Thursday, December 11, 2008

The 3 Mistakes of My Life

After I had read Chetan Bhagat's "One Night @ the Call Centre", an instant fascination in his work grew in me. But while going through this one's back cover, somehow it did not arouse any interest. Still, my hobby of collecting at least one work for any renowned author won over and I bought it. Well as I started reading through the pages my fears of losing interest in the piece was growing steadily until the "1st mistake" and from then onwards it was a real roller coaster ride.
The story is about three friends in Ahmedabad, Govind, a practical minded youth whose passion was maths and who dreamt of a flourishing business of his own, Ishan a passionate guy whose chief obsession was cricket and who believed his freinds blindly and Omi, the son of a priest to whom religion was the first priority. Govind, in trying to shape his future, convinced his friends to open a business in sports good and stationeries and they opened the same in the premises of a temple, where Omi's family lived.The guys struggled with the business and it initially flourished and profitted. They started two parallel small scale projects with Govind tutoring the local school goers and Ishan giving cricket coaching to those interested. But all of a sudden when everything was running smooth and they were looking forward to shift business in a modern mall, Govind made the 1st mistake of his life that cost him his confidence. From this point onwards the story becomes much more involved where business gets mixed with social issues, religions and politics and how these three cope with them.
The story is told from Govind's point of view and how his three vital mistakes became crucial to his business and his personal and social life. The emotions have been richly painted and nowhere it had turned out of the ordinary but Mr. Bhagat's trend of a signature Hindi movie style finish seemed to mar the end IMO. Also a slight discrepancy that I noted was that though the author has used the 1st person in two ways, one while describing his own conversation with Govind and secondly in the flashback mode with Govind as the 1st person, the style of both seemed the same. Maybe a slight different way of expressing feelings would have been more appealing to the reader.

No comments: