Shashi Tharoor
Description
Critically injured, Indian film superstar Ashok Banjara lies suspended between life and death in the intensive care unit of a plush Bombay hospital, w
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atching the final rerun of his life. Visitors come and go, talking, confiding, pleading with him to rise from his coma, but there is no reaction from Banjara, a prisoner of the technicolor film that plays inside his head. He encounters again all the people he used along the way in his successful film career - his father, a principled politician whose desire to see his son follow in his footsteps is, ironically, fulfilled at the cost of his own aspirations; Maya, his wife, a film star herself who gives up a promising career to live in the shadow of her husband's superstardom; Pranay, the archetypal cinema villain, who has always loved Maya and can no longer watch from the sidelines as her life is destroyed by the man who snatched her away; Mehnaz Elahi, India's sexiest screen heroine and Banjara's mistress; Ashwin, his devoted younger brother, whom Ashok can only betray...and many others who had supporting parts in his life but whose confessions now change the script forever. As a backdrop to these unforgettable characters a private retrospective of his major hits unreels - gaudy, exuberant, beguiling - a never-ending celluloid fantasy that took over his life completely and transformed it into an astonishing, compelling lie. With irrepressible charm and a genius for satire, Tharoor portrays the Indian film world with all its Hollywoodesque glitz and glamour, egos and double standards, as a metaphor for Indian society and no doubt all societies. Onscreen fiction and offscreen reality intertwine seamlessly to weave a tapestry of power andprivilege, seduction and betrayal, politics and intrigue, that is at once colorful, entertaining, and deadly serious. Show Business is many books rolled into one: it is a story about the telling of stories; it is a wonderfully funny tale about the romance and folly of cinema; it is a novel on an epic scale of ambition, greed, love, deception, and death. And, perhaps most important, it is a fable for our time which teaches us that we live in a world where illusion is the only reality and nothing is as it seems.
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