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A review by ameya88
Baluta by Daya Pawar
4.0
My main issue with this book (in reality with myself) is that I did not really feel as strongly as this story demanded I should. Or to make myself the 'object' & deflect responsibility - I was not 'impacted' by the book as much as I needed to or should have when I rethink now about some of the horrific things I read.
Two reasons for this in all probability -
1) We have become numbed to reading about the sufferings of fellow human beings around us to the extent that we've already imagined the worst and it would take a lot more to shock me any more. The shock I felt later was not so much about the incidents he has described but more around how blasé he was about them.
2) Pawar's matter-of-fact style of exposition and it's translation kind of normalises this. I almost think I have been conditioned to need a raving Arnab equivalent, frothing at the mouth around the injustice of it all for it to make me feel bad about it.
Nevertheless, it is an eye-opener of a book - which kind of tells us where some of the other less members of our society actually started from and why having discussions on privilege and equality and affirmative action without living these lives is merely lip service. It is brutally honest - when the author talks about himself, his family, the community and how they fell short as well and I truly hope parts of it are mandatory reading in the school textbooks of the future at least.
I'm assuming this was not an easy book to translate given the tonality, and it is evidently jarring in some places but Jerry Pinto is a boon to Marathi literature for making it accessible to new generations and audiences, circumventing the barriers of language. And while there are many, I wish future editions have more footnotes - I had to rely on Wikipedia quite frequently - as we grow further from the era in which this book was written a lot of the characters, political movements, places and incidences will be unfamiliar to newer audiences like myself.
Two reasons for this in all probability -
1) We have become numbed to reading about the sufferings of fellow human beings around us to the extent that we've already imagined the worst and it would take a lot more to shock me any more. The shock I felt later was not so much about the incidents he has described but more around how blasé he was about them.
2) Pawar's matter-of-fact style of exposition and it's translation kind of normalises this. I almost think I have been conditioned to need a raving Arnab equivalent, frothing at the mouth around the injustice of it all for it to make me feel bad about it.
Nevertheless, it is an eye-opener of a book - which kind of tells us where some of the other less members of our society actually started from and why having discussions on privilege and equality and affirmative action without living these lives is merely lip service. It is brutally honest - when the author talks about himself, his family, the community and how they fell short as well and I truly hope parts of it are mandatory reading in the school textbooks of the future at least.
I'm assuming this was not an easy book to translate given the tonality, and it is evidently jarring in some places but Jerry Pinto is a boon to Marathi literature for making it accessible to new generations and audiences, circumventing the barriers of language. And while there are many, I wish future editions have more footnotes - I had to rely on Wikipedia quite frequently - as we grow further from the era in which this book was written a lot of the characters, political movements, places and incidences will be unfamiliar to newer audiences like myself.