Amitabha Bagchi’s Above Average, is a coming of age book that describes in meticulous details the sights, sounds, taste, and confusion of growing up in a hostel of a competitive university.
Arindam Chatterjee is a middle-class Delhi boy with an aptitude for science and maths but the yearning to be the drummer of a rock band. Both of which necessitate his admission to the premier engineering college of India, the IIT, where life revolves as much around proving rarefied mathematical truths as it does chasing the elusive high of rock stardom at the IIT Rock Fest … Lyrical, spare, and charmingly self-deprecatory Amitabha Bagchi’s debut novel is a deeply funny account of growing up intelligent, sensitive, ambitious, and confused.
This book is not for the average Chetan Bhagat fans- who like a good mix of drama, sex, fight and cheap thrills. This is a book for above average readers or more serious readers, the ones that like bookers, etc.I always doubted the mass market would appreciate this book. The getting into IIT, the rock band,insults from the professor on how average the class was, PhD application recommendations, experience at Johns Hopkins University as a PhD student, the peer group comparisons and the inferiority complex – every bit is as true as a sensitive soul could feel.
