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WORK TITLE: No Direction Rome
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981?
WEBSITE:
CITY: Rome
STATE:
COUNTRY: Italy
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1981.
EDUCATION:St. Stephen’s College (New Delhi, India), graduated; attended the London School of Economics.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and businessman. United Nations, Rome, Italy, employee. Has worked in international development and public policy.
AWARDS:Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar award, for Windhorse.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kaushik Barua has worked in international development and public policy for organizations including the United Nations. His work has taken him from South Asia to West Africa, to Rome, Italy, where he is currently based. Barua holds a degree from St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, India and has attended the London School of Economics. He is the author of novels, including Windhorse and No Direction Rome.
Windhorse
Windhorse, released in 2013, is the winner of the Sahitya Academy Yuva Puraskar award. It tells the story of a privileged young Indian man named Norbu, whose life connects with Lhasang, a refugee from Tibet. They join together to fight for Tibetan liberation. In an interview with a contributor to the Good Book Corner website, Barua discussed the inspiration for his first novel, stating: “In the case of Windhorse, clearly it was the suffering and the struggle of the Tibetan community. Though the story wasn’t mine, it moved me in ways I couldn’t understand. But then, empathy and inspiration are whimsical beasts and you never know what might move you beyond comprehension.”
Critics offered praise for Windhorse. A writer on the Modern Gypsy website suggested: “While it is a fictionalized history of Tibet, it is also a story about human beings and their search and struggle for purpose and freedom. All-in-all, it is a story that must be read. Highly, highly recommended!” A contributor to the Good Book Corner website commented: “The story moves fast and is gripping till the very end. The historical research is impeccable and the story is strong enough to reach out and create widespread awareness towards the Tibetan cause.”
No Direction Rome
An Indian man named Krantik is the protagonist of Barua’s 2017 novel No Direction Rome. Now living in Rome, the jaded Krantik comments on his meaningless work, his romantic relationships, and the social media proclivities of his peers. In the same interview with the contributor to the Good Book Corner website, Barua discussed the ideas behind No Direction Rome. He stated: “You could say it’s inspired by … the rootlessness of our generation (especially the urban, social-media soaked generation), the fact that we don’t have a struggle, not even a losing cause that we believe in.”
The reviews of No Direction Rome were less than favorable. A Publishers Weekly critic remarked: “While the novel is occasionally sharp and even insightful in its cultural critique, its caustic, bitter voice grates.” Shougat Dasgupta, contributor to the Hindu Business Live website, commented: “Krantik is vividly drawn, an appropriately shallow example of a particularly shallow class of persons, the ‘overpaid expat’. It’s unfortunate that Barua felt it necessary to fill the rest of the novel with so much contrived ‘zaniness’.” Dasgupta added: “Some of the slapstick comedy, a prolonged scene with sleeping gas, for instance, is out of kilter with the blacker comedy, the social satire No Direction Rome gestures towards without fully committing to. Rome itself, where Barua works for an international aid agency, is an inspired setting, mouldering and falling apart albeit with far more grace than poor Krantik can muster.” Writing on the Indian Express website, Amrita Dutta suggested: “While you coast along in the first half, following Krantik and his caustic stream of thoughts, his encounters with a crowd of other drifters like him blur into sameness. It’s all very well to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, but not the wisest move to consign readers to the boredom of his life.” Dutta continued: “Before the end, is there love? Or a sense of direction? Krantik is not the most likeable of characters but … he is impervious to happy makeovers. There is a sliver of a silver lining at the end of this novel, but even that could well be a pose.” “Barua’s prose in No Direction Rome is laboured, and the only relief, for those who must complete a book that they’ve started reading, is that at 190 pages, it ends sooner than most novels,” asserted Elizabeth Kuruvilla, reviewer on the Live Mint website. Kuruvilla also stated: “No guilty or acquiescing laughter emerges from us at Barua’s dark humour. And the use of a fragmented narrative style appears a tired means to a familiar tale in Barua’s hands.” Kavya Kushnoor, critic on the Coldnoon website, noted: “The novel has no coherent structure. Still, it retains the reader’s attention with witty prose at every turn.” However, Kushnoor added: “No Direction Rome is a successful experiment in its genre. It is an exposition into the protagonist’s inner world and his shallow, yet courageously honest conscious thoughts. In contrast to Barua’s previous novel which is about revolutionaries living and dying for a cause, NDR is about the reckless ways of a privileged millennial. In the narrator’s crudeness, it is easy to miss the ideas that he presents. This book can easily provoke hearty laughter, but if we dig deeper, Krantik’s ramblings could also be a doorway to important conversations and profound realizations.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 2017, review of No Direction Rome, p. 40.
