The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

A short summary of everything happening in contemporary India. Beautiful in many places but not an easy read and requires a lot of patience.There is the plight of Hijra community, discrimination faced by Dalits, Anna Hazare movements, the rising Hindu fanaticism, Maoism and of course Kashmir. Sometimes feel like the author has pulled out too many issues with some lacking serious depth.

We feel like reading through a non fiction book sprinkled with some fictitious characters. And in many cases, it is hard to decipher whether a character is fiction or real, falling into the trap of googling the tale behind a ‘fact’.

The first few chapters were unputdownable when the story focused on the life of Anjum — a Hijra. There was so much heart in her story. But her tale was soon paused and the narrative completely transferred to the world of Tilo and the ever serene but mourning Kashmir. Tilo, an extension of the author herself, is an interesting character but fail to attract any emotional attachment. More than the characters, it is the story of Kashmir as a whole that captivates the readers with its tale of martyrdom, mourning and the unconsoled (to whom the book is dedicated). We see Kashmir and its issues through the lens of its people and how deeply it has affected different generations. We fear for the generation that the mainland has constructed, a generation that has known nothing but war.We see the rising ‘stupidification’ of the mainland and impending danger that it brings.

Into the midst of all this sadness comes the baby miss Jebeen the second, with a Maoist past, who spreads happiness to the people in Jannat guest house, a place where hope and grief are beautifully woven together by the people who have endured suffering and discrimination in their own way.Things turn out all right in the end.

Arundhati Roy is a brave author and this book is all about her experiences of being an activist, a vocal resistance against the exploitation of the weak and the voiceless. For people who holds an extremely different political stand, the book will be like a blasphemous and irrational creation. But for me, it was deeply powerful and moving, at least in some places.

‘Once you have fallen of the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,’ Anjum said, ‘you will never stop falling. And as you fall, you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.’

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental cause.

Notable Works include: The God of Small Things,The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,The Algebra of Infinite Justice,Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy..