Mother Teresa The Untold Story by Aroup ChatterjeeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like all people, I was also also enamoured by the persona of Mother Teresa when I was growing up. Her congregation Missionaries of Charity was always in the limelight when some dignitary, head of state or a celebrity visited Calcutta to meet her. I was elated when she was ordained a saint by the Vatican in 2015. After she died, her Missionaries of Charity was somewhat out of the "limelight". This book is an outright critical piece of her haloed persona and the way Calcutta was portrayed as a city teeming with beggars and diseased people. Like the author has mentioned, it aggravated the negative image of Calcutta as portrayed in the book and the film "City of Joy" and for a long time I too was influenced by the book and viewed Calcutta as a place where poverty thrived.
The protagonist in the book is the city of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) and the antagonist is Mother Teresa. The author has taken pains to shatter every myth surrounding Mother and her Missionaries of Charity who are viewed as doing good deeds around the world. MT is portrayed as a self-centred individual and vociferous activist of anti-abortion practices, pushing her agenda of promoting religious conversion and anti-abortion around the world.
At one point, MT bashing becomes the whole narrative in the book and it gets too tedious to continue reading. However, with all the feel-good persona of MT ingrained in us, the book presents a counterpoint argument against the same.
With all this bashing, it cannot be denied that she has done things which a commoner would not dare do. The book has a strong anti-Catholic narrative and is a scathing attack on MT.
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