Chandra, a native of New Delhi who now lives in India and California, knows his mother country well, with all its religious, racial and ethnic rivalries, its dangerous relations with Pakistan, its "enormous bustle of millions on the move," its obsession with movies and movie stars, its splendid but endangered natural glories. But Ganesh is indeed afraid. And of course, tons and tons of violence. The language is a s colorful (i.e. This is a sometimes long, but altogether satisfying, read. Chandra tells nice stories! But so well written. Et cetera, et cetera. “SACRED GAMES [is] as hard to put down as it is to pick up.” ( Four, you'll have the opportunity to get as close as possible to living in modern-day Mumbai/Bombay for as long as it takes you to finish the novel, without picking up any unpleasant parasites along the way.
It is no accident that Ganesh is named for the Hindu god of success, the elephant god much revered by Hindus everywhere. In 1994, Gaitonde resurfaces in a new location.With the terrorist-cell investigation underway, Sartaj visits Guruji’s ashram. One kill. The book was long and worth reading. Removed from the case, Sartaj begins his own investigation.The woman found in the bunker leads Sartaj to Gaitonde's thug, Bunty. Sacred Games combines the ambition of a 20th-century social novelwith a cops-and-gangster detective thriller. I wouldn't say I glided through it in 2-3 days but it is gripping enough to finish in that time if you are that kind of an attentive reader.
They are against violence," the guru coldly replies: "Have not holy men fought before? by Vikram Chandra. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. The working of Mumbai police and underworld have been covered really thoroughly. It's brutal, tender, funny, hopeful, despairing, filthy, religious, political, violent, divided, diverse and pretty much everything else you can get into 800 pages.
The two men ruminate on the meaning of life and death, and Chandra connects them as he connects all the big themes of the subcontinent: the animosity of caste and religion, the poverty, the prostitution and mainly, the criminal elite, who organize themselves on the model of corporations and control their fiefdoms from outside the country. This seems to be a cynical, world-weary variation on the old sportswriter Grantland Rice's maxim: "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game." While at heart it is a police procedural and a mystery, it is much broader in scope and grasp.
A page turner!
But "the silky Sikh" is now past forty, his marriage is over and his career prospects are on the slide.
I haven't read a more beautiful, thrilling and chilling story from our part of the world. Buy Sacred Games by Chandra, Vikram, Chandra, Vikram from Amazon's Fiction Books Store. This book tells us the story of one Sartaj Singh a Police Inspector and One Ganesh Gaitonde a Gangster. . I feel that he had an agenda within this book, which is sometimes OK, but it almost ruined the story. Tolstoyan, I'd say (now that I'm such a big Tolstoy expert having finally read War & Peace recently). A gigantic epic sweep over India since Partition as told through a Hindu gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde, and a Sikh policeman present at his suicide, Sartaj Singh, plus side stories of a huge cast of minor characters. There was remarkably little blood, but the sight of Fluffy's brains did send the conventeers into hysterics, and meanwhile, above, the man who had swung Fluffy around his head by one leg, who had slung Fluffy into the void, one Mr Mahesh Pandey of Mirage Textiles, that man was leaning on his windowsill and laughing. After negotiations fail to persuade him to come out, Sartaj orders a bulldozer operator to demolish the structure. I went through all 900-odd pages in record time, enjoying every minute, including all the Insets, which are only tangentially related to the main narrative. Lotsa filmi references to Bollywood through songs and actors. You have to commit yourself to this book, because it's an Indian novel in the Mahabbarata style...900 pages long. Sacred Games encompasses vivid and colourful characters, it contains multiple strands and viewpoints.
Sartaj is ambivalent about his choices, but Gaitone is hungry for position and wealth from the moment he commits his first murder as a young man. A confrontation between the two men opens the novel, with Gaitonde taunting Sartaj from inside the protection of his strange shell-like bunker. In the opening chapters of the book Sartaj corners Gaitonde in an impenetrable fortress where Gaitonde takes his own life. It rambles and it twists and turns. The chapters that follow tell both their stories, but especially chronicle Gaitonde's rise to power. . He finds Ganesh dead of a gunshot wound, and an unknown woman dead in the bunker along with him. And two amazing characters - Sartaj and Gaitonde. After 12 months I sat down, opened it, and proceeded to consume it in three days.It took me a year to read this book. As someone with a 300-page attention span, I wasn't sure I'd finish Vikram's 900-page magnum opus. We are approaching the crest, the outburst. In Sacred Games he clearly has tried to gather the entire country within the pages of a single book -- as Faulkner said, "to put it all on the head of a pin" -- and in the very limited sense that the novel is indisputably a grab bag, perhaps he has succeeded.
Seen-it-all-weary yet disciplined, Sartaj is both ruthless and compassionate, and his acute awareness and street wisdom play in counterpoint to Ganesh's naked ambition. A murderous plot. I don't know if the Kindle technology would support this, but it would be very helpful to have a quick and easy way to look up the meanings of the non-English words. Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional richness and power. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. What a story. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Vintage Departures) Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Chandra's first novel, was inspired by the autobiography of James Skinner - the Irish Raja of Hansi in Haryana, a legendary nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian soldier. What a great read.