Sriram Karri's constant attempts to assert his intellectual superiority prove the undoing of an otherwise riveting novel, says Stuti Pachisia.
Autobiography of a Mad Nation
Sriram Karri
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Rs 450 | 381 pp
The novel starts off with a distinctively déjà vu moment, à la The White Tiger. Twenty-something Vikrant Vaidya is the archetypal Indian youth—aware, intellectual to a fault, and terribly frustrated. The combination of these highly volatile factors leads him to do the unthinkable: own up to a crime that he did not commit. A few pages and a letter to the People’s President, APJ Abdul Kalam, later, you learn that Vikrant Vaidya is innocent but uninterested in mercy or pardon, because “one of the many things [he finds] wrong with our world is mercy.” Vikrant Vaidya is Holden Caulfield thrust in a 21st Indian scenario, but despite his rather “emphatic assertions”, you cannot really bring yourself to care about him.
Nevertheless, the People’s President, by virtue of his title, does. So, in a nearly unrealistic turn of events, he assigns ex-CBI chief, M Vidyasagar, to find out whether Vaidya really is guilty of killing his poor, mentally unstable neighbour, who is incidentally Muslim. The case is a subject of media-frenzy, heightened beyond repair. What unfolds is a winding tale, revealing that Vaidya may simply be a pawn in the expansive chessboard of events.
Vaidya’s diary note assertions are thoughts that have crossed every Indian’s mind, but Karri’s deliberate choice to intellectualise Vaidya to an extreme level destroys the effect that Vaidya could potentially have.
The saving grace of the novel is its parallel storylines. On one hand, as we delve deeper and deeper into Vaidya’s case, the line between fact and fiction begins to get blurred. Karri uses historical fact to create his fiction by using the controversies around Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Vaidya manages to address practically every fathomable burning issue—fundamentalism, religious conflict and the India’s desperate attempt at secularism. Somehow, Vaidya is a by-product of all these events, having had his grandfather become a casualty to the Emergency and having witnessed a Sikh playmate being threatened in the light of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
On the other, we read pages out of Vaidya’s diary, where we realise he is the quintessential Frustrated Indian Youth caught in a dire state of events, willing to resort to desperate measures in desperate times. You feel sympathetic towards Vaidya and connect with his frustration, but the sympathy comes with condescension. More than once, you cannot help but think that Karri tried too hard to create his “answer to Jean Paul Sartre”. Vaidya’s diary note assertions are thoughts that have crossed every Indian’s mind, but Karri’s deliberate choice to intellectualise Vaidya to an extreme level destroys the effect that Vaidya could potentially have. This is a novel intended for literary savants, but through his all-too frequent references, from Francis Bacon to Hermann Hesse and downward, Karri is in a constant bid to assert Vaidya’s, and consequently, his personal intellectual superiority.
The story in itself, however, is riveting. With plot twists and turns guaranteed with every turn of the page, as the truth of Vikrant Vaidya’s involvement begins to emerge, the pieces fall into place. The second half of the book is the unravelling of the whole story, marking the origin of a man frustrated by what his mad nation has to offer. Set in Karri’s alma mater, Daly College, the novel uses flashbacks to mould the story and trace the origin of all its characters, and how their lives are intertwined and scarred by larger political events. This is the novel’s saving grace—the hobnobbing of a group of young, idealistic boys is reminiscent of Rang De Basanti, and in the long run, has similar, dire consequences.
What makes the novel successful, is also its brutal hamartia. Karri tries to put together every one of the the multi-dimensional aspects of India into a 381-page novel. In covering everything (cricket included), he captures the concept of a mad nation by trying to create a method in the vast madness of the novel. The problem is, however, that the method is not as apparent and as riveting as one would like it to be. The novel is unsettling, but not unsettling enough to provoke the average citizen. The novel is a stab at greatness, ambitious, but to quote Shakespeare, as Karri often does, “ambition is made of sterner stuff”.
