You Know Fun’s in Store…

when the book you picked up randomly at the bookstore has this in the third page:

The Raj Atithi Guest House was a fourteen-storey building crawling with low life. A five-foot-high wall separated its compound from the world’s largest garbage dump. Atop the wall stretched four rows of barbed wire, from the various points of which sagged torn polythene bags of diverse colours. These contained human shit in different stages of decomposition. They’d been flung, of course, at the dump and had’t made it across the wall. They in fact looked pathetic, like POWs in a Hollywood movie ensnared in a vain attempt to escape from a concentration camp.

Yummy, you say? Now, hold that urge to shout ‘gross!’?

This ones from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Mammaries of the Welfare State which I had picked up about three months back from Crosswords. The protagonist is a government employee who has just been tranferred to a new city and is supposed to live a government guest house for ten days. As the name might have suggested to you, it’s a satire on the Indian bureaucracy. And as the paragraph above might have suggested, it’s witty, funny and hilarious (and I have only read fifteen pages). There’s a healthy sprinkling of the the four-letter word and a lot of not-to-be-mentioned-in-civilised-company words as well. In short, lotsa fun in store.

Lyrics for the moment

But we’re never gonna survive unless
We get a little crazy
No we’re never gonna survive unless
We got a little… – Crazy, Alanis Morissette Seal