A few days back I was surprised when Shankari Murali picked on this aspect of reading Roll of Honour: the most disturbing idea for me was that I was there in the book as a voyeur – vekhan chali.

It made me reflect again if I had in my pursuit to not be a voyeur of other people’s pain in fact created voyeurs out of readers. There is a little bit of voyeur-ism in all our reading and listening. We also often seek pain to define ourselves. Happiness can be unlimited but often pain has boundaries and threshold levels and those define us. In the following account Shankari shows immense courage by recording her story, a sort of my experiments with pain.

This is more a result of the trigger that the book gave her, her musings, than a review. Please read.

Tags: 1984, Bluestar, Mrs. Gandhi, Pain, Pleasure, Punjab, riots, Roll of Honour