First and foremost, if you do not know Cyrus Broacha and his brand of comedy, you may not enjoy the book as much as I did.
Anybody who grew up in the 90's in Mumbai (no this is not the beginning of one of those chain mails and facebook notes) will relate to the first few pages of the book. It describes the childhood and college hood of the protagonists/best friends Karl and Kunal. The characters or rather caricatures are spot on, although they seem to be written by an attention deficit 10 year old and the story keeps jumping around and about and through some weird ramblings. But if you read with Cyrus in mind, all of it suddenly seems to make enough nonsense to be termed as hilarious. There were some paragraphs where i wanted to laugh out loud but had to do the 'jerking silent holding in laugh' (I was at Colombo airport and coming from Tamil Nadu, i didn't want to give them an excuse) with tears streaming down my face. I annoyed a whole lot of people and scared a lot more. The meanderings of Karl and Kunal through life and the changes in fortune and fame they go through are interspersed with real life characters and places with a comic twist, so we have Pearl Padamsee who 'discovers' the two. We have Prahlad Kakkar too. Some incidents, me thinks follows Cyrus's own life. Bollywood, politics and even the pleasure of digging noses is delved into :) There is a bit of Mumbai snobbishness and a whole lot of tongue in cheek - a little too much, come to think of it. The acknowledgments and the preface all fall under this category.
All in all for those who like "mokkai" jokes or pj's and 'groan out loud' jokes will enjoy the book. All the rest - stay away!
8/10
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