Saturday, November 27, 2010

Operation Karakoram

Operation Karakoram is the debut novel by Arvind Nayar. Though Chetan Bhagat has written a testimony that it’s a nice novel to begin with, but I don’t think it comes even closer to what Chetan’s debut novel was.

Anyways, the story is about another fictional Indo-Pak tussle where Pakistan wins, for a change. There is an Indian politician who is about to become the Prime Minister, but is dreaded by Pakistan because of his hard stand on Pakistan. So, the most secret body of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, hires a professional assassin to kill this politician. Then the novel is all about irrelevant things like this assassin’s Spanish mission and a murder in Oman, which bear no relevance to the story, but just showcase that Arvind has been to these places. A lot of loopholes are obvious in the story. For instance, Pakistani intelligence hires an assassin to kill the Indian Prime Minister, without knowing that he’s an Indian, even after they met him in person. But nevertheless, the guy was professional and completed his task of killing the to-be Prime Minister.

I would say that the concept was fine, but the articulation was extremely poor. Boy, you need to work a lot more for your new piece. If I had to rate it on a 5-point scale, I’d rate it at 1.5.

-Arun Sharma

(Originally published at www.whynothavefun.wordpress.com by Arun Sharma)