The word that came to my mind after reading Arundhati Roy's second novel after 20 years, 'The Ministery Of Utmost Happiness' was, ''underwhelming''.  Don't get me wrong, this is not an inferior book by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I just feel she took too much on the plate as subject matter.  After the luminous success of 'The God Of Small Things' two decades ago, she not only became a different kind of writer, but also a different kind of person.  In the intervening years, Ms. Roy went headlong into activism and advocacy negotiating the dangerous fault lines of the modern Indian state.  From Gujarat pogrom of 2002 to the insurgency in Kashmir, from resistance against big dams to the atrocities on the tribal population in India's own heart of darkness, the forests of Chhatisgarh.  She has been a stellar and provocative voice on all of these and more.
  What has been most remarkable about this new book is that how she has been able to bring together so many disparate elements from a nation's life together and weave a cohesive, even if at times unwieldy narrative.  It is a tribute to her exceptional skill as a writer, that even though the incidents that form the backdrop of the novel are very much contemporary in nature, you just want to keep going.  Especially in the section on Kashmir, the prose literally soars to new heights.  Why I said ''underwhelming'' in the beginning is because for some reason, it doesn't quite capture the haunting beauty of 'The God Of Small Things', and as a great admirer of Arundhati, it kept bothering me somewhat.