Now That You're Rich

Durjoy Datta

Description

WILL IT BE MONEY OR LOVE? For Abhijeet, Saurav, Shruti, Garima life is about to change. They have the most sought after jobs in the country jobs that will pay for designer clothes, shoes, watches, holidays in foreign locations . . . all the things they ve ever wanted. But then, is life ever perfect? Things begin to get tough from day one as they begin to work under bosses who are straight out of hell, who pile them with work, push them for more and make their lives miserable. Things go from bad to worse as they fall in love and sleep around with all the wrong people. Then when recession affects the company, their bond begins to strain. Till one day, the very reason that got them together tears them apart: Money.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351183945
• Langue: English

Extrait

Durjoy Datta Maanvi Ahuja

NOW THAT YOU RE RICH
Let’s Fall in Love!
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
You Need to Hear This
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
Epilogue
Also in Penguin Metro Reads
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN METRO READS
NOW THAT YOU RE RICH
Durjoy Datta was born and brought up in New Delhi. He completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book, Of Course I Love You , was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels- Now That You re Rich , She Broke Up, I Didn t! , Oh Yes, I m Single! , If It s Not Forever , Someone Like You -have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India. Durjoy lives in New Delhi, loves dogs and is an active CrossFitter.
For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1 ) or Twitter (@durjoydatta).
Maanvi Ahuja was born in New Delhi, and did her post graduation in finance from IIM, Kozhikode. She is the author of two books, Of Course I Love You and Now That You re Rich , both of which have been on various bestseller lists. Currently residing in Mumbai, she works as an investment banker at a leading banking firm.
To know more about her, you can mail her at: [e-mail].
Also by Durjoy Datta
Hold My Hand
She Broke Up, I Didn t! I Just Kissed Someone Else!
Of Course I Love You Till I Find Someone Better
(With Maanvi Ahuja)
Oh Yes, I m Single! And So Is My Girlfriend!
(With Neeti Rustagi)
Till the Last Breath
Someone Like You
(With Nikita Singh)
You Were My Crush Till You Said You Love Me!
(With Orvana Ghai)
If It s Not Forever It s Not Love
(With Nikita Singh)
To Shelly (1998-2009) The bravest, cutest and smartest dog ever. We will miss you.
You Need to Hear This
I have always been terrible with secrets and stories that are never meant to be told or passed on. A very feminine trait, I know. But then, stories are meant to be told, aren t they?
Lazing in my cosy couch today, with a laptop on my lap, I can t help but recall a story that I have told a million times, no matter how many times I have been asked to shut up.
But I find no reasons as to why I shouldn t pen this one down and entertain a few souls while irritating a few others. What the heck! I will write it.
This one, I think, has all the elements: a guy with a Porsche, a girl lost in love, selfish parents, loving siblings, a love scene on a thirteenth-floor terrace, lecherous seniors, blackmail, life-altering videos, hideous bosses, infinitely sexy co-workers, drunk guys professing undying love and last but not the least definitely not the least money.
Fifty years after you get married, you find women with no grey hair desirable, you find women who are not obese attractive; whoever that woman might be, she won t be your wife. The girl you re in love with today, the girl who you think is smart and interesting and pretty, will be the one who will make you feel your skull is being clawed open with Wolverine paws. Love is often blind, and it blinds you short-term and makes you overlook what time changes.
Love makes the world go round. But money buys the tickets.
Maybe, love lasts a lifetime. Money lasts longer. It pays for the funeral, too.
Falling in love is easy. Choose the sweet guy who sits next to you in class and flutter your eyelashes at him, or pick the girl who does as much as talk to you, exchange numbers, be her wake-up call in the morning, send sweet text messages telling him or her how much they meant to you, and BAM! You are in Love.
So, what s wrong?
The analysis You forget to analyse how this situation will play out after a decade when the girl or the guy is no longer pretty and they are predictable and boring. You forget to ask yourself the simplest and the most obvious of questions.
Is the guy rich? Is the girl rich? Does the girl have a brother? Am I ready to be with him after thirty years, come what may? Will I be happy with a husband who has not been to the gym since his teens when he used to be buff and fit, and is now fat and lazy? Will he be able to sustain my needs and the kids who are going to wreak havoc later?
Will I be happy after ten years with the girl who now dresses up like someone s dead? Will I be happy to see her wrinkled smile twenty years down the line, with bills piling up at my doorstep?
