Nikesh Shukla (OMT, 1998)

Meatspace (what non-geek types call “the real world”) – the second novel from Nikesh Shukla was published in paperback in June. The Guardian review of the hardback edition was laudatory (as were all others) ‘Like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, this novel captures a cultural moment’. A real MTS boy, he launched a lamb chop into outer space to promote the hardback! The film of this event (or Daily Mail coverage of it!) is easily found via Google, while the video-short to launch it was prepared with Nimer Rashed, another creative from the Class of ’98.

Our hero Kitab (Kit) Balasubramanyam has writer’s block (Kitab means “Book” in Arabic, Farsi, Hindustani). A young up-and-coming Asian author, he is a master of task avoidance due to his neurotic obsession with social media and building his personal online “brand”. By unlucky chance, Kit’s namesake, who has found him online (a bit like Joey’s “hand twin” in ‘Friends’) turns up at a book reading in his local and refuses to leave him alone.

The world of cyberspace has suddenly become the world of Meatspace and the cyberworld of infinite, glorious possibility has now become a sea of possibilities with a distinctly sinister aspect… This is a very witty book, full of scintillating dialogue, which speaks to anyone who has ever found themselves in cyberspace browsing their phone, whilst simultaneously sitting with friends in “meat space”.

There is the classic part-caustic, part-benevolent, self-deprecating humour of the MTS alumnus, together with the razor-sharp mind singled out by the Huffington Post in their intellectually astute review, “Learning to Dwell in the Possible”. “His journey away from cyberspace back to Meatspace is filthy and troubled … despite the pain though, Kitab’s destination is never in doubt: he must find a way to live in the real world. He is thus something akin to an Everyman 2.0. His struggles with loneliness, with grief, with the diminishing returns of social media’s ability to confer self-worth, the temptation to escape into the digital world of fantasy from the alienation and oppression of the modern city: all so resonant and familiar to so many as technology’s ‘multitude of promises’ begin to curdle and rot”.

You might also want to flick through ‘Coconut Unlimited’ (2010, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and described by Metro as ‘a riot of cringe-worthy moments made real by Shukla’s beautifully observed characters and talent for teen banter’). A coming of age story, set in the 1990s, three Asian friends who live in Harrow get up to the normal raft of teen misadventures at their nearby public school; despite its rich vein of fantasy, there is a very definite location for this school, with its lakes and its tuck shop called ‘The Lun’!

Glancing through some old reports the other day, Nikesh’s Divisions English report turned up, “His best writing is when he relies on his own judgement and finds his own voice” – Glad to know that he took at least one piece of advice from the school to heart!

To return to Parvae Res, please click here.