Skip to main content

Colorful Notions


Book Review

Colorful Notions: The Roadtrippers 1.0 by Mohit Goyal is a unique novel insofar as it combines masterfully travelogue with fiction.  The novel tells the story of three people in their twenties who give up plush jobs and secure life in order to embark on a three-month long journey across India covering 25 historic destinations.  Their personal stories are intertwined with the journey and present dramatic scenes making the novel a gripping read.  The reader also travels along with them from Delhi to places such as Ladakh, Kanyakumari and the Sundarbans. 

Abhay, Shashank and Unnati are the travellers.  Abhay hails from a broken family and there is little love lost between him and his parents.  He longs for relationships.  The massive Shashank is a businessman whose weakness is food.  Unnati is his fiancée and the journey offers her a few occasions to rethink her romantic attachment.

The personal stories of the three characters appear at relevant places and times in the narrative which mostly speaks about the journey which brings in its own characters such as Mutthuraman Swaminathan Unnikrishnan aka Unni who is shown as a shrewd swindler.  He is a tourist guide in the Corbett Park and can create a tiger where there actually is none.  He drinks all along though drinking is prohibited and gets out of the vehicle during the safari though that is prohibited too.  About a hundred pages later we’ll meet a few other South Indian characters in Mysore who are also slightly caricatured as lungi-wearing, non-Hindi and non-English speaking country bumpkins.  Does the author carry some prejudices against the South Indians?  The reader may wonder.  Mercifully, the stereotypes don’t last long and the journey continues.

The journey has its own adventures, risks as well as thrills.  There is romantic rivalry as Abhay gets infatuated with his friend’s fiancée and plays a nasty game to drive in a wedge between them.  But quarrels are soon made up and the characters prove to be people with sophisticated hearts and sentiments.  At  Bodhgaya the two men (Unnati has had to take leave of them due to an accident in the Sundarbans) encounter a Buddhist lama who teaches them the secret of happiness.  This part of the novel is at variance with the others as it turns mildly philosophical if not spiritual.  The author succeeds in giving his work certain required depth. 

In a novel which takes the characters from place to place, we can expect diverse experiences.  There is adventure in one place, horror in a place like the Bhangarh Fort or awe in another.  The author succeeds in creating those sensations in the reader while telling a credible and delightful story.

Young readers will find the book absolutely delightful while the older ones will find it amusing. 

Read more about the book and the author at http://www.theroadtrippers.in/

Buy the book from Amazon India

PS.  I received  a review copy from The Tales Pensieve http://thetalespensieve.com/ as part of Reviewers Programme.  Register at http://thetalespensieve.com/reviewers-sign-up/ for lots of book fun and activities.





Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Interesting, no doubt. I finished it in two days. Reader's interest is sustained.

      Delete
  2. Nice Matheikal. Thanks for being generous (and kind to a debutant) in your review. Hope i have a chance to get 2.0 reviewed by you as well (its a roadtrip/travel through Himalayas and its never-ending secrets).. rgds, Mohit Goyal

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...

The Ramayana Chronicles: 26 Stories, Endless Wisdom

I’m participating in the A2Z challenge of Blogchatter this year too. I have been regular with this every April for the last few years. It’s been sheer fun for me as well as a tremendous learning experience. I wrote mostly on books and literature in the past. This year, I wish to dwell on India’s great epic Ramayana for various reasons the prominent of which is the new palatial residence in Ayodhya that our Prime Minister has benignly constructed for a supposedly homeless god. “Our Ram Lalla will no longer reside in a tent,” intoned Modi with his characteristic histrionics. This new residence for Lord Rama has become the largest pilgrimage centre in India, drawing about 100,000 devotees every day. Not even the Taj Mahal, a world wonder, gets so many footfalls. Ayodhya is not what it ever was. Earlier it was a humble temple town that belonged to all. Several temples belonging to different castes made all devotees feel at home. There was a sense of belonging, and a sense of simplici...