✴️Thinking Activity: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Hello everyone, I am Nidhi Dave, a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is a response to my thinking activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the some questions of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
1) The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children By S. Tilottama - Give answers to the questions asked regarding any three stories. Questions are given at the end of each story.
2) Three points mentioned in the photo of board-work. (List of characters, Summary - plot - narrative structure, Fact & Fiction)
3) Write about any one theme or character of the novel with the help of Chat OpenAI GPT. Ask to Chat GPT and put screenshot as well as copy-paste the answer generated by this response generator.
Arundhati Roy:
Arundhati Roy was born in 1960 in Kerala, India. She studied architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture and worked as a production designer. She has written two screenplays, including Electric Moon (1992), commissioned by Channel 4 television. She lives in Delhi with her husband, the film-maker Pradip Krishen.
The God of Small Things, her first novel, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and has sold over six million copies worldwide. She is also the author of several non-fiction books,including: The Cost of Living (1999), a highly critical attack on the Indian government for its handling of the controversial Narmada Valley dam project and for its nuclear testing programme; Power Politics (2001), a book of essays; and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a collection of journalism. The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire was published in 2004. She has since published a further collection of essays examining the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009).
Arundhati Roy was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003. Her latest book is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), her second novel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and, in the US, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
💠The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:
Spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a 2017 novel by Arundhati Roy, follows the interconnected lives of several characters against the backdrop of contemporary India. The novel skips backwards and forwards in time freely, often pauses for detours into the stories of minor characters and includes several texts within the main text (e.g., Bhartiya’s manifesto, or Tilo’s Kashmiri-English Alphabet). At heart, however, the novel consists of two main narrative threads, one of which is centered in Delhi, and the other in Kashmir.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.
Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her.
1] The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children by S. Tilottama. (Question - Answer)
✴️First story (The Old Man and His Son)
💠THE OLD MAN & HIS SON
When Manzoor Ahmed Ganai became a militant, soldiers went to his home and picked up his father, the handsome, always dapper Aziz Ganai. He was kept in the Haider Baig Interrogation Centre. Manzoor Ahmed Ganai worked as a militant for one and a half years. His father remained imprisoned for one and a half years. On the day Manzoor Ahmed Ganai was killed, smiling soldiers opened the door of his father’s cell. ‘Jenaab, you wanted Azadi? Mubarak ho aapko. Congratulations! Today your wish has come true. Your freedom has come.’ The people of the village cried more for the shambling wreck who came running through the orchard in rags with wild eyes and a beard and hair that hadn’t been cut in a year and a half than they did for the boy who had been murdered. The shambling wreck was just in time to be able to lift the shroud and kiss his son’s face
before they buried him.
Q 1: Why did the villagers cry more for the shambling wreck?
Q 2: Why did the wreck shamble?
1, Why did the villagers cry more for the shambling wreck?
Ans, The villagers cry more for the shambling wreck because Ahmed Ganai was killed.
2, Why did the wreck shamble?
Ans, Wreck Shamble because his boy was killed.
✴️Second Story (NEWS)
💠NEWS
Kashmir Guideline News Service Dozens of Cattle Cross Line of Control (LoC) in Rajouri
At least 33 cattle including 29 buffaloes have crossed over to Pakistan side in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district in Jammu and Kashmir.
According to KGNS, the cattle crossed the LoC in Kalsian sub-sector. ‘The cattle which
belong to Ram Saroop, Ashok Kumar, Charan Das, Ved Prakash and others were grazing near LoC when they crossed over to other side,’ locals told KGNS.
Tick the Box:
Q 1: Why did the cattle cross the LoC?
- (a) For training
- (b) For sneak-in ops
- (c) Neither of the above.
Ans, (C) Neither of the above
3, THE CAREERIST
The boy had always wanted to make something of himself. He invited four militants for dinner and slipped sleeping pills into their food. Once they had fallen asleep he called the army. They killed the militants and burned down the house. The army had promised the boy two canals of land and one hundred and fifty thousand rupees. They gave him only fifty thousand and accommodated him in quarters just outside an army camp. They told him that if he wanted a permanent job with them instead of being just a daily wage worker he would have to get them two foreign militants. He managed to get them one ‘live’ Pakistani but was having trouble finding another. ‘Unfortunately these days business is bad,’ he told PI.
‘Things have become such that you cannot any longer just kill someone and pretend he’s a foreign militant. So my job cannot be made permanent.’ PI asked him, if there was a referendum whom he would vote for, India or Pakistan?
‘Pakistan of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is our Mulk (country). But Pakistan militants can’t help us in this way. If I can kill them and get a good job it helps me.’ He told PI that when Kashmir became a part of Pakistan, he (PI) would not be able to survive in it. But he (the boy) would. But that, he said, was just a theoretical matter. Because he would be killed shortly.
Q 1: Who did the boy expect to be killed by?
(a) The army
(b) Militants
(c) Pakistanis
(d) Owners of the house that was burned.
Ans, (A) The army
✴️ Three Points mentioned in the photo of board - work.
