What not to do while writing a book. Review on Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat

The good thing about college stories is that they end when the college years do. Five point someone is a similar story – fun while it lasts, embarrassing in hindsight, forgettable over time. Chetan Bhagat jumps into the much exploited American genre of Campus Novels and following Anuraag Mathur’s failed attempt – How to be a spinster, ask a Stephenian, sets out to document what not to do at IIT. The promise of the plot is more intriguing than the plot itself. The IITs have long been the revered institutes of learning and knowledge, the temples of hallowed education in India and the crème de la crème of Indian technology passes through its erudite halls. The insider’s story with juicy morsels of scandals and screams, of affairs, flings and midnight escapades would have any reader craving for more. One gets visions of Shobha De taking a male form and bitching about the sacred, the fragile, the frivolous of this monumental system.

But such visions fall flat on the face as Bhagat tells the tale of three students who start their IIT years with a low Grade Point Average and sink into the ignominy and despair that the relative grading offers them. The tale is of three friends – each a Don Quixote in the technical fields, with dreams that don’t go beyond cheap booze, aloo paranthas and erections. Simulating a bildungsroman but not quite succeeding in chronicling either the inner thoughts or conflicts or growth of the characters, Bhagat creates three tolerable characters – Hari, Ryan and Alok, who blunder through their four years at IIT, caught in the grip of their own failures, fears and the inability to fight a system designed to keep the underdog down under. Hari, a boy with a disciplinarian military father and a stuttering to authority problem, Alok with a physically dysfunctional father and a neurotic mother embedded in middle class poverty, and Ryan with an alienated family far away from him in foreign lands and a picture perfect body that houses an inquisitive and innovative rebel, form an improbable threesome which quickly results into a plausible camaraderie. They bonded on ragging day and in spite of the ups and downs – bad results, fights, misunderstandings, troubles, love affairs, show downs in class, confrontation with professors and a discrimination by the system – become best friends who share their smokes, booze, porn and assignments.

One of the highest points of the novel is the way Ryan comes up with fool proof ways of defeating the system, only to be proved a fool himself. His Cooperate to Dominate is perhaps one the most hilarious bits in a novel that tries too hard to be funny and fails spectacularly at it. Hari – the narrator of the novel has a love affair that is more insipid than gold fish mating, in spite of the elements to create the masala movie of a life time – he falls in love with the daughter of his Head of the Department and screws her while wearing his shirt! Alok’s attempts at rising above the squalor and despair he was born into are too pathetic to invoke sympathy. Ryan’s constant attempts at creating a family out of his friends in order to substitute his biological family are repetitive and not fairly described. However, with all these imperfections, the story, like its protagonists, blunders through the honeycombs of IIT courses and gives a whimsical, pop-eyed view of the world behind those barbed wires.

The novel is so keen on telling the story that it does just that – functionally tells the story without letting us enter either the characters or their situations in detail. Agreed that the college life that Bhagat sets out to describe is a kind of a whirl wind but he has failed at capturing either the dynamism or the inertia of the tale and hence gives us more action than thought. The plot outline is bare enough – Hari falls in love with Neha, Ryan falls in love with his work which is independent of itself and Alok falls in love with ghee smeared paranthas. In a desperate attempt to improve their situations in life they try many strategies which would allow them to enjoy life – movies, girls, eating out, squash, booze parties et al without dropping their grades. However, they realize, with growing dismay that all their strategies fail. As they grow into their apathy other factors come into existence – their status as low graders becomes their claim to fame and they get stuck in the groove. Hari’s love affair blossoms to reveal that Neha’s brother had committed suicide under the pressures of his strict IIT father. Alok has the burdens of getting his sister married off and Ryan secretly yearns for his parents. These things only intensify a state of academic degeneration they are in and the story, told in a flashback, predictably culminates in a disastrous attempt at Operation Pendulum – stealing examination papers to come out with flying colours and getting caught at it. The DISCO - a disciplinary body internal to the IIT, which makes them dance to more than just tunes, promises to ruin their lives forever when in a sudden twist things fall into place and three five point some people live happily ever after.

What makes these three losers become heroes and how they rise above the system to come into their own might is what Five Point Someone is all about. In parts preachy, in parts predictable; in parts funny, in parts facetious; in parts awry and in parts forgettable, it is a first time attempt of someone who has not yet perfected either the tone or the craft of his story telling and so what we have at hands is a mediocre book that might do well on a train journey. All in all, the clunky story telling, the completely unreflective narrator and the absence of a coherent motif that might help in unraveling the tale, Five Point Someone, like its protagonists, is just fairly acceptable and not worth a second read. There is nothing memorable or particular in the novel that will want you to pick it up. Five Point Someone is like a cheap Bollywood movie that makes its money simply because it was cheap. A book written for circulatory libraries, it is best forgotten in a public loo or used as a wedge for a table once it is read.