudo compulsory team outings) even once in the last 12 months despite having longed for it almost every week?
Even with all the money availibilty, it is our inabilty to afford these in terms of time that is causing the problem. Did some one say time? Weekends are ours, right, two days every week.
That is the point. It is the systematic denudation of all our creative pursuits by our professional lives that has made us so lethargic to take any fresh initiative, hasn't left us with any energy to allow us to make a serious effort to even redeem or salvage whatever we can. This is the height of the existential crisis, wherein we not only feel trapped but get accustomed to the trappings of the trap so much that we seal our escape routes from inside.
And whenever we manage to shake it off and run away, our world treachorously follows us all the way. We feel a voluntary compulsion to call back at our respective workplaces just to assure ourselves that the world behind hasn't come down crashing in our absence. No matter how much we would rue the incoming calls from our office colleagues to find out the location of a particular file on the shared drive, we would be left with shattered egos if no one missed us.
Our itineries are fixed and customised to suit our tastes. Even before we leave we know when we would be back. When we leave with a return ticket in our hand, we are not leaving in the first place. We are leaving a part of us behind. The feeling of escape can never be total in such a scenario.
After one has exhausted the list of weekend activities that the most critical existential crises play themselves out. The many options that weekends offer are - get togethers at friends place, movies, pubbing/discs, hobby cultivation (books, photography, music) etc more or less in the same order as one starts graduating to the adult from the youthful phase of life. By the time one starts approachng 30, this routine is hardly exciting and there comes a phase when all that we mention under "hobbies/interests" in our profiles actually become revulsive. That is when the masks that we wear to delude ourselves slip off, the charades that we perform week on week to assure ourselves of our interesting/happenning lives expose the hollowness within.
What follows is complete emptiness, a sense of ever increasing void within ourselves and we having exhausted our quota of activities long ago. An all pervading sense of ennui engulfs our lives. We start spending more time in the technology enabled virtual world (chatrooms, networking sites, blogs) with our backs to the real world, feeling let down by its inabilty to fill the gaps in our lives.
That is where weekend getaways come into the picture, the leisure tourism as we know it now. Although it is not a panacea, it definitely helps us to break the monotony, recharge ourselves and feel revitalised. Slowly this has develpoed into a full fledged industry finding many obliged buyers like us.
The idea has its appeal for two reasons: one being versatility and the other being novelty.
There is something for everyone. Rafting, paragliding and outdoor activities for adventure freaks, walk in the moonlight in the woods, bird watching and candle lit dinners on cliff tops for the serious minded folks, or just a pleasant stay at exotic locales with sauna, spa and jacuzzi thrown in. Whatever be your taste, there is good chance that someone has already thought of it, if not, would be more than willing to customise.
Since this is a relatively new phenomenon, we generally do not find things getting repititive. A little bit of creative tour planning goes a long way in capturing as well as retaining the interests of the clientele, who get their money worth. Most of us in the highly competitive sector don't mind such welcome interruptions in our normal routine. Almost all of us look forward to and carry vivid reminisces of the time spend in a Nainital, a Mussoorie, a Kasauli and for our colleagues down south, Goa, Munnar, Ooty.
Obviously we can't have these every weekend. An honest question: what is right frequency? Once in four months at least... definitely once in six months. That brings me to the second question: how many of us have actually had the chance to plan a weekend get away of our own choice (not the corporate spoansored, pseudo compulsory team outings) even once in the last 12 months despite having longed for it almost every week?
Even with all the money availibilty, it is our inabilty to afford these in terms of time that is causing the problem. Did some one say time? Weekends are ours, right, two days every week.
That is the point. It is the systematic denudation of all our creative pursuits by our professional lives that has made us so lethargic to take any fresh initiative, hasn't left us with any energy to allow us to make a serious effort to even redeem or salvage whatever we can. This is the height of the existential crisis, wherein we not only feel trapped but get accustomed to the trappings of the trap so much that we seal our escape routes from inside.
And whenever we manage to shake it off and run away, our world treachorously follows us all the way. We feel a voluntary compulsion to call back at our respective workplaces just to assure ourselves that the world behind hasn't come down crashing in our absence. No matter how much we would rue the incoming calls from our office colleagues to find out the location of a particular file on the shared drive, we would be left with shattered egos if no one missed us.
Our itineries are fixed and customised to suit our tastes. Even before we leave we know when we would be back. When we leave with a return ticket in our hand, we are not leaving in the first place. We are leaving a part of us behind. The feeling of escape can never be total in such a scenario.
Life Is All We Have
The world exists for me because I exist here. The world will continue to exist for me as long as I continue to exist here. No sooner than I am gone, nothing else will matter, what goes on here.
Being of reflective disposition, I did ponder about the origin, the continuity, the end of life, pretty often, these eternal mysteries which capture our imagination. However, today I was having a closer look at MY LIFE, my space in the endless scape and my role in it. The reason being a narrow escape earlier in the day and I have lived to tell the tale and I would want to tell the tale.
I was incidently in Connaught Place, New Delhi, where an explosion ocurred. Since we Indians are relatively new and unexposed to such incidents (a legacy which we are unlikely to pass on to our future generations), our responses are primordial, instinctive, untampered, untempered by learnings that are imparted to people who have to encounter it pretty often. What surprised me was my absolute lack of response..for a couple of seconds, the moments that demarcate survival or perishness, I was stunned, numbed and frozen.
Jolted back to my senses with the chaos around, I still could not decide my next response. As if the cognitive mechanism had failed, my abilty to decipher, to interpret my surroundings and act had left me. Almost absent mindedly I followed the crowd, which obviuosly enough didn't have any plan of action either, following their own instinct towards exit, to avoid getting extint.
It took some time before I could be coherent again and decide for myself. The only thing that was on top of my mind was to get out of the place, like everyone else was attempting to.
It was on my way back that the frigidity inside me thawed and what followed was an unending chain of thoughts. Once I had spoken to my near and dear ones, ascertained their locations and safety, my thoughts returend to myself.
How easily it could have been curtains for me or for anyone else who was unfortunate to be present there and fortunate enough to survive. The trauma of having witnessed the incident, having shared the agony and helplessness of everyone around me, the relief of having survived, the reassurance of unscathed fellow travellers on the way back, was too heavy a mix.
Then my mind went back to the split second just before I heard the explosion. I had been thinking of something so trivial as the shoes that I had just bought and how would they fit me..and then blank.
All the world with its riches, its myriad offerrings, its immense pleasures, its innumerable problems could not have matterred aymore. They matter only because I am here, because I am alive to see them matter. In the truest sense, life is all we have...nothing else matters.
Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.
Being of reflective disposition, I did ponder about the origin, the continuity, the end of life, pretty often, these eternal mysteries which capture our imagination. However, today I was having a closer look at MY LIFE, my space in the endless scape and my role in it. The reason being a narrow escape earlier in the day and I have lived to tell the tale and I would want to tell the tale.
I was incidently in Connaught Place, New Delhi, where an explosion ocurred. Since we Indians are relatively new and unexposed to such incidents (a legacy which we are unlikely to pass on to our future generations), our responses are primordial, instinctive, untampered, untempered by learnings that are imparted to people who have to encounter it pretty often. What surprised me was my absolute lack of response..for a couple of seconds, the moments that demarcate survival or perishness, I was stunned, numbed and frozen.
Jolted back to my senses with the chaos around, I still could not decide my next response. As if the cognitive mechanism had failed, my abilty to decipher, to interpret my surroundings and act had left me. Almost absent mindedly I followed the crowd, which obviuosly enough didn't have any plan of action either, following their own instinct towards exit, to avoid getting extint.
It took some time before I could be coherent again and decide for myself. The only thing that was on top of my mind was to get out of the place, like everyone else was attempting to.
It was on my way back that the frigidity inside me thawed and what followed was an unending chain of thoughts. Once I had spoken to my near and dear ones, ascertained their locations and safety, my thoughts returend to myself.
How easily it could have been curtains for me or for anyone else who was unfortunate to be present there and fortunate enough to survive. The trauma of having witnessed the incident, having shared the agony and helplessness of everyone around me, the relief of having survived, the reassurance of unscathed fellow travellers on the way back, was too heavy a mix.
Then my mind went back to the split second just before I heard the explosion. I had been thinking of something so trivial as the shoes that I had just bought and how would they fit me..and then blank.
All the world with its riches, its myriad offerrings, its immense pleasures, its innumerable problems could not have matterred aymore. They matter only because I am here, because I am alive to see them matter. In the truest sense, life is all we have...nothing else matters.
Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.
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