Waiting for the Mahatma - R.K.Narayan (1955)

Mini-Reviews just for movies? No for books too. Those are my first love. Since I am too forgetful, a quick review about the books i read will serve to bring back fresh thought floods about it.

Waiting for the Mahatma - I read this for the second time. Good books can be read a million times and still it will continue to offer us something new.
Sriram is just like me- a lazy idiot with total lack of self-motivation. Throughout his twenty years, he knew and faced nothing other than his Granny, Kanni's shop sweets and kabir street in malgudi. Inside the comfort zone all the time. He sets his eyes on Bharati ,a busy bee who has completely sacrificed her life to the service of the Mahatma when she goes about the street asking for donations and immediately falls in love with her. Things begin to get interesting when Mahatma himself visits Malgudi and Bharati introduces Sriram to him.
The excellent part of this book is how well RKN has melded Gandhi into the story's framework. Introducing fictional characters in historical situations is common- Sujatha had handled such a thing in 'Ratham orey niram' expertly. But making a famous personality as one of the characters in a book is rare, i think. And RKN has done a beautiful job of it. The simplicity and humor of the Great man has been portrayed well. From what i have read and contemplated about the Mahatma, i can say RKN has completely absorbed his character. A flawless work. Another remarkable thing about RKN narration is its impartiality. Throughout this book you could read views praising and opposing Gandhi's principles. Yet there wouldn't be a single spot where you could smell the author's inclination. That's very difficult to achieve. I especially liked the emotional dilemma Sriram undergo seeing people too busy with their own apparently trivial matters, not concerned about Gandhi's sacrifices to uplift them. When he sees a crowd heatedly arguing about a playful boy hanging upside down from a tree, he gets upset.
An excerpt:
"The country was engaged in a struggle for survival; in a flash there passed before his mind Gandhi, his spinning wheel, the hours he spent in walking, thinking and mortifying himself in various ways, his imprisonment, and all this seemed suddenly pointless, seeing the kind of people for whom it was intended. He suddenly felt unhappy. All his own activity seemed to him meaningless. He might as well return to the cosy isolation of Kabhir street...."

One of Gandhi's grave mistakes is to assume the society to be a simple system. He expected everyone to develop self control and have their actions mapped according to the satyagrahic blue print. He did succeed to a large extent in bringing about and maintaining this before independence but associated events that led partition broke the threshold.. BIGTIME.!
Sriram's emotional conflict is an example.
The only reservation i have about RKN's style is a sense of superficiality in the narration, just like Sujatha's. Writers like Balakumaran and Baldacci to some extent go to the depth of the characters' mind revealing the entire thought process while Sujatha and RKN prefer to give just a few wisps of thoughts. (Why Bharati likes such a loser still makes me wonder- of course with a slight pleasure that i stand a chance too. :D ) Indeed the above excerpt is an exception, a fine one at that.