How To Become A Billionaire By Selling Nothing by Aditya Magal is a freakishly crazy book, I’ve ever read. Reading the book was a crazy ride and laughing riot all throughout. If you are aware of the Jhunjhunwala twitter handle, then the author’s tweets were just the trailer, this book is the full movie.
The book is full of spoofs and sarcasm. Whichever you can think of and even those you can’t think of under the sun has find the place in the story. The whole plot revolves around the spoofs and irony. I’ve watched many spoof movies but reading one for the first time.
The author has tore apart mercilessly the toothpaste companies like Pepsodent and Colgate, Lays Chips, Coca Cola, Leather products, washing powder producing companies, restaurants charging exorbitant rates for the paltry amount of food etc. He has jibed and taunted every personality one can think of like Asharam Bapu, Ram Jetmalani etc and he has mockery the sales and marketing strategy adopted by the companies to trick people into buying their products.
The story is about two individual Jhunjhunwala and Ramakant. The author has portrayed Jhunjhunwala’s character larger than life image or let say larger than Rajnikant’s image. Jhunjhunwala has been described as inordinately flamboyant and boisterous. He has become absurdly rich and owns whale shaped submarine, the Batmobile, the Optimus Prime Transformer Truck, Jetpacks, Helicopters, Aston Martins and what not as his mode of communication. He is the God of Stock Exchange. Initially I find it very absurd but gradually his character became tolerable as more intolerable character of Ramakant comes into the picture.
Ramakant becomes billionaire in matters of few months by selling ‘Nothing’. Now seriously, I couldn’t make out anything from his concept of NOTHING. It is only towards the end that ‘Nothing’ started making some sense that it is a complete non sense.
Coming back to Jhunjhunwala, like his unduly and unreasonably fat bank account, he is also physically excessively overweight. But he doesn’t like anybody calling him fat and each times he comes with a hilarious arguments of not being fat. Let me give you an example- “I’m not fat. I just happen to wear a protective armour under my skin instead of over it and it just happens to be made of adipose tissue. It’s a shock absorber for my six pack abs!” There are similar dozens of witty explanations he comes up every time someone calls him fatso. Hats off to the author for it.
The most highlight scene of the book is the verbal fight between Jhunjhunwala and his rival Stinker. There are two encounters between them in the book and both of them were hilariously mindblowing. Arnab Goswami also makes appearance once in the plot which was also very well written. I was expecting a “ever never” kind of stuff in the Super New Hour Debate but still whatever gibberish debate written was heartily to read.
The author has used every adjective available in the Oxford dictionary into the book. I think he hasn’t left any. He also did not shy away from using abusive words and slang in the dialogues just to spice up the things.
The Verdict:
If you like spoof movies then you will also like reading How To Become A Billionaire By Selling Nothing. It could be compared to movies like Housefull, Dhamal, Ready, Humshakkals etc which might not have any logic but still are full time entertainer.
If you can survive all the bizarre crap of NOTHING and overly boasting attitude of Jhunjhunwala, the book becomes a bit thought provoking at the end. It highlights many absurdities and ironies happening around us.
A sensible story line up could have earned the book a five starer. But all in all it is a complete crazy book. It needs guts to write meaningful crap.
