Memory Remains: Journey Of An Indian To The US & Back, as the sub-title says, is about the journey of an Indian to the US and back. It is a fiction novel written by Prashant Karhade and loosely based on events from his own life. But in many ways, it is about the journey of every Indian who goes to the US, then ends up working there, and faces the dilemmas about whether to stay in the US for good or return to India. The book also tries to capture the essence of the 8 years from 1995 to 2003, which were very important from a historical standpoint because they coincided with the rise of the internet, the boom before the dot com bubble burst in 2000, and life after that.
Avinash the protagonist of the novel, or Avi as he is fondly called by his loved ones, decides to go down memory lane and pen down all his memories, for want of anything better to do. His memoirs will take you to Satara (a city in Maharashtra, India), St Johns High School (in Mumbai, India), Ruparel college (in Mumbai, India), IIT Bombay (in Mumbai, India), Vanderbilt University (in Nashville, Tennessee, US), and Intel headquarters (in Santa Clara, California). If you have visited or been to any of these places or if you are an Indian who has traversed the same or similar trajectory as Avi, this book will strike a chord like no other! If you are not an Indian, this book will take you to an unknown world, most probably a world that is quite different from the one you grew up in, which should hopefully be interesting. It will also give you an inside peek into the lives of Indian techies who come to the US, their dreams, their passions, the lives that they lead as graduate students in American universities, and the lives that they lead as working professionals in American hi-tech companies.
Avi absolutely adores Madhuri Dixit (the Bollywood actress) and VVS Laxman (the Indian cricketer). He is a true music lover and simply loves Metallica, Eagles, Pearl Jam, GNR, RHCP, Rolling Stones, Nirvana, U2, Pink Floy, Led Zeppelin, and Doors, and pays tribute to these music Gods through his memoirs. And during his stay in the US, he also ends up loving American fotball and baseball, America's passion and favorite pastime respectively. If you share Avi's passions and would-die-to-meet-them-at-least-once list, again, this book would strike a chord like no other!
Avi has many successes and many failures in his life, but he tries to learn from each one of them. He also meets many people in his life and tries to learn from them as well. So on a deeper level, Memory Remains is about success & failure, learning from failures, learning from other people, self-help & self improvement, finding oneself, finding God. In other words, the book is about life itself! So if you are a spiritual person and a seeker like Avi is, you will absolutely love this book!
