A NOVEL Meet Raj Kumar Reddy and his brother in life, Iqbal Ali Mohammad
Khan. They are Gandhians. Peace-lovers. Truth-seekers. At least in
intention if not yet in action. Means what? As Iqbal puts it, "how can
we say we are pursuing truth if we do nothing but drink tea and go to
office and eat dinner and love our families? If we say pursuit, then we
must pursue." And so, when the price of onion increases by hundreds of
percents, they set about pursuing the truth. After all, an onion problem
is never a small problem in India. Goverments have fallen because of the
onion problem. Murders have been committed because of onion problem. And
these are just the facts. The rumors are much, much worse. They say that
the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan was thirty-five percent
due to onion problem. Current border disputes with China are minimum
eighty percent related to onion problem. After all, China is the number
one producer of onion and India is number two. Onion requires land for
cultivation, and therefore any land dispute is almost definitely related
to the desire to move ahead in the onion rankings! Shamelessly
trivializing everything from Indo-Pak relations and terrorism to
food-shortage and foreign-policy, The Gandhian Adventures of Raj & Iqbal
is a quirky, desi satire about friendship and patriotism in the Indian
subcontinent. Zubin J. Shroff writes unique, entertaining, eclectic
novels, many of which contain elements of satire, drama, and surrealism.
