Name: Sudeep Nagarkar

Genre: Romance, Casual Fiction

Famous Books: Few Things Left Unsaid, It Started With a Friend Request

Basic Introduction: 

Sudeep Nagarkar is a best selling Indian Author. He writes about college life, relationship and ambitions in life. Though the heights of those ambitions and their depth can be debated at length, they are best called youthful fancies. Though he writes English Novels, he often uses colloquial terms (and even sentences) in his works that make readers more comfortable. He writes in the same direction that other contemporary Indian English Fiction writers are writing. His debut novel ‘Few Things Left Unsaid’ became the best seller in no time! This success and a quick shot to fame gave him the impetus to further proceed in the career as an author for youths.

Personal Life: 

Sudeep Nagarkar was born on 27th February 1988 in Mumbai. He has done his schooling in Mumbai and further pursued engineering in electronics. He has completed MBA as well after getting success from writings. He started his writing career while he was pursuing his engineering. After the success of his first novel, he chose writing as the main objective of his life. By now, you can easily guess his role models and ideals in English literature. Yes, he keeps things down to the local level.

His Writings: 

Undoubtedly, the role model of every young Indian writer is Chetan Bhagat. They want to be famous like him and that’s why the motive of every engineering student has shifted to writing from innovations. Well, don’t take my words too seriously because I am not, in any iota of intentions, generalising my comment. Still, this is a common fact that innovation and developing a new technology requires patience and hard work but writing fiction like Chetan Bhagat needs nothing other than the ability to translate sexual fantasies in the appropriate or inappropriate words. That’s simple, isn’t it?  

Sudeep Nagarkar writes about college life and modern generation love. His novels move fast and the characters develop very slowly or do not develop at all. He takes more than 200 pages to tell something to the readers that can be told in less than 50 pages if proper words and sentences are used. The characters of his novels are flat, amusing and immature. You will have a hard time understanding the characters because they are not meant to be. Really? You seriously need to read any one of his novels to understand this (in action).  

It is surprising what motivates young Indian contemporary English fiction writers to label any fictional work as ‘romance’. But in reality, you can seldom find anything like this in the whole story. The story revolves mainly around college beds and cafe drinks and in between, you will find nothing than mere chit chat between the girl and boy. Though this is becoming a fashion only because readers want this trend to continue. It’s like a situation we can perfectly model on the phrase who will bell the cat? And it is not surprising the most among the top Indian book bloggers have their issues with this and many other authors in this category.  

An interesting thing that I found in his book is that he has used the word ‘Fuck’ may times and aggressively as well without any reason. The words like Baccha, Babu and many more are used repeatedly that will provide you with ‘good reading experience’ (not at all). Though it may be hard to accept for the readers who have read the best as well as the worst of Indian fiction, it is still surprising that these talents have brought these couple terms to the mainstream. What do you think?  

His writings are nothing different than other modern writers. They all are selling adult fiction in the name of a romance novel. His characters are always in the search of true love and it starts peculiarly. When the boy looks at the girl’s dress and stares at her to look inside from her transparent dress. Within the two days of messaging and talk, they come to a point where pulling the pants down becomes a common occasion. With so much erotic scenes, the writer presents a classic cheap erotic fiction where the character thinks nothing more than ‘kiss and sex’. 

So much to the downside of this ‘young author’! However, it is hard to find any literary merit in authors like Nagarkar and it has become a very tough situation for Indian literary enthusiasts. Should the expect that it is the new beginning and lower the bars of their expectations? Should they or not? Nevertheless, it is to be accepted that authors like him have given rise to the ambitions of highschool pass-outs or even the dropouts to become writers. A teenager can write some hanky-panky fiction with a boy loving a girl and dumping her for another and the girl becoming a successful singer and sell 10,000 copies… If this has become possible then only because of inspirations like Chetan Bhagat playing at the highest level and his followers like Nagarkar and Durjoy Datta at different levels. While this trend is good as it has brought Indian English literature down to an even playing ground where only the ones like Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai cannot have all the shares, we have to think about setting a certain standard so that we have some face-saving titles when it comes to literature scholars doing research and thinking on the overall picture. That responsibility, to maintain the fiction level, has been put, though unconsciously, on the figures like Lakshmi Raj Sharma and Ashwin Sanghi… and a few more like them who are still indulging in meaningful fiction practices.

Major Books: (click on the titles to read reviews if available)

1. Few Things Left unsaid – 2011
2. That’s The Way We Met – 2012
3. It Started With a Freind Request – 2013
4. Sorry, You’re Not My Type – 2014
5. You Are The Password to My Life – 2014
6. You Are Trending in My Dreams – 2015
7. Our Story Needs no Filter – 2017

He has written many cheap pieces of contemporary fiction but these are the worthy ones to be mentioned here. You can analyse all the names and applaud the abilities of Sudeep Nagarkar to apprehend the thoughts of his readers and keeping them busy.

Major Awards: 

This section is still empty and should be empty for a long duration if better sense prevails in the world of literature.

Conclusion: 

Sudeep Nagarkar is a modern Indian writer who writes in English and especially about romance and college life. He tries to portray the lifestyles and relationship status of today’s youth but fails miserably by limiting it to merely a cheap adult sexual fiction. If authors like him use the tremendous teenagers and youths following and reader base they have, they can educate them, on a serious level, about various psychological and emotional problems modern people are having. However, we cannot dictate what an author should write or avoid. This is the best if chosen by Sudeep himself and we can only expect that someday he will take the call and use his books for the purposes more than mere hourly entertainment. Serious readers, on the other hand, need to acknowledge that these guys have used their technical analysis well and understood the supply and demand zones in Indian literary context rather well compared to the serious authors who have, unfortunately, confined themselves in the zones with very limited takers. 

Written by Amit for The Indian Authors