Finally, some good Indian pulp fiction

I finished reading “One night @ the Call Center” last night. I enjoyed it a lot as it was a very easy read and mostly entertaining. Calling it a novel maybe a stretch, but I was happy to read a something by an Indian author that will not be nominated for the Booker Prize.

I usually lament with a couple of my Indian born friends who are also avid readers about the lack of mindless Indian novels. Most books by “Indian” authors are dense. It is a saga about this lady who misses the river and the mango tree and her grandmother’s chutney while walking down the streets of New York to meet her daughter and her white boyfriend at Columbia University. Again, they romanticize and celebrate India similar to Bollywood movies. They have titles like “Inheritance of loss” or “Interpreter of Maladies” or “The God of small things”. I have enjoyed each of the books mentioned here. And they have either won or have been nominated for the Booker or the Pulitzer.

I have read books by Salman Rushdie, who I think deserves the Nobel Prize for literature. But, say there is a situation in his book, where a boy wants to go out with a girl. Rushdie can go on and on, bringing up the Mahabharata and the Iliad and Sigmund Freud and 20 pages later you are confused as to what you were reading about.

It took me just a couple of nights to finish “One night @ the Call Center”. It was funny and contemporary with well developed characters. It tries to delve into some of the aspects of this new generation of Indians. They make money working odd hours using a different name, rather a different persona. They put up with the abuse dished out by the “stupid fat Americans” while saving a lot of money for the companies. The author does tend to go a little overboard with his criticism of America and Americans. An “Easter egg” in Microsoft Word has an important role, but is incorrectly referred to as a “bug”. The end is a bit cheesy like a Bollywood movie. Incidentally it is being made into one, with 45 year old Salman Khan, fresh from another hair transplant, playing the main 25 year old character.