Click to play videoMumbai: After the success of his debut novel The Last Song of Dusk, writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, is ready with his second book, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay. Inspired by real life events, this book, says the writer, more than a chronicle of the times, is an individual political act.
It's an ode to the city he grew up in and Shangvi brings home a reality in the The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay that's very different from the one in Slumdog Millionaire - from to the stomping grounds of the rich and the famous to the shopping grounds of the middle class.
"The reality that you see in Slumdog Millionaire is completely valid but are you looking at it as somebody from the inside or are you looking at it in the position of an observer and engaging in poverty porn, a kind of vouyerism about how other peoples' lives are lived? I wanted very much to hold a mirror to contemporary India," says he.
The book criss-crosses Mumbai's heady social circles. It's about four lives which are connected by a murder set in a nightspot, owned by a prominent socialite and her fashion designer daughter.
The theme of the book has evoked many raised eyebrows among the cocktail circuit.
"There are a lot of people particularly these tacky socialites who believe themselves to be caricatured are actually flattering themselves," was Shanghvi's smooth rejoinder to some people thinking the book was based on them.
Shanghvi adds that its not just a chronicle of contemporary india, but is also a political act in an era of moral policing.
"The people who read it will find a certain resonance of the freedoms that they have negotiated under the governments of the Shiv Sena as well as the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena," he says.
Shanghvi says this could be his last book, and as swan songs go this one may end up ruffling quite a few feathers.
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