BOOK REVIEW | The hills of Himachal, otherwise serene and salubrious, have started echoing voices of protest. Though not on ground, a new book titled Pee For Protest, very vividly uses the mountain landscape to capture the anxieties of a generation, which, according to the writer, has forgotten to rebel.
The work of fiction, written by Sanjay Versain, who hails from the hills and works for a national newspaper, is set during the spring of 2011 amid the protest movement sweeping India and is reflection of the anxieties of the youth of that time, battling uncertainty and hopelessness. The author claims that a decade later another wave of protests arose but this time the landscape had changed with not much scope for dissent, and therefore the youth were still standing at the crossroads of hope and despair. The book, written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, brings out this internal conflict, and in the end deliberately leaves it for the reader to decide the fate of the protagonist.
“For two decades the nation enjoyed the fruits of the post-liberalized economy but with that also came the ills of free economy and issues like corruption and governance paralysis took centre stage. With the last big protest movement, the Mandal Commission unrest, being more of history than recollection for this generation, the internal unrest among the youth found a vent in the Anna Hazare protest movement. Everyone got swept but most were reluctant participants,” Versain claims. The novel is the story of one such youth, Nachiket, who, while dealing with a monotonous and hyper-competitive career, gets drawn into the wave of dissent and reluctantly becomes an unwitting conspirator against the prevailing status quo. The author somewhere attributes his reluctance to a certain ‘genetic mutation that make Indians incapable of revolt’. The protagonist seeks solace in silent candle protests but soon finds himself entangled in a series of unfortunate events. In a bout of nothingness, he lands up at a very unlikely place while on way to meet his girlfriend and that is when he gets sucked up into mysteries that the author unravels very clinically in rest of the book.
In his pursuit for meaning and trying to make sense of his own mistakes and indecisiveness, Nachiket finds himself being accused of rape. Is this a witch-hunt a consequence of mocking a police officer during a protest rally? Nachiket is almost convinced and thus started his journey of defiance and then a full-fledged revolt. His defiance leads him to attend a rave party in a secluded mountain hideout, where he encounters a surreal cast of characters — a paraglider selling marijuana from the sky, an elderly foreigner living alone in a cave, and a woman shaman seeking divine union. Uncanny and ethereal, these encounters add to Nachiket’s sense of uncertainty and pathos. He even experiences a near-suicidal moment, surviving it because he “promised himself not to harm his own being”.
Coming from a growing breed of English writers from the state, the language used is very refreshing with good command over flow. The ideological stand taken by the writer too is unconventional as the protagonist makes an unusual decision to atone for the sins he had not committed. “The concept of atonement comes from the thought that we cannot expect others to bring about change in the country without making a personal sacrifice,” the writer says. The book also sees a number of mythological and cultural motifs being used as metaphors and also uses the mountain topography and local issues like power projects, hyper tourism, and drug abuse as a backdrop of the story. But the writer claims that these local issues are as much central to the larger national issues because people prioritize personal problems over those further from them. “It is very difficult to build a countrywide mass movement, given the vast expanse and diversity of the country. Conversely, it is difficult for local issues to attract national attention for the same reason. Sitting in Himachal, It is impossible for someone to understand what is happening in Manipur and vice versa,” Versain says.
The story’s climax is rather steep and leaves the reader on an uncertain plateau built over dramatization of a ‘spectacle’. That is how revolution in our times can at best be described, the writer concludes.