Back to tradition

People who uncategorically hate activists, writers, NGO workers and academicians would be delighted to read Sanjeev Sanyal’s first attempt at fiction. Life Over Two Beers and Other Stories is his debut in the genre of the short story. Most of the stories work as satire on inconvenient people like professors of Sociology and English Literature, and journalists. There are these figures elevated (or demoted?) to the level of frivolous socialites, people hobnobbing with the powerful class. These characters are shown to be surviving by deceiving others and flourishing as hypocrites.

The used-car salesman in the story of the same name is jobless and living on a relative’s charity by taking care of his art gallery. Everybody thinks the gallery is his. Very soon, he begins to be known as a patron of the arts, giving his opinion on television debates, or appearing in literary festivals. In the festival he attends, the police arrest an editor for sexually assaulting a colleague. The tamasha leads to more tamasha: “A panel on workplace sexual harassment was hurriedly put together. Rishi was a natural choice and he spoke confidently on several aspects of the subject. No one noticed there were no women on the panel.”

In the title story, a former bonds trader learns of how the non-governmental sector operates in Delhi. One such organisation exaggerates the severity of a problem to grab funding from foreign agencies. The story ‘The Troll’ is about a homemaker secretly operating as a social media activist. The target of the satirical attack is not her, but a news website that claims to be supporters of truth: “In reality, it was run as a sly front for publishing articles that suited the political and commercial interests of those who financed it. Between gossipy articles about Bollywood and scholarly articles on obscure topics, it inserted personal attacks on inconvenient individuals, cleverly couched as investigative journalism. At other times, it lobbied for or against legislation while claiming to espouse high-minded causes like ‘social uplift’, ‘human rights’, ‘environmental conservation’ and ‘poverty eradication’. It was of course entirely coincidental that the articles invariably took a stance that helped the cause of one of the website’s backers.”

In ‘The Bench by the Lake’, a former “revolutionary poet” publishes his own obituary after moving to another city and assuming a different identity. People begin to show an interest in him. There are talks of having his bust made for a park, of including his poetry in the university syllabus. While there is no bust made, and the university syllabus remains unchanged, the poet is satisfied because his friends from the old city who had first ignored him begin to write to the editors of the newspapers praising him.

He has had his revenge by becoming immortal: “For years to come, he would be discussed under the old rain tree: many an anecdote would be told about him, many an aphorism and miraculous remedy ascribed to him.”

‘The Intellectuals’ ends with an abstract of a paper published on intellectual culture in India. The convoluted language is a further ridicule of how the intellectuals speak: “group dynamics can still be manipulated through external stimulus. This is possible because the incumbent hierarchy is itself based on claims of external validation since prolonged stagnation precludes internal validation.” It is a study of pretentious scholars chitchatting in Kolkata and how they suck up to a foreign scholar. The one dominating the group has written only one paper in two decades. When the American accepts the paper of another timid fellow, the power structure in the group changes.

‘Drivers’ is about how expatriate Indians and foreign journalists rely on their drivers, maids and cooks as their source of information and begin to call themselves experts. A civil servant who hates these pseudo-intellectuals becomes a part of this gang after his meteoric rise in his job.

These characters do nothing and thrive on the others’ impression that they are doing a lot, and therein lies the satire. These are hollow men and women who know nothing, but bluff their way to financial success and social stature.

Since the volume disapproves of the Brahmins of urban Indian modernity, there ought to be a glimpse of what ought to replace such buffoonery. The answer is perhaps some kind of ancient wisdom. A verse in the last story reads: “Listen to the Ancient Verses, / Just like the whispers of the Gods, / May they fill the Heart with Wonder.” In ‘The Troll’, an old man, a leader of a local yoga club, who protests against teenage disobedience, loud music, or children playing in the park is shown to be wrongly understood as a grumpy villain. The message is clear: worship the old and the authority. People who question the old and the authority will not welcome the book at all.