Books – Page 9

My rating of My Friend Sancho by Amit Varma: 8.9 / 10
Publisher: Hachette India
Price: Rs 195

I ordered my copy if My Friend Sancho many moons ago (right when it was launched in fact) through Flipkart. Now, I had the time to read the book again. What struck me is how simple – yet beautiful and quirky – the cover design is. (Those adjectives describe the story too perfectly.) The artwork on the cover is embossed in the way it’s done on greeting cards, which is, I’m sure a first in design cover making. I think Hachette is new to India, which is why they are willing to experiment. (They’re also the Indian publishers for The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.) Moving on to further minutiae, I love the typeface that the book is set in. Normally I don’t care about that but the particular font that was used in the book – Bodoni MT – is just so…pleasing to the eyes when reading. I generally prefer sans-serif fonts but printed stuff usually stick to serif fonts; Bodoni MT was a good choice in that regard. A little irreverent, just like the story you might say.

Okay, before everyone packs up and leaves let me really start with the review. Written by Amit Varma, ex-journalist and author of the wildly popular blog India Uncut, My Friend Sancho follows the life of a reporter in Mumbai named Abir Ganguly over the period of a few days as he witnesses a fake encounter – and is then asked by his newspaper’s editor to do a feature-length article on the lives of both the murdered man and the police officer who lead the time which raided that guy’s house. Unknown to most others, Abir was present outside the housing society when the incident happened (he had been called by the police to be there to cover the story once the arrest of some underworld gang members was over) which makes him somewhat uncomfortable about interviewing Muneeza, Mohammad Iqbal’s (the dead man’s) daughter, for the purposes of the story. Over that period, Abir falls in love with Muneeza (her nickname is Sancho, thus the title) and ends up losing it too. The love angle is definitely a major aspect in the story, but how Abir goes about dealing with two opposing views – one, of Inspector Vallabh Thombre that Iqbal was a gangster, and Muneeza’s that he was innocent. Falling in love with Muneeza, and yet understanding the rationale behind what happened from Thombre confuses Abir further.

The story in itself isn’t highly complex. You’ll breeze through within an hour or two this book. What still makes it a worthy read is deliciously witty humour – and genuinely witty at that and not just an exaggeration on the blurb. The character of Abir Ganguly has a penchant for fantasising and thinking up conversation snippets – on how or others are actually feeling about a situation – that are many in number and funny. In a way, My Friend Sancho is like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Tarantino movies often have not that complicated plots, but where they truly outshine everyone else is with the engaging, somewhat quirky dialogue.

I liked the fact that Amit Varma doesn’t stereotype anyone. Even when he seemingly does so in the beginning, he later moves on to focussing on what made the characters to become or behave in a particular way. The bit where Inspector Thombre speaks on why he became a police officer and what his job entails is particularly interesting. It even makes you sympathise with Inspector Thombre who ended up killing an innocent guy, and the fact that policemen, just like any other human being, can make mistakes too. In the ruse of writing a dual portrait story of both men, Varma leaves you thinking on how life isn’t all black and white. The character of Abir’s mom though is bang on target. 😀 Seriously, the first question that a Bong mom asks you in case she gets to know you’re going out with someone would be “Is she Bengali?”

Amit Varma also has a Tarantino-ish obsession with promoting his blog India Uncut (“Then I go to India Uncut, the only blog I read every day”) which I found extremely annoying the first time I read the book; by this second reading though, I chuckled at those bits and let it be. This book is definitely R-rated and not PG-13, so if you’re planning to gift this book to someone I suggest you to be careful. A quote from the back cover on the back cover itself should make this clear:

My name is Abir Ganguly. I work for a tabloid in Bombay called The Afternoon Mail. I am 23. I masturbate 11 times a day. I exaggerate frequently, as in the last sentence.

Comparisons with Chetan Bhagat are inevitable. My Friend Sancho isn’t a Vikram Seth, and yet it isn’t quite down to the level of Chetan Bhagat either. It’s an easy read, and yet I can’t help thinking at the same time that you definitely need to be an avid reader to appreciate the brand of humour Amit Varma brings to the table. This is not a book that will be enjoyed by Orkutards. At another level, Amit Varma and Chetan Bhagat focus on ‘different Indias’. Amit Varma’s India is that of the big city with shining malls, Cafe Coffee Day, tuna sandwiches at Subway and the like; Chetan Bhagat’s India is that of small town guys trying to make it big in Amit Varma’s India thanks to outlets such as IITs, call centres, businesses. This is quite evident in how the character of Muneeza, who perfectly fits in Bhagat’s India, is hardly seen from her own perspective and rather through the eyes of city rat Abir who cares only about the fact that he loves her.

