About Book
Critically ill, Bollywood superstar Ashok Banjara lies suspended between life and death in the intensive care unit of a plush Bombay hospital, watching the final re-run of his life...
Visitors come and go, taking, praying, pleading with him to rise from his coma but there is no reaction from Banjara, a prisoner of the technicolour film that play inside his head. As if for the first time, he watches himself rise to the heights of Bomaby`s commercial cinema from unremarkable beginnings, and encounter again all the people he met and used along the way. As a backdrop to these characters is an endless carousel of the major hits he`s acted in-guady, exuberant, beguiling- a never ending fantasy that (as be realizes now, when he is unable to redeem a single moment) took over his life completely and transformed it into an astonishing, compelling lie. Show Business is many books rolle dinto one-it is a story about the telling of stories, it is a wonderfully funny tale about the romance and folly of cinema, it is a novel on an epic scale of ambition, greed love, deception and death. And, perhaps most important, it is a fable for our time which teaches us that we live in a world where illusion is the only reality and nothing is what is seems
About Author
Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of ten works of fiction and non-fiction and a widely published critic, commentator and columnist (for The Hindu, Times of India and Newsweek, among others). In 2007 he concluded a nearly twenty-nine-year career at the United Nations, during which he worked for refugees in South-east Asia at the peak of the boat people crisis and handled peace-keeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. Latterly, Tharoor occupied the role of Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and in 2006 he was nominated as India's candidate for UN Secretary-General, emerging as strong second out of seven contenders.
Tharoor earned his PhD at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at the age of twenty-two and was named 'Global Leader of Tomorrow' at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honour for Indians living overseas. Shashi Tharoor's website is www.shashitharoor.com