Of books and bullets

by Zafar Anjum

In Woody Allen’s film, Bullets Over Broadway, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), a gangster, takes over an under-production Broadway play (he was there to protect the third lead actress of the play, his boss’s keep), rewrites the dialogues and the scenes, makes it a highly successful drama in public and eventually, makes the poor playwright realize that he has no talent to be in the business of creativity. The gangster, who came from the streets, was more creative than the writer who came from the university!

Something like this is happening in India now. A former mafia don, Babloo Srivastava who is based in India, is making his literary debut, and if the Indian media is to be believed, is making quite a splash about it. Babloo once worked with notorious mafia don, Dawood Ibrahim. Now he is turning a new leaf—he is becoming a writer.