My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Chetan Bhagat - the bollywood author

I'm a fan of Chetan Bhagat. I truly believe that the man has made a difference in the style of Indian story telling. All three novels of him are best sellers, in fact people are still crazy about Five point someone. This year in Kolkata Book fair in the stall of Rupa Publishers I found lot of young men & women were heading for his first novel. That's amazing! That shows his charisma! I loved his third novel Three Mistakes of my life even more. The way he associate earthquake of Gujarat in his story or the way he described communalism is truly commendable but I must say that his novels are becoming little monotonous now. The same male protagonists, the same shy, introvert,looser boy meets bold,beautiful,intelligent girl has become identical with all his novels. Not only that he always end up giving the climax of his story a melodramatic bollywood touch. It's evident from all his three novels that he loves Bollywood movies....so does we! But we really want some variation in Bhagat's story. He is the new age author no doubt...we book lovers love him to no end...but lets be fair in judgement, we don't want another Yash Chopra or Karan Johar in Chetan Bhagat! But surely Chetan Bhagat can do it better than Aravind Adiga. The white tiger - written by the winner of the booker of the booker award 2008 Aravind Adiga, failed to do a good business in India although the book is declared to be a best seller in abroad. Three reason can be traced behind the success of Chetan Bhagat, they are; 1) Pocket friendly price, 2) He use the lingo we use in the real life(although for this he has been criticized many times by the critics ; but who cares for 'em anyway?) & 3) We can associate with the characters of his novels.

But when it comes to talk about Chetan Bhagat as a scriptwriter we can hardly say anything positive, after the release of Hello! We, the fan of Bhagat's writing expected a lot from his debut film as a scriptwriter, but after watching the movie based on the best seller One Night @ The Call Center we were at our wit's end! But still we keep our fingers crossed for the movie Three Idiots which will be based on Five Point Someone.

Cheers!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

woooo....
i never knew so much about Chetan Bhagat,I bet u have done a research on him..to give a brief account of his charisma.
(thnx anky)