It146;s A Class Apart

Why this fixation, even in a hilarious campus novel, with a melodramatic ending?

If laughter is the best medicine, nothing can do you better than a dose of No Onions Nor Garlic. Your food may taste a little bland but life will not lack for spice8212;as the characters of Srividya Natarajan8217;s latest novel found out.

My progress with the book was more than a little slow, given that every page or so I found myself rolling on the floor and was obliged to get up and brush myself off before I could carry on. Campus life can be endlessly entertaining.

But add a whacko professor hung up on his Brahminical credentials, his sex-starved wife bent on chasing godmen and parents eager for an NRI 8220;catch8221;8211;8211;and even a theme of faculty infighting on caste politics can leave you in stitches.

It is not just the antics of the couples that get the laughs. There8217;s the builder 8220;Professor Ram openedhic my eyes to religion. Glories of hic-hic-Hinduism8221;; the wannabe academic 8220;The entire discursive economy of post-coloniality in terms that take into account the polyhegemonic rather than panoptic operations of identity and authority8230;8221;; the concerned grandmother 8220;If you don8217;t wear a boddy those will be hanging down to here8230;dingle-dongling before you are thirty8221;; the politically aspiring auto-driver; the nervous music teacher who thinks only the coffee justifies this particular tuition; the cowpats placed strategically on paintings hailed as 8220;modernist collage8221; by unsuspecting guests; the 8220;bucket maami8221; who places 30 pots in queue before the water lorry turns up8212;the fabric of life stands unravelled.

We Indians are like this only.

It is purely a matter of chance that the drama happens in Chennai University. It could have been any one of a dozen universities in the Great Indian Small Town where Shakespeare got rewritten in the best Hindu tradition, with Krishna as a character spouting Gita and four young bucks who joined the audition to catch girls, got cast as 8220;fairies8221;.

From there on, the drama and mystery unfold in the life of Sundar, the 8220;Mustard seed8221;, and the midsummer night8217;s wet dream turns into midsummer nightmare.

What else can you expect when your dragon professor turns up at your doorstep as a prospective father-in-law? And you are desperately in love with his pet hate8212;a comely bright Dalit student?

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The lone voice of reason is Sundar8217;s father, failed Naxalite Vaithi. As someone who misplaced his poonal a long time ago, Vaithi has one cosmic poser: If four castes sprang from the four parts of the cosmic man8217;s body, who sprang from the cosmic man8217;s bottom? He found the answer only when he met his prospective son-in-law.

Love, hate, friction, hostage situation and a chase8230; it is a denouement tailormade for Bollywood. We Indians are like this only. Pity about the novel.