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

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 Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some