The title of Pankaj Dubey’s latest book, Trending in Love, can in all fairness, be called a little misleading. It makes it sounds like a lighthearted love story, with a breezy plot setting and protagonists who face, at best, lukewarm challenges.
However, it is anything but.It is a story of a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy, whose pursuit of their dreams bring them together. What follows is a tale of love which, given their religious backgrounds, ruffles many feathers. To add fuel to fire, the engines of social media come into play and their private matters become a subject of public debate and altercation.
The author successfully weaves together many sub-plots into the central line of the story. The male lead, Aamir, is a Kashmiri youth who comes from an environment where militancy is rampant, and decides to do the right thing, the right way.
At a time when metropolitan gentlemen are the norm as male leads, this Kashmiri boy felt like a welcome departure. Through him the author explores the valley, and narrates the saga of a society worn down by prolonged strife and suffering.
Sanam, the female lead on the other hand, is a pampered kid of a bureaucrat; free-spirited, modern and headstrong. Unlike the sorted and grounded Aamir, she is at times immature and quirky. This difference in temperaments lends itself beautifully to how the two come together and how their characters develop as the plot progresses.
The climax hits when charges of ‘love jehad’ are made. A Hindu girl in love with a Muslim boy, quickly becomes a tempest in a teacup as a Hindu-Muslim furor rises in the mohallas and bastis. The academy too does not remain untouched as fault lines appear in the elite institution.
Social media platforms become both a weapon and a battlefield of the two groups.The author seems to have a way with describing scenic locations. The picturesque Mussoorie has been weaved beautifully into the narrative, doing full justice to the location of the training academy where most of the plot unfolds.
Nothing is left wanting in the way the characters have been developed. Even the minor characters like the students and the professors of the academy are close to life and exhibit candid honesty. They are imperfect and with their own idiosyncrasies, which does justice to their responses to the situations the writer puts them in.
However, fault may be found with the pace with which the central conflict of the plot is resolved. An insight into what went in the minds of the central characters as they found themselves in the midst of a controversy and how they coped with it might have made for a more satisfactory ending.
Also, Aamir as a character seems to be overshadowing Sanam, a shade more than can be ignored.All in all, go for this book, if you are looking for a contemporary love story which has a rich plot and the potential to pose a few serious societal questions. Also, it is soon to be a web series under the ALT Balaji production.
