Written by Paro Anand
Pictures by Priya Kuriyan
Published by Harper Collins Children’s Books
Like Chandrasekar, the 13 year old protagonist in the story – many of us feel that we have notionally reduced the month of October to remembering Gandhi as an ideal or a symbol of ‘freedom’ through school program – projects – competitions and such. This year the buzz was particularly heavy with 150 years of Gandhi being pushed to some heights of activity that despite planning, enforcing, funding and branding permeate nothing but the very , very surface of our beings. So Being Gandhi which appeared to have a timely launch in September at the Neev Literature Fest made me wonder if it was one more thrust in this direction. It is not. It had a timely launch, but Being Gandhi is a book we need to have on our shelves in the library. 
The story opens with projects on Gandhi being assigned in a classroom by Preeti Ma’am .Chandrasekar , is portrayed as a boy who loves to draw and immerse himself in stories of his own making. The story is narrated in first person but somewhere in the writing Chandrasekar grows up and grows out into a very different character. This may cause us to pause and wonder about the ‘event’ that led to this change. But we may also wonder if the writer did this deliberately or strategically to communicate to us readers, the growth of the character through the arc of events of the novel.
Being Gandhi is a slim book and therefore not intimidating or overwhelming. Knowing it is by Paro Anand immediately evokes a sense of a ‘ difficult theme’ embedded within and that is well fulfilled through the reading. The language is simple, perhaps too much in quotes but this too I find ties up in the end to the protagonist evoking ‘quotations’ by Gandhi as building blocks to actions. Was this planned and deliberate or is this the reader in me responding to ‘devices’ ?
Most readers who reach for this text would have been born at least 20 years after the events of 1984 and therefore the event of the story is compelling. However, is the classroom experience, life and imagination of the setting of the story located within a 1984 lifestyle ? I am not sure. The setting is an urban , upper middle class building complex in an unnamed location. What would life have been in this location in 1984? Would schools have assignments and projects ? Would pastry and coffee shops exist and offer Mille-feuille pastry and such ? We would need someone who has lived in an urban multicultural milieu to comment because I do not have a reference for this kind of living. I however do tend to wonder if there is an imposition of a different place and time , a more contemporary life style back tabled on 1984 because it seemed modern to me as did the school.
The plot is replete with moral dilemma’s, death and violence handled with sensitivity, questions around child agency, complexity of larger political questions, issues around community, power, privilege. It would have been even more compelling if some of dilemmas that Chandrasekar encounters were also considered around Gandhi. The character sketch of Gandhi glorifies and does not humanise Gandhi who we know from his own writings also had many dilemmas and made choices. Including those as well would have been quite wonderful and layered the text even further. However, we acknowledge that we do not have any / enough of texts around the simmering communal tensions that brew in our geography and so in taking this on and writing about it, Paro Anand adds to a much wanted corpus for our library collection.
We await sharing this with readers at Bookworm and invite you to come , borrow – read – talk soon !