Mistress of the mundane

YOU ARE HERE (Penguin, Rs 199) by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is an excellent first novel by the writer of the popular blog, The Compulsive Confessor. If you enjoy the confessions of eM, then you will sink into an easy familiarity from the very beginning. The relaxed and confiding tone might remind you of the friendly chat you had with some random stranger at a party — a mildly boozy tittle-tattle that then leads to sharing gentle confidences and perhaps to an enduring friendship. However mundane might the stuff of such conversation be, it requires an innate gift to sustain the listener’s attention — which the narrator of You are here does brilliantly. Twenty-something Arshi has just been dumped by her boyfriend, Cheeto, and is trying hard to keep her chin up. But the combination of having a lousy PR job, a weepy and creepy neighbour and an increasingly tetchy flatmate makes life really difficult. Plus, there is perpetual boy trouble: Michael, Arshi’s friend, is trying desperately to take their relationship “to the next level”; Gagan, the cute ex-flame, is being the typical “himbo” and Kabir, “the Ice Prince”, only melts at his own convenience. There are the usual heartbreaks and catastrophes, a mishmash of GenX rhetoric and registers. As Arshi hangs out with her super-rich South Delhi friends, mulls over her parents’ broken marriage, and tries to see the funny side of her American stepmom (who greets her with an aarti), the novel turns the mundane into something all-too-human. Although Madhavan works with a limited canvas, her irreverent style and sparkling wit make this a promising debut.

STUFFED AND STARVED (Harper, Rs 495) by Raj Patel tells you “what lies behind the world food crisis”. For Patel, the key to understanding the shortage lies in the way producers of food — agriculturalists, for instance — end up starving, while the consumers they cater to stuff themselves to diabetes, disease and death. In this extensive study — combining economics, market research and political analysis — Patel decodes the paradox that underlies a strangely unfair system. As a handful of corporations try to capture the market economy, they leave millions malnourished alongside millions who are overfed leaving them on the verge of obesity. Written lucidly, this is a comprehensive guide to the looming global food crisis.

BANDICOOTS IN THE MOONLIGHT (Penguin, Rs 250) by Avijit Ghosh is another semi-autobiographical first novel set in a small town in Bihar in the Seventies. Anirban Roy, the young protagonist, grows up in this non-descript place, where his policeman father is expected to help clean up the Naxalite insurgency. Ganesh Nagar is Ghosh’s Malgudi, where idyllic childhood unfurls into adolescent angst. This transition — thanks to the raging hormones, inventive friends, and petty criminals — is as much listless as it is exciting. Weird experiments are not only carried out on men but also on beasts. The prose is crisp, sometimes even veering towards the pedestrian, and tells a coming-of-age story with suitable verve.

MARX’S DAS KAPITAL: A BIOGRAPHY (Manjul, Rs 195) by Francis Wheen comes in the “Books that Shook the World” series. This is a masterful commentary on the making of a classic. By looking at the immediate context of Marx’s life — both personal and political — Wheen presents the founding principles of Das Kapital in a new light. For those who have always wanted to read Marx’s magnum opus but were daunted by its sheer size, this little volume might just be the ideal stepping stone to make a much-awaited leap.