sweeping arc and said to me: why don't you write about all this? Being an obedient student, I nodded. Although within, I was thinking that this was a weird idea that no one would ever want to read such a book. Besides, what was there to write about?

Some five years and a couple of false starts later, I started writing a novel set in Delhi. Every character I wrote about was striving to transform himself - they all seemed to be male - into something bigger and better than he was. Every story seemed to be a story of ascent - successful and unsuccessful. Then one day, a few months into this project, my professor’s words came flashing to my memory. I realized that the themes I was thinking about were the main themes of life at IIT. And so the novel grew and IIT came into its ambit, or perhaps IIT dragged the novel into its gravitational field.

Those of us who grew to adulthood in the nineties remember that mode of Indian middle class life where everyone told you that you could only succeed in one of two or three different ways. And soon, like everyone else around you, you started believing that one of those two or three different ways was your own independent freely chosen preference. An analogy to this came in my fourth year at IIT. We were sitting around in someone's room chatting about marriage. One of my friends delivered a line that shocked me then and has stayed fresh in my mind to this day: “I'll marry a girl I love,” he said. “But I won’t fall in love with a girl my mother won't like.”

Above Average is about people who dream dreams that their parents would approve of, and about people who dream dreams their parents would not approve of. It is a book about wanting, always wanting, without necessarily knowing why you want. In that sense it's not just about IIT or Delhi, or ambitious young Indian middle class men coming
of age in the nineties.

A number of people have asked me why all these people from IIT or IIM are writing books, and why are these books so autobiographical. It appears to me that today we have produced a generation of people who were formed in these professional institutions. They may be from different backgrounds, but in these Indian Institutes, they are being forged into global citizens, into a new kind of human being that India has never produced before. This newness brings with it a desire to bear witness to what separates them from their history; it also brings a brashness and confidence that people will listen to what they say. So far, the sales figures stand in unambiguous support even if the reviews are mixed.

Having said that I do not identify with these writers (and it's not really clear to me that we can speak of all of them together.) But then I don't really identify with an earlier generation of writers who put out grand narratives of identity, caste and gender, always seen through the lens of the nation. I have written a book where the setting, Delhi, is extremely important but I don't really believe in books “about” cities. I think IIT is an important cultural phenomenon but I don't think it's a good idea to write an “IIT book.”

But when you set out to write a novel, every choice you make is loaded, every question you ask yourself has multiple answers. You realize it's not particularly useful to complain about how other people go about their business.

When I was studying for my PhD, my advisor called me into his office one day and waved a technical paper in front of me and said: “Bagchi, I think the results in this paper are wrong.” I was aghast, the paper was by some respected researchers. “Should we write to them, “I asked. “Tell them what the mistake is.'” “No,” he said. “The correct way to point out something is wrong is by writing another paper with the correct result.”

And so this book, Above Average, offered with the hope that readers will approach it not with “Oh no, another IIT novel” or “Wow, another IIT novel” but with the question “Does this writer have something interesting to say about this life we live?”

	Amitabha Bagchi was born in Delhi and went to school there. The last few years of school were a blur of exams - Junior Science Talent Search, National Talent Search, Annual Maths and Physics Olympiads - and coaching classes to prepare for those exams. He finally found himself at IIT Delhi in the summer of 1992 thinking that the worst was over. It was not. Belying the expectations raised by his uninspriring performance
at IIT, Amitabha got his PhD in Computer Science in 2002. Then, after loitering around for a couple of years with the nebulous designation of post-doc, he returned to IIT Delhi where he is currently employed as an assistant professor. Courtesy: www.aboveaveragebook.com

Share your views with the author, Amitabha Bagchi. Click here to write to him.




Click here to view For My Readers Archive.




Oxfordbookstore.com is pleased to invite authors for the new section, For My Readers. If you would like to write about your new book, mail us. We will get in touch with you shortly.


Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee