Book Review: Serious Men

Serious Men - Manu Joseph

Serious Men falls under one of my favourite categories of good books -  Books that can be read in transit airports and in red-eye flights (Not that I spend a lot of time in those conditions, just to emphasise that how much I despise those, and how fun those books must be). It's a debut fictional novel that won several awards for the author, who was a Journalist with New York Times and Hindustan Times.

The protagonist is a Dalit clerk who lives in Mumbai slums and works in a Brahmin dominated research institute. Emphasis on the qualifiers - Dalit/Brahmin, is of paramount importance. While the self-important and routinely casteist researchers are busy with the great questions of universe - whether there is life outside of earth, is Bing Bang Theory a Christian conspiracy to leave space for the God to create it etc., intertwined with their greater egos, the street-smart Dalit clerk silently observes them, and works his way to exploit the system to balance out the injustice (that be believes had been done to many communities), to create a genius out of his ordinary son. 

 I haven't heard about the Author before reading this book. I was watching Shut Up Ya Kunal series by stand-up comedian Kunal Karma, when I bumped into an interview with the Author to promote his latest book (Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous). I found him very witty and expected him to be great at satire, and picked up his first book. I was not disappointed. Besides the satire, I loved his attention to detail and his style of describing ordinary events with the ease of a seasoned writer. I read that this is going to be a movie soon. But, I can't tell whether I had just read a book or I had watched it in its entirety.