Shobhaa De’s latest offering ‘Superstar India: from Incredible to Unstoppable’ is the author’s personal story of her romance with a free country that shares her age. In the words of the author herself, “It is about the good and the bad; it is for the Indians and the non-Indians who act as if they have just discovered India.”
Though the book was critically slaughtered by many a serious reader; the author insists that the ‘flaw’ of the book reading like a set of unrelated blog entries is it core strength: “I wrote it keeping the youth in mind; who, how do I put it mildly… have an attention deficit. Hence, the book can be read from any page and still makes sense as it reads more like a blog,” said the author at the launch of the book in Hyderabad last year. Lack of statistics and substantial data? Oh! C’mon! “I hate statistics!” Amen.
What discounts for the authoritative claims of the book being for those “who act as if they have just discovered India”, is the fact that De accepts that the book is a “personal” and “completely emotive” tale about the “author’s India”. In large parts the book reads like a sine wave constantly oscillating between the ‘good’ India and the ‘bad’ India with occasional forays into the ‘ugly’ India with animated word paintings like these:
I know a couple of German acquaintances, who were so shell-shocked when they tried going for a walk along Mumbai’s famed Marine Drive, just a few metres from their fabulous hotel, that they turned around and ran back, shaking with fright. They told me later that they threw up on reaching their room, stripped off the ‘polluted’ clothes, packed them roughly into plastic bags and discarded the lot. They instantly changed their travel itinerary and took the next flight home, vowing never to return. I’m sure there have been countless such instances.
Or sample this:
The trouble is Indian’s aren’t used to being prosperous. We are more comfortable dealing with poverty – after all, poverty is the staple here, and has been for centuries.
It is otherwise, staid De fare with feminist overtures and a strong saucy tone. The book is a very polar account of the country; a polarity unfortunately built on false binaries. So, a poor boatman’s selflessness comes to mean the selfishness of the filthy rich; and two men walking arm-in-arm in public represents the sexual frustration of a country that is yet to come to terms with homosexual love. Further, the author builds a strong case in favour of whatever she is in favour of, by generalizing to the larger society, eccentricities that occur in sparse pockets of certain communities. However, the derailing element of the book is that these generalizations are also scorned upon in later parts to break the myth of a ‘prosperous India’. Hence, urbanites searching online for old age home indicates to the utter fallout of ‘traditional Indian values’ (sarcastically denoted) in all of India, including its 70 per cent rural population; while ‘the sexy Sensex’, ‘the booming economy’ and ‘our IT triumphs’ are not to be representative of India’s upbeat mood. And yet: ‘We have gone smoothly from Poor India to Rich India. From Unsung India to Surprising India.’ Confused? It is common sentiment.
The book was written to address the youth who, the author says, will take the country forward. The author is a strong advocate of India needing an image-makeover on the international arena, and has attempted to achieve the same through the book. However, the reading of the book is bound to leave the reader in doubt if it did any good; or worst still, did more harm than good to the existing image of our country. The book is a victim to the author’s celebrity, which more often than not, overshadows the book and ‘The India Story’ it had set out to tell the world.
____
Ajinkya Deshmukh is a media student and a freelancer. He blogs at http://matte-finish.blogspot.com/
Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
