Book Review :Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadorai

When I saw the name `Shyam Selvadorai' at a bookstore, I squealed with delight and so did my mom. We just rushed and picked up a copy. Afterall, we had been dying to read another book by this guy who had written `Funny Boy' and `Cinnamon Gardens'.

My friend Neetu, who is as enthusiastic about Selvadorai as my Mom and me, was a bit hesitant. `This book has been classified under the young adult genre' she said doubtfully. Momentarily stunned, my mom and I looked at the book a bit suspiciously, but finally as Selvadorai was too much to resist we picked it up.

Swimming.... is the story of a young Sri Lankan boy discovering his sexuality. Till the advent of his cousin into his life, Amrith, our 14-year-old protagonist is just a teenager with a chip on his shoulder because of his past. He has been lovingly adopted into Aunty Bundle's family following his mother's death. All of them (Aunty Bundle, her husband and two daughters) love him as their own, but Amrith refuses to belong to the family. But life brightens up for him with the advent of his Canadian cousin Niresh and the rest of the story is about how he falls in love with Niresh and through that process comes to terms with his past and with his sexuality.

The story is fairly simple, straight and well-told. There are the glimpses of Sri Lankan society as well as references to racism in Canada and how settlers deal with it. It is therefore by no standards a bad book.

However, it doesn't draw one as did Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens. In fact, I thought Funny Boy was particularly brilliant weaving the tumultous times of Sri Lankan society with its civil unrest into the story to a young boy discovering his homosexuality.

The evocative social commentary, depth of characterisation as well as the humour lacing his previous two books was missing in Swimming....and thereby made for a disappointing read. We had definitely hoped for more... Well, until the next book perhaps.

I recently read the Chetan Bhagat book `One Night @ Call Centre' which inspired me to create this blog(especially the title) and of course, once you have a blog, you have to write something on it. So this is an article dedicated to the `Thinking' Indians and the `Dumb' Americans of Chetan Bhagat fame.

The book of course, unabashedly declares itself as a pop fiction, not to be mistaken for literature. Excellent and truthful positioning (a bit of a rarity these days). Uh-oh, that was a pot-shot, the idea is not to review the book, but just review one of the thoughts in there.

Many times in the book Chetan Bhagat (this is too long for me to keep repeating, so henceforth he shall be known as CB) makes the statement that Americans are dumb and somewhere he says that we Indians are an intelligent species capable of `thinking'. I, being the random secularist that I am, find this kind of generalisation rather racist. But considering this is an opinion voiced by several others, I wondered if there was any reality in it.

Considering I have never lived outside of this country, I thought I would start with examining the `Thinking' Indian angle. I sauntered along thinking (?), for what is more conducive to thought than a walk along the Indian roads. I had chosen a rather unfortunate time when a maximum number of vehicles seemed to invade the roads of Besant Nagar(where I live). Horns roared as vehicles competed in overtaking each other, practically all headlights were on high beam making the road a sound and light nightmare to traverse. And then of course, all vehicles have the self-important objective of `me -first' and all pedestrians believe in `do or die' methodology of sauntering casually across the road impeding the maximum number of vehicles, creating a small traffic jam, when none was needed. Of course, consideration for others is not necessarily linked to brilliance of thought. Au contraire, it indicates an ingenuous ability on our part to create drama in real life without having to resort to props or productions.

So I proceeded to ponder and walk ahead. A disagreeable smell, terrible enough to choke breath, reminded me that the bus depot was closeby. It must indeed be a thoughtful variety of Indians who mark out useful public places like railway stations or bus depots by way of emptying their bladders.

OK, so real life is not working for me. Lets get intellectual. Idle conversations with colleagues led to justification of Godhra, the Mumbai bomb blasts meant India should unleash a terror attack on Muslims (vaguely defined as Pakistan).Just look at Israel said one, how brave they are to destroy enemies and we as a country just stand by and let ourselves be terrorised. Right!

Shift focus a little bit more and you realise India's largest selling newspaper is propelled by Page 3, television channels are full of `family' soaps much along the lines of the Bold and Beautiful, except for the costumes of course. Maybe the costume designer is the Thinking Indian.

We have had a history of class,caste,race wars over the past few years and we have even banned films because our politicians take objection to some actors. We are indeed a thoughtful democracy!

Ok, I am getting a bit tired here and I bet so are you. So, the point I am driving at is that when I look around me (or at me for that matter) I do not see any signs of thought. So where is this breed of Thinking Indians that CB is so proud of?

Or maybe, what exactly is Thinking? Does it denote our ability to quickly memorise? Does it refer to the massive problem solving skills? Do we define intelligent thinking by way of skills? What kind of thinking people are we then?

On the other hand, our output in terms of sheer genius has been limited. Our corporates traditionally have thrived on reverse engineering rather than original thinking. We haven't made any great strides in fundamental thinking on science, maths or for that matter history,arts or literature. Our day-to-day philosophies are hollow one-liners so there is no `thought leadership'. So where exactly is our pride coming from?

It is really a depressing thought to admit that we, as a race, are thoughtless, which is as bad as or maybe worse than dumb, because it implies that we are capable of thought but we choose not to make use of that capability. And as long as we let such hollow superiority dominate us, we will never be able to think - wholistically.