{"id":761,"date":"2012-08-14T05:39:50","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T05:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=761"},"modified":"2012-08-14T05:39:50","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T05:39:50","slug":"why-chetan-bhagat-sells-despite-the-mediocrity-tag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/08\/14\/why-chetan-bhagat-sells-despite-the-mediocrity-tag\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Chetan Bhagat sells, despite the mediocrity tag"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul
\n<\/strong>
\nIt was sometime in late 2005 or early 2006 my memory fails me, when I ran into Chetan Bhagat at the Crossword book store at Juhu in Mumbai. Those were the days when he was still an investment banker based out of Hong Kong. He was passing by the book store and had decided to drop in to check how his second book was selling.
\nOne Night At the Call Centre<\/em> had just come out and was number one on the bestsellers list. He hadn\u2019t become a celebrity as he is now and people took some time to recognize him. He sat down and started signing books that fans brought to him.
\nI must confess that I was a fan of his writing back then and had loved reading Five Point Someone<\/em> (On a totally different note I was even a fan of Himesh Reshammiya for a brief period). So I promptly bought his two books and got them autographed from him.
\nBhagat\u2019s first book Five Point Someone<\/em> wasn\u2019t a literary phenomenon but had broken all sales records. The story was set in IIT Delhi and had a certain charm to it. Bhagat must have borrowed a lot from his own life and that honesty reflected in the book.
\nBut Bhagat had had a tough time finding a publisher for his first book. Bhagat had to do the rounds of several publishers before Rupa latched onto Five Point Someone<\/em>. As one of the editors who had rejected his manuscript wrote in the Open<\/em> magazine \u201cHe later went to a rival firm and became a publishing sensation overnight, and to this day, our boss complains bitterly that he missed out on the biggest bestseller of the decade because he went by the judgement of three Bengali women\u2014a flawed demographic, if there ever was one!\u201d (You can read the complete piece here<\/a>).
\nIn the CD that accompanied the manuscript of Five Point Someone<\/em> Bhagat had also elaborated on a marketing plan. The M word did not go down well with the female Bengali editor and as she remarked in the Open \u201cA marketing strategy that would ensure the book became an instant bestseller\u2026If only he had written his manuscript with half the dedication he had put into his marketing plan! \u201c
\nHence, the so called \u201csophisticated\u201d people at the biggest Indian publishing houses missed out on India\u2019s bestselling English author primarily because his writing wasn\u2019t literary enough. ,Bhagat eventually did find a publisher and the rest as they say is history.
\nThe day I ran into Bhagat was a Sunday and I came back home and finished reading One Night At a Call Centre<\/em> in a few hours. I found the book pretty boring and at the same time got a feeling that the author had decided to put together a quickie to cash in on the success of his first book. But then I was probably in a minority who thought that way. The book became an even bigger success than Five Point Someone. His next book was The Three Mistakes of My Life.<\/em> I couldn\u2019t read the book beyond the first twenty pages. His next two books, Two States<\/em> and Revolution 2020<\/em>, I haven\u2019t attempted to read till date.
\nVery recently his sixth book and his first work of non-fiction What Young India Wants<\/em> has come out. The book is essentially a collection of his newspaper columns. It is also an extension of his attempts over the last few years at building a more serious image for himself of someone who not only writes popular books but also understands the pulse and paradoxes of Young India.
\nAs the Open<\/em> magazine puts it \u201cYears spent as a pariah in literary circles seem to have caught up with Chetan Bhagat, India\u2019s largest-selling fiction writer. He\u2019s excited that he\u2019s moved on to some \u201cmeaningful\u201d writing as well. \u201cThe charge against me is I\u2019m too flippant,\u201d he says. The author, who sees himself as a spokesperson for India\u2019s youth, has just launched his latest book, What Young India Wants, a compilation of his essays on issues troubling the country, mainly corruption and discrimination based on caste and religion. He\u2019s hoping that it will gain him some credibility as a writer.\u201d
\nSo what does Bhagat come up in his tour de force<\/em>? Here are some samples.
\nOn Pakistan:
\n<\/strong>\u201cMore than anything else, we want to teach Pakistan a lesson. We want to put them in their place. Bashing Pakistan is considered patriotic. It also makes for great politics.\u201d
\nOn Voting:
\n<\/strong>\u201cWe have to consider only one criterion\u2014is he or she a good person?\u201d
\nOn Defence:
\n<\/strong>Money spent on bullets doesn\u2019t give returns, money spent on better infrastructure does\u2026In this technology-driven age, do you really think America doesn\u2019t have the information or capability to launch an attack against India? But they don\u2019t want to attack us. They have much to gain from our potential market for American products and cheap outsourcing. Well let\u2019s outsource some of our defence to them, make them feel secure and save money for us. Having a rich, strong friend rarely hurt anyone
\nOn Women<\/strong>: (Rajyasree Sen<\/a> hope you are reading this):
\n\u201cThere would be body odour, socks on the floor and nothing in the fridge to eat,\u201d writes Bhagat on what would happen if women weren\u2019t around.
