Book Review: Sikandar, Binayak Banerjee, Translated by Soma Ghosh

"But we have lost track of the original context." says one of the characters during her interaction with another in this fictionalized account of a reality show, almost echoing the readers sentiments. This comes at a point almost half way through the book and you're left dazed, wondering where the story is going. And why are you still reading it? I'm surprised at how most of the things these days have ceased to surprise me. This book seems to be one of them. You can read it and conveniently forget that you ever read something like Sikandar.

The premise is something we've grown familiar to. Thanks to the million reality shows that have invaded prime time Indian television. This book borrows its format from Big Boss/ Big Brother. There are ten players, mostly consisting of the usual suspects, who are thrown together in a house for 68 days. The one who manages to survive the eliminations by the public emerges as the Sikandar.There are a lot of things that could have been done interestingly, but the author fails to conjure up anything that's memorable.

One big problem with the book is that it is populated with too many characters (though the plot demands it) and sub plots. After reading ten pages you've forgotten the first character. Sometimes you can also mix them up conveniently  without really bothering. Though these characters do have depth, it all somehow fails to add up to anything interesting and instead turns into Goulash.Also most of the characters very conveniently seem to have past connections, a little more than a coincidence which is slightly hard to believe. Call it stereotypical, but the author explores the quirks of two characters really well- the actor Kanishka Sengupta and the prostitute Lovely.

The book reminded me of The president is coming (I've only seen the film, not read the book or seen the play). But that was at least hilarious. Here all the characters talk in riddles and drown everything in philosophy, that really gets at you after a point. Probably it sounded nice in Bengali, but doesn't really work for the translation.Also, we aren't even really made aware of the game show, except that characters keep getting eliminated after every few pages.The author employs the technique telling the story through the point of view of the characters,  something that was done brilliantly in Election by Tom Perrotta. This is what I ended up thinking of, making comparisons to several other things while reading it. The book could have have been many things, but it leaves you high and dry. But the language is good (though there are a few typos), not like the one in this.

You can probably read it once, that is if you really have to. Otherwise go watch the latest season of Big Boss. The latter though, would be a mind numbing exercise.

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