I recently received “Big Boss, A Story of Every Professional” from Diamond Books for review. It is written by MVP and is about a fictional character, Aditya Mohan aka, Adi and his struggle to come to grip with the complacent and at times, negative role bosses play in the career and professional life of their subordinates.

Now this is something that I am quite sure, each and every person who has ever worked in an office can identify with. Even people like me, who were only ever employed for a brief spell, before deciding to forge their own course.

Getting back to the book, our dear protagonist is not only a dreamer and has strong aspirations, but also has a somewhat disturb family life and hates how his dad used to bitch about his bosses and work all the time, and is thus looking to prove him wrong and find an ideal boss and organization, who cares about his future prospects, even if they are in opposite direction/away from their own!

Add a dysfunctional father-son, mother-son and mother-daughter-in-law angle and one is looking forward to a comic relief in form of this novel.

Which it does provide in the beginning and one cannot help but grin and at times, laugh out loud at some of the scenarios depicted in Big Boss. One also identifies with some of the scenarios, poor Adi has to go through and apathy he encounters from his seniors, while trying to achieve the goals he has set out for himself.

However, since narration is done as third person, it doesn’t get as intimate as it should and even though it isn’t a major handicap, it implants a sense of detachment, which gets compounded by the somewhat strong aspirational behavior of the protagonist. Who even after finding a great boss ( who is ready to stand by his team and go the extra mile to take care of their welfare), decides to move on to a different firm, just to get a chance to go abroad and gets his fingers burned in the process.

But this is where everything goes haywire and author indulges in a strong dosage of proverbs and unneeded synonyms for the commonly used words, to convey his deep anguish and frustration (I guess) in a more “classy and sophisticated manner”. Due to which, paragraphs seem to belong more to a thesaurus and a proverb handbook than a novel. And renders the novel superficial and dry.

Even though there are plenty of proverbs, synonyms and what can only be described as “dude talk” in the beginning, to make the novel appear cool and sophisticated, it isn’t half as bad as what one encounters towards the end. And I would have loved it, had the author decided to stick to the same.

Additionally, I did not particularly enjoyed “critical analysis” by the former CBI director, Joginder Singh, at the end of each chapter and usually skipped through it, which I guess, majority of the readers would do as well.

Overall Big Boss is a nice attempt by the author to depict the strained, complex and often frustrating relationship between the employee and management, which not only results in high attrition rate, but also disgust, anguish, disconnect and at times even depression on the part of the employee.