An unhappy Sergeant, Sushil Awasthi,
feels that his circumstances dumped him into doing drudgery in the Air Force
and that he deserved better out of life. Grumbling often, he accuses his wife,
his parents and even Air Force for his agonies. When he finds that, the newly posted
medical officer, Wing Commander Shabd Mishra, is his best friend of school
days, his inferiority complex plunges further down.
The Wing Commander is still hankering
after his school day’s crush Soumya despite knowing of her being married to
another Air Force Officer, who too is posted at the same Station. How things
shape up when three classmates get together? What fate does the love story of
the lovelorn Wing Commander meet? How do others around, the officers and the
non officers, react to the friendship between a Sergeant and a Wing Commander?
I tend to believe that authors who bring in their own personal experiences into writing need a higher level of self-introspection while writing their stories. Reason that there is so close to the material, they tend to lose objectivity over its plot, nuances, length and most importantly, relevance to the main characters. Love@ Air Force suffers heavily on this account. As a result, the book never becomes a solid love story in the back drop of Air Force nor it acts as a much simpler story of three individuals stuck in complex circumstances.
Gaurav Sharma, who himself is a
mathematician, borrows heavily from his father's life and experiences who has
served in Air Force. There are things to admire in this novel. Notably, the
mature romance between the three lead protagonists, the complex power structure
in Air Force, the monotonous life
officers usually get sucked into and the obsession of ranks. But all these high
points are buried under long passages of self-introspection and a running
commentary of Air Force that as a reader you tend to lose patience and
readability with the characters by the end of the book. The novel had to be
much shorter and less of all this clutter to have a better impact on it's
readers
The author maintains a soft tone to the characters, the flow is easy but there are numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes to encounter in the first print of the book. I am going with 2/5 for Gaurav Sharma's 'Love@ Air Force'. By the end of the book, you could just feel a tinge of disappointment. This book could have been so much more. An opportunity wasted.
