Aravinda Adiga, the latest discovery of the literary world, made an impression with description of the underbelly of India’s development in his very first novel. His ‘The White Tiger’ impressed the Booker judges enough to award his maiden venture the Man Booker Prize 2008. <br/><br/>The same year, Salman Ruhdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ was taken up for a fresh bout of praising by the Booker association which awarded it the Booker of the Bookers. The book traces India’s evolution in the period 1915 to 1977 through the lens of a handful of families, who have only one thing in common, their bizarre and grotesque destiny. <br/><br/>There are others who have ably exploited the shadows and the sadness of life. Of them Naipaul and Anita Desai are established faces, while Roberto Bolano and Jhumpa Lahiri are more famous of the younger lot. <br/><br/>Not only in India, but across the globe, contemporary comedies are black, the non-fictions are observations on tragedies like war, dislocation, the experience of the subaltern; while other works are mere escapes into fantasies, with a queer kind of wisdom which we do not look for in such books. <br/><br/>The common factor among the more appreciated works of contemporary authors is the ever present pain of humanity, the nostalgia for a better world, and the experience of immigration. When the depiction of pain is precise and the insight profound the books rise to the heights of greatness. <br/><br/>Realism is popular and people like to look at ugly facts on the face. When a work shows a mirror to the society unabashedly, it sells. <br/><br/>Still, not everyone likes reading about the ‘realities’; which they anyway have to face every moment. Half the population likes to be given a fairy ride to the other extreme. Nothing excites such readers like an escape into an impossible make-believe world. This is what made JK Rowling, that bewitching blond mother of three, become the best-paid author of 2008. Rowling gave the world Harry Potter and took a break to figure out what to do with her still-enlarging bank balance. <br/><br/>It is either a well-documented open-wound operation of what ails the people, or a powerful palliative that blocks out the spasms jolting the society every now and then. But it has to concern the wounds – for earth and its dwellers are riddled with them. <br/><br/>If a decent writer comes up with any such idea for a book, rest assured it would be a success the very next day.
