***3 stars for the plot***
**The plot**
The writer starts with the history of India. The country is divided into Hindustan and Pakistan, on the basis of religion and further partitioned into Bangladesh. And how conversion of people into Islam -*love jihaad* - started. The country has a deep background of religion based politics and also caste based discrimination in a democracy. And then there is this story, the love story between Naved and Vedana; trying to focus on*love jihaad.*
**The execution**
The writer took up a serious matter to explore - the failure of our democracy. Starting from speaking on religion based discrimination, casteism; navigating through illiteracy and failure of*Hindus* to counter-action conversion to*Islam, * the writer ends up writing a love story.
A tragic love story of a muslim boy Naved and a hindu girl Vedana. They were childhood friends and their father worked together. The young duo fell in love and got married against their parents’ will. They changed their names, their religions. Naved became hindu and Vedana, muslim. There was mention of force conversion that’s prevailing, at many places but this story had nothing to do with it. The marriage led to lots of anguish to everyone involved and ultimate death, in various circumstances.
A completely different ending from what the book started
The*jewel in the crown* was added by the choice of vocabulary. The writer is an MA in English and he showed it off quite a lot. Its an Indian story and people don’t use such words in conversation. This rendered the book unreadable and adding to agony was the punctuation as well as spelling mistakes. There is some format to write the story, how a sentence should end or should not end - the continuity.
*If proper typesetting and proofreading would have been performed, the book would have ended in 130- 140 pages instead of 180.*
***Extra shot***
After reading through half of this novel, I realized that instead of Ve-daa-naa, I should pronounce it as Ved-na and its an anagram for Na-ved.
And then the title of the book, Vedana- the Anguish! Doesn’t in sound like those hindi dubbed south Indian movie.*just saying!*