It seems I have been moving from Chetan Bhagat's (India's most widely read English author according to TIME magazine) less promising books to the better ones. I started off with One Night at the Call Center; on which I commented because I felt I had to, on his take of Indian Call Centers, since I am familiar with the BPO industry; moved on to his latest book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, which I felt was utter trash and did not deserve comment, but finally discovered a gem in his first book, Five Point Someone - a book which he describes as, what NOT to do at IIT.
This book is well written so I wonder how I missed reading it in the first place. The plot and storyline of his book comes out as pretty realistic which describes life in the IITs but could pretty well be a scenario in any one of our Indian colleges.
The college where I studied in fact had many similarities to what he describes in his book.
Our college principal's daughter, was something of a college starlet and there was not a single desk in our college classrooms that did not have her name inscribed on it with pen or carved out with a blade by some daydreaming Romeo in the middle of a boring college lecture. Chetan Bhagat's character Neha, who is Professor Cherian's daughter in the book could pretty well be her equivalent.
Then I know a close friend of mine who never wrote a single exam without having a nip of whisky in him (just to loosen up his tension as he said!). But unlike our protagonist, Hari, in the book who found that vodka in him before the college vivas was an utter disaster, this friend of mine passed every exam that he wrote with flying colors!
The book pretty well captures how domineering, intimidating and bookish college professors can be, except for the rare one who truly inspires and will go to any lengths to help out a hapless student. He pretty well describes how boring college life, with inane lectures would be, without some of the colorful characters you would find around any campus.
The book is pretty well a mish mash of romance, comedy, dark humor, passion and a lot of laughs and he uses language pretty well to his advantage, sometimes resorting to Indian English. His mastery over description is captivating. For instance there is a scene in which Chetan describes Hari's interest in Neha's bare legs against her car's brake pedals on their first encounter- writing "how erotic a girl's naked feet on metal can be"!.
On the whole, a pretty wholesome book and I can say one of the good books that has come out of an Indian author without being too academic or classic. I would say populist literature without being too cheap. Worth a read, once, maybe twice.
5 months ago