The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

Author: Siddarth Dhanvant Sanghvi
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Zone : Trying too hard

This book was clearly was written to sell, beginning with the provocative cover with Meghna Reddy.

The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay puts together some big scandals(Jessica Lal, Salman Khan running over people etc.,), of the last 2 decades and makes one story of them.There is no hiding the fact that there is no orginality. Only the names are changed to weave the story around the characters. That makes it nothing more than a clever MBA project.

You have to be patient with this book. It suffers from some of the many problems of books written nowadays- over setting the context, too many issues, inconsistent characterisation, really bad one liners - "Character building is too much work","Mumbai is about as appealing a name for a city as Gonorrhoea."

Inspite of the above the book really grabs your interest with its sensitivity and pace.The places where it works are when the reader is allowed to to use her own brains. The characters belong to a class of people that I have never met, but seem strangely familiar. The good ones are - Rhea who is married to her childhood sweetheart who she loves but is tired of it all, Samar the brilliant pianist who gives up his career but we never know why.

Not bad.