Laid in 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.