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BOOKS
Perilous
Precision
A thriller
crafted by a newsperson's clinical mind
By
Ashok
Banker
 |
THE
SRINAGAR CONSPIRACY By Vikram A. Chandra
Penguin
Price: Rs 250
Pages: 304 |
Hubris
must be working overtime. How else do you explain two writers with the
same name producing thrillers set in Kashmir at the same time? Fortunately
for bewildered readers, one Vikram Chandra chose to tell his story through
a screenplay in the forthcoming Mission:Kashmir, while the other Vikram
A. Chandra tells it as a novel. To clarify the differences further, the
former is the son of a filmi family while the latter is a news
editor at NDTV and a familiar face on the nightly Star News broadcasts.
The Srinagar
Conspiracy tells the story of a small group of fictional characters
caught up in the historic turmoil of Kashmir. The bracketing plot is a
suspense thriller set in today's Srinagar - the conspiracy of the title
- and aims for the diehard political-action-suspense genre that Tom Clancy
excels in. While the suspense revolves around the enactment of the conspiracy,
the bulk of the novel spans the period from Partition to the present day,
at times dipping even further into the past for brief history lessons.
The fictional
protagonists are, predictably, a young Kashmiri Pandit, Vijay Kaul, and
his Muslim friend, Habib Shah. Their idyllic youth and friendship end
suddenly in a blaze of flames when the ugly spectre of militancy rears
its head. There's romance in the form of a beautiful Muslim girl, Yasmin,
and sympathetic villainy in the form of Jalauddin, an Afghan mujahideen
weaned on the outrages of the Soviet army in his native land. Jalauddin
is the negative force that impels the narrative forward, and the parts
where he isn't on the page seem to suffer from his absence.
Throughout
the book, the real plays out alongside the fictional. Chandra recreates
events like the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping, Charar-e-Sharief occupation,
and several others, with a methodical professionalism that almost suggests
a publisher's outline listing "historical events to be included in
the novel". His writing is professional to a fault; like that other
desi thriller writer Shashi Warrier, his style is cut-and-dried
to sterility. He neither involves us emotionally in the lives of the people
affected by the militancy, nor does he make us care enough for the militants
themselves. The result is a curiously detached and objective tone of voice
- like a business news report on a dull day at the Sensex. You could almost
visualise Chandra reading the entire narrative out on the News at Nine,
with accompanying visual clips and comments by experts.
Having said
that, The Srinagar Conspiracy is a clean, professionally written
thriller. There's no excess of any kind-violence, sex, suspense or thrills.
This isn't a novel that will keep you up at night, nor does it come close
to capturing the trauma, angst and terror of contemporary Kashmir. But
if you're looking at a potted history of militancy in Kashmir-clearly
taken in great dollops from books like Manoj Joshi's The Lost Rebellion
and Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors, then you'll find this a painless
history pill to swallow. If that's what Penguin and Chandra had in mind
when producing this book, it works well enough. If they thought they were
creating a gripping, nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat thriller, they clearly
don't know their genre.
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In
India, youth is marked by impetuosity and prevented from getting ahead.
Elsewhere, of course, the young rule the world, says INDIA TODAY Deputy
Editor Swapan Dasgupta in 
