Bade Ghar Ke Bete... Why I have No Issues with Abhinav's Rich Background

All my friends, quite a few in the media - are talking about Abhinav winning the Gold Medal in a shooting event at the Beijing Olympics - simply because he had a dad who could afford to give him the best of the best training. A sort of scorn for the State, yet tinged with pride.

Look at these two pictures - see the similarity?
Both are Bade Ghar ke Bete... Scions of wealthy parents.

All I say is this :
Better for the nextgen of the 'haves' to be shooting in the Olympics, than at the hapless Jessica Lalls, here in India.

We have hundreds - perhaps thousands of very well-to-do indulgent Indian parents out there. Who will do anything for their children.

Well - may they all learn a thing or two, from the Bindras - Apjit and Babli rather than from the Sharmas - Vinod and whatever, who were ready to cover the tracks of son Manu Sharma - pictured here at right, in his shortlived 'acquittal' in 2006. For the murder of Jessical Lall, in 1999, with so many witnesses who were then arm-twisted. Justice has since prevailed, and he is serving Life Imprisonment.

Unfortunately, the truth is this: Each of us can list at least six families - those in the media - the celebrities and politicians, or even in own circle friends or society, where there is a higher probability of parental 'cover-up' tactics rather than the patient year-in-year-out training, as seen with Abhinav. So, for sure, he has an Olympic size back up system at home.

Better a training ground at home, international coach, than a Mercedes or a BMW. And dad's unlimited political clout.

What Happened to the Child?

Sulochana Bai cannot read or write. Her conversations are peppered with words like 'danger', ' 'emergency', and that favorite word used by so many folks : 'Chapter', to be used this way: 'yeh aadmi ek chapter hai'. Chapter = What a Character.
She was with me, next to me at a hospital in front of the MRI department, and wanted to know what MRI was. Was it X-Ra (that's the way she pronounced it - X-Ra).

As I struggled to come up with an explanation, she came to my rescue herself:
'CT- Can type ka kuch hai kya?'
Yeah!
'Haan na, CT-Scan ke tarah hi kuch hai.'

Bai may be illiterate, but she is the current head - adhyakhsh - of the mahila mandal in her residential area. Time spent with her is always so illuminating. About life in the basti, social tensions, how resolved, how not. And I always wonder why I don't talk more often about these essentials, rather than day to day stuff like 'kapda-dhona, sukhana, bartan saaf karna, kuda-kachra'.

She asked me if I remembered what she had told me a couple of years ago - of the couple that had died by pouring 'rakel' kerosene on themselves, in her neighborhood? Of course I recalled the incident. The man was a perennial drunkard, and the wife struggled to make ends meet, to send her seven year old child - who was slightly handicapped physically - to school.

One day after the usual late night fight over her money, she had - in a fit of pique - poured kerosene on the man, and dared him over god knows what. He was part -drunk, went and picked up a match, lit it. Before she knew what was happening, he went and caught her in a tight bind, saying ' *#@*, come, you die with me'.

The little boy had come running to Bai's house, the neighbors went running back. The man had over 80% burns, she had less - 60%. Was conscious, narrated what had happened. Over the next few days, she succumbed first. He went a day or two later.

Her sister arrived from somewhere in the boondocks of Northern Maharashtra.
When the neighborhood said - and this is always such a heartening aspect of life in a basti - they would pool in and continue to send the boy to school, the aunt said, No need, I'll take him back with me, to myhome. And send him to a good 'English' school there. I owe this to my sister.

Bai became suspicious when she happened to see this woman trying on various saris of the dead sister, when she thought no one was looking, inside the small home.
But the police said they wouldn't stop her from taking the child. After all she was the legitimate relative. The basti women on their own, quietly removed the dead woman's bank book, and kept it in their own safe keeping. With some Rs. 30,000/- in it. That they could not touch, of course, but the idea being that it could go to the child some day.

The dead man, it seems, had just sold the hutment. For some Rs. 25,000/- advance and this issue and the money already in the home was the root cause. Of all that had then taken place. Aunty dearest got this money, sold the TV, almirah and whatever else she could get hold of, and went away.

This was two years ago.

Last week, she arrived, asking for the bank book. Saying how the boy was now in fourth standard doing so well. After all, he had always been a quiet, shy and such a good student at his studies as all the neighbors were aware of. She arrived with this man, who went off to catch a drink. Bai and the other women of the mahila-mandal smelt a rat, and continued drilling her, talking to her, trying to figure out how the boy was doing.

A couple of hours later, the man comes back, completely drunk, and tells them 'Don't you believe a word of all that she is saying. She threw him out two years ago. She just wants the bank money now'.

This 'aunty' later, I am told, escaped.

After a sound thrashing from the basti women. Apparently, in a moment of distraction, while they debated what to do, how to get the police to take some action.... Basti life and the police after all share a strange, uneasy equation - they had wanted to be sure of what to do.

No one has any idea where the little boy is today.
Is he somewhere begging. Did some kind soul take him under his / her wing (our minds would want such an outcome, and these are the 'happy endings' we wish are happening). Is he alive at all. Does he have anyone to call his own.
And what about his state of mind? What happens to a shy, quiet, endearing seven year old? Who was a favorite of the neighborhood. And yet, how could a seven year old ever find his way back to a certain loving basti of this large metropolitan city from some place 250 kilometres away?

