While I may not call Neeraj Chhibba’s debut novel — Zero Percentile: Missed IIT, Kissed Russia good storytelling, it is definitely a good story.
Chhibba’s protagonist Pankaj starts off a confused kid trying to deal with school and friends, gets to being a young IIT aspirant in a post-1984-riot Delhi, manages to get real close to his dream, and then loses it to a tragedy. Fate then lands him in an engineering college in a Russian city called Volgograd.
From here begins the hero’s eventful journey into adulthood. The neighbourhood is rough, the dangers are many and often hidden, and Pankaj has very little to fall back on in a cold land thousands of miles from his comfortable home.
Yet, not only does he fight the many obstacles in his way, Pankaj also manages to make a place for himself in this alien world. Zero Percentile is a good old underdog story.
But as I have already said, I found the story suffering because of an uneven pace and choppy editing. The book is very slow in some places and very fast in others. In addition, for a story that relies on drama to a great extent, I found the book rather unexciting.
I asked the author if the book derived from his personal experiences (Chhibba has lived in Volgograd himself) and he said that only about one-fourth of Zero Percentile is based on his life.
The reason I asked was because real life is often boring. Stories that borrow heavily from real life sometimes do not work — they just sound too much like real life. To quote Robert McKee, "A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street." I am not implying that Zero Percentile is completely devoid of depth and meaning. I am only saying that it suffers somewhat because of this reason.
Having said that, I am keeping my eyes peeled for what Chhibba writes next. Choice of subject matter counts for a lot in my book and Chhibba does great in that department. Engineering college in Russia? Mafia led by a guy called Victor? Punjabi bad guys? Sex with older women? Whoa!
Your review was spot on. Besides the fact that the guy can barely string a readable sentence together.
Here’s the thing with title reviewed; think it was specifically ‘acquired’ by Rupa and published at the time that it was, to time with release of ’3 Idiots’. Roopa guys buttressed their book portfolio and gave it this name, so as to have an immediate identification in the wake of ’3 Idiots’.'Zero..’ as a title resonates better with ‘Idiot’, than ‘Five point’, which was anyways supposed to see an upside, given that the movie was ‘officially’ based on it. Further priced at Rs. 95, became an impulse purchase, along with and or instead of ‘Five Point’. That’s my take on it, at least.
Also, look how suggestively it is titled. Taking a little liberty, it can easily come to mean
‘No misses in IIT, so kiss only in Russia’
But yes, choice of subject is ‘brave’ and does deserve a pat, though no matter overall it looks like a ‘manufactured’ success.
There is no easy way to establish “success” of a book in the short term. Monetary gains yes, they can be measured. But true merit is only shown by how long the work lasts in public memory and how much of a change it makes in the public’s mind.
Yup, yup. But that is what u and me think, for that acquisition manager and that publisher agent, numbers are important. No ?:)