The first epigraph to Amitava Kumar's Home Products is as good an introduction to the book as any: "An intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, only a fool can make anything he wants of himself." The two men who lie at the heart of Kumar's narrative are Binod, a journalist who has immense trouble turning himself into any kind of success, and his cousin Rabinder, who thinks far less and does far more.
The protagonists of two recent books, Siddhartha Deb's Surface and Siddharth Chowdhary's Patna Roughcut, were also journalists. These three books share a few other details, as well – they all belong to the Picador stable, for instance, and their settings are far removed from the metropolitan world of most of their readers. In some ways, both the Indian Northeast, where Surface is set, and Bihar, where the other two take place, are counterpoints to the very idea of 'India'. The Northeast is where the idea dissipates into cynicism, while Bihar is where it is magnified into a mockery of itself, with every flaw seen larger than life. In such settings, a journalist brings a critical gaze.
Home Products' title comes from its second epigraph: "…one relative or neighbour mixed up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders gone rotten. Give me the home product every time." More than one of Binod's relatives is mixed up in various scandals. Rabinder is in jail after having set out on the trajectory of a Bihar mafia don; his widowed mother, Binod's 'Bua', is a politician in the midst of a very public affair with a minister in Lalu Prasad Yadav's government.
Binod belongs to this world, but it is his years as a journalist that allow him the perspective of an outsider. But this is also where the trouble starts, for Kumar's idea of what constitutes an Indian journalist reduces to an assemblage of whatever is convenient for his purpose. Binod, we learn, works for India's largest-selling English-language newspaper; he has ostensibly been sent to Bombay to cover the film world, but is also often called upon to write editorials, or to be sent on outstation assignments to places such as Goa. We learn that one time, when he had been sent to Bihar for a story on the Mandal Commission, he managed to appease his editor by instead sending a piece on the first anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the world of Indian journalism, all this is rather implausible.