Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
I must confess that I have never taken to Kamila's previous works and so I picked up this book with a lot of apprehension, perhaps with a slightly more critical attitude than I might normally have had. And yes, after an ambivalent start I found myself quite intrigued by the characters, wanting to see how the story would unfurl. I soon found myself agreeing with friends that this was a good book, especially in the way it explored the deadly lure of terrorist organisations and their recruitment processes. I found myself not wanting to put the book down and finally I reached the end only to discover that…spoiler alert…Ms Shamsie ripped her ending from..hold your breath…Bollywood's "Dil Se". Then I thought, hmm, I should have seen that coming…after all there was that awkward description of the iconic Chaiyya Chaiyya song ("… a man dancing on top of a train, declaring—in Urdu, with subtitles—that if your head is in the shade of love then surely your feet are in Paradise") clearly an attempt to portray it as a Pakistani song and not the famous Bollywood song that it is (of course, anyone who knows Bollywood would never have mistaken the song for anything else). Then to make sure that I was not being overtly critical, I showed the end of the movie to my English class, as we were talking about Intellectual Property, followed by a reading of the last page of Home Fire to them. They too were struck by the similarity!
So now I must ask, does Shamsie deserve all the praise and even the Women's Prize for Fiction which she won in 2018, after all is the end not a matter of plagiarism given that there is no credit to the movie anywhere. Ironic isn't it—for once Bollywood is being ripped off!
So now I am confused: how do I classify this book?!?!?!?
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