Skip to main content

Sorting Out Sid


Book Review

Reading Yashodhara Lal’s novel, Sorting Out Sid, is like watching a Bollywood comedy, especially of Priyadarshan type.  There is lot of fun and frolic in the first half and then the plot becomes more lifelike, sorting out problems created by the fun and frolic.  One difference is that in Lal’s novel, the fun and frolic runs into two-thirds of the book. 

That is a major flaw in an otherwise captivating novel.  There is something Wodehousean about the novel.  The protagonist, Sid [Siddharth], may remind the reader of Bertie Wooster.  He gets into all sorts of embarrassing situations because of his immaturity, superficiality and idiosyncrasies.   We meet him in the very first chapter walking into his friend Aditi’s house, later than he should have been, and wishing her “Happy Birthday” while it is actually her little son’s birthday.   We find Sid in many such comic, sometimes bordering on the farcical, situations.  The comedy drags on a bit too much into about 200 pages.  Unlike Wodehouse’s, Lal’s comedy fails to be brilliant flashes on human foibles and peccadilloes. 

Hence the novel remains a light entertainment for the most part.  Occasionally, though, Lal displays flashes of brilliance.  For example, the conversation between Aditi, who is a kind of mentor with an ‘elder sister’ bearing , and Sid about the latter’s relationship with Neha who is the lovely, spunky mother of a little kid and separated from her husband:

‘So you’re not serious about her?’  [Aditi asks Sid.]
‘There’s nothing to be serious about.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
‘So you’re not going to sleep with her?’
‘Adu...’  He glared.  ‘What is this?’
‘Look.  I’m asking because I’m concerned.’
‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘Oh my god, you slept with her on the first date!’
‘I have not!  It wasn’t a...’  He swallowed. 

The plot is very lifelike.  The characters are drawn from the next door.  You know them; you have seen them.  They belong to our own society, with its superficiality, lack of both emotional and intellectual depth.   Rather, unwillingness to probe deep into oneself.  Relationships bubble and froth like beer which flows abundantly in the novel.  And threaten to fizzle out eventually.

But there are redeeming factors: people who genuinely care, though they are very human too, all too human with the usual foibles and peccadilloes.   That is how life actually is.  And the novelist has shown us that life.
Yashodhara Lal

However, the author’s failure to bring in the “intensity” of life keeps the novel a light comedy.  Life is not “all fun and games, after all,” as the novel itself says.  But that realisation comes a little too late, on page 301.  By that time, the reader is saturated with an excess of “fun and games”. 

When Shelley declared that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” he was not merely being petulant.  The deep truths of life lie far beneath superficial fun and games which the contemporary world, especially of the economically better off, has become addicted to.  There is a touch of melancholy about those truths.  Lal tries to touch that melancholy but fails. 

“Tears and laughter are, aesthetically, frauds,” asserted Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and essayist.  A good novel probes deep beneath both laughter and tears to show the deeper meanings of human existence.

Sorting Out Sid rises to a certain degree of eminence in the third and last part.  Sid approaches the ineluctable self-understanding. 

For those who love light reading, the novel is a boon.  Personally, I felt that Yashodhara Lal is capable of more depth.


Acknowledgement: Thanks to Harper Collins India for sending me a free copy of the book, autographed by the author, in association with the Book Review Project of Indiblogger.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. sounds like a good book to pick up next

    ReplyDelete
  2. I too have got the copy but yet to read. But it seems I should read it as I'm anyway going through bit of bad phase! This might help me laugh more right now :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It is a nice book and you have written a brilliant review. Keep it up. I am also thinking of writing a review of the same book for www.keveinbooksnreviews.in

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

War and Meaning of Victory

In the summer of 1999, while the rest of India was soaked in monsoon and Cricket World Cup, the country’s soldiers were clawing up frozen cliffs daring the bullets that came shooting from above. India’s incorrigible neighbour had sent its soldiers and militants to capture the snow-covered peaks of Kargil. It was an act of deception, a capture of India’s land stealthily. The terrain was harsh and hostile, testing the limits of human courage with every jagged step. The Kargil War was not just against a human enemy, but against peaks of stones and snow where the air itself was an adversary. Three months of bitter conflict and subhuman killing ended in India’s victory over the invading Pakistan. Victory! July 26 is celebrated ever after as Kargil Vijay Diwas by India. What is victory, however? Philosophically, I mean. We are supposed to be rational (philosophical) creatures, after all. “ W ar does not determine who is right,” Bertrand Russell said famously, “but who is left.” Every...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke....