What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street?

You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course.
Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead.
Samrat's rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while his grades – and self-confidence – plummet. Soon, Samrat's quest for identity turns increasingly bizarre as it takes him places he hadn't planned on visiting – prison, for example – and makes him do things he hadn't banked on doing: 'meditating' stoned with a sexy Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares.

Does Samrat – Yale valedictorian, investment banker, convict, pothead – survive his fall from grace?

Karan Bajaj is a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Washington D.C. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2002 where he was selected as one of the top ten young business leaders of India by the Aditya Birla Foundation. Karan has earlier worked as a Brand Manager for Procter & Gamble in India, the Philippines, Singapore and the U.S., and was nominated a 'Top 40 under 40 marketer in the U.S.' by Advertising Age in 2007. Born in 1979 into an Army family, Karan studied in various schools in Delhi, Shimla, Ranchi, Jabalpur, Lucknow and Assam. His interests in backpacking, hiking, reading and philosophy are key writing inspirations.