My review of “Prayogshala” of Sudheer Sharma

My review of “Prayogshala” of Sudheer Sharma

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The Chief Editor of Kantipur Daily, Mr. Sudheer Sharma has written a book in Nepali called “Prayogshala - Nepali Sankraman ma Dilli, Durbar ra Maobadi” (Laboratory - Delhi, Royal Palace and Maoist during Nepal's transition) herein after referred only as "Prayogshala". It hit market almost one year ago but I got to read it only during holidays of Dashain – Tihar of 2014. The book is about how India experimented (s) different things by using Maoist, King and Political Parties during the period of 2052 BS to 2063 BS and even today. The book was an instant hit and Sharma garnered a lot of praises and citations. His main focus was to analyse India’s intervention in Nepal’s domestic affairs in different phase of #Maoist movements and how #India tried to tilt the movement in its favour. In this process, India’s equations with different power sectors have changed and Sharma has tried hard to link every event with India’s interventions. I will come to this issue little later in my review.

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Before I will write more on Prayogshala (Laboratory or House for Experiment), I would like to make a mention of two notable books among others which I read during the vacation. The first one is: Manjushree Thapa’s “Seasons of Flight”. I have stopped reading MST long time ago because of her questionable contributions to literature. I had bought this book long time ago as a mark of respect to Nepalese writers but now, have stopped doing so. The book is just an average novel without anything much to offer to the readers.

Another book that I read is “Open Secret” of KP Dhungana published by FinePrints. The author tries to show that Indian establishment was involved in various crimes in Nepal to eliminate Pakistan encouraged terrorists/criminals. The book also shows that Nepal Police and Government turn a deaf ear to investigate such incidents. To derive this conclusion, author has done a good research but the references are regularly repetitive. In many pages, completely unnecessary, irrelevant, mundane and boring details have been provided making the book an ordinary one. Nothing much one can say about the book.

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Coming back to review of Sudheer Sharma’s book Prayogshala, the book was an instant hit. It garnered wide appreciation despite being ordinary chronicles of events. No new fact or new details having any significance have been revealed by the book. The book suffers from the myriad of drawbacks.

It makes continuous attempt to link anything and everything with Indian establishment and Research and Intelligence Wing of India. In the process, it throws some facts based on the interviews given by retired Indian “babus”. The book works hard to give credentials to rhetoric that nothing happens in Nepal without India’s expressed permission. This is a very sincere effort by Sharma to instil inferiority in Nepalese People. As stated by KanakMani Dixit sometime ago (in different context, though), this is another building block of that systematic game plan to show that Nepal is subservient to India.

While writing the book, there is hardly any first person account of the author. As Sharma was not a party to any of the game changing power deals concerning Nepal and India, everything he mentions is based on interviews of retired Indian bureaucrats, various leaders from across the entire spectrum. To make the book little bit interesting, he inserts some juicy stories about the meeting of different parties. However, all these accounts are sourced from different people’s articles, books etc. This makes the book devoid of any new content.

If we have to compare this book with recently written book “Maile Dekheko Darabar (The Palace that I had seen” of Bibek Shah, Bibek’s book clearly stands out in terms of quality of information and in terms of credibility. Bibek was there making his hands dirty and he had certainly much more credible information with him whereas a journalist can only pretend that he too was there. This is where “Prayogshala” stands out lowly. In fact, Sharma has extensively referred work of Bibek to make any points.

Another aspect where “Prayogshala” miserably suffers is compiling information not from so credible sources. In fact, the research Sharma has done is to rely on anything and everything written on Maoists, King, India etc. So, without any distinction, he quite regularly cites Janadesh – Maoist’s mouthpiece to tell his views. There is no filtering of information and hardly any application of sound mind in gathering references. This further deteriorates the quality of writing.

In Sharma’s books, the heroes and villains are pre-meditated. It seems Maoist brought panacea to all ills created by political parties who were struggling to establish multiparty democracy. Hence, the book is well scripted to create stardom of Maoist, and to create larger than life picture of Maoist Leaders. The Author seems to be so much moved by Maoist’s vision that he treats the general peace loving public nothing more than a trash. This can be seen in his derogatory reference to people’s retaliation against continuous Maoist protests in Kathmandu. It seems author was shattered as Moist had to call off all their protests due to unimaginable public outcry in Kathmandu. So, the shattered soul has only the contempt to the people of this republic.

However, at one instance, Sudheer is very honest about himself. He recognises his fallacy of showing soft heart to Maoists and recognises his failure to come to any conclusion despite talking with and reading numerous sources. So, he, howsoever painful it might be to state this disclaimer, accepts his futile attempt at the very beginning that he has nothing to offer in his book. Painfully honest disclosure indeed.

To close the review, I borrow words from Vinod Mehta, a celebrated India journalist, who writes in Lucknow Boy: A Memoir (2010), “For a journalist, credibility is like virginity. You can lose it only once.” Sudheer may be a celebrated among his tiny amateur circles of journalists, many a times, his actions as an editor of Kantipur have come under scanner and this is hardly a first stance of his losing it. The book falls devastatingly short of hype it could luckily, managed to create.