At Moon Suzuki’s funeral

INDIA STINKING: MANUAL SCAVENGERS IN ANDHRA PRADESH AND THEIR WORK (Navayana, Rs 100) by Gita Ramaswamy is a result of extensive fieldwork and research on the thousands of manual scavengers based in Andhra Pradesh. It has detailed appendices providing valuable information about organizations working to abolish manual scavenging and lists of municipalities still using that system. The book also traces the societal and historical foundations of this kind of work and discusses the laws that prohibit it. The Safai Karamchari Andolan, its origins and its efforts to wean away all those who have been slaves to this “caste-based hereditary and inhuman occupation” are aptly chronicled. The author’s appeal for the abolition of around 96 lakh dry latrines is not merely for the sake of a more modern, hygienic sewage system. It is an attempt to save the people who are forced to dispose of human excreta with their hands from a job that gives them nothing but indignity and disease.

GRAFFITI MY SOUL (Penguin, Rs 275) by Niven Govinden starts with 15-year-old Veerapen, a Tamil boy from Surrey, recounting his girlfriend, Moon Suzuki’s funeral. Constantly switching from flashback to present mode, his story embodies the cynical arrogance and tender vulnerability characteristic of any teenager trying to cope with a world full of competition, disguised racism, infidelity and death. Moon’s death becomes an allegory of the death of innocence. The novel is a constant trail of thought, a soliloquy that gives the reader glimpses of what is going on within and outside the boy. Govinden’s style has an easy eloquence and wry humour that makes the book memorable.

HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT FROM ALMOST ANYBODY(Westland, Rs 175) by T. Scott Gross is primarily a book about “customer service” and the power relationships between the server and the served. What makes it unique is that the author acknowledges the power of the service provider “to make your transaction wonderful or absolutely miserable”. Gross, a participative service expert in America and a recognized speaker, breezes the reader through crisp anecdotes from everyday life, telling him all the while that a little bit of tact can make a person sail through the most harrowing of situations.