Varun Agarwal is the perfect salesman of the century. He sold his book in the first 10 seconds of his pitch just by lowering your expectation, and brilliantly setting the tone of the review that you are likely to leave for this book!
It’s not a Shakespeare or an Amitava Roy. It’s not a Stephen Hawking or Amish. It’s not even an Ashwin Sanghi. What it is in fact, is a rare piece of fresh, light humor that reflects the life and perception of the contemporary youth. In short, it is the cultural zeitgeist of a time fast receding into the pages of history.
It’s only now that the entrepreneurial bug has finally bitten the Indian youth; but the time which has been portrayed in this book was a crude nascent stage of evolution of the new age proletariats in India. The book essentially captures the clash of two or may be three generation of attitude quite distinctly, and beautifully renders an account of the coming-of-age story of Varun, the protagonist who heralds from a bourgeois Marwari family in Bangalore.
“I am not a writer but a story-teller”
And what a beautiful story it illustrates! It is a story of passion for a dream that you saw while sipping coffee by the roadside and later, fought the world for. It is a story of how you grew up with your bunch of loony friends, fighting, clawing, laughing and crying at the same time. It is a story of how you have been played into the hands of disillusioned societal norms and forced to live someone else’s definition of right vs wrong, good vs evil and faith vs logic. Because Man is a social being, right?
[color-box color=” customcolorpicker=” rounded=false dropshadow=false]It is a story of how you have been played into the hands of disillusioned societal norms and forced to live someone else’s definition of right vs wrong, good vs evil and faith vs logic. Because Man is a social being, right?[/color-box]
That guy whom you see lolling away in the sofa with his eyes glued to either his gorilla glass screen or his Apple laptop – he is your lazy, good-for-nothing kid brother chuckling to himself with some amazing cool ideas churning in his mind that makes you reach out for an IQ test once again.
That girl with a cute smile and a cuter tattoo on the lower back – she is your friend whom you take out shopping in spite of knowing that you’ll probably get bored waiting outside the Trial Room, yearning to get out for a smoke.
That friend who leads you all to a street fight with his stupid antics – he is probably sitting right next to you, overlooking your shoulder to share in the secret smile twitching at the corner of your lips right now.
[color-box color=” customcolorpicker=” rounded=false dropshadow=false]That Aunty in your neighborhood, soliciting advice to you and your family on matters specifically not concerning her or her family’s welfare – she is your inspiration…[/color-box]
That Aunty in your neighborhood, soliciting advice to you and your family on matters specifically not concerning her or her family’s welfare – she is your inspiration, your guide to self branding & self patronizing and will effectively give you a literature class on “How to Beat Your Own Drums”. So don’t hate her.
Instead follow Varun’s success story as he climbs towards his dream, one step at a time, and sells that story back to the masses to earn a million bucks in return (well, maybe not a million).
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