I found Five Point Someone awesome, but after that One Night @ The Call Center was a heartbreak, and The Three Mistakes Of My Life has nowhere to go but down the drains. I mean, has everybody got to show Muslims as heroes and Hindus as villains? And that Australian cricketer sub plot was really weak.
Baijayanta Banerji, advocate
When I first read Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, I was greatly amazed by the casual-yet-collegy take the book had on problems that a typical engineering student such as myself faces: assignments, vivas, ragging by seniors, ragging by professors and the elusive girls. I became an instant fan of this one-book-old author. But when his next book One Night @ The Call Center had hit the shelves, I was appalled by the elements of commercialism that had crept into his writings. The plot, the characters everything seemed tailor-made for a Hindi masala movie. No doubt Bhagat is a master of words but he should understand the distinction between a book and a movie plot.
Rajaditya Mukherjee, Jadavpur University computer science engineering 2nd year
They say he is making India read like never before. What they miss is he is achieving not by writing good literature but by serving them the same potboilers that they used to see on screen…in paperback. There is melodrama, sex, office power games, and these days even the angry dad of obedient heroines! His books, a permutation and combination of these typical ‘Masala’ factors (better than average combinations though, don’t ignore his IIT IQ!) have commercialised reading beyond imagination. His somewhat hormone-driven portrayal of his ladies, excessive use of F*** words, overtly casual lingo and supernaturally happy endings which had been a welcome change initially among readers, has become more clichéd with every book he has published since Five Point Someone. His biggest blunder was writing the script for Hello.
Debapriya Mandal, 4th year MBBS, NRS Medical College
I have read most of Chetan Bhagat’s book under cover of textbooks as a medicine that kept me awake in boring classes. For me, Chetan Bhagat is only light entertainment, good to read if you are careful enough to put to sleep your critical judgment. Five Point Someone was a fascinating read, sprinkled with dollops of humour. In fact, this was the pioneer which started off the college campus books revolution. But writing The Three Mistakes Of My Life was Bhagat’s fourth mistake. Like a typical Bollywood romcom, it had a good start but lost steam in the middle and ended pathetically on a melodramatic note. The sudden appearance of God as the ultimate panacea to all troubles of human life in One Night @ The Call Centre was a big spoilsport and in itself, very defeatist. Bhagat’s books are fun and a must read for teenagers.
Devaki Ghose, 2nd yr Economics Honours, St Xaviers College
Chetan Bhagat makes me race through his lines and I can live the lives of his characters as I read his novels. The superbly patterned words and the use of jargons make his novels all the more “chuck-me-not” kinds. The protagonists can be easily related to. The female characters are depicted with practicality of the current generation, not the “Oh-so-virgin” types. Amazing here, is the use of numbers in these novels starting from 5, 1, 3 and 2. What else can be expected from an investment banker? He is my favorite author.
Piuli Banerjee, 2nd year, MSc Forensic science
They may say he writes commercial stuff. They may say he writes cheap literature that caters to the tastes of the masses. But all I care is, his books are fantastic reads. I can identify with the characters and I can’t put his novel down until I turn the last page. Bhagat does not need to prove himself to his critics. His sales figures should keep them quiet. It is not for nothing he is the largest selling Indian author in the English language.
Soumajit Saha, Media Studies student, Calcutta University