My curiousity about this book was first aroused, predictably enough, when it won the Man Booker Prize. I have read both positive and negative comments on the book, the most striking of them being "How can a page turner like this win a Booker?"
Sad, but true. Page turners sell the most but are the bottom of the heap, relegated to airport terminals and the occasional reader who picks up a book when all other timepass options have been exhausted. Which brings me to: What does winning a Booker tell you about the book, anyway? As the saying goes, one man's nectar is another's poison.
But I digress. This post is about the book, not what it won.
For a non-Indian, the book may be a revelation: Yes, there is an India beyond the traffic clogged roads, the spanking new and tall buildings coming up at an amazing pace (Wish I could say the same for the flyovers and the Bangalore metro!) and the 9% GDP growth. And yes, it's not pretty at all.
For an Indian, it puts to words all the emotions of this other India, the majority India. Mass migration, urbanization, poverty.. the list goes on and on. There are people who accept their fate and spend their lives pulling rickshaws or selling vegetables, and there are people who will not.
To make a point effectively, we have to provide a stark example. Hence the book takes us to one of the places in India where this poor man-rich man difference is as stark as black and white: Rajasthan. Replace the 'Laxmangarh' with a 'Lakhansipur' in UP or a 'Daulatpur' in Bihar and the story could be the same. The poor man is the good guy-turned bad, and the rich guy, when not being cruel or downright arrogant, is confused and utterly lost.
I bet we can write an equally good book on exactly the opposite happening in India: How a good rich man becomes poor and becomes bad, or how a bad poor man becomes good and therefore becomes rich.
One swallow does not a spring make.
Also, I don't think the book speaks of anything that we should be ashamed of as Indians. Indeed, there is an abundance of literature on this topic, but not all of it has won the Man Booker of course, for various reasons. TOI's India Poised campaign was based on it. Shashi Tharoor has talked about it in India: From Midnight to the Millennium. So do, I suspect, Gurcharan Das in India Unbound and Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi.
Read it, it'll help you pass a boring weekend afternoon.