Samrat Mitra

Rare is a hip hop album without the standard diss track or self pity( yes, I love Kendrick but maybe he could dial down on the self hate sometimes), this is an unusually lyrical melodious set by Huncho which shows a different shade of London that no one wants to talk about. Reflective, melodic and thoughtful. I never thought I could get that without the standard dose of what’s that, uh, self hate.

At 1349 pages long, the readers would expect some degree of redemption from the book after turning page by page to read about the characters in which they have invested much of their precious time on but there is little to redeem by the end. I am an Indian and I am supposed to like this book but maybe I am not an educated reader to appreciate the supposed ‘nuances’ of the ‘lyrical’ imagery that has been quoted by another critic. No, I tried but cannot go past the fact that the book read is a bit hackneyed in plot and fairly predictable in its ending. Maybe we Indians do not appreciate India the way the Western world does, but this book to me is like a revered brown sahib in an elegant suit trying to pass off being exactly that: an elegant Indian brown sahib in an elegant suit.