Aug 03, 2009 01:48 PM
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The Perfect Bollywood Script
Chetan Bhagat has become the biggest – selling English – language novelist in India’s history. He is the author of three best sellers, Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center & the Three Mistakes of My Life.
Book is a powerful medium of expressing a thought, a thought which may propel a country or could even be used for personal satisfaction. But when you know that your book is going to be read by million pair of eyes and that each tongue can speak fire, a little bit of precaution rather caution should be incorporated.
Chetan Bhagat’s first novel “Five Point Someone” is his best work so far. That was the genuine effort from an author and not a wannabe bollywood script writer. Thereafter, the qualities of his novels are declining. Considering the Box Office performance of “Hello” which was adapted from “One night at Call Centre” by Chetan Bhagat, he is better off as an author rather than a script writer.
Chetan Bhagat, Just like his two previous books Five point someone & One night at the call center, this book is also based on young people’s lives, their friendships, struggles, etc
Well frankly speaking if the book is taken for the young blood yes no doubt it is a hot selling cake, and why shouldn’t it be, for there is cricket, there is a girl, money , booze and then the water falls from the cliff to religion, business, dreams and suicide.
The style and presentation of the book almost remains the same as it was for ’Five Points someone’ and ’One night @ call center’. The plot of the story is based on the familiar ground of Gujarat where people love to be in the business and respect business than any other place in India does.
The plot is pretty simple, It revolves around three friends, Govind lives in Ahmadabad with his mother. He has two best pals, Ishaan and Omi. The three friends become business partners in a cricket shop which they open inside a temple run by Omi’s family. The business prospers with time and they plan to shift to an upcoming mall in some reputed area.
The three young entrepreneurs work round the clock to save money for the new shop. Besides shop, Ish starts to provide cricket coaching to young people and Govind, the maths tuitions. During one of the training sessions, Ish learns about this muslim boy Ali who is a night mare for bowlers and whose favourite shot was a six. Ish decides to coach Ali and puts him into the national team. Govind’s love story begins when he starts to teach Divya maths who is about to take medical entrance exams.
The rest of the story revolves around these five main characters and how do their relationships change through thick and thin of Gujarat earthquake, terrorist attack on World Trade Towers and Godhra train mishap. The Last fifty pages or so concentrates more on Godhra train mishap, its aftermath and its effect on the three friends and their protégé Ali.
In short the story revolves around struggles of the three friends, their love lives and their fights. Later in the story, the author weaves religion, cricket and politics which are considered India’s biggest national obsessions.
This book seems more like Chetan Bhagat’s effort to establish himself as a bollywood scriptwriter rather than a genuine fiction. Anyway, it’s something fictional, but an entertainer in all. Chetan has to make the job of the script writers simple now that all his previous books are being made as bollywood movies with some of the biggest names like Aamir Khan involved. But we do not want to lose a good author to a mediocre scriptwriter.
Chetan knows that Indian viewers like the movie to have a lot of twists, romance, some comedy here and there, lots of emotions after the interval and a happy ending with a sadness mixed in it. To make it more successful he has mixed all this with the other two passions of the Indians, Cricket & religion / politics.
Chetan chose the best possible time-span to set the story in. Between 1999-2002, India faced the worst of all. Worst of riots, the worst of earthquakes and there were a hoard of problems especially in the part of India he spotlighted on. So well, the book in the end seems a little more than a detailed study of these problems.
After reading the book, I kind of felt that it had just one major objective. Making the Indian youth vigilant and aware of some of the biggest problems that plague its society like Expensive Education , Small-scale businesses are extremely risky ,Lack of development in smaller towns ,Conservative mentality ,Extremism in politics , Sick politicians ,Religious extremism ,Bias towards agnostics and atheists ,Poverty amongst the brighter lower-middle class youth ,People just want to earn, and passion for anything is dead .
Indians live with many of these, even most of the readers do. The story was just a nicer way of illustrating the most extreme faces of these problems.
Several one-liners, witty metaphoric comparisons and unique usage of words with examples plucked from lives of all of us living in the sub-continent did have me bowing down at the same time munching at the food for thought he provided. A few things that he wrote in the book were such that, we might always have it in our mind, but then never have we ever managed to phrase that situation out into a clever statement… At times, he feels just so right. But then at times, it feels that parts of this book were just Chetan speaking out to the public and having his opinion read.
Chetan Bhagat is fast emerging as a storyteller who deals with contemporary and youthful themes. He has the kind of writing that you can actually relate to it. I cannot say that his books have great literary value, but they are really good and young and new authors are always welcome.
I would say if you are a person of “never say die attitude”, have it in you to take everything in good stride, someone who can resurrect from ashes, someone who has dreams and has the will to realize them, then the book is definitely for you.
