P A U L A    E V A N S

…is a young and attractive American television investigative reporter-cum-documentary film-maker – career-oriented, ambitious and dedicated to becoming No: 1 not only in America in her field of work – but No: 1 the world over.

Now juxtapose this character…

T O T A L Y     A M E R I C A N

…with the exotic annual Hindu religious festival “bettele seve” (NAKED WORSHIP)


T O T A L Y     I N D I A N

…and won’t the sparks begin to fly?
They will.
Because the contrasts between East and West are still startling. The clash of cultures, of attitudes to life, work and prayer, to male chauvinism (which still dominates the East) and Women’s Lib (which dominates only the upper-crust segment of modern society in a few West-oriented Indian cities), to the attitudes to the sexes and to one another, all of which are vividly different in West and East…

… and ultimately to human values, to human emotions, and the basic goodness that must lie at the core of all human beings worldwide – all this melts down to the simple fact that human beings, the world over, are one.

But we are running ahead.

Let us begin at the beginning of this…

That is how, on the morning of March 3, 2007, “NAKED WORSHIP,” Bunny Reuben’s controversial new novel set in India at the turn of the century, begins.

Chandragutti is a secluded little village on the northern border of South India’s Karnataka State where, every year in early March, a strange and pagan religious festival is held – the Festival of “Bettele Seve” (NAKED WORSHIP).

The legend which gave birth to this pagan religious festival goes back several hundred years.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties – headline-hungry politicians seized upon this religious festival and decided to abolish it in order to polish the secular and modernistic image of a land which is still a heady cocktail of brutal savagery, human oppression and strange rites, of elephants and snake-charmers, arbitrarily mixed with huge dams, petroleum refineries, rural electrification – everything, in short, which stands for modernity including its most superficial veneer of mod dresses and glamorous fashion models, film stars and television personalities, all the glitz and glamour which has taken over big city life in India today.

The arbitrary implementation of the ban on NAKED WORSHIPled to violence in the mid-nineteen-eighties, highlighting several crucial issues . . .

• Can anyone arbitrarily ban anyone’s right to practice his own religious rites and customs in a democracy?

• Where does news and “the public’s right to know” end and where does “invasion of privacy” begin?

• Is it only the bottom-line – BIG MONEY – and burgeoning newspaper circulations and sky-high television ratings that matter?

• These are some of the issues which constitute the base of Bunny Reuben’s controversial new novel of contemporary India titled NAKED WORSHIP, in which West (symbolized by Paula Evans) and East, (symbolized by our hero), America and India, confront and eventually come to understand and accept each other.

NAKED WORSHIP is spread over a span of two event-filled years, A.D. 2006 and 2007. It begins in the year 2007 when a Minister of the State of Karnataka goes to America on an official visit ostensibly to promote tourism in his State. He meets . . .

PAULA EVANS, hot-shot T.V. news and features program producer-director who has just made a T.V. documentary on “The Sex Life of the Eskimos.” She maneuvers him into a position of organizing for her – at a stiff price paid in cash to the Indian Minister in US Dollars – exclusive rights to make a documentary on the NAKED WORSHIP festival for her T.V. conglomerate.

Though Paula Evans appears only in Part One of the novel, which part is set in New York, and then again in the entire climactic sequences, she is a very major and motivative character of the novel.

Events bring a variety of other characters together, all converging on Chandragutti at the time of the annual NAKED WORSHIP festival. They are . . .

SEETHALAKSHMI (our heroine) a beautiful young Bharat Natyam dancer, frustrated and lonely because of a loveless arranged marriage, thrust upon her by her ambitious mother, to the Minister who has gone to America when our book opens.

CHANDU NALLAPPA (our hero) a fiery young idealist who is torn between his dream of going to America to fulfill his driving passion for aeronautics and space research, and his desire to free his Backward Classes communities from the yoke of these primitive religious rites. He is brainwashed by . . .

