Serious Men Paperback – 17 Feb. 2011

The British scientist C.P. Snow lamented the divide in the society between science and humanities and hoped for a third culture which would be an amalgamation of the above two to solve the world's problems.Manu Joseph would be a perfect representative for that third culture. He has presented interesting scientific questions in a page turning yet sometimes improbable plot peppered with an unique sense of humour that can come only from being a keen observer of human nature.A very entertaining and aesthetically pleasing read.

Took me a long time to get into it. Not as great as ' Illicit Happiness'.

At the center of this funny story are two men working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, India. But the place of work of perhaps is the only thing that unites them.Ayyan Mani is a representative of the lowest caste. Janitor's son, Mani began working at the Institute as a courier, rising to the position of secretary to one of the most important researchers of the Institute Arvind Acharya. Mani, after ten years of marriage, became tired of his silly wife and half-starved existence. His wife no longer seems attractive; the future does not seem bright. Not being the holder of outstanding intelligence, Mani nevertheless has the ability to intrigue. Every day, Mani places on the stand at the Institute fictitious quotes, allegedly belonging to an outstanding scientist or thinker, but in fact he makes these statements up. The only way to rise from the bottom Mani sees in his clever son. But just cleverness alone is not enough, you need something more. Deaf in one ear, Adi is presented by his father as a mathematical genius.Eccentric people inhabit this somewhat eccentric story. «Serious Men» can be easily mistaken for satire, but it is rather humorous novel. Satirical allusions to the structure of Indian society, Indian science and Indian religion then are withdrawn dashed, and the humor here, perhaps, is even English.All the troubles come from women - about this with a smirk on his face Manu Joseph is trying to tell us. Indeed, the plot is moved with this premise. This is the same engine of the ridiculous here. The two main characters are tormented by vanishing love in them. They're both tired of their wives, available lovely creatures with whom they had once felt good, and now somehow uncomfortable. Both the secretary and the scientist, excel, as they can, just to pull themselves out of the swamp, to refresh their covered with cobwebs existence. Mani sets up to the scam involving his son to shake his wife, to prove to her that even the lower castes can achieve something. Acharya is looking for bodily pleasures, and finds them in a lovely young colleague. But the scientist forgets that science and feelings are different matter, and they require a different approach. At the beginning of the novel there are a few funny scenes where Acharya looks in the mirror at his body, starts to use deodorant, though he already seems to have given up on his looks long ago.The story would be lost in the background of similar ones, if the action occurred in Britain, for example, not in India. Exotic colors entourage battered story in a new way. The people there have a different mentality, different views on life, different values. The mere fact that India has the Institute for the search of extraterrestrial life, is laughable.Joseph is verbose, but he does have a sense of the word. He can equally good describe the poor neighborhood and the meeting of the Disciplinary Commission. This is a leisure reading, but because, after all, it is not a thriller.Serious Men does not discover new lands, but tells a story that could suck you in and make you laugh.

I have been hearing about this book for some time now and I am so glad I finally got down to reading it. It is one of the funniest books I have read but it is not funny in a flippant way. There is something about it that still lingers in me. In the beginning I could not make up my mind about whether I liked Ayyan Mani, the cunning anti-hero who promotes his 10-year-old son as a child-genius, but without my knowing I began to like him. Right from the start, I loved Acharya because Acharya is exactly what my father is. I found Oparna very recognisable among my friends. I am still not sure if I entirely liked her portrayal but I can see she is very believable. I know I will re-read this book a few times.

The plot is interesting and there were some good observations about life in general and Indian middle class life in particular. I was, however, confused and put off several times by what appears to me to be grammatical errors in this book. The novel is the place where some of the most considered writing resides - and readers choose to turn away from the rubbish of daily life (social networking, reality TV shows) and in my view it is important for a novel to be more discriminating, more worthy of a reader's time than an article in a newspaper.I'm no grammatical pedant and am young enough to understand that the way we use English changes over time. My grammar is certainly not very good either. However these errors in a novel - such as treating a common noun as a proper noun - grated with me. I grew up in India and this is a typical Hinglish way of using common nouns in conversation, although I find it alarming in a novel, especially as part of the narration (and not as a piece of dialogue from a character, which is fine of course, because a character can speak how a character needs to speak). "It was seven when he reached office," is one sentence halfway through the novel. The lack of a "the" before the word office, is one small example of the grammatical errors littered throughout the book.English newspapers seem to fall over themselves to praise every so-so book from India, each one hailed as a "new generation" and as a "satire on the caste system." Perhaps England is still in love with the romance of Empire, and sometimes fetishises Indian fiction, whether is is good or not. Although I do like it that England has an appetite for Indian fiction. Tired cliches abound - a woman whose husband has admitted to an affair thinks to herself, "It felt as if someone had died." Much later, as a couple are going through a confrontation, the rain "grows violent" outside, matching the weather to the mood.All in all it's a good, light, urban plot and touches on the Indian IIT (India's Harvard)graduate's typical obsession with science above everything else. It's a first novel and that's obvious too. It's also not sentimental and it's intelligent, which is great (unlike the un-literary 'gap year' fiction that was Shantaram). I'd just like British critics to judge Indian fiction in the same way as fiction from England. If a book of this quality was written in England, in my view, it would certainly get none of these inane, undeserved pieces of praise it has received. Sloppy praise damages the faith of the reader in reviews and ultimately in the novel itself. If you want an intelligent recent urban Indian novel, I'd recommend Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals.

If cynicism is what that passes the insight among the mediocre, then Manu Joseph is an Indian master of satire.Within in a blink of an eye, what a person may miss or do is captured by the author is an unpredictable way.The reality which seemed harsh will rub your belly bones with laughter.Serious Men is his first debut novels, which is a cunning war between the Dalits and Brahmin in the daily hustle of life.The colorful spectrum of men tamarinind thoughts and carnal feelings towards women, the eerie of her eye lashes and swing of her hip bones how a man carves his own canvass is all opened by the author hilariously.Story: Arvind is a legendary astro­physicist, a perennial Nobel candidate banned from the Vatican for having whispered something naughty in the pope’s ear. his unusual or unsettling personality traits and the unabashedly ambitious, taboo and hubristic nature made him deny the theory of big bang and search for aliens as microscopic particle falling on earth, this is what all he is concerned of, but somewhere he is suffocated by his aloofness which eats him within only due to his own lure.Ayyan is Arvind’s personal assistant at the institute, a sweeper’s son of the untouchable caste with an affinity for mischief equaled only by his aptitude for it. Whose great grandfather's were harassed by the Brahmins, who therefore consider himself as a Buddhist even though being a Hindu, his wife who doesn't talk to neighbor watches television and his genius son who is perlingual deaf doesn't like to be called special, he and his father play games which shocked the entire school, his mother and the ethnic Brahmin people in the Indian Institute of theory.How the father sons game flips up and down everyone's life is all you need to see.I totally loved this book. The characters were unique and we could totally relate or see in our daily life's, but what goes behind the walls and curtains is all we know but no one says it loud.The author has graciously penned down, the lives of the people living in the old traditional tenements in a shanty room divided two ways kitchen and a common bathroom.the efforts of newly Weds to find privacy in cramped spaces and the fear to accept the change on losing out unity, camaraderie ethos. The rising star of the chawl and praises to mother for giving birth to such a genius, saving penny by penny to to live up for monthsA witty narration of child prodigy, office politcs, external affairs, mocking people up winds up your head and calm the temple with a smile on your face.I didn't just like the switching of life between the main characters.it bored a little in between.Rating: 4.5/5Author: Manu Joseph.Publication: Harper CollinsIf you like my Review do follow me will follow you back!!♥️♥️

1. A very few funny moments and lots of irritating grey fillers. Manu had a great idea, but somehow the extra details made this novel dull. It's clever, but it's also heavy with unwanted baggage. By the last page of this novel, you may end up feeling cheated since the build up had so much to offer. But an excellent effort nonetheless.2. As far as the physical condition and the packaging bead concerned, this novel was up to mark. So kudos to Amazon and the seller.

I had been watching this title for quite some time now but never thought of actually reading it. Now I only wish I should have read it long time back. A lesson to myself that to never judge a book by its cover.The BDD chawls, scientists, their idiosyncrasies, power struggle, office romance and one underprivileged mind's cunning to take on a big scientific institution.

The serious men of the title are the Brahmin scientists of the Theory and Research Institute in Mumbai where a funding war is going on between those in favour of the „Giant Ear Project“ to capture messages from intelligent beings in outer space and proponents of the „Balloon Mission“ to harvest microscopic aliens in the earth’s stratosphere.While the scientists pursue their lofty tasks in a kind of parallel universe shielded from the trivialities of life, their less fortunate fellow-citizens are mired in the real world of regular people, having to face daunting adversities every day of their lives: poverty, slum dwelling, overcrowding, caste division, superstition, wife-burning, police brutality, thuggish, corrupt politicians using the poor masses for their own purposes, sexism, racism, joblessness, hopelessness and despair.The connection between those two worlds is Ayyan Mani, a bright and resentful Dalit clerk at the Institute who loves to commit small acts of revenge against his Brahmin superiors.To escape – even for a while - the „suffocating routine and the grimness of his unremarkable life“ he invents a scheme involving his intelligent 11-year-old son, Adi, to make the child appear to be a genius. Over time, father and son become addicted to Adi’s celebrity status and the whole thing gets out of hand.At the same time the Institute’s director, Arvind Acharya, is involved in an extramarital affair with a female employee, Oparna Goshmaulik.Manu Joseph’s writing is brilliant and the characters are credible and fleshed out with the exception of Oparna, who remains sketchy . All we know about her is that she has had a string of failed relationships, humiliations and rejections – it is never clear why – and her passionate affair with Acharya doesn’t quite ring true.Nevertheless, all later developments hinge on that affair and the story takes many astonishing twists and turns before coming to a satisfying conclusion.

I really feel that I should have read Serious Men first before going on to Manu Joseph's second book, The Illicit Happiness of Other People. Not to take anything away from Serious Men, which is an exceptional, and a very courageous debut at that, but Joseph's second book is a tour de force which takes you to an entirely different level of cherished literary hangover.Serious Men is a work, where so many things happen at so many levels, so many issues are tackled or brought forward, that you tend to lose your way at places, but Joseph does manage to bring you back to the shore deftly. Joseph's prose is again sparkling, racy, his vitriolic sarcasm and ready wit regaling you in almost every page. The book is full of myriad characters, with their individual quirks and idiosyncrasies masterfully described, but for me the standout performance was always Ayyan Mani's. Ayyan is the rogue who went to Mensa, he is the Everyman, and also the Big Brother, with eyes and ears everywhere, he is the little big man of his 'chawl' society, and also the Dalit secretary who decides to wage war on his Brahmin superiors, and how! Ayyan's scheming mind is a puzzle that you revel in unravelling, and every time you feel that 'this is it, this time Ayyan Mani, you have gone too far, you and your lot are done for', the man comes up with yet another ace up his sleeve... Sometimes it's absurd, it's crazy, it's like hitting the jackpot, but you never stop rooting for him and his son Adi, his puppet extraordinaire, because of the very familiar middle-class yearnings that makes him do what he does. It's also because of the very real treatment of the prevalent class divide, which becomes a direct catalyst for the supposed 'intellect-divide', that you are not forced to suspend your disbelief anywhere. The plot, though having parts, where you are somewhat taken for a ride, a "balloon ride" at that, is ultimately grounded in the base realities of living in a honeycomb-chawl, the Indian attitude towards education and prodigies, the hypocritical behaviour that one encounters at every strata of society, where serious scientists can drop the mask of politeness and engage in washing dirty linen in public just like politicians, where infatuation turns to obsession, and betrayal is a double-edged knife... How does one rise above all this? Ask Ayyan Mani, the seriously ultimate "Un-serious Man".

I adored the writing! Manu Joseph has a good understanding of social dynamics in India and presents a sensitive topic pretty well. Got some good laughs while reading it in the middle. Soon to be adapted into a Netflix move, can't wait to see it on the screen!

I love Manu Joseph's writing style, especially the way he observes the human behaviors and thoughts. Found the book making me laugh loudly at some places. All in all a good one time read

A satirical novel depicted the casteism in India and how the elite born were grabbing the opportunities while the low born were struggling to find their place alongside the geniuses. A one time read and not many moments take deep into the story to savour.

Have read only a couple of pages till now, but the expectation is met already. I bought this after reading Manu Joseph's other book- The Illicit Happiness of Other People. That made me a fan of this writer. Go for it.

Its not what I expected when I started reading the book. The end seemed very forced to be a happy ending. Maybe others will like the twist in the end, but not me.

worth a read .. the way the story goes spell binding . although i felt the story was dragged a bit in the middle but its just for a little time but its a good read. not like the general romcom we have now days .

Laughter riot while reading the book. If you are from Mumbai, you can relate better to the content presented in the book.

Loved the sketch of soon to be vanishing BDD chawls and the Institute of Theory. And Ayyan Mani.Loved it.

Could not get past the first few pages.. the language is not good

I’ve read his other 2 books. While I liked illicit happiness... most, Leila was ok. But this is a waste of time.