ONLINE
Coldnoon, https://coldnoon.com/ (December 30, 2017), Kavya Kushnoor, review of No Direction Rome; (March 19, 2018), author profile.
Good Book Corner, https://thegoodbookcorner.com/ (July 5, 2015), review of Windhorse; (March 19, 2018), author interview.
Hindu Business Line, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ (May 15, 2015), Shougat Dasgupta, review of No Direction Rome.
Indian Express Online, http://indianexpress.com/ (November 14, 2015), Amrita Dutta, review of No Direction Rome.
Live Mint, http://www.livemint.com/ (February 2, 2016), Elizabeth Kuruvilla, review of No Direction Rome.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 19, 2018), author profile.
Modern Gypsy, https://moderngypsy.in/ (August 5, 2015), review of Windhorse.
Kaushik Barua
Kaushik Barua is working with an international development agency based in Rome. Previously, he worked on policy and development issues in South Asia. He studied political economy at the London School of Economics. The views expressed here are his own.
Kaushik Barua
Kaushik Barua received the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, for his debut novel Windhorse. His novel No Direction Rome will be published in the US in November 2017 by Permanent Press.
QUOTED: "In the case of Windhorse, clearly it was the suffering and the struggle of the Tibetan community. Though the story wasn’t mine, it moved me in ways I couldn’t understand. But then, empathy and inspiration are whimsical beasts and you never know what might move you beyond comprehension."
"You could say it’s inspired by ... the rootlessness of our generation (especially the urban, social-media soaked generation), the fact that we don’t have a struggle, not even a losing cause that we believe in."
Interview with Kaushik Barua
7768172
Kaushik Barua is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar award for his first book, Windhorse, published by HarperCollins India in 2013. He is currently based in Rome, where he works with the United Nations. He has worked over the last decade in the development sector, supporting development projects across South Asia and West Africa. He graduated in economics from St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi and subsequently studied international politics and economics at the London School of Economics. His second book No Direction Rome released in May,2015.
For me, reading Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome and Windhorse back to back was a rollercoaster ride. From the two earlier reviews, you already know that I enjoyed the debut novel, but was unable to connect with the second one. There were shades of brilliance in No Direction Rome and that was the reason I decided to interview the author himself. I was intrigued by the stark difference in the writing style and a bit upset too as I couldn’t get my head around the second book. An interview with the versatile author gave an insight into what he wanted to convey in both the books.
Watch out for Kaushik Barua’s next, because i will definitely be interested to see what he churns out!!!!!
TGBC: Inspirations behind both the books?
KB: In the case of Windhorse, clearly it was the suffering and the struggle of the Tibetan community. Though the story wasn’t mine, it moved me in ways I couldn’t understand. But then, empathy and inspiration are whimsical beasts and you never know what might move you beyond comprehension. I was obsessed with the struggle, awed by the courage and resilience I saw in so many of my Tibetan friends (I was, at the same time, careful not to have unrealistic expectations or create super-human cultural stereotypes in my head about the community). And my obsession led me to countless conversations, years of trawling through archives and footage, drafts and re-drafts and re-re-drafts that led to Windhorse, which is set on the real-life struggles of the community.
In the case of No Direction Rome, you could say it’s inspired by the opposite: the rootlessness of our generation (especially the urban, social-media soaked generation), the fact that we don’t have a struggle, not even a losing cause that we believe in, the absurdity and banality of our urban lives and struggles. (Of course, I am speaking of a certain class- there are enough people who struggle for the basic rights and experiences that we take for granted.) At another level, it’s also about the fragmentation of our identities across different social media and platforms. Krantik, the narrator, records every detail and broadcasts them for the reader, somewhat like people on Facebook. Only, instead of curated photos of his dessert, he provides graphic (even unpalatable) details of all his obsessions: his haemorrhoids, the aesthetic appeal of his blood in the toilet bowl, his complete and sacrilegious disregard for the gods, who he sees as products of pop culture- cultural fiction created over generations of brainwashing- and for whom he reserves special contempt. He is self-obsessed and delusional and paranoid (minor symptoms swell into life-threatening diseases in his head thanks to obsessive searches on google): an appropriate character for our times and our generation.
TGBC: Your personal favourite from the two as the writer and why?
