Kasari Masari
Three young men wanted notoriety, and they chose the most audacious possible route to it. Blending into a crowd of journalists covering a live broadcast, they waited until the cameras were rolling and the whole country was watching before shooting Babar Qureshi and his brother Taimur at point-blank range. Prime-time television. Real bullets. No going back. Kasari Masari, written in Hindi by Manoj Rajan Tripathi, draws directly from the real-life killing of notorious Uttar Pradesh gangster Atiq Ahmed, who was shot dead alongside his brother in front of rolling news cameras. The novel asks three questions that are far harder to answer than they first appear: who gave the order, who devised the plan, and who, exactly, were these men executed while supposedly under police protection? Babar Qureshi, the fictional stand-in at the story's centre, had accumulated over a hundred charges ranging from murder to extortion. Yet the courts bent, witnesses disappeared or were quietly paid off, and the police flinched at the mere mention of his name. Governments, it seems, were no less susceptible. Tripathi turns this grim machinery into a gripping thriller about organised crime and political corruption in UP, and he knows this world from the inside. With nearly three decades in journalism, stints at Dainik Jagran, the Hindustan Times Group, News 18, and ETV have given him an eye for the details that fiction writers usually have to invent. His debut novel, Code Kakori, was a bestseller, and his credits span Bollywood dialogue and national television. Kasari Masari is tense, troubling, and rooted in events that actually happened. That combination is difficult to put down.
- Author: Manoj Rajan Tripathi
- Publisher: Eka
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN: 978-9360458669
- Pages: 264 pages