'The Candidate' gives you a glance into the mad world of Indian politics

One of the first things, Anirudh Bhattacharyya makes clear about his book, The Candidate, is that it is supposed to be an entertaining read and does not make any effort to lecture anyone — “because it is not a message book”.

Set in the present day, the book is a satirical take on Indian politics and tells the story of an inadvertent candidate, Jay Banerjee, who comes back from the US, without a job and a marriage on the rocks. After a chance meeting with a childhood friend, a neta who has too many scandals to his credit, Jay plunges into the mad world of politics. Along with the fight for a seat in his native state, West Bengal, he begins his discovery of ‘the real India’.

“This book is supposed to appeal to the candidate that lurks within all of us, and who thinks he can make a difference. It is about a regular person who has never been involved in politics, and gets an opportunity to enter the fray. He tries to bring a modicum of integrity into the process and by doing so, has plenty of misadventures because it’s not easy being on the path less travelled,” Anirudh adds.

Anirudh, who has been a journalist for over 20 years, and has extensively reported on elections in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, feels that it is only natural that his first book was on the topic. But he decided to have a fictional take as it gave him the scope of exploring the subject much further.

“As journalists who have covered politics in Delhi, we know a lot of things which go on in Lutyens’ Delhi, about the power conclave that we have in the city that are very difficult to report. But fiction is a good device to talk about the most salacious things which go on during Indian elections.”

The book released on March 20, days ahead of the general elections, but Anirudh insists that he hardly planned it to be so.

“I started planning the book around two years ago and at that point, we had no idea when the Lok Sabha elections were going to be held. I started writing the book at the end of 2012, which is when I realised that the elections are coming up and it might be interesting to have the book out around that time,” he says.

Anirudh, who is presently based in Toronto, has been already making notes and researching to come up with a sequel for The Candidate, which would be based in Delhi.

Speaking of his experience of writing the book he adds, “The biggest challenge I faced while writing my first book was to make it more entertaining than politics because Indian politics is anyway very funny and most of it is usually unintentional. The humour in my book was intentional, so it was a much more difficult job.”