Will I tolerate it with a smile when she tells me that the neighbour just bought a new car and she wishes to have one, too?
One answer settles it all.
Marry rich, very rich.
We are nice people, and for us, relationships are meant to last a lifetime. If they don t, the guy is a bastard and a jerk, and the girl is a cheating slut. So, till the time that changes, choose your date for tonight carefully. You might just end up spending a lifetime together.
Fall in love carefully. Piles and wads of money usually break the fall and make for a smoother landing. So, now that the pearls of wisdom have trickled down my brain to the recesses of yours, let us go on with the story.
It s the story of the four of them.
Overachievers. Geeks. Nerds. The ones who ask for sheets after sheets in examination halls while you look blankly at the question paper, cursing yourself for not studying the night before. The ones will be out with the answer while you are still looking for your calculator, trying to figure out which numbers to tap. Whom would you not consider as serious contenders while predicting class ranks? Olympiad winners? College gold medallists?
All four of them, brilliant minds.
The first amongst them, Abhijeet, exemplified everything I just said. He had yet to score in the eighties, or the seventies; anything less than the mid-nineties depressed him and for good reaon. He was the most hardworking student you would ever come across.
He had led an uneventful life. The craziest thing he had ever done was to take an exam with a chapter not revised. So, let me start from the day he spent his last day as a college topper, when something remotely happening happened.
1
It was the fourth of January and the air in the college campus was redolent with expectations and the sweat of his fellow classmates who were still looking for jobs.
There were more than a few pairs of eyes on him; most of them had disgust dripping from them. A few greeted him and the others looked away. He had already been placed in a company which offered him seventeen lakhs per annum, but he wanted more. The company on campus that day was offering thirty lakh Indian rupees per annum. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.
He left the presentation that the Human Resources of the company had prepared especially for the students of Shri Ram College of Commerce and headed for the library where he came across a few of his professors. They wished him luck and said they had full faith in his capabilities. Abhijeet was too brilliant for his own good. He was good enough to be hated.
I need this. This is what I want to do, he told himself and trudged to the library. He passed the college bookshop and spotted a few of his classmates in an intense discussion with Raju bhaiya. Raju had seen hundreds of students spend the best three years of their lives in front of him. Years later, they would discuss him in their reunions, but Abhijeet would never be a part of those discussions because he had been too busy with books and seniors and sucking up to his professors. Being the brilliant college topper for two years in a row was a full-time job that hardly left any time for friends or frolic.
Macroeconomics , by Ravi Shastri. He flipped through the pages. There was nothing new. He flipped through some other books. Accounts. Business Studies. Law.
Same thing.
The last two years of spending hours neck-deep in those books, while others were looking down cleavages, held him in good stead.
Abhijeet had been brought up in a single income family. His father worked in the Delhi Development Authority while his mother was a housewife. The glaring difference between his father and his uncles wealth always pinched him: their cars, their big houses and the big rings on their fingers. He always felt he was missing out on something. Though his parents did whatever they could for him, he did not like it when his uncle discussed business and laughed out loud at losses that were more than his father s yearly income. He wanted to make it big. This was his day and his chance to get back at them. While his cousins were waiting in the wings to join their fathers in their dingy manufacturing units that made plastic buckets and trinkets, it was his chance to become a front-end investment banker, the most grossly overpaid and overworked of all white collar jobs.
Abhijeet was always conspicuous by his presence. He was a Delhi Board 2004 topper, an NTSE scholar and CA foundation rank one. Everybody knew who he was. Some girls even found him cute, but then, girls also say that about stray puppies. Big deal.
But I wouldn t really call him average-looking with his just-right complexion, lean frame and chocolate-boy looks on a six-foot frame. He was better-looking than many guys around, but he hid behind huge rimmed glasses, dull shirts and oversized trousers. The worn-out white sport shoes under the loose dirt-brown trousers just made things worse.
That morning, it had been hardly a few minutes since he had started reading an article on subprime losses and their fallout when he heard a meek, squeaky voice of a