Serious Men - by Manu Joseph

It's a clean and transparent plot - Ayyan Mani works in the institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as a personal assistant to the director Arvind Acharya. While the latter boasts of a stellar career in research and a zealous search for the ultimate truth, the former lives in a chawl and has only one aim - to make the lives of his wife and son a bit better and more out-of-the-ordinary than it actually is. Acharya's arch rival in the Institute is his friend from schooldays Nambudri and his gang of radio astronomers. Portrayed as "lesser" scientists this gang is more easily led by fashionable research than the Director Acharya and this often creates friction between them in matters of funding and space. Into this equilibrating stream arrives turbulence in the form of the beautiful Oparna Goshmaulik, who comes to collaborate with Acharya on his pet project - looking for microbes from outer space.

(Well naturally when I describe Oparna as turbulence I am only stating the way she is projected in the novel and this has no inputs from me personally)

The mesh of interactions between Ayyan, Acharya and Oparna form the basis of the story of Serious Men.
The novel is extremely well written, excellently easy to read and flows fast and has a clarity of writing that many a writer would envy. There are also some points where I tend to feel more sensitivity would have made it a work of art instead of a commodity. Since the novel's already a big hit there's no danger in me stating reasons for saying that here -
Ayyan Mani's portrayal as a Dalit and Oparna's fatal attraction to Acharya have a plastic and forced quality about them - they are seen plainly to be the devices that were put in to make the plot work. Similarly, the shallowness of the experiment that Acharya is all so fired up about strikes a discordant chord. This too appears too deliberate - why microbes, why not neutrinos? It's very fishy.

Manu Joseph's defence for writing about a dalit in negative terms is that he has broken a barrier, an elitist mindset towards viewing the Dalit with compassion... buried into this defence itself is a monolithic image of Dalits that I really object to. Besides all this, making him a cunning man who eavesdrops on his bosses calls (he goes to ingenious lengths to do so, which is where the science fiction really works) and steals quiz papers and does all kinds of underhand things in the novel...Not to mention the way he speaks of women in general and brahmin women in particular.

There's much more one can say, about the absence of anyone except Tamils Bengalis and Malayalees in the institute etc but it's better to read the novel and decide for yourself...