Been There Bungled That

A piece of news: my book Been There Bungled That is being published by Random House.

Been There Bungled That is a funny look at our everyday journey through life – navigating career, managing relationships, encountering people and traveling outside our comfort zone (physically and metaphorically) – through the eyes of the fictitious Jags Srinivasan.

In a way Jags is a reflection of me. Many of his fictional fumbles are based on my real-life ones. Like him, I studied engineering not out of passion for the field but because I made it into a good engineering college. However Jags and I are not alone in this regard. A large section of my class applied for engineering because that was what you did after school. And if you secured admission, you went on to study engineering (though ‘study’ may be a strong term to apply to what I did in engineering college).

However, even with my strong penchant to goof things up, I would have found it difficult to stumble through five distinct careers in one lifetime. After a brief stint in engineering, I settled upon marketing and have restricted my bungling to this field ever since. But I’ve made Jags jump from engineering to consultancy to advertising to marketing to banking because it’s funnier that way. And while ‘truth may be stranger than fiction’, fiction should at least be funnier.

Which brings me to the next point: Been There Bungled That is unabashedly a humour book. It may offer you pearls of wisdom that redefine your life and make you a better person, both physically and philosophically, but most likely it won’t. However I hope it will make you laugh. And that’s not a bad thing, I say. Consider how many things don’t make you laugh today. The price of onions, corruption in high places, corruption in low places, delayed flights, stressful job, pollution, irritating co-workers… I could go on, but you can read today’s newspaper to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. If George Mallory climbed Mount Everest ‘because it is there’, I write humour for the opposite reason: because it is not there in everyday life, at least not in sufficient quantity to enjoy.

As a famous person said – or if he didn’t, he should have – ‘Humour may not make the world spin but it will help keep you from spinning off it.’

If you would like to read the book (and you missed all the links I helpfully provided above!) you can pre-order it here.