Above Average

Arindam Chatterjee floats from the middle-class security of his home in East Delhi to the fiercely competitive world of the Indian Institute of Technology and onward to the East Coast of the US. He encounters rock musicians and coaching-class nerds, mathematical geniuses and mountaineers, ill-fated underachievers pursuing big dreams and overachievers who are never satisfied. On his journey he begins to realize that his life is a confused tangle of ambitions and aspirations, some attainable, some not and some hanging tantalizingly in between. Imbued with a gentle humour, and lauded for its honesty and lucid prose, Amitabha Bagchi's bestselling debut novel is a story of adulthood being forged out of adolescence; a story about wanting, always wanting, without necessarily knowing why you want.