the 3 mistakes of my life

There are only a few things I hate more than my emotions - cricket, medical students/doctors, pseudo intellectual religious humanism and darkness, "the 3 mistakes of my life" had them all. After reading "5 point someone" and "A night at call centre" I was determined not to fall for another Chetan Bhagat nonsense, but luck seems to be on his side. While waiting for the delayed flight at the airport, 250 pages for 95 Rs, seemed like a deal to me moreover there was a curious fascination with the bright yellow cover of the book, Ok! ok! I accept it, whatever be the level of despise for his last two books, I wanted to read his new book (something similar to a morbid fascination).

An old saying warns us against judging a book by its cover, for me though the entire reading experience begins from the visual sense. The cover of the book is important to me, not to judge but it is a part of the experience. With a bright yellow cover and 3 silhouettes standing as cricket stumps with bells off, it looked more like a film poster than a book cover, no wonder his acknowledgement page has names like salman khan, sharman joshi and "all my friends in the film industry". The synopsis of the book had words like "Ahmadabad", "year 2000", "dreams", "turbulent city", I was not hard to figure out that the book takes Gujarat riots and Earthquake as its backdrop.

The book begins with a prologue, where Mr. Bhagat mentions the source of this story, much like the one in his last book. Then the story begins in first person narration with the protagonist being the narrator. It takes a fascinating yet dark tour of Ahmadabad. I would not say that the the pages are as spellbinding as any thriller fiction, but it is a reasonably hard to keep the book down before finishing it. I like reading fiction and listening to radio mainly because it involves a lot of imagination, so is the case with this book. However the imagination part is not tough here, because it is the story of a middle class youth, his aspirations, his failures, his love, his regret, his friends and his thinking. Five pages into the book and I could relate to this Mr Govind Patel (narrator), picturing the rest of narration was easy. The story is fairly predictable, but still I was hooked on to it, just because I wanted to cross check whether my prediction is correct or not. The book moves back and forth between predictable path and unpredictable detours. I started reading the book at 11 in the morning and finished it at 8 in the night, in the meanwhile I had my share of smiles for I recalled my triumph, my first romantic talk, my first date and my first kiss, I had my share of agony for I recalled my failures, my bad judgements, my choice of engineering over cricket. It was an extended roller coaster ride of emotions.

The praise for the books mention "the biggest selling english-language novelist in India's history" and when you read this book, you will find the reason for this. We have numerous novels about middle class youth, or the common man, but most of them have come from the likes of Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra. They still have a hard time reconciling with the fact that middle class youth or the common man can not relate to book which has to be purchased with a dictionary and they are fascinated with the image of India they have taken from their young age i.e. 70's, 80's and the early 90's. They remain to be the pseudo intellectual elitist.
Chetan Bhagat on the other hand, writes easy to read, simple English and the elements of the story are so much realistic to the modern day middle class, you can't help but to love it. Right from binary career choice of doctor vs engineer to shoe string budget birthday celebration of first love, everything is impeccably life like detailed. The book has a joke about the size and weight of the IIT preparation maths book by M.L.Khanna, there is a mention of the terrifying content of Resnick Halliday Physics, there is a cricket match description as viewed from our living room and trust me you would feel as if you were part of the discussion. The love story is as chocolaty as it could be, from hand made "get well soon" cards hidden in maths books, to the guy getting scared of mention of the two dreaded "P" words, it has it all. It was a sudden realisation while reading that in real life, real teenage life relationships do not start with "I Love you", but they progress from friends, to close-friends, to true-close-friends to "I missed you" before actually getting down to the 3 mystical words.

The book was a fun read, but I couldn't help but to notice certain similarities from other works. For instance, Govind's popping of a sleeping pill with every sentence was shamelessly identical to the end of Khushwant Singh's "The Company of Women", Ali's cricket voyage was in theatres near you sometime ago, it was called "IQBAL", and the end fight sequence was a cocktail of so many bollywood potboilers that I didn't even bother to recall the original ones. With so much of grief and darkness in the beginning and some moments of joyful heights I expected the book to end on a dark yet optimistic note, rather than the happy, cheerful, filmy ending. But I guess that is why both his previous works are getting on 70 mm now, the reading is much like watching a movie, a much more involving movie.