Investment banker becomes best-selling author in India

HONG KONG: Until about four years ago, Chetan Bhagat was an investment banker who was distinguished from the suited phalanx of his colleagues in this city's crowded financial district only by his secret hobby.

While others planned weekend excursions on the golf course, Bhagat, then employed by Goldman Sachs, indulged a passion for writing, laboring in his private time on a racy and comedic little novel about life on the campus of an elite college in his native India.

In the early morning before going to the office he would work on draft after draft of the book, trying to get it right. He did 15 drafts in all. He almost gave up when publishers kept turning him down.

Today, Bhagat is still an investment banker, now with Deutsche Bank. But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist ever in India.

His story of campus life, "Five Point Someone," published in 2004, and a later novel about a call center, sold a combined one million copies. Only the autobiography of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi has sold more.

Less than three days after the release in 2005 of "One Night @ the Call Center," another slim comedy about love and life in India's ubiquitous call centers, the entire print-run of 50,000 copies was sold, setting a record for the country's fastest-selling book.

Bhagat, who wrote his novels while living in Hong Kong, has difficulty explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare time has had such phenomenal success in reaching an audience of mainly middle-class Indians in their 20s. The books, which are deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket - just 100 rupees, or $2.46 - and have won little praise as literature.

One reviewer in The Times of India concluded a review of "One Night @ the Call Center" with the suggestion: "Time to hang up, Mr. Bhagat?"

"The book critics, they all hate me," said Bhagat in an interview here.

But Bhagat has touched a nerve with young Indian readers and acquired almost cult status, and this undoubtedly says a great deal about their tastes, attitudes and hopes. Bhagat might not be another Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, but he has authentic claims to being one of the voices of a generation of middle-class Indian youth facing the choices and frustrations that come with the prospect of growing wealth.

"I think people really took to the books mainly because there is a lot of social comment in there," said Bhagat. "It's garbed as comedy. The plot structure is like Bollywood, because that is what my audience has been used to."

Bhagat's choice of subjects for his first two books - life at a highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology and at a call center - allowed him to explore some perennial themes: the pressures, many of them parental, to get into a top school, earn high grades, get a good job and find the right partner, while still taking time to enjoy one's youth. His argument is that for the current generation of young Indians those pressures are greater than ever before.

He described the country's current young generation as "more gutsy" than their parents, and as interesting as the generation that led India to independence in 1947.

But the competition among them is severe. Bhagat said only 1 out of 700 applicants now gets into the Indian Institute of Management that he attended in Ahmedabad, compared with 1 in 200 when he applied in 1995. That experience and his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi are the inspiration for "Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT," the title an allusion to the struggle his three main characters have with low grades.

The pressures to succeed are part of what is making India a vibrant, fast-changing economy and society, Bhagat said. But he added: "Competition has its limits. Some of it is good and some of it is harmful." A message of "Five Point Someone" is that poor grades and happiness are not mutually exclusive.

This month, after more than 10 years in Hong Kong, Bhagat moved with his wife, also a banker, and their 3-year-old twin sons back to India, where he is a director in Deutsche Bank's distressed-assets team in Mumbai. When he left India with an MBA to start a banking career in Hong Kong, just before the 1997 Asian economic crisis, there were fewer opportunities at home even for graduates of the best schools.

Bhagat now wants to be a part of the historic changes taking place as India awakens to its potential.

Still, he sees a lot wrong with the model of economic success, particularly from the perspective of the country's youth. His "One Night @ the Call Center," which is being made into a Bollywood film entitled "Hello," is, beyond its story line about frustrated office romance, a critique of a nation climbing to prosperity by answering phone calls from American consumers.

Millions of Indians might have lifted their incomes by doing call center work. But the jobs are dead ends, said Bhagat, and no well-to-do parents want their daughter to marry a call center worker.

"Is this the best we can offer to India's young generation?" he asked. "If call centers are so great and brought riches to the country, like the government says, why aren't they marrying their daughters off to a call center guy?"

With each new book, Bhagat is attempting to toughen his social criticism. He has just finished writing "Three Mistakes of My Life" - a pun of sorts, this