Ek Break Ke Baad

At an age when most people retire, K.V. Shankar Iyer is constantly searching for jobs. K.V. believes that Indias economic boom has given the countrys billionaires dreams of prosperity. The world is no longer ruled by governments, but by corporate companies. Gurucharan Rai, an executive at a multinational company, listens to K.V. without interruption. K.V. has no idea what he occasionally does in the mountains. Ultimately, he disappears on company business to a remote province in Madhya Pradesh. After a break, during which he has become a passing news item, K.V. finds his diaries, but he finds no substance in what he wrote. Bhatt, the novels third character, is destined to wander from city to city, from one job to another. br>Faced with the blows of the corporate world, he wanders the mountains with Gurucharan, also known as Guru. Without knowing what Guru seeks in relationships with women or what his dreams are, Bhatt, traveling with Guru, constantly encounters lifes many truths. This new novel by Alka Saraogi br>travels through the many assumptions, ironies, and deceptions of corporate India. Somewhere beside this world lies the old, bigoted, and backward India, where 300 million people live like street dogs. br>Corporate India, lost in its alluring dreams, assumes that the trickle-down effect will sooner or later benefit those at the bottom. Gurucharan br>Decision to shed the corporate garb and live solely as a guru is a silent resistance to the blind race for so-called development. Even as a guru, his death could be considered a kind of novelistic suicide. The kind of emotional world he dreams of creating has been overshadowed by Corporate India, with new dreams and new successes for people like Bhatt.