The Naked Truth

Josy Joseph takes one through a very flawed India, one that we choose to close our eyes to. But he is also a rather biased author.

- Seetha

AT ONE LEVEL this is a cracker of a book. At another level, it is deeply problematic. So what makes A Feast of Vultures work?

Interest doesn’t flag as Josy Joseph takes one through a very flawed India, one that we are all familiar with but choose to close our eyes to. This is the India where there are still villages without access to basic services because people don’t have access to the right connections, even as a handful of people are able to get even illegitimate work done by just snapping their fingers.

This is not the account of an armchair journalist, pontificating on the basis of some desultory conversations on the rare occasions that he decides to move out of the confines of his office. It is hard reporting from the ground— whether it is in the interiors of rural India or of posh drawing rooms.

Joseph starts by taking the reader to Hridaychak village in Bihar where one man kept badgering everyone from district officials to the union minister’s office in Delhi to get a road sanctioned. From there, the book journeys through the world of naya netas who “get things done” in remote villages, the typists and stenographers of politicians who become centres for power, the arms dealers, the highly sophisticated lobbyists and powerful family members who influence policy and the cream of Corporate India, which has no scruples in turning to underworld dons. Joseph pulls no punches and hides nothing, not even big names. Middlemen are a legitimate function in any economy, he points out, even as he shows how Indian middlemen operate in a shadowy world, unlike in other countries.