Book Review: The (in)eligible Bachelors

Target Audience: 

1. People who love their mother to the core, but cannot live without arguing with her for a single day.
2. Men - who are searching for a girl through our age old route called arranged marriage.
3. Girls aged 23 and above (as they will either experience this or they will relive the moments mentioned in the book).
4. MBA Grads. (This was one of the two reasons why I thought of reading this book. It didn't turn out that way).

Plot: The protagonist (Kasturi Shukla) comes back home after completing her MBA from a prestigious B-School - only to be pushed by her mother into the proverbial "arranged marriage market". Her father takes an impartial and safe stand. She goes back to Delhi to start her corporate life. She meets some interesting personalities, two of whom becomes her close buddies. What follows next is a mom-initiated search for a guy and the meetings that follow. She also develops a crush for her boss. And then there's a doctor friend of hers. Things eventually become complicated. The plot has it's own twists and turns which makes it a nice read.

Writing: Simple. That's the only word I can use. Anyone and everyone can read and understand it. Ironically, this is where the book loses out on. It's too simple. As a reader, I expect any book to be simple to understand. If the author expects the book to be read by 23+ public (youngsters), you have to write it that way. Another point I observed about the book was that the book is actually the protagonist's diary. However, only from page 52, we come to know about it when the protagonist mentions the word 'Dear Diary' - monologue. Till that page, the book was a periodic log of the events happening - third person narrative. Read page 52 and then come back to page 1 and read it again. You will know what I am trying to say. Either there is a genuine mistake, or I am missing out on something. The spellings also have messed up in many places. In their defence, they might have deliberately done it because the book is actually Kasturi Shukla's diary and no one proof reads one's own diary right? (Sarcasm totally intended). A character Rajeev is 'Rajev' in page 106 and 'Raeev' in page 150. The editor of the book has really messed up the reading experience.

Relevance in today's times: The book is totally relevant to those mentioned in the 'target audience'. There are instances (especially in the first half) where you can relate to and will surely relate soon, especially if you are a modern person and your family is traditional (current state for most of the middle class Indian families). The matrimonial adverts, taking wedding oriented pictures and wedding websites make it more real. The book is apt for the current demographics of modern India.

To sum it up, Ruchita Misra is exploring a market that is yet to take off on a grand stage in India. And that is, what I would like to call, the 'chick-books' market. As far as I understand, there's still lots of room to explore and many such books will be on the shelf sooner rather than later. As far as this book is concerned, it is an easy going book, but it could have been a lot better. Marriage market in India is huge - many things could have been explored and written in a more humorous way. I had a certain amount of expectation from this book. Didn't live up to it.

My Rating: 2.5 / 5

PS: This review is part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda. A special thanks to the BlogAdda team for selecting me for the review process.