I have recently read many novels and I decided to review the ones that I have liked the most. I have read across the genres in my life and in recent weeks, I have read mostly thriller, crime and some fantasy novels as well. However, I also read a very different work titled The Great Indian Bust: A Coming of Age Fiction and written by a mostly unknown author Rishabh Bhatnagar, a young one. This is a different kind of autobiography that is incomplete and traces life’s certain portions of the protagonist (who represents the author).

The Great Indian Bust is about the ordinary life of an ordinary boy who grew up in different parts of India in a middle-class society. Life from his perspective is what we find in this novel in abundance. Addociring to the age of the protagonist, we readers are presented with the events and situations. Sometimes you may laugh them out and at times you might feel like feeling sad with the protagonist and at other times, you might make no sense of what is being presented to you! However, with these differences and indifferences, you keep moving page by page and it keeps interested the reading sense.

School life is an attractive feature of the novel that has been described in vivid colours. However, it might not engage different kind of readers who want to read beyond personal experiences. At the same time, the readers who want to understand different perspectives of life from different person’s point of views will find these details quite attractive and useful. So, one thing is very clear that the readers who might like this novel should be patient, have the reading perception and also have an understanding of the features of quality fiction.

Rishabh Bhatnagar has not paid full attention to a single point or a concentrated theme. Rather, he has scattered his concentration across the themes and opinions and scenarios that he builds along the way. Constancy is seldom seen in the narrative as it changes rapidly but the subject or the protagonist is always at the centre of events after his birth.

Personal experiences are always better when you read them coming from the person who has experienced. And the novelist has tried to present the same thing here. Every event and even in the implicit thoughts, you will only hear the protagonist and on one else and hence, the autobiography part is also completed in a fashion. In the end, I would like to say about the language which is quite simple and nothing like the standard language of standard fiction. Perhaps the novelist has tried to write his work for youths in his mind as the only target audience who seldom care about the level of language… and if so, the novelist is quite right!

This is a one-time read that may be completed by the readers of a certain kind and maybe left abandoned by the readers of other kinds. What kind are you can only be found when you read this novel yourself. For your convenience, you can get a copy from Amazon by clicking the link below:

buy the novel – Amazon India