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Beautiful Thing: Inside The Secret World Of Bombay's Dance Bars (2010)

by Sonia Faleiro(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0670084050 (ISBN13: 9780670084050)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Penguin Books India

review 1: Faleiro found a great subject in Leela, the bar dancer whose story she uses to portray the ravages of Bombay's sex industry. The book provides a rich, novelistic human story behind the horrifying recent headlines about India's sexual violence. Two criticisms: Because the book mainly reads like a novel, the moments where Faleiro steps back to provide commentary or context do not flow well. Also, she uses a lot of Hindi words - sometimes italicized, sometimes not - whose meaning is not clear from the context and she never defines them. It goes beyond color and capturing speech to just being distracting for the non-Hindi-speaking reader.
review 2: Almost unreadable book; partially due to stylistic device of using the language of characters and translating it in En... moreglish, where 'veg' the short of vegetarian becomes wedge, and written in a rather choppily. Great affinity for Hindi cuss words and their translations. At times it seems that cuss words is the propelling force behind this book which tells about the bleak life of Bombay Bar-Dancers before and after the ban on their trade in a gritty manner. I so wish it was well written as I have read some nice pieces by Sonia Feliero and she has great material on hand. Here she follows a few of them and does tell us about their lives as she sees them. However she covers a lot of ground in these 212 pages where the cast includes not only Bar-Dancres but prostitutes, madames, transvestites, hijras, gangsters, Policemen, pimps etc. Someone should find out how many times the word 'bra' is used in the book or those colourful cuss words for that matter. less

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