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x0pherl's review against another edition
4.0
This was a fairly interesting book focused on day labor in Delhi, and one laborer in particular. It wasn't brilliant, but it kept my interest and had its moments:
But why am I telling you about Raja again? How did we start this conversation? I remember now — I was telling you the way home from Raja’s house. But for that I had to first tell you where his house was and then of course how he got the house. Funny how every short story is actually just the beginning of a really long one.
‘The santrash line is a risky line. All sorts of things are released when you break a wall — dreams, desires, secrets…’
I like the idea of a house absorbing what occurs within the safety of its four walls: sound waves imprinting themselves onto wet concrete surfaces like a phonograph record to be read by the santrash’s hammer
‘That’s it, Aman bhai. Now you know everything about me — sab kuch. Like a government form: name, date of birth, mother’s name, place of residence, everything. Our faces are pasted in your notebook, our voices all locked in your recorder — me, Lalloo, Rehaan, Kaka, J.P. Pagal, everyone. Now you know everything. What will we talk about if we ever meet again?’
...
‘The past is done, Aman bhai. In future we will only talk about the future.’
moogen's review against another edition
3.0
A grittier version of My Beautiful Forevers- Closer to a 3.5 rating
abigails's review against another edition
4.0
Diving into the lives of Indian working class men, this book is both interesting, new, and filled with confusing terms. I really enjoyed it, and it let me experience a way of life completely different from my own. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.
mikkitrow's review against another edition
5.0
“Funny how every short story is actually just the beginning of a really long one.”
tinkerer's review against another edition
4.0
//A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi// by Aman Sethi is a great read, a book comfortable in its own skin just like the people it portrays. Sethi started out with the intent to tell the life story of one man, Ashraf, but his attempts to fill in a “timeline” are waylaid over the course of five years. Sethi fortunately wrote the book anyway, depicting the travails and explaining the tenets of street life of laborers in Bara Tooti Bazaar, featuring Ashraf and others whom he formed friendships with. The larger historical backdrop of economic, political, and cultural forces inserts itself insofar as it changed daily life for the laborers, and these fascinate precisely because they are not forced connections and they inform the individual stories. //A Free Man// is free from a tyranny of form but that is not to say that there is no form and flow. The everyday stories, especially because of the dialogue, are engrossing and enjoyable. How the need to run becomes the need to stay away is a tension underlying the freedom and invention in the laborer’s life, which Sethi shows without patronizing or particularly romanticizing his subjects.
maulik's review against another edition
3.0
A book that won't make you feel that you wasted your time. Applauds for Aman Sethi :D
sujata's review against another edition
4.0
I loved this book. True story of laborers in Delhi. Great writing that for me truly captured the sights,sounds of that world (at least that i've observed from afar) and insight into these usually nameless, faceless lives.
bluepigeon's review against another edition
5.0
Thank you Goodreads First Reads for this great book!
At a point in my life when I feel tied down to a not-so-great job, desperately looking for a better one, or fantasizing about irrational alternatives (like opening an indie bookstore!) to be free of dysfunctional offices and bad bosses, the idea of working and living wherever and whenever you want, working for money and living until the money runs out, leaving a city at the drop of a hat to go live and work somewhere else for a few days or months or years... All of this sounds so fascinating and almost romantic. Except, as we learn in A Free Man, this type of freedom has its price, too. In fact, it seems only the very poor, who have nothing to their name, can maybe live this kind of life. Half vagabond, half day-worker, the main character in the book that Sethi follows seems to be a typical example of the "free man" life. But no man is truly free, as we all know, and as the story unfolds, the things that severely limit his freedom come into focus. I am still in awe of such a life and I think some people can lead this sort of life, especially if they were born in a western country that gives them the freedom to move around without visa issues and a relatively cheap or free health care system to fall back on in their old age. I remember my sister once met a European guy who just travels around Europe and Asia, staying in hostels for free in exchange for doing repairs and IT work. That's the rich version of Sethi's book, I suppose.
Well-written with a good sense of humor, A Free Man is a great read. It certainly puts life in perspective in many ways.
At a point in my life when I feel tied down to a not-so-great job, desperately looking for a better one, or fantasizing about irrational alternatives (like opening an indie bookstore!) to be free of dysfunctional offices and bad bosses, the idea of working and living wherever and whenever you want, working for money and living until the money runs out, leaving a city at the drop of a hat to go live and work somewhere else for a few days or months or years... All of this sounds so fascinating and almost romantic. Except, as we learn in A Free Man, this type of freedom has its price, too. In fact, it seems only the very poor, who have nothing to their name, can maybe live this kind of life. Half vagabond, half day-worker, the main character in the book that Sethi follows seems to be a typical example of the "free man" life. But no man is truly free, as we all know, and as the story unfolds, the things that severely limit his freedom come into focus. I am still in awe of such a life and I think some people can lead this sort of life, especially if they were born in a western country that gives them the freedom to move around without visa issues and a relatively cheap or free health care system to fall back on in their old age. I remember my sister once met a European guy who just travels around Europe and Asia, staying in hostels for free in exchange for doing repairs and IT work. That's the rich version of Sethi's book, I suppose.
Well-written with a good sense of humor, A Free Man is a great read. It certainly puts life in perspective in many ways.
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