Rohinton Mistry

Reading Response Journal #1 I chose to read Rohinton Mistry 's A Fine Balance, a story about four very different people living in India during a period of great civil unrest known as The State of Emergency. I found this book incredibly easy to get into because of the way Mistry writes. He seems to create the story around you, placing you in the setting as a viewer, involving you in the lives of the characters. Mistry clearly outlines the political and economic situation of India at the time, further

Introduction In Rohinton Mistry’s novel, “A Fine Balance”, he has portrayed a cluster of characters efficiently and elegantly. By portraying a cross section of Indian society especially those who called rubbish, the writers draw the real picture of India. There are four champions in the novel Dina Dalal, Ishvar, Om Prakash and Maneck Kohlah in this novel. The other famous characters are beggar master, Rajaram, the hair collector. Thakur Dharmasi, Vasantra Valmik, Ibrahim the rent-collector, Shaker-

are both social evidence and testimony. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry gives historical insight and evidence, describing the culture of life in India. Both the corruption of power and the sufferings of the people spread across the pages. Written by an Indian-born-Canadian, the events are gruesomely true and have the purpose to educate and create more empathetic readers. Illustrating the downfall of life in India under the Emergency, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

actions. This chaotic situation in their society is addressed in the novel A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry through the quote “Government problems- games played by people in power. It doesn’t affect the ordinary people like us”, which illustrates how the law is being bent in the society and how it is breaking the balance of justice bringing misfortune to the people in lower classes.

about where he has a place; what is his personality and ethnicity; what does it intend to have a place with a country and how to manage multiculturalism inside of a structure of a country state? In a meeting with Nermeen Shaikh of Asia Source in 2002, Mistry state: I felt very comfortable with the books and music [of the West] but actually living in the West made the same music seem much less relevant. It suddenly brought home to me very clearly the fact that I was imitating something that was not mine

When choosing novels in previous years, I have developed an imaginary checklist in which I run through. This checklist allows me to determine if a book is suited for me and the major theme(s) being studied during that year. The novels I often gravitate towards are the ones that I can relate to or share a connection with (text-to-self and text-to-world). These are the books I opt for because as a reader, I visualize the plot and being able to connect to it means I can sympathize with the protagonist

if we were villains by necessity” (Edmund, King Lear). Similarly, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry demonstrates that the joys, injustices, and cruelties present in the characters’ lives happen due to circumstances beyond their control, such as government regulations and the societal traditions and systems surrounding them everyday. Amidst the political turmoil and uproar of the Emergency in India, Rohinton Mistry depicts the lives of good, everyday people as they struggle to gain stable footing

depicted in the short story, 'Squatter'. Squatter is a short story that depicts the challenges faced by immigrants and their experiences while on their journey but is also described as 'an insoluble dilemma'. (Prescott, 2008, p. 232). The author, Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay, currently known as Mumbai,

In “Journey to Dharmsala,” Rohinton Mistry offers a memoir narrative of his trip to the mountainous city of Dharmsala which emerges as an attractive, ocular and fictional delineation of a tour to a Tibetan people’s town in India that ease the speaker come full circle: His childhood imaginations which he pictured by seeing the photographs of his uncles family in reality were quite different in adulthood: “How far was it- that Dharmsala of my imagination and of my uncle’s youth-how far from what I

Rohinton Mistry’s (38) first person autobiographical narrative of his trip to the Himalayan city of Dharmsala is on the surface a quaint, visual, biographical account of a journey to an Indian town that helps the author come full circle: His childhood visions of the city he dreamt of visiting and its reality as he sees it in adulthood are different in many ways, yet his childhood and adulthood converged in serene moment that epitomizes Mistry’s glorification of his native India: “To have made this