Love, Me and Bullshit: Vivek Kumar Agarwal

Image Credit: latestbookreviews

It’s not always that authors send you their books to be reviewed. So when Vivek Kumar Agarwal sent his book “Love, Me and Bullshit” to be reviewed I was excited. The book is about Romal who is a 20 something young man chasing after the IIM (Indian Institute of Management) dream. In his quest to get into the portals of one of the most premier management institutes in India, life takes Romal on a ride through girls, alcohol, friendships and family troubles.

What I liked about the book is that through Romal we see how competitive and tough IIM exams are. We also see life as an IIM student and the kind of aspirations students have once they finish the course. The humor is funny in places and Agarwal’s philosophical thoughts come across as quite interesting many times. Romal’s depression, frustration at failures and emotional pain is also quite vivid and palpable at times.

However, there is a lot that is wanting in this book. To begin with, the grammar begs straightening out and even included in some cases. Sentences like “They did use to hint that I would drift away from them” don’t make sense. Neither do sentences like “My friends had to bear with it. My usage of English and ghusedofying words of the day in our conversations.” I am all for the usage of local words in an English language book but there is a way in which we use them. Most importantly make the meaning clear through an explanation in brackets or in some other manner.

Romal is a man low on self-esteem, confidence and happiness. He reminded me very much of Gopal from Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020. The same distress, the same trysts with girls, the same mistrust of oneself. Agarwal has mentioned in the beginning that Bhagat was his inspiration to write and I can see more than a little similarity. Agarwal has tried to write in the same vein, by keeping the language extremely simple, rather colloquial and spoken and heavily leaning on the North Indian language, Hindi. He has included all the necessary elements that seem to make a book popular here in India in recent times – the story being set in a campus, a group of friends, a romance, some four letter words, dreams and hopes and a big incident or two.

While Bhagat has something of a plot going for him, I don’t see much of that here. Of course, a book does not have to have a plot set in cement; it can still be a glorious read even if it just follows the lives of people within. But here, I feel the book fairly rambles in more than a few places. If only Agarwal had spiced it up a little more with perhaps better writing or characters the book would have been a far better read. Romal remains lost and dazed as he stumbles through tests, relationships and jobs, his dreary sense of self-worth only serving to chain him down. To add to the maddening melee of Romal’s circular thinking, Agarwal’s incessant use of “I mean” in every third sentence got under my skin. He even admits it,

“If you are thinking there are way too many of them, ‘I mean’ I mean, just wait a little. You will get used to them.”

I couldn’t. Get used to them, I mean.

I saw flashes of genuine feeling and automatically better writing in the passages where Romal describes his family and where he realizes he would have to support his family now that his father had a heart attack. Yet, I shut the book feeling like I had just run through a maze of streets only to arrive at a road that was not the one I was looking for. In other words, I felt incomplete. I didn’t get the feeling that I had finished reading the book. Maybe that’s the way Romal felt in the end. Incomplete. Maybe I should see it as a case of writing-mirrors-the-feeling. In which case, the book is brilliant since it made me feel as confused as Romal.

Verdict: Please read and clear the doubts in my head

Rating: 2/5

PS: A note of thanks to Vivek for sending me his book.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand: Helen Simonson

Image Credit: Fizzythoughts

I am inching forward slowly in my reading. I just finished another book. And the count so far is just a pitiful 6 books in 3 months! Oh well. Not that the book was bad. In fact, it’s one of the most delightful books I have ever read. They don’t write books like Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand anymore. Just a handful of quaint characters who live in a beautiful English countryside make up this book and yet its charm made me smile more than a few times. Let me give a summary from Amazon before I continue:

You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.

The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?

The book begins with the Major coming to terms with the loss of his brother and the introduction of Mrs. Ali at the same time. Moving at an even pace henceforth we are introduced to the Major’s two passions. One is a set of Churchills, a pair of shotguns, which his father had divided between him and his brother. The Major had always wanted to reunite the guns and it’s this single minded focus that drives him on. And then there’s Mrs. Ali. The Major and Mrs. Ali slowly discover their passion for reading, particularly Kipling, for relishing tea and flowers and gentle afternoons. Of course, the book does reach the inevitable end we all expect, but the course of events leading to it is what holds the book from falling to an average level.

