This the second collection of short stories by Nikhil Sachan, a 30-year-old who works as a financial consultant in Gurgaon. Sachan’s first book, Namak Swadanusar, came out in 2013 and has been one of the most frequently ordered Hindi books on the Internet ever since.

Once again, most of Sachan’s stories revolve around children, as evident in the title, but his idea of childhood has little to do with innocence. There are also stories of nostalgia, felt by the overworked employees of multinational corporations about things they have left behind in their small towns.

Among the politically sharpest writers of his generation, Sachan uses many of his stories to show the cruel hilarity of communal politics in India. He attributes his remarkable grip on the fixations and hypocrisies of Hindutva politics to the years spent at Kanpur’s Madan Mohan Malviya Vidyalaya, “an institution with deep RSS ethos”.

This time Sachan takes on saffron-style moral policing through the story Vicky Malhotra ka Pyaar, whose titular character is incidentally lying about his name to get ahead in love and life. Sudhir Kumar has decided to call himself Vicky Malhotra because it’s the kind of the name that screams cool confidence and wins over the girls. It’s the name Shah Rukh Khan’s character in Baazigar, Ajay Sharma, assumes to fool his enemy into handing over to him not only his daughter but also, famously, the power of attorney to his business empire.