You may have heard of One Night @ the Call Center, an Indian novel attempting to ride the call center trend. 
It’s sold multitudinous copies and is being made into a movie. The script will be penned by the same author, an i-banker whose author’s voice brags about not being a writer.
He’s right. The story has an interesting premise, but it’s one of the worst-written books I’ve ever read, falling somewhere between bad high school love poem and sixth-grade book report. You’ll laugh out loud. The hilarity will be entirely unintentional.
The best review of a book this bad is to quote from it liberally. Enjoy the stank. Spoilers below.
The author writes groaners rivaling the one from Notting Hill:
‘Deep inside, I am just a girl who wants to be with her favorite boy. Because like you, this girl is a person who needs a lot of love.’
There are even more lines straight out of a Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:
‘It is time to face the real world, even if it is harder and painful. I’d rather fly and crash, than just snuggle and sleep…’‘Do you have a dark side, Shyam?’ … ‘I have so many–like half a dozen dark sides. I am like dark-sided hexagon [sic].’
Then he pats himself on back for minor-league wordplay:
‘Sorry, but calling is not my calling,’ Vroom said. I thought his last line was quite clever, but it wasn’t the right time to appreciate verbal tricks.
Telling, not showing — the author can’t write action, so he grasps at a voiceover:
‘We’re hanging above a hole, supported only by toothpicks. We’re screwed,’ Radhika said, summing up the situation for all of us.
He stoops to the cheap, Hardy Boys suspense close:
Like a drunk tramp, the Qualis stagggered down and into the site of a high-rise construction project. [Chapter ends suddenly.]
Here’s a vague generality (‘gross’) with a dangling antecedent (what’s outside the entrance: the toppings, the pizza or the puke?):
‘Unnh…’ Vroom said as he threw up. Puke spread around like a 12″-thin crust pizza with gross toppings outside the entrance.
He shares his deep insight into female psychology:
The effort it sometimes takes to make women speak up is harder than interrogating terrorists…When girls call a guy a ‘teddy bear’, they just mean he is a nice guy but they will never be attracted to him. Girls may say they like such guys, but teddy bears never get to sleep with anyone…
The prose drips with sexual repression:
It is never easy for a guy to work with a hot girl in the office. I mean, what are you supposed to do? Ignore their sexiness and stare at our computer? Sory, somehow I don’t think men were designed to do that…
Here’s the no-good, really bad insult which sets a character off on a bout of tremendous violence. Oooh, severe:
‘Yeah, I’ll change the dust bag. What about you guys? When will you change your dusty country?’
He includes lots of anti-American racism:
‘Remember,’ the instructor said to the class, ‘a thirty-five-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a ten-year-old Indian’s brain. This will help you understand your clients… Americans are dumb, just accept it…’
The novel does have a few highlights:
Apart from blonde threesomes, hitting your boss is the ultimate Indian male fantasy…According to Priyanka, a door-bitch is the hostess who stands outside the disco. She screens every girl walking in, and if your waist is more than twenty-four inches, or if you were not wearing something right out of an item number, the door-bitch will raise an eyebrow at you like you are a fifty-year-old aunty.
But maybe he should’ve just unconsciously internalized something created by a writer.
you said it gupta!
RAJAT:
if people felt superior to others from the same ethnic group they wouldn’t be on sites like this one. just cos someone’s brown doesn’t mean their crapalicious writing should be supported or appreciated.
i’m not knocking it cos i haven’t read it, but would just like to let you know that there is a middle ground between blindly accepting culture-lovers and pretentious people who hate other FOBs:
it’s called thinking for yourself.
ha ha ha. the envy can be smelt in the post. show me some funny lines of your dudes, while u state punchlines out of context.
btw, i have a friend in random house uk, and they are raving fans of bhagat. they paid close $400k for intl rights for this one. were they stupid?
or maybe ..the entire world is stupid..apart from u bloggers of course..
grow up. why didn’t u stop reading it?
I’m late to the party, but my 2 cents anyways. I am having a little bit of the “fofatlal complex”, so I don’t think I will write under my real name. I should say that I registered a certain level of annoyance, even shock, when I read the book, mainly because of its somewhat casual use of religion and God.
It seems to be a bit of a stretch to have “God” endorse the sort of plan that Shyam comes up with. What is worse : it is made amply clear that the religion being referred to is Hinduism, and that it is a Hindu God herself who has endorsed the entire course of action. Now, I think a lot of people would find the plan utterly deceitful : the plan is to call up customers in America and tell them that their systems are messed up because they all have a certain “bug”, the one referred to earlier. It is premised on what is quite casually referred to as an American “culture of fear”, and the idea is to prey on such fear. It really annoys me that religion, of all things, should be used to validate deceit, extortion and patently loathsome behavior.
That stench you smell is from the prose. If you don’t smell it, your literary judgment probably froze at an age where you thought Readers Digest was lit. But Readers Digest was far better written than this crap. Sadly, you won’t recognize that for the putdown that it is.
Oh wait, you read this book and thought it was good? No wonder you’re wearing a brown bag over your head.
I don’t think this has much to do with being born in India, really, as many have pointed out. I am desi-born myself, and I read both the books. Aside from the point I raise above, I would say that Chetan Bhagat does have talent, but I think he could do with some discipline and some effort. You know, take a class on creative writing and so forth.
He does do a good in getting the conversational English right. What he needs to do is to polish up the rest of the prose. I really do think Chetan Bhagat is capable of devlivering better. And in the future, he probably will.
Damn Good Book … i’ll remember the experience for long time … Thanks … Chetan
The critic encuorages us to “Enjoy the stank.” This is exactly what I was doing the moment I opened this site and had my senses utterly intruded by the critic’s brave mix of poindexter specs and pterodactyl collared Rainbow Pop clubwear. Is that a gold chain or is it a baited trap being set to kill that shirt? I hope it succeeds.
Seriously …. nice shirt.
I think I’ll go buy Chetan’s new book now. I’m definitely watching the movie when it hits the big screen in the States!
Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Balzac – the greatest of novelists have written v.bad prose. that doesn’t diminish their stature. it is a feature of the novel as a literary form which takes realilsm seriously and this realism extends even to the linguistic arena where each word corresponds to real life.
perfect prose doesn’t a perfect novel make!