It is customary, I guess, for authors to thank people. It is
out of this custom alone that I thank people here; and not because of any sort
of gratitude!
Jokes apart, I grew up on books. Even for our meager means,
my parents never refused me a book, however expensive. My love for books has
grown so much that till this day, I find it difficult to enter a bookstore and
exit without a book in my hand, as also equally difficult to not enter a
bookstore if I have spotted one. Thanks, thus, to my parents for buying me all
those books and thanks also to those authors who have shaped my thinking and
taken me to their own worlds – various, variegated and vibrant.
I must say not a day has passed after If God Went to B-School was released that people haven’t asked me
and irked me with questions about my next. It is almost like people constantly
pestering a newly-wed couple when they are going to have a baby. I am thus
thankful for all those who asked and thus pressured me to birth this one. The labor
pains were horrendous – not least because I have a mind and energy sapping day
job.
Most of this book was written in the backseat of my Alto with Ram – my driver – weaving in and out of traffic on the nightmarish jam-ridden journey to office. (I bet you have never seen a ‘chauffeur driven’ Alto.) I thus attribute any and all spelling and grammatical errors to Ram’s jerky driving style. Over the past ten years in an effort perhaps to keep Delhi authors writing in the backseat of their cars, the state governments have grown road coverage by 30% while vehicles have gone up 3000%. I must thus thank profusely Delhi’s own Sheila Dikshit and that UP politician who has that big hideous expensive handbag and elephant sculptures to her credit and their respective governments as through Kanwariya, monsoon, weekly accident, traffic police barricades, ill planned road/ flyover/ metro construction, VIP movement and random inexplicable traffic jams, they have almost singlehandedly ensured that this book got written. My vote is and will forever be for you, ladies!
I am grateful to all my friends, colleagues and fellow human
animals, for their stories & their banter. In no particular order- HK, MG,
Avtar, KV, Vijay, Bajrangi, Anshul, Dharam, Rajat, Nauty, Sikka, Khulla,
Bengali, Sartaj, Lisa, Varsha and Shilpi – people I met and befriended during
my education (which is mostly fraudulent). Also thanks to all the friends I
made at work (no particular order again) – KDK, Yaka, Cartoon, Sashi, Deutsch,
Doshi, Doshi’s wife, Ashwin, GTJ, Rungta, Chulbul, Pratyush, Taufees (actually
the entire Citi MA Batch of 2010), Monz, Shahani, Nirajana and Aman. Thanks for
making me laugh and laughing at me and my jokes. And thanks for letting me
observe the human animal so closely.
Thanks also to my array of friends and family members– all my
masis, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, neighbors– all those who bought
If God Went to B-School and having
read it, were kind enough to say kind things about it. Several of them actually
bought more than one copy of the novel, almost as if it were a collectible.
Eternal gratitude.
I will also hold an eternal grudge against the many people
who I presented copies of IGWTBS free of cost to and who did not read it. You
are the reason I will never gift a single soul a single free copy of this one.
(Good looking women might be exempted from this rule.)
Special thanks to HK who went through the various drafts of
this book, kept my spirits up and most importantly, kept my cynicism in check.
Well, at least she tried. Also she is, till this day, quite sure that someone
is going to sue me. Eventually.
The highest praise in my mind for If God Went to B-School came from one of my mother’s best friends
who told me that reading the novel was like listening to me talk.
Sarcastic, bitter
and cynical. It tells me my writing has a voice. Perhaps.
Jokes and tomfoolery aside and as always, infinitely grateful
to my parents, all my teachers and God.
Best,
Vaibhav
PS: If
I have missed thanking you here and you feel wronged, please do email me at vaibhav.a10@fms.edu. I’ll be sure to thank you in my next. Or
to write back explaining to you in painstaking detail why I am not grateful to
you. If I do not email you back, it means you have hitherto sent one too many
emails with pics of cute kittens or babies or monkeys or ‘Forward this to 20
people and you will meet the love of your life near a green dumpster today’ and
I have blocked your email ID. I spent one whole week at a foul smelling dumpster
and no one – ‘love of my life’ or
otherwise – ventured near me.
It was singularly disappointing.
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