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Wanted: CEOs from India

: Whoever said reading is a dying art? Look at the popular fiction flying off the shelves or the many novelists making their debut this summer. Think of it as an exploding Chetan Bhagat phenomenon, and you have all the signs of a reading revival taking place among young Indians. The cynics would say, as does one in Keep off the Grass, “publishers don’t want literature any more, they want soft porn and crime chronicles disguised as literature.” But a snappy read is usually also a well-crafted read, and deserves kudos on that front. Plus these former investment bankers, diplomatic experts, IITians and IIMites, and their energetic etchings of worlds that they know inside out are absolutely infectious. Their entertaining spice is mixed up with handy insights into subcultures, say that of the culturally significant TV soap community, its writers and producers, its wild editors and crazy creative directors.

Addressing a euphoric Gen Y that expects its stories delivered in Indian contexts and glammed up with Indianised spectacles, or that willingly puts aside John Grishams and Janet Daileys for their local counterparts, these are writers unapologetic about abandoning the high art road. Sure their landscapes are awash in the colour of the three Cs — cinema, cricket and celebrities. Sure they are more likely to quote from the Desperate Housewives than from Dostoevsky. But these are tendencies they share with their audience, and ultimately it is this that gives them a connect that can elude conventional literature. Even if this means dishing out masala by the bushelful.

Anirban Bose

Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls

HarperCollins

Rs. 195; Pp 462

“Oh, baby I get by with a little help from my friends.” The Beatles got it so right when they wrote The Wonder Years. Debutant author Anirban Bose’s Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls is all about those college wonder years and he hits plenty of right notes.

Bose’s take is a bit unusual, based as it is in a medical college and narrated by Adityaman Bhatt who hails from small town Ranchi and has come to Bombay to study at Grant Medical College. It’s about his life on campus — new friends and first love, then heartbreak and true love.

The author’s own experiences seem to have influenced his writings and helped him come up with some very believable characters and incidents. The descriptions of hostel life — the ragging, late night discussions or the mugging up before exams — often take you back to your own college days. Note Adi’s dilemma between joining the striking medics and his responsibilities as a budding doctor to his patients, relevant anywhere.

But unlike the song, the book tends to go off key. Bose has tried to cram too much into one book . How can so much happen to one person in less than four years? And the boys’ journey to Nagaland should have been edited — brutally! And no book should be filled with phrases like “the tears of a clown look like drops of blood.” And there are too many neat answers. Adi finds answers to life’s big questions and you wonder if at 20, life was that easy to comprehend. Read it for those good old college days when there were no simple answers but life was still simpler.

—Surabhi

Roma Bansal

One Afternoon

Rupa

Rs 195;Pp 250

If you are fascinated by the ubiquity of billionaires in Bollywood, the heroes who jet around across London and New York, driving the flashiest cars and sporting the most fashionable of accessories or the heroines who seem unbelievably comfortable in bikinis and ball gowns, if you actually enjoy all that glitzy hoopla but happen to be a teenager, here is the book for you. Roma Bansal’s One Afternoon charts the coming of age of Ria Rathore, an Ahmedabad collegiate for whom buying a Christian Dior bag or a silver Rado watch or a bottle of Hugo Woman is the work of an afternoon, who seems to have limitless freedom over both her time and money. What Ria wants, she gets.

When she happens to want her English teacher Radha Chatterjee, there is nary a gasp to be gotten from her friends or an obstacle to obstruct her course. There is a sentimental scene in which Ria reads a Kaveri Nambisan passage aloud to Radha: “Love, my dear, is the most difficult thing in the world.” Not for Ria, her life has no truck with difficulties. —Renuka Bisht

Rajeev Sharma

Sting in the Tale

Kaveri

Rs 195;Pp 342

For those wanting to create a special kind of Inspector for their thrillers, there are worse things than emulating PD James’s Inspector Dalgleish, which is exactly what Rajeev Sharma does in creating Inspector General Dashamlav for his English fiction debut Sting in the Tale. The similiarities extend across the two inspectors having rare strategic sensibilities to their being accomplished albeit pseudonymous writers. Except Sharma spices up his intelligence landscape by adding on layers like that involving the kidnapping of a Bollywood diva, textbook style lessons in the history of terrorist organisations that spread from Afghanistan to Kashmir, and exotic renderings of ISI operatives and so on.

To top all the masala, the kidnapped writer Dhruv has a

Roja style ideological exchange with his abductor Amaso, who explains: “We are against social injustice and inequalities and the policy of might is right so blatantly practiced by the US and the UK. We are not against nonMuslims.” The kidnapping also becomes the occasion for a plethora of soft porn scenes, whether it is by way of Amaso narrating a wicked Abu Ghraib story or by way of Dhruv turning into a Scheherazade of some kind, narrating stories abounding in sadomasochistic sex.

