The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat
- Author: Brannavan Gnanalingam
- ISBN: 9780473725976
- Availability:
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Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time
for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He
dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks
of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more
grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job.
Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South
Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The
novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of
representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the
day.
Bio
Brannavan Gnanalingam is an award-winning novelist based in Poneke. He is the author
of Sprigs (winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel and shortlisted for the Jann
Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book
Awards), Sodden Downstream (also shortlisted at the Ockham New Zealand Book
Awards), and A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (longlisted at the Ockham New
Zealand Book Awards). He is also a former columnist for the Sunday-Star Times, and
winner of a Qantas Media Award (as it was then known) as a film reviewer for The Lumière
Reader. The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is his eighth novel.