Palash Krishna Mehrotra and The Butterfly Generation

I did not read Eunuch Park, Palash's inaugural book of short stories.It had very positive reviews , but I have a cynic's view on too much gushing over a person with an illustrious pedigree - too much can be bought in India with your father's credentials, and  literary merit must be earned.however I picked up TBG because of a sneaking fondness for 'India' books. The kind of things that are well researched,often well observed,in which the writer tries to dissect and analyse a country famously resistant to both these processes.It is entirely possible to write a good book about it and have most Indians pick it up and feel that most of it is outrightly unauthentic and wrong.the writer being usually  foreign. But Palash  has a 'both observer and observed' heft on the material, and this makes the book truer then many with similar objectives.he is of my generation too, and this made me identify with both the author and the people he chronicles in the book.It is structurally amorphous - a Writer Looks At Post Reform India and The Modern Generation in aim,and travelogue cum memoir in realization.Along the way he talks about  ragging,girls,bands,Bollywood(obligatory)servants,stand up comedy....and  how different these used to be just a few years ago.Pretty par for the course,in the context of these kind of books,but where he scores is that he's grown up here,knows what he's talking about and has some original analysis to share.He also remembers the days when kids used to fight to stay up and watch DD,to the time they shifted to FTV, to the present obsession with the Net.People who grew up during this brace of years have a unique perspective, and I hope that others too write books like this one.
Since the book is episodically divided, I'll  choose the one's I liked the most- the Yellow Umbrella, the one on ragging, and the first one focused on Delhi.The chapter on servants, the least.It's shallow in its sociological analysis(including a misapplication of Srinivas' Sanskritization theory).Palash does'nt extend his analysis of Delhi's working class to the rural UP-Bihar milieu it hails from and its caste-honour linkage.He also hasn't extended the India he writes about to the young people who 've stuck to the  conventional professions-law,medicine- and their perspective on their lives.But these are minor gripes.Such a book's challenge is to focus on what to talk about,and Palash does this capably.