Latest news with #ShreyasRajagopal
Hindustan Times
2 days 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
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
