This is the story of three young men; Adhyayan, Uday and Rajsekaran working in a software firm based at Bengaluru. This is the story of their friendship and frustrations, love and longings, ambitions and aspirations, success and failure, love-life and married-life and much more.
Soon, stereotype and monotony of their job force them to seek another alternatives to fulfill their ambitions of doing something unique in their life. Boredom takes its first toll and Uday resigns from his job to start his own venture Schoolyard; a website providing almost every information regarding schools. Adhyayan is married to Shristi and soon he also joins Uday. Due to overindulgence, firstly in the job and later in nurturing their own website, he fails to provide enough time to his wife Shristi who reminds him time and again about his duties and responsibilities towards their family. Later, Rajsekaran also joins them. In realizing their dream Schoolyard, they end up with all their savings. When Shristi is planning to buy a flat and is going through pregnancy, Adhyayan asks her to handover all her savings too including her LIC policy's accrued money. Suddenly, as their website is supposed to hit in a big way, something very grave happens and eventually a misunderstanding and difference of opinion crops up, mainly between Adhyayan and Uday.
What happens next! Read S.O.A.R ( Success Over Adversity Reigns) by Abir Mukherjee, published by Frog Books.
Merits: Abir has woven an interesting story highlighting the frustration of today's workaholic and career oriented young generation. The plot, the flow and the character development and their compulsions and emotions are perfectly narrated. Nowhere you'll feel that the story is being dragged.
Demerits: The subplot describing the mystery behind Uday's arrest and its unfolding could've been more tight as in today's world you cannot expect a businessman not keeping a track of his bank account without the facility of internet banking and sms facility. Moreover, getting a fake website registered is far more complex than creating a fake email id. Here it involved both. Some minor issues of editing are also there but they don't spoil the reading. The one thing I noticed is the area of its cover which has to be improved. I would suggest to reverse the cover page and you may feel the boys dreaming to soar. Or, a new cover is strongly recommended for the next edition.
Quotes I liked most:
"In spite of the unrelenting effort of human beings to win over nature, he is left defeated every time by nature."
"Adi, we will talk about it tomorrow. Anyway, there is no point talking to a drunken person who can't realize anything even in full consciousness," she answered through the closed door.
Abir Mukherjee has done a wonderful job by writing this book. It may be an eye opener for the restive younger generation who jump over new ventures without going deep into the all the nuances pertaining to the start-up, without going through a detailed project report, without keeping a fine balance between their duties and responsibilities towards their family and business together. I wish him all the best for the success of this book and would like to read more from his pen.
Overall Rating : 3.5/5
Rajeev Pundir
