Interview with Madhulika Liddle

Madhulika Liddle is a very talented writer. I have reviewed two of her books earlier and can say that she is very good. Here’s a short interview with her.

1. Why not a second novel? Why a collection of short stories?

That’s mainly because I love writing short stories – in fact, of the ten stories in The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries, seven had already been written before The Englishman’s Cameo was published. I’d discussed this with my publishers, and we’d toyed with the idea of publishing a collection of Muzaffar Jang short stories first. Eventually, the decision we took was to begin the series with a novel – it helps establish a character better.

2. While reading the book, I felt Muzaffar Jang and his mysteries were taking a different turn altogether. Was this intentional?

If you’re referring to the fact that more of Muzaffar’s personal life is revealed – yes, that’s intentional. And it was done because a number of readers had asked me, “Why doesn’t Muzaffar have a love life?!” (If you’d meant something else by that question, do let me know)

3. Your favourite short story writers….

O Henry, Saki (H H Munro), Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond, Arthur Conan Doyle (and not just the Sherlock Holmes series, but also his boxing stories and horror stories).

4. I have always believed that it is very difficult to write a short story than it is to write a novel. Did that happen to you as well?

No; quite the opposite. I am primarily a short story writer; I don’t like writing novels – keeping track of characters (and ensuring they don’t run away with me), and keeping the plot in place is too much of a pain. For me, short stories are much more fun. They are challenging, especially if you’re trying to write a detective story, because you have to think up a plot, figure out clues and red herrings, and have your detective make sense of it all, in a few thousand words – but the challenge is what I enjoy.

5. Was Muzaffar Jang based on any person? If not, then the process of creating a character from scratch and to fit him in 17th century Delhi would have been quite a mind-numbing task, wasn’t it?

No, Muzaffar isn’t based on any person (though he does share some of my traits – his love for coffee and his interest in birds, for instance!). He is, actually, an oddity – his outlook is more 21st century than 17th century. For instance, even though he’s a nobleman, some of his closest friends (like Salim and Faisal) are from social classes that would’ve been considered taboo for an amir to associate with back in those days.Mostly, Muzaffar is a rather contemporary figure written into a backdrop that’s historical – intentionally, because I thought that would help modern readers identify more closely with him.

6. Favourite story/stories from the collection and why?

Though I like all the stories, two are particularly close to my heart: The Bequeathed Garden and The Woman Who Vanished. The Bequeathed Garden, because even though it’s not a crime story, I enjoyed putting that puzzle together (and read Golestan in the process) – plus, I liked the way it finally came together; I thought it a good example of poetic (literally) justice. I like The Woman Who Vanished because I thought it showed, very precisely, how Muzaffar goes about unravelling the clues. I took a long time to sort out that plot, and I was pleased with the end result.

7. If there was a movie to be made on the collection, who do you think would play Muzaffar and why?

Hrithik Roshan. I thought his portrayal of Akbar in Jodhaa-Akbar was exactly as I’d pictured Muzaffar: the same imposing, yet approachable, character. And, he carries off the Mughal look very well!

You can read my review of the book here: The Eighth Guest and Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries

Book Review: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Jonathan Cape, Random House UK
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 144 pages
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

We are what we remember. But imagine, suddenly, that you were confronted with incontrovertible evidence that what you remember is wrong. That, in fact, you behaved in a very different way than you remember at a key point in your past. Would it change your sense of identity, or alter your understanding of the world? This is the central theme in The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, more of a novella than a novel at around 150 pages, which was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

The protagonist of The Sense of an Ending is Tony Webster, now retired and divorced, living a quiet, satisfactory, largely uneventful life and reasonably content with his lot. Out of the blue he receives a surprising bequest from the recently deceased mother of an ex-girlfriend from his student days, someone he has not seen for many years. As he puzzles over why he has been remembered, he recalls events and friendships from his student days. But it soon becomes apparent that others have very different memories of those times and their consequences than he does, and there is hard evidence to suggest that Tony’s recollections are wrong. Gradually in the course of the book the layers of the past are peeled away to reveal a truth which shakes Tony’s belief in himself.

