Jaideep Varma's novel, Local, is the story of Akash Bhasin who works in a advertising company in Mumbai. To get away from his troubled life, he decides to live his nights on Mumbai's suburban western line trains. The train is the only place where he can forget the chaos and stress in his life. This book talks about Akash's experiences of the two contrasting worlds. It is the tale of the people who inhabit and move in and out of these two worlds; a competitive ad agency and a local train. It includes short stories with which Varma paints a city where its people are trying to adjust to the gap between dreams and reality, success and failure. Read it for an interesting and contemporary novel about the kind of people that we run into everyday.
