Customer Reviews

Give 'em Hell, Hari

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Give 'Em Hell, Hari is an epistolarly novel about a group of Indian journalists working in an American news bureau in New Delhi. The story's narrator is the bureau's chief technician, Hari Rana. An aspiring writer, Hari writes letters to Indian newspapers in the hope that the more letters he gets published the higher the chances that his American bureau chief will be impressed enough to hire him as a writer. (Hari is also aiming to break the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest number of letters to the editors ever published.) The letters, hilarious and wonderfully descriptive about Indian society, bring Hari in contact with various other Indians. One of them is a retired colonel of the Indian army to whom Hari starts writing regularly. What unfolds in his letters to the colonel is a delightful cornucopia of office politics involving some of the most lively and fascinating characters in modern Indian fiction. Chief among them is "the Bengali," a scheming middle-aged journalist from Bengal who hates Westerners and everything Western (except the dollars in which he wants to get paid.) There's also Sam "Daanav" Scott, an easy-going American news editor with a horrendously bad memory (the Indians nickname him "Daanav," meaning monsterr). And there's Damon "Danger" Hatcher, a supercilious American bureau chief who doesn't care much for multiculturalism and political correctness. Half-way through the book, Hari gets a scholarship to study in America, where the story takes on a Candide-like quality. This is a wonderful book.

I'm a sucker for any book that stars writers and eccentrics, and this book is replete with both. It's brilliantly observed, and so cleverly written that I was laughing every time I turned a page -- and I turned them rapidly. It's a fast read, lots of fun, and its cultural observations, on everything from newspaper work in India to riding the Greyhound bus to Washington, are incisive and often hilarious.