Thursday, May 15, 2008
The 3 Mistakes of My Life
Warning: This post contains Spoilers
Chetan Bhagat is one author I have always respected and adored. And the respect doesn’t comes because of any great pieces of literature he has written with enlightening people with a lot of new perspective of life but because he brought to life the habit or the joy of reading to what I would call Indian masses, specially the youth. His art of story telling is such amazing that the audience can actually correlate so much with the characters that they find it irresistible to keep the book down. It made them wonder as they were a part of story and the readers voraciously turn the pages to live a bit more of the characters. Even his second book was very good. Now that his third book was very much awaited and obviously very high hopes pinned to it.
I bought the book yesterday as soon as it was available on stores yesterday. Last time I saw such a craze and the volume of books being sold was for last book in the series of Harry Potter. However I brought the book and read it in a single stretch of 3 hours. The book is very typical Chetan Bhagat; an Indian setting in an easy and flowing language. The book is very well written in terms of ease, readability and flow of story throughout the book.
The story is setup in a backdrop of Gujrat, the mail lead of the story Govind is a guy who tries to commit suicide and emails his suicide note to the author. The author traces him from far across the world and comes to meet him. The story continues in the flashback completely. Here again like Five Point Someone the main character Govind takes a back seat as his friend takes a stronger role as Ish. The story is setup in the backdrop of Gujrat Earthquake and then Riots.
The characters have been well etched out and the overall read is quite good but the book lacks the sharpness of Five Point Someone. Somehow it looks to be half baked and looses finishing touch. Till the first mistake when Earthquake happens the reader remains at the edge of the seat and feels the passion of the three guys to grow the business. But after that the struggle to resurrect and low paced second mistake and third mistakes are too late in the plot and sometimes reader looses touch with the characters. And actually most of the events in the second half of the book were quite predictable and made the reader feel monotonous at times.
Chetan has tried to put in a lot of stuff and issues in one single book through one single story politics, passion, greed, hatred, and cricket however the mark that is left by the book is not so strong. Despite touching on such steaming topics like politics & religion through cricket but still it lacks that joi de vivre in the story.
Ps. I understand that it is unfair for this book to be compared to Five Point Someone but I believe it is Chetan’s Own Benchmark
