Show Business

Critically ill, Bollywood superstar Ashok Banjars lies suspended between life and death in the intensive care unit of a plush Bombay hospital, watching the final re-run of his life... Visitors come and go, talking,praying,pleading with him to rise from his coma but there is no reaction from Banjara.A prisoner of the technicolour film that plays inside his head. As if for the first time, he watches himself rise to the heights of Bombay's commercial cinema from unremarkable beginnings, and encounters again all the people he met an dused along the way... As a backdrop to these characters is anendless caroused of the major hits he's acted in-gaudy, exuberant, beguiling- a never- ending fantasy took over his life completely and transformed it into an astonishing, compelling lie. Show Business is many books rolled into one- it is a story about the telling of stories, t is a wonderfully funny tale about the romance and folly of cinema, it is a novel on an epic scale of ambition, greed, love, deception and death. And, perhaps most important it is a fable for our time which teaches us that we live in a world where illusion is the only reality and nothing is what it seems.