How to tell a shattered story?
By becoming everyone? No. By becoming everything.
Ministry of utmost happiness's plot runs like a river through the crevices let open by the political climate of the country. Goverment after government ensuring that the cracks expand and go deeper and deeper while opposing the same when they are thrown out of power and replaced with a different one who claimed to be exactly the opposite of the current and promised freedom, prosperity, peace and 'solution'.
Hopes shattered, people live on their lives turned upside down because someone somewhere has a vision. A vision to be loved, feared, remembered.
Arundati Roy takes us on a ride on a houseboat on a lake that is grey reflecting the gloominess of the country, wading through the corpses of those killed by meticulous plan or some as collateral damage, we can't see the faces of the dead because they have been crushed by force, or blown out by a goverment owned light machine gun at point black range when facing it unarmed, naked with private parts tortured with electric shocks. We don't have to close our nose, the corpses do not stink, by the magic of her language she has filtered out the smell but allowed only the sadness to wash over your face, mind and conscience.
A story of the broken who have seen the many faces of brutality, negligence, disregard for their freedom of choice to be as born and die peacefully so.
A real slow boat ride that shows you your country as you already knew but never cared to acknowledge
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