Message Is In The Medium

The election fever is soaring in the country with no one but politicians and media people going crazy over the supposed festival of democracy. Though they always find a reason to bellow through microphones, the season of election gives them a particularly bizarre energy. The powerful become vulnerable and the forbidden questions resurface. For the past one month I am being bombarded with advertisements and promises of Utopian worlds and fears of broken ones. I get calls from Arvind Kejriwal himself telling me what my problems are; Narendra Modi hopefully looks at me with innocent eyes from every web-page that I open. Suddenly everyone is a well-wisher. As an example, someone allegedly(they told me) from Aam Aadmi Party called me to inform me about my name being struck off the electoral roll. Though I was skeptic from the beginning, I played along and asked what I should do. The person at the other end told me not to worry in a completely mechanical tone, as if he had said the s...

The Great Indian Novel  by Shashi Tharoor sits on the shoulders of two mammoth Indian fables everyone discusses still no one really knows about. The epic myth Mahabharata by Vyasa and India's historical struggle for freedom, that come together in this book, are both tales so far behind in the past they might as well be the same for the  young  India of today. Tharoor binds the two sagas, dwindling between facts and myth, which feels like a fading memory or an elaborate dream, to create this masterpiece. But one must not consider it religious just because it follows the plot of a Hindu epic; the book tells the history of India. The epic myth Mahabharata provides the satirical vehicle for the story. The Great Indian Novel  tells the tale of India's freedom struggle and the subsequent culture of majoritarian democracy in the country through the characters and events of the Mahabharata. The characters in Tharoor's novel lie somewhere between their counterparts in ...