Tick-Tock We’re 30 – Book Review

Tick-tock we’re 30

This is a novel by Milan Vohra from the Indian Mills & Boon fame. The first sign that writing was going to play an important part in Milan Vohra’s life was when she frequently found herself slipping into the back rows of the English honours lectures, while doing her degree in Economics. She juggles an advertising consultancy and looking after family by day and writes by night. One of her stories won a Harlequin contest and made her India’s first Mills & Boon author. Her book, The Love Asana, became so popular they’re now translating it into several Indian languages and taking it global too. She lives in Bengaluru, India, in a lovely red-brick home with her husband and two children.

Turning thirty can be scary. What if that comes with extra tension of making up a fake-new boyfriend for a reunion, falling head over heels with an old sort-of-boyfriend, seeing your best friend flirting with him and meeting your ex-boyfriend who says he still loves you. That is the story of “Tick-Tock We’re 30” and much more. It is about Lara’s upcoming thirtieth birthday party when the whole SN gang is coming together for a reunion and celebrating the event “OTWT- Oh Teri! We’re Thirty!’ as Sita, one of the gang members, likes to call it . It is a pact that they had all made back then to meet when all of them turned thirty. But that isn’t the only pact that was made then, Lara and Nishad had a pact too, a pact to marry each other if neither of them were hitched by the time they turned thirty.

But Lara doesn’t want to give Nishad the pleasure of knowing that Ranndeep, her boyfriend then, a hunky pro-racer, was wrong for her. So she convinces Perzaan to play her boyfriend’s role for the reunion week. This cute bartender cum male model, Perzaan, has to go through a make-over to look like a banker but can he act out of his character? He can but a week is a long time esp. when you are hanging out with all those friends for all 24 hours.

It is a light-read with lot of drama and comedy. Simple language with believable characters. It is like a guessing game of who ends with who and how. The reunion reminds you of the college days and makes you forget they are thirty something’s or about to be turning thirty. The author is successful in bringing out the whackiness of all the characters and string a story around that to make perfect matches at the end of it.

As Nishad says in the novel, ‘Interesting, isn’t it, how someone is always utterly attractive to someone else? For every male tree frog, there is a female tree frog whose dry skin and warts and bulging eyes are the most divine.’. But humans are a little more complex as they don’t readily accept those feelings or sometimes don’t even know those feelings exist. This is a story of such realisations. An interesting end is what makes the novel appealing only it could have been a little less lengthy without losing the flavor. An entertaining read for sure!