He has a fine flair for comedy and he rightly excels in that craft. The forte even trickles into his style and content to rustle up a unique recipe of success.
Wisecracks, tongue-in-cheek humour and in-your-face honesty are the key ingredients to qualify Anuvab Pal as an interesting writer. With a slew of successful plays, two films and two novels tucked under his belt, Pal’s diverse streaks are obvious in his trade.
Call his pen a versatile weapon and he responds with a timid, humble smile to accept the praise. But the vantage point which he scores with elan is his stand-up stage acts. Add to this, his passionate pursuits of screenwriting and scripting of plays, respectively. Pal knows how to brandish his pen with an emphatic power.
Recently, his book, 1888 Dial India, a searing satire that captures the pulse of corporate India, has hit the stands of bookstores all over. Youthful in spirit and sassy in feel, the premise of the novel certainly caters to the emerging Indian minds, touching upon a slew of coherent contemporary issues.
The trigger that worked for 1888 Dial India to spur an impactful storyline is of course, the fiscal downslide happened in the West.
“That disturbance further snowballed into several insolvencies, shutting up lucrative shops, winding of brisk businesses and sadly enough, jacking up the annual suicidal rate. In fact, many desi boys folded up their files to return to their native roots with empty hands and pockets only to look for greener pastures on the homeland after their dream-balloons got badly damaged and deflated,” says the writer.
For the uninitiated, the idea braided into the book’s plot lucidly documents the dreams of a corporate India through the politically incorrect words uttered by its antihero Arun Gupta, who is a loud-mouthed, Punjabi entrepreneur. Portrayed as an industrialist, lothario, Aramis cologne-user and an evangelist of new India’s new dreams, Gupta is seen as a man of many tricks up his sleeve.
Quite a go-getter of sorts, this man with an ingenious brain sees a glimmer of an ambitious business plan stem out of a big, fat American crisis — precisely the recession blues. He wants to save lives from the gut of a demonic depression and just do it sitting right inside his extravagant Navi Mumbai office. His enterprising idea is simple.
If everything can be outsourced to India, then why not an effective magic pill rescue a multitude of American lives? 2009 was the year of the slump and America is still in the grip of severe economic hardships and unemployment. The only numbers that are on the rise is the dreadful suicide rate.
Harping on this note, the book comes as a sweltering satire, promising to arrest the exact pulse of a corporate India. Today’s readers are already lapping up the corporate culture. It’s a no-brainer that the subject will be an instant hit with the Gen-Y bizkids as some of the characters and the given situations developed through the tale truly resonate their own realities.
An acclaimed playwright and a scriptwriter in his own right, Pal loves to work at his own pace within a niche circle of patrons and spectators. His screenplays include the award-winning movie, The Loins of Punjab and The President is Coming.
Having been staged at numerous festivals, his dramas include Chaos Theory, Fatwa, Paris and Life, Love and EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation). Incidentally, he has also held his pen for acclaimed sitcoms like Frazier and Law and Order.
