12 years by Chetan bagat

 As mentioned prior, there is a similarity in naming their novels between Matthew Reilley and Chetan Bagat. Though chalk and cheese could have more similarity than their writing styles, Matt at least had a reason for the naming convention, it was a series with a countdown starting from 7 ancient wonders. For CB i guess, it could be more of numerology or a success template that seems to work for him. 

Unlike regular people who may use QWERTY keyboard for typing, CB has stereotyping set in his keyboard i guess. Like every other book of his, where the protagonist or the male character with least negativity, always happens to be a Punjabi, it is no different in this one as well. Like every single soul in Punjab, this person also drinks heavily, non vegetarian and as an additional character trait - is a health conscious gymaholic. Like tamils, bengalis and many other characters of different ethnicities that were shown in as poor light, or to be precise only in poor light, possible, in this book it happens to be Jain. If repetition is a sin, CB is Satan!! Every alternate page has a mention about some form of food and a constant mention of how Jains avoid garlic and onion!!! Seriously..this guy has some issues with people who are not Punjabi's and that too considering he married into a south Indian family, which he made a story out of and even sold to a movie house!! And his lead characters would invariably be IIT-ian or IIM or bare minimal at least in investment banking. Ditto in this novel as well. May be he finds those domains as his area of strength having come from that background. But ella booklayum idhey setupna epdi!!

The story is a slight mishmash of "Hum Tum" movie and wonder how the publishers even agreed to publish this and i doubt if they would've even read it prior!! The additional intimate scenes to cater to his niche audience apart the only thing that works out to some extent are the stand up comedy segments. During Corona time, i remember CB doing some stand up comedy sets and he was bit decent. He carries that form into this book as well. There is nothing else to write about the story in general that would've been a decent blog post at best, 2 decades back!! If the publishers are paying good money to churn books like this, high time i will dust off the "Ram and Priya" series :D