An eccentric tale of a man who has been everywhere and done everything he shouldn’t.
Picture this: Nikhil Arya, a student of MIT, goes on holiday to Colombia to celebrate his graduation; next he is tortured in Cambodia; manages to reach Thailand, where he becomes a monk; finds himself in Brazil in the employ of a drug lord; marries a supermodel; becomes a dotcom entrepreneur in the USA; and ends up in India as a player in an Indian version of Russian roulette. Phew!
Arya is the star of Karan Bajaj’s new book, Johnny Gone Down. His story is not unlike that of Forrest Gump, in the eponymous novel by Winston Groom which inspired the famous movie. There too the protagonist finds himself time and again in the middle of something big (the Vietnam war, Reverend King’s “I have a dream” speech, the Watergate break-in, and so on). When asked, Bajaj readily admits that Groom’s book has had a lasting impression on him.
Bajaj has a corporate job as a brand manager at Kraft Foods in the USA, from which he took a year’s sabbatical to go backpacking around the world. Out of that trip came Johnny Gone Down. “During my journeys," says the 32-year-old IIM alumnus, “I stayed at hostels and interacted with different types of people. A lot of my travel experiences have gone into [my book].”
Johnny is Bajaj’s second novel. His first, Keep off the Grass (2008), was one of the ‘campus books’ which sprang up after Chetan Bhagat’s great success with Five Point Someone (2004). Bajaj says with admirable frankness that he knew there was significant scope for improvement when he started writing his second book. Language apart, “Keep off the Grass was more ‘relatable’, while Johnny is not a character you would have met. Still, a lot of readers will connect with the ordeal he goes through.”
Though that seems improbable, readers have connected. According to Bajaj’s publishers HarperCollins India, 45,000 copies were sold in the first week after the release. Johnny is a bestseller.
“I have tried my best to make the book a pacy and easy read for the readers,” the author says. With its unlikely plot, action and far-flung locales, the book works like a thriller movie — logically weak but able to grab and keep the attention. However, there is another advantage which Bajaj can claim: Johnny, though hardly literary, is well written by the standards of its genre. Like any novel should, it works on the reader by how it is told as well as by what is told.
Many of Bajaj’s peers among Indian authors of ‘light reads’ appear to be influenced by Bollywood’s taste for books that can easily be turned into movies. While reading their books, the reader might be forgiven for thinking he or she is skimming a screenplay. “I can’t speak for others but that never has been my intention,” Bajaj says. Given a choice, he adds, he would pick the book being read by more people over a film deal.
Apart from the travel, part of the work that went into this book was reading and observation. Bajaj says he read a lot about political unrest in Cambodia, life in the favelas (slums) of Brazil and so on, and tried to incorporate what he learnt in his book. Yet he seems to have neglected his characters. Other than the protagonist, Nikhil Arya aka Johnny, the other characters are not well fleshed-out — even important ones like the drug lord for whom Arya works in Brazil, or the Buddhist monk who takes him under his tutelage in a Thai monastery.
Perhaps because Bajaj wants to give his protagonist so many situations and experiences, he overloads Arya’s character. Arya is a martial arts expert, learns computer languages in a few days, creates a software along the lines of Secondlife.com, and so on, and yet he does not want money or any of life’s other pleasures. The portions where Arya becomes an IT entrepreneur and a bit of a delusionary are quite over the top. Very soon the reader realises that the story is essentially predictable; Arya may commit stupid mistakes, but he will always emerge the hero.
But Bajaj is happy with his book. “No matter what they say this time, I know I’ve written a pretty good novel. :)” he says on his website. And he is delighted with the response Johnny has received. “I haven’t given it a thought as of now,” he says about a third novel. “I can choose what I want to write and not fall into the trap of what is the flavour of the season in the publishing industry,” Bajaj says. His first book veered very close to that trap, but his second is nowhere near it.