Latest news with #Gunboy
Hindustan Times
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Book review: Shreyas Rajagopal's Gunboy is a revenge saga soaked in style, swagger, and schoolyard bruises
Right from the word go, Gunboy fires off from all cylinders. It's a bullet-laced bildungsroman tangled in a gun-slinging revenge drama. It's a tale that knows exactly what it wants to be. It's fast, familiar, and never pretends otherwise. The cover of Shreyas Rajagopal's second novel Gunboy Set in Maharashtra's Rannwara, we meet Arvind and Sudipto, two schoolboys — one scraping by, one rich — both bruised by the same schoolyard tyrant, Jaggi. Their days are stitched together with fear, until the infamous hitman Amar Singh drifts into town with a stash of guns and the swagger of a Hindi crime classic. And that's when they meet Gun. Not a gun. The Gun — gleaming white, gold-dipped, and blessed by Lord Hanuman himself. Until this point, the novel gives you a tender, observant peek into the kind of childhood pain that adults dismiss, but for the children never really disappears. But then, the tempo shifts and the prose tightens. The story steps into the now-familiar visual territory of a streaming thriller. You might imagine the alternating POVs of Manoj Bajpayee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui of Gangs of Wasseypur playing these characters. It could be a coincidence, or maybe it's the echo chamber of every OTT screen we've been glued to for the last five years. But let's be clear: just because it feels familiar doesn't mean it's forgettable. Author Shreyas Rajagopal, in his second fictional outing, knows how to build style. The action is crisp and the pace is addictive. There's a mythology-tinted mystery around the Gun that keeps the intrigue burning. This willingness to blend myth, memory, and machismo in the same breath is what makes it interesting. The Gun itself is treated less as a weapon and more as a relic, complete with the ethereal calibre of a talisman that has been blessed by the gods. This straddling of pulp stylisation and spiritual symbolism injects a surreal charge into an otherwise grounded tale. That is a gamble, since those expecting gritty realism may find the mystical charge going against this world of Maharashtra's street politics. But it does deepen the novel's folklore quality. By daring to place divine iconography in the crosshairs of a crime saga, this is not just about boys and bullets, but also about the myths we build as a people to survive violence of all natures. But where the book falters is in its (unsurprising) lack of female voices. There is only one female voice and POV — Srilekha — and she is barely given the space that she deserves, especially in a story this testosterone-heavy. Still, Gunboy doesn't try to be revolutionary. It wants to entertain and makes no promises it doesn't keep. You can flip through this read in a single sitting, be it on a flight, in bed, or during a lazy monsoon afternoon. Pick up a copy not to chase the new, but to enjoy the familiar done with flair. A good cliche is still a good story. Title: Gunboy Author: Shreyas Rajagopal Publisher: HarperCollins India Price: ₹499 For more, follow @
Scroll.in
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Atharva Pandit
'Gunboy': A Bombay underworld novel that falls a little short of the depth it demands This is Shreyas Rajagopal's debut novel. Atharva Pandit · 15 minutes ago 'The Hippo Girl': Each of these short stories has the potential to be a novel The characters in Shah Tazrian Ashrafi's stories are haunted by the history of Bangladesh, but it is not the only thing that defines them. Atharva Pandit · Mar 17, 2024 · 01:30 pm Fiction: Three sisters vanish on February 14, 2013. Six years later a journalist revisits the case An excerpt from 'Hurda', by Atharva Pandit. Atharva Pandit · Oct 30, 2023 · 05:30 pm
Mint
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Zarna Garg's memoir: The super-sad story of an immigrant comedian
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are a female American comedian of any standing, you must write a memoir. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have written best-selling ones, Mindy Kaling has written no fewer than three, and chances are every female comic you've heard of, from Ellen Degeneres to Hannah Gadsby, Caitlin Moran and Ali Wong, has had a memoir out. Obviously, at some point, someone in publishing decided that this was a bankable genre and guided by the spirit of the late, great Nora Ephron, went full steam ahead. I'm not complaining here; I've read Fey, Poehler and Kaling and they were all immensely satisfying. Beyond such cynical calculations, however, I think the reason comedy memoirs work is because all of us who consume comedy are seeking to answer one question: where does comedy come from? Male comedians observe people around them from a great height and find them absurd; female comedians examine the absurdity of their own lives with a microscope and turn the sad bits into funny bits. This is what Zarna Garg does with This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir, and she has so much material to work with. Those who have watched her standup routines might be already familiar with parts of this story: Garg grew up in an affluent, traditional, steeped-in-patriarchy business family in Mumbai as the youngest of four siblings in what we today call a 'blended family" (her mother was her father's second wife whom he married to look after his three older children). She was the pampered youngest till she was not—her mother died when she was 14 and her father immediately wanted to marry her off. Also read: 'Gunboy' review: A bloody good thriller set in the badlands of Maharashtra Garg ran away from home and couch-surfed for two years, drifting between relatives' and friends' homes till she gave up, returned to her