Show Business by Shashi Tharoor: A Book Review

Abstract

The novel Show Business begins almost as a farce and ends in widescreen panoptic drama and acute personal pain. The perfect medium for such a sweep of the matter is film. For a story set in India, the perfect medium is, of course, Hindi film. In India, the film has a mystic power and its main characters are neargods. Often religious in content, shown to multitudes, sometimes on huge outdoor screens that glow like apparitions over an enchanted crowd hunkered down in the street, Hindi films are the embodied dreams of millions of the poorest people on earth. Their stars are some of the richest, most known, and therefore most powerful, people in India. The film-making quarter of Bombay and its people makeup what is known as Bollywood, a community as vulgar in some ways as Hollywood itself, but still - just - publicly respectful of religious and sexual codes of good observance and behavior. The casting couch, big egos, glitz and various forms of exploitation are just as much a part of India's film industry as of Hollywood, to judge from this entertaining, occasionally uneven satirical novel. Bombay superstar Ashok Banjara, a government minister's son, is a personable, egotistical cad. He courts a co-star while his wife is pregnant with triplets, flaunts his affair across the nation and later runs for a seat in the Indian parliament long held by his disapproving father.