RAMAIYYA, a shrewd and selfish politician who schemes and manipulates his way to the top of the political heap in Karnatak. For him there is only one bottom line: MONEY / POWER / HIMSELF.

RADHA, a plump, dark-complexioned, sharp-eyed girl of one of the Scheduled Castes of Karnataka, a worker in Ramaiyya’s political party, the KYPP, the Karnataka Youths for Progress Party. She is possessively in love with Chandu Nallappa.

SALEEM RAZAK. Chandu’s friend from schooldays, a young, liberal-minded Muslim who by virtue of being Inspector of Police, is thrown into a maelstrom of controversy as the lone Muslim police-inspector burdened with the order to implement the Government-imposed ban on what is essentially a Hindu religious festival.

PARVATI, Chandu Nallappa’s younger sister, silently and very much in love with Saleem Razak, and he with her.

AUNTY GIRIJA, a fiercely independent, politically and socially influential, highly educated and progressive champion of individuals’ rights. She is (our heroine) Seethu’s aunt who plays Cupid to the young lovers and even bucks the traditional antagonism to inter-caste marriages to do so.

J. J. TILLEY, an elderly Anglo-Indian newspaper Editor of the old school of integrity-based journalism. Tilley is opposed to the sensationalizing of the NAKED WORSHIP festival and resigns his long-time Editorship of THE SOUTH INDIAN TIMES on grounds of principle. Settling down to write a book on the decline and fall of integrity in public and political life in the post-Gandhian era in India, Tilley is drawn to the fiery idealism and the poetic-dreamer quality of young Nallappa.

These and several other characters all meet up at the annual Chandragutti NAKED WORSHIP festival in 2007. Each is there for his and her own personal motives and, even as the cataclysmic climax of events explodes into the world’s headlines, Chandu Nallappa and Seethalakshmi – for whom it had been first love when he was nineteen and she only sixteen in the year 2006 – are brought face to face again in 2007 to confront once again the basic questions:-

What really makes life worth living?

And . . . why are we born?

. . . and more about P A U L A    E V A N S

America’s No:1 Television documentary producer who is a very important character in Bunny Reuben’s novel of contemporary India NAKED WORSHIP, comes across in Part One as the typical American career woman, ambitious, getting-ahead-oriented and totally dedicated to becoming not merely No: 1 in her field of work but No: 1 the world over.

However, when we reach the climax of this novel, and when Paula Evans actually enacts the reincarnated Goddess at the annual NAKED WORSHIP festival on the night of the full moon (she is being filmed by her own production-team … see details in Part One and climax of the novel) the striking reality and impact of the exhibition of blind faith on the part of the hundreds of poor, illiterate masses who worship the Goddess Renukamba every year at Chandragutti, has a profoundly emotional, even spiritual impact on her.

It is the kind of impact about which the author comments, in his AFTERWORD to the novel NAKED WORSHIP, as follows:-

“This author likes to think that some day, soon, Paula Evans may return to India in quest of the soul she realized resides within her only after that memorable night she played the reincarnated Goddess at Chandragutti.”

So?

Would you care to read the whole book?

1. The author desires prospective buyers to know that he is aware of the immense “best-seller” potential of his new novel and prefers a big-name, prestigious publishing house for NAKED WORSHIP

2. The author having been an important film journalist, has written about all the important Hollywood as well as Indian movies in the various leading film magazines in India and is aware of the immense potential of his novel NAKED WORSHIP to be made into a motion-picture.

3. We inform those who all are desirous of knowing more about the author Mr. Bunny Reuben, he already has a web-site which can be accessed at www.bunnyreuben.com

4. Prospective big-name publishers desirous of getting in direct touch with the author may kindly contact him on his e-mail address being bunreu@hotmail.com

5. The author assures everybody that whosoever sends any queries to him regarding this or any other books of his, will get a prompt reply.

6. The author emphasizes here that he will sell the publishing rights and motion-picture rights only to prestigious publishing houses who will offer the highest possible price. This will also include rights for translation of the book into other foreign languages.