And having heard this incident, what can we do? Do I leave it as it is? Another story to be filed away in my mind? And how do believers explain this 'logic' of God?

And how come some 'shy, unassuming' kids become Abhinav Bindra, chased by all the newspapers. Others - I don't even know this child's name - fall between the cracks of our attention?

At Long Last, A Great Satisfying Read!

There are some excellent reviews out there. Of the Case of Exploding Mangoes.
New York Times
Jai Arjun

And some overly critical ones as well. The Guardian for example.

What can I add? Yet it is one of those books that affects deeply and goes beyond trite words such as unputdownable, brilliant and so on.
And I don't think it is merely because we in the subcontinent are aware of this moment of our regional history - Of Zia's assassination in 1988.

Each of us will have our own favorite parts in this book as we read it ...
One to me, is this. ... Almost at the tail end of the book, 'Ali' the protagonist (who is in every alternate chapter, author writing in first person) grabs the book his friend Obaid is reading - "Chronicles of a Death Foretold", and reads the first sentence.
"So does Nasr really die?"
"I think so"
"It says so right here in the first sentence. Why keep reading it when you already know that the hero is going to die."
"To see how he dies. What were his last words. That kind of thing"
"You are a pervert, comrade." I throw the book back at him.

And Mohammed Hanif has most successfully thrown history back at us - After all, we all know Zia (a hero in his own eyes at least) is dead, and the book in the very first chapter describes his last walk up to 'Pak One'. The one that explodes four minutes after take-off.
Like a Moebius strip we come back at the end of the book to the beginning, and it is magnetic enough to make me want to continue reading all over again.
So I would wager that this viciously satirical book will have hundreds of thousands readers like me, across the subcontinent, across the US and the rest of the world, devouring every bit. Reading the book at a multiple of levels.
To the West, this book reminds of Yossarian and Catch 22. To us Indians, it is seminal as well . Somewhat like what English August was to the IAS, this one is to the Pakistan Air Force - and I expect all Armed Forces anywhere in the world. I was also reminded of Manil Suri's Death of Vishnu somewhere - I am not quite sure why.
Here then is a master writer. His command over language, situations, satire is awesome. Even the words related to religion. Words that the rest of the world is usually mortally scared of, words used gingerly in general in the fear of hurting sentiments of some moral guardians somewhere. Ditto for his searing indictment of archaic laws in a radically Islamized nation.

And New York Times has indicated the book's zany timeliness - the book is about a time when the Soviet forces were about to pullout of Afghanistan, now in real-time of the book release, it is NATO's pullout time from Afghanistan; back then it was the mystery of Zia's death along with so many of his key Generals, now it is Benazir who has recently been assassinated. (NYT also makes a very pertinent observation in the beginning about the fact that it is 'Men' who love to write about things like assassinations!)

I for one am most fascinated by the Reality Show nature of the current world we live in. Our entire media. TV shows - Fear Factor, the choice of our music icons, Big Brother and what not. That tread a thin line between fact and fiction, where it is all a simulated reality. So when a popular lead music icon dies - in real life last week, it is almost as if the reality show TRPs just shot up, so it was worthwhile to someone somewhere. Kind of eerie.

This author - coincidentally or not, he works in the world of 24 X 7 TV: BBC - follows such a genre as well - with 'a foot in both boats' as we would say - of real history as well as masterfully manufactured fiction. And gets away with it. I have often wondered how people who are alive in real life take it when they seem to wander into the realms of fiction via the imagination of authors.
Do they shrug it off as non-facts, or do they get all het up? In this book, apart from the usual General Beg, CIA etc. , Mrs. Zia ul Haq comes off - if not exactly smelling of roses, at least a person one can wonderfully empathize with. Similarly Nancy Raphel, wife of the then US Ambassador to Pakistan (the ambassador went down in Pak One along with Zia) surely she exists somewhere out there. Is she then to be treated as 'real' or not, as part of this world we live in? Or should she be treated as a faded shadow, no longer relevant thus to be 'fictionalized'. Perhaps she is a fictional character through and through. And there is no Nancy Raphel?

At some point, 'Ali' calls Lata and Asha the 'old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens' . So should Lata and Asha ignore it. After all wherever they are spoken of in the book, it is as if in Ali Shigri's thoughts and his world , as if 'through the mouth of a fictional character'.
Or is it about the author's own aversions?

American reviewers of course are hugely amused that OBL of Laden & Co is in the book as well, when he comes to the party thrown by the ambassador and where all Americans come dressed as the mujahideen.

And I begin to feel : do we in our own lives nowadays live like that? Not quite sure where fact ends and fiction begins. And perhaps it just doesn't matter in this post-modern world we inhabit.

Aka 'Cigarette smoking is injurious to health', we all know the line 'All characters in this book bear no resemblance to anyone living or dead'.
Random House the publishers have done away with this statutory announcement in this book.
Making you wonder why all the other books all these days required it anyway!

Ultimately it is Le Carre's description of the book - 'Deliciously Anarchic' - that says it all.
My money is on this book for the Booker.
If this book misses this year's Man Booker, all it means,
critics' critiques have begun to override the public imagination and the mangoes were sour.