She's everywhere. And why shouldn't she be? Magazine editor, Rhodes scholar, Oxonian, wife of high profile TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai, daughter of TV host Bhasker Ghose---

Sagarika Ghose is the toast of Delhi with her precocious literary debut.

Her debut novel 'The Gin Drinkers' could only be the product of a true-blue Dilli bureaucrat's child (as Ghose undoubtedly is). Ghose is an insider to the elaborate "liquid colonialism" that makes up Delhi. Old school civil servants who carry on their tasks of nation building over a glass of gin and tonic.

'The Gin Drinkers' is about this old school and the new school of johnny-come-latelys as each struggles for supremacy in the battle to define India's future.

This battle spills over into academia. A new foundation is being set up, and jostling for the top spot, is a motley assortment of characters who represent both the old and new India. In the quest for power (with the inherent assumption that knowledge is power), Madhavi battles her former lover Dhruv in an epic struggle to be the next head of the institution. Their struggle is a mirror of the larger struggle taking place- India's traditional social aristocracy slugging it out with brash, previously marginalised classes on the make. A classic case of previously disenfranchised classes trying to usurp power and stamp their vision on the country.

Dhruv and Madhavi's fight to the finish is catalysed by an array of interesting characters. There is the institution head Pamela who must choose her successor, Oxford educated Uma, Anusuya, Shantanu, Deekay, Peter, Jai Prakash, Tomakutty.. and the Kitab chor. The Kitab chor (literally book thief) who keeps ..well, stealing books.

This is an assured debut. It has none of the misty romanticism 'tailored for the West' style of other Indo-Anglian writers (let's not name names here.) This is a novel about modern India and its duelling classes chronicled by a prescient writer who has the inside track. The book is contemporary in its concerns with an easy if somewhat breathless style.

All in all an entertaining read, especially if you are interested in the shenanigans of India's future nation builders.

Rating: I rather liked the book, but then I'm a hybrid Dilliwallah bureaucrat's brat myself. The book never rang so true or so well, especially for those who claim to be in the know of how and why our nation's capital ticks.

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