Chasing Butterflies by Richie Singh -- The 2012 South Asian Reading Challenge

Chasing Butterflies by Richie Singh (2011, 136 pages)

South Asian literature is a very big part of my reading life and my blog.   R. K. Narayan is one of my favorite authors and my posts on his work have been for a long time now among the most visited on my blog.   I am happy to be once again signing up for the South Asian Literature Challenge hosted by S. Krisna's Books.   For the purposes of the challenge South Asia includes  the following countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives.    So far I have not yet read anything by authors from the last three countries.   I will be posting on a short story writer from Nepal soon but the challenge is about books only.   I will try to read at least six South Asia books, hopefully more.   I will soon read R. K. Narayan's acknowledged by all best work, The Guide and The Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand.   I also have on hand E-Books by Salmon Rushdie and Amatar Ghosh.    There are lots of wonderful short stories by writers from these countries also, many of which can be found online.

Chasing Butterflies by Richie Singh is a good book for inclusion in the South Asian Challenge.   It is about a man from in his late twenties from  India working in the USA at a very professional job who wants to move back to India and wants to do what family expects him to do and marry an appropriate wife.  (I was given an E-Book of this by the publisher with no strings attached but of course they want me to post on it.   If I receive a free book and I do not like on it I do not post on it).    I was not able to find much biographical data on Richie Singh but his last name is very Indian.  

There is a lot to like in Chasing Butterflies.  We see the anxiety of the first person narrator as he talks over going back to India after several years in the USA with his friends and family.   He decides he wants to get married pretty much as soon as he can to a nice, professionally employed well educated Indian woman so he joins a match making web page.   It was a lot of fun to read the very well done transcripts of his conversations with women he meets on the webpage.   We also see him try to tweak his profile so as to attract the right sort of woman.  

A friend had told the central character that life was like chasing butterflies.   Each one of us has their own personal meadows and butterflies. 

Another interesting aspect of the novel occurs when the narrator goes back to India to sort of check it out as everyone tells him it has changed tremedously.   We get to go along with him on several different job interviews.  

Chasing Butterflies is worth reading.   It is available in Kindle and book form on Amazon.  


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