India operates at its own pace and I spent many hours on this trip in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. To help pass the time, Martin handed me the novel he was reading, said he was about a third through, would buy himself another copy later and wandered off to the book store. And indeed, it helped pass the time and I finished the book by the time I reached immigration in Mumbai nine hours later.

I usually do not pass judgement on books as I do not feel qualified to comment on literature, but I am sure that if Martin had read on a little further, he would not feel inclined to spend another 95 rupiah.

One night is bookended by the author recounting a night train ride in which a beautiful girl offers to tell him a story about six people in a call centre receiving a phone call from God, but only if he promises to turn the episode into his next book. After the story is finished she also provides an alternative version of how that call might really have happened. That construction reminded me a lot of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, where it is immensely more effective.

The first third of the book introduces the main characters, who in the second third are each faced with very predictable calamities, go on to have their conversation with God to remind them about what is important in life, and finally bring about a happy end that is too infantile even for a novel targeted at young adults, with whom it has apparently struck a chord anyway, as the book made Bhagat the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India's history and has inspired a major Bollywood picture.

On the plus side, I learned a nice MS Word hack.