Delhi’s Batgirl - a review of Under Delhi by Sorabh Pant

Delhi has long been called the ‘rape capital’ on India and statistically speaking anyway, perhaps that moniker is not too far wrong. For years, the people of Delhi have yearned for a Batman-type vigilante, and Sorabh Pant’s book puts one on offer.

The narrator and protagonist of Under Delhi, Tanya Bisht, is that vigilante. Traumatised by an incident in her past, she vows to eradicate perpetrators of crime against women, or rather, make them pay. And like Batman, Tanya would never kill.

Outwardly, Tanya is a typical Delhi girl. She loves to drink, she loves to roam around the city and (this is key!) she loves sex. Her attachment to her boyfriend is a purely sexual one – she feels no emotional affection for him. In an already enlightened book, this is perhaps the most enlightened statement of them all. Yes, girls have sex. Yes, girls like sex. No, having sex doesn’t mean that they are in love with that person.

Come night, however, and she jumps into her white Omni van, the favoured vehicle of sexual predators worldwide. She transforms into a destructor of evil, a yuppie Durga if you may, roaming the city in search for those perpetrators who, due to loopholes in the legal system, slipped through the cracks. She catches them, beats them up, takes them to India Gate (where most candle-light vigils take place in the city) and then dumps hot candle wax on their forehead, leaving the villain bound and tied. Oh, before she takes off, Tanya, in true Dexter Morgan fashion (her favourite TV show), also snipes off the baddie’s little finger.

Under Delhi will at times leave you cracking up. The accurate description of Delhites is excellent – people in Ambience Mall who always make you feel underdressed; the pretentious lot who work in Gurgaon; the superrich who blow more cash on one meal than the average per-capita income of the country; the average, slightly corrupt cop and so on and on.

Pant also paints the beauty of the city into his book – the wide, clean roads; the lush and green Lodhi Gardens; the winters in the city. He also manages to put across the devil-may-care attitude that the city has – except for a (perhaps vocal) minority, nobody gives a damn if you drink, smoke, are sexually active or basically do anything that the morality police frowns upon.

The book shows how the typical urban woman is not the innocent belle of the way Bollywood likes to portray her. She is fun-loving, likes to party, likes to get wasted, can smoke, can sleep with whoever she wants and is still an ethical and principled person. And it’s just not just young women – in the book, Tanya discovers that her mother is in a live-in relationship.

However, in my opinion the book lost its plot along the way. Somewhere along the way, around the last quarter of the book, the threads of the story start falling apart and the book becomes a far cry from the tight narrative style of the start of the tale.

I feel that the book ends on a slightly anti-climatic note and her eventual taking down of the great big villain in the book could have been better handled.

But the book is a lot of fun, and perhaps will be even more interesting to read if you are a Delhite – there are certain subtle gags thrown in that only somebody from the city would get. My only complaint is that such a book was written by a guy!

--- Kartikeya

Diary of a Battlefield – a review of This Divided Island by Samanth Subramanian

This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.

So reads the jacket of the book. As soon as I was told that it deals with the war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese and the LTTE, and how it affected the country, I knew I wanted to read this book. I will admit, quite openly, that one of the biggest reasons I picked up this book was sheer curiosity: I wanted to know what the Sri Lankan civil war was all about.

I mean, broadly speaking, I do know what it was about. I know why the Tamil Tigers picked up arms and why they were fighting a bloody war, and what the idea of an Eelam meant for them. 

 

 

 

My curiosity was in part because the civil war in Sri Lanka lasted for the best part of three decades and has shaped the country’s future forever. Can you imagine, a war that lasted for close to 30 years? In a country that has an area of only 65,610 km²! For comparison, Tamil Nadu, the closes Indian state to Sri Lanka, with an area of 130,058 km² is almost twice as large! 68.86 million people live in the Indian state compared to 20.48 million people in Sri Lanka, but these 20-odd million people have lived in a war zone for most of their lives.

Tens of thousands have been born into this war and died without ever knowing what peace feels like. I picked up this book because I was fascinated by what lives these people led, what life meant to them. At the same time, I have a personal connect as well. Members of my own family had to flee to India due to the war and I have never really known what made them leave everything and come to this country. 

 

 

 

And so I picked up this book. And what I loved about it was that except for a few people here and there, the book speaks to none of the main protagonists among the belligerents. The book gives the views of the ordinary man, the civilians and the foot soldiers who were caught in a fight which, towards the end, did little except to devastate the country that they lived in.

