I thought that at least the romance might be mildly interesting, but it is mostly laced with heavy-breathing sexuality, with the image of a boy from Bihar ruining a perfectly platonic friendship the only takeaway from the book. The prose is flat and caricaturist in nature. While one understands why Bhagat couldn’t have used Hindi for the narrative, he makes his characters sound like men and women from American films about Indians. And while I wished that I could make a case for reading this book, if only for the sake of a greater debate between the canon and those outside it, it would be an injustice to the delightful popular literature I’ve read and has found space in my memory and my bookshelf.