In a South Indian film I had seen in my childhood (most probably Shankarabharanam but I am not sure), there is a telling scene where some young kids fooling around with modern musical instruments get into an argument and subsequent bet with a classical Carnatic vocalist. The bet is the kids would sing the classic music the maestro was rehersing when they disturbed him and the maestro would sing the modern song the kids were playing. Somewhat predictably yet satisfactorily, the maestro easily sings the modern song while the kids cannot keep with their end of the challenge.

I was reminded of this movie while seeing Sanjeev Sanyal, the bestselling author of such works as “Land of seven rivers” and “Ocean of churn” transition smoothly and effortlessly to fiction with his latest “Life over two beers and other short stories”. Sanyal who is already among India’s top selling non-fiction writer has tackled this relatively light-hearted project with the consummate ease of the maestro singing the modern day tune.

A compact collection of some 14 odd short stories and a couple of poems, “Life over two beers” has much more to offer to readers other than the relatively rare feat of non-fiction writer turning a contemporary storyteller.

Nominally almost all the stories are set in modern day India and yet as far as the basic construct of  quirky characters finding themselves in tricky situations part goes, this collection is firmly in the Wodehousian Blanding Castle series mould. A conference call goes on for three months without anyone noticing it, a building watchman spends an entire career without ever finding out the purpose of the department he served and a middle-aged, disillusioned journalist meets the woman he almost married once in the most unusual circumstances. Sanyal explores the humour in these situations with wit and warmth and with nary a misstep into either overt romanticism or angry cynicism. From the used car salesman who becomes the biggest patron of art in the Delhi circles to the hardworking Babu who finally realizes that you got to talk to your driver (go figure!), all the character are perfectly every day and yet with the tiniest oddities, just an unusual decision here or there, they step into a world that is almost ludicrously surreal. As an economist Sanyal has written at length about complex adaptive systems where even the tiniest variations cause great changes in the outcomes. In his stories, he explores and exploits the same theme with sure-footedness.

Equally remarkable is how tightly controlled the political undertones are in almost all the stories. As the author takes us on a tour from the literary festivals to the Khan Market crowd, and from club of intellectuals in Kolkata to five star conferences in Mumbai, the reader can constantly relate to the real life incidents he might have come across in news and yet nowhere the stories slip into an exploitative or a preachy mode. Thankfully, the author also resists the temptation to insert himself into his stories, though when you read about a Singapore bond trader having a reflective beer at the end of a rough day, the author’s familiarity with the set-up as well as the sentiment is easily identifiable. For most part though, the author sticks to good old-fashioned, tell-it-like-it-is storytelling. That the reader, from time to time, might root for one set of characters (for example for the Mumbai housewife running an anon twitter handle in the “troll”) over others is just how the cookie crumbles.

Very often the Indian fiction has focused on seeing the everyday India through the eyes of the activists, the intellectuals and other assorted elites. In a reversal of sorts, Sanyal trains the focus on the aforementioned constant observers and make them the observed and let me tell you some of them do not stand up to this critical examination.  As someone who has spent a large part of his career either interacting with or observing the page 3 crowd, Sanyal’s take on their idiosyncrasies, pettiness and myopic world-view is as cutting and hilarious as Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of the method acting obsessed, narcissistic, five times Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder.

Dale Carnegie once said “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing” and I think behind the success of “Life over two beers” lies the immense amount of fun its author seemed to have got writing it.