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She Writes by Anisha Bhaduri

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

She Writes promises to be fantastic read at the outset. It is a collection of 12 short stories, by 12 different authors. 12 different women writers, each with an impressive background and accolades to their credit. She Writes is the outcome of a competition conducted by Random House India alongwith MSN in a quest to "hunt for India's finest women writers", in their own words. The stories were supposed to be based on one of the three themes enlisted, keeping in tune with the rules of the competition. Each of the themes had a particular quotation from old classics, acclaimed works and celebrated authors which had to be incorporated somewhere in the course of each story.

With such a magnificent facade I was thrilled to read what I thought would take me on a wonderful journey. What I realised was that it was a journey all right, but a rather strange one. The geographic diversity by way of the locational backdrop of the writers' stories, which is in most cases also their own origin, is well represented. The stories take you from Sikkim to Calcutta all the way to Tamil Nadu and also overseas. They have done a good job in painting the perfect mental picture of the physical world in their tales. What disappoints me is the poor narration of the actual stories. Each of the plots is unique and could have been a real gem in the world of short stories. The pace of the stories is homogeneously inconsistent - delving into arduous and rather unnecessary details about the surroundings and silly minute details that do not warrant mention in short stories and then, in what seems like a rush towards the finish line, a hurried statement of facts and conclusion. Most of the stories leave you with the same feeling as you get when you have dumped all ingredients into the wok instead of cooking your dish methodically. The stories left me with several unanswered queries - which were the things that those silly minute details should have actually taken care of - innumerable Whys and Whats. It appears as if a word limit was imposed after the stories were written or that all of them have been retold by a single, rather uninterested, writer. The insertion of the mandatory theme based quotation is also glaringly deliberate and out of place in most stories.

The stories that stood out from the lot for me are - and this is strictly relative - The Tourist by Jyotsna Jha, Mirage by Santana Pathak, Conundrum by Chitralekha and A Boston Brahmin by Belinder Dhanoa. The White Chilly by Dr Geeta Sunder had a wonderful build-up but ended anticlimactically. Mantras of Love by Yishey Doma describes Dewachen and the festival of Padmasambhava beautifully but compromises on the story-telling. The rest frankly do not deserve a mention - what with visible efforts to unsuccessfully create an aura of enigma around the protagonist or portraying a near Utopian sense of righteousness or creating a rebel without a cause or building up a whole lot of emotional tension and then just leaving it at that.

I was thoroughly let down by what Random House India has put together after its "hunt for India's finest women writers". I am certain She Could Write Better.
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