The ancient Greeks, in their infinite wisdom, discovered and invented much of what would later become the basis of modern Western civilisation. One such gift to mankind was language. The Greeks introduced several words that described otherwise-indescribable human emotions, and etymology suggests that hundreds of those made their way into the English language. One such word, which the scientist-philosopher Aristotle used for the first time in his landmark work Poetics , is ‘catharsis’.
It’s a beautiful word, catharsis; in nine seemingly disparate letters, it talks of how humans feel when they purge themselves of a spectrum of emotions ranging from anger and pity to fear and loathing. Aditya Sinha’s crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head is catharsis. It reads as if he spent hours, weeks, perhaps months, plotting a fictional timeline of events that would let go his anger against an organisation and a set of people whose tactics, it would seem, led him to resign as editor-in-chief of Daily News and Analysis (DNA) , a Mumbai-headquartered newspaper. Sinha resigned in December 2012, after spending an eventful two years at the helm, to write books.
If you know this background — and quite frankly, this is not such a difficult thing to find out with a few Google searches — Sinha’s book comes across as a hate-filled hit job. Just how angry does one have to be to get a fictional CEO of a newspaper killed in a gruesome manner in the second page of the book? Quite angry.
Sinha’s monikers for the various dramatis personae do not leave much to the imagination. The paper is called Morning Analysis , which becomes ‘Morning Anal’ in casual newsroom conversations and also during the police interrogations. Buster Das (referred to as Bastard Das by his colleagues) is the murdered CEO, and is presumably based on Bhaskar Das, DNA’s real-life CEO until about a year ago. Vishwas Bandra Koel, chairman of Morning Analysis , is the real life Subhash Chandra Goel, a media magnate who runs the Essel Group, whose subsidiary Zee Media is DNA’s parent. Similarly, there are other nicknames of other not-so-public editors, reporters, sales and HR executives, actors, producers, and film writers. The Times of India becomes News of India , and Hindustan Times becomes Harappan Times (another newspaper Sinha has worked at).
It would seem that Sinha has a bone to pick with almost every single person who crossed his path in his two years at DNA . Except himself, that is. As the editor of Morning Analysis , Rocky Borkotoky (Sinha’s character) comes across as righteous, irreverent and non-deferential to authority; exactly what an ideal newspaper editor should be.
It is this background knowledge that could blind people from reading the book for what it is actually meant to be — a crime mystery.
Sadly, it isn’t much of that either. A good crime novel should entice a reader into looking for clues between the lines, it should draw her into developing her own theory of who the murderer is, it should make her jump from one chapter to another in anticipation of something more exciting; you know, a slowly developing tale of musical notes sneakily dropped at carefully calculated junctures that eventually rise to a crescendo in the final chapter for the big reveal. Sinha’s book does none of that. It is, how do we put this, puerile media gossip.
Much of the investigation by the two policepersons (named, once again, to evoke mirth from readers, but doesn’t) is done via interviews. There is a post-mortem report that makes what Hindi films would call a “friendly appearance”, and then mysteriously disappears. Then there is a blog, written by a Hindi film journalist, supposedly a key to the murder. What does it contain? Why does the woman police officer suspect the murderer based on the blog’s contents?
One of the hallmarks of good crime writing, or for that matter any writing, is that a reader should feel close to the protagonists. Their personality and their struggles should make us cry, laugh, a part of their lives. Despite Sinha’s valiant attempt to make his lead investigators “different” (including a sketchy gay lovers’ angle), they don’t seem to become a part of us, or we of them. It seems as if Sinha was so self-contented about the hit job that he forgot to write a story that should have kept us on the edge of our seat. It is sad, really, because the droll humour spread across the book is classy in parts, and gives a glimpse into the murky and not-so-murky world of media in a hilarious manner.
We are left with a question about something we started with: what price catharsis?
The CEO Who Lost His Head , Aditya Sinha, Pan Macmillan India, ₹299
