A Breath of Fresh Air Coalescing Romance, Suspense, and Sci-Fi, with a dash of non-Toxic Feminism

“…Gupta shifts gears effectively and an everyday run-of-the-mill campus tale becomes a convoluted web of mind games, deceit, ambitions, and survival.”

Create a Conducive World for your Characters. Period!

“It's the job of a manager not to light the fire of motivation, but to create an environment to let each person's personal spark of motivation blaze,” declared Frederick Herzberg, American psychologist, and arguably, the most influential names in the field of HR studies dealing with motivation.

Those of us who find academic quotations a tad too… well… academic can understand the above counsel in the simple, direct, and far sharper (sarcastically so!) words of one Mr. Chandler Bing:

“What I do do…<suppresses an acerbic chuckle>… is manage to uh, create an atmosphere of support for the people working with me.”

How is it relevant for writers, readers, and books?

It’s germane <yes, yes, a thesaurus has been used in this review!> because what a manager is supposed to do with her workforce, a writer would do well to do the same to her workforce… her characters. In other words, a writer is supposed to create a (fictional) world for her characters that’s so conducive to her intended narrative that the characters take to it like ducks to water. Everything else – the storyline, the backstories, the character build-up, the twists, the language – they are all just tools to achieve this singular objective.

And, this reviewer is delighted to say that on the aforementioned litmus test, Inside Out hits far, far more (and far more accurately) than it misses. As a novelist, Ms. Dolon Gupta, has been successful in creating a conducive environment for her characters so that they take her narrative forward as their own, WITH great panache, and WITHOUT sticking out like sore thumbs.

On this note, let’s take a look the traditional review parameters on which stories are evaluated.

Story

Inside Out takes us on a journey that alternates between college campuses and upper middle class urban households (one can argue if they are borderline rich though).

A levelheaded but headstrong collegegoer with a loving nuclear family is going about her life, minding her own business, aiming to make a career. Like most college students, she has emotions, friendships, some of them falling in the proverbial grey area of being romantic interests. Just when everything is hunky dory, sort of banal, one might add, there enters a cutting-edge prototype gadget that is ethically questionable, and potentially life-altering. The contraption claims to make its owner something of an अंतर्यामी.

This is where Gupta shifts gears effectively and an everyday run-of-the-mill campus tale becomes a convoluted web of mind games, deceit, ambitions, and survival.

Will the innate resolve of a fine student pass the tests of धर्म-संकट (the moral/ethical dilemmas) her newfound powers throw at her? Or will the young hormones, pumped up on the omniscient might, succumb to the intoxicating taste of ‘playing God’?

Well…read the book to find out!

Overall, the plot is fresh.

A tale that touches the lives of relatable, everyday city-dwellers, their struggles, emotions, hits and misses, disgruntlements… while in the background, the city of Mumbai keeps… running, as is famously said about the financial capital.

Readers are sure to find themselves identifying with several aspects of the story. The Sci-Fi angle to explore the ethical frailties of human mind is a potent plot device that successfully takes readers to the edge of “Will she/Won’t she?” through several major and minor marker-events.

As it is a work of fiction, it would be unfair on readers’ part to expect a story that completely mirrors reality. Hardcore realists may be at times find events that do not exactly mirror their version of reality. However, the explanation to that, as has been said before, is that it is a work of fiction.

The author describes the details (the surroundings, sounds, smells etc.) when she can, and builds pace when she needs to. As a result, the flow is even.

Given the freshness in the plot, the judicious mix of genres (romance, Sci-Fi, suspense), the intelligent leveraging of plot devices, Inside Out gets a solid 4/5 in terms of story.

Characters

If your farmland is perfectly ploughed and well weeded, the crops usually come to life seamlessly. Gupta has brought her characters to life exactly like that. She gives them a conducive environment, to go back to our original litmus test, and they do the rest organically. Rarely do you find their actions out of-place, or their emotions too unexpected, because their descriptions and backstories have established sufficient ground for their upcoming actions and emotions.