\nOn Self Promotion:
\n<\/strong>\u201cI had for years wanted to create more awareness for a better India. Wasn\u2019t now the time to do it with full gusto?\u201d
\nThe book like other Bhagat books presents a very simplistic vision of the world that we live in and is accompanied by some pretty ordinary writing. \u201cWhat young India wants is meri naukri and meri chokri<\/em>,\u201d Bhagat said while promoting the book. Bhagat also comes up with some preposterous solutions like the one where he talks about outsourcing India\u2019s defence needs to America. Really?
\nAt the same time the book stinks of self promotion. In interviews that Bhagat has given after the book came out he continues to refer himself as destiny\u2019s child.
\nThus it\u2019s not surprising that Bhagat has come in for a barrage of criticism for his overtly simplistic views and his unabashed attempts at promoting himself. \u201cBhagat is not a thinker. He is our great \u2018unthinker\u2019, as sure a representative of heedless \u2018new India\u2019 as the khadi-clad politician is of old India,\u201d wrote Shougat Dasgupta in Tehalka. (You can read the complete piece here).
\nThe criticism notwithstanding Bhagat\u2019s books sell like hot cakes. \u201cHis publishers, Rupa & Co., are counting on it. Rupa, which has brought out all of Bhagat\u2019s novels since Five Point Someone in 2004, says that 500,000 copies of an initial print run of 575,000 were sold to retailers in a day, and booksellers have already begun to place repeat orders,\u201d reports the Mint.
\nGiven that there must be something right about them. The answer lies in the fact that the mass market is not intellectual. It\u2019s mediocre. It would rather prefer the movies of Salman Khan than an Anurag Kashyap. It would rather go and watch a mindless Rowdy Rathore rather than a Gangs of Wasseypur<\/em>, which demands attention from the viewer. It would rather watch a Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi<\/em> than the History channel.
\nThe mass market likes stuff which is not too heavy. Chetan Bhagat fulfills that need. There has always been space for the kind of mindless and simple stuff that Bhagat writes. How else do you explain the success of the Mills & Boons series? Also in a country like India where people are just about starting to learn English, it\u2019s easier for them to understand a Chetan Bhagat than a Salman Rushdie or even a much easier Jeffrey Archer for that matter.
\nBhagat\u2019s writing is thus initiating people into reading. And in that sense it\u2019s a good thing. Let me give a personal example to elaborate on this. Recently I started listening to Hindustani Classical music, more than 25 years after I first started listening to music. My taste has evolved the years. I started with the trashy Hindi film music of the 1980s, moved onto the Hindi film music of the fifties and the sixties, then went into Ghazals (which had its own cycle. First Jagjit Singh, then came Ghulam Ali, then Mehdi Hasan and finally came the likes of Begum Akhtar) and so on. It took me almost 25 years to start listening to Hindustani classical music. Maybe I was slower than the usual. But the point is that nobody starts of listening to Hindustani classical music from day one. We have to go through our share of \u201ccrappy\u201d music to arrive at that. If I hadn\u2019t heard the crappy music of the 1980s, I wouldn\u2019t be listening to Ustad Bismillah Khan today.
\nSimilarly readers who start reading books with Chetan Bhagat are likely to move onto much better stuff over the years. In that sense Bhagat\u2019s writing is a necessary evil. The entire market for Indian writing in English has expanded since Chetan Bhagat started writing. Before that Indian writing in English did not appeal to the average Indian. Now it does.
\nIt would also help them reach a stage of understanding where they will be able to understand the following paragraph written by Shougat Dasgupta in Tehelka.
\n\u201cBhagat is adept at this sort of corporate speak, bland pabulum that appears to be reasonable, but is buzzword piled upon truism piled upon platitude, a tower built on the soft, tremulous sands of clich\u00e9. A Bhagat column makes a house of cards seem as substantial as the pyramid at Giza.\u201d
\n(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 14,2012. http:\/\/www.firstpost.com\/india\/why-chetan-bhagat-sells-despite-the-mediocrity-tag-417177.html<\/a>)
\n(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com)
\n
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul It was sometime in late 2005 or early 2006 my memory fails me, when I ran into Chetan Bhagat at the Crossword book store at Juhu in Mumbai. Those were the days when he was still an investment banker based out of Hong Kong. He was passing by the book store and had … <\/p>\n

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