KB: That’s a really difficult question, even an unfairly cruel one. I hate to sound clichéd, but I value both experiences for different reasons. As a first book, and a labour of love spanning over many years, Windhorse is special, and will always remain special for me. But with No Direction Rome, I have tried to do a lot with the language and narrative voice. It’s a very self-aware, ironic voice. Like Krantik says, everything is ‘an image of an image of an image’, so his self-aware rant is also just that: an image of an image. And the bizarre. dark humour was developed over thousands of hours spent on online communities such as reddit, where language and humour are now moving to newer forms.
TGBC: What next?
KB: I’m working with a few ideas. In fiction, I’m thinking of working on something that disrupts the framework of a narrative further: a story that refuses to be told, falls apart, digresses into non-fiction/ autobiography, meanders into another story. With non-fiction, I have worked on development-related issues for many years now, and would like to write something based on my experiences. It would be difficult, because sustainable development occurs at the crossroads of so many different worlds (culture, rural/ informal economies, politics, macro-economic influences and of course individual initiatives). But development often fails because of a lack of imagination: people who frame policies lack the imagination to understand the lives, fears and aspirations of the people affected by their policies. Maybe my training as a development economist and as a story-teller could help me bridge that gap.
But most importantly, I intend to write just what I please and to enjoy myself thoroughly while doing it!!!
QUOTED: "While the novel is occasionally sharp and even insightful in its cultural critique, its caustic, bitter voice grates."
No Direction Rome
Publishers Weekly. 264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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No Direction Rome
Kaushik Barua. Permanent, $29.95 (200p)
ISBN 978-1-57962-512-2
Barua's reflective debut mostly consists of the novel's exceedingly cynical narrator, Krantik, an Indian man living in Rome, talking with friends, acquaintances, and strangers about subjects ranging from sex and drugs to the fate of humanity, always with the beautiful and haunting ruins of Rome as a backdrop. Krantik's fiancee through an arranged marriage has just attempted suicide and returned home to India for psychological treatment, and Krantik is now pursuing a fleeting relationship with a complicated Italian woman whom he meets after asking her for directions to a tourist site to which he already knows the way, a recurring behavior that serves as a metaphor for his lack of direction in life. Struggling to find meaning in his work and personal relationships, Krantik rails in interior monologue against everything from society's fetishistic relationship with popular culture to his generation's propensity for communicating primarily via social media, expressing a particular disdain for the use of Instagram filters. But while the novel is occasionally sharp and even insightful in its cultural critique, its caustic, bitter voice grates, and the plot seems incidental to the point of simply providing the scaffolding for a rant about the dispassion and detachment of an entire generation. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"No Direction Rome." Publishers Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634867/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7211e072. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
QUOTED: "Krantik is vividly drawn, an appropriately shallow example of a particularly shallow class of persons, the 'overpaid expat'. It’s unfortunate that Barua felt it necessary to fill the rest of the novel with so much contrived 'zaniness'."
"Some of the slapstick comedy, a prolonged scene with sleeping gas, for instance, is out of kilter with the blacker comedy, the social satire No Direction Rome gestures towards without fully committing to. Rome itself, where Barua works for an international aid agency, is an inspired setting, mouldering and falling apart albeit with far more grace than poor Krantik can muster."
Happy to be a phony
SHOUGAT DASGUPTA
No Direction Rome; Kaushik Barua; Fourth Esate Fiction; ₹399
No Direction Rome tells of today’s overpaid expats aware of their own ludicrousness
It is, or at least should be, standard reviewing practice to read or re-read a writer’s back catalogue to offer an intelligent opinion on the writer’s latest work. How else to note patterns, the ideas that move a writer, to discern the shape of a career? So it is with some shame that I confess I haven’t read Kaushik Barua’s debut novel, Windhorse — published just over a year ago and winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar award for 2014. But, to the relief of derelict reviewers, it appears that Barua’s second novel, No Direction Rome, is wholly different from his first in setting, tone and preoccupation. Nothing, I gather, in Windhorse would have prepared me for No Direction Rome.
Although, there is one thing. (There always is.) Windhorse is about Tibetan revolutionaries engaged in doomed armed resistance against China. For the Tibetan in exile, as for the Palestinian or any exiled people, the lost home, at once real and chimerical, becomes defining, even for generations that know only statelessness, whose knowledge and experience of ‘home’ is at best secondhand.
