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Eimona
While not grand in scope like the Hollywood film Gatacca which chartered a biometric future for humanity, Prabhat has created a Chennai microcosm where children are assessed, diagnosed and medicated for suffering from "anomie". A new world is spawned, where not going on chat groups, not being able to access mails, and not playing psychedelic video games, amounts to not belonging. Founder of the consulting unit of Satyam Computers, Prabhat has brought his insights of the IT world to his novel. His characters are geeks who drink away their weekends, are obsessive watchers of the stock market and CNBC, who make millions sitting in front of plasma screens, and who suffer from Brandwidth Separation Anxiety. Western fiction set the definitive note for such doomsday predictions when the first computers revolutionised western society. Prabhat’s work is as much a part of this tradition as it is of modern Indian writing. In as much as they reflect a social trend, his characters ring true. Told from the viewpoint of a 75-year old grandfather, Subbu, it occasionally falters in conveying to the reader what drives the other protagonists Indu and Bharat. Bharat does go through some pages of self-questioning, as the sword of the new God of commerce swipes at him rendering him jobless, robbing him of his identity and existence. But Indu is totally indoctrinated into this new religion and reveals nothing but her harsh ruthlessness. Their daughter Maya is surreal, but then she belongs to the world of India as we still know it today. Prabhat has taken care to ensure that the only character with whom we empathise is a misfit in Eimona. Simple prose carries through the plot. Fear follows success. Whatever one has achieved can be severed with one stroke`85 your job, your marriage, your children, everything is neatly captured in contracts. Indian words are used occasionally to conjure up a nostalgic sepia-tinted picture of a by-gone era, of kolams outside the house, and namaskarams to parents, now replaced by a pan-American culture. In eimona, an entire society has changed, though the transition is not explained satisfactorily, and shed its Indianness. A gripping, if depressing, read.
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A
sensitive portrayal of what’s happening to India’s urban digital
youth, G B Prabhat’s Eimona succeeds – and depresses. Cloaked
in gentle satire, it is nonetheless chilling in its portrayal of a
money-obsessed future that a section of India is hurtling towards, with
the only social prop being psychiatric web portals.