Book Reviews: Chetan Bhagat's novels of the New India

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So did I ever tell y'all that Superefficient Infosys Grrl -- who teaches "Soft Skills" there -- also has another job? She takes English classes at a "CAT" coaching centre. The CATs are the Combined Aptitude Tests (I think) that are used as admission criteria by Business schools in India -- and apparently, they're huge. I mention this because this year's CAT test was held on Sunday and they made the front pages of all the main Indian newspapers -- 230,000 students wrote them and most of them want to get into the MBA program at one of the internationally famous IIMs (Indian Institutes of Managements). Given that there are a few thousand places at these elite institutions, most of the writers are headed for heartbreak -- and one of the thousands of other private "B-schools" that have suddenly cropped up in India. Anyway, the IIMs are patterned after the IITs (where the T stands for Technology) and both now seem to form the pinnacle of those aspiring to reach the top of India's newly liberalized and aggressively capitalist economy.

So I thought that the time was ripe for me to review Chetan Bhagat's two novels for Mysore Daze, given that the first of them, Five Point Someone, is subtitled "What Not to Do at IIT." If you check out Chetan Bhagat's website, you'll note that he also has degrees from both an IIT and an IIM and now works for a "global financial corporation." And I've been here long enough and associated with enough upwardly mobile middle-class folks to realize that CB is living his parents' dreams. I'm not talking about the novels, either!

Five Point Someone is both a bildungsroman and a classic college novel: a young man comes of age -- he makes friends, learns to deal with success and failure, develops a relationship and finally emerges onto the real world. That he happens to do all of this at IIT Delhi adds to the appeal of the book; I imagine a lot of people who read the book read it for the vicarious thrill of trying to see inside the fabled institution. There are some good bits in the book, notably an early scene wherein Our Hero and his soon-to-be best mates are called on to introduce themselves to bullying seniors in the college: they mumble their names and then enunciate their CAT ranks clearly, suggesting the relative importance assigned to these two identifying factors. On a similar note, the title refers to the middling GPA of 5 point something (out of a possible 10.0) that Our Hero and his two best buds soon settle into. There are many more trite bits; I have to admit that Bhagat's treatment of women in the book is banal and irritating. I realize that his focalizer is a shallow 17? 18? year old boy but still! The sexist bigotry should at least have been leavened with humour -- and it is not. As for the end, meh. Too much melodrama.

I give Five Point Someone a 5.6 out of 10 too. In case you're wondering, that's a C- in my book.

I managed to finish Bhagat's second novel, One Night @ the Call Centre, while relaxing today. It's a fast read -- six people who work at a call centre have a bad night, which ends with them perched on a precipice of construction materials taking a call from God. Again, there were a fair number of things I liked about the book, not least of which is Bhagat's obvious concern with the consequences of a too-quick liberalization and a too-rampant corporate globalization. That the precipice our call centre staff are perched on is made of the iron grids supporting new construction is an irony that we can all pick up on. And at moments, Bhagat's writing flows because he is intimately familiar with the cultural economies he's dealing with: here's how an irritated ex describes his girl's new fiancee, an NRI (Non Resident Indian) who happens to work for Microsoft in the US: "He is MSGroom 1.1 -- a deluxe edition" (70). But as with Five Point Someone, it is the details that I found interesting, while the story itself is too Bollywood for me. Incidentally, it should surprise no one that One Night is being turned into a film, tentatively titled Hello. Anyway, what Chetan Bhagat has captured in this novel is the wholly new (to India) lifestyle of the young staffers who work in call centres or BPO offices or in the info technology sectors.

So I'll give One Night a slightly higher grade: a solid B.

Final comment on the anomie of the young that both the books hint at, though they never quite dare to go there completely: there's an attempted suicide in Five Point Someone and a young woman who cuts herself in One Night. Clearly, the call centre economy brings in wealth -- the kids the two books are about have access to the kind of wealth that would have been unimaginable even when I lived in Mysore (and that was only in the early 90s!). Along with this wealth, they've acquired the superficial trappings of Western life: pizza, SUVS, alcohol, crushes on members of the opposite sex, even sex occasionally... but there's been no real integration of these objects (yes, even the sex seems to be more of an object than a visceral experience) into the culture of home. Nor is there any sense that these kids (be they call centre employees or IIT students) will be able to move on from the fry-guy-for-the-business-sector jobs of the call centre economy into something more satisfying.

If you come across the books -- and I don't know that you will because they're both published by Rupa & Co, an Indian firm and are so popular that they've sold out many printings here so I don't know that they're being exported anywhere else -- read them for what they tell you about the state of a particular (and influential) class in Indian today, rather than for their literary or entertainment value.