I was expecting better from Suzanna Arundhati Roy but alas, this book does not come anywhere near close to the brilliance of her first novel. I’d bought this at a book promotion event at Dublin where author explained her reasons for writing this tome. Arundhati Roy never ever had anything good to say about India but looks like now she is on a crusade to denigrate anything remotely Indian in front of easily swayed western audience. Being an Indian it was humiliating to sit in audience with Irish readers and hear the author spell out outright lies and half baked truths about current Indian political and social landscape. After reading this book it becomes distinctly clear that the only reason she has written this book is to carry forward her known agenda of disparaging Indian state and spitting out venom against Hindu religion & culture. She herself has acknowledged in the past that she is not that well read but this book exposes her utter ignorance of history and sociology. She talks about high handedness of Indian state in controlling the Islamic terrorism in Kashmir fomented by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and increasingly by China, but conveniently omits out the plight of thousands of Kashmiri native Hindus who were brutally murdered, raped and thrown out of their homes. Nowhere in the world history there is another example of majority community suffering so severely at the hands of minority in a state. Arundhati Roy has gone all out glorifying Kashmiri Islamic terrorists and saves her choicest expletives for the nationalist party of current prime minister. Towards the end of this strange book, the author attempts another ludicrous attempt to somehow connect Kashmir issue to Naxalite challenge in Central India. For those not up to date with contemporary India, the only thing that links these two socio political issues is foreign illicit funding coming from Pakistan & China but other than that they just represent the two scourges of humanity in recent centuries i.e. Islamic Terrorism and Communism. I’m an Indian but reading this book it feels that Arundhati was visiting a different country when she was writing this third rate and possibly Vatican funded propaganda book to slander rapidly progressing India. She fails to mention any recent achievements of Indian scientists like space missions to Moon and Mars or the growth of Indian IT industry that is motoring the growth all around the world. Indians in increasing numbers are reaching the pinnacle of Industry, Business and Politics all around the globe. To just highlight a few examples, Indians are now leading major global corporations like Microsoft, Google, PepsiCo and numerous others. Indians are in American, Canadian and UK government cabinets. But for Arundhati what is worth the mention are the scums that operate in Kashmir, in Central India forests and their foreign funded representatives that crowd Jantar Mantar which is an Indian version of UK’s Hyde Park. My advise to the readers of this book is not to make any misguided inference about India after reading this collection of lies but visit India and see for yourself its magic and its multitudes. Its a miracle that such a place as India exists, it is the soul of this world and its young population represent the only positive force in todays contemporary world. Savour the magic of India by visiting it in person.