You Are Here...Am I?

With so much hype about the novel, You Are Here, I bought a copy to see what the noise was all about. I started reading about a few pages and instinctively I could hear the echo of various chick flicks, all strewn together in a massive obsessive-confessor style.

Girl gets dumped – career goes bad – suddenly life is falling apart – then the hottest boy turns up – falls not for the hot models in the party but for this poor little girl with her hair ever messed up and perennially smelling of coffee – sparks fly all over the place – they hook up. Sounds familiar? Well, that is all what this book is about.

The book starts with a girl – in a vey fancy event-management job recently dumped by her boyfriend. So typical of Hollywood movies, I thought. In Hollywood, the girl either has to be jobless and loveless in the beginning and suddenly finds herself in the most glamorous of the jobs - event management, Page-3 journalism, or invariably fashion. Sometimes, the girl is already in a fancy job but get dumped right at the start of the movie so that the entire 90 minutes can focus on how miserable her petite life is and how she meets this drop-dead gorgeous man and they live happily ever after.

This novel is no different. In a supposedly raunchy style, it takes off the same way. The girl is yet to get over the tragedy of being dumped and always finds the hottest boy in town to make out. In between, you will find flavours of humiliation and disaster in career, about how this middle-class girl wants to be the models or Page-3 society she works with and yet all the time cringing and whining about how miserable her life is.

If you grew up watching movies like Never Been Kissed and the other numerous high school movies that Hollywood has churned out, you will see the similarity here. Only that the hangout is not some fancy place but our very own Café Coffee Day and all other Indian spices garnished all around. Also the chapter titles are lifted directly from the episode titles of Private Practice – a popular American drama. They all start as ‘In which..’

Some of the descriptions want to be very bold and I-am-the-new-Indian-girl. Sadly, they wound but being vulgar and utterly unreadable. And the book is so typical that I wanted to vomit all over it. The same cycle everywhere you turn. Why are the girls always portrayed as vulnerable, utterly insecure, lacking confidence and the entire time craving for men? I you have read books that come out by the ‘Red Dress’ publication, you will know why I am disgusted.

I know this might come harsh, but it is such a shame that books like these sit next to the greatest works of literature such as Catcher in the Rye, God of Small Things. I was so temped to visit the book store and ask them to make a separate rack for filth like this.

Anyway, I think I have ranted enough. So my summary of the book – it is the story of a 26 year old teenager who forgot to grow up.