Ink and Insights – Medhansh Saha

There are many types of relationships. Like the 50 shades of grey, there are varying degrees with which girlfriends identify themselves and how their boyfriends classify them. Though to a baby boomer, the very thought of such a relationship is appalling and mind-boggling. Why would a completely happy man wish to constrain himself with pleasing a woman for a short period of time, with no guarantee that she will reciprocate the same forever?

While this might seem absurd to many, the book “Half Girlfriend” by Chetan Bhagat adds a completely new level of absurdity. What even is a half girlfriend? Is she half committed? Half present? Half in love? Or merely half imagined by the protagonist himself? The title sounds less like a relationship and more like a contractual loophole to be exploited.

Whatever the answer may be, the phrase is sufficiently bizarre to provoke curiosity before one has even turned the first page. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the writer’s greatest trick. He persuades the reader to accept a relationship category that no sociologist, psychologist, or even the Oxford Dictionary recognises. Whether the idea survives scrutiny beyond the title, however, is something we can only say after reading the book itself…