Random sentences from this book: However, he cognized the futility of proliferating his blood pressure ruminating anent him.Prakash ejaculated a muffled wimp....He dressed himself meteorically... clasped her soft, creamy paw with his other mitt.Prakash supersonically glanced towards his mobile.He squashed the face of the green button and confabbed with her momentarily.Befuddlement prevailed in his mind-palace.He dressed himself dapperly and skedaddled to Shantana Bakery.After devouring the succulent nimbu-paani...The guys bobbed their noggins; the lab attendant scooted.You get the drift. At least when it comes to the language. If you can stand to see English being slaughtered in this cavalier fashion, FLAKE (which, by the way, is an acronym for Friendship Love And Killer Escapades) might be your cup of tea. Not that it’s got much of a plot; this is basically just another campus novel that follows the lives of a bunch of engineering students—Prakash, Purvesh, Anand, Amish, Tenzing, etc—through their years at college. There are loves found and lost, quarrels, pranks, exams, passes and fails, cheating, partying—just about everything that happens to young people. Nothing new, nothing unusual, and not all of it interesting. In fact, some of it (especially a couple of metaphor-heavy descriptions of diarrhea and masturbation and sex) is either downright disgusting or hilarious (have you ever thought of equating sex with a wizard and his wand, with which he’s approaching a tree, to pierce its bark?)But, back to the language, which was what really got my goat. This is English at its very worst: a frightful attempt to cobble together ‘big’ words without really understanding how the language works, what goes together, and what doesn’t. Without realizing, for instance, that corroboree and wassailing are words for very specific gatherings, not just any food-and-drink party. Without realizing that it’s silly to substitute—wholesale, with almost no exceptions—‘simple’ words like about, hear, late, talk, quickly and all at once with anent, discern audibly, tardy, confabulate and tout de suite. When you don’t know idioms, when you don’t know that someone rang his girlfriend on her phone (not ringed her, like some bird), or that the past tense of spit is either spat or spit, not spitted (unless over a fire?)… what hope is there? When you don’t even realize that bringing together so many disparate elements in language—archaic words like ere long and anon on the one hand, slang like skedaddled, vamoose, collywobbles and bushwhacked on the other, and the sort of stuff you usually find only in medicine and law courts (ad interim, juvenescence, diurnally and so on)—just results in pandemonium, how can you call yourself a writer of English?Befuddlement prevailed in my mind-palace, therefore the 1 star. I got this book as a free copy for review from one of the authors; I wish I could’ve given it a higher rating. My conscience won’t allow that, however. This is one of those you shouldn’t touch with a barge pole.