Accidentally in Love

Accidentally in Love by Nikita Singh is a romance based novel, mark my words! Why I said romance based is due to the fact that there is nothing in the novel apart from romance. Perfect girls falling for perfect boys and vice versa is the basic framework on which the pages of this novel are painted. There is no scope of imperfection anywhere. There only they keep complicating their love lives falling in and out of love. The characters in the novel have no other things to do perhaps apart from physical intimacies. So, what’s the catch in the novel Accidentally in Love? Let’s get into a little detail.

Chhavi, who is a struggling model, falls in love with Tushar, a struggling photographer. (Do you notice the perfection of the creation?) Both are perfect in looks as well as in their profession as the author tells us. Their love blossoms as an open relationship and then they start falling in love. This gives scope for a question on the frailty of relationships in today’s world. Love doesn’t take you to the union of bodies but union of bodies many times makes you fall in love with that person. Strange but true, this is the catch today. Intermingled with Chhavi and Tushar is the love story of Vatsala and Ankit. Vatsala is infatuated by some star Ronit. This leads to another confusion. So even when these protagonists have a perfect life, they keep ruining it by their foolish acts.

The picture that these kinds of novels present is that parents trust their children and send them out of cities or more precisely to Mumbai to build up their career and they kind of ruin it. Running into a disastrous life of Discos and late night party hubs. They work, no doubt, but at the cost of what, at the cost of their virginity or their health because of excessive intake of liquor or weeds. This kind of description hampers the progress of laborious genes.

Another thing that I didn’t like was the perfection of the girls and boys. The so-called model like girls sitting in pubs make elite eligible handsome bachelors fall for them. But what’s the fun in that, not only young impressionable youngsters even elders are besotted by perfect men and women. In case imperfection follows love that’s what is attractive and catches the attention of readers. Overall a good read for ‘those’ youngsters as it is filled with a vivid description of physical intimacies.

Our editorial take on the novel is harsh but we have to present it without any bias! These novels, as we often categorise them, fall into the class of ‘quick reads’ with no head-no leg! The novels like Accidentally in Love present the contorted figure of society and even go ahead and try to create that… Indian fiction needs a jolt seriously and good authors with good stories will have to break this tradition which is doing nothing but spoiling the thing called serious readership!

Review by Nidhi Sharma