Jaipur Journals

A fresh breeze, after reading 7 books in 7 weeks about mythology, historical world literature which made a huge stretch on my limited abilities in geography, history and limited capacity to appreciate the strength of human endurance against the tests of destiny and time. Jaipur journals takes you away into a real yet fictional world of liberal urban book readers and writers who live in their intellectual ideals and judge others as lesser than them. They believe only their art is the highest form of living and by art means only their form of art.

There is no better way to review this book but thru the poison words of ‘Rudrani Rana’ the protagonist of the book to her own creator ‘Namita Gokhale’ the esteemed writer of Jaipur journals. This anonymous hate letter with abundant spelling errors would be most likely in a greeting card with a purring kitty with a seemingly snarky smile.

You intelektual buly, you think by showing a glimp of your own petttty world where you try to feel better by sounding superior to them - your own literary brothers and sisters  - the critics, thought leaders, liberals, pseudo intellectuals and likes who breed on contempt and comparison to justify their existential crisis. You think you are better than them, the NRI authors who get all the international snobby literary awards and write about India of their parents generation while growing up in US of America. Their English literature degrees and grants from foreign university to study the exotic India and tell their emotional immigrant story to the gullible American public feeding on nostalgia and a feeling of belonging nowhere. You are jealous of these small time literary celebrities who write critical essays or ironical stories, on the pretext of telling the truth but without any skin in the game. But if you look closely one can see how you give yourself away thru the story. All those shady characters each has a piece of you in them - your insecurities, your biases, your fears, your failures and of course your vices. All of these are out there and as they judge them so do they judge you. The creation is not far from its creator, like the apple does not fall far from the tree. 

And the location of the story is the Hapur literary fest, the biggest fest in India for intellectuals, liberals, thought leaders, politicians and any one even remotely linked to written world. There are the standard literary icons like Shashi Tharoor with his ‘troglodyte’ thesaurus behavior, Javed Akhtar with his sing song poetry, and the milieu of aspiring writers, NRI writers, smart teenage readers balancing education and love for writing, gay cartoonists, bollywood tell all celebrities, travel writers exploring Indian mystic, historical - mythological genre characters, gender fluidity proponents, economy critics, editors and translators. 

If this is not what a bookish heaven is like then I don’t know what is. And if this gist is not enough for me to advocate and advise you to read this book, then I am not sure what would convince you. Go now, get your copy. Each page has a line, a quote, a thought or an observation which is worth marking and keeping with you for something to chew on.