Review of Anurag Tripathi’s Dalal’s Street.

  • Title –  Dalal’s Street
  • Author – Anurag Tripathi
  • Format – Paperback
  • Print length – 212 pages
  • Publisher:  Niyogi Books Pvt. Ltd. (Under the Imprint: Olive Turtle); First edition (6 September 2019)
  • Also available in – e-book format

A group of young Indian business School graduates are attracted to jobs in a high paying trading company. This batch of hardworking, intelligent and ambitious friends is focused on success in the fast paced, hyper competitive world of stockbroking where greed, use of cunning and wealth are the stepping stones to survival and success. The survivors are the winners.

A financial thriller of dark humour where friends become competitors in their struggle for survival, threat lies in every wry smile and Superfast action to tip the scales of finance and fortunes in a bid to achieve quick wins is the order of the day.

Dalal’s street explores the complex interplay of human relationships in a world ruled by the rise and fall of share prices and etches out the emergence of the protagonist through a test by fire.

The moment I saw the title of the book, I thought it would be all about the stock markets and a bit about some of the famously infamous names and the scams thrown in the mix. Well, I was correct of the first half and a little bit on the rest!

Four business graduates think they are ready to take on the the financial world and succeed in terms if name ,fame and money. They soon realize that hard work alone is sufficient or is it insufficient!

There are a lot of things that I learnt from this book. All the stock brokering terms and the life inside the stock market building, the way people behave / react and basically what how things go about in the financial market.

The author has brought before our eyes the way the recruiting firms operate and how the gullible graduates take the bait ,believe in everything that is said done and finally fall prey!

The language is simple and easy. The story line does not drag and the pace was good till the end. But in some places I felt it went a little technical and I had to read those paras a couple of times.

I would say the main characters are well developed and given weightage but the other characters don’t have so much depth. And sometimes the way a certain character behave does not seem totally convincing. But if you read it as a story and not look at how it will reflect when this happens in real life, then it can just be left aside.

Apart from the stock market stuff, you can see betrayal, romance, violence, lust, greed , manipulations etc and also their consequences.

The black humor works out in some places.The cover is interesting and I also liked the glossary at the end.

If you are into stocks, financial world happenings, then it will surely interest you. And you can also pick it up to get an insight into the word of stock markets ,share trading and brokering.

Anurag Tripathi is an alumnus of the Indian School of Business with a course in Advanced Creative Writing from The University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education. A keen observer of people and a master raconteur, he draws on his vast reservoir of life experiences. As an erstwhile investment banker, he previously led the retail equity business for a financial company in India.

This novel, his second, is a fictionalised no-holds-barred account of what goes on behind the scenes in the financial advisory business in India. However, that still hasn’t deterred him from continuing to invest in the Indian stock markets for the last twenty years.

His debut novel on the art market in India was nominated for the Raymond Crossword Book Awards in 2017. Dalal’s Street is his second novel. A member of the Singapore Writer’s Group, Anurag now lives in the ‘Lion City’, along with his wife. Both are keen scuba divers, who like travelling and exploring the worlds lesser known.

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Check out the 80+ books that I have reviewed so far in the Book Reviews page .

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