Skip to main content

The Rainbow Troops




Book Review

Author: Andrea Hirata
Published in India by Penguin , 2013
Pages: 291       Price: Rs 399

Every person has at least one story to tell: his/her own.  Andrea Hirata’s debut novel, The Rainbow Troops, tells the story of the author and ten other students of a crumbling school in a poor village of the Indonesian island, Belitong.  It is a story that elicits delight and tear drops at the same time.  It is a story of childhood innocence, mischief and malleability as much as of the indifference of God and destiny, the indifference of life itself.

The Muhammadiyah School in Belitong is a dilapidated building.  A 15 year-old girl, Ibu Muslimah Hafsari (called Bu Mus by her students) has abandoned life’s enticements to join the only other teacher, an old man named Bapak Harfan Effendy Noor (Pak Harfan), in order to provide free education to the poor children on the island.  The norms stipulate that there should be at least ten students for a school to function.  When Harun, a child with special needs, joins the number is complete.  And the school begins.  Along with that the novel too.

The novel tells the heart-touching story of the ten students (and the eleventh one that joins later abandoning her posh public school) and the two teachers.  Their life is a struggle all through.  It is a struggle against grinding poverty, the education officers who are keen to close down the school which is seen by them as mere nuisance, and the mining industry which has its eyes on the tin that lies beneath the school building as well as its campus all of which belong to a religious organisation.

The book is not a mere novel.  It is the real story of some children and a few adults in Belitong.  That’s the chief reason why it is captivating.  We get insightful glimpses into a world of poverty, dedication to a cause, and childlike innocence.  The novel is about the ineluctable vicissitudes of life.  It is about how hope can sustain people when everything seems oppressive and depressing.

The novel is also indirectly about how capitalist globalisation is no different from colonialism: “Its goal,” in the words of the novel, “was to give power to a few people to oppress many, to educate a few people in order to make the other docile.”

Not infrequently does the book touch upon the ludicrous side of religion and shamanism: “One of the extraordinary qualities of Malays is that no matter how bad their circumstances, they always consider themselves fortunate.  That is the use of religion.”  Shamanism seems better at least when the students who approach the greatest shaman for help in passing their exam easily are given the advice: “If you want to pass your exams,/ Open your books and study!”

The whole episode of the students’ adventure to meet the shaman and their encounter with him ended in such an anticlimax that I burst into a loud laugh.  The book can make you laugh occasionally, smile often and feel empathy with the downtrodden all through.  It is a story of some marginalised people, narrated in a very simple manner with no pretensions of any sort. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 9, 2013 at 1:47 PM

    I always preferred Real Story than to a Novel and Going by the Review I guess this book is worth a read..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 9, 2013 at 4:47 PM

      It is a real story converted into fiction. Bu Mus and Pak Harfan are as real as the 11 students.

      Delete
  2. ArunAugust 9, 2013 at 3:32 PM

    Great review bro!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownAugust 9, 2013 at 6:58 PM

    A reader's choice leads to the book to be read and an honest review brings out the true qualities and the appeal of the theme dealt with. Now through your brilliant review, we have come to know of the story of life unfolding in a different way- a story of conundrums that culminates into something meaningful. A great review characteristic of your genre.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 9, 2013 at 7:34 PM

      Thank you, Kajal, for your constant appreciation. It's a blogger's delight to have fellow bloggers like you.

      Delete
  4. hindustanisakhisaheliAugust 10, 2013 at 1:29 AM

    good review :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousAugust 10, 2013 at 9:16 AM

    This is going to make my list of books to read. Great review!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sumeetha ManikandanAugust 10, 2013 at 10:51 AM

    Sounds interesting. Will check this out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2013 at 11:05 AM

      Do. You'll like it if you are interested in a good story about some very ordinary people going through hard times.

      Delete
  7. RajeshAugust 11, 2013 at 12:25 PM

    This sure seems a great book to read.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Manjulika PramodOctober 17, 2013 at 4:11 PM

    I wanna read this..

    :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
8 comments
Read more