That’s, of course, where the whole thing began, when a 20-something, seven-point-someone, Chetan Bhagat wrote Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT about three engineering students who arrive at the elite institution only to find their classes rigid and boring. It went on to become a best-seller, an implicit indictment of the Indian education system.
Then came One Night@The Call Center in 2005, which first led me to reach out to Bhagat when I was reporting on India’s economy for a US newspaper. That book, about a group of workers who get a call from God one night, also achieved best-seller status.
As Bhagat has grown up—IIT to IIM, i-banker to father, irreverent to reflective—so, too, have his books. The 3 Mistakes of My Life takes readers into that ever-familiar terrain of friendship but it is clear, from the rendering of the main character’s own business ambitions to the love scenes, that Bhagat has matured as a storyteller.
Even now, Bhagat, the son of an army officer and a scientist, has this aura of “I can’t believe it’s all turned out this way for me”. But he’s also made his own luck. The businessman details how stuffing 150 books into boxes versus the standard 100 books helps save money on cartons, enabling publisher Rupa & Co. to price the book low.
In The 3 Mistakes, three friends band together to open a cricket shop. But, against a backdrop of the terrorist attacks of 11 September and the 26 January earthquake, the Godhra attacks and ensuing riots, pursuing entrepreneurship in Ahmedabad is not so simple.
“I checked myself from dreaming again. India is not a place for dreams. Especially when you have failed once. I finally saw the sense inherent in the Hindu philosophy of being satisfied with what one had, rather than yearn for more. It wasn’t some cool philosophy that ancient sages invented, but a survival mantra in a country where dreams are routinely crushed,” protagonist Govind says on page 115.
The common guy’s boyish banter remains central to Bhagat’s shtick: “I don’t do 10 pages on how to tie a Bengali sari. I don’t describe how characters look. Let the reader decide.”
Still, because his stories have an accessible, everyman feel, I can smell and picture their world: cigarettes, alcohol, sweat, scooters, takeout tikka and home-made chakras and curries. As Bhagat and I agree, they are our cousins, the aam aadmis of a new generation. “I have Mr Approachable written right here,” Bhagat says, gesturing at his forehead. “Readers come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t like Priyanka’,” the main character’s love interest in One Night. “Can you imagine going and telling Mr Salman Rushdie something like ‘Shalimar the Clown, what the (expletive) was up with that?’”
But, will a book set against Hindu-Muslim tensions have the same sway over Indian youth as IIT and call centres? And this time, God’s not talking to anyone by telephone; he’s represented in the entire saffron brigade.
The 3 Mistakes of My Life comes amid the triumph of two Modis: Lalit (as in the vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the mastermind of the Indian Premier League) and Narendra (as in the re-elected chief minister of Gujarat).