Word Attack!!

A Fine Balance

April 1, 2008 on 5:38 pm | In Book Reviews |

March 17th, 2006

I picked up this book in Landmark a couple of months back, and realised I had time to read it only now. I finished reading it a couple of weeks back. Let me start with why i wanted to read the book.

I suddenly developed this great interest to know what life was like for people in the seventies and eighties. Well, I’ve been around since the late seventies, but then, I wanted to know what it was to be an adult at that time…you know what I mean…young and raring to go or just young.

I think I was romanticising the entire age, especially the early eighties and I started speaking to a few people (who were already adults at that time, and by default are middle aged now) and started asking them what it was like to grow up then. To me, life without internet, mobiles, computers, satellite TV had suddenly become something so exciting and quite out of the dark ages. But what most people seemed to talk about was the Emergency in India in 1975.

Somehow, that period had left such a deep impression on their lives, that they werent able to think about the mid seventies without thinking of the Emergency. I hardly knew what the Emergency was all about. I had heard about it vaguely, but had absolutely no idea what actually happened, and why it had happened. I guess I wasnt interested enough.

Someone suggested I read A Fine Balance to know more about the Emergency and about the seventies. And dutifully, when I spotted the book at LM, I picked it up. Here’s what I have to say about the book:

The book has an amazing sense of atmosphere. You have to just read it and you can have a pretty good understanding of what it was like to live then. For the few days it took me to finish this book, I was living in a parallel world.

The story seemed to have some sort of knack of falling together and tying up in neat circles wherever you turn. Whichever way you go, someone is connected to someone else, or they will be.

Every character from the main protagonists to the not so important characters develop some kind of reason to exist in the book.
I didnt like the toilet language that crept up in the book every now and then.

The ending depressed me. I know I didnt want a happily ever after ending, and it wasnt even possible. But the sheer dreariness of it made me world weary.