father's house and agreed to get married. Then, a miraculous call from a US college allowed her to get away to her step-sister in Akron, Ohio and start life all over. In someone else's hands, this could have turned into a very different kind of memoir. Though Garg was a late bloomer, having started her comedy career less than a decade ago, she decided to mine her story for its comedic potential. All female comics need a narrative Garg with her daughter Zoya. (male comics? They can get by with disjointed jokes and stray observations) and Garg's became her transformation into an American woman. If our idea of NRI women is shaped by popular culture (and embarrassing videos of our NRI friends dressing up and dancing to Bollywood songs on every suitable and unsuitable occasion) as largely conventional people who did well in engineering college and work in IT while dealing with crushing cultural isolation, Garg defies the stereotype. Her story is full of dysfunction and uncertainty. This material works great on stage— Garg clearly knows how to land a joke and play the audience—but does it work well as a book? Well, broad generalisations about life in India tend to do better in a stand-up setting, whether it's something as banal as bathing out of a bucket because of water rationing or more readily come dy-friendly material, such as arranged marriages. Garg is 50 and it is difficult to accept when she says, in the book, that 'in India" everyone gets married in their teens or that it's unusual for chil dren to be inter ested in books and magazines, as she was. The parts of the book that are really riveting and bene fit from Garg's sharp observation skills are the account of her relationship with her husband and their harum-scarum wed ding, and then, later in the book, the story of how she became a writer and performer of comedy. Also read: The continuing stranglehold of Indian film censorship This section of the book—a quintessential American success story about an Indian housewife who becomes a stand-up sensation opening for the likes of Poehler and Fey—is not quite stage material, but works fantastically in this form. These are the bits comedy lovers will lap up—the kind of stuff watching five seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, about a 1950s housewife who becomes a standup comic, and Hacks, about a legendary female comedian's comeback, has primed us for. There's the story of how Garg's teen age daughter Zoya convinces her stay at-home mom to start working on comedy; the one about doing open-mic at a New York comedy club; and the details of finding her writing voice and winning a prestigious award for her first ever screenplay. What could be more American than the story of a woman who tries her hand at match making and ends up making fun of arranged marriages? And yet, her growing up years are where her comedy essentially comes from, I think. In fact, one does not work without the other—among the first jokes Garg ever wrote was 'I am an immigrant living in America. People often wonder if I have some sad, depressing backstory. And I do."
Mint
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
‘Gunboy' review: A bloody good thriller set in the badlands of Maharashtra
Shreyas Rajagopal, who published his first novel Saltwater (2014) under the moniker of Shrey, has emerged from a decade-long hibernation with his new book, Gunboy. And it's been worth the wait. Set in Rannwara, the badlands of Maharashtra, it is as close to The Gangs of Wasseypur as you will get on the page. Unfolding in the same breathtaking pace as Anurag Kashyap's 2012 duology, Gunboy is a feat of storytelling—its 400-odd pages fly by before you know it—and told with a flair that standard-fare action thrillers can rarely muster. As a hardened literary fiction reader, I didn't expect the novel to engross me as much as it did, especially with all the casual and calculated violence, blood and gore, splattered all over its pages—the book isn't for the faint-hearted or squeamish—but by the time I was done with it, it left me spent but also moved. A major part of the appeal behind the Gunboy is the craft and care with which Rajagopal builds the eponymous character, a skinny 12-year-old Tamilian boy called Arvind, who feels like a fish out of water in the suburban outpost where his father, an employee at the local steel factory, has been transferred. With his strange accent and broken Hindi, he is an outsider, rife for bullying in the hands of Jaggi Ranade, the spoilt brat of a powerful political leader. School is a waking nightmare of beatings and humiliation in the hands of Jaggi and his gang of senior boys, a reign of terror that inevitably ends in bloodshed. Arvind suffers along with his best friend, a Bengali boy called Sudipto formerly schooled in America, another outcast like him, whose best means of self-defence is to piss his pants when beaten and force the tormentor to abandon him in disgust. Plump and pampered Sudipto is the son of Arvind's father's boss, but in the real world, the social dynamics between the two are turned upside down despite the difference of class and standing. It is Arvind, tough as nails, who steers the soft-hearted Sudipto through the tortures inflicted on them by Jaggi, scheming ingenious plans of escape when all his terrified friend can see is sure death by torture. Into this world of schoolboy mafia war arrives Amar Singh, a sharpshooter on the run after a botched mission in Mumbai, with the long arm of the underworld in his pursuit. Amar is protected by 'the Gun," a mythical instrument of death that came into his possession when he was a few years older than Arvind. The weapon has saved him from certain death at least twice, but in Rannwara, it is lost in a scuffle and falls in Arvind's hand. Rajagopal fractures the narrative voices into many pieces, giving short and urgent episodic bursts to his long