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| I'm Not Twenty Four... by Sachin Garg |
The prologue of the book tells Sachin's story how he met a girl named Saumya, working in a steel plant in a remote village in Karnataka and the book has thence-forth been written in the first-person view of the girl. Saumya, a pass-out from MDI Gugaon lands up in a man's job in Toranagallu in a steel plant, all because of her unisexual name. I'm Not Twenty Four is the story of an ultra-modern Delhi bred young girl Saumya, working in a steel-plant in Toranagallu. Saumya, an HR major is designated as an Assistant Manager in the HR department and is assigned the profile of handling the reaction team in the Safety Department. Having come from a pampered Delhi lifestyle, Saumya not only finds it difficult to adjust to her new surroundings without any real friends but also proves to be faint-hearted in times of some gore accidents that she is asked to handle. Accepting the fact that she is not fit for the job that she has been assigned, she decides to quit, just when she meets a dusky Bengali hippie/wandered, Shubhrodeep Shyamchaudhary, who loves weed and beer more than anything else in the world. It is then that she sees a new side of life when she learns about his experiences in life and his 'Move-On' theory which makes him stay in no place for more than 90 days.
Right from the onset of the book, I felt too many words being wasted to describe a small event and too many repetitions of adjectives and descriptions. A few pages into the book, you accept typos and grammatical or time-line errors an integral part of the book, though on the part of the writer, I consider it as a cardinal sin. (Forgive me, if I too make them, but they are OK only as long as its a personal blog.) The first 50 pages of the book, though establish a setting for where the rest of the events take place, but they are highly likely make you put the book down due to a lack of Wow-factor as I like to call it. The story begins to get a bit interesting on the entry of Shubhrodeep (Shubhro), but soon falls back to a sluggish pace. The chain of events that provoke Saumya to arrive at the decision of quitting her job and going back home make perfect sense following the psychology of her character but the re-entry of Shubhro in the story is predictable and desirable in order to bail out the reader from succumbing to the sluggish pace of he book.
The second half of the story takes Saumya through the life of Shubhro and his experiences in the 12-odd cities around the world that he has lived in for three months (90 days) each. Saumya falls in love with Shubhro at first sight, and his character never fails to shock you throughout his stay. What disappointed me the most was the porous description of the 90-day stay of Shubhro with Saumya and the untimely death of a potentially interesting character, Mallapa just before Shubhro's re-entry.
The character of Shubhro is very well written and there there is not too much to be credited to any other characters, other than Saumya herself. What struck me a little into the book was the fact that the biggest folly, perhaps, that Garg made was to write a story as a girl's first person account when he himself is a man. Let's accept it that you do not expect a man to fathom the feelings of a woman, leave alone writing something from her perspective. The second half could have been more interesting had Garg experimented with Shubhro and provided a more vivid account of his stay.
The story picks pace around the 180 page mark when on the last day of his stay with her, Shubhro confesses his love for Saumya and they entwine into passionate love-making, only for Saumya to wake up and realise that Shubhro had left, without a trail, without even bidding adieu, in resonance with his 'Move-On theory.' It is only in the last two chapters of the book that you are actually glued to the story and I, personally, silently cursed Garg for leaving the good (mind you, I'm using good and not the best) for the last. The book in its last 20 odd pages becomes a mystery you want to unfold. It was Shubhro's story, how a Bengali kid with a noxious childhood made it to IIM, graduated with an MBA in finance and ended up a hippie for the world to curse, when he was silently doing social service for the under-privileged in each city he visited. Shubhro's story is inspiring and the way it was narrated, made me wonder whether Sachin Garg was facing a writer's block when he wrote the rest of the book.
I'm going with 1.5/5 for Sachin Garg's I'm Not Twenty Four..., instead of reading the whole book, I would suggest you read the back cover followed by the last 40 pages of the book. Sachin Garg has written something different from other Indian authors but the book lacks novelty in form and idea and is something that you can easily miss. Read it if you have nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon but do not have any high hopes from the book as it is one that you can easily put down and forget till you dust your book closet sometime in the future.
My Rating: 1.5/5
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