For one, the author was being treated like a bona fide celebrity. Normally, authors at these things have to hang around shiftily beforehand while a three-person audience looked fixedly at them wondering why they don't look like their book jacket photos. This guy was being followed around by mobile phone cameras as if he was a movie star.
Then there was the content of the event itself. It wasn't a dry panel discussion. It wasn't a dour presentation of a selection from the book. It was part group therapy, part motivational speech, part one-man play. And, further, it was one of the most illuminating evenings I have spent; it revealed much about the anxieties that haunt this vast and disturbing mass of young Indians we're saddled with.
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The book was not pop sociology. It wasn't reportage; it wasn't a self-help manual, or even whatever genre Abdul Kalam's Vision 2020 is a specimen of. Nope: it was a slim romance, titled Your Dreams Are Mine Now.
Ravinder Singh, the man who wrote it, is an easy-going man with a soul patch, who dresses most of the time like an off-duty MBA. This is in fact what he is, and it is perhaps the most important part of his identity as an author. Mr Singh is either the second- or the third-best known Indian writing in English. Chetan Bhagat is, of course, an undisputed number one; and everyone knew when he broke out that Mr Bhagat is IIT-IIM-Citibank Singapore. The second is either Mr Singh or Durjoy Datta, another novelist who writes for Penguin Random House. Mr Datta is Delhi College of Engineering-MDI Gurgaon; Mr Singh is Infosys-ISB Hyderabad -Microsoft. In other countries, for other authors, for other readerships, at other times, these affiliations would merely be markers of a past life, an entertaining last question for literary journalists to slip into Q&As. For India's biggest mass-market novelists, they are front and centre - the first line on the author blurb, a large part of their appeal.
The IITan Mr Bhagat's first book, Five Point Someone, was set at an IIT. Mr Datta's first book, Of Course I Love You, was set at his alma mater, the Delhi College of Engineering. Mr Singh's first book was similarly autobiographical, and was in fact blurbed by Infosys' N R Narayan Murthy ("Simple, honest and touching").
On some level, this fascination with the best institutes reminds me very strongly of one of George Orwell's most famous essays, in which he tore into the "boys' weeklies" common in England before the War. The stories therein, of public schools and aristocratic hijinks, were , he said, written to "allow the boy who goes to a cheap private school (not a Council school) to feel that his school is just as 'posh' in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton". The parallels to Mr Singh's readers write themselves.
But Orwell, like many men who disagree with everything, tended to imagine that such things did not just happen, that they were made to happen by the ruling class. I am far from being as certain. The books that Messrs Bhagat, Datta and Singh - and their literally hundreds of imitators - write are not the product of shameless pushing by the ruling class. That crowd at that Kolkata bookshop had chosen Mr Singh of their own volition. The ruling class prefers to imagine that people like Mr Singh do not matter.
I have other, unanswered questions. Mr Singh's books are tragic romances; Mr Bhagat's books are happier, but are unquestionably romances, too. In the rest of the world, such books are read overwhelmingly by women, at least according to publishers' statistics. This does not appear to be the case in India. And certainly Mr Singh's audience that day was more than half male. So are the people who importune writers of his success on Facebook or Twitter, wanting to tell their stories too. For them, the characters' stories of family, of love, of arranged marriages and illicit romantic phone calls, are inextricably linked to their business successes or career choices.
So at a time when we are justly questioning Indian male values when it comes to gender, it is worth noting also that this entire generation of young men seems to desire romance, and places it on a pedestal with careerism. (And, of course, will take advice on both from engineers and MBAs.) This is not to defend India's young men, but ensure that we have a suitably complicated idea of who they are - and perhaps of what romance writing is, too.
Either way, if we want to understand the young people who will build tomorrow's India, the young people who voted in Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, then we need to seriously read what they do. Here's Orwell on the boys of the 1930s, again: "They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them." Perhaps in the India of 2015, future employers should at least try and find out what their employees' illusions are.