26 September, 2012

#BookReview :: Just Married, Please Excuse by Yashodhara Lal


Caution! Marriage Ahead …

Yashodhara, a quick-tempered gal from the big city is hitched to Vijay, a laidback desi boy from a small town – in one word, Trouble!
The young couple must learn to adjust to married life and to each other – whether it is Yashodhara's 'tamper tentrums' or Vijay's foot-in-mouth syndrome – with a little help from their idiosyncratic staff, Zarreena and Vinod, their nutty friend Vivi and, of course, their respective families.

With the unexpected arrival of baby Anoushka a.k.a. Peanut, the battles escalate, fuelled by their vastly divergent views on raising a child. Will their many differences – so endearing at the start of their romance – actually turn out to mean that they are just incompatible? Will they ever manage to agree on anything? Or have they just bitten off more than they can chew?



Yashodhara is a modern Delhi girl and Vijay is somewhat modern guy from Jaipur.  The corporate world plays a cupid bringing them together. While Yashodhara is fun-loving, easy going sorts with a big temper, Vijay is more serious, steady and man of few words. While one is strictly non-vegetarian the other is strictly vegetarian. They couldn’t be more different. But since when did ‘love’ ever have a checklist of likes, dislikes and temperament? In a split-moment decision made by Yashodhara (not so sudden for Vijay, of course) they get hitched and life takes a different turn for both of them.

Let me get a small fact out of the way – I am newly married. I have only about 9 months of experience in this life and I couldn’t agree with the author more. I had more time with my husband before our marriage, yet everything is playing out in the same way. Reading this book was like reading my own life story, albeit with some differences. 

Yashodhara has managed to keep the story so true to life. She has maintained a certain balance between all the elements. Also, she has incorporated her amazing sense of humour into the book so well that it had me in splits many a times. The characters develop over a period of time and the author lets you in to their psyche, which greatly helps in understanding each situation from both ends. But the USP of this book lies in the everyday, general conversational language that it is written in. It doesn’t have many BIG words and neither does it seem like a child’s work. It is simple and it is the way we talk. It helped immensely in picturing the characters, the situations and the conversations. But at the same time, I think that this book must have been written with only the Indian readers in mind as it had a lot of ‘Hindi’ in it without any translation provided. 

‘Just Married, Please Excuse’ is a story that deals with the good and the bad, the ups and downs, the expected and the unexpected, the small things and big fights – in short with ‘Marriage’ and all that it entails.

It is quite a fast read – thank God for that since I do not think I would have been able to put down the book in between (then I could probably add a ‘dinner’ situation to the story). I am looking forward to getting my hands on the second book. I recommend this book to everyone – provided you understand Hindi too.




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