Those Pricey Thakur Girls transports into the old world charms of 80’s Delhi

It’s a simple love story set in the 80s Delhi. Dylan Singh Shikhawat, a prominent investigative journalist of one of the very rare private media houses of that time, falls in love with the star news reader of Doordarshan who also happens to be the fourth daughter of Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur. Set in a posh neighborhood of South Delhi, Those Pricey Thakur Girls dives into a charming love story with political upheavals as a background in a time when privatization of Media was just kick starting.

Think of all the stereotypes that the genre of chic-lits has built in your universe. Think of popular fiction you have otherwise come across; think of Chetan Bhagat and his woeful tales of love stories from an engineer’s perspective that produced a nation of young readers. Combine all those feelings of romance, of popularity and finally, of stories that had so far been absorbing the pop-fic scene in the country to land on to Anuja Chauhan’s “Those Pricey Thakur Girls”. She builds up a story very eloquently and one relishes the well written text which somewhat manages to mask a very filmy love story.

Even though the book resorts to a few clichés, like Dylan’s entry into the story and the various south Delhi quirks, none of the characters fail to make us smile as we read about them as them. Our heroine Debjani, a regular, slightly unconventionally beautiful and slightly clueless of her splendor is our average girl next door. Many of us would associate, with her nervousness as she sets up to perform on the very first day of her job. Her naivety is attractive. And though one understands what her household is like and where she hails from, one gets slightly put off by the adverse dozes of innocence that her character embraces.

Compared to Dylan, who embodies a socially aware pragmatic youth, Debjani comes off as a negligent child. Like all clichéd love story, the smart guy goes for the fragile, flustered yet childishly stubborn girl; and a reader like me wonders how that happens. But the book shows it happening and even to a skeptic reader, tries to convince that these two are a perfect fit for each other.

Those Pricey Thakur Girls boasts of other rounded characters like the four sisters of Debjani and her parents, along with average neighbors who are extremely identifiable and is possible that the reader has gone through conversations similar to that in the book if they happened to have lived in South Delhi ever.