iBlog: Nishit Shah

Summary

What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street?
You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course. Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enroll in business school in India instead.
Samrat’s rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades – and self-confidence – plummet. Soon, Samrat’s quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn’t planned on visiting – prison, for example – and makes him do things he hadn’t banked on doing: ‘meditating’ stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga.

Does Samrat – Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead – survive his fall from grace?

Very smart book. Read cover to cover in just one sitting and enjoyed is thoroughly. I just couldn’t keep the book down as it became more and more interesting as I turned the pages. I usually don’t read fiction and almost never by Indian authors except for Chetan Bhagat and an occasional Anurag Mathur.

This book is a complete thriller and yes, it does justice to the number of trees cut to make this book I enjoyed reading it more than the last 2 attempts at writing fiction by Chetan Bhagat. What Chetan had done to IIT in Five Point Someone, which I liked, Karan has done to IIM-B and done it well.

Makes me think that anyone who has stayed in hostel long enough and made lifelong friends and has had too many ups and downs in the span of 3-4 years can write a bestseller by adding some masala to it

Since this book is Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Semifinalist, I would rate it 4.5/5 and an extra 2 points for the last sentence by Mr. Bond, for putting it in such a fine manner.