Zero Percentile

A senior colleague at Nagarro, Neeraj Chhibba, has surprised us all with his first book, "Zero Percentile", which is published by Rupa Publishers. It must have made it to bookstores all over the country by now and is also available online.

A lot of young Indians used to go to the Soviet Union to study. Many decades ago, my father got a PhD in geology from Moscow (he wrote his thesis in Russian). Many of my friends too went to the USSR to study engineering and medicine. But while they were there, the USSR disintegrated and everything went haywire. They saw the socialist system collapse before their eyes. Many were shunted from institute to institute and their futures were in doubt. As if that were not enough, the Medical Council of India began to raise questions about the validity of the medical degrees out of some of the ex-USSR institutes. It was a tumultous time, and the book is set in that era.

What I liked about it is that it makes you smile innocently from time to time. Although the book is semi-autobiographical (luckily I do not figure in it like my brother and I did in another friend Amitabh Bagchi's book, "Above Average") the author always seems to be making gentle fun of the story and its characters, including the protagonist, even in the most tense and violent moments.

Just BTW, the title "Zero Percentile" is a bit of a pun on www.100percentile.com, an education software company that we are also associated with.

Neeraj works long six-day weeks at Nagarro, so it is a tribute to his focus and energy that he managed to write this book. I feel motivated by this to try to publish a book of poems sometime in 2010.


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