Writing a book is a long and arduous task. I commend Pravesh Kumar on getting to the finish line with his debut novel.
Honestly, I have never in my life read a book so desperately in need for professional editing.
The formatting is all over the place with this one. There are paragraphs indents jumping from wide margin to narrow margin, there are sentences jumping to a new line in the middle, and opening quotation marks at end of a sentence. I only wish the Paperback version does not have this issue – I read the Kindle version.
And – spoiler warning – the author uses the words ‘after hearing’ extremely frequently. After the first dozen times or so, I got triggered whenever I read ‘after hearing’ in the sentences.
I checked the book out on Kindle Unlimited as was intrigued by the title more than anything…certainly more than by the blurb. I have lived in Delhi for a little under a year but I have spent over 8 years of my life in the City of Joy. So, I was a bit underwhelmed to see that the book titled When Delhi Meets Kolkata lacked in the flavour of both Delhi and Kolkata.
I mean, the locations are only locations and do nothing to add to the flavour of the story. But that is OK.
This is a story of a self-proclaimed playboy. An ultra-rich, self-absorbed protagonist without a job, without a vision or a future plan, and with a crude ego riding on his multiple strikes in the matter of getting laid in Delhi. Rahul Malhotra narrates his conquests with pride but actually does nothing to add to the character’s development.
Now a person like this falls head over heels for a Bengali woman named Tanvi Banerjee: Love at first sight.
What follows is Rahul’s attempts to find her, contact her and woo her.
The last part sends him to Kolkata where he manages to make Tanvi fall in love with him. How? I don’t know. This was the place where I was most invested in the story. But that period of one week, which should have formed the backbone of this romance, cemented the reciprocation of love, explained the acceptance of fate over engagement, was actually presented to the reader as a short summary of a few dates and conversation.
The reader is privy to very little of the conversations between these two, nor is it clarified in any manner how a young, educated, beautiful, rich—not to mention engaged—Bengali girl agrees to marry a man whose sole profession is partying and who specializes in sleeping with random women.
I know – stranger things have happened, both on pages of a book and in real life, and have been attributed to love. I only wanted to enjoy the how of it while reading. A romance without the nuances of emotions changing and people evolving, well, is not very stimulating to read. And talking about stimulating, the raunchy scenes in the story are few and far between, but most importantly, feel dry.
A sequel is coming, as promised by the author. Although I am not keen on reading that, I do hope the author works on his writing style which, though quite reader friendly and easy to understand, is quite repetitive and unpolished.
I would not recommend this book to anyone.
But if you do feel like reading it - Here's the link: https://amzn.to/3z6uc3e
