Chetan Bhagat's 5 Point ...& One Night....

My credit card cup was overflowing with points & I had to act fast n encash before the yearly redemption term got lapsed. So among other things I added to my shopping cart this book from Chetan Bhagat - ‘One night at the call centre’. I read his first book ‘5 point someone’ sometime last year and found pretty readable for its archetypal Indian humour of the college variety. It also had the backdrop of IIT campus which added it a touch of cerebral munificence and made up for a silly plot ( found it pretty ‘duh’ by IIT’ian standards -the plot revolves around 4-5 IIT guys who are a bunch of outcasts due to their poor scores. And they come up with an idea to hood wink the system -wonder whether somebody could have the audacity and get away with that in a cerebral system like IIT? ) . Anyway the characters & their interplay made it eminently readable though some characters like that of ‘Venkat’ sounded pretty cliched.

This book (One night at the call centre ) begins well but meanders midway through pretty listless past love sequences of its main characters. As someone who has seen the rough & tumble of a BPO shop floor, I expected a great deal of creative yarn & spin on the machinations of the Industry. Yet found nothing of it, there is this simple western appliances strategic desk which is kinda troubleshooting desk for Home appliances users in US, where a group of Yuppie youngsters deal with dumb oversized US customers(the author bolsters the point with the 35-10 equation meaning a 35 year old American has the same IQ that of a 10 year old Indian. Who discovered that, eh? ) . With a bit of ‘divine' help , they not only get out of their rut but also endeavor to put their lives in order. In the process they muster enough courage to kickass-their-jackass Boss & also help their company keep hundreds of jobs with some imaginative yet fancy plot. All in one night, Bingo!

If you are expecting a cerebral thriller of a “Corporate variety” like Michael Crichton’s Disclosure , Rising sun or Joseph finder’s Power play you will be pretty disappointed.In both the books Chetan Bhagat’s protagonists are the yuppie generation , in 5 point someone they get choked in a rigid and rather old fashioned education system while in One Night... they deal with a disgruntled workplace and messed up personal lives.