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The Middleman Mani Sankar Mukherji, popularly known as Sankar, is Bengal’s reigning novelist whose works have moved a generation of book lovers. But it’s this particular novel —The Middleman — which had caught Satyajit Ray’s attention to such an extent that he’d gone ahead and quipped, "I felt rampant corruption all around, and I didn’t think there was any solution. I was only waiting for a story that would give me an opportunity to show this."
An opportunity Satyajit Ray got to show this and much more along the strain when he read this novel and made his award-winning film Jana Aranya based on it and not to be overlooked is Ray’s rather apt comment on this particular film of his — as the only bleak film he’d ever made. Yes, this novel does focus on some of the bleak aspects of life and everyday realities — unemployment, frustrations, recession and all those layers of corruption — that affect thousands amongst us. In fact, what could be termed amazing is that even though this novel was originally written in the 1970s (its English translated version, published by Penguin hit the stands a few months ago), it seems as though the very storyline is apt for these hard-hitting ‘recession’ times that we are going through now. The entire novel revolves around the life and times of an unemployed young man, Somnath Banerjee, who lives in Calcutta.With a tremendous flow to it, the story takes one along a heap of frustrations and disappointments that the young man goes through together with the contradictions and the utter turmoil that he faces. In fact, last month when I’d finally met Sankar, the very first query had to be obvious, "Was this novel written along autobiographical lines and patterns". And with a rather nostalgic smile playing on his face he’d quipped, "I have seen unemployment, poverty and injustice taking place all these years." In fact, though that evening he seemed rather tight with his words and wouldn’t let them flow out spontaneously, but in the very "Afterword" to this novel he does elaborate, "Since there’s a story behind the writing of every novel, many people have insisted that I reveal the facts about The Middleman in the form of a confession. I had first considered the idea of this novel in, what now seems, another lifetime, when I was jobless. My father had passed away suddenly, throwing the responsibility of a huge family entirely on my shoulders. I was desperate for a job, but had no contacts in any office or factory then. I didn’t even know how to secure employment. Why, I didn’t dare even to ride in the lifts of unfamiliar buildings, incase I was asked to pay. One day, a well-established gentleman chided me in exasperation, ‘Are Bengalis incapable of trying anything other than jobs? Why don’t you get into business?’ That was the beginning. I decided to go into business." And with that he portrays and derails some of the dark realities and darker truths he’d confronted during those days when he’d tried to survive in the so-called business-cum-corporate world of Calcutta. Pulling out rather generously from those experiences, weaving them in this novel. But he did it with a well-defined and definite purpose. To quote him, "I had a clear objective to leave, through a novel, a reliable document for the future generations of Bengalis — a depiction of the extreme humiliation and abuse that was heaped on the helpless unemployed young men and women of our times. I wanted, too, to remind our youth and their parents that without emergency measures to tackle the employment problem, the very foundations of our social and personal lives would crumble." Aren’t we all seeing, sensing and witnessing this crumbling taking place in 2009 — when there’s not just joblessness but recession and rampant corruption and merit has taken a backseat. And it’s the well connected who are thriving with nexus networking in full swing, paving way for more sleaze and slander. But who is crying halt.
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