1, List of Characters
- Jahanara Begum- mother of anjum
- Malakat Ali- father of Aftab
- Anjum/ Aftab (Man who knew English)
- Gudiya and Bulbul (Hindu)
- Begum- Kulsoombi (Leader od Khwabgah Haveli)
- Tubby old Gandhian (Anna Hazare)
- Gujarat ka Lalla (Narendra Modi)
- Manmohan Singh (Trapped rabbit)
- Chtrarupa (Biplav’s wife)
- Rabia and Ania (Biplav’s daughters)
- Hariharan Nagarjun- journalist
- S. Tillotama (Tillo)- Ustaniji
- Maryam Ipe (Tillo’s mother)
- Jebeen (Musa and Arifa’s Daughter)
- First Jebeen) Baby- Jebeen, The second Udaya- Udaya Jebeen (baby found at Jantar Mantar)
- Lavleen Singh (Amrik’s wife)
- Balbir Sodhi(Pinky’s brother)
- Khadijah (Musa appointed her with Tillo in Kashmir)
- Aijaz (terrorist; has an interview encounter with Nagarjun)
- Jalil Qadri (Human right activist)
- spirit evoked by her salutation “Lal Salamaleikum”
3,Plot and Narrative Style
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Roy’s second novel, appearing almost twenty years after TGOST. In the interim, Roy has written about the many grassroots movements and mass agitations in India, using her considerable polemical skills in arguing for the marginalized, the lost causes, consistently taking anti-establishment positions.
It seems logical that Roy, who has always held that her fiction and her essays are part of the same persona, should marry her skills and venture upon a polemical work of fiction, and that for its content, nothing less than the contemporary history of India will do. This is a novel which takes up, with righteous anger, a swathe of causes, from the “soft” social issues such as the plight of the hijras, or that of beagles dumped on the road by unscrupulous testing labs complete with tubes dangling out of their sides, to the “larger” political events and causes, including caste discrimination and violence, the Bhopal gas leak, anti-Sikh violence, the Gujarat riots, the rising saffron tide and cow vigilantism, the anti-corruption stir at the Jantar Mantar led by “old-man-baby-voice”, he of the “gummy Farex baby smile” — Roy’s sharp wit, observation and felicity combine in her pithy epithets for political figures — and finally the burning cause at the heart of this novel – the ongoing political unrest in Kashmir.
It appears as if Roy has opened her third eye and subjected the nation to her searing vision; and here lies the strength and the weakness of this ambitious novel. While the sweep of issues that Roy tackles is impressive and even plausible, her storytelling engaging and multi-layered, the polemicist wins over the writer of fiction — she sees everything in black and white – and red. The intimate anecdotal narration which we saw in TGOST takes second place – and for a historical narration of the kind The Ministry aims to be, Rushdie had his foot in the door first with Midnight’s Children.
Roy evokes a poignant symbol of resistance — a boy is brought home “his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, (were) full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.” However, Roy’s monochromatic vision allows for only two sides, the good and the bad; one side is noble and blameless, and on the other side, even the children are not innocent. Despite Roy’s considerable story telling skills, the overkill in the narrative with its stock figures of fun, vilification and heroism turns weary, making the reader long for the nuances of a plain old newspaper report.
Which brings us to the purpose of the novel. How to tell a shattered story, Roy asks in the course of the novel, and answers, “By slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything.” Perhaps a single, sweeping grand narrative with a smoothly interlinked plot, an organic conclusion, rounded characters, polyphonous voices and chuckling wit are the tools of a novelist who has come to terms with her vision and the world she has created, and left it behind. This is a novel of unfinished business, whose dedication reads — To the Unconsoled. In the world that Roy beholds and which she has evoked, utopia can only lie in a place like Jannat House, a people’s paradise built in the graveyard, a bottom-of-the-pyramid of disenfranchisement, a collection of simple, never-say-die people, the happy few, the band of brothers, who wear their wounds lightly, and where an Anjum and a Tilo can live side by side.
3, FACT & FICTION
💠FACT IN THE NOVEL:
- 2002 Godhra riots- Gujarat
- Leaching of Dalits (lower class) in Una Gujarat
- Gulf war between Iraq and America
- Hanging of Sadam Hussein by America
- Anna Hazare movement 2011-12
- All the Jantar Mantar protests
- The madness of adopting names
- Naxalite Maoist movement
- Sanjay Gandhi and Emergency
- Narendra Modi and his case of suit
💠FICTION IN THE NOVEL:-
- Trauma to Anjum; their visit to Gujarat
- Dayachand’s father’s killing in Haryana for taking a dead animal’s skin
- Inspiration for Dayachand to adopt the name, Sadam Hussein
- Tubby Gandhian at Jantar Mantar in TV and news
3] Write about any one theme or character of the novel with the help of Chat OpenAI GPT. Ask to Chat GPT and put screenshot as well as copy-paste the answer generated by this response generator.
💠Resilience & Hope in Ministry.
✴️Explain the theme Resilience and Hope in the ministry of utmost happiness.
The theme of resilience and hope is central to the narrative of Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". The novel portrays a complex and diverse world that is deeply scarred by conflict, violence, and trauma. Yet, in the face of such adversity, the characters in the novel demonstrate remarkable resilience and a steadfast hope for a better future.
One of the primary ways in which resilience and hope are portrayed in the novel is through the characters' ability to overcome their individual traumas and challenges. For example, Anjum, a hijra (transgender) woman, faces discrimination and violence from her family and society, but she finds a sense of belonging and purpose in the community she builds in a graveyard. Similarly, Tilo, the novel's protagonist, navigates political violence and personal loss, but she remains committed to her principles and hopeful that change is possible.
The novel also highlights the resilience and hope of marginalized communities that have endured centuries of oppression and violence. The novel's setting, the city of Delhi, is a site of ongoing conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities. Despite this, characters from both communities demonstrate a deep sense of solidarity and a commitment to coexistence.
Throughout the novel, Roy emphasizes the importance of hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. The characters often turn to religion, mythology, and stories as a means of finding solace and inspiration. For example, Anjum finds comfort in the stories of the Prophet and the lives of the Sufi saints, while Tilo draws strength from the legend of a Kashmiri queen who fought against the Mughal Empire.
Overall, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" presents a powerful portrayal of resilience and hope in the face of trauma and oppression. Through the characters' stories, Roy highlights the enduring strength of marginalized communities and the importance of maintaining a sense of hope even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Thank you.
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