To give you a backdrop of why I picked this book up for review, I will start with the honest admission that I got hustled into buying it. I initially knew Suresh as an active member of For Writers, By Authors, a writing-focussed Facebook community that I am also a part of. Upon checking the excerpts he would regularly share from his blog, [...], I realised this unassuming person was actually one of the top bloggers in India who had won acclaim and accolades from BlogAdda. He had even got a book published, curiously titled A Dog Eat Dog-Food World. I read the blurb, liked it, and consigned ADEDFW to the list comprising books I would read some time in the future if and when someone else goes through the effort of releasing a pirated eBook version. That would have been that, but for the fact that almost everyone I knew on the group waxed lyrical about how Suresh had managed to write a literary masterpiece akin to the works of P. G. Wodehouse. That got my goat. With many people claiming to have bought the book and several others writing glorious reviews, I was forced to smash open my piggy bank and sell two packets of my father’s cigarettes in black to place the purchase order for the book. Peer pressure is a dangerous thing, people. It made me do some real bad things.
With my illegal activities having escaped the eye of the law and, more importantly, my father, I started reading this ill-acquired tome. Tome is probably the wrong word to use here, for ADEDFW is a sprightly nymph of a novella. Published by Fablery, ADEDFW’s bright yellow cover caught my eye, as did the cover image which had a dog and a cat sitting at a table placing their respective orders with a human waiter. Its blurb, as all good blurbs should, managed to convey what the book was about in very few words and pique my interest at the same time. After all, it is not every day that I managed to get my hands on a satirical pseudo-history of marketing (although now that I have the book, I probably can). The contents inside were just as quirky, and the author managed to, from the very onset, build a very clear outline for his story with impeccable language and interesting characters. There isn’t much I can say about the story that was not mentioned in the blurb without dishing out spoilers.
Or rather, I can. I can tell you of Spike Fortune, a hypochondriac whose only aim in life is to spend all the money his ancestors have earned, and how he, by the end of the story, transforms into a consummate businessman hell-bent on making more and more dogs eat his dog-food, whether they wanted to or not. I can write about how his fortuneless (haha!) nephew Jerry, who has never exercised a single grey cell in life, suddenly becomes the fount of revolutionary business ideas. I can extrapolate of the rivalry between Spike and Tom Rich, one of those simmering, amicable socially acceptable feuds which often have their roots in shared classrooms (Sharma-ji ka beta comes to mind when thinking of a middle-class example). We can discuss for hours how the society pushes an unwilling Tom into competing with Spike, and how their rivalry ends up altering the basic fabric of the society in this pseudo-historical world to such an extent that the reader is left wondering just how the author managed to make the leap in just 94 pages. I can tell you all this, and more, and none of it will make a damned bit of difference. Not. One. Bit.
See, this is where Suresh’s innate humour and storytelling ability come into the picture. Spike will not be Spike without Suresh’s expert hand guiding him through his journey from the deathbed to the treadmill of commercial success, Jerry will not have come up with a paradigm-changing idea of selling dog-food to dog owners had it not been for the author’s subtly pulling the threads behind the scenes, and the world would not have changed (for the better, one hopes. This is the inception of marketing we’re talking about, after all) without the delightful progression of events right up to the climax. Without reading the book, any retelling will be, at best, a boring, mundane affair, much like boiled dal without tadka. It is Suresh, with his effortless prose and near flawless execution, who adds various flavours to the mix. He, with the cunningness and guile of a seasoned (and marinated) veteran, makes you stack up all the dominoes, entering only to knock them all down once everything is in place and leave you wondering just how it was that he managed it.
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A hilarious take on the workings of the corporate world. The satire makes one chuckle out loud and is a testimony to the author's intelligence.
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