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!

I have been known to buy costlier editions of a book if the cheaper one didn’t suit my visual tastes. I know what you will say. Anybody would say the same thing. So I won’t say it.

Reading a book is an experience. A learning experience, an aesthetic experience, and a whole lot of other experiences that defy blogging. Being the detail-oriented (some have called me fussy) patron of reading that I am, I see my books as much more than what they can teach me.

The colours of the book’s cover, the feel of the paper, the typeface on the cover AND the pages, have as much of a say in my decision about buying a book as the book’s content, author and style.

I have a weakness for hardbound books. And for serif fonts. I am also highly biased in favour of light/bright covers. Dark colours on a book’s cover turn me off (unless the book is hardbound of course).

I love a well-written blurb. It saves me a lot of trouble. I believe the blurb does 90 percent of the bookselling. This is why I hate it when they stick annoying little price labels right in the middle of a snappy blurb. I really care about the back cover people!

I like the Landmark/Crossword variety of music playing in the background when I am browsing for books to buy. It makes me feel special. It whets my appetite. Do I hear an “Oh please!” from you? There is little I can do about it. I am a product of the times.

A book didn’t have to compete with video games, DVDs, VCDs, and websites in the days that quaint little bookshops did good business. Today, everything that comes out of a press goes up against an army of easy-to-use / easy-to-setup / easy-to-understand information products that have grown out of the general consumerist stupor of this age.

The book won’t die. It might have to pick up arms though.