—RB

Anuja Chauhan

The Zoya Factor

HarperCollins

Rs 295; Pp 509

If once Snotnose Saleem Sinai wiped his nostrils and trundled through a nation’s narrative, having been born at the precise instance of India’s independence, now, in these Twenty20 times, cute, chubby-cheeked, Diesel glares-wearing advertisement executive Zoya Singh Solanki is born at the exact, propitious moment India clinched the Cricket World Cup in 1983. Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor is where chick lit meets cricket, cola ad meets kookaburra, and Zoya meets India skipper Nikhil Khoda, a fictional variant of MS Dhoni.

Chauhan’s debut novel begins engagingly enough, with familiar names and urban lingo thrown in, as Zoya from “uncool” Karol Bagh half-heartedly leaves a shoot with Shirtless Shah Rukh and boards a flight to Dhaka to get the Boys in Blue for a Zing! cola ad. The ICC Champion’s Trophy is on and after India’s unexpected win against England, a few players wonder if they pulled it off because they breakfasted with the born-on-June-25-1983 Zoya. For the ICC World Cup 2011 Down Under, Zoya becomes the Lucky Charm of India XI, and the Indian Board of Cricket Control promptly flies her and her chaperones to Australia and puts them up in five-star hotels just so that she can breakfast with the team before every match. And the charm works. India goes “Zoyadevi Ki Jai,” blogs wonder if she is a “Karishma or Coincidence,” channels discuss Luck as a Factor in Cricket and Amul hoardings say “Don’t skip her breakfast, Skipper.” Meanwhile, she and the skipper with Boost-brown eyes go for that zing thing called romance.

Chauhan, who has worked in advertising, comes up with some inspired oneliners but what delights is the guessing game that the reader is forced to play — is Jogpal Lohiya a shadow of someone we know? —and the way certain instances tickle memory, like that leaked e-mail of a coach. Although the World Cup and the ad world have the potential to create a highfalutin pop backdrop, this novel about midfield’s children does not push the envelope and remains quite coy for chick lit. And at over 500 pages, The Zoya Factor turns into a slow-scoring Test match moving to a very predictable draw.

—Charmy Harikrishnan

Karan Bajaj

Keep off the Grass

HarperCollins

Rs 295; Pp 320

For most B-School aspirants, going from top shot Wall Street investment banker to local sales head for a chemicals firm in Varanasi is the leap of horror their nightmares consist of. But US-bred Samrat Ratan has followed the route — and while the much elusive happiness still remains exactly that — his quest takes him places. From IIM Bangalore to a prison in the city, to a Danish hippie in Dharamsala and even an encounter with the Aghoris — all in the haze of being stoned tight more often not.

Born to first generation immigrants, Samrat has come to India in search of his soul. And the rest of the tale is a search for that elusive goal, with occasional insights and lots of hash shared with his friends, Shine Sarkar and Vinod. No surprises that his discovery is predictably patchy and not seemingly leading anywhere. It’s not a straightforward campus novel — though most of the sluggish protagonist’s action takes place there. And there are surprises in store for him — his expectation of sweeping his super competitive batch of 200 — he after all is the only WS banker to come to India to do a course — comes to naught soon enough and he soon realises his mediocrity and that achievement - academic or in the real world is not exactly going to be his nirvana.

The name — Keep off the Grass — is exactly what it suggests, for drugs are a constant companion for our hero. There’s philosophy strewn through the text. Sample this , “My life was a study in insignificance, and my actions would not cost a dent in the universe.” There are quite a few laughs too. But if you are on a search too, look for solutions elsewhere.

—Suman Tarafdar

Smita Jain

Krishnaa’s Confessions

Westland;

Rs 350;Pp 369

Wow, when someone pulls off a clever mix of two popular genres and indigenises them to boot, that’s quite a coup. In her novel Krishnaa’s Konfessons, Smita Jain pulls together the threads of the romance and the murder mystery, placing them smack bang in the middle of Mumbai. Adding to this exciting mix is an interruptive Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi kind of script. Anchoring it all together is a brassy female lead who has adopted the Kris tag (get the K angle?). As a TV writer, she draws inspiration from such pop faves as Peruvian soaps and Boston

Legal, and such abridged classics as made available by Reader’s Digest.

What makes her pull off the thing is this gut-deep instinct about how to bastardise literary plots to get to a perfect soap mix, ideally suited to the K gang’s jagged editing strategy. Challenges she is quite conscious of meeting and overcoming: how to get a youthful beauty married to a villain and still retain her virginity for a later marriage to her true love; how to introduce some hard-up folks into a high society landscape; how to make sure that her script titillates to kingdom come yet remains on the right side of the mahila morchas and so on.

When Kris finds her creative juices drying up, she takes a telescope to one of the most expensive pieces of multistoried real estate in Mumbai, housing famous politicians, businessmen, gurus and film stars. Spying out their shenanigans, spotting a murder most foul, then devoting her considerable energies to solving it, she does it all in the company of handsome Dev and a Monk-Karamchand combo of a detective.

At the end of it all, someone asks her: “Pretty boring, huh? Not at all exciting like in films, eh?” Kris replies with characteristic conceit: “When I write about it, it will be.”