Vimoh's Blog

Once upon a time, on a world not very different from this one, there lived a race of people with very short memory spans. They remembered nothing of yesterday, and only very little of what had happened a few hours ago. Their view of the world therefore, was mostly limited to what was happening now.

One popular debate that raged among the people was about the existence of the sun and the stars. During the day, one group sang praises of the sun and laughed at those who spoke of the night sky and the stars. They said that all that needs to be seen can be seen quite clearly in the light of the sun. Anyone who, in spite of the sun’s very real presence, insisted on believing in fairy tales about a so-called star-studded night sky, was clearly delusional.

After sunset, the other group praised the stars while singing and dancing under the beautiful night sky. They ridiculed the sun people and asked them where their sun was, now that the glorious stars had appeared to prove them wrong. Revelling under the starry sky, they denied the importance, and even the existence, of the sun. They declared that the stars were all anyone should ever need and that no sun could ever stand against the sheer awesomeness of the night sky.

There was a third group on this world, a relatively small minority of people. This was composed of those who knew of dawns and twilights. They knew that while it was true that the sun lit everything up when it was out, it also blinded people to the beauty of the stars. They also knew that even though the night sky was beautiful to behold and brought them much joy, it wasn’t really much of a light source, especially when compared to the sun.

They did their best to point this out to the day people and the night people, but nobody much listened to them. And thus, the quarrels went on as surely and as frequently as the sun rose and set.

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!