Book Launch & Reading - Arzee The Dwarf June 19, 2009

Book Launch & Reading - Arzee The Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury. Actor Naseeruddin Shah will read from the book. Arzee the Dwarf is the story of the doubly marginalized Arzee - a half-Hindu half Muslim midget who works as a projectionist in a decrepit Bombay cinema theatre called Noor. It is about Arzees extraordinary urge to find an ordinary life. As Arzee curses his stars and retreats from life, he is kept from sinking entirely into a morass of self-pity by a series of encounters - with Deepak the gangster, with old Phiroz, the outgoing head projectionist of the Noor, and his daughter Shireen. He is tormented also by the memory of one set of now-distant days when everything in his life had been beautiful, and he had felt loved and wanted, and no shorter than anyone else. Is there a chance that that time can somehow be resuscitated? Or is Arzee about to find that even the few certainties he now possesses are also chimerical?. Set in contemporary Bombay, the streets of which Arzee is always walking, and unfolding over a duration of two weeks, Arzee the Dwarf is a dark comedy that peeps into the vanishing world of the city's old cinemas and communicates, even through the highly particularized unease of the protagonist, a larger sense of the uncertainty of people left behind in a fast-changing world. About the Author: Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer and literary critic based in Mumbai. His reviews appear regularly in the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mint. He also writes the literary weblog The Middle Stage.

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