Three robust brothers from Jalandhar -- Harinder, Joginder and Balwinder -- stormed excitedly into an architect's office one sunny day in Delhi, flourishing photocopies of the building plans of their dream house. They had recently returned from Virginia you see, and wanted to replicate Thomas Jefferson's 18-acre home on their 1,000 sq yd plot. Architect Gautam Bhatia's eyes gleamed. Here lurked a story. He pulled out his diary and forgot his fees. Thus was born one of his books, Punjabi Baroque and Other Memories of Architecture.

An unerring satirist, Bhatia has a keen sense of the absurd, the idiosyncratic and the humorous. Writing for him, he claims, is not a compulsive calling; it is impelled by immense hatred or immense love of a building. The idea of India Gate turned into a five-star hotel, the purple range of his clients' aesthetics, the impossible humbug of people's postures -- these are the things that usually make his writer's fingers itch. "We used to fall off our seats laughing, reading his column Sutradhar in India Magazine," says publisher and friend Ritu Menon.

However, in his new book and first "literary" venture, Punchtantra -- Parables for the 21st Century, the spoof has gone out of Bhatia's satire. Is it witty? Yes, undoubtedly. But not funny. The original Panchatantra by Pandit Vishnu Sharma was a collection of fables intended to inspire courage and selflessness; Bhatia reinvents them to reflect the amoral paradoxes of the 20th century. The sacred rivers and banyan dotted landscape of Vishnu Sharma's Vedic Age have been replaced by nuclear reactors, sluggish streams and the psychedelic flash of fluorescent lights. The wily jackals, clever crows and naive Brahmins give way to repugnant and rapacious creatures: an oedipal mongoose, a lesbian feminist, an expatriate dog, an environment-conscious tortoise, a battery of monstrously greedy Brahmins.

In each of these stories, Bhatia writes with a rapier pen and sabre eyes, lancing unforgivingly at every preposterous detail of modern life: unemployment, sexual incompatibility, environmental pollution, hypocrisy, cant and corruption. The characteristic relish for the absurd is there but the indulgent affection is absent. "I didn't intend to paint a grim picture," says Bhatia. Unwittingly, he has -- because even the most excessive leap of his imagination is still only a disturbing approximation of reality.

Shoma Chaudhury