How many points did u say?. Review on Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat

For all the new members at MS...Hi !!!

read in recent times...Five Point Someone

For starters...

When we hear the name IIT the only image we can conjure up in our minds is of a student wearing thick black rimmed glasses, studying a thick book on Quantum Mechanics and while studying thinking of the new advances made in the field of Nuclear Physics...FPS removes even the traces of all such imageries.

FPS opens our eyes to a whole new thought process..IITans are not some superhuman aliens. They are normal people like us; with faults of normal human beings, Just that they had slogged hard in the last 2 years of schooling

It's a story of...

FPS is a story of three friends...

Hari, the narrator is a simple guy who does well in school and somehow gets into IITD. Here he falls prey to the system and starts neglecting studies. He falls in love with Neha, the daughter of the Head of his Department.

Alok, a nondescript guy belonging to the lower middleclass of the Indian societal fabric. he has all the normal problems of his class...father terminally ill, household runs with the money his mother gets, a sister to marry off, everything will get better once he gets a job. But, does he live up to expectations?

Ryan, the hero of the three, he is stinking rich and has real courage to face the world. He decides to defy the system but can't do so.

A bit of the plot....

FPS is the story of how these three friends spend their days at the IITD, their joys, their sorrows, their fun, their thrills, their disappointments.Alok and Hari easily falls for every other idea of Ryan though they know these ideas won't work. It's something magnetic about Ryan's personality that always attracts them.

I'm not revealing too much of the plot because the whole book, all of 200 odd pages is solely based on plot. So, if you read the entire plot in MS then you won't need to read the book.

In short, FPS has all the ingredients that would keep us bided to the book till the end. It has romance, thrill, friendship, love, betrayal and all other feelings human beings are used to.

Critically....

The language of the book is pretty simple. Chetan Bhagat is no Dickens and he does not even pretends to be so. the language is kept simple so that even an average reader can understand the book.

The length of the book, as I've already stated earlier, is of around 200 to 250 pages. to describe 4 eventful years in 225 (I'm very good at averaging!!!) pages is nothing short of doing injustice to the whole concept of the book. But, that doesn't

really matter. The narration is done wonderfully. It's just that after reading the book, you tend to think that the author could have written a little bit more.

Another thing that I've noticed about the book (and I don't know how many of you will agree with me on this point) is that the book also throws light on the societal divide of India. Picture this. HAri belongs to middle class, Alok to the lower class and Ryan to the upper class. each faces problems typical to their strata of the society.

The grading system...

Being an engineering student myself, I'm well aware of the point based grading system prevalent in colleges. The results of my semester is just out and by now people tend to identify students by the points one got in the semester. It's always the guy with an 8 point and not Shankha.

Ryan decided to defy this very grading system. At the end of the story, he personally wins over the system but fails to make any difference. Anyway, his character is really awe inspiring.

What say, my fellow wannabe engineers?

A last word....

I think that every individual should read FPS irrespective of whether he is a science or humanities student. The book has something for everybody.

Hi Friends,

Shankha.