Literarycritics and laymen alike opine that anyone who ventures into writing is, moreoften than not, a person with a social conscience, with empathy and commitmentto healthy human relationships. The hallmark of a writer is that he/she willhave the ability to ‘feel’ the real and imagined experiences and truthfullyportray it. There is that powerful urge in him to find expression to hiscreativity in words and images without which he feels helpless, thinks there isa void in his life. Thus, his creative pursuit becomes his raison d’etre. In other words, a sense of fulfillment marks the vocation and life of awriter. A good writer, in addition, will have the confidence and capability inmaking excellent, even extravagant, use of his good sense, sensibility, andsensitivity in the process of creating a corpus of his own, a niche forhimself. A good writer is invariably socially informed; and is expected to bealive to socio-political realities so much so that he creates a context forunfolding these in his writings in an artistic manner. He thus, inter alia,discharges his social responsibility.
Gollapudi Srinivasa Rao is a bi-lingual short story writer, he writes both inTelugu and English. Many of the well-formed stories included in this collectionhave been published in The Statesman and Pratibha India, kind ofconfidence-boosting approval for a promising writer. It must beacknowledged that not many English writers, especially fiction writers haveemerged from the state of AP so far, and the Telangana region is no exception.I hope that Mr. Gollapudi fills this void in the days to come. He is coming upwith this collection at a relatively young age, and if the promise it holds isany indication, one can expect more from him in terms of quality and quantity.And he has the needed qualities: He is talented and he is ambitious. He hastime on his side, and good temperament too. Anyone who reads his first Englishshort story collection will be convinced of his qualities as a good writer: Hehas a compassionate view, attentive and sensitive eye, and more importantlyfine sensibility, and feel for social realities. In most of Mr. Gollapudi’sstories, pacing of the narrative is smooth, free-flowing and effortless. Thecharacters too, are rooted firmly in the soil, and hence carry the stamp ofauthentic feel; they are down to earth, drawn from different walks of life,some simple and rustic, others wily and exploitative who know ways of theworld. The focal point in all the stories is contemporary middleclassmilieu wherein the writer examines how a set of individuals living in a(dis)comfort zone of their own behave and interact with others in a given context.The writer succeeds in bringing out their different shades, moods, temperamentsand attitudes.
Most of the stories here, or for that matter anywhere, proceed from asubjective stance and it is from this standpoint, a picture of reality/world issought to be portrayed by the writer which need not necessarily be subjective.It does not mean that the writer’s work is marred by any inconsistency, but thesubjective-objective elements become complimentary. As in many fictional worksthe subjective is self-sabotaged here to such an extent that the finished workgives a construct of objective reality. There is also the equation of thelocal-universal. Creative works, especially fictional ones, though rooted in aparticular context and specific social milieu, possess the self-gyratorydynamics of transcending the local and particular into something universal withthe deft touch of mastery over the medium employed by the writer. Thesefictional techniques are employed in some stories, but if Mr. Gollapudi keepsthem in mind more authentic works could be expected from him.
The setting in many stories in this collection is the Telangana region. A largenumber of NRIs in Americaconstitute Telugu speaking people, especially from Telangana region. Millionsof people here suffered many decades of impoverishment and malnutrition,backwardness and misery, humiliation and exploitation. A sort of social andeconomic engineering has been taking place in Telangana of late. It is only inthe last one and half decades, with the boom in IT sector, students of theregion began to migrate to Europe and America, perhaps the main cause ofthe empowerment of their poverty-ridden families, of the middleclass people aswell as backward sections. As a result, new-found possessions came up,progress of less privileged sections took place, but then new problems toobegan to crop up as in other parts of country. Comfort zones are there, butthey began to give way to anxiety zones as well. Nuclear families havereceived a setback in that the parents here are left uncared for with theirchildren settling in other parts of India and the world. The muchcelebrated Indian family system is cracking up with the indifference of thechildren towards their parents, leaving them a deserted and dejected lot. Thistheme forms the core of Mr. Gollapudi’s story, “The Heir.” In Shanti Nivas, aHome for the Aged, the inmates proudly discuss how they brought up theirchildren, how they provided guidance to find suitable jobs (maybe suitable spousestoo) for them. But when one of the inmates, Mr. Jogeshwar Rao dies, his threesons settled abroad could not make it to the funeral on one pretext or other,and consequently it was left to the young ward boy to lit the pyre.
