What’s so Godly about this book? It’s a portrayal of something that isn’t actually out of the blue. It’s something which many Indians come across and many more suffer throughout their life.
Yeah, it may be something new and awe inspiring (or awful) for foreigners. Yet I guess that it was only for their perusal that this book was written.
I think that the writer of this book is more interesting than the book itself. The causes that Arundhati Roy has picked up are really commendable and in many ways, worthwhile.
Yet this book by her , which is a concotation of many Hindi movies , Sharukh Khan starrer Koyla being one of them , is not actually something too much to bother about .
The only reason that it won the Booker is because it was something that struck a cord in the foreigners and made them relive the old world realm known as India. They were treated to something that was always known as the land of the snake charmers. Yet the romance of the snake charmers was removed and it was replaced by the backwardness and ignorance of the masses of India.
May be Arundhati Roy did do a great service by bringing the sufferings that are felt by many of the poor and the down trodden but is ignored by the rest.
Yet the conviction that it had , if it had any except for the one to get a market for her book and make the world take notice of her , definitely lacked the true ring that her article which she wrote against the nuclear weapons after the Pokhran II blasts .
Anyway she did make up by the, I think repeated, toothbrush episodes. I guess that it was one of the few real things and insights that really showed the innocence of the human mind.