A new Crossword bookshop is coming up on Rue de Montosrier here in Pondy. Ain't that wonderful?? Like the advent of multiplexes brought with it the 'multiplex movie' phenomenon, could the spread of chains like Crossword be ushering in a 'bookplex' too?
Certainly the kinds of books being written in English for Indians has undergone a sea change. The 80s and 90s saw the Salman Rushdie-Arundhati Roy variety off books which were based on India but written for the international audience - with a spillover Indian readership.
Today, you have a new generation of books and authors with no literary pretensions. They're just good time pass reads about people, places and things the urban Indians can connect with. And surprise! many are written by B school graduates.
By day, they are investment bankers and brand managers. By night, they toil away at their keyboards, tapping into their own experiences to spin out slice-of-life stories that appeal to 'People Like Us'.
IIM Ahmedabad graduate Chetan Bhagat relived his IIT days in Five Point Someone with the same being converted into 3 idiots now, with some changes here and there. Swati Kaushal's stints at Nestle and Nokia provided rich fodder for Piece Of Cake, a light-hearted tale set in corporate India. And that was just the beginning. 2005 saw the launch of Mediocre But Arrogant, a story of love and life in the fictitious Management Institute of Jamshedpur (MIJ).
Bottomline: MBAs turning to writing is actually not that surprising because many Indian B-school graduates are simply exceptionally bright individuals who followed the easiest path available to them. Anyone who's been on an elite B school campus will vouch for the many potentially great singers, writers and film makers lost to the world of business.
Or then again - as these novelists prove - maybe not.
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