The story begins with Mr. Vittal, a septuagenarian-widower-inmate, feelingvindicated. His argument and the cause of his satisfaction form the course ofthe proceedings in the story. He had no children and refused to adoptchildren. His point is that Mr. Jogeshwar Rao with his three children lived thelife of an uncertain man and died a miserable man while he, in a strange twistof irony, would die a happy man because he knew beforehand that it would be theward boy or someone else who would lit his pyre. In fact, it does notmatter whether one has ‘such’ children or no children in the end. Perhaps thisis the argument Mr.Vittal has built for nearly forty years. This is a movingstory that records the plight of many uncared for parents whose number isincreasing by the day in the country in imitation of the West. The storycautions that ‘Home for the Aged’ is fast becoming the address of millions ofpeople.
Long periods of stay abroad, resultant greed and the race for riches corruptedthe mind-set of large sections of the emergent, neo-rich middleclass youth. This is portrayed in the story, “A benefactor” in an engrossing manner. Ayouth resigns his software job in the USmuch to the dismay of his friends and relatives, and joins the most lucrativeprofession in Indiaat the moment called politics. His investment here is next to nothing whencompared to the enormous returns he earns after becoming MLA and then aMinister. Everything moves as planned with clockwork precision, or like somecomputer programming he had earlier been used to. He not only succeeds in hisventure of amassing wealth and popularity with least trouble, but at the endtells his friends proudly how he has made it really big—without scruples, ofcourse. Vulnerable people, as usual, feel cheated and it has been proved timeand again that people do not easily learn from their past mistakes, that theirmemory is short The story is an experiment with ‘aesthetics of negation.’The writer focuses on negative attitudes and tendencies prevalent in societyonly to draw attention, by implication, to the opposite of what has beenprojected—a conscientious mind-set, humane approach, healthy atmosphere, andpositive living.
In another NRI story “The Reluctant Philanthropist,” published in a reputedEnglish daily, The Statesman, a young NRI, Rakesh, inspired by the newslogan of the NRIs in the US “Do something for your motherland” comes to Indiaand wishes to do something different. Finally, with the help of his friends andwell-wishers he completes a Home for the Aged in his village and experiencesthe thrill of hogging all limelight. The story ends on a note ofinflation-deflation. As he distributes clothes to the aged people he sights anold man standing in the queue and he begins to tremble even as discomfortingthoughts of old age and loneliness seize him. The success of the story lies inthe fact that the ending is muted, the narrator does not overtly state who thatold man could be. It is left to the conjecture of the readers. Poetic suggestiongets precedence over fictional statement here. The pitiable plight of a numberof parents of NRIs in Indiais poignantly portrayed in this story.
Of the fourteen stories in this collection, five stories deal with the theme ofcorruption in varied ways. The narrator, in the story “The Design,” lets divineintervention to teach lessons to corrupt ones, and in “The Riddle” he depictshow a corrupt man’s habit of receiving kickbacks proves to be his undoingas he cannot find, literally, space and time to perform funeral rites of hismother despite his best efforts. “Bloody Revelation” depicts thehaunting images of a bloody accident changing the corrupt ways of a governmentemployee.
I shall take up two stories for a closer examination of the theme of corruption—“Canker to the Core and “Bitter Fruit”. because these address legal, andlong-practised customs of nyaya and ethical and practical questions of dharmaand I would like to interrogate some sociological aspects too: a) corruptionvis-à-vis class, and b) corruption and its levels/scales. In “Canker tothe Core,” a young and ambitious man, Sandeep, tries to build his dream housewithout resorting to corrupt practices. When he follows normal procedurenothing works his way and fails to get his license; he meets the wardcorporator and then the Mayor. Both of them demand money for the license andthey also mention the reasons: The corporator says that there is a hierarchy inthe office and the amount of Rs.25,000/- would be distributed among them as perthe established practice and he would be left with a pittance. The mayor toomakes a telling comment that the young man’s salary is ten times the amount heis paid, and when VIPs like the Chief Minister visit the city, it is his look-outto play host and decorate the city and says money collected that way would bespent on such occasions. For the young man obviously the license is moreimportant than his ego. Ironically, he would have avoided all this trouble forhimself if heeded to the advice of the office boy who had promised to get histhings done following the established ‘procedure.’ But Sandeep learns hislessons the hard way.