Krantik, in whose sardonic, antic voice No Direction Rome is told, is found early in the novel at a bar telling a woman that his name means ‘the fighter’: “Fighting against what? Against oneself, against the universe, I think. Wow, that’s so profound.” If the Tibetan revolutionaries in Windhorse had an obvious purpose and foe, Krantik is a revolutionary in search of revolution, a fighter not even lucky enough to be fighting for a lost cause. It is that flailing for purpose, as the novel’s title suggests, that directionless drifting, that defines Krantik as clearly as the loss of home might define an exile.
Krantik’s is a voice I haven’t heard before in Indian writing in English. He is related to Agastya Sen of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August, and shares his urban disaffection, his scatological humour. But Agastya, for all his alienation, is mired to India. Krantik has left India behind: “Don’t ask me about that stuff, find someone else. They’ll tell you about their Indian mother’s spices and mangoes and elephant dung and shit.” This is a literary statement of intent. Barua’s Krantik is uninterested in romanticising India from New York or London. Neither is he interested in contemporary India, its inequalities, its ugly, unlivable cities or its moribund villages. India intrudes into his life only in the form of guilt over his mother, and the vague menace of an arranged marriage. The book begins with Krantik’s betrothed, the daughter of a politician, attempting suicide in Amsterdam.
Uninterested in evoking India from afar, Krantik is also uninterested in the immigrant narrative, in telling the story of leaving India to find material success, if spiritual confusion, in New York or London. Krantik is not a migrant. Instead he is that privileged species — the expatriate, a label hitherto reserved for Westerners condescending to work in the third world. “And I’m not a stupid foreigner anyway,” Krantik sneers, “I’m the overpaid expat.” He is part of a globalised technocracy, a protean, mobile class of well-educated, well-compensated white-collar workers for whom the world blends into a succession of airport lounges, coffee shops and office lobbies. Wherever in the world they are from they speak an Americanised English and share an air of gilded imperviousness.
Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is such a technocrat, as are the protagonists in Zia Haider Rahman’s ambitious debut In The Light of What We Know. But these novels teeter on the fault lines that trace a jagged path between that imperviousness and the political realities of being Muslim in the West after 9/11. In Krantik’s case there is nothing, political or religious, to obtrude on the good life, the casual hedonism of those who take recreational drugs and go to clubs while the world burns around them.
Still, as they carefully curate another album of pictures on Facebook of a recent island holiday, an existential panic occasionally sets in. Ever get the feeling, as Johnny Rotten once asked, you’ve been cheated? “Sometimes my anger is fake,” Krantik observes. “Often my sorrow is fake too. If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can.”
Krantik, a whiny hypochondriac, is not a likeable protagonist but he is funny. Barua has described him in interviews as Holden Caulfield in his thirties, but this is to sell Krantik short. Caulfield is sentimental about childhood innocence, terrified that adulthood means becoming a phony. Krantik knows he is ludicrous, knows that he is already a phony. He understands that even his alienation is not original but an attitude, a pose — like much of contemporary life it is, as Barua writes, “an image of an image”.
Krantik is vividly drawn, an appropriately shallow example of a particularly shallow class of persons, the “overpaid expat”. It’s unfortunate that Barua felt it necessary to fill the rest of the novel with so much contrived ‘zaniness’. Chiara, with whom Krantik carries on a desultory affair, is a nerd-boy fantasy, a wild-haired bohemian with an open marriage and a penchant for cutting herself; she’s a stock character, as Barua himself acknowledges in the text, out of a Woody Allen film, the alluring, damaged Charlotte Rampling in Stardust Memories, for example. Some of the slapstick comedy, a prolonged scene with sleeping gas, for instance, is out of kilter with the blacker comedy, the social satire No Direction Rome gestures towards without fully committing to.
Rome itself, where Barua works for an international aid agency, is an inspired setting, mouldering and falling apart albeit with far more grace than poor Krantik can muster.
Shougat Dasgupta is a freelance journalist
Published on May 15, 2015
QUOTED: "While you coast along in the first half, following Krantik and his caustic stream of thoughts, his encounters with a crowd of other drifters like him blur into sameness. It’s all very well to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, but not the wisest move to consign readers to the boredom of his life."
"Before the end, is there love? Or a sense of direction? Krantik is not the most likeable of characters but ... he is impervious to happy makeovers. There is a sliver of a silver lining at the end of this novel, but even that could well be a pose."
Book Review: No Direction Rome
Kaushik Barua’s new novel is an existential comedy, but the laughter is often edged with a tired sameness.
