Bimal in Bog

Bimal in Bog is a shrewd, ironic, witty exposé of the hypocrisies of the Indian middle class. "This is Bimal's book. He alone will rule here." And what a tin-pot of a sexpot-despot he is! By dwelling on the apparently ludicrous erotic hang-ups of his protagonist, a young college lecturer named Bimal, Krishna Baldev Vaid succeeds, through spoofing, deliberate goofing, parable, parody, irreverence, irrelevance and an incredible sense of pure fun, in making a serious-cum-hilarious raid on the suppressed and inarticulate areas of smug pseudo-orthodox living. No one is spared : the transcription is done with such deadly use of complex word-play and comic imagination that the novelist seems almost hoist with his own petard. "I'm no mythmonger. A mere moanmaker me!"

A careless or unsuspecting reader may find, however, that the joke-a four-letter word !-is on himself. It may help to notice the cunning irony in the title itself : the original Sanskrit meaning of the name of the hero who is "in bog" is "stainless, spotless, clean, bright, pure (literally and figuratively);" in the Mahabharata it is also the name of a serpent-demon.