Honest portrayal

Philosophy or romance? There is a lot of both and the reader will be hard-pressed to decide which of the two dominates in the book. Despite suffering the weight of too many issues cropping up throughout, Big Apple 2 Bites redeems itself somewhat with its honest portrayal of society as it is.

Anirudhdha SenSharma or Sen for short is a statistician temporarily in New York on work and readers are given a glimpse of the other side of outsourcing— loss of jobs for many Americans, the bitterness and frustration at losing their jobs to lesser paid Indians, corporate charades and manipulation to grab projects, relying on the subtle art of lying to save one’s skin etc.

Sen is also well-read and mouthing philosophy at the drop of a hat. Most of it goes flat on his not-so-well-read colleagues.

His life is dominated to a large extent by his infatuation for his soon-to-be married American colleague, Allison Palmer, and to a lesser extent to his commitment to the martial art, aikido. In the middle of all this comes 9/11 and for Sen and his Indian colleagues it’s time to pack up and go home.

Sen has a second bite of New York when he returns on another job three years later, more mature and sure of himself, but with his infatuation with Allison and his love for aikido intact.

Although Sen’s philosophising gets tedious in some places, it can be read for its fresh perspectives on almost everything from the very mundane to the most lofty.