Sunil Sethi: The real life of a geek from Noida

AL FRESCO

The sub-text of Hari Kunzru's new novel Transmission, a contemporary comedy of manners, is information and digital technology and how it has the power to change the lives of Indians speeding on the global highway.

What happens to young Arjun Mehta, the geek from Noida, plucked out of the blue and transported to a software firm in California, is really a result of his absorption in the world of downloading words and images, networking and emailing and shoving CD-ROMs in and out of computers: "Hungry for more computer time, he would beg or steal it where he could: libraries, college labs, the houses of richer or luckier school friends."

The computer is, in fact, the novel's real hero or villain, depending on how you consider the cultural clashes posed: notions of identity or fantasy, collisions of trans-continental reality or inter-generational conflict. Not a bad idea, but how credible is it really ?

Not particularly as you might expect from a Brit of Indian origin (Kunzru's father, a Kashmiri doctor met his mother, who's British, in a London hospital and the novelist was born and brought up in England) whose impressions of Indian life seem at best cursory.

Each time Arjun Mehta's computer flickered to life to reveal a slew of emails or a burst of Internet delights in Transmission I grew more irritated. Why was it, I wondered, that despite paying regular sums of money to three separate servers, all I generally end up getting is a placard announcing words to the effect of "No Connection Available".

Even in fiction, there is something to be said for verisimilitude, a word that means truth-like. One of the few occasions there is a flash of it in Kunzru's IT-driven novel is when a Bollywood star's rich-bitch mother complains: "Arre! When you make a complaint all they will say is this down, that and the other is down. Shocking how we all rely on computers. Really." At which her daughter, an Aishwarya Rai-type stereotype called Leela Zahir squeals: "Oh, Mummy."

In fact, the problem with Kunzru's novel is that like so much recent fiction set in urban India it is adolescent rather than adult. It is neither funny enough about commonplace Indian life nor tough enough about its comic aspects.

Arjun Mehta is in for a ride so ridiculously far-fetched, from fiddling about in Silicon Valley to being sleepless from getting laid in Seattle, that I kept pondering the fate of the 23-year-olds left behind in Noida.

About the brightest moment in the daily lives of Noida's geeks must be crossing the DND flyover. The reality is crushingly dull, spent mostly at work or in filling up passport forms, queuing up outside foreign embassies for visas, negotiating car and home loans, punctuated with occasional visits to restro-bars and multiplexes (where they forget to switch off their cell phones).

Unlike Arjun Mehta, I doubt if random job interviews land them instantly to America or their Internet connections work at lightening speed or they spend their evenings haggling over soft-porn in DVD parlours.

Most regular lives are quite ordinary. Surely the whole point of a fiction-writer's art is to make them credible and incredible at the same time ? Think how mundane characters and everyday situations are made memorable in classics by Jane Austen or Tolstoy, how a mood is developed by Salman Rushdie or a setting created by Vikram Seth.

A few days ago I watched a new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. Sensing that it didn't ring true, I picked up the book again. Re-reading it I saw why no film version "" there have so been many "" can hope to capture the intensity and drama of Emily Bronte's tale of a wild consuming passion.

It boils down to the power of words and it is true of the best of escapist comic fiction. I regard P G Wodehouse as one of life's great restoratives; my recommended cure for headaches or flu are unbeatable comic masterpieces by J D Salinger and James Thurber; it never ceases to amaze me how swiftly and credulously Thurber fuses fantasy and comic observation in his famous short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". What's more he puts in some zippy, high-powered machines too.

Hari Kunzru's novel about the adventures of a wired up Indian doesn't work because Arjun Mehta is too much of a silly ass to be made in Noida. Besides, who told Kunzru that it was so easy to log on in India ?