EARTH REPUBLIC

An Indian politician, lawyer, author, and activist presents a collection of brief musings and random thoughts.

In. this book, Devi assembles 10 essays on such disparate topics as the #MeToo movement, online shopping, judicial and welfare reform, constitutional privacy protections in her native India, and the fight against world hunger, to name only a few. As a self-described “politico-legal activist,” her abiding concern for human rights and the progressive realization of them is a consistent thread that runs through many of the works. Despite this, they remain a desultory lot, and they have the tone and tenor of rhetorical improvisations. The author’s own account of her motivations for writing this book feel as scattered as the pieces in the book itself: “The promptings for the writing of this book are as much the intention to document history, as to accelerate creative exercises in the world of theatre, and to rattle, or throw open the doors of ethical reality theatre, planet earth, aluminium diet-coke in hand and all, to begin with.” Devi eclectically collects excerpts from her “almost-secret childhood diaries” dating back to the 1980s, as well as blog and Facebook posts. However, it’s never clear whom her intended audience is, or who might want to revisit her opinions of Indian political speeches given in 2013. The essays themselves are ill-disciplined in style; the author calls them “free-wheeling” and “verging on the informally careless,” but it is more precise to say they lack structure. The book’s tenth and final chapter, devoted to world peace, is intended as a “dream-catcher” that captures the “emerging trends and essences” of what preceded it, but it fails to meet this goal, as it’s as frustratingly digressive as the rest of the work.

A wearisome book that will struggle to hold readers’ attention.