Early on in the book, when the protagonist of Chetan Bhagat’s Two States meets his future wife, she asks him what he wants to be. A writer, he replies. “Someone who tells stories that are fun, but bring about change, too.”
Two States is, like Five Point Someone, among the better of Mr Bhagat’s trillion-selling books — probably because those two are the most autobiographical. (As one of Mr Bhagat’s skilled parodists on Twitter said recently and nastily, the plots of Five Point Someone and Two States could be summarised as, respectively: “I got laid at IIT” and “I got laid at IIM”.) It has now, like Five Point Someone, been made into a movie. I have not yet seen the movie it’s been made into; somehow I can’t bring myself to. Partly that’s because I was appalled at what 3 Idiots did to Five Point Someone. Mr Bhagat is not a man who can be accused of excessive nuance in his writing; but what Rajkumar Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra did to his story of three sensitive boys at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, was appalling. I can only imagine what that cesspool of degenerate humour, that moral and creative vacuum we call our film “industry”, has done to Two States. The book was already full of Punjabi-Madrasi jokes (“Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian”), and there were a few excessively soppy passages. Bollywood, I imagine, dialled both up to 11.
The problem, of course, is that most listen to only the first part of Mr Bhagat’s self-definition as a writer, not the second. In Five Point Someone, the smart student who detests how engineering is taught at the IITs performs poorly in his examinations; in 3 Idiots, he tops them. (Pity. People would have paid even more to see Aamir Khan failing at something and looking confused.) In the process, the larger point that Mr Bhagat wanted to make, about the disaster that is India’s focus on engineering, and the mess that engineering colleges make of our best minds, is lost.
All of Mr Bhagat’s books are firmly about National Problems as much as they are about young people. (Although Young People, of course, are our foremost National Problem.) Five Point Someone is about higher education; Revolution 2020 about corruption; Two States about parochialism; The 3 Mistakes of My Life about sectarian violence. Mr Bhagat has, if nothing else, stuck doggedly to his vision of his role as a writer.
And it is something for which he receives too little praise from those who care about writers making a difference in the world. True, there’s a certain casual sexism in some of his books; but it’s the sexism of a chauvinistic IIT boy who is trying really hard to get over it. In Two States, for example, he can effortlessly skewer, in the dry voice of his then-girlfriend-now-wife, the opinions of his younger self about how women need to cook and so on.
People’s reasons to dislike Mr Bhagat’s books are usually more shallow than any of his characters. An IITian who has never read much? A former banker who maps out his plots on spreadsheets? This is clearly not someone, the high priests of Literature murmur disapprovingly, who deserves any sympathy. Especially not if the Great Unwashed choose to actually read him in disturbing numbers. Mr Bhagat’s own contempt for Indian literary fiction, when it reveals itself, is expressed with greater directness and more humour. From Two States, for example: “Smells of mustard, curry leaves and onions reached us. If this was one of those prize-winning Indian novels, I’d spend two pages on how wonderful those smells were. However, the only reaction I had was a coughing fit and teary eyes.”
The distance between his fiction, and what the cold-eyed guardians of Literature’s gardens demand, is not Mr Bhagat’s fault. He always wanted to be a writer; and he became a writer as soon as he could. The problem is that in those years when he could have been happily reading away, and no doubt perfecting a prose style critics could later describe as convincingly natural, he was swotting to get into, and out of, the IITs and IIMs. True, one look at the writing of his nearest rivals in terms of popularity – men like Ravinder Singh or Durjoy Datta – reveals, quite sharply, how much Mr Bhagat cares about what he would no doubt call product quality. That he outsells his competitors is a gladdening reminder that sentence construction matters even to his readers. Still, it remains true that, although Mr Bhagat may have always wanted to be a writer, he was clearly pretty conflicted about what it took to become a great one.
This isn’t surprising. Mr Bhagat is pretty conflicted about a lot of things, reflecting the schizophrenia of the generation he represents and writes for. In Two States, the protagonist detests the hoops he must jump through in order to placate the two soon-to-be-affianced families, but does it anyway, and is proud of it. In both that book and Five Point Someone, disdain for the way the IITs and IIMs teach comes through, but so does pride in the institution. In many, the protagonists look down on accumulation for the sake of it, believe that values are more important — but focus on money-grubbing anyway. And let’s not even start on The 3 Mistakes of My Life. That book, published in 2008, was fiercely anti-Narendra Modi; but it was made, with Mr Bhagat’s involvement, into the sanitised movie Kai Po Che last year. Presumably, in the five intervening years, Mr Bhagat had decided that being anti-Mr Modi might be the biggest mistake of his life.
But being slightly confused about what you believe is not a capital crime. And the truth is that we could do a lot worse than Mr Bhagat. Someone was always going to be the person who spoke for a generation of people who are, as I said before, our foremost National Problem. That it’s someone who tries so noticeably hard to be less sexist, to be less sectarian, and to be more liberal, is a relief. It could be someone who was a muscular, militarist nationalist – a tone that clearly succeeds with the young – but instead it’s someone who, in one of his most persuasive newspaper columns, urged India to reduce its defence spending. It could be someone who reinforced every prejudice held by a partially educated, upper-caste North Indian man; but it’s someone who visibly tries to challenge them. He may not always succeed; but which other icon of popular culture even tries? Typically for Indians, we don’t know how lucky we are.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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