Tuhin A Sinha's protagonist Shruti Ranjan, at first glance, could be any of us. A newspaper journalist in a live-in relationship with a TV reporter, she agrees to an arranged marriage after discovering her boyfriend is involved with her best friend.
So far, so cliched. But this is not going to be a rom-com chick lit beach-read. Sinha aims at a gritty political page-turner, and even before his heroine has adjusted to life with her prim IAS husband, she is gang-raped by a local goon and his men. Denied justice, publicly humiliated, Shruti grabs the opportunity offered by politician-on-the-rise Sharad Malviya. Within months, she's an MP, a minister, and then the Bihar Chief Minister. Her rapist is thrown in jail (but naturally) though her past is dragged into the front pages and will continue to be ammunition in the hands of her detractors. The book's opening pages show Shruti in jail and the next 300-odd pages trace the journey that took her there.
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01:34 PM, May 25, 2012
Can a woman's humiliation change the destiny of a nation? It did in the Mahabharata. And it does, once again, in the lawless Bihar of the 1990s When journalist Shruti Ranjan, newly-wed wife of the Deputy Commissioner of Kishanganj is brutally raped by a 'politically sheltered local goon', all her attempts at getting justice are crushed by a corrupt and complicit state government. Thats when the charismatic Sharad Malviya, a...
11:38 AM, May 07, 2012
