Description

But will I forget all your ways, city?

I hope not

At 27, the author realised that the romantic Delhi he believed in mostly existed in his own head, and that he was stuck therein. So, he embarked on a half-conscious exit, alone into the country, an escape not only in terms of geography, but from the sundry trappings and numbing patterns of the urban bubble. Exit One provides first glimpses from this on-going journey, and as a precursor, includes poetic tales from the author’s days as a magazine reporter, venturing an unapologetic look into contemporary time and place.

Ishan Marvel takes his own sweet time to get to places. He was born in the mountains, and has now returned to them with the mission of building a samgh and effing the ineffable.

If you liked this book,
don’t hoard it on a shelf, or in a box
Give it to someone who may like it too,
or read it somewhere
Better still, translate it, or tear off pages
and stick them on public walls
That is, if you liked it
Otherwise, do as you please

Reviews

Ateesh Kropha on Amazon
It is difficult to slot ‘Exit One’ into a genre. It’s part poetry, part travelogue (Delhi, Benaras, Puri, Kolkata, Nagaland), part biography, part therapeutic rambling, part philosophy. It’s how Ishan (the author) sees the world around him. As a reader you get an unfiltered glimpse into Ishan’s mind, body and soul – narrated with honesty, flair and courage. In a world full of pretences the most difficult thing to do is to tell the truth as we see it, and the author does it in spades. By the end of the book, I got a good sense of who the author was during the time the book is set. The world he inhabited, the kind of people whose company he enjoyed, the things he liked to eat, the places he liked to hang out, the things he liked to do, and so on. And at the end that’s mostly all a reader wants from a book, to be convincingly transported to another place, another body, another time – and yet be happy in this new skin – even if it didn’t follow the traditional arcs of storytelling. The book also discusses interesting themes like social conditioning, the corruption of religion and finding meaning amidst the confusion. Exit One feels like a metaphor for taking the red pill and exiting the Matrix. It would be interesting to read a follow-up on how green the world is on the other side.

Vaibhav Sunder on Amazon
It is a beat generation kind of book, I know the author will all due dilemmas. It has beautiful photographs hanging in the background as dark and deeper things of life in poetry come through, Delhi kids, Delhi, environmental changes, road trips we hear of in Standup comedies. I left Delhi in 2013, he in 2018. It is a recommended book on Delhi, for Khushwant Singhs is old, and probably a pre-cursor to such times now.