Written by Amrita Dutta | Published: November 14, 2015 12:00 am
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Title: No Direction Rome
Author: Kaushik Barua
Publisher: 4th Estate
Pages: 190
Price: Rs 399
To Krantik, the protagonist of Kaushik Barua’s second novel, life is as pointless as Kim Kardashian. Even if he seems to have it all. A number cruncher at a multinational in Rome, he is an expat, a member of the global elite, who doesn’t need to work very hard but definitely parties harder. When he is not stoned immaculate, he is also astoundingly bored — of Facebook likes and Instagram nostalgia. And he is convinced that he is about to die of cancer when he is sober. He spends his days dodging deadlines at work or asking for directions in a city he knows too well. The Colosseo, to him, “with its massive open mouth gaping at the skies,” is like “a toilet bowl for the gods.” He is often an un-endearing mix of hypochondria, restlessness and scatalogical humour — but one has the feeling he would get along well with Agastya Sen.
English, August was a slacker novel set in the dead-end town of Madna, its satire scraping away at the particular absurdities of Indian small-town life in elegant, languid prose. In contrast, No Direction Rome plays out in a European city but its disaffected hero could be a member of the privileged class from any world city, laughing at the cult of efficiency and Excel sheets that drives the world and pays his bills. The language is the stacatto, hyperventilated patois of the interwebz. “Krantik. 1982. Cause of ruin: Tobacco, alcohol, keeping up.” “If I meet the Buddha on the road, I’ll send him a friend reequest.”
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It’s a voice not commonly encountered in Indian writing in English, which is often tied to city, home and family. “Don’t ask me about that stuff, find someone else. They’ll tell you about their Indian mother’s spices and mangoes and elephant dung and shit,” Krantik says. There is no back story of how he reached the shores of the First World, or too many details about his relationship with his mother. Nevertheless, he nearly drifts into the very Indian tradition of an arranged marriage — before his fiancee, Pooja, attempts to kill herself. This is a funny novel but the laughter is often edged with a jaded, corrosive cynicism. “We can paint it any colour we want, we can call it anything we want, everything we do. There is nothing inside and there is nothing in the end,” says Pooja before she walks into a canal.
But the pointlessness of existence is tough to enact in prose. There is a thin line between whining and existential despair, though it’s also rich pickings for comedy. You only have to think back to Vladimir and Estragon to see how much fun “nothing happens” can be. In that respect, Barua’s novel succeeds only partly. While you coast along in the first half, following Krantik and his caustic stream of thoughts, his encounters with a crowd of other drifters like him blur into sameness. It’s all very well to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, but not the wisest move to consign readers to the boredom of his life.
Before the end, is there love? Or a sense of direction? Krantik is not the most likeable of characters but, thankfully, he is impervious to happy makeovers. There is a sliver of a silver lining at the end of this novel, but even that could well be a pose. “Sometimes my anger is fake. Sometimes my sorrow is fake. If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can.”
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QUOTED: "Barua’s prose in No Direction Rome is laboured, and the only relief, for those who must complete a book that they’ve started reading, is that at 190 pages, it ends sooner than most novels."
"No guilty or acquiescing laughter emerges from us at Barua’s dark humour. And the use of a fragmented narrative style appears a tired means to a familiar tale in Barua’s hands."
Book review: ‘No Direction Rome’
The new novel of Kaushik Barua, the Sahitya Akademi’s young writer award winner, is just tired prose
Last Published: Tue, Feb 02 2016. 09 08 PM IST
Elizabeth Kuruvilla
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No Direction Rome: Fourth Estate, 190 pages, Rs 399.
No Direction Rome: Fourth Estate, 190 pages, Rs 399.
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Nowadays, when publishers seem to be digging deep into their slush pile, one of the ways to choose what to read comes from the author’s profile. An award, or even a nomination for a previous book, is usually good enough to recommend a writer. The note on Kaushik Barua in this second novel begins thus: “Kaushik Barua is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar… for his first book, Windhorse…,” a moving narrative on Tibetan refugees. Rightfully, the publishers assumed this was half the battle won.
However, this is a promise that the second book doesn’t live up to. Barua’s prose in No Direction Rome is laboured, and the only relief, for those who must complete a book that they’ve started reading, is that at 190 pages, it ends sooner than most novels.
The protagonist in this existential rant is Krantik, who lives in Rome. The novel begins with his fiancée Pooja—daughter of an influential member of Parliament, read thug, so best not trifled with—attempting to commit suicide during their secret rendezvous in Amsterdam. Because what did life have to offer anyway? Pooja and Krantik are two of a kind, it appears several pages into the novel. The question, though, is whether Krantik will choose the same path that Pooja did.
