Aarushi is a book by Avirook Sen. It's on the Aarushi murder case. No sooner is it out than a journalist questions, "Why write about one Aarushi? Why not the 100 kids that Nithari killed? Could it be because Aarushi was middle-class and those 100 were poor?" One gets irritated about such stuff. Easy to dismiss off anything that involves the middle or upper-middle these days - the Aarushi book or the Vogue video or whatever. But somewhere else, a film-maker had made the point that a movie about poor people or lower middle-class people does not do well in Bollywood. (If they are poor, they have to be gangsters. The exception was, apparently, Peepli Live.) So one does wonder - why NOT the 100 kids that Nithari killed? Could it be that the middle-class will only read non-fiction about injustice if it involves 'one of us'?
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