Best book I have read in my life? Maybe. That was what I was telling myself some 2 weeks ago. Now, yes. It is the best. Indra Sinha's Cybergypsies is a stunning tour de force, entertainment in the form of book reading at the highest quality.
What doesn't the book have? Imagination? Yes. Suspense? Yes. Reality? Yes. Humor? A big fat yes. Sattire? Thoroughly. Emotion? Greatly. Intellect? Yes. Enlightenment? Yes again.
Everything one should and would ask from a book is in this 392 page of absolute great craftmanship.
Cybergypsy is the account of Bear (Sinha himself), a copywriter at an advertising firm who details his travels on the electronic frontier and also in his 'real' life, often hovering on a guilt of losing his real life as he gets addicted to the Vortex of imaginations, and trying to recuperate and win back the Eve- the woman of his life, the woman he married.
In between this two ends, Bear travels to deep aeons of humanity, through his work with Amnesty he is exposed to the biggest conflicts that took place in the world at the time of writing- i.e. Saddam Hussein's crude mass murder on thousands of Kurds in Kurdistan, The Chinese prison guards' electric raging brutality on Tibetan freedom pledges, and also a corporate company's crude blindfold after a gas explosion in its factory wiped out almost an entire skirt of Bhopal in 1984. Harsh realities yes, but Indra mixes these harsh realities with a pint of imagination, narrating the story to us a-la a Shades or a Vortex game. The book is a celebration of the reality in which we live in, telling that of a man who transfixed himself to a fictional world and by the end of the world, realized that the gargantuan reality, no matter how harsh or unnerving, is where he wants to be. How subtly he narrates he wants to be Eve more than a Luna he never knew, and how he sees a soil homing so many little insect lives to be more of a miracle rather than Cyri, the beautiful horse in the Vortex.
Above all, the book subtly reads to us that instead of choosing 'not to know' realities which are harsh and live in our own imagination, we could stand up and make a difference, and be counted for if we had the guts to be honest to ourselves and accept the truths around us.
Sinha is a phenomenal writer, one who relates deep humanity with his narration, a touch of subsequently stunning humor, and also is, on a personal level, an amazing person because he has in fact travelled to such contrasting ends in his travels. From writing an ad for a nuclear plant, writing a Kama Sutra book and narrating a voice over for a video adaptation of the book, talking to pornographers, trying to hack and sabotage into the computer of a person believed to be nude-picturing underage girls, sitting beside a man who writes an indefatigable, utterly logic defying letter to Saddam Hussein pledging him to flee Kuwait,receiving a letter containing torture items that were personal belongings of the Dalai Lama, and narrating ad voice over with actor John Hurt. He has done it all. And he tells it all to us in this brilliant book.
We get a glimpse of how the pre-internet generation were already addicted to the online bug, how viruses were already a fashionable trend back then, and above all we see how much the Internet becomes a vortex that sucks people in and caters as a permanent hom for many people, leaving them both destructed and delusional, and at the same time, how it acts as a channel of reality, an expression of free speech, a flow for information that were blocked by governments and also companies.
Read this book if you could. In one word, this is 'Important'.
What doesn't the book have? Imagination? Yes. Suspense? Yes. Reality? Yes. Humor? A big fat yes. Sattire? Thoroughly. Emotion? Greatly. Intellect? Yes. Enlightenment? Yes again.
Everything one should and would ask from a book is in this 392 page of absolute great craftmanship.
Cybergypsy is the account of Bear (Sinha himself), a copywriter at an advertising firm who details his travels on the electronic frontier and also in his 'real' life, often hovering on a guilt of losing his real life as he gets addicted to the Vortex of imaginations, and trying to recuperate and win back the Eve- the woman of his life, the woman he married.
In between this two ends, Bear travels to deep aeons of humanity, through his work with Amnesty he is exposed to the biggest conflicts that took place in the world at the time of writing- i.e. Saddam Hussein's crude mass murder on thousands of Kurds in Kurdistan, The Chinese prison guards' electric raging brutality on Tibetan freedom pledges, and also a corporate company's crude blindfold after a gas explosion in its factory wiped out almost an entire skirt of Bhopal in 1984. Harsh realities yes, but Indra mixes these harsh realities with a pint of imagination, narrating the story to us a-la a Shades or a Vortex game. The book is a celebration of the reality in which we live in, telling that of a man who transfixed himself to a fictional world and by the end of the world, realized that the gargantuan reality, no matter how harsh or unnerving, is where he wants to be. How subtly he narrates he wants to be Eve more than a Luna he never knew, and how he sees a soil homing so many little insect lives to be more of a miracle rather than Cyri, the beautiful horse in the Vortex.
Above all, the book subtly reads to us that instead of choosing 'not to know' realities which are harsh and live in our own imagination, we could stand up and make a difference, and be counted for if we had the guts to be honest to ourselves and accept the truths around us.
Sinha is a phenomenal writer, one who relates deep humanity with his narration, a touch of subsequently stunning humor, and also is, on a personal level, an amazing person because he has in fact travelled to such contrasting ends in his travels. From writing an ad for a nuclear plant, writing a Kama Sutra book and narrating a voice over for a video adaptation of the book, talking to pornographers, trying to hack and sabotage into the computer of a person believed to be nude-picturing underage girls, sitting beside a man who writes an indefatigable, utterly logic defying letter to Saddam Hussein pledging him to flee Kuwait,receiving a letter containing torture items that were personal belongings of the Dalai Lama, and narrating ad voice over with actor John Hurt. He has done it all. And he tells it all to us in this brilliant book.
We get a glimpse of how the pre-internet generation were already addicted to the online bug, how viruses were already a fashionable trend back then, and above all we see how much the Internet becomes a vortex that sucks people in and caters as a permanent hom for many people, leaving them both destructed and delusional, and at the same time, how it acts as a channel of reality, an expression of free speech, a flow for information that were blocked by governments and also companies.
Read this book if you could. In one word, this is 'Important'.
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