It’s a book about history and how we recall events. Tony has his memories but without evidence or corroboration, how sure can he be? Do the lessons learnt in the History classroom apply to the individual? What starts off in the manner of Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” soon turns into a darker mystery as Tony is forced to face up to the actions of his younger self.

It’s a joy to read. Thought provoking, beautifully observed with just enough mystery to keep you turning the pages to find out what happened. Books that involve the narrator examining their own actions can get too easily bogged down, but by keeping it brief, this never happens with Barnes. There’s insight into the human condition and gentle philosophy without it becoming too introspective. It’s very readable literary fiction.

Julian Barnes is one of our leading novelists and The Sense of an Ending shows him working at a very high level. It is beautifully written and always interesting, while striving to address serious themes. At the core of this is the unease produced by the idea that Tony has lived an entire life built on a self-image relying on false memories. Is this because memory is inherently unreliable, or because some of us have the ability to reimagine events to be different than they really were, enabling us to live a different type of life than the one that our behaviour warrants? Barnes does not answer these questions, but makes the reader think about them.

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Book Review: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Title: The Pale King
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin
ISBN: 9780241145142
Genre: Literary Fiction, Satire
PP: 560 pages
Price: Rs. 599
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Writing reviews on the late American author David Foster Wallace is an anxious and parlous process. There is first of all the saint like reverence in which is held in by his fans with Paul Morley on the Review Show proudly proclaiming himself as “Wallacistic” and in an almost Stalinist unthinking manner stating that within this new novel “every sentence and every word is tremendous” Then there is Wallace’s brutal suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 which left the Pale King unfinished after 10 years of work. It was eventually compiled by his editor, Michael Pietsch, who has pieced together the finished chapters and undertaken a degree of guess work to bring a kind of conclusion to a work in progress. Then there is the literary figure of Wallace himself coming on the back of 1996′s labyrinthine yet uber smart “Infinite Jest” a novel, which takes months to read, but which you can quote for years. This is followed by his tragic death as he stood on the steps of becoming one of the giants of American literature.

“The Pale King” is a novel assembled from a large collection of fragments left by the author after his untimely and tragic death in 2008. According to the editor’s note at the beginning of the book there was no synopsis or outline of the novel as a whole and months of work were needed to attempt to put together a novel that approached what may have been Foster Wallace’s intentions. There can be little doubt that a writer as meticulous as DFW would have been dismayed at the idea of an editor taking his unfinished work and publishing without his intervention; however, in the circumstances I think the decision was the right one. Unlike some posthumous works, this is not some early novel unfit for publication or the work of an author in decline: there is writing of the highest quality here.

My sense is that probably 70-80% of the novel was completed but there is clearly considerable uncertainty about the final structure and for this reason the novel is perhaps best approached initially as a series of short stories with a strong unifying theme: the activities of a group of employees of the US Internal Revenue Service in the mid 1980s when the organization was undergoing some radical reorganization.

The novel is at least to some extent autobiographical; Wallace apparently worked for the IRS for a year or so during the period when the novel is set. Chapter 9 is a strange `Authors Forward’ in which DFW addresses the reader directly and states that the `characters and events are fictitious’ disclaimer at the front of the book is completely misleading and that in fact everything is true. He then goes into a lengthy discourse about discussions with his publisher’s lawyers, the obtaining of legal releases from some of his former colleagues featured in the book (plus the refusal of one of his family members to give such a release) and the extent to which autobiography can be truly accurate when filtered through memory and the writer’s subjectivity etc. This all has the ring of truth but to what extent this is DFW throwing red herrings to his reader is hard to guess.

The book itself consists of 50 chapters of greatly varying length and no clear narrative structure connecting one chapter with the next; events do unfold through the novel however via the activities of the people in the group but the reader has to be very alert to the allusive character of the work.

