A Burning by Megha Majumdar is a burning arrow of a book that pierces your heart
The book opens with student Jivan witnessing a passenger filled train burning after a terrorist bomb explodes, while on scene police seemed unable or unwilling to help the victims. She later writes in a Facebook post, “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, that the government is also a terrorist?” The book deftly answers that question.
Jivan is correct. Governments do become terrorists when innocent lives are lost at their behest, collateral damage for those occupying chairs in the seat of power. The true horror is such betrayal is not the crime of a faceless monolith exerting it’s will. It is a political Ponzi scheme, where power at the top is supported and perpetuated by a vast cadre of individuals beneath, receiving trickle down benefits ensuring their continued allegiance to a corrupted organism. This insidious ideological food chain, cannibalizes the most vulnerable, served up by the very people surrounding them, quietly selling their souls for personal gain.
At the book’s core is the issue of how such betrayal is effected. A terrorist is an enemy of the state choosing openly spectacular murders to advance his cause. State sponsored terrorism is one government secretly sabotaging another often by the use of group assassination, engaging in a brutal sparring for domination. But what of the government that solidifies its power by sacrificing the most vulnerable of its citizens, those it has a duty to protect and represent? Civilization seems in retrograde.
How is an outsider drawn into the government web? In this story the wife of PT Sir, a school teacher recently involving himself with politics, cautions him, “In our country politics is for goons and robbers. You know that. When you do something for them, like when you helped them when that technician was not there, they make you feel nice. On a stage in front of so many people, who wouldn’t feel like a VIP? But associating with such people...?” She has just served up some food for thought, but Sir, irritated by her statement thinks, “But he is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she has cooked.” By book’s end, even the most conscientious eventually rationalize the fruits of aiding and abetting their government’s crimes.
Author Majumdar shows it takes more than political players to grease the wheels of government terrorism. It requires a willing collaboration with those outside it’s ranks, the masses who vote such governments into or out of power. This collective thought machine is moved by groupthink, fed by what is read in papers, or seen on social media. Jivan, who observed the terrorist train bombing as it happened sagely observes, “Where public feeling goes, the court follows.”
The humanity of this book rises off its pages, lifted by the author’s words, and flows directly into the hearts and minds of readers; we are drawn onto the streets, into trains, alongside muddy fields of grass, into fragrant kitchens, inside prisons, into crowded festivals, a pageant of cultural uniqueness within a story of shared human commonalities. Through her craft, author Megha Majumdar allows us the privilege of entering and inhabiting the souls of her characters, and we are both enriched and heartbroken by the experience. As my audiobook came to an end, the narrator said the publisher hoped I enjoyed the book. I thought to myself, “I did not enjoy all of this book, Majumdar’s arrow pierces through the heart, but I now bear witness to victims of government terrorism, and will not soon forget this artfully taught lesson.”
Jivan is correct. Governments do become terrorists when innocent lives are lost at their behest, collateral damage for those occupying chairs in the seat of power. The true horror is such betrayal is not the crime of a faceless monolith exerting it’s will. It is a political Ponzi scheme, where power at the top is supported and perpetuated by a vast cadre of individuals beneath, receiving trickle down benefits ensuring their continued allegiance to a corrupted organism. This insidious ideological food chain, cannibalizes the most vulnerable, served up by the very people surrounding them, quietly selling their souls for personal gain.
At the book’s core is the issue of how such betrayal is effected. A terrorist is an enemy of the state choosing openly spectacular murders to advance his cause. State sponsored terrorism is one government secretly sabotaging another often by the use of group assassination, engaging in a brutal sparring for domination. But what of the government that solidifies its power by sacrificing the most vulnerable of its citizens, those it has a duty to protect and represent? Civilization seems in retrograde.
How is an outsider drawn into the government web? In this story the wife of PT Sir, a school teacher recently involving himself with politics, cautions him, “In our country politics is for goons and robbers. You know that. When you do something for them, like when you helped them when that technician was not there, they make you feel nice. On a stage in front of so many people, who wouldn’t feel like a VIP? But associating with such people...?” She has just served up some food for thought, but Sir, irritated by her statement thinks, “But he is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she has cooked.” By book’s end, even the most conscientious eventually rationalize the fruits of aiding and abetting their government’s crimes.
Author Majumdar shows it takes more than political players to grease the wheels of government terrorism. It requires a willing collaboration with those outside it’s ranks, the masses who vote such governments into or out of power. This collective thought machine is moved by groupthink, fed by what is read in papers, or seen on social media. Jivan, who observed the terrorist train bombing as it happened sagely observes, “Where public feeling goes, the court follows.”
The humanity of this book rises off its pages, lifted by the author’s words, and flows directly into the hearts and minds of readers; we are drawn onto the streets, into trains, alongside muddy fields of grass, into fragrant kitchens, inside prisons, into crowded festivals, a pageant of cultural uniqueness within a story of shared human commonalities. Through her craft, author Megha Majumdar allows us the privilege of entering and inhabiting the souls of her characters, and we are both enriched and heartbroken by the experience. As my audiobook came to an end, the narrator said the publisher hoped I enjoyed the book. I thought to myself, “I did not enjoy all of this book, Majumdar’s arrow pierces through the heart, but I now bear witness to victims of government terrorism, and will not soon forget this artfully taught lesson.”
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