cast of characters. The propulsive force of his writing not only provides the thriller with the kick it needs but also, at times, make it feel like the early draft of a screenplay of a TV series or movie in the making. If the cinematic energy of Gunboy makes the novel a page turner, it is Rajagopal's gift for creating rounded and credible characters that keeps the reader's investment in the story high all through. Not everyone is given a solidly fleshed out back story, especially Amar Singh, whose transformation from a 16-year-old sidekick in the Mumbai underworld to one of its most feared snipers perhaps deserved more attention. But in the microcosm that is Rannwara, Arvind, Sudipto, Jaggi and their social circles are depicted with a piercing acuity. The genteel privilege of the Chatterjees (Sudipto's parents) is contrasted with the god-fearing, middle-class, IIT-worshipping Tamil household where Arvind grows up. Then there are the Ranades. The patriarch is past his heyday, bedridden but still obeyed like a deity, the mother of his three boys is dead, while his three musketeers are each of a kind: Om, the eldest, is cerebral and cunning, while the younger two, Jai and Jaggi, are hot-headed brutes, foolhardy, and lusting for blood at the slightest provocation. Thrown into this urban jungle inhabited by the ultra-civilised and ultra-barbaric, Arvind is an anomaly. Unlike his sister Srilekha, whose life's goal is to win her father's approval by qualifying for a seat at an IIT, he is a sharp kid who can already see patriarchal boorishness for what it is. As he labels his math teacher, Mr Ray, 'a vicious little man in a world of vicious little men." And yet, literally a little man in this dangerous world of grown-ups, Arvind finds himself radically changed, or rather released from the shell in which he had hidden his true self, after his chance encounter with Amar Singh. Gunboy remains mesmerising because it gives the reader a ringside view into revenge as seen by a 12-year-old male child. Srilekha, who is also betrayed in other ways than Arvind, is held back by an innately gendered sense of duty, even love, until the very end. At 16, she too is a child, but one who has the demon of patriarchy breathing down her neck, punishing her for 'crimes" that are part of every pubescent youth's coming of age. Arvind isn't forgiven or protected by his misdeeds either. He has other crosses to bear, such as being born a male child in a society where, people, meaning mostly men, 'protest violence with violence and will be put down with violence." In Rannwara, especially, violence is 'the language of the state, the language of its people." Even at home, almost all of Arvind's communication with his Appa is through the language of violence—beatings, verbal abuse, constant heckling. If it puts things in perspective, the story is set in the 1990s, where punitive parenting was the norm, not that it has been eradicated fully still. But Rajagopal gives us a chilling sense of what it was—indeed, still is—for a generation, and class, of children growing up in a country, where histories of violence are handed down like heirlooms. It makes the reader question all the welfarist narratives of India Shining out there, when in the big, bad world, there are gunboys like Arvind running amok, making headlines for crimes too shocking for words, as they grow up into men like Amar Singh.
Indian Express
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Shreyas Rajagopal's Gunboy is a disappointing cliche
Speculations about the Next Big Thing and jokes about bestsellers subsidising the non-sellers run rampant at literary parties and sighs are expended and heads shaken about the sad state of modern-day publishing before the evening's sorrows are forgotten in drink. Festivals are populated by the same figures every year, where the serious and literary have to settle for wispy audiences while social media stars (or, lately, bored celebrities discovering the art of the novel) draw armies. It's no secret that people are reading less books than ever before in a media environment saturated by the Image and the novels that people are reading tend to be test-runs for TV/film adaptation, with only enough philosophical and political content to go down easy after dinner. Gunboy by Shreyas Rajagopal is guilty on both counts. It's the story of two boys who are often bullied at school and get a chance at retribution when a gangster comes into town with a hoard of fancy guns. Genre fiction did not use to be this bad. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the gangster admiring, cleaning and reassembling his guns because, ostensibly, the author needed to let readers know that this here is a guy who really likes guns, is really lethal and — spoiler warning — is not afraid to kill. Sample this line: '(This gun) is a cold thing, a thing of death and astounding accuracy.' This chapter does a good job of summarising the book's problem. The truism 'show, don't tell' holds as true here as it does in most prose but it bears qualification: the reason this advice is given to novice writers is that it mimics the momentum of movies and TV, where you only 'see' images and you don't 'hear' thoughts, so it's easier to suck a reader into the prose by substituting circuitous thoughts with concrete images, which easily linger in the mind. But there's another perk — it's a shortcut to trusting the reader's intelligence, something most novice writers struggle with. Gunboy has plenty of passages with cliched phrases like 'this weight is his own' and 'the pressure building inside him explodes' which say… nothing. What would have worked infinitely more is to just describe the action and move on. Sometimes we don't need commentary about a character's motivations and goals. Actions speak louder than words. To paying readers, buy better books. To aspiring writers, write better ones
