By AMRIT DHILLON
What a pointless, silly, irritating book. So fatally flawed in conception and execution, you wonder what possessed Penguin editors to publish it. It’s never difficult to work out what drives people to write drivel and pass it on to a wider audience: vanity and ego. But what are publishers up to when they go along with it?
Surjit Singh Bamala, Akali Dal politician and the former chief minister of Punjab, resolved one fine day in 1994 to give his security guards the slip, left a message for his family saying that he would be away for several months, with a warning that they should not inform the police or the media. Now feeling liberated, he traveled through Indic incognito and mixed with “ordinary” Indians.
Now, in theory, there is a germ of a good idea. Like notably a white American who had his skin chemically treated so that it turned black and then wrote a powerful account of what it means to be a black man in the US. To work, such an adventure needs to generate tension in the sense that the author’s outlook on life is questioned or enriched when it confronts an unexplored region of unfamiliar people, situations and events, India, in fact, has a tradition of rulers moving amongst the masses in disguise to see for themselves what the man on the street was thinking. Now the gap between a king posing as a commoner is not as huge as a senior politician doing the same thing but it does, nevertheless, have some “tension” potential. But what does our Sikh author do? He dyes his white beard black, ties a cloth around his head instead of a regular turban. Dons a different pair of spectacles, hitches rides on trucks or travels by bus to a few towns and villages and, I kid you not, visits gurdwaras. It generates all the tension of a Hollywood star going into a clinic for a facelift. Perhaps, it is asking too much of a 71yearold man to embark on too radical an adventure. Let him remain a VIP who, having enjoyed power both in Punjab and at the Center as agriculture minister, desires to experience life as an ordinary person.
For readers who suffer palpitations on exposure to piercing insights, I strongly advise lying down at this point. Story of an Escape tells us the tea served at dhabas is sweet and syrupy; roads in Madhya Pradesh are full of potholes and stray cattle; buses are rickety with windowpanes missing and torn covers on the seats; truck drivers like their booze; and roadside dhabas serve a hearty fare for a low price. To be fair, there is one previously unknown piece of information in the book, namely that the sand in Chambal in Madhya Pradesh is excellent for wiping your bottom after defecating. For those planning to visit Chambal for this purpose, a great piece of information. But is it something the rest of us wants to know? Story of an Escape fails because Barnala treats the reader to nothing more than a series of painfully trite observations, interspersed with autobiographical details (necessitated by the “escape” being so thin), all conveyed in an excruciatingly plodding style.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 24, 1996
