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.

One Night @ The Call Centre

Had heard about the story from the year of its release and was aware that it was a best seller till now but somehow never got the urge to read this as I am not a fan of new authors. I generally believed that the stories of current day authors lost that appealing touch as compared to the old generation. But it really pleased when I found that my line of thinking was way astray when this book was recommended to me by my cousin and I surprised myself by worming through the pages, eagerly waiting for its exciting finish.
A very unique point about the book is the author's use of different Fonts to narrate the past, present, introductions and the frequent SMS & emails. This is a new experiment in literature and I found this quite an ingenious method of story telling where the fonts have been used to categorise the different events so that the reader finds it easier to form a mindset while following the main theme of the story.
A major part of the main theme of the story is in flashback and the use of excerpts of a future chapter at the beginning of the book is also a praiseworthy approach.
The story begins with the author on a return journey to his place in a lonely train comes across a young lady in the compartment who makes a deal with the author. The deal is that the lady will recount a tale depicting the modern day youth on the condition that the author pens that as his next novel.
Her story was about 6 call centre agents and we are introduced slowly to their crooked boss, their families and you won't believe it........... their encounter with God. Yes sir, this last event has been introduced in a surprise twist where Providence directs the characters to the right path. The whole span of the story is within one night with some occassional flashbacks. We are introduced to the protagonist Shyam, living at Gurgaon who works in the call centre Connnexions. He strives to be a team leader but his boss Bakshi (with a MBA degree but with a less, if at all, managerial ability, who loves to use management jargons for as trivial issue as photocopying) never recommends him to the higher authority as he feels Shyam is yet to achieve leadership qualities. Shyam is currently engaged to another girl though the latter doesn't bring much joy to his life. Then we have Priyanka, ex-girlfriend of Shyam who breaks the relation due to some difference of opinion. Currently we find her to be engaged to be married to an NRI settled at the States. She also hopes someday that she will be able to complete BEd. Then we have Vroom, who gets his name owing to his fascination to cars & bikes. He was earlier pursuing the career of a journalist but his too much truthfulness and patriotic attitude gets him in trouble with his bosses. Currently working at Connexions, he is not very satisfied and within his heart he has a dream of a better India. We then come across Esha, who could have been a model but her height gets in the way. So she works at call centres while secretly she nurtures her dream of becoming a super model in a later period. Next is Radhika, married with her love Anuj but on the night @ the call centre she dramatically discoveres Anuj has a mistress. Then we have Military Uncle, a much older person than the other 5, who had difference of opinion with his married son and strained his relations with him while staying at the States. As each vents their frustrations and marred hopes, there comes the call from God in what can be said a dramatic situation. Not only this is a surprising twist to the story but also the surprise in the manner the story thereafter turns on. Till chapter 31 the style of the story was unique, the set was perfect, the evolution was wonderful but from chapter 32 onwards it becomes the same as a poorly directed film where the director forgets about the detailing. Thus the ending is a oversimplified one with only a slight touch of realism. The main points where it fails to impress are:

1. I can't buy the idea that all of the call centre employees and the Americal nation don't know the MSWord bug =rand(200,99)! These always keep coming from your friends thru fwd emails.
   
2. It baffles anybody of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"! Anybody who is a web serfer someday or the other comes across this sentence.
3. I failed to understand why in the last few pages, Shyam refuses Priyanka's proposal and minutes later he is seeing racing after her with a completely different mindset. Well a call centre agent forgetting to use a cell phone in an urgent time is quite difficult to digest.
   

As a whole this is an enjoyable read and I feel that a slightly different style of ending would have made this a better piece of art.