And if you notice reviews for this book you’ll find that most of them are from what newspaper op-ed editors love to call ‘People Like Us’; most of the reviewers being bloggers who have been following India Uncut for a while now. Amit Varma mentioned in an interview that we wanted to take the middle ground between an Amitav Ghosh and a Chetan Bhagat book, but My Friend Sancho is firmly in territory that an Amitav Ghosh reader will bother to tread upon as ‘light reading’. Hachette’s pricing of the reflects this fact – at Rs 195 instead of Rs 95 they are clearly positioning this at a level above Rupa & Co’s pop-novel genre.

I don’t believe you need to be a reader of India Uncut to understand the novel, as some people have said. It might help you spot a few in-jokes otherwise that’s about it. As the novel is written in first-person from Abir’s perspective, the story is narrated according to how he perceives the world around him than what the world around him actually is; this might be difficult to comprehend based on how well-read you are. In case you’re ‘graduating’ from ‘reading’ Chetan Bhagat novels, well, reading a few posts on India Uncut won’t make you adept at noticing sarcasm. BTW, the character of the lizard (on the book cover too) which Amit Varma has hyped so much calling it a personification of himself is minor character that gets hardly any print space. In a sense, it is an in-joke somewhat like my ‘obsession’ with forty two, though it did remind me of the Unwaba from Samit Basu’s GameWorld trilogy.

My main criteria for whether I like a book or not boils down to one simple point – would I want to read the book again or not. My Friend Sancho makes that cut easily. Engaging dialogue, witty humour and many wisecracks, a few passages giving food for thought – all contribute to make this book a highly delightful read.

Download the first chapter of My Friend Sancho here (released as a sample chapter by Amit Varma) by clicking here. Also, he mentions an excellent essay by Thomas Nagel titled What Is It Like To Be A Bat, which is worth reading.

To recover from the spectacularly bad writing of Chetan Bhagat, I went back to reading Douglas Adams’s Salmon of Doubt. Once again. By now I have lost count of the number of times I have read DNA’s works. My only regret so far is I that I could never read through his book Last Chance To See – also what he has often said is his most favourite work out of all the ones that he has written. I’m pathologically incapable of appreciating flora and fauna unless there’s accompany dialogue with colourful words. By that I mean a select few Tintin comics of course. All this environmental crap brings images of unwashed hippies to my mind (and more often that not they do fit that description). Douglas Adams is an honourable exception of course, despite the fact that he (partly) climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit that smelled of sweat and Dettol (his words, not mine).

But I digress. American publishers have this curious fascination tagging on subtitles to any and every book to entice readers; probably, they’d have wanted to stick tearaway brochures with scantily clad women praising the book but then that might cost too much. The tagline for Salmon of Doubt is Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, which contributes to the eerie sense of finality: “This is it. This is the last Douglas Adams work ever to published”.

At various points of time, Salmon of Doubt was supposed to be a Dirk Gently novel, a Hitchhiker’s novel, and then a standalone novel but on similar lines to the previous two series’. He was notorious with his publisher for he “loved deadlines, and the whooshing sound they made as they went by”. Tragically, Douglas Adams reached the dead-line in his life way too early than anyone who knew him wanted. And with that, so did the hopes of further gems from this brilliant man.

Soon after his, work started on releasing the Salmon of Doubt even in the unfinished state it was in. This book contains eleven chapters of that unfinished novel, which in the current working stage was a Dirk Gently novel – but DNA stated in interviews that he wanted to use the ideas in the novel for something else. Documents salvaged from his computer were stitched together to make these eleven chapters. Varied ‘versions’ were edited together by Peter Guzzardi, an editor who had worked with DNA.

The rest of the book consists of various speeches, newspaper / magazine articles, interviews, website postings, et al that Douglas made in the years leading up to his death. The book is divided into three sections – Life, containing some short snippets on his thoughts on the world around him; the Universe, a section almost completely devoted to his writings on technology and religion; and Everything, the section which has the unfinished novel along with supplementary material / interviews where DNA spoke on which direction he wanted to take the novel in.

For most readers who haven’t looked beyond his works, The Salmon of Doubt is a huge revelation about what the man was like. Biographical and autobiographical anecdotes from his early life and what he really went through on his road to stardom. His well-reasoned – and totally Apple-worshipping – love for new gadgets and technology. His passionate appeals to save various endangered species. His logically thought out speeches on why religion came to be what it is, and how we should be careful about not ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’ when trying to replace religious practices with atheism because of their practical uses.

