You Are Here

I can't believe someone can write such a dumb book and get it published it as well.

The story goes on and on and on rambling endlessly about a stupid, alcoholic ever smoking woman in pursuit boyfriends and it also talks about her brainless friends who are so rich, ready to go skinny dipping and booze all their time away. Oh, btw,she also works as a PR executive with a bitchy fat boss.

I think ,a more appropriate name for this book would be 'I am stuck" or 'This story is goes nowhere'

Is there nothing else to write about in this world or about India or about women other than sex and alcohol and sesationalizing the 'new found liberation' of women?

The publisher could have done one favor to this world and saved the trees cut to make this book.

Picked up this book recently called 'You Are Here' by a self proclaimed 'compulsive confessor' Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy. Tried to pull through 105 pages with the hope that maybe..just maybe the story will start from the next page...with every flip of the page my ray of hope became fainter. Alas! dramatic as I may sound the book has absolutely no story. The story is about a hapless girl Arshi who is urban, chic, with just the hint of sophistication but actually comes across as crude and a desperate wannabe. I just have one question. Is being an independent working girl all about the number of cigarettes one smokes in a day? or the number of boyfriends one has? or about the number of vodkas you wolf down every evening? There is no plot absolutely. The ramblings of her mind have been penned down and they boil down to more or less the same thing in every page. For those who would really like to listen to some funny ramblings of a single woman then Bridget Jones' Diary is my recommendation. Please do not waste your precious bucks on this trash. Please

This book is garbage. I repeat, garbage. There is not a storyline per se, except you get to hear a continuous monologue of a whiny, obviously confused, entitled, and horribly stupid 25 year old woman (probable going on 16 by the looks of it, not 25-something). All this book talks of is the drunken sexual escapades which aren't justified at all as I said before, there is NO STORYLINE! By the looks of it, its just a printed tangible version of Miss Reddy's blog; one post taken from here and another post copied and pasted from somewhere else from her blogroll, put in a bit of male-bashing, invent sketchy situations and hollow characters and voila! She now calls herself an author. What shame!

Truth to be told, I really could not go beyond first 50 pages of this book...probably the only book in my life that I did not even read half of because it was so pathetic. The language, Oh Gosh. Miss Reddy has apparently majored in English from St. Stephen's, Delhi and now I am seriously wondering if this book has been written really by her or her 16 year old niece?

As far as people calling it a story of liberated Indian heart, go fish. The main character of Aarshi is not liberated, she is a confused brat who does things on impulse without using her own brain (Madhawan Reddy seems to have a thing for inventing pea-brained characters in this book).

@Deepa , Your anger drips all over your review :)

I put the book down after reading the first 2 chapters.

But anyways owing to the money I spent on the book, I think I will complete it some day :)

But definitely not recommending this book to anyone.

But of course if you are a fan of her blog, or any other blog of women of such genre, you might as well enjoy the book. Can't even give it a tag of 'chik-lit', I guess.

I got bored of it.

Thanks

I must say I'm pretty shocked by the kind of reviews that have been posted here. Sure the book is no Pulitzer-winner, but I don't think it deserves such venom. I had plenty of problems with the book myself -- there was no absolutely no plot, there was too much rambling, language could have been crisper, and so on. It read like an insanely long blog post, so in essence, I do agree with some of the negative comments. But what I disagree with the pretentiousness bit. I picked up the book BECAUSE I wanted to read something light at that point of time. The blurb TELLS you that it's a book about a single twenty-something-year-old living in a big city. What kind of deep insights were you expecting anyway?
I could personally relate to a lot of stuff in the book. Our country is made up of different realities. The author lives in a reality made up of cigarettes and vodka-and-sprite and a huge existential crisis, LIKE A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE. She doesn't fool you into believing that she's writing about a different reality, where girl children are murdered as soon as they are born. Of course there are plenty of issues that need to be addressed and written about, but it's also important for the writer to be acquainted with those issues. Madhavan has decided that she wants to use her skills to write about urban life as she sees it. All she lacks is polish (though her blog says otherwise) and a ruthless editor.