Your Dreams are Mine now – a book review

Title: Your Dreams are Mine now

Author: Ravinder Singh

ISBN: 978-0-143-42300-3

 Publisher: Penguin Metro Reads

I have read all the works by Singh, his first “I too had a Love Story” as a work will always be his best in my eyes. It truly was an honest story of a man who loved and who lost love of his life. Back then, when the book was originally published the number of authors and number of stories were limited. The balloon of authors and fiction novel has been blowing too big since then. The number of authors we had back then were limited. Singh and Bhagat were very few who came with their initial books. Since then, the Indian writing space went through a big change. Self-publishing came in picture, there are more publishing houses than there are authors. The quality of stories has degraded only since then. Among them stand those few authors who were good back at that time and end up being good even today.

Having read Singh’s all three books (not counting the anthology) I was decently excited to read his fourth work. No questions that his last book had disappointed me to umpteen extent. Honestly, the only reason I choose to read their work even today is because somewhere or else I relate to them. I relate myself with these stories. I think they are among me. Yes, time and again I’ve been disappointed but just for the sake of supporting them I read their work.

Singh’s latest book – Your Dreams are Mine now is a story based in Delhi and more specifically University of Delhi. This is understandable because Singh now writes full time from his Delhi based house and it was a clever attempt on his part to take Delhi as the story backdrop. Though, his attempt failed miserably. I shall come back to his part later in the post.

The story is claimed to be an innocent love story based in dominant campus politics. It is about the two protagonists who fall in love and how they attempt to create their positive hold in DU campus followed by their rise and fall. The story is based in North Campus and a famous commerce college in North Campus that is made of red-bricks (that is how author describes the college). I would not dug deep in the story part as it would be unfair to the author and would strictly write about the novel and what I feel about it.

On the story: Well, I wish there was a story to this novel. The text in the novel seems to be an over stretched piece of two individual’s who were born in author’s mind. To worsen the whole thing, author actually! Added a summary of a major newsbreak from 2012. This obviously was not expected from Singh, this cannot be called plagiarism because the content was modified in terms of name, actual incident and few minor changes here and there whereas the context was EXACTLY what we read in news back then. If you end up reading this part of the novel, you will think that you just completed reading a summary report of the incident that happened back then. It is a shame that Singh would indulge in such malpractice. It is total 30 pages of text that seems to be copied from newspapers only. I wonder if Singh was short of ideas or wrote this book in too much of hurry that he felt the need to use an extended news report to complete his book.

On the backdrop: When you pick up a book that you know is based in your city you expect to find yourself so close to the book. You expect that may be you will read about places you have visited, places you were present at one time or another. May be your college, your “Adda” where you used to spend your whole day during college days and many other related things. This book fails miserably on backdrop part. It seems that the author only wrote this book siting in four walls of his house and didn’t even bother to do basic research before writing this book. Honestly, no one who will read this book can agree that author has lived in Delhi for years now. The kind of backdrop setting author has presented in the book can also be written by anyone who sits in Bangladesh or as a matter of fact Mars. There is no close link of Delhi with the story, just some random mention of “North Campus” “ Rashtrapati Bhawan” and “AIIMS”.

Being a part of North campus, I was expecting so much from the book but apart from some random mention of a commerce college I didn’t read ANYTHING in this book. It seems that Singh only knew that there is a North Campus and then there is a red-brick college there. More like he didn’t even gave North Campus a visit before taking it as the battle ground of his book.

On writing style: Simple and elegant is what Singh’s writing style is in this book. No difficult or out of the world language is used. I am sure he has kept all his readers in mind who might not be as proficient as others in queen’s language.

Another good part was that there were no explicit sex scenes in this book. Apart from some kiss scenes and another romantic conversation part there was nothing that can annoy a reader. It obviously has became a tradition that an author would add some steamy hot scenes to keep the reader’s interest going in the book. Thankfully, Singh nailed it there and didn’t create more mess of this book.

My Ratings: 2/5

Please, this review is more like a personal note on the book which I happen to share with you. I don’t say read this book or don’t read this book. It should absolutely be your call. If after reading the book you think I was unfair and the book deserved more then please do not hesitate to drop me a line in comments.

Thanks Priyanshi Gulati for proof reading.