This is what is written on the back page of I, Romantic by Rajeev Jhaveri and this is exactly what is reflected in his debut novel that takes you through the ups and downs in the life of Avinash Rai an officer in the Indian Army who refuses military services justifying why he doesn’t want to go to war.
I, romantic is thus about the transformation of Avinash From a naive soldier who entered the army with stars in solider who is not scared to stand up against his officers for he thinks that what they are ordering him do is inhuman knowing fully well the consequences of disobeying the orders will be a court martial and may be termination of services Just when he is indulging himself with the glory, charisma and power attached with Army life, he is rudely awakened. His life undergoes a metamorphosis when he falls in love with a film student and that is when he starts questioning his own life, and the trials and tribulations that he faces on his journey of self—realisation is what I, Romantic is about.
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Knowing that Rajeev Jhaveri served in the Army for six years before taking voluntary retirement, the reader can well gauge that most incidents penned down in the book are based on the facts that me writer must have experienced during his Mass Communication at the CME Pune is a master storyteller. His use of small sentences and the puns incorporated in the pages bring on the guffaws from time to time. Sample this – The mercury was flirting between2 and 1 degrees Celsius. So was my fear. Or when he mentions the afternoon siesta – “the only thing that moves in the barracks is the stomachs heaving vertically.”
Jhaveri weaves the story deftly urging the reader to flip the pages. So vivid is the description of the events unfolding that the reader is unwittingly drawn into the narrator’s world. The book is like an open chapter of the author’s life; it is romantic, it is intense and that is what makes it readable. Granted there is a lot of mention of sex in the beginning and the book is replete with expletives but Jhaveri doesn’t exalt sex; rather he presents it as an urge that every human experiences. While the book is rather engrossing, at a few places, for example when he is writing about the Narmada Andolan, it tends to be tedious. Narrations at such points should have been crisper. However, the author’s use of expressions that describe situations and his narrative capability keeps you hooked on to it because the characters and the narration are so alive. It is definitely a good read.
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