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A Thing Called Love in an Utterly Rotten World Amitava Chaudhuri has penned over 50 poems and 15 short stories. A Thing Called Love is his debut novel, which unfolds a tragic tale of a man who fails to maintain a healthy balance between family and work.
Sumit portrays himself as a successful middle-class family man and paints an idyllic picture of life. Later, he decides to shift to Bombay where he gets so engrossed in his work that for Deepa, his presence or absence in the house meant the same. Deepa sulks day and night within the four walls of their pigeon-hole flat. Even for his daughter, Kiran, his fatherly duties end at bringing home his pay packet. Life offers us a set of priorities and in order to fulfil a few commitments, we cannot ignore the very idea of living. Desires are never ending and sometimes they do lead us astray. Thus. one needs to draw a line between ambitions and achievements. A happy and contented family is the ultimate test of a successful man; everything else fades into insignificance. It is the family that brings happiness and assures peace, something money cannot buy. Looking at Sumit’s perspective, being young and enterprising is not enough in the corporate world, where in the mad race for promotions, one loses one’s family and peace of mind. Sumit gets drawn to the attractive pay packages and failed to visualise beyond their glitter. At the home front, he always gets frustrated over trifle issues. Once he drives his family to a party unwillingly and meets with an accident that claims his daughter’s life . "I loved my family but not the responsibilities that came along with it," he rues. It is after his daughter’s death and the breaking up of his marriage that Sumit starts looking at life beyond his work. It is the same city where now he realises the presence of others people enjoying their family life after he loses his own. People were living in it like it should be lived. The glamour of the corporate world entices young entrepreneurs who somehow fail to find peace as they have to work round the clock. Finally, Sumit quits his job and takes to drinking. On the whole, the author has presented a stark picture of the corporate world in a matter-of-fact blunt language.
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Sumit Sahai, a
mechanical engineer, marries Deepa and they start their married life
in Lucknow at former’s ancestral house. Before marriage, Sumit was
quiet apprehensive of the holy Indian tradition of arranged marriages
where a mere 15 minutes talk with a stranger required one to know each
other, and subsequently love each other for the rest of their lives.
Though marriage brought romance, adventure and love, it also brought
forth a core of responsibilities, and something Sumit was not ready to
cope up with.