Of Bookers, and everything after


Completed reading "The Inheritance Of Loss" by Kiran Desai yesterday. The last Indian Booker "The God of Small Things" was one of those books I simply could not finish reading. It was just too miserable. A fastidious exercise in in shredding misery to its finest detail and watching it rot.

Kiran Desai is much the same. The story of a group of people living out their lives, in full awareness of the hypocrisies they harbour and nurture, and hold on to even as everything collapses. Hypocrisies resulting from immigration, from poverty, from India, from diversity, etc. I have to say this is a book that will definitely make you more sad than happy. For the most part, the plot is weak and the pages are filled with some description or the other. If you glanced past 3 pages, you wouldn't have missed a thing.

And finally, Kiran Desai misses, or rather forgoes the opportunity to make this a great story by settling for a safe, hopeful ending rather than a bold one. In fact, the bolder ending would have been more in character with the sadness that abounds the book. Instead, Kiran takes a different, rather anticlimactic route.

The book has its positives though. The author is skilled at description and observation. Observations about nuances of hypocrisy and all that must not be. Given her own background, she does a great job of unveiling the phsyche of Indian immigrants all over the globe. Although the story itself is set in the 1950s, one cannot but observe how much things have remained the same for people in India and for Indians abroad. Infact, the one segment of people, Indians abroad, for whom this book is written, will wince the most while reading it.


If you are someone who has the stomach for this much pain, then please go ahead and read this book.

If you are not, then I would recommend that you stay away from this and listen to my recorded music instead :-).