Saturday, 15 July 2017

Suppandi: Fire Away by Tinkle – Book Review



Publisher’s write-up:

‘A painter, a driver, a copywriter, and even a chef, Suppandi has applied his truly unique wit to almost every imaginable job out there. The perpetual optimist, Suppandi is never afraid to take up a new occupation, much to the amusement of his fans everywhere, Suppandi has remained, from the day of the character’s conception, Tinkle’s most popular toon.’

This is a short collection of humorous stories based on the character Suppandi from Tinkle, an Indian comics magazine meant for children.



Suppandi is known for his extreme levels of self-esteem and confidence accompanied by a very low level of wit. He mostly works as an assistant to various professionals and eventually gets sacked for the very blunt interpretation of his boss’ instructions which leads to problems and confusion.

The book totally had fifteen stories, thirteen of them on Suppandi on two other fillers. The Suppandi stories, most of them maintained the usual Suppandi stories trait – works as an assistant, messes things up, gets sacked and he doesn’t understand why (for according to him, he was merely carrying out instructions) and of course, the stories were well illustrated. The stories were longer than the typical one pager that comes in the regular magazine but it maintained the humour. Suppandi also tried out a lot of diverse professions in this, such as, working as an assistant to a business man caught in an Income Tax Authorities’ raid, an assistant to a magician, tried his hand at acting, mining, football and certain other stories where he was with friends.

However, I would have to say that the two filler stories were quite awful, neither humorous nor did they have a good story line and in a seventy page book, these occupied nearly seventeen pages. To add to that, a couple of Suppandi stories seemed like filler by themselves, where he randomly has a dream and by means of day dreaming, he loses focus on work, which was hardly creative and the stories lacked the element of humour either. These were another thirteen pages book and thus, I have a qualification on nearly 40% of the book.

By a sheer mathematical approach, considering 60% of the book was good, I should award it a six but also considering the value for money factor, I would award this a five on ten.

Rating – 5/10

Have a nice day,

Andy

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