A Fine Balance

What a miserable place India was in the '70s.  Even before reading this book I never had a desire to go to said country, but now I'm sure that if I ever did happen to be there I would constantly be getting depressed thinking about this book.  Maybe though, it would give me a sense of how much progress the country has made when before this read, I would have just been disgusted with the lack of sanitation and poverty.

I suppose this story is about friendship and love through hardship, but what's coming in loud and clear is that life is hopeless so you should just give up.  This is hard to grasp as an entitled asian girl in America who's family always had money and therefore had the means to keep working at getting what she wants with certainty that someday it could be attained, but as a poor person in 1975 India, I'd say that motto of "just stop trying" is pretty accurate and that basically dying was a better alternative to trying to climb the social ladder, or even to keep on living.  This was supported by insane amounts of violence between religious groups and poor people, government officials and poor people, and then some weird tensions between student activists and some entity I didn't quite understand (potentially more government assholes).

If there is a movie of this book, I never want to see it because I would have nightmares forever.

Also, there is a person who is basically a pimp for beggars who's name is Beggarmaster.  He keeps all of the money he collects in a suitcase that is chained to his wrist.  This is not a joke and no one seems to find this strangely hilarious.  He also happens to be one of the nicest characters in this book so seriously, what I'm getting at here, is India was pretty fucked up.

This was the last book I had left from Colleen's generous gift.  This means I need new books.  My birthday happens to be two weeks away.  Wink wink.