Word: vidiadhar
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...Grotesquerie" is an odd word to use here, because it's in conflict with much of the reportage that follows. Consider some of the places Theroux visits, and people he meets. In Bangalore, India, he comes across two guys, Vidiadhar and Vincent, who had managed one of the earliest call centers, among other things processing mortgages for an Australian finance company. Theroux sets up this section by noting that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labour had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labour was the basis of the British Raj ... Again I recognized the paradox, that India...
...transpires that Vidiadhar and Vincent eventually quit the call center and go to work for another company (or maybe found one, Theroux doesn't quite say) that makes low-cost shirts for big American brands like Kenneth Cole and Tommy Hilfiger. These guys are "exploited?'' They don't seem to be. Considering Ghost Train is supposed to hark back to the journey Theroux took three decades ago, we might get a better sense of whether or not Vidiadhar and Vincent are exploited if we knew what their parents' lives were like. But Theroux doesn't bother to find...
...Vidiadhar is also a great prose stylist and innovator. In The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, he has evolved a signature blend of autobiography, artifice and journalism that tests (even by today's liberal definitions) the limits of conventional fiction. Half A Life (Knopf; 211 pages), the latest hybrid, begins in colonial India with a droll anecdote. The son of a Brahmin family marries a low-caste woman and forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor...
...Seepersad Naipaul wrote to his son Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, "Your letters are charming in their spontaneity. If you could write me letters about things and people--especially people--at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: Letters Between a Father and Son, or My Oxford Letters." Family Letters: Between Father and Son, a moving collection of the Naipaul family's written correspondence, is the realization of the elder Naipaul's suggestion...
...personality is a ritual. Naipaul is himself a successful product of modernity's powers of transformation. He was born 61 years ago into a Hindu society that had been transplanted to rural Trinidad by indentured laborers from India. Molded by family custom and the tensions of his multiracial island, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was then reshaped by British institutions. They included a scholarship system that brought the gifted young colonial to postwar England, where he settled and began his long, penny-pinching slog toward literary distinction...