The First Was Sexier

In The Other Half, it is not clear whether the protagonist Niranjan is married, in The Insider, he is, to a rather sad 'homegrown' figure named Veena. The first draft has politicians like Jeevan Prasad for whom "sex was like an itch" and the urge to "fornicate was like the urge to urinate". In The Insider, the descriptions are a little less lurid. There are instead practitioners of pragmatic politics like 'Chaudhary', who takes ideological decisions about the adoption of socialist principles while musing on his mistress' body.

The Anand character is as relentlessly brilliant, consistently noble and wearingly exceptional as Niranjan was in the first draft. His equally brilliant but unscrupulous life-long rival, ('Ramchander' in The Other Half, named 'Shekhar' in The Insider) is also similar. Through both narratives, the two stage a moral battle over Gandhian postulates on ends and means.

There is also more sociological detail on Aruna than there was on Sumitra in The Other Half, how she suffers in a loveless marriage and is oppressed by family obligations before being rescued from an Indian woman's middle class death by the dazzling Anand. Perhaps an attempt here to gain the sympathy of women readers in a book otherwise peopled largely by educated, mostly upper class male participants in muscular realpolitik.

Several characters are obviously more developed than they were in The Other Half, such as the fixer-contractors like Ajit Singh, Sinha and Ramprasad, who don't figure in too much detail in The Other Half. There is also a new sequence in which Anand in a dream confronts an angelic child which is revealed later to be himself, in a pure and innocent form, his "other half", as it were. This is the only instance in which the name of the first draft figures in the newly published novel.

The political and social themes are more or less unchanged. The disabilities of caste, the effects of political power on human values, rural poverty, the continuing feudalism of India underneath the modern state and the sleaze factor in political campaigns are all present in The Insider. One new area of concern, however, has been added though fleetingly yet quite powerfully on the oppressions of the Hindu family and how generations of Indians dutifully play out family obligations, bow to authority and consign their individualities to silence. Coming from the angavastramclad, grave Rao who appears to personify brahmanical patriarchy, this is quite a revelation. There are also new sequences on drunken journalists who trade disinformation for drink: Rao's revenge on the media.