DYNAMICS OF APPEARANCE AND REALITY IN SHASHI THAROOR’S SHOW BUSINESS

Abstract

Mumbai is usually synonymous with Bollywood, a tinsel town where there is always a big gap between appearance and reality and where people live a life of show, away from the ground reality. In this world too, human relationship is, often, based on falsehood and selfish interest, not on commitment and loyalty towards each other. So, everything finally turns out to be make-believe. Shashi Tharoor’s Show Business, likewise,  brings to the fore the ‘reel life’ as well as the ‘real life’ of an actor and tries to convince us that at times  these two lives complement each other but at other times they appear diametrically opposed to each other. This paper is an attempt to evaluate how wonderfully Tharoor has brought the fusion of these two different lives in his novel. Besides, it also tries to assess how successfully actors live these two lives simultaneously. In addition, the paper also aims to discover if this novel has been able to expose us to the social, political and cultural realities of contemporary India using film as a genre