Just about average

Freny Maneckshaw

In an interview, author Amitabha Bagchi, in reply to a question, said he had originally intended to write a story about a guitarist but the influences of the IIT intruded until it became yet another IIT novel.

There may well be a marketing angle in this morphing, given that the genre has become a popular part of the book-reading and promotion circuit.

Bagchi’s protagonist in his IIT novel is Arindam Chatterjee, a middle-class Delhi boy with an aptitude for maths and aspirations to be a rock star. Bagchi charts Arindam or Rindoo’s rites of passage from an earnest pupil of the JEE classes to IIT hostel inmate who finally makes it to the promised land — the US of A.

Most Indians view the IITs as those hallowed institutes where brilliant students can wallow in their own distinctive sub-culture, immune from worries about unemployment and so on.

The book faithfully re-creates this sub-culture with its language and idioms — JLT (Just Like That), fuchas, palaoing and so on. It is dotted with minutiae about life in the hostel, rock bands, mean-minded professors, Delhi suburbs (Mayur Vihar) where teenagers neck behind water tanks on the terraces (“one hundred per cent masti was going on”), SPICMACAY concerts,  and the pubescent obsession with sex and the F-word.

Bagchi has an honest candour in realising that IITians lead a hermetic, rarefied existence and so frequently brings in events of the outside world. Sensitive to issues of gender and caste, he attempts to address these concerns through allusions to the problems that SC quota students like Meena face.

Violence intrudes into Rindoo’s cocooned existence when he learns of the murder of a friend, Bhavna, and when his friend Neeraj hints at abuse inflicted on the women of his household by a brutal father.

With so much earnestness and honesty invested in the book and with a style that is lucid and humorous, it’s a pity that the novel is unable to really take off and diffuses into something vaguely interesting. The problem is the vast panorama of characters, none of whom develop properly, and the plethora of details that simply fail to coalesce into a cogent whole.

The core of the novel, the protagonist’s bitter-sweet friendship with Neeraj, is not adequately explored. Above Average fails to score simply because the “mathematical truths” don’t add up to anything substantial.

Above Average

Amitabha Bagchi
Harper Collins
305 pages Rs195