Trashy Tales!

With lectures barely happening once a week (and I bunk even that), I don’t know what to do with my free time. Yeah going home is an option which has been exercised far too often, and the thought of a long journey puts me off. As you can see, the lack of academic activity is making me extremely lazy as well. And am completely broke, so no money to go shopping or eating out either. Sleeping, eating sad mess/café food, gym, jogging and swimming take up some time, but the rest of the time I am lazing around on my bed, reading trashy literature. Yeah, that’s my new obsession: devoting hours on shallow, feel-good fiction by young Indian authors, still trying to find their feet. Well, since I aspire to be in their category in a few years, I am lending them some support. So in the last week itself, I have finished half-a-dozen books like ‘Joker in the Pack’, ‘Keep off the Grass’, ‘Bombay Rains Bombay Girls’, ‘Almost Single’, “Above Average’ and yesterday I finished “You are Here’, which was launched the day before! This is the book based on the blog of Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, more famous as the compulsive confessor. While these are nice easy reads, complete no-brainer, extremely alike in their tone and setting, they don’t particularly offer the kind of satisfaction you derive from reading good literature. The protagonists are uncannily similar in their lifestyle, their ambitions, their trials and tribulations- they are young people in their twenties, educated, independent, urbane, rich, successful in their own fields, with too much money and no idea what to do with it. Yeah, I identify with them at some level, especially as most of them are still disillusioned in spite of being sucessful- looking for a passion in their lives. Yeah, my dad totally disapproves of my reading tastes (or the lack of it), but I still can’t give up on it. What began as a fleeting interest after reading Chetan Bhagat’s “Five Point Someone” has steadily developed into an addiction. Just to take a break and feel good about myself I read “Thousands Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini (enjoyed it more than Kite Runner) and “The Namsesake”, but I am abashedly pro chicklit, because, hey, that’s where my passion lies!