CAMPUS LIFE
A life half-lived
SHEBA THAYIL
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Above Average is horribly reminiscent of life in Indian colleges.
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Above Average; Amitabha Bagchi, HarperCollins, Rs. 195.
THERE is a line in this book where the protagonist — a thinly-veiled illustration of the author one presumes going by his bio — has an epiphany about one of his friends as he rides a bus from the States to Canada. He "wondered if what I had learned that day would change my life forever".
Not good enough
There are two tragedies inherent here: One, nothing ever changes our lives forever, either our days are cocooned in a dull patchwork of non-events or, worse, what we learn from tragedy fades with time. Two, it hints at a dramatic turn of events and unfortunately, being Above Average just isn't good enough to reel the reader in that way, or any other.
You wait to have your socks knocked off, but you end by just snuggling into them a little more; the story you have just been told is a slice of a life half-lived. If there is anything to be learned from it, it is to immediately stowaway on a cargo ship and sail the seven seas in the hope of some thrills and spills. Perhaps that's the epiphany for us?
Amitabha Bagchi, sorry, Arindam Chatterjee is a studious Delhi boy who hangs with other nerds and is into playing the drums, getting his hands only slightly begrimed as he visits the very basic homes of his poorer friends, or tremulously meets `n greets boys who are brave enough to grab the world of women and vaguely deviant behaviour in accordance with the laws of youth. Arindam's world is tunnel-visioned to Computer Science and IIT. He's clever, cold, never loses his virginity as far as we can tell, (and at some point in the book he's 19), never cuts loose from the shackles of Indian middle-class dreams, and is never fully satisfied at what he is becoming.
In fact, Above Average is horribly reminiscent of a lot of Indian college life. There are the students who are competitive and face heartbreak from cleverer peers on a regular basis; those who make your stories their stories; those who make up grand tales to impress and are then found out; teachers who humiliate and themselves have feet of clay. But these remain threads: Arindam decides to eat mustard fish curry at home one day; his friends tell him about the sexy aunties in the society, one of whom brushes her teeth without a blouse on; Rocksurd, so-called because he's a Sikh who's into rock music, cuts off his hair because other Sikhs come up to him and pick a fight as he's a smoker...
Inconclusive
These are authentic characters with authentic dialogue, but what of it? "Have you heard Gravy Train? ... They are fundoo, man," but the conversations are so inconclusive you feel like crying out "fiction, fiction," much like a man craving water in a desert.
Saving graces? There's Maiti, an `elder statesman' at 22, who can't pass his course, (and there is a Maiti in every campus in this country), who tut-tuts when Arindam gets into a fight (verbal, of course), and gives us some humour. "Fratricide, his faraway expression seemed to say, was inevitable in this Dark Age. He looked like a powerless blind Dhritrashtra... forced to listen to a blow by blow account of man killing man."
Flashes of perspective
There is some perspective we can understand, as when Arindam chooses IIT over Delhi University, half-regrets it later but knows even if he had chosen to be where he may have fitted in better, "safe harbours were an illusion"; or when thinking of "role models at IIT (whose) lives were our possibilities"; or when talking to Indians and Americans he sometimes felt "there's a whole country within me that this person can never travel to... " but these don't quench.
The book's blurb says, that it is "Lyrical, spare and charmingly self-deprecatory". Did they get their titles mixed up, or are we to be bombarded by these random clichés every time a blurb-writer's well runs dry? In any case, it looks like everyone stays parched in this endeavour.
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