Chetan Bhagat … Finally !!

 

Chetan Bhagat is a popular Indian Author. No two views about that.

Chetan Bhagat is a good Indian Author. That depends.

Chetan Bhagat is a fantastic Author. Well …. ... .. . No

 

There was too much of hype around him and his books (and hype scares me). There was always some superficial hype and comments about his work. Generic terms would be used and I never quite met someone or read anywhere, anyone analyzing his works and talking good about different aspects of his writing. Maybe I didn't search well. Maybve my bias towards him colored my thinking about him. Maybe.

To read or not to read has been a question for me as far as Chetan Bhagat goes. Too much of hype around his writings made me wary of them. I had thought about reading his works and including it in my reading list for 2012 but something more appealing would come up and I would push this aside. Finally decided to quit procrastination on this one and picked one of his works to read.

The story seems interesting though written in pretty much uneventful manner. Chetan has an ordinary narration style – merely relaying of storyline – rather than making it interesting.

In this particular story that I read (The Three Mistakes of My Life); Chetan made good use of Real World Events to weave a story around them. Using the actual cricket matches with their actual dates, events and scores along with cataclysmic events like the Bhuj Earthquake in Gujarat, , the 9/11 Terrorist attack and the Godhra Train Burning in Gujarat and the consequential riots; and weaving them into the story (making them integral to the story and critical plot change points) was a good device and made interesting reading.

So in conclusion, Chetan Bhagat writes good time-pass books. We might even call them good. But they are definitely not fantastic. Irony is that they would anyway top the bestselling and largest selling charts because a good marketing campaign can make that happen (irrespective of quality of book) and CB is a known name now with quite a fan following, I suppose.

 

I would probably pick up another of his books and see if I would like to read further.

I will treat his works as a light read; just like I would treat Durjoy Datta's work.