Love and Life in India's Call Centers

Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Bhagat is an unlikely cult figure. An investment banker currently with the Deutsche Bank, the 35-year-old has become the biggest selling English-language novelist in India and acquired somewhat of a cult status among millions of under-20 middle-class men and women after publication of his two novels - campus life,  Five Point Someone,  about campus life of three young men in 2004, followed by  One Night @ the Call Center,  a comedy about love and life in India's ubiquitous call centers in 2005. His books have sold a combined total of one million.

 Five Point Someone  (FPS) won the Society Young Achiever's award in 2004 and the Publisher's recognition award in 2005. This heartwarming, fast-paced tale has even been prescribed as course reading across various Indian universities and schools.

Bhagat grew up in Delhi and attended the Army Public School. Graduating from IIT Delhi in 1995 and IIM Ahmedabad in 1997, he wrote his novels while working with Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong during the weekends. As stated in The International Herald Tribune, While others planned weekend excursions on the golf course, Bhagat indulged his 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.  But surprisingly, whe4n published, the novels were lapped up by young Indians. Choosing the subjects of his first two books - life at a highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology and a call center – was easy and allowed him to explore some perennial themes such as parental pressures to get high grades, get into the top colleges, get good jobs and find a right partner.
According to Bhagat, the current generation of young Indians those pressures are greater than ever before but that they are  more gutsy  than their parents, and as interesting as the generation that led India to independence in 1947.

However, he says, the competition among the youth is now more severe. Only one out of 700 applicants now gets into the Indian Institute of Management that he attended in Ahmedabad as compared to one 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. He feels that his books were successful mainly  because there is a lot of social comment in there. It's garbed as comedy. The plot structure is like Bollywood, because that is what my audience has been used to.  In the meantime,  One Night @ the Call Center  is being made into a big-budget Bollywood film entitled  Hello,  starring Salman Khan, Katrnia Kaif, Sharman Joshi and Gul Panag.

Bhagat has just finished writing his third novel,  Three Mistakes of My Life  which will be released in July this year. But theme is more sensitive theme than campus or call center life. Set in the state of Gujarat soon after the bloody sectarian riots of 2002, it deals with issues of tolerance and the confusion that young Indians feel about religious values, says Bhagat.  The story will have a very modern twist, Bollywood comedy sort of format. If you read my books they are comedies, but very dark. 

- By A. Sharma