Interesting points.
1. But the competition among them is severe. Bhagat said only 1 out
of 700 applicants now gets into the Indian Institute of Management
that he attended in Ahmedabad, compared with 1 in 200 when he applied
in 1995.
2. Millions of Indians might have lifted their incomes by doing call
center work. But the jobs are dead ends, said Bhagat, and no
well-to-do parents want their daughter to marry a call center worker.
"Is this the best we can offer to India's young generation?" he asked.
"If call centers are so great and brought riches to the country, like
the government says, why aren't they marrying their daughters off to a
call center guy?"
===========================================
Investment banker becomes best-selling author in India
By Donald Greenlees
Published: March 14, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/14/asia/writer.php
HONG KONG: Until about four years ago, Chetan Bhagat was an investment
banker who was distinguished from the suited phalanx of his colleagues
in this city's crowded financial district only by his secret hobby.
While others planned weekend excursions on the golf course, Bhagat,
then employed by Goldman Sachs, indulged a passion for writing,
laboring in his private time on a racy and comedic little novel about
life on the campus of an elite college in his native India.
In the early morning before going to the office he would work on draft
after draft of the book, trying to get it right. He did 15 drafts in
all. He almost gave up when publishers kept turning him down.
Today, Bhagat is still an investment banker, now with Deutsche Bank.
But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist
ever in India.
His story of campus life, "Five Point Someone," published in 2004, and
a later novel about a call center, sold a combined one million copies.
Only the autobiography of the Indian independence leader Mahatma
Gandhi has sold more.
Less than three days after the release in 2005 of "One Night @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
the
Call Center," another slim comedy about love and life in India's
ubiquitous call centers, the entire print-run of 50,000 copies was
sold, setting a record for the country's fastest-selling book.
Bhagat, who wrote his novels while living in Hong Kong, has difficulty
explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare
time has had such phenomenal success in reaching an audience of mainly
middle-class Indians in their 20s. The books, which are deliberately
sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like
an Indian movie ticket - just 100 rupees, or $2.46 - and have won
little praise as literature.
One reviewer in The Times of India concluded a review of "One Night @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Call Center" with the suggestion: "Time to hang up, Mr. Bhagat?"
"The book critics, they all hate me," said Bhagat in an interview
here.
But Bhagat has touched a nerve with young Indian readers and acquired
almost cult status, and this undoubtedly says a great deal about their
tastes, attitudes and hopes. Bhagat might not be another Vikram Seth,
Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, but he has authentic claims to being
one of the voices of a generation of middle-class Indian youth facing
the choices and frustrations that come with the prospect of growing
wealth.
"I think people really took to the books mainly because there is a lot
of social comment in there," said Bhagat. "It's garbed as comedy. The
plot structure is like Bollywood, because that is what my audience has
been used to."
Bhagat's choice of subjects for his first two books - life at a highly
competitive Indian Institute of Technology and at a call center -
allowed him to explore some perennial themes: the pressures, many of
them parental, to get into a top school, earn high grades, get a good
job and find the right partner, while still taking time to enjoy one's
youth. His argument is that for the current generation of young
Indians those pressures are greater than ever before.
He described the country's current young generation as "more gutsy"
than their parents, and as interesting as the generation that led
India to independence in 1947.
But the competition among them is severe. Bhagat said only 1 out of
700 applicants now gets into the Indian Institute of Management that
he attended in Ahmedabad, compared with 1 in 200 when he applied in
1995. That experience and his undergraduate studies at the Indian
Institute of Technology in New Delhi are the inspiration for "Five
Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT," the title an allusion to the
struggle his three main characters have with low grades.
The pressures to succeed are part of what is making India a vibrant,
fast-changing economy and society, Bhagat said. But he added:
"Competition has its limits. Some of it is good and some of it is
harmful." A message of "Five Point Someone" is that poor grades and
happiness are not mutually exclusive.
This month, after more than 10 years in Hong Kong, Bhagat moved with
his wife, also a banker, and their 3-year-old twin sons back to India,
where he is a director in Deutsche Bank's distressed-assets team in
Mumbai. When he left India with an MBA to start a banking career in
Hong Kong, just before the 1997 Asian economic crisis, there were
fewer op****tunities at home even for graduates of the best schools.
Bhagat now wants to be a part of the historic changes taking place as
India awakens to its potential.
Still, he sees a lot wrong with the model of economic success,
particularly from the perspective of the country's youth. His "One
Night @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
the Call Center," which is being made into a Bollywood film
entitled "Hello," is, beyond its story line about frustrated office
romance, a critique of a nation climbing to prosperity by answering
phone calls from American consumers.
Millions of Indians might have lifted their incomes by doing call
center work. But the jobs are dead ends, said Bhagat, and no
well-to-do parents want their daughter to marry a call center worker.
"Is this the best we can offer to India's young generation?" he asked.
"If call centers are so great and brought riches to the country, like
the government says, why aren't they marrying their daughters off to a
call center guy?"
With each new book, Bhagat is attempting to toughen his social
criticism. He has just finished writing "Three Mistakes of My Life" -
a pun of sorts, this being his third novel. But this time he is
tackling a far more sensitive theme than campus or call center life.
Set in the northeastern state of Gujarat soon after the bloody
sectarian riots of 2002, it deals with issues of tolerance and the
confusion Bhagat maintains that young Indians feel about religious
values.
"India is a very religious country, and older people have extreme
views on religion," he said. "Young people are not able to relate to
it."
True to his form, the story will have a "very modern twist, Bollywood
comedy sort of format," he said. "If you read my books they are
comedies, but very dark."
The Web chatter and e-mails Bhagat receives about his books suggest
that the dark social messages, wrapped in what he described as "quick
reads" in the style of the humorous British writer Nick Hornby, have
been getting through to his young audience.
But it is a balancing act, Bhagat said. His is an audience that grew
up with Bollywood and wants a story that "tugs at the emotions" rather
than moralizes or betrays serious literary ambitions. Bhagat said he
develops his plots using a computer spread sheet before he sits down
to write.
Initially, he did get some literary praise, winning a Publisher's
Recognition Award and a Society Young Achievers Award in India in 2005
for "Five Point Someone." But the first flush of critical success has
worn off. Ravi Rao, a critic writing in The Times of India, said
Bhagat had gone from "candor, easy wit and tight structure" in his
first book to "a dud" with his second.
Bhagat and his publisher, Kapish Mehra of the company Rupa, have an
easy retort to the critics: The books sell.
"He is not a literary writer," Mehra said. "But, more im****tantly, he
is a successful and popular writer."
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