The justification given by the corporator and the mayor is built on sound logicand practical approach, given the system they operate in. One cannot butsympathize with them, because they are following their dharma. It may not be agood practice in legal and ethical terms in an ideal situation, but given thecontext, it is not against dharma. If they don’t take money they will belosers, if the young man gives the amount he will not be a loser. It is notuncommon for us to find on tv, images of clerks and superintendents gettingcaught red-handed while taking amount as little as two thousand rupees. Whencompared to thousands of crores of kickbacks routinely involved in armypurchases, that too at the cost of national security (The film “Rang deBasanti” was released more than seven years ago and Mig-22s are stillcrashing), or fourteen thousand crore fraud committed on gullible investors byone land-greedy individual, Satyam Ramalinga Raju, or the more lucrativebusiness of taking kickbacks and giving license to unscrupulous elementsfor mining operations (a state Chief Minister was implicated, and in anotherstate the late Chief Mnister’s kin is supposed to have interests in miningoperations), what does the act of the clerk amount to? What is the amountdemanded by the corporator and the mayor? Ethically, legally they are on thewrong, but if we listen their version and empathize with them, we are not onthe wrong side. And dharma is a concept unique to Indian thought since the daysof Kurukshetra war and Krishna’s preaching toArjuna in the Mahabharata. Dharma and nyaya meet on the same ground sometimes,but take opposite dimensions and in many directions intricate cases. Perhapsdharma makes a fine distinction between all-evil and not-so-evil or less-evil,scales and layers which do not matter to nyaya.
In “Bitter Fruit” a popular pan-shop owner, Yadav, gets jittery when he learnsthat his shop would be demolished in the road-widening course. He approachesthe local MLA who demands fifty thousand rupees to protect it. But what worriesYadav is the kind of humiliation meted out to him. He learns that others toogot similar treatment from him and then he begins to mobilize the locals. Hebecomes the centre of protest and agitation and soon, when elections areannounced, he is forced by his supporters to contest as MLA against the arrogantincumbent. He wins by a good margin, but the problem is that he begins tobehave in the same way as his predecessor, demanding money. But his needs aredifferent. The story ends on a note of disillusionment on the part of thepeople as one of the fellow trader quips, “some trees always bear bitterfruits.” Once again, levels of corruption as well as the question ofclass disparities come into picture here. Yadav’s hard work alone gives himfood for the day and he must be regarded as belonging to below middle class. Inhis pre-MLA days he is projected as sincere, hard working individual unmindfulof the remarks of his customers, but when his very existence is threatened, andfeels humiliated at the hands of the MLA, he wants to pay back. He wins theelections, but he is left without any money to meet the huge expenditure thatthe position involves. What does he do in this piquant situation? He has nomeans of livelihood, and he is in the thick of politics. As he performs hisdharma, one cannot but sympathize with him, whatever the law says, even ifpeople comment him as bitter fruit. The tree is not to be blamed, it is thesoil that should bear the brunt. Any given system or society or people get thekind of rulers they deserve.
There is a basic difference of ‘kind,’ ‘logic,’ ‘judgment’ and more importantly‘dharma’ in the type of corruption portrayed in these two stories and theearlier one, “A benefactor.” There, the youth’s decision to join politics,exploit the people, and amass wealth in a short time, was premeditated and evencold-blooded. I do not know on which side is the narrator; in fact, itdoes not matter as the narrator’s job ends with projecting the grey shadeswhich could be seen all around but the biggest challenge is taking sides, andof course interpreting subtleties of nyaya and dharma.
I hope Mr. Gollapudi concentrates more on focusing the customs and traditionsof the Telangana region which need to be highlighted and celebrated infiction form to reach a wider audience, for greater appreciation. At thesame time I wish he would give more space to female characters in his futureendeavours. Creating a context for the valour of Rani Rudrama of Kakatiyakingdom or giving fictional space to Batukamma festival, Sammakka-Saralakkajatara which are celebrated on a grand scale in this region would serve thetwin-purpose of cultural specificity and female space. But it is the writer’sprerogative to choose his themes and techniques. His choice and my suggestionproceed from a subjective standpoint as mentioned earlier. All the same I thinkalter-‘native’ paradigms, local variables, would serve his purpose better.
K.Damodar Rao 13-12-2009
Departmentof English
Kakatiya University
Warangal
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