Review: Show me a Hero

I recently read Aditya Sudarshan’s second book Show me a Hero, a story about youth, growing up and standing up for their beliefs. A good effort but not an extraordinary story to keep it interesting enough for the reader. I found the plot good but the characters very disconnected.

The story is of how a fresh out of college youth Prashant Padmanabhan wants to make a movie about his cricketing icon Ali Khan. He wants to clear the controversy surrounding Ali’s retirement from cricket through his movie. Prashant, thanks to his sheer persistence, manages to convince Khan to be a part of the project. Everything seems to be falling in place for Prashant in terms of the movie; he also gets his friend Vaibhav to help him out with the project. Things start going awry as soon as they start filming with Prashant receiving death threats for supporting Ali, also court summons from religious groups that do not want their community portrayed in a bad light. It gets worse when Prashant is found dead in his home.

It is first assumed that it was an accident but it is soon established that he was murdered. So the book soon turns into a whodunit when Vaibhav and Animesh, his roommate, try to get to the bottom of Prashant’s death. That is when they discover not everything is as simple and not everyone is as they seem, bringing to the fore the complexities of human mind.

Interesting plot but seems to go haywire at times. At times I just skipped pages to know who could have done this to Prashant and why but midway it was pretty clear and evident who the murderer is. The book does try to address issues that young adults are facing, the challenges of urban living. Just wish it could be a more gripping and interesting read.

About the Author:

Aditya Sudarshan is a fiction writer. He is the author of a novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday, a play, Sensible People, and several short stories and television scripts. He also writes literary criticism for The Hindu Literary Review and other publications.

Review: All and Nothing

Five individuals brought together by a friend to spill their guts, bare their souls and in the process, to embark upon a journey of self-discovery and...and...what? Inner peace? Forgiveness? Redemption? Perhaps a melange of all the above...

This is the premise for Raksha Bharadia’s, “All and Nothing.” A successful author in the self-help genre (Me: A Handbook for Life; Roots and Wings), Raksha is also the first Indian editor of the Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series, having edited close to a dozen best-selling titles. So the expectations from her first ever work of fiction were high.

And she has met those expectations with confidence and elan!

An engaging book, the characters introduced to us by Raksha have a disquieting sense of familiarity – maybe we can recognise qualities and traits of friends and family members in them; maybe we can even see bits of ourselves in them.

Beautiful, talented and sensitive, artist Tina believes she has found the perfect husband in Aditya. However, her seemingly made-in-heaven marriage turns awry as Tina unsuccessfully struggles to free Aditya from the shackles of his past – a past which he can’t seem to break free of, nor does he seem to want to. His betrayal almost pushes back...almost. Just as she’s about to teeter over the edge, she pulls back and realises there life is still worth living. One just needs to break free from one’s shackles of sadness and be brave enough to make a grab for that cloud of happiness. And it is this new-found realisation of hers that she wishes to share with her closest friends, all of whom she knows would benefit from it: celebrated fashion-designer Kriya who has a sordid secret; confident, beautiful socialite Poorvi whose sense of self-worth seems to hinge on the one thing that she does not have; Manas, suffering from a broken heart and bruised ego; and domestically-abused Upasana, an intelligent woman who should know better.

Raksha allows us to be a voyeur into the lives of all the characters and as we listen to them relive their lives and spill out their secrets, we can feel their pains, their dilemmas and the result is sometimes shock, sometimes judgemental – after all, we can’t help but be.

And it is this, my personal sense of judgement, of right and wrong, of punishment and redemption, that threw up a few dislikes, because I didn’t believe in the final resolutions of some of the characters. I think Aditya got off waaaaayyyyy too easy, Antara (Aditya’s ex-wife) deserved to face some sort of hell and Poorvi’s route to deliverance was a cop-out.

But then, that’s just me. I am not as forgiving of crimes and faults as others are. I have a harsher sense of fairness than others. But like I said, that’s just me. To others, probably everything falls into place perfectly and ties up tidily. And still, there may be others who might feel some of the characters suffered too much in their own personal purgatories and should have been let off more lightly.

However, that’s the delightful thing about reading isn’t it? The characters and experiences colour your world as much as you allow your world to colour your reading of that fictional world.

For a first book, Raksha has done a fine job! It makes us eagerly await her next one. After all, a good start only guarantees a great follow-up, right?

(This book is reviewed by Baisali Chatterjee Dutt. Baisali blogs athttp://mammamiameamamma@blogspot.com)