{"id":196443,"date":"2013-10-04T19:28:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T13:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=196443"},"modified":"2013-10-04T19:28:12","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T13:58:12","slug":"malice-in-blunderland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/malice-in-blunderland\/","title":{"rendered":"Malice in Blunderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo:
Shovon Chowdhury Photo: Ankit Agrawal<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAt one point in Shovon Chowdhury\u2019s hilarious debut novel, The Competent Authority<\/em>, the protagonist \u2014 a 12-year-old slum dweller called Pintoo \u2014 asks his headmaster to name one thing he would change about the country if he could go back in time. \u201cFind Indira true love,\u201d is the reply. \u201cMaybe if someone had been by her side, giving her hugs from time to time, her heart would have been softer. Then perhaps she would not have hated us so, and turned us all into her servants, and gifted us the culture of chamchagiri, and made us an aristocracy of idiots, and allowed every manner of corruption to thrive, so long as the corrupt bowed deeply as she walked by.\u201d (Pintoo, who can actually send people back in time, dismisses the idea since \u201cengineering romance sounded like a tricky business\u201d.)
\nThere\u2019s much speculative thinking like this in the book. It is a novel set in the immediate future that sends three of its characters to the past to undo three key events in Indian history. But what The Competent Authority<\/em> is really concerned with is the present. The India of the book is ostensibly different from real life. After a particularly hawkish prime minister refused to apologise to the Chinese for feeding a Tibetan baby (the next Dalai Lama) a piece of dhokla, Delhi and Mumbai have been obliterated by Chinese nukes (the US, targeting Islamabad in retaliation, managed to bomb Punjab). Bengal has seceded and become a Chinese protectorate. After the war, the newly formed Bureau of Reconstruction has consolidated most political power and the country is effectively run by a shadowy bureaucrat known as The Competent Authority. Bananas are purple; some people have extra limbs.
\nBut there is so much about this India that mirrors reality. The destruction of New Delhi has sent real estate prices skyrocketing; only the rich live in New New Delhi, while the poor who survived live in a ghetto. The rule of law is virtually non-existent, and the police carry rate cards for convenience. Slavery is legal, but it\u2019s not just the poor who are enslaved. Professionals \u2014 doctors, engineers and plumbers alike \u2014 sell their skills to the wealthy, conditions not entirely dissimilar to the terms of contract employment. It\u2019s a sobering thought, how little a leap of reason is required in order to accept the dystopian setting Chowdhury creates.
\nThat sobering moment is what the best of satire seeks to create. Dr Strangelove<\/em> works precisely because you end the film with the thought that nuclear armageddon is barely one crazy Colonel away. Like his influences \u2014 Mark Twain, Anthony Burgess, Sukumar Ray, Philip K Dick, Manoj Mitra; \u201can odd mix of some science fiction guys and some funny people\u201d \u2014 Chowdhury brings great insight to his social commentary. Pintoo\u2019s quest to find the correct moments to undo provides some of the best bits (Tarunda, a communist who helps in Pintoo\u2019s education, feels that BR Chopra\u2019s Ramayana<\/em> is the root cause of communalism). But even in the events of the future, in the cynical moves of the rich and powerful, there are gems to be found. The Bank of Bodies, which takes body parts from poor \u201cdonors\u201d to sell to its rich \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d, decides to diversify its customer base by branching into the \u201clow-margin, high-volume\u201d religion business. \u201cIn religion, all that the customer gains is hope, and the possibility of return at some point in the undefined future\u201d, after all.
\n
\"The
\u00a0 \u00a0The Competent Authority<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Shovon Chowdhury; Aleph \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0462 pp; Rs 495<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAgain, like in the best of satire, there is plenty of vitriol. In an interview in the offices of the advertising agency he works at in Delhi (having studied at Jadavpur University and IIM Kolkata), I ask Chowdhury if he wrote the book from a place of anger. \u201cElements of it were therapeutic. You can chuck shoes at the television set, or if you\u2019re more of a hero, at actual people. But beyond a point, what\u2019s that going to achieve? And obviously, being a Bengali, one way would have been to drink in the evening with buddies and do adda<\/em> for hours on end. It seemed a little\u2026 yeah, I was really angry.\u201d
\nThe idea for the book came as he watched the Gujarat riots play out on television. \u201cIt really struck me how cheap human life is in this country. The basic thought process was, what if you had a country where life had no value at all. What kind of a country would it be if you corporatised that notion? I don\u2019t think the Bank of Bodies is that different from Dr Kumar\u2019s Clinic. The only difference is that Dr Kumar was too cheap to put in carpets.\u201d It took him 11 years to write, made up of whatever free time he got at home and office (he isn\u2019t particularly picky). \u201cThe thing is, when you\u2019re trying to write a book about the near future, you need to be much faster. So I kept having to revise it.\u201d
\nThe accumulated labour shows in the scale of the book, which, at over 450 pages, is a shade too long. He\u2019s still not done; there\u2019s another book in the works that tells the story from the vantage point of the Bengal protectorate \u2014 \u201cnot a sequel, but an equal\u201d \u2014 where he intends to tie up the few loose ends. In his review of the book, Indrajit Hazra has said that he\u2019d rather it was \u201ca collection of shorter stories set under the thrall of The Competent Authority<\/em>\u201d. It\u2019s a fair point; the sheer bulk of the plot can overwhelm, and Chowdhury overuses the easy crutch of giving characters defining tics and mining it for gold. He redeems himself by being genuinely funny, papering over the weak spots by making his characters seem like absolute nutjobs, but absolute nutjobs you want to hear more about.
\nThe Competent Authority<\/em> is great satire, but immediately raises the question why there isn\u2019t more satire, great or otherwise, in Indian writing in English. \u201cThat\u2019s a very easy one,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s 5,000 years of history, which has made us inclined to be worshipful. In the Indian cricket team, a junior player will call Sachin Tendulkar, \u2018Sachin sir\u2019. If you\u2019re acting in a movie together, one minute Sonakshi Sinha is smooching Akshay Kumar, but then on a television, she will say \u2018Akshay sir is a great inspiration to me\u2019. Satire, at some level, always demands that you make fun of somebody.\u201d It\u2019s changing, though, he says, with a new generation of comic writers, mostly bloggers, unafraid to get past their \u201cinherent worshipfulness\u201d and take potshots at those in power. (It doesn\u2019t bode well, though, that the most successful satirists are essentially replicating The<\/em> Onion<\/em>. There are few truly original voices yet.)
\nChowdhury holds the darkening national mood responsible for the nascent growth of satire, likening it to the genesis of Jewish comedy or even Pakistan\u2019s mainstream acceptance of satire. He believes that only when things get really bad does a population grow a sense of humour. \u201cYou\u2019ve really got to start worrying when funny guys start coming out of the woodwork.\u201d
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shovon Chowdhury depicts a failed Indian State in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. An India that is strikingly similar to the one we live in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":196444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,7056,8434,8435,8436,8437,8438,8439,8440,8441,8442,8443,7666],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}