As metaphors for what Krantik—who himself stands for the current confused generation—is going through are both the still-standing ruins of Rome as well as a bunch of talking turtles whose universe is his landlord’s terrace, the landlord being God in this case. The turtles discuss: “What’s a job? It’s what we have to do. If we all do it well, everything will be okay.” And Krantik wonders: “Do turtles remember the sea? Even if they have spent their whole lives on a terrace?”
Barua sets up a perfectly humdrum life for Krantik: A number-crunching job that is complete drudgery, an on-off wacko girlfriend in an open relationship, “friends” with whom he shares beers, joints and other drugs, and polite conversations, loneliness of such proportions that he regularly stops random strangers to ask directions to monuments he has no intention of visiting just so he can talk with them, and a hypochondriac to boot.
The last was designed no doubt to provide the laughs in this tragi-comic story—but really, “pain in the ass”, “hands sinking into the pot to examine shit”, “the smell of asparagus piss” kind of cringe-worthy humour should have run its course by now. Barua also cocks a snook at the particularly sensitive times we live in with the casual manner in which he throws in eyebrow-raising descriptions of people and religion.
One knows what Barua is attempting to do; we’ve read The Catcher In The Rye. But no guilty or acquiescing laughter emerges from us at Barua’s dark humour. And the use of a fragmented narrative style appears a tired means to a familiar tale in Barua’s hands. There are times when it goes completely awry. Here’s one passage that follows an episode where Krantik spots his landlord in a pub:
“No issues. I just don’t want to meet him. Or him to meet me.
Somewhere in northern India, a twenty-year-old is sneaking up on his sister in the little room the family of seven shares. He’ll slip his hand into her pyjamas and slide them down. Or maybe he’s crawling next to his brother.”
There’s nothing to explain this passage on sexual assault. Why does it exist here? We’re left clueless. But more importantly, unlike J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Krantik leaves us cold.
This story has been modified from its original version.
First Published: Sat, May 16 2015. 12 22 AM IST
QUOTED: "The novel has no coherent structure. Still, it retains the reader’s attention with witty prose at every turn."
"No Direction Rome is a successful experiment in its genre. It is an exposition into the protagonist’s inner world and his shallow, yet courageously honest conscious thoughts. In contrast to Barua’s previous novel which is about revolutionaries living and dying for a cause, NDR is about the reckless ways of a privileged millennial. In the narrator’s crudeness, it is easy to miss the ideas that he presents. This book can easily provoke hearty laughter, but if we dig deeper, Krantik’s ramblings could also be a doorway to important conversations and profound realizations."
Review: No Direction Rome by Kaushik Barua
By: Kavya Kushnoor On: December 30, 2017
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No Direction Rome (Permanent Press, New York, 2017, 200 pages).
No Direction Rome follows a stream of consciousness that frequently shifts off tangent. Thus, the prose neatly reflects the limited attention span of the millennial generation and the age of several browser tabs and incessant distractions. The novel has no coherent structure. Still, it retains the reader’s attention with witty prose at every turn. The protagonist, Krantik, is full of profound questions. But he is constantly looking for escape from his profundity with hilarious observations, soaked in dark skin-deep humor. This is his way of escaping the confrontations brewing in his mind. The escapism in Krantik’s inner world is introduced with finesse. His apathy is not a clichéd stereotype about what is wrong with this generation. It is entertaining. It keeps the reader moving forward, even yearning for more comical anecdotes.
Krantik’s internal monologue of sexuality is most amusing. He never says any of it out loud, so we cannot label it obscene. He normalizes the sexual tension in the air. The book has several witty nuggets of imaginary, flirtatious conversations he has with random women towards whom he may harbor the slightest hint of attraction. The tone is original, like nothing ever heard of in the Indian literary landscape. This is literary fiction written with the language and cadence of casual break room banter, peppered with the slang you would find in chit-chat on college/ high school grounds or in informal rendezvouses over beer or coffee. One might raise an eye-brow to find this tone in the written word and not just confined to speech. There is no denying, however, that it reflects the speech in vogue of the era. It is scattered with words found more often on platforms like Urban dictionary and Reddit than within the more formal boundaries of Webster’s or Oxford dictionaries. While these words and phrases have only recently entered the popular imagination, one cannot imagine another way of presenting this contemporary story with the same comical effect.
