I will never be a snob about Chetan Bhagat’s writing or his popularity, for I would be lying if I say that I didn’t enjoy his earlier works and I would be forever be thankful to him for igniting my interest in reading. These days, books about campus love stories, friendship and other petty screw-ups are a dime in a dozen, but Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone was probably the first and may even be the only one at that time that tackled these issues, that too at an IIT.  That should also explain why other impostors failed, while his brand still hasn't waned yet

My fiction reading in my graduation days was limited only to the cheap paperbacks I bought from roadside vendors and most of them were written by Agatha Christie, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robins, and James Hadley Chase et al. So when I first saw the book titled Five Point Someone, I didn’t understand what it could be about. I have no idea about CGPA, but on closer look it had the tagline “What Not to do at an IIT.” My curiosity rose a bit and I read the blurb. It was modestly priced at 95 bucks, so I didn’t have to think much for buying it. 

Needless to say, that I enjoyed it immensely and I knew I would be checking his other book “One Night at a Call Center” immediately. I liked that one too as it mostly dealt with people I felt I know closely, in part because those were the early days of my first job. Bhagat was a national phenomenon by then and wherever I went, people were raving about his works and I personally recommended the two books to some of my friends, who had equally great things to say about them. 

So much fuss has been made about the lack of “literary merit” in his books, but I don’t like to give much thought about it, since he has got a story and he choose to tell it in the manner which gets the point across to his target readers. In my opinion, any artist to be popular in our country, he has to know his own strengths and weaknesses, should have a definite understanding of what he aims to do with this work and who his work is targeted at. Chetan Bhagat checks all these criteria emphatically, and so it is not baffling to see why he is so popular. His contribution in bringing reading into vogue and even managing to make it a part of our pop culture can’t be ignored. While his books resort to escapist optimism, it can’t be denied that they have had positive influence on more people than the number of critics, whom he never set out to please in the first place.  

Chetan Bhagat always reminds me of my Mathematics Lecturer from my Intermediate. His tuition classes were hugely popular and his house used to be brimming with students from all parts of our town. Yet he only had a graduate degree in mathematics, not even engineering. He is more popular than me and helped many students, I included, graduating into higher studies. If I say, he doesn’t have a Post Graduate Degree from a Foreign University and hence has no business being as popular as he is, I’m missing the point by a long way. 

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Written for Indispire Edition 38:What makes Chetan Bhagat so popular? What do the other lesser known talented Indian writers need to do to get the same recognition? #5pointAgenda