A review by khyatipriya
Everybody Loves a Good Drought by Palagummi Sainath, P. Sainath
4.0
Beautifully written and easily readable, Sainath's "Everybody Loves a Good Drought" is a collection of articles that are about the miseries faced by the poorest of the poor. It puts you into the scene of 90’s rural India, and although written more than two decades ago, the stories seem to reflect the present state of the country- people are still being displaced, corruption is still common, some of the poorest people are still stuck with unending debts, and so on. Reading this book lets us dive into the lives of these people- what does it mean when your land is taken away from you, and your entire community is displaced for a government project, the benefits of which you'll never enjoy? How are some of the rural Indians trapped into debt cycles because of a one-time loan they took? What happens when a poorly designed scheme is implemented onto an entire village?
Each individual article in isolation holds the capacity to move you, however, a collection of it becomes a struggle to read halfway through the book. The same five or six districts are introduced again and again. At times, when the original story was published in the Times of India in two parts, you read both the parts as different chapters thereby going through repetitive content. In my opinion, this book would have been better as a non-fiction read had the content been re-written to suit a book. Nevertheless, I still recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.
Each individual article in isolation holds the capacity to move you, however, a collection of it becomes a struggle to read halfway through the book. The same five or six districts are introduced again and again. At times, when the original story was published in the Times of India in two parts, you read both the parts as different chapters thereby going through repetitive content. In my opinion, this book would have been better as a non-fiction read had the content been re-written to suit a book. Nevertheless, I still recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.