indiascribe satire

    V ikram Seth's mega novel, ' A Suitable Boy ', is not for the impatient reader used to slim volumes of some 250 pages to be polished off in one sitting. The saga straddles a hefty 1,349 pages in the hard-bound edition and 1,488 pages in paperback. But don't let the heft put you off reading. The Kindle edition is available. Early warning for the reader At the very outset, Seth warns the reader in a satirical vein. "The superfluous, that very necessary thing..." and "The secret of being a bore is to say everything". Both quotes from Voltaire . Towards the end of the novel, a poet-novelist, perhaps fashioned after the author himself, says at a literary meeting that, faced with ponderous volumes like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare , he just rips out the particular play he would like to read. He says he stuffs the pages in his coat pocket to be read at leisure. Fortunately, there is no need to rip out the pages, especially in a Kindle edit...

Anna Hazare and his team of underachievers could now retire to wherever they came from and repent at leisure. Repent they must, having fooled themselves and their followers by foisting a make believe revolution that was nothing but an ill conceived invitation to anarchy. How did all this happen? We first got a glimpse of this old man with his Gandhi cap in April last year when he sat on a five-day fast at Jantar Mantar, the same venue where he met his nemesis this time. He sat on a fast when no political or other activities were taking place in the national capital. Most of the leaders were away busy campaigning in state assembly polls. the 24-hour television news channels were starved of anything worthwhile to cover. So for them, Anna's appearance was manna from the heavens and that too at the centre of the city, on a road that had adequate parking space for their OB vans. The TV reporters, mostly youngsters fresh out of journalism institutes, had never seen anything like thi...

Time was when any King worth his name would seek to expand his kingdom through conquest to become an emperor and gain what they thought would be everlasting fame. It is another matter that most of them ended up as just ciphers in the march of time. In modern democratic India, we have the curious spectacle of everyone demanding lesser things. Take the case of caste based reservation itself. Of and on, there is a  clamour for being included in most backward classes list. For a people who consider "loss of face" as the worst thing that could befall a person, it is indeed strange to see that so many sections are prepared to lower themselves to any extent to grab a piece of pie on offer. Similarly, the demand for smaller states by insignificant politicians. They have discovered that fellows who cannot win even a municipal election could become the Chief Minister through this route. Otherwise how could Chandrashekhar Rao, whose TRS party was soundly thrashed in the elections ma...