Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Chetan Bhagat Revolution


Gone are the days when companies used to come to campuses to do a very meticulous and selective recruitment of capable students. Now companies from the IT-services sector swarm into campuses and rope in hundreds at a time. Chetan Bhagat sweeps majority of the Indian audience in this fashion. The books sell at every nook and corner of India in incomparable numbers. Now the fifth of his books, Revolution 2020 are out, and I found it the best among the five.



This, I call, cotemporary writing. Even though the inevitable scenes of affairs and sex are included as in his previous novels, undoubtedly to sell more copies, Chetan has hit the right chords with the evergreen topics of love and greed that run throughout the story like stave in an orchestra composition. When writers spend months to coin phrases that might hold the verbose-liking readers to ponder over non-existent meanings, this IIM-A graduate has tabled his cards in a plain and simple fashion. Now here I might have hurt a few of you, but I don’t care - because bestsellers are not always meant to adorn the shelves of ardent literati fans and amateur wannabe pedants.

From a masala-point-something of a story to millions of books sold, Chetan has so far got the right going in everything. He was in the TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he is the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history. Hope he uses this influence as a jig to instill in youth the realization of the need behind the youth to come forward for every common cause, rather than sulking away to comforts. He quit his career as an international banker, to dedicate his full time to writing. The Indian youth needs icons desperately, and this guy might have already proved his candidacy through his influence.

At a time when sins are redefined and erstwhile taboos have come out of sediments to the periphery, that the people (especially youth) have started to view corruption from a third person point of view gives hope. The book spits overt blame on the Indian educational system, but finally gives the reader a chance to choose which was right and which was wrong

Awesome reading, guaranteed.

6 comments:

  1. You really think its the best of the rest??well, for me 2 states and five point stands a step above this book. Didnt reach upto the expectations.

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  2. @AV : five point was class, I agree.. But its success was partly because it was the first book of its kind.. But R2020 came at the right moment.. When the whole country talked and read corruption..

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  3. yeah....thats right...i agree...but still it missed that spark!!after reading the prologue and reaching half way the story you can easily guess what the climax is...

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  4. @ambika: but wasn't the climax unpredictable? though it was kind of strange!!

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  5. the gopal-arathy part was predictable. .anyways good effort.... the corruption in the educational system is being picturised cleanly.. at some point I was thinking lyk,is it this easy to start a college? :)

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  6. @ambika: exaggerated, but you get the point..

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