Politics as Thriller

A very popular piece I salvaged from my previous blog:

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Although some would argue that the epics, Mahabharat and Ramayan, could be read as masterpieces of political play, I hadn’t, till very recently, read any modern political thriller. 

Last December my Party colleague Shri Anupam Trivedi presented me a book called Imperium by Robert Harris. “Read it, you would like it,” he said. I had never heard of Robert Harris before, and with the increasing pressure of the developing Lok Sabha campaign pinning me down, I put away the book for perusing at a later date. 

Now, almost a year later, trying to finish my reading backlog, I picked up the Imperium and over the course of a week finished reading it. And I was, to put it simply, hooked. 

Imperium is a fictionalised story of the life and political career of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), as narrated by his slave and secretary Tito. The Roman civilization, much like the Greek civilization, has thrown up a galaxy of titans and noteworthy characters. Cicero is one of them, but what makes his life remarkable is how he had risen from very ordinary circumstances to become a most vociferous defender of the Roman Republic. In between scaling the ranks of political offices, he also cemented his reputation as the finest lawyer and orator in Rome. 

Let me not write a review when so many worthies have already done the job. In particular, I would point you to 2 excellent pieces in The Guardian and The New York Times. My only take on the book is that politics hasn’t changed one bit in the past 2000 years. Imperium ends with Cicero’s election to the post of the Consul, the highest office in the land. Now the good news is that Robert Harris has come out with the second part of his Cicero trilogy: Lustrum. Here are the reviews by The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. 

Imperium has been a great education for this young politician. I hope Lustrum is as educative.