Sorabh Pant launches his debut novel The Wednesday Soul

Sorabh Pant launches his debut novel ‘The Wednesday Soul’ at Bonobo, Bandra on January 19, 2012. Special Guests Gul panag, Vir Das and Farhan Akhtar graced the occasion. The launch started with a dramatic reading of the expert himself, Sorabh Pant! He addressed the crowd and introduced the book with his funny one liner and took Farhan and Gul also by a complete surprise.

A comic by profession, Sorabh Pant has toured India with 150+ shows in 18 cities. He has also toured with Rob Schneider, Wayne Brady and Vir Das and is one of the most revered comics in our country today.  As a writer, he’s written columns for prestigious newspapers and magazines, and spent a decade writing for TV wilderness, the memories of which are too haunting to delve into right now. Sorabh makes his debut in the sphere of novels with “The Wednesday Soul” – a book that delves into the rather grim issues of life and death.

The Wednesday Soul is an account of Nyra Dubey, a feisty, bordering on violent girl, from Delhi and her life after life. Run over by a bus, she lies on a grey road, fuming inside, like the noxious fumes outside. The infamous vigilante—The Delhi Belle—reduced to an accident statistic? Surely, this was not her fate. A fortnight ago, she would have not only settled for, but embraced a violent death. Today, death is a colossal inconvenience, holding her back from enjoying her newly-acquired fridge-sized boyfriend.  Death hath no fury like a woman dead, she thinks, plotting an explosive vengeance upon death’s ethereal masters for the loss of love. A vengeance delayed, as she’s labelled a Wednesday Soul, carried off by a monstrous Eledactyl (an Elephant-Pterodactyl), and then kidnapped by the biggest, ugliest eagle she has ever seen to the mysterious Big Ball. Unanswered questions race through her head as Nyra quickly learns that souls are made of light, that she is in the midst of a destructive plot to destroy the life after life, and that the quickest way to escape from an Eledactyl is by rubbing its bum from the inside. Compared to death, she thinks, life is a breeze.

Sorabh Pant, being the funnyman that he is, shines a happy light on that giant fear of humanity: death. He reveals how death can be quite entertaining, if you’ve lived your life well and fairly.

This book shines a happy light on that giant fear of humanity: death. It reveals how death can be quite entertaining, if you’ve lived your life well and fairly. The end could be glorious and joyful or heartbreaking and painful. The Wednesday Soul makes for profound material packaged in an entertaining light and is a promising read.