Written with an absorbingly dry and witty sense of humor, the kind that’s hard to find nowadays, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand keeps us chuckling throughout. The Major is outstanding with his instant repartees, while Ferguson the American, Daisy, Mrs. Rasool, Grace and the rest of the ladies who make up the club, where the Major is a member, all form this humorous tableau. My favorite passages were the Major’s parries with his son Roger. Here's one -

“I seem to remember a small boy blubbering over a dead woodpecker and vowing never to pick up a gun again,” said the Major. “Are you really going shooting?” He leaned towards Sandy and poured her more tea. “Could never get him to come out with me after that,” he added.
“Yeah – like ‘bring Woody’ is a great invitation,” said Roger. “It was my first shoot and I potted an endangered bird. They never let me forget it.”
“Oh, you have to learn to shrug these things off, my boy,” said the Major. “Nicknames only stick to people who let them.”
“My father.” Roger rolled his eyes. “A great believer in the cold-baths-and-blistering-rebuke school of compassion.”
…

He was mortified at the thought of Roger waving a shotgun around, and for just an instant he saw himself explaining a dead peacock on the lawn. However, the Major accepted the futility of trying to hide his connection with Roger. He would just have to keep an eye on him.
… “I’m looking forward to giving the old Churchills a good day’s work,” said the Major, also standing as Sandy left the room. “You should stick with me, Roger, and that I can toss a few extra birds in your bag if you need them.” Roger, as he closed the door behind Sandy, looked sick to his stomach, and the Major felt he might have gone too far. His son had never been able to stand up to much of a ribbing.

Simonson’s character sketches are quirky, funny and heartwarming. The Major of course steals the show with his old world charms, his one-liners and his opinions.

“I am to be converted to the joys of knitting,” said Mrs. Ali, smiling at the Major.
“My condolences,” he said.

Then there is Roger, with his modern beliefs, a cocky attitude and brashness. You can’t but help feel a little bad for him each time he is undermined by the Major who treats him like a little kid. Mrs. Ali is quiet in her ways but there is a certain strength within her which is palpable but not visible till the end.

I loved Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand for its language, for its setting and its lovable characters. Men like the Major are extinct, I think, men who reads and understands literature, who knows how to treat a lady and who has a never ending line of witticisms.

One of my favorite passages in the book is also when the Major describes love –

“Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction,” he said, “I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That’s what love is about, Roger. It’s when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence.”

Expression of feeling is his strength although ironically he comes across as someone who is un-emotional and practical. He has his faults, but truly, as Ferguson said, “Major, you are an original.” Perhaps, I can also say, books like these come quite close.

Verdict: Girls be prepared to fall for the Major as I did and guys be prepared for a lot of lessons from him

Rating: 5/5

The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers : Toru Dutt

Image Credit : Barnes and Noble

It's funny how life can just rush you by, and here I am, looking at my Shelfari bookshelf, and there is this little admonition - "You’ve read 5 books this year. Last year you read 30 books, so you’re behind your pace." That's what I get every time I log on to Shelfari. Last year, I took a career sabbatical, and spent 7 months in China, where I had little opportunity to read. I would have thought that this year would be better. Yet, here I am - just 5 books and already it's March! I am behind my pace. Behind life. Behind happiness. Behind every little nothing that counts as nothing. 

Toru Dutt on the right, with her sister Aru. 

But well, Shelfari will be happy to know that I did read Toru Dutt's quaint little novella The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers. Toru Dutt is that rare Indian author - credited with writing what is considered the first French novel by an Indian author, and the first English novel by an Indian woman. I didn't know that she wrote novels- children in India grow up reading her poems, including the famous Our Casuarina Tree. It's that same poetry that breathes its way into The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers as well. Set in France, the novel is an intimate look into the life and thoughts of 15-year-old Marguerite, fresh from her convent education, and extremely religious. 

Marguerite 'returns to her family and experiences the first stirrings of love, only to find herself entangled in a complicated net of relationships.' Interestingly, Toru Dutt wrote this novel in secret, and it was only discovered after her early death by her father, who then undertook the task of ensuring that these poignant works were not lost to posterity. It still amazes me how an Indian woman in the 18th century could have written with such depth while setting the novel in as foreign a setting as France. As noted in the introduction, Toru Dutt's Indian roots give themselves away sometimes - in the strong familial bonds to the piety shown by the women to their husbands - and even a little sentence like this : "His coloring was of an almost feminine fairness, that denotes his high birth." Ah! The deeply religious Christian that Toru Dutt was could not overcome the traditional Indian longing for 'fair skin.' 

What of the novel itself? There is beauty in every sentence. Marguerite displays a maturity beyond her years - her first tryst with love is shaded with doom, but she survives the terrible onslaught of circumstance and fate to find conjugal happiness. Yet, there is a funereal thought that runs through the book - and it gives the novel a poignancy that reminded me a bit of Wuthering Heights. 

Verdict : A little gem of Indian literature. 

Rating : 3.5/5 

PS: Isn't it strange? I wrote this review on Toru Dutt's birthday. (March 4, 1856 – August 30, 1877)