Run and Hide

Growing up in a small town, in the shadow of a busy railway junction, Arun dreams of escape from his low-caste family and a life full of deprivation and everyday acts of violence. At the prestigious IIT college, he meets two students, also from impoverished towns, who seem to possess the sheer will to smash through merciless social barriers.

The alumni of IIT become the financial wizards of their generation, travelling to workplaces and playgrounds, from New York to Tuscany and Kalimantan.

Arun and his friends are the recipients of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom, with no awareness or concern for its true costs. While his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies in the East Hamptons, Arun decides to pursue the writerly life, and retreats to a small village in the Himalayas, until the world comes crashing in, in the form a young woman named Alia, who is writing an expose on his former classmates.

Alia draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. And, when someone in Arun's circle commits a terrible act, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become. Run and Hide is the story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost.

It is the story of a group of friends, a changing country and global order; it is also the story of many lives over the last thirty years.