Serious Men

So last week I hopped along to the library and there appears before me Manu Joseph’s Serious Men. I had checked out the book earlier, drawn to it, quite simply by its pleasantly quizzical paperback, but the foreword with its mention of Institute of Theory and Research, made me think the author was doing a Satyajit Ray and I skipped. But a few days later, there was a review of it in the Hindu, a promising one and correcting my wrong ideas about its genre. So this time I picked it up. And right off the funnies start. Indian funny. Neither uptight witty nor slapstick. A little crass at places, which reminded me of Tom Sharpe, but they too were necessary I felt, it nicely framed the sleaze in the otherwise simple/genius minds of Oparna Sen’s male colleagues and our population as a whole. Now who is Oparna Sen? She is, I guess you could say the female lead in the book, a microbiologist (?) who has got the hots for the most ancient relic at the Institute of bla bla and the only bit I had a problem with. Every time she appeared in the book, I felt a pang, a pang at seeing a 30-something beautiful unmarried woman being typified as the hungry hound of innocuous males. But thankfully, Ayyan Mani is quick to distract, he’s a sneaky, cunning, lowly and unethical. Yet I find myself cheerfully amused at his, uhm, ‘enterprising’ ways, I find myself sending him telepathic messages, warning him dearly not to twist his fate any further and, much to my co-conspirational relief, I find he never listens.