Customer Reviews

Rag Called Happiness

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This is a story about a group of young theatre players, each with unconnected pasts. They choose to leave their everyday lives in order to come together and enact plays in the hope of uncovering something of value that they could hold on to in the turbulent world on the other side of the curtain.

From the very start, the novel deals with the conditions of life of each of the players and extrapolates them to the 'human condition' at large. Their lives are depicted as those 'lacking completeness'. This sense of incompleteness is the driving force in the novel

A central theme of the novel is the notion of happiness and it's place in life. Each of the characters is portrayed as searching for happiness, but their search only makes them less likely to find it. The position the author seems to hold is that even though people persue happiness as the utmost thing that life has to offer, happiness, by it's nature is elusive and transitory, not something that can be possessed once acquired. The characters of the novel experience happiness in interminnent and somewhat satiric bursts. Munnu remarks one night on the roof that '(maybe) happiness was watching Bitty with your head on Darry's stomach'. During a party on the roof, he says 'Happiness comes in unannounced in the midst of conversation, in the moments between picking up the bottle and setting down the glass, on bursts of shared laughter... As I read through my diary it occurs to me what a stupid fellow I am'. Bitty remarks during an argument with Darry that 'we quarrel about the troubles of other people because our own happiness is nowhere in sight'. Loneliness is another central theme in the novel. The character's feelings of loneliness are tied to their feelings of incompleteness. They all share a troubled reaction to loneliness. Each of them try their best to get away from this feeling, but, like their feelings of incompleteness, this feeling lingers on and torment them.

About his own writing and the emptiness of urban life, Nirmal Verma says 'It is not a question of whether God exists or not, but it highlights the vacuum, the loneliness this has left in our life. In my creative writings I transform some of these concerns into a field of existential choices with which man is faced in everyday life.'

I personally liked this novel as the exploration of human beings caught in a web of relationships and ideals far outshadows social concerns that normally dominate modern Indian fiction.