Critically ill, Bollywood superstar Ashok Banjara lies suspended between life and death in a Bombay hospital, a prisoner of the technicolour film that plays inside his head. As if for the first time, he watches himself rise to the heights of the film world, and encounters again all the people he met and used along the way. Show Business is many books rolled into one-a wonderfully funny tale about the romance and folly of cinema, a novel on an epic scale of ambition, greed, love, deception and death. It is a fable for our time, which teaches us that we live in a world where illusion is the only reality and nothing is what it seems.
After reading Riot: a novel, I was swept away by Shashi Tharoor's writing and it also prompted me to read this book. Brilliant writing from one of the most ignored but best Indian writers in English. Shashi Tharoor is not one of those new so called writers (whose English I think makes Shakespeare turn around in his grave!) nor is he a Salman Rushdie that you have turn to the dictionary for every third word. In this book, supposedly based on Amitabh Bachhan, Tharoor writes about the Hindi film...
A:Critically ill, Bollywood superstar Ashok Banjara lies suspended between life and death in a Bombay hospital, a prisoner of the technicolour film that plays inside his head.