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Screen adaptations of books usually need to add lashings of spicing to the plainness of the printed page

Aravind Adiga’s hugely enjoyable novel Last Man in Tower (if the adjective enjoyable can be used to describe an account of one man’s lone battle against rapacious neighbours and a powerful builder) is crying out loud to be made into a movie.

Screen adaptations of books usually need to add lashings of spicing to the plainness of the printed page; Adiga already has flavour by the ladlefuls. He portrays the city as a breathing, hissing sentient being, and his richly atmospheric descriptions of the housing society that former schoolteacher Murthy seeks to prevent from redevelopment, as well as Mumbai itself, are purely cinematic.

Last Man in Tower is supposed to be a contemporary tale but the story and characters are reminiscent of parallel films from the 1980s. Was Adiga among the thousands of Indians who plopped down before Doordarshan on Sundays at 1pm in the old days to watch socially conscious regional language cinema? The book harks back to films like Tabarana Kathe, in which Charu Hasan wages a Camus-worthy battle against governmental bureaucracy for his pension. Or Veedu, starring Archana as a middle-class woman trying to buy a house. Or even the films of Saeed Mirza that depicted the travails of the working class in Mumbai. Most of all, the novel reminded me of Mahesh Bhatt’s Saaransh, one of the director’s finest movies. Anupam Kher’s schoolteacher Pradhan, who is mourning the death of his son, finds a reason to live when his tenant, who is pregnant by the son of a Bal Thackeray-like politician, wants to keep her baby. Adiga’s Masterji too is haunted by the past like Pradhan, and perhaps Kher, who started his acting career with Saaransh, could be recruited to play yet another schoolteacher fighting the good fight in another time.

Full report here Mint