{"id":5681,"date":"2012-03-25T10:35:36","date_gmt":"2012-03-25T05:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=5681"},"modified":"2020-11-15T14:30:57","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T09:00:57","slug":"deaf-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2012\/03\/25\/deaf-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaf Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pinki Virani<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m quite a fan of Pinki Virani’s earlier work – Once was Bombay, so there might be a bit of a bias here. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

‘Deaf heaven’ is billed as her first work of fiction, but is perhaps as close to non-fiction as it can get. The characters are clearly based on the contemporary personalities – from movie stars to politicians, and the descriptions are such that a little knowledge can easily help you identify them – the ‘caterpillar -eyebrows’ actress to the leader of the saffron army, to the famous film star and his wannabe famous son and the lesbian maker of daily soaps. See? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The narrator is the cleft lipped and recently dead Saraswati, librarian by profession and collector of facts. Over a weekend, with an eclipse that serves as a climax for the multiple narratives, she traces the lives of the characters, a mixture of the famous and the ordinary, connected to each other by varying degrees of separation.<\/p>\n

The book is a commentary on modern India and its mixture of contradictions, with representatives from different geographies, strata in life, age, and religion. Though primarily a woman’s perspective, the author manages to tackle the paradoxes of the emerging superpower – from female infanticide (and an ingenious way of communicating the unborn child’s gender – an illegal act), and tribal exploitation, to the mechanics of religion-politics, the effect of chemicals on vultures and the ‘death by railway track’ on Mumbai’s famed local trains, all interconnected, just like the characters.<\/p>\n

Though a preachy tone does dominate the last part of the book, it is definitely a must read, not just for the pertinent and fundamental questions the author makes us think about, but also for her razor sharp wit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pinki Virani I’m quite a fan of Pinki Virani’s earlier work – Once was Bombay, so there might be a bit of a bias here. \ud83d\ude42 ‘Deaf heaven’ is billed as her first work of fiction, but is perhaps as close to non-fiction as it can get. The characters are clearly based on the contemporary […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[370,6007],"tags":[2154,891],"class_list":["post-5681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-fiction","tag-deaf-heaven","tag-pinki-virani"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5681"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6323,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5681\/revisions\/6323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}