God Save the Dork

I'll say this for Sidin. He's a brave, brave man.

He's one of India's finest humour writers, with an instantly recognizable style, which is not something very easy to achieve. And yet, when he came out with a book, it was written as someone else (Robin Varghese). He deliberately HAD to be mediocre, he HAD to be annoying, he HAD to curtail his usual brilliance in order to bring out the character in the first person. And since your first novel is what many people are going to judge you by, that is a brave, brave thing to do.

Which is why I loved Dork 1. It wasn't Sidin as we knew him on Whatay, but it was Sidin in terms of the humour. The character. It was fresh. And at one point, I laughed out loud.

I was excited about Dork 2.

Unfortunately, the book disappoints. Robin's character was endearing in Book 1 but just seems out-and-out annoying here. The storyline is predictable - guy builds himself up in pomposity before crashing, only to be rescued by sheer luck at the end. It's not a bad thing, having a predictable formula (heck, Wodehouse did it for 90 books), but the story stops being gripping at a few points. Which is sad, because the hype around the book was huge and the Author's Note was a riot (coming to think of it, probably the funniest thing in the book).

It's also unpardonable to have typos. Putting in a 'loose' for 'lose' is something you might expect on a n00b starting on Blogger, but not from one of India's best bloggers and editors at Penguin India. Shocking. I spotted at least three errors.

Not that it's money badly spent. The narrative is a refreshingly different style (form of diary entries), there are certain gems (Robin dissing a person who wants to develop a social network where people tell each other what they do in 140 characters), and at the Flipkart price, it's a fantastic bit of timepass for 3 hours. And the Flipkart packaging is, as usual, brilliant.

It's going to be interesting what Vadukut churns out in the next book of the trilogy - it has to be along the same lines, and it'll be challenging keeping the fatigue in mind.

I maintain that Sidin is one of India's funniest writers, and the stuff he puts up on Cricinfo is probably the funniest stuff on the Indian interwebz today, and it's highly recommended you check that stuff out before forming your opinion of him as a writer on the basis of this book alone.

Okay, you want to read a review of a book based upon Sarcasm at its belittling best, quirky office culture and misadventures which some mysterious way settle like you have never expected, well you said you wanted, so you suckh :) Leave it, coming to the real deal, it is a worthy successor in sort of propelling to wish the third to come too.

I finished the reading in a week, taking some 30 min of my bus journey to office and back and sometime reading at home before dinner. I had expected it to be laced with high flying management gyaan and Robin's self-praising super skills, a foreign setting and lots of moronic acts, I have got them all. You may not proudly place it on your book shelf and wait to show off to your would be 12 year old kid to be a classic and full of worldly values and yet chances are so, he would pick it up someday and that will be the day he would find you a cool dad!

One criticism of the book could be the underdeveloped characters of Gouri, any close friends and yes Valentia. How could we forget her, Sidin has got his best lines for her. I can guess we all would get a sweet little spot for the hapless office-girl. One thing to look forward to would be to come out of the dairy entries like thing and stop saying he always wanted to invent twitter. The white tiger reference should end.

Still, happy I picked it.

Jagannath.

Few points on Flipkart- Prompt delivery, did not face any issue, neat packaging. Thanks FLipkart

Book- I always liked Sidins work, right from his blogging days, to his first book and also tweets. So it was kind of disappointing for me to see few negative reviews on his second book. But all these were blessing in disguise because i just loved the book. To be honest Sidin is one of the very few Indian authors who would be able to make you ROFL (literally). He has very strange sense of humor and might not be liked by all. The way he portrays his work environment, interactions among resources are over the top and highly exagerrated but still makes you smile. Its kind of a guilty pleasure, like watching karan johar movies. (Sorry Sidin :D ) You know its total nonsense but still end up liking them. I would certainly give 5/5 for this book and it is definately not a disappointment for me.

The last time I laughed so much when reading a book was when I was reading PG Wodehouse, many years back. Sidin has the same type of wit.This book is better than Sidin's first book. A must read for all book lovers, especially if you had ever read/liked PG. Sidin makes fun of the modern day MBAs and their jargon, neatly. And intersperses the text with dashes of clean humour, PG style.

What starts as a good humored funny story turns to an overstretched novel. You can't help loving the Hero i.e Robin 'Einstein' Varghese till later in the book when he becomes simply annoying. Character development is non existent which could be due to the reason that its a sequel. This, however, is no reason since there will be many readers out there for whom this will be the first Dork book they read. There is no point referring to incidents that happened in first book and that don't help the story. All in all, read it if you can finish it one sitting. Not worth it if you have to pick it up on second day to finish it.