There are fleeting glimpses of the nomadic loneliness that the privileged millennial faces, with his globe-trotting job. It brings with it a constant yearning to connect with strangers. He lives a stimulating social life in his head with imaginary mental pictures and conversations. His reflections are shallow, full of projection using lighter, simpler objects. There are open relationships which have affection without obligation, chemistry without the gentle flame, anxiety and envy at sharing a partner without batting an eyelid on the surface. This constant non-engagement is achieved by firmly remaining cosmetic should any piercing or troubling thought arise. For example:
And then she said Stop.
So I stopped. Still throbbing like a dog on heat, but I stopped.
…What are you thinking of? I asked her….
…Do you have any questions for me?
I do, actually. Leonardo has nine turtles on his terrace, I said.
And?
I keep wondering: what do the turtles think about when they have sex?
At one point, Krantik dwells on the turtles’ imaginary conversation:
What’s my union?
You and Turtle 4.
Oh, yes. That’s important.
You guys are nice together. Why did you choose her?
I don’t know. But this one time, a great leaf of lettuce was floating on her back. I could already smell the fungus. So I climbed on top of her.
Oh, my… That’s so romantic. Okay, stop now. I’m getting teary-eyed, we need to pay attention.
There is suspense too, whenever the narrative shifts to his fiancée set up through an arranged marriage alliance. His ruminations are deeper (and darker) when she surfaces, but only for a few moments. He then drifts back to the description of life in Rome. Not as a tourist would describe it, but in terms of how he responds to the sights he sees, the things he experiences in daily living: people, metro rides, food, scenes and conversations. One can picture the Coliseum, the ancient Roman temple, Trajan’s market, the Roman forum and the Roman aqueducts with scenic beauty despite their crumbling walls and remains of the glory that once was. On the other hand, one is reminded of uber urban parties seen through Instagram frames and filters. White dresses, satin sashes, smiling faces, group pictures, pizza, wine, pasta, poses, whiskers on kittens, raindrops on rose—each one, not as it would seem in the real world, but as it would be lived on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.
The superficiality brings along other unwanted guests of its own. Krantik literally worries himself sick. A paranoid hypochondriac who develops psychosomatic markers with frequent visits to doctors’ clinics. He shops for doctors who validate his paranoia. Not surprisingly, he is drawn to tempestuous relationships with just as messed up characters with tendencies of self-harm. These characters appear to live perfect lives in terms of career, luxury and ambition. Facebook validates their mess. They are good as per the norm.
Krantik makes several obsessive and repetitive inquiries about God. His monologues are filled with questions and irony (with somewhat repressed anger) about the design of the world and God’s role in it. He merits credit for delivering his views satirically. The redeeming quality is in how the protagonist raises some profound questions and gets the reader thinking about tabooed topics like suicide, religion, gods, sex, drugs, relationships, emotional and mental well-being.
There is a part in the book about the banality of ambitions when the hero imagines his colonoscopy—a conversation between the doctor and the nurse who could see “the soul snuck away inside our intestines.” “What’s that? That’s him in his office, note the dull reflection in his eyes: that’s the life he had dreamed of… We are the generation that have lost our parents but have found Facebook.” It is poignant, yet comical. A contrast to this is when he meets a stranger Eddie in his dream who pushes him to follow his creative pursuits in writing his book. Eddie asks Krantik to make him a part of his book and get a cake in return; the other choice being death, whereby the dream remains undone. What terrifies Krantik most is when Eddie says, “When you die, no one will remember your memories.”
Krantik also indulges in substance abuse as a source of escape. It leads me to wonder if he is motivated by the desire to seek self-persecution. A purgatory indulgence in self-castigation and self-deprecating humor. He is never guilty in his thoughts. That brings more persecution from a critical reader. But the interesting part about the twisted character that he is, is that he brings up his pet obsessions (suicide, religion, gods, sex, drugs) in a jocular way. Perhaps his humor is the shield against his obsessions? But one cannot help but notice their effects on his emotional and mental wellbeing.
Despite his flaws, Krantik is not vain. No Direction Rome is a successful experiment in its genre. It is an exposition into the protagonist’s inner world and his shallow, yet courageously honest conscious thoughts. In contrast to Barua’s previous novel which is about revolutionaries living and dying for a cause, NDR is about the reckless ways of a privileged millennial. In the narrator’s crudeness, it is easy to miss the ideas that he presents. This book can easily provoke hearty laughter, but if we dig deeper, Krantik’s ramblings could also be a doorway to important conversations and profound realizations.
