The Tales Pensieve

Entry no. #1 – Debut Indian Writers Month: October 2012

Part of Debut Indian Writers Challenge and South Asian Challenge 2012

Title: An Idiot, Placements and IntervYOU
Author:
Publisher: Times Group Books
ISBN: 978-93-80942-87-2
Pages: 189
Genre: Non-Fiction, Self Help
Rating: 1 of 5
Reviewed for: Blogadda.com

Statutory warning: If you are not a third or final year engineering student you should not even bother reading this review and by extension the book, obviously. There you have been warned! Don’t ignore this like you would ignore the warnings on cigarette packets. You may regret.

Now this is one book that is not what it seems to be, atleast not what it seemed to me. The blurb of the book tells you that the protagonist of the book, an idiot, is a school topper, gets into one of the finest engineering colleges in Hyderabad and like most of us, wastes all his college time doing things that cannot be featured on his resume for employment but eventually he does manages to get placed in his dream company After a year he feels like sharing his experiences with the world about placements and interviews and he writes this novel-like book in a funky and interesting style. Well, nothing wrong with it except that don’t take novel-like, funky and interesting style too seriously, I did and I am still struggling to find modest words here.

Taufeeq Ahmed a.k.a Toffee has written a good book for job aspiring engineering students – a light self help, feel good about you – type of a book but beyond its target audience the book is a disappointment. This is no novel like book, except for that it starts and ends with the author ranting about a lost love, also the reason and dedication of this book (in reality what happened is just a proposal rejection!). Apart from that there are just few snippets of tales of hostels, placements, canteens, colleges, boys, girls etcetera which all of us have experienced or atleast read/ heard especially with the splurge of professionals turned authors on the Indian literary scene now.

Secondly if gonna, gotta, kindda is funky and interesting style of narration my modest thoughts to Taufeeq here is, that it a big turn off in a published paperback book. The narration is as simple as the word simple (as the author says in the book) and that is the plus point in reaching out to the target audience but such language usage made me squirm – firstly because I felt like I am reading an amateur blog (infact no self respecting serious blogger would use that kind of a language connotation) and secondly it will have a negative influence the book’s target audience. I can imagine rejecting forthrightly any candidate using gotta, gonna in an interview.

The book is filled with tips and techniques of clearing the placement process successfully, all with aptitude model questions to a resume format and should help the job aspirants in the reading audience in the form of a much-needed simplified, confidence booster, engineer centric placement help. There are a lot of dos and don’ts in the placement process as far as job aspirants are concerned and the author covers most of them without getting into an academic lecture type mode though the book is spewed with some intermediate gyaan narrations.

One thing that really impressed me is the book jacket and the quality of the pages. Kudos to the publishers for that, the quality of pages definitely takes the reading experience to another level. The book jacket is designed to look like a ruled notebook and for once you would expect it to be ruled inside too (luckily it isn’t). All in all a good reference book-cum-crash course for (engineering) job placements but I wish the publishers would change the blurb a bit. It is highly misleading in this engineers-turned-fiction writer’s era.

Also I would also like to understand from Taufeeq how could his heart and brain interact and agree with each other so much; I thought that exactly was the problem with the world!

Happy reading (all you engineering job aspirants).

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