This book of mine, containing political satire and lampooning our social peccadillos and pretences, was first published by PIPPA RAN BOOKS AND MEDIA in 2020. It has now been republished by AUTHOR'S UPFRONT/ PARANJOY THAKURTA this year. I am reposting this brief introduction to it on my blog for the benefit (or mortification, as the case may be!) of those readers who have discovered me after 2020. Six years is almost a generational space nowadays in this fast-paced world, where you have to register your presence on social media everyday lest you are consigned to internet oblivion.
The sixty odd pieces in this book cover subjects as varied as high society dinners, judicial oddities, the arcane mumbo jumbo of economics, politicians and their misdeeds, social peccadillos, the absurdities of governmental policies, the inanities of our media and TV channels, and a lot more. But rarely is there a frontal assault: the battle is waged with humour, irony and satire; the intent is to both inform and amuse!
The book has a fabulous Preface by the evergreen Shashi Tharoor, and I cannot blow my own trumpet better than by quoting from it:
"Avay Shukla is no ordinary blogger. He is a former senior bureaucrat... now retired but armed with a formidable (nearly) four decades of experience administering the complexities of Indian governance. He was clearly no ordinary bureaucrat either, for he wields an incisive pen, a highly effective vocabulary- and a style so original, so witty and often so devastating that his file notations must have been classics in their own right!"
"Every subject is tackled with a command of both subject and language that make his conclusions both impossible to resist....Some of his writing is satirical, but much of it is infused with a burning passion for issues that matter in India, tinged perhaps with the tinge of disillusionment of one who has seen it all and found it wanting."
"The talent for brevity makes him the ideal blogger-somebody who has something to say, and does so readably and pithily....I hope (Avay Shukla's) work finds the wide and discerning readership it deserves, well beyond the transience of its original medium in cyberspace."
The book has merited a number of reviews, and I am happy to share one of them, by Jawhar Sircar, IAS (Retd) and ex-MP of the Trinamool Congress. Jawhar is a batchmate and even otherwise a kindred soul! Here are excerpts from the review, published in the Statesman Literary Review:
Few bureaucrats are endowed with a great sense of humour, or else they would not be bureaucrats in the first place. And, a profession that claims to be the world’s second oldest surely lacks the excitement of the first. There are, however, certain similarities and Avay Shukla’s PolyTicks, DeMockrazy & Mumbo Jumbo lifts the hemline to reveal saucy bits, but leaves it to the reader to fantasise. We benefit from his insider’s ring-side views about “babus, mantris and netas (un) making our nation”. His wit has surely not deserted him even after cohabiting for thirty five long years with dull, dusty and musty files. Behind his satire and flippant delivery, however, he displays his utter seriousness with facts and figures, as is expected from a senior administrator.
Shukla’s blog, View From (Greater) Kailash, is immensely popular among his former colleagues and a large band of other readers. They love his flippantly serious dissection of earth-shaking problems and eagerly wait for their weekly fix. One is reminded of RK Laxman’s apparently innocent but sarcasm-loaded gaze as he spoke for the common man whose one-liners were more devastating than gnashing one’s teeth or tearing precious hair. Most of his 58 articles tackle one problem at a time and he keeps smiling even as he rips through its abdomen for the world to see. .....
Let us sample his fare. Discussing the growing trust deficit, his opening comments are: “Many decades ago when I was growing up in a simpler era when crooked people were called cheats not “ethically challenged”; when a “face lift” was generally given to a building, not to a visage ravaged by time; when “silicone valley” was understood to refer to Pamela Anderson’s cleavage not to a techie wonderland, it was easy to have trust in people or things. The only objects that were universally not trusted were politicians, bureaucrats and shop-keepers, something, by the way, which holds good today.” He plunges thereafter into the serious business of analysing some notable professions to show how “the trust factor gets more invidious” with time. “Beauty”, he sighs, “does (not) lie in the eye of the beholder, it lies in the scalpel of the plastic surgeon.”.........
Delhi’s forever upwardly mobile society and its inescapable humbug are obviously targets of his acid tongue. He tries to figure out why nobody but a nobody ever arrives in time. “To do so ensures you will not be invited again (because) such aberrant behaviour reveals........that you are unemployed or (God forbid) retired, that you have no other place to visit that evening , that you are trying to save on your AC charges in your home, that you are unimportant flotsam”. Then, after listing a long series of mandatory fake behaviour that one has to suffer and keep grinning, Avay Shukla explains that “exiting a South Delhi dinner is also an art which needs a lot of practice and panache”. He suggests a good exit line like “Sorry, I must rush — Mr LK Advani is waiting for me”. He has no qualms about this fast one, as “the poor guy has been waiting for years now for anyone to call on him”.
His remarkable wit notwithstanding, Shukla is deadly serious when examining his issues — that range from police excesses, bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, citizenship disasters to smart-phones, smart cities and India’s rapidly-plunging GDP and international ratings. He lays bare hard, internationally-acknowledged data for his readers to mull over. Like “1% of Indians own 55% of its wealth” or how “10% have collared 74%” of the country’s resources. But even these need updating, as in two quick years, they have become worse and more skewed. Berating the regime-encouraged or caste-inspired agitations and violence against certain films, launched mainly by uninformed goons, he laments that “all film production will cease”. And he rues: “Sunny Leone will regrettably go back to Canada, Amitabh Bachchan will become Baba Ramdev’s brand ambassador and Salman Khan will resume shooting black bucks and chinkaras which is a far safer occupation in India than shooting films.”
Lampooning Rahul Gandhi’s sudden hugging of the Prime Minister, Shukla comments “I don’t think he was expecting any reciprocal cleaving to the bosom by the PM. It is well known that Mr Modi never, but never, hugs an Indian: his expansive embraces are reserved for foreign dignitaries, preferably on foreign soil.” Shukla take on the IAS is quite true, mercilessly so, and he aptly compares their service years with Russian dogs, who are “well fed but not allowed to bark”. “When the muzzle comes off after 35 years”, he notes that “they tend to be a rather chatty lot”.
In this apparently flippant vein, he tosses various persons, societal ailments and governmental goofing around. To Avay Shukla, there are no holy cows that can’t be tickled, despite unpleasant consequences that have befallen several outspoken critics who went too far. He is, however, quite even-handed with all political parties and if ever people are curious how bureaucrats put up with the largely-obnoxious political class, the answer is that they “faked it” most of the time. Mercifully, Shukla does not pontificate or compare his bravado with the antics of the ‘lowly specimens’ who populate his service since he left it. He laughs at himself all the time and that, by itself, proves that he has achieved something that is very difficult for most of his colleagues. That is: to remain plainly human and simply normal.
The paperback version of the book is available on Amazon at the following link: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8199353686
or simply type the name of the book. Kindle version should be available soon.
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