Manan

He closes his eyes and finds today’s date floating towards him. Shimmering in the darkness, swivelling – like the text on the Windows 95 screensaver. It seeps in through his forehead and gets absorbed. 23-04-98 is now a part of him. Today’s date, a Saturday, when the first sign of what he so eagerly awaited has appeared… It is the summer of 1998 in a sleepy Indian town that is just awakening to the age of information, and young Manan has acquired his first official sign of puberty. The world around him, though, refuses to understand the magnitude of the moment. Instead, it teases him by offering all sorts of temptations, posing all sorts of quandaries. And it doesn’t help that his friends are taller and larger than him, that his parents fight all the time, that his sister no longer has time for him, that the love of his life barely knows that he exists. With an earnest voice that is colourfully candid about middle-class India and the tyranny of family relationships, authority figures and peer pressure, Manan is a tragicomedy of growing pains and the triumphs of a stoic heart.