When Strangers Meet (2016)

Reading mass fiction novels has their own advantages and disadvantages. It provides a quick refreshing change from the heavy duty stuff, similar in vain to the potboiler movies in Bollywood. How much you enjoy K. Hari Kumar’s ‘When Strangers meet’ depends how much you have missed reading the-all-genre-mixed style books. Even though essentially it remains a love story which encapsulates the major middle portion of this book, there are strong indicators of parent-children generation gap, caste divide in metropolitan cities, male bromance and a existence of paranormal phenomenon.

An irritating but lovable wise-cracking ‘Stranger’ called Iyer meets a frustrated and arrogant teenager, Jai, on a fateful day in a congested room at the Metro station.Meanwhile, Pathan, abandoned by fate and friends, surrounded by responsibilities and poverty knew only one thing…How to keep the faith in Allah binded. How the tale from the Iyer’s past will change Pathan’s present and Jai’s future forms the rest of the crux of the novel.

Too long by at least 50 odd pages, the middle portions goes around in circles doing very little to take the story forward. However, the story starts a brisk pace and through the interactions of Jai with his father presents a strong hate relationship and an ever increasing generation gap in today’s world. The dialogues are over written at most places and have a laboured feel towards them and makes you cringe with oh-so-cool-jargon language. The climax will take you with surprise and even though not all loose ends are tied up properly, you are willing to forgive for this faltering note.

What stays with you in the end is a feeling of observing almost all the emotions together in one novel — be it romance, action, thriller, fantasy or paranormal. It will provide you with brisk entertainment, just don’t keep your expectations too high. You will not be disappointed.