Samanth Subramanian has a rare talent as a storyteller. He takes on the role of the chronicler, and weaves characters and their stories in with such ease that they fit into the narrative seamlessly. If he has one shortcoming, it is that on occasion, he seems to wander off a little, leaving the reader a little bewildered. However few Indian authors have the ability to share the horrors of what they have witnessed and Subramanian’s skill in recounting these tales of terror is commendable.

His style is reminiscent of William Darymple, Mark Tully and P Sainath, yet Subramanian’s book deals with the issue of war. He talks of war in a wry, blunt yet curiously emotional tone, which leaves the reader feeling a little masochistic – repulsed by the ugliness of it all yet eager to read on. The LTTE may have been defeated and the civil war may have been officially over but as he puts it, 

Sri Lanka was a country pretending that it had been suddenly scrubbed clean of violence. But it wasn’t, of course. By some fundamental law governing the conservation of violence, it was now erupting outside the battlefield, in strange and unpredictable ways.

In the book, Subramanian talks to civilians living in Colombo, the wife of an LTTE political operative who surrendered to the army, a Sinhalese journalist, a Buddhist monk who urged the army to wipe out the Tamils, a Muslim whose family was massacred in front of him by the Tigers and a Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh member, among others. But what he does very well is to not take sides. Whatever his own personal views, the book never leads you to blame one side or sympathise with the other. 

 

 

 

What the book does do is tell stories – stories of pain and suffering and great losses, but ultimately the story of survival. 

Perhaps the only community that Subramanian does show his sympathy for is of the Muslim. Caught between the crossfire of the army and the Tigers, the communalism of the Sinhalese and the Tamils, it is this community that has suffered the most. Though initially the Muslims were mere spectators in the war, they quickly became caught between the hammer and the anvil. Subramanian writes,

It must have been tempting [for Prabhakaran, the LTTE chief] to purify his vision of Eelam... stripping it of Muslims entirely, concocting a Tamil heartland that matched his own claustrophobic view of the world.

No long skein of ancient hatreds between the Buddhists and the Muslim [was present]... The Muslims were demonised, accused of eroding the country’s Buddhist heritage.

The book makes one question the humanity of humans. Reading it, I was reminded of Georg Hegel’s theory of the other, where, in order to justify one’s own existence and superiority, the “other” is demonized and shown as weak to such an extent that it becomes part of the psyche. 

 

 

However, what really binds the book together is the ability Subramanian has in finding irony in a situation as terrible as this war. The irony of a Buddhist monk justifying violence, the irony of an LTTE soldier who forcefully recruited teenagers for the Tigers and later surrendered to the army or even the irony of talking politics with a pimp. However, for me, the best part of the book was an anecdote, when the author, in erstwhile LTTE territory, stops for a drink.

“We have beer,” the waiter said. “Tiger beer and Lion beer.”

“All right, we’ll have the Tiger.”

Two or three minutes passed. Then the waiter returned and said, “I am sorry sir. The Tiger is all finished. We only have the Lion.”

 

--- Kartikeya

Modi’s wave is waning

I am surprising myself by posting something on my blog on politics. But then I thought, why not? Writing on politics is what I do for a living (even if it means biting back my true feelings).

So I decided to write what I would have liked to post with my company. A heavily censored version of it went online, but here is the original piece that I wrote. Yes, it still is rather dry, and re-reading it, it does sound cautiously (read barely) critical, but hey, it’s a start!

With the counting for the by-poll results in 33 constituencies across 10 states taking place on Tuesday, a trend emerged where the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led wave for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that was so successful in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, failed to live to its hype.

The biggest change came in Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) made huge inroads into a state that had been hit by riots last year. Despite aggressive campaigning by the BJP, especially its Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, the BJP could only bag two of the nine seats in UP.

The BJP did not do well in Rajasthan either, with the Congress bagging three of the four seats which went to the polls. While Congress leader Sachin Pilot termed his party’s performance as ‘spectacular’, BJP winning the lone South Kota seat would not have gone down well with Prime Minister Modi, who has repeatedly called for a ‘Congress-free’ India.

One result that has slipped under the carpet is the result in Gujarat, where BJP did win in seven out of nine seats, but significantly, the Congress managed to win two seats.

 

The BJP’s biggest gain came in West Bengal, where the party made inroads into the state for the first time in the legislative assembly, winning the Basirhat Dakshin seat. Apart from that, in Assam, three parties won one seat each – the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), the BJP and the Congress while in Andhra Pradesh, which too had only one seat going to polls, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) won from Nandigama.

Overall, the by-polls results can only be seen as a disappointment. The BJP is yet to buckle the trend on not doing well in the by-polls after the dissatisfying results in the by-polls held in July in Uttarakhand and August in Bihar.

 

--- Kartikeya