The Salmon of Doubt is a glimpse into the world of a man who realized that common sense presented a lot of answers or potential answers to almost any sort of problem. His trademark style of humour – intellectual, witty and so many other adjectives brims in each and every article. Most of the articles included are from a time when Adams was past the h2g2 / Dirk Gently novel stage and had moved on to endless book signings and lecture tours, so it’s as if you’re getting to a know a different person while at the same time feeling as if this was your best friend in some past life.

Stephen Fry (one of Douglas Adams’s close friends), in the foreword to this book, says:

I advance this is a theory. Douglas’s work…It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do – just as your friends (thank heavens) don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on an on about to them.

That is precisely what DNA’s work makes most fans think like, once you come to truly appreciate them. (At least, that’s the case with me!) The simple fact that his jokes are not “Yo Mama” jokes but ones which require those little grey cells to understand and chuckle about is what makes DNA’s work special – and it is what makes the reader feel special. I already mentioned an excerpt from Douglas Adams’s first Dirk Gently book in an earlier blog post which I found especially funny. Here’s another excerpt from the same book which had me howling with laughter:

“…There are certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself.”
“Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim,” agreed Reg earnestly.
Dirk was about to correct the misapprehension, but thought that it might be somewhat of a long trek and left it.

I’ve often actually found myself doing what Stephen Fry describes, when some particular turn of events reminds me of something that Douglas Adams wrote about such situations; I end up calling friends randomly from my phonebook. Some of them do get the joke, but not quite. After all, if you randomly called some person whom you haven’t spoken for some time, just because in some movie you saw some cop shouting “Freeze!” to a criminal, and went, “Hey! What’s up? Oh, BTW, Marvin said ‘Freeze? I’m not a refrigerator'” immediately followed by 10 minutes of non-stop laughter then I’m sure my friends have the right to feel thoroughly confused. (I know I don’t make much sense in the last sentence.)

(Note to the ones with whom this has happened: my sincerest apologies. Nah, I’m kidding. I’ve no remorse at all for what I’ve done.)

It doesn’t end with his written works. Depending on whether you are a fan or not a fan, the Hitchhiker’s movie will be the best movie ever or the worst movie ever, or if you fall in the middle ground which gets *some* of jokes then you might chuckle a bit but really not get what the big deal is about. I admit, that if hadn’t read the Hitchhiker’s books then I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the movie on its own. What’s ‘wrong’ with the movie, as many have pointed out, is that it feels as if the novel is being read out by someone rather than a movie screenplay. Whether this what DNA intended or the later scriptwriter (Karey Kirkpatrick) being overcautious after DNA’s death about not deviating too much from Hitchhiker’s is immaterial to me. All that matters is that Douglas Adams wanted every version of h2g2 to contradict the other and thus made the changes from the novels / radio series.

People allege the movie didn’t do that well in the box office; that may well be true but h2g2 fans around the globe made it a success anyway. Roger Ebert correctly called the Hitchhiker’s movie a lovesick puppy – you can either take time to take it under your wings, learn to understand it and come to love it, or you can let it be. Most people let it be. You folks are missing out on something truly magical. (Yes, I do suggest reading the h2g2 books, at least the first one, before you embark on watching the movie.) No matter what others say, I find the movie thoroughly enjoying and it has immense re-watch value, just as you can read his novels as many times as you want without ever getting bored.

A sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide novel has been commissioned by Jane Belson, Douglas Adams’s widow. DNA admitted that Mostly Harmless (the fifth and final book in the h2g2 trilogy) was a terribly bleak book and that he wanted to write another novel to end the series on an upbeat note. Taking that idea forward, this sixth and (now) final book – titled And Another Thing… will be written by Eoin Colfer, best-known for his Artemis Fowl series. (The title comes from a joke in the fourth h2g2 book.) When I first heard about this my first reaction was outrage (“How dare they think anyone can live up to Douglas Adams’s reputation! He. Was. Douglas. Adams.”) and followed by measured scepticism after I had calmed down (“I’ll give Eoin Colfer a chance, but he better not screw it up”). Turns out that Eoin Colfer went through pretty much the same emotions, and was quite apprehensive himself whether he would be able to do the job. Time will tell what happens.

So there is not an iota of doubt in my mind that when And Another Thing hits the bookstores on 11th October 2009, I will be attending Hitchcon 09 where Eoin Colfer has a book-signing session too. And any other events by ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha – the official h2g2 appreciation society. Not an iota of doubting that I will be tweeting the galaxy…