“Johnny Gone Down” is the second offering of Karan Bajaj. In contrast to his earlier “Keep Off the Grass, ” JGD is a beautifully written thriller that shows that the author has matured over a span of just two works.
Like most new age Indian fiction writers who try to emulate Chetan Bhagat, in having IITians and IIMians as their lead characters(hoping wishfully that with such backgrounds they will be popular with readers), Karan Bajaj has gone one better by casting an MITian as his lead character. But that is just where the similarity ends. JGD is a fast-paced novel about Nikhil Arya, an MIT graduate, and American citizen and a NASA appointee who seems to have everything cut out for him – or so it seems!
Within a span of three hundred odd pages, Nikhil’s fate takes him from the US to the revolution-torn Cambodia, a monastery in Thailand, the drug cartel in Brazil, a computer nerd’s den in the US until he reaches Delhi, the place of his childhood. What is really surprising is the ease and the conviction with which the author has managed the seamless transitions from one phase to the next, effortlessly creating a “world without boundaries” for our hero!
Changing names and even characterizations, from Nikhil, to Monk Ramche, to Donos, to Johnny, and ultimately back to Nikhil, the book is a beautifully inter-woven philosophy whose easy narration style makes for an interesting read that grips you from page one.
Through his amazing writing skills and adept wordplay, the author has not only vividly described the adventures that Nikhil had, but also described the lifestyles of all that he met during these adventures. His description of ruthless Cambodian-style torture, the peaceful lifestyle and ideologies followed by the Buddhist Monks in Thailand, the trigger-happy drug lords of Brazil, the melancholic – almost paranoid behavior of top Brazilian models and the laid-back attitude of software developers in the US, are beyond parallel.
The storyline is such that the reader is well prepared for a tragic ending. So much so that when everything seems to fall in place in the end, the average reader may find it like something of an anti-climax.
All said and done, it is a great piece of work by a budding author who has managed to keep the reader on tenter-hooks from cover to cover - and all this without even having to resort to erotic episodes just to keep the reader from losing interest. Good job, Karan. Keep it up! You have the makings of a celebrity writer.