This work was first published as part of the Sage ~ December 2017 Issue, of the Coldnoon journal.
QUOTED: "While it is a fictionalized history of Tibet, it is also a story about human beings and their search and struggle for purpose and freedom. All-in-all, it is a story that must be read. Highly, highly recommended!"
Book Review: Wind Horse by Kaushik Barua
Posted on August 5, 2015 by Modern Gypsy | 1 Comment
Wind Horse by Kaushik Barua Windhorse is the story of Lhasang, who grew up in Kham in Eastern Tibet. The son of a trader, he grew up with stories of King Gesar of Ling, of Padmasambhava, the man who taught Buddhism to Bod (Tibet), and Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje, the man who conquered fear and killed the godless king. But after the Chinese invade Tibet, when it becomes apparent that they will take away "class enemies" to be "retrained", he makes the death-defying trek to India with his family. Uprooted from everything that he knew, all that he held dear, in a foreign country, surrounded by people whose language he doesn't understand, he comes to realize that the only way forward for him is to go back - to Tibet.
This is the story of Norbu, the son of a successful Delhi-based Tibetan businessman, for whom Tibet is just an idea, a picture of a young Kundun (The Dalai Lama), the place where his grandparents stay. In college, he's lumped together with the Northeastern group on the basis of their facial features. He goes through life controlled by his father, secretly learning all he can about Tibet, but confused about his identity, about his purpose. Until he meets Dolma, a young Tibetan college student. She's escaped from Tibet, though her parents are still there. And she's very active on the political front, fighting to get the Tibetan voice heard, to get help to the refugees who are flocking in to Delhi, to Majnu Ka Tila, almost every day. Norbu goes with her to the refugee colony to teach children English, which is where he meets Lhasang, and his life takes a completely different turn.
This is the story of Thupten, the rich Tibetan trader whose business was ruined by the Chinese and whose only daughter Dechen was killed during the uprising in Lhasa. It is the story of Ratu, a disfigured rebel, of Athar, a rebel monk who took up arms when the Chinese killed the head of his monastery.
This is the story of Tibet. The story of the early years of the Chinese invasion, of the Tibetan's struggle for freedom.
It's a story that is alive with Tibetan myth and culture, with their innate sense of non-violence, and the clash between the ideologies of the older and younger generations caught in the conflict. This is the story of a people who are still in exile, of a conflict that continues until today. And while it is a fictionalized history of Tibet, it is also a story about human beings and their search and struggle for purpose and freedom.
All-in-all, it is a story that must be read. Highly, highly recommended!
QUOTED: "The story moves fast and is gripping till the very end. The historical research is impeccable and the story is strong enough to reach out and create widespread awareness towards the Tibetan cause."
Kaushik Barua’s Windhorse
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While Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome failed to reach out(to me), his debut novel Windhorse connects from page one. Set in Tibet, India and Nepal against the backdrop of the Tibetan struggle,the book follows two main protagonists Lhasang and Norbu. While Norbu has lived a privileged expatriate life in India, Lhasang’s life has been a struggle in Tibet. Lhasang’s father Dadul, pushes him towards the path of the Buddha, but the Chinese Occupation and atrocious treatment thereafter, force Lhasang to take the aggressive path. While Norbu is miles away from Nepal and firm in his faith in the Dalai Lama, Lhasang flees Tibet along with his parents and makes his way to India. Lhasang’s destiny clashes with Norbu’s, when they both meet up in Delhi and join the resistance movement to free Tibet. Their Dharma takes them across the border to fight for their homeland.
Much has been written about Tibetan Buddhism and how the path of the Buddha leads one to a happier life. There is also enough media coverage on the Dalai Lama and the Chinese occupation of Tibet. With Windhorse, Kaushik Barua has managed to bring out the ordinary human element in this politically charged movement to light. The story has shades of Tibetan folklore and mysticism, which till date makes up the core of Tibetan beliefs. This deftly written narrative is well researched and beautifully presented. As each page turns, the reader connects and feels the trials and tribulations of the characters, both minor and major. Each character is portrayed brilliantly, with their personal characteristics shining out. The characters created by the author even though fictional, reflect authenticity. Barua manages to give convincing perspectives on the ordinary Tibetans’ conflicting views on the need for resistance and the strongly advocated non-violent approach. The story moves fast and is gripping till the very end. The historical research is impeccable and the story is strong enough to reach out and create widespread awareness towards the Tibetan cause.
Windhorse is a gripping, poignant tale of struggle, loyalty and beliefs.
A definite read!