A little nervous, I was
when I started to write this review. 'Autobiography of a Mad Nation', is a novel, which reminds the reader which country
s/he is born, this book or rather this saga contains a nation with its up and down
history, and its gigantic reasons, and stupendous explanations and probably the worst ever nightmares known to
man.
It begins with how Dr M
Vidyasagar, a retired CBI chief becomes involved in an investigation, which has
been commissioned by the President of India, privately. Sagar gets to work and
we are involved in the writing, which takes us across not just the young man,
Vikrant Vaidya who has been sentenced to death for killing a neighbour. Involuntarily, Vidyasagar is wrapped up in an intriguing plot, which rides through the history of
India, starting with the Emergency and going till the Godhra riots.
We are put into the
various situations of what happened, and the emotions felt by not just the people
of this truly 'mad' nation, as we try and figure out what exact happenings are, in
this tale, which spans across the Emergency, to the anti-Sikh riots leading to
the Ram Janmabhoomi Rath Yatra, the Mandal Commission protests, right through
the economic liberalisation, the Babri Masjid demolition and finally, the riots
at Godhra.
With talk of cricket,
Rushdie, Hyderabad, Dalits, controversies, books, the
youth, godmen, et al with
a good dose of religions and of course, the effervescent politics and its
handlers. I refused to be confused with
the ideals of all the ideologies, while I kept reading on. We go back and
forth through the pages of this book and through this nation's history.
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| Sriram Karri - Photo by Ashwin Kireet |
The
brilliance rests in the fact that this author, Sriram Karri has managed to weave India into its own, rather
largish web. It is naturally, not a story of emotions or even day to day activities.
It was not a book that I loved, but definitely not a book, I could ignore.
But,
there is still only one emotion, which one holds on to. Exasperation, at the
mad nation that India is, because nothing in this book was ever, too small to not be noticed.
How
it finishes is probably the end, but this particular story could never really end...
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