A couple of chapters into the book, and a reader can tell that Inside Out has strong female characters. However, that’s NOT the real hallmark of the book. In this reviewer’s opinion, the more tangible triumph of this gripping tale is the naturally crafted female characters whose strength is empowered by their own accomplishments. They are not propelled by the forced diminishing of their male counterparts, an easy-to-use, but toxic phenomenon, conveniently hailed as a panacea for equality, and stuffed down the readers’ throats in some quarters of the so-called feminist literature, written exclusively for women and necessarily by women. For the record, that, too, is a gallon of codswallop. If being someone were necessary to tell their tale, then James Cameron would be a ship captain, and Bigelow would head a bomb defusal squad before making The Hurt Locker. To come back to Inside Out, another reason ‘a breath of fresh air’ fits this book aptly is because its rationally developed strong female characters do not indulge in male bashing.

Hardcore realists may probably find the abundance of women characters slightly unreal. However, there are two arguments against this observation. First, it is a work of fiction and the author is दृष्टा, as well as सृष्टा. As such, she has full liberty to create the world as she deems fit. Second, and a finer explanation to this apparent anomaly is that the real world may not reflect the novel’s character-configuration in some cases, but in some others, it may. There may very well exist an evenly keeled-but-headstrong college girl, with a homemaker-cum-businessowner of a mother, finally juxtaposed against a successful CEO of a startup (an older version of the protagonist herself perhaps) in climax. Inside Out is a story of that scenario.

The scenes describing ‘landmarks’ of Mumbai (e.g. local train, Bandra Bandstand, National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA)) develop Mumbai itself as a character in the novel. Hence, readers are likely to joyously revel at these ‘Mumbai moments’ with an approving, “Hey, I have been there! It’s exactly like that!” For that matter, if the story were unravelling in another metro, I am sure the author would have described that with equal finesse.

Talking about cities, Inside Out is a story of India’s cities, its metros in particular. This appears a carefully thought-out conscious choice on the author’s part, and if you do not find rustic India in the novel, that cannot be held against it.

For the lifelike characters that emote efficiently, identify closely, and speak readers’ minds, on this metric, Inside Out gets the maximum score of 4.5/5.

Language, Style

That Inside Out is not Ms. Dolon Gupta’s first brush with long pieces of text is not only evident from her novel, but also from her non-fictional, academic texts that Google throws up should one look her name up. Perhaps, in terms of language, the novel is a lesser challenge for a writer well versed with academic texts. This is the strength of Inside Out, for the most part. The characters speak in line with their age-group, their social surroundings, their emotional build-up.

So, when we read a scene set in a college campus, the language adapts well. When we switch to a boardroom, the language updates automatically. For that matter, ‘setting a scene’ and ‘switching scenes’ are two skills that the author really aces, despite this being her first major work. There are times – however few – when the language tends to be a bit academic. Some of such scenes are explainable by the fact that they are set in a class of English literature. I don’t think the language becomes more academic than that! Some dialogues could have been punchier. That’s where this reviewer feels that the language, despite being suave, carries less retentive character.

In terms of style, wherever the author uses jargons, or domain-specific words, they are accompanied by sufficient exposition. Sentences are not too long for the most part, and the voice is suited to the narrative. Flashback has been used effectively and ‘time markers’ leave no room for confusion when we move across timelines. Puns, idiomatic expressions, and devices of irony have been leveraged effectively.

On this parameter, Inside Out scores a good 4/5 again.

Overall (4/5)

A potpourri of romance and suspense, with the science fiction paying the icing, makes the novel a riveting read. Additionally, the swift pace renders Inside Out a quick, easy and engrossing narrative. Read it to find out how everyday characters (you, your family members, or your social acquaintances) become unwittingly special when an omniscient power makes them virtually omnipotent.

Does their nice exterior remain but a façade? Does the most powerful weapon on earth – the human mind – turn their character Inside out?

Click here to buy the book.

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Writer can be reached on Instagram at @story.worldz