Dave Besseling was born and raised in Canada, and has lived pretty much everywhere but there after skipping his college graduation to go travelling for a decade, which led to his memoir,
The Liquid Refuses to Ignite. He landed in India for the first time in 2008 and has been in and out of the subcontinent ever since, working as a writer and journalist in Bangalore, Delhi and now Bombay, where he is the deputy editor of
GQ India.
'For a guy, attraction is simple,' says Sid. 'It's like a switch. You see a hot girl, you want to have sex with her . . . For a girl, things are more complicated,'-fingertips glued together for a few seconds of emphasis-'looks are just one switch of six, maybe seven. If you can flick all those switches, she will feel a compelling attraction to you. It's evolutionarily hardwired.'
Meet Siddharth Malhotra, self-appointed Number One Pickup Artist in India, once a dork in a Tier-2 town in Andhra Pradesh who has never known the touch of a woman. Like many before him, he can now get just about any woman, as he boasts. The trick? A secret move only he knows, and an urban encyclopedia of psychological know-how targeted at the fair citizens of India's metropolises.
Trailing him disbelievingly is a Canadian journalist, drawn to this curious character, six feet plus, wearing geeky glasses and a tailored suit-'no Ranveer Singh, but no Shakti Kapoor either'. As he watches Sid prove his game bar after bar in Bandra, we discover a frightening yet compelling substrata of Indian pick-up artists. What makes young Indian men like Sid tick, and how do they thrive within a society which is the ultimate 'cock-blocker'?
The story that follows is that of young urban India today, guided by Tinder and TrulyMadlyDeeply as well as the all-seeing Indian mother and equally ubiquitous societal pressure. Hilarious, acute and full of uncanny insight on modern-day dating, Laid in India reads as real as a pub brawl-and punches just as hard.
