Q and A (aka Queer and Asinine)

Just finished reading Q and A by Vikas Swarup (of the Indian IFS, as we are frequently reminded) over the weekend. It was a quick read and quite unputdownable. Both, because it was such tripe that I couldn't wait to finish it and see if there was anything to salvage at the end. As it turned out, I'd wasted much money and much time that I could have spent on doing the dishes or re-stitching buttons on my shirts, or making paper boats out of the hundreds of newspapers we still have around the house.

Actually I must correct myself - it's eminently putdownable, as I will demonstrate. First the story.

Eighteen-year old Ram Mohammad Thomas (oh dear), an illiterate waiter in Asia's biggest slum in Mumbai wins the top prize of Rs. 1 billion on W3B - Who Will Win a Billion but is framed for cheating by the show's producers.

Authored by IFS officer Vikas Swarup, 'Q and A' is told in 12 chapters as Ram pleads his case as to how a lifetime of experience led to his miraculous win. In each chapter, Ram relates a slice of his amazing life that gave him wisdom - or the luck - to answer the questions.

Ok, the concept is so ridiculously far fetched, but I'd still have let that pass had the individual stories (12 of them, one for each question) been of any merit. The anecdotes don't flow. They are not related in any way in time and space, so the reader tends to get confused as to how old the characters are at each point. Because of this you can't relate to the Ram and Salim. Then the whole gimmick of introducing popular Indian personalities into the story, albeit with thinly veiled names (such as Sachin Malvankar, India's top cricketer) is childish and patronising. It also displays a lack of imagination. And what's with the gay theme pervading the book?

And the revelation at the end - "I am Gudiya!" is downright predictable and... words fail me.

In my opinion, he could have written a better book, had he linked the individual stories better using time and place better, and not a game show as the common thread. Not that that would have done very well either; another problem is his style, alternately abrupt and long winded, reads more like an amateurish essay/first draft than a published work. This badly needed an editor.

I don't have a picture of this book, as Amazon doesn't have it up yet, but I will post one up soon, so you can avoid it at your local bookstore.

I hear that film rights have been optioned by the UK's Film Four and a London theatre producer is keen to transform it into a musical. Eek! Jane Lawson, senior editor of the Doubleday Transworld publishers, said it was a "rollicking story" and "one of the most exciting". My foot!



Some more thoughts on this book (and the author). I hope I have put it down sufficiently.