Book Review: The Department of Denials
Anurag Mathur is the man who was Chetan Bhagat in the 90’s and early 00’s. After the unprecedented success of his book, The Inscrutable Americans (the book was even made into a movie), Mathur fathered several other books. The Department of Denials is one of them.
I found The Department of Denials readable. It’s not massy, it’s not coherent and most importantly, it’s not Chetan Bhagat. It is undeniably witty but unfortunately not laugh out loud funny, though Mathur does try ever so hard. However, I found it funnier than The Inscrutable Americans – a book that is almost derogatory towards Indian Americans, without really being funny enough to justify its biases.
In my sense is the primary reason people still buy Mathur’s books is because he is a Stephanian, who are alleged to be a class apart. Trust me, they aren’t. I have met several of them and the only thing that differentiates Stephen-kind from humanity is that they choose every opportunity to reiterate the fact that they are Stephanians, as opposed to other sub-species of human beings I have met.
D.O.D. is a book from an era gone by and even so, not really a chronicle of India a decade ago. Read God of Small Things instead to understand what India was, is and will be.
Title: The Department of Denials
Author: Anurag Mathur
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pages: 184
Genre: Fiction/Humor
Rating: 2.50 of 5
Reviewed for: Personal Copy
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This review was first published on www.makingrain.blogspot.in.
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