Author: Payal Kapadia Publisher: Hachette India INR 399 This is something we have read or seen before, the jackboots, a Supreme Leader and a lack of freedom of speech. Payal Kapadia’s book treads on the heels of Orwell’s dystopian 1984, a place where Newspeak has been created to replace Oldspeak so that undesirable words can be eliminated and words like free can be stripped of unorthodox meanings. Orwell also added Big Brother to the vocabulary.
Getting a grasp of what is happening in the book to begin with is slightly difficult. Why are people buying words and how much are they able to speak, since they are called Speakers. Readers are introduced to Asha and Zeb, two Speakers who seem to skirt the boundaries of what is forbidden.
Gradually Ash and Zeb’s lives pick up pace as a drone kills a word ‘brunt’ on something called Gathering Day in front of Asha’s eyes and a troop of Chasers are hot on her heels. BY Ashutosh Kumar Thakur Big Brother in this case is Gunter Glib who is houses in Word Bloc and has an horde of troops at him command. Speakers who go against rules are appropriately Silenced.
Glib, we discover, is the uncle of Woebegone from whose warehouse words are bought and despatched to their buyers for a limited period during which they can only pronounce that word. Surrounding this world is that of the Barrens a waste of sand and plastic where a Thesaurus Rex lives a beautiful creature whose exact purpose is a slight mystery. As in all movements there are.