DFW chose to set the novel largely at an IRS `Examination Centre’ where employees are tasked with sifting through hundreds of tax returns that have been flagged up by a primitive computer system as possibly containing discrepancies indicative of underpayment; the work is unremittingly tedious while at the same time requiring a continuous high level of concentration and alertness in order to do it well – a production line without the option of switching off one’s brain.

The main theme of the novel is around the people who have submitted themselves to this work regime, their individual characteristics and the way they approach the work and interact with each other. Many of the players have unusual personalities with several having strange and magical talents: Chris Fogle’s ability to track the exact number of words he has spoken at any point during a conversation; Sylvanshine’s unconscious acquisition of random facts about people in his vicinity (two colleagues unknowingly related `through a liaison five generations ago in Utrecht’) and Drinion, a high-functioning autistic, gradually levitating from his chair during a lengthy and intense conversation with Meredith Rand, the office beauty. All this leavens long passages describing in comprehensive detail the inner workings of the IRS bureaucracy in DFW’s meticulous and rather addictive prose (plus footnotes). Many chapters are in the first person where the speaker is not explicitly identified; the reader had to pick up clues and cross-correlate information from other chapters to fully work out what is going on.

This book will undoubtedly be compared with `Infinite Jest’; `Pale King’ has a similar convoluted structure but is much more circumscribed in its theme. It is also a darker work with none of the big set comic pieces which intersperse `Infinite Jest’ though not without a lot of black humour. Above all, DFW’s writing is a huge pleasure to read and the novel has a great degree of empathy with its characters. Not perhaps the best novel for newcomers to DFW but definitely recommended for fans.

Book Review: Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Stories about Mental Illness by Darryl Cunningham

                                                                            
Title: Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Stories about Mental Illnes
Author: Cunningham, Darryl
ISBN: 13:9781608192786
Genre: Graphic Novel
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
PP: 160 pp
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

I’ve been looking forward to this book for some time, and it’s as impressive as I’d been hoping. In one sense, the book is a fascinating handbook, focusing on different kinds of mental illness in each chapter. These include dementia, self-harming, depression, anti-social personality disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, and great figures in history who’ve suffered mental illnesses. But it also follows Darryl Cunningham’s own journey, starting as a health care assistant and then training to become a mental health nurse until the strain of the course threw him into severe depression and he had to stop.

But all the years of working as a carer gave him a deep insight into the lives of people suffering different conditions and provided him with real-life work anecdotes that make him able to portray them as real people, not just clinical conditions. And it also makes the reader care about Cunningham as a health worker, realizing the hard-core things these carers deal with, and the emotional beatings they go through. But the book’s not a request for us to pity the writer; his straightforward, almost dead-pan voice at times focuses us as readers on the universality of mental health problems, and emphasizes the need to be able to talk about these things in a way that doesn’t stigmatize people for being ill, in the way we wouldn’t if someone had, say, a broken leg. A deep sense of empathy is the thing that came through most clearly to me in this book, and the last chapter clinches it, when Cunningham allows us to see his own struggle with depression and the hope he gives to other people who suffer it.

The artwork in this book reads very easily and clearly, and provides an excellent introduction to graphic novels for readers who are not very familiar with the medium. Cunningham’s solid line-work and shapes draw inspiration from a long tradition of woodcut illustrations, and his clever compositions give the story its great impact.

This accessible book could become a classic text for people learning about mental illness, and would fit just as easily into a school library or doctor’s office as in a comic book shop. The book raises a lot of important issues and would make an excellent assigned reading to start off discussions about different kinds of mental illness, the role and treatment of health carers, living with someone who suffers one or more of these illnesses and public perception of mental disorders. Or it may simply provide much-needed comfort to readers in discovering they are not alone in a world where they don’t seem to fit in.

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas is a collection of eight modern fairy tales. In each of the novellas, a sense of the fantastic intertwines with the mundane, sometimes enchantingly, sometimes crudely but still beguilingly.

The title story, for instance, transports the reader into the midst of a women’s gulag during Soviet rule. Tatyana and others who bunk together are determined to smuggle out messages to their children — all daughters, coincidentally or not. The women naturally worry about what they should write their children who are now most likely wards of the State. With a limit on the precious amount they may write, they agonize over what is most important. Then, the prisoner considered by the others to be “the most scatter-brained of them all, the most sentimental, the least headstrong” stuns everyone by being the first to get her message down. She is at utter peace with her choice of words. The others can’t help feeling jealous and very curious. What did she write?

“The Most Beautiful Book in the World” packs a nice emotional punch. The conclusion, in its Epilogue in the year 2005, imparts a fitting epiphany about how we human beings can communicate immensities with but a few choice words. It is a lovely comedy in the classic definition of the term: there is a triumph over adverse circumstances.

Immediately before the gulag folktale, the collection’s longest selection (thirty pages) has its turn. The title character in “Odette Toulemonde” has “a talent: joy.” Odette excitedly goes to a bookstore to buy the new book of her favorite author, Balthazar Balsan, and to have him autograph it for her. Odette, a lower middle class widow with two jobs gets so tongue-tied when she meets him that she can’t even speak her own name properly. Balsan’s books, she believes, showed her that ” ‘ in every life, no matter how miserable, there are reasons to be happy, to laugh, to love.’ ” Balthazar, a wealthy man with a troubled marriage and young son who is taking too much after his old man, goes through his own identity crisis soon after this book signing. In true fairy tale form, he and Odette meet again. But when their attachment may be going too far, Odette tells Balthazar, ” ‘Our paths may cross, but we can no longer meet each other.” Will that be the end of them, or are they destined for more?

“Odette Toulemonde” tries to point the way to balanced living. In “Every Reason to be Happy” a woman discovers her husband isn’t the man she thought and she has to decide how she will handle the startling revelations. In “The Forgery” the ability to trust is tested by two women with very different results. And what would any set of fairy tales be without “A Barefoot Princess” who may not be what she seems?

The leitmotif being forwarded in THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD by the author, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, is, arguably, that regardless of our histories, regardless of our economic status, regardless of our pettiness and self-centeredness, life often hands out teachable moments that can either make or break us. Truth, beauty, and especially happiness are ours if we possess the strength to see them everywhere.

Playwright, novelist, and short story/novella writer Schmitt, informs the reader in his Postscript, dated August 15, 2006, that he used free minutes between directing the screen version, Odette Toulemonde (original French ONLY Version No English Options)(for which he had also penned the screenplay), to write these stories. He explains that he’d been carrying them around in his “mind for a long time.” So, Schmitt didn’t have the luxury of endless hours in which to fine-tune his pacing or his prose. Although the plot ideas were pre-thought, his execution was impromptu. This unfinished quality accents each of the eight stories, and this insight about how these stories were written adds an intrinsic value to their recurrent “draft” feeling.

The back cover lauds Schmitt as “one of Europe’s most popular and best-selling authors.” Europa Editions is the first to publish short stories/novellas of his, translated by Alison Anderson. Schmitt’is fables — his fairy tales — give a tantalizing taste, but leave this reader wanting more. Some of his plays are available in English (Schmitt Plays: One (Contemporary Dramatists) (v. 1)), as is one other collection of novellas (Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran & Oscar and the Lady in Pink) but what about his novels and other short stories? Perhaps we’ll see more of this author very soon…

Most Beautiful Book in the World The: 8 Novellas; Schmitt, Eric-Emmanuel; Europa Editions; $15.00

The Moorland Cottage by Elizabeth Gaskell

Moorland Cottage by Elizabeth Gaskell is a short novella that was first published around 1850 after her first novel Mary Barton but before one of her more famous novels Cranford. It centers on Maggie Browne, her brother Edward, and their mother who live at the novella’s title Moorland Cottage. Mr. Browne died when the children were very young and Mrs. Browne has spent most of the rest of her time neglecting Maggie and catering to her Edward, allowing him all of life’s pleasures and ambitions. Maggie obediently stands by and watches her mother spoil Edward and never complains when she is ordered around or criticized for every little thing she does wrong. Maggie’s fortune changes when a friend of her father’s Mr. Buxton visits the family and invites them to come and spend the day at his home. Maggie becomes a favorite to his sick wife and only son Frank and spends a day a week in their company. Mrs. Buxton teaches Maggie alot of self-sacrificing, and as Maggie grows she becomes a beautiful, pious young woman and she must learn to find her voice if she is to overcome some of the obstacles that come into her way.

For the most part I really enjoyed this novella. I love the way that Mrs. Gaskell writes and I have enjoyed all of the previous books of hers that I have read. She is one of my favorite authors. I think she has such a way with words and expressing simple thoughts and ideas, she can make the most mundane circumstances sound charming and poetic. This novella has all of the things that I love so much about her work. Also, for a novella the pace is never hurried and I never felt as if the story was skipping over major events to save time.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is one of her strongest works. The story is at time too sentimental and I found that some of the characters were a little flat or too perfect. Maggie is so virtuous and never does anything wrong or complain about her lot in life. She feels horribly about the way her mother treats her but she doesn’t moan about it. It seems a bit too much for a young girl to accept her life like that. Edward is so bad that at times he seems so flat and hardly ever shows any remorse for his actions. Also I see a lot of similarities in the relationships between Maggie and Frank and the relationship between Roger and Molly in Wives and Daughters but I think that by the time Mrs. Gaskell went to write Wives and Daughters she expanded so much on Roger and Molly and perfected this relationship perfectly. Also I see a lot of similarities in the relationships between Maggie and Frank and the relationship between Roger and Molly in Wives and Daughters but I think that by the time Mrs. Gaskell went to write Wives and Daughters she expanded so much on Roger and Molly and perfected this relationship perfectly. This novella is an excellent way to introduce Mrs. Gaskell’s writings and see how well her writing develops when reading some of her later novels.

Moorland Cottage, The; Gaskell, Elizabeth; Hesperus Classics; $12.95

Being Polite to Hitler by Robb Forman Dew

The title phrase occurs about halfway through the book. The year is 1953. Lavinia Alton, who has married into the close-knit family of Scofields and Claytors in the mid-Ohio town of Washburn, has committed the cardinal sin of expressing her political opinions (in this case, outrage at the execution of the Rosenbergs) in the midst of a Christmas gathering of relatives and neighbors. She has already offended their dress code; now she flouts their conversational norms that involve, among other things, turning a blind eye to bigotry.

The moment is emblematic of Robb Forman Dew’s approach, as she structures her book in expanding circles. At the center are a few independent individuals like Lavinia and, even more so, her feisty mother-in-law Agnes, a widowed schoolteacher nearing the end of her patience. In the middle are all those relatives and neighbors, so intricately interknit that I needed to spend half and hour drawing up a family tree to keep them all straight. [I now learn, however, that this book is the third in a trilogy with THE EVIDENCE AGAINST HER and THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER, so presumably the author's followers would have less trouble.] Beyond this circle are the events of the outside world: memories of the War, of the first atomic bombs, Eisenhower-era politics, the threat of polio, the doomsday clock, and fallout shelters. Indeed, the fallout shelter is a good metaphor for the community itself, as it tries to maintain an oasis of cheerful normality in a world with a traumatic past and uncertain future. The first two-thirds of the book are the portrait of an era, of a small-town middle America simultaneously turned in upon itself and facing outwards, enjoying the dawn of a new prosperity but paranoid about Cold War threats and Communist spies.

Then suddenly the year jumps forward to 1957, with Sputnik and school integration. It will jump again to 1963, with the Birmingham church bombing and the Kennedy assassination, and end with 1973 and Watergate (only more gracefully). The novel now becomes much more the story of Agnes Scofield, who has now acquired a partner, a dog, and a summer house in Maine. There are more events in this final section, but less connection; the book loses that intense focus on place and time that so distinguished it earlier — again I suspect the change in tone would matter less to those who read the whole trilogy. Is there an element of family biography here? Although given a different name, the nearby college to Washburn is clearly Kenyon, where the author’s grandfather John Crowe Ransom founded the Kenyon Review. Agnes’ brother-in-law Robert Butler teaches at the college, and real-life faculty members Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and William Empson make cameo appearances. It must have been a heady, even intimidating environment — but perhaps both Agnes and the author find peace in being able to escape from time to time.

Being Polite to Hitler; Dew, Robb Forman; Little, Brown and Company; $24.99

Skunk Girl by Sheba Karim

Bleaching her mustache and missing out on all the best parties are part of what Nina’s come to expect as a Pakistani-American teen with the strictest parents in town. At the start of her junior year in high school, she’s still living in the shadow of her genius older sister and still trying to figure out how to keep up socially in spite of her family’s fear that she’s becoming too “Um-ree-can-ized.”

Then the unexpected happens: Nina meets an attractive Italian exchange student named Asher—and Asher catches a glimpse of the dark line of hair running down the middle of her back. More humiliated than ever, Nina is certain that Asher will prefer button-nosed blond Serena over her scholarly, hirsute self.

I started laughing from page 1 of SG, and not just because of the Jolene and SAT antonyms and the fact that we’re hearing a story about South Asian immigrant lives. Naturally, overbearing traditionalist parents and obsessive academic regimes are resonant themes with me, and it’s great to finally get a window open in that house, but more so, the writing in SG is light and witty and humorous and the teenage protagonist, Nina Khan, is actually loveable, as the book jacket promises (prompts?).

The dialogue and pacing is great, and I found myself wanting to know what Nina was going to do or think next, even if it was just a tiny tumult versus a grand upheaval. Her two best friends are nicely depicted (though it took me some time to separate them in my head). I especially enjoyed her father’s character.

The great thing about skunk girl is how realistic I found it. I laughed at Nina’s woes concerning her South Asian “curse” and sympathized as her parents’ heaped responsibility and tradition upon her, but I hoped that she would eventually appreciate her parents, her family, her culture. Nina chooses to sneak out to a party in hopes to see Asher and do some underage drinking with her friends, but quickly finds out that it may not be for her. It was nice to see Nina make not the greatest decisions and learn from them.

Teens of all backgrounds will be able to relate to Nina’s struggle in reconciling her own identity with her family’s culture. While the girl-crushing-on-boy story may be familiar, the funny and touching Skunk Girl is truly a novel of a different stripe.

Skunk Girl; Karim, Sheba; Penguin India; Rs. 250

Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka

I am not a Cricket Fan, never have and probably never will be as I do not get the game. I really don’t understand the fuss over it and why do some nations go crazy after it leaving everything to just be able to watch a game. I do not understand why fans idolize and worship cricketers. What is the big deal? After all aren’t they humans, just like us?

I used to think all of the above till I read Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka. Chinaman is the most amazing book I have read this year. It is a superb work of fiction blended with non-fiction (about the game of course and beyond the game) that makes you sit up night after night reading it. I finished reading it in about 3 nights and I stand by what I say – I do not like the game nor have I started liking it after reading the book, however, this book is something to read and ponder over.

Chinaman is the story of a Sri Lankan journalist’s hunt for a long-forgotten and fictional, Sri Lankan cricket player called Pradeep Mathew. Mathew has a brief, meteoric cricketing career in the late 80s and early 90s that sees him achieve superhuman bowling records. But he vanishes as quickly as he appeared. As the curious, and increasingly obsessive, journalist, Karunasena, begins to peel back the layers of Mathew’s life he realises something is amiss. Mathew has vanished not just from the cricketing scene; it appears he has ceased to exist. His existence has even been expunged from the record books. And there is something disturbingly Orwellian about it all.

The book is all about the cricketer (but obviously) however it is also about Sri Lankan Cricket within the larger framework of Sri Lankan History and Society which sets the book apart from being just another sport-driven chronicle.

What I loved about the book is that the author has crafted a thinly veiled version of modern cricket, complete with the commentators, the horny cricketers, loose women on one hand and the greed to keep making more money on the other.

Chinaman is a slow start. It takes a lot of time to get into the book, however once you are – as the cliché goes you cannot stop till you have finished it. The sheer scope of the book itself humbles you while you are reading and savouring it. The characters are well-etched and more than that the writing is exquisite. I am guessing that the book had such a huge impact for a non-cricket-lover like me, then how would it be for a cricket fan. I am sure it would be hundred fold as he/she would then be able to relate to almost everything, including the scenes and dialogues and the characters.

At the end of it all, all I have to say is that yes please read the book. Read it may be without any biases or judgment unlike me and enjoy the lovely ride.

Chinaman; Karunatilaka, Shehan; Random House India; Hardcover; Rs. 499

Bangalore Calling by Brinda S. Narayan

So I received my copy of Bangalore Calling from the publishers and I as I sat down to read it, I almost saw my life flashing by. I have been working in the BPO Sector for about 9 years now and if there is one person who could relate to the book more than anyone else, it would have to be me and of course millions like me who work for this sector. Before I start with the review, I would like to say something about this industry. It grew and it grew at a speed that was unimaginable. From the very famous and pioneer GE Capital International Services (now GENPACT) to IBM making its foray to WNS to many such organizations who probably have been built by scratch in this industry. The BPO Sector in its own way and alone has generated so much revenue for the country, that it is astounding. I will not bore you with the figures, however certain (mis)conceptions that people have of the so-called “Call Centres” need to change. Our work is not mind-numbing. It can get monotonous just like any other job. I remember when I used to introduce my profession in a room full of lawyers and meds and corporate men and women, I would get the look that questionned: Why? But well that is one part of the industry. The other part is displayed beautifully by the author in her book.

Bangalore Calling is but of course about the BPO Callus (fictional? – I would not say so as it is modelled after so many BPOs I know and am aware of) based in Bangalore and how its employees live their lives day in and day out. There are fifteen interlinked stories in the book, that make you sit up and take notice. The stories are about the call centre employees - from an agent to the manager to the cab driver – their hopes, dreams, zig-zagging through the hustle and bustle, the work demands and the need to make sense of everything at the same time. From the fake acccents adopted by the employees (Training anyone?) to the aspiration of a toilet cleaner working for the same organization. Different stratas of the society and the ability of the BPO Sector to give many such people the right to dream and want to make something of their lives.

The stories of Bangalore Calling are vivid and starkingly real. They bite you when you least expect them to and that is probably the defining feature of this collection. This is not a piece of America – the BPO/Call Centre that is. It is a slice of life as depicted in the book, rightly so. The book goes deeper than what is seen on the Outsourcing surfacing and may be that is the reason why I enjoyed reading the book besides the fact that I could relate to every story.

Bangalore Calling is a book that must be read by all with perceptions about the call centres in our country and how they function. The author’s prose is crisp and to the point. She sure does not run in circles. Her plot is tight and thankfully it does not get dramatic at any point. The book is well-written for sure.  It will sure help clear minds and introduce new perspectives. A great read for one.

You can purchase the book here

Here’s the book trailer and by the way there is also a review contest by the publishers where you can win Book Hampers…Please log onto: www.bangalorecalling.in

Bangalore Calling; Narayan, Brinda S; Hachette India; Rs. 295