Book Review : Jalta Paani by Meenna Dawar

Author - Meenna Dawar Mohini
Publisher - Invincible Publisher
Pages - 100

About the book

Jalta Paani is a collection of stories relating the life experiences of acid attack victims and how they coped with the terrible experience to regain their sense of purpose in life. The book works as an excellent medium to question the attitude of the society towards the victims and also the government and the constitution which allows the perpetrators of such a heinous crime to walk away with minimal punishment. For the purpose of the book, Meenna Dawar travelled across various cities in North India to interact with and share the pain of the acid attack survivors and used her position as artist and poet to make their voices heard.

Review

First of all, I'd like to mention that the author has done a wonderful job in choosing such a topic to write on. Acid attack is indeed one of the unfortunate and undesired kind of mishap and there's so much stigma associated with it. The pain and trauma of the victims is unexplainable ; but somewhere this undesired episode becomes the basis of taking control of their life and they flatter their broken wings to fly high in the sky. This book is an eye opener and openly challenges the prevalent social attitude towards the victims as well as the culprits.

The theme is wonderful. The language is simple and lucid. The title is relevant but I feel the author should have been used an English title because it can discourage readers like me who don't really understand Hindi.

This has been a wonderful pre Women's Day read for me. I hope this book will create an awareness among the mass and one day hopefully we'll be able to curb this kind of heinous crime.