As a colleague put it, ‘Arundhati is everywhere’. Yes she is. Arundhati Roy’s new book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is finally out. Promoted by her publishers since fall of 2016, the cover was unveiled in February.

Politically incorrect Arundhati is intensely disliked by the country’s right-wing dispensation. She was jailed for contempt of court in 2002. Again in 2015 she got into a spat with the courts for making ‘scandalous and scurrilous allegations’ against the Indian judiciary when she publicly called for the release on bail of an disabled and allegedly Maoist professor. Her detractors wanted her in jail again in as recently as last year. Yet, it is Arundhati who all publishers pamper, no matter what her politics.

Left icon and Canadian author Naomi Klein introduced voice of the Left Arundhati Roy at the popular Indian Summer Arts Society event in Canada late June. The book is already on Amazon’s ‘top 50 best-seller books’ list. It will be published in 30 countries and 26 languages. The media, including the New York Times and The Guardian admit, it is almost impossible to see Roy clearly through the haze of adulation, condescension, outrage and celebrity that has enveloped her since the publication of The God of Small Things, a gothic about an illicit intercaste romance in South India. The same sources reveal, a writer who had judged the Booker the previous year publicly called the book ‘execrable’ and the award a disgrace.

Arundhati’s second fiction is not bereft of criticism either. One reviewer says, ‘The problem with… (her) lampooning is that personal attributes have little bearing on a politician’s real significance and it therefore illuminates nothing. The same is true of Roy describing Atal Bihari Vajpayee (also without naming him) as a ‘lisping poet’… a comical description of Arvind Kejriwal (renamed Aggarwal) compares him to the (transgender) character Anjum: He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body.’

Poet Tabish Khair, reviewing the work, writes:… even an excess of telling can result in an interesting novel by a good writer—as The Ministry of Utmost Happiness proves. Gujarat happens, as does Kashmir; Prime Ministers appear, and Maoists. Such vastness and diversity—also in the various narrative modes deployed (diary entries, news clippings, a ‘Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar,’ text messages and a very effective ‘Kashmiri-English Alphabet’)—would have sunk most novels, but Roy’s book keeps sailing, even though some readers might need to resist the temptation of jumping overboard for a pause.’