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Is New York Burning?
The pioneers of history as pulp – Freedom at Midnight, for example – must have truly raced against time to get their book out before 9/11 of 2004 and do their bit to feed the hysteria in New York at this time of the year. The novel Is New York Burning? is anything but racy and certainly not the ‘diabolic thriller’ it proclaims to be. Terrorists, Islamic of course, inspired by the irrepressible Osama bin Laden have hidden a bomb in New York; and threaten to wipe off what Ram Manohar Lohia called "the world’s greatest city", unless the US gets Israel to vacate the Palestinian land they occupied after the 1967 war. All the answers are what you’d expect. It is no empty threat. The terrorists, who are appallingly careless in covering their tracks, have actually managed to smuggle in a bomb. Millions in New York would be ‘toast’ and the city itself rubble unless Bush along with the best and brightest of his buddies find a way out to defuse the bomb before the deadline. No prizes for guessing that Bush, given the peerless resources and resourcefulness natural to Americans, is able to marshal every bit of these and defuse the bomb in the nick of time. New York is saved. Thank God for the Americans. Needless to say, George Bush is helped along by his Christian faith, Papa Bush and the might and expertise of the US administration, in that order. — S.R. |
COME September, and since 9/11 New York goes into a
hysterical frenzy, haunted by apprehensions of whether ‘evil’ would
choose to strike again. Since even many literate Americans believe in
the Francis Fukuyama-scripted ‘End of History’, they cannot be
persuaded that history does not repeat itself in an identical way,
although there might be similarities between two cycles in history. But
history being all bunk, and not just for Americans, we must make do with
the kind of fiction churned out Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins.