Book Review: "If God Was A Banker" By Ravi Subramanian

Generally I do not condemn books and writers but this book is an exception. If God Was A Banker is a debut fiction novel by an Indian writer, Ravi Subramanian. And I think after reading this, you would surely feel that why did I read it in first place. It is a totally amateur-ish, childish & naïve attempt at writing a book. It is not a book; it is more like an typical Indian movie. It is a story of bad boy & good boy, how bad boy reaches to higher things in life but finds himself tangled into his own web; and later realizes that he was bad and returns home and blah blah blah…

There are two main protagonists in this book – Sundeep & Swami. Both of them are from IIM (by the way, the writer is also an alumnus of IIM) – one is bad and the other one is good. While Sundeep rises to the top most position in a bank through his devilish acts, Swami raises to similar heights but with sanity. And then there is the climax, like a bollywood movie, where in Sundeep realizes that he has been bad; gets into organization enquiry and is fired (or asked to put his papers down) from the company. And then he realizes that it was all bad and blah blah blah…

The plot is very bad in the book. The characters are black or white – no gray. Each character would be established as soon as he enters the story – which shows that the writer is too immature. The novel is also loaded with unnecessary (read detailed) description of the sex escapades of Sundeep – totally crap and useless sleaze. The internal politics & working of so-called world’s number one bank has been shown in such a manner that it looks like a middle-man (one of the characters) runs it. And the only thing which people do there is either to screw colleagues wives or their lives. Ok, even if this all happens – what is the need to write a book about it? The novel is totally useless. Do not do the mistake of buying it. If you still want to read it – get your hands on someone else’s copy instead. After reading this book, I wonder how can a IIM guy write such a book – and he gets a publisher to publish it (well, this shows that he is from IIM).