I have got back into my reading habit….at last….
I have also configured my Shelfari book shelf on this blog. I wanted to keep my reading list and not he book shelf, so that my current list of books come up here. But WordPress doesnt take the code for reading list!

I have been reading Indian literature in translation. Finished Satyajit Ray’s short fiction, Perumal Murugan’s Current Show and now has taken up P Sivakami’s The Grip of Change.

Now how did I get back into this habit? Out of the pressure of academic reading, I have not got a long list of theory to be finished before I start a paper! Technical Writing doesnt require much professional reading. I get lots of time in the cab which picks and drops me to and from office.

The book which I just finished reading: Current Show.
I picked it up by looking at the translator [V. Geetha] and by reading the jacket.

Set in a small highway town in South India, Current Show explores the life of a young soda-seller in a run-down movie theatre.

Sathi’s grim and dreamy life is clocked by show time. The tedium of his ill-paid work is offset by his friends – young men who work around the theatre, fighting, playing, bullying, yet supporting each other. An intense and tender friendship with one of the men sustains Sathi, until a train of events casts the meagre certainties of his life into disarray. Written in a spare, swift style that mimics the rapid images and cuts of cinema, Current Show leads into the murky twilight world of the dispossessed.

I remember Sathi and his friends, each time I pass by a movie hall now. They were there always, but I never saw them before. Blind with privilege.

The book is very raw and coarse when you enter. But I feel the characters, their desperation, sexual pleasures and pride are dealt with a very sensitive hand. For example, Sathi as a helper in the soda shop in the movie hall is not shown as someone without choices. The soda man wants him to come to his house to look after his cattle. There is more money, good food and other perks involved in that. But Sathi decides to stay back with his protta and spicy curry from the street vendor and more important, to Nateshan in the movie hall. In abject desperation, he is someone with a choice in deciding his life.

The adolescent men around the movie hall are exploited and used. But there is no romanticization of poverty, but a stark depiction. Perumal could have shown the same sensitivity to the women characters as well. Besides the local sex worker who comes to the movie hall, we done remember reading about anyone else.