Starting from the cover of the book is amusing which reminds me of Hindi movie 3 IDIOTS. The cover is colourful and related to the story of the book but could have been a little better. The title of the book ‘REWIND And PLAY, Hostel Diaries Of A frustrated B.Tech’ is very interesting and gives a hint that it’s going to be about college day life issues.
The story revolves around Raghav, the main lead, who is a product manager at a company. The situation goes against him and he faces downfall in his life. Being division head of consumer product in VisionTek, he gets into a product failure which leads him into media defame and depression. As he struggles with his life and his family feels a distance from him, But then the college reunion makes him come back to reality and sort his life problems. Raghav realizes that life is the same. Some bad experience shouldn't stop life.
Where it's not just Raghav who have a story, but everyone else in the batch has an interesting past from the college. As they meet and play a game in the reunion. One by one they reveal what was their past, secret or memory which no one knew, how it happened. As Raghav goes through this, he travels in the past and present. This helps to unveil the inner him, and get solutions for his complex life. How does Raghav deal with this.? Did his friends know his problem or the reunion was a blessing in disguise?
While reading the book, readers start living with the college days again to revive those old beautiful memories which we cherish the most. This is really not a novel but a collection of different events from once life. A bunch of friends, sit together and recite the past college stories, hostel life, which were a problem then and now they laugh on them.
The author has portrayed each and every character with the utmost significance of their own and every one of them has done justice to their respective roles throughout the story.
“All decisions in life are made either from the head or the heart. Knowing when to use what is a journey called life.”
Language of the book is lucid and written in a simple way to comprehend for any kind of reader. A book which won’t require the use of a dictionary, a book which evens an amateur reader would love to get indulged in. If the edit was done properly, the story would have sounded much better.
The narration of the story is engaging though predictable at some times. The story is fast-paced but somewhere it goes irrelevant with the theme, but again back comes to track. The blurb could have explained better rather than giving false assumptions over the plot.
Words flow smoothly and emotions find expression thus making the book a veritable treat but I don’t like the sudden climax, the story is too short and little unrelated with the starting of the story. The ending could have been more explained with a logical ending.
I’ll recommend this book for the one who have just picked a book, for the first time in their life, it’s easy and short with less paragraph and more dialogues.
An engaging short and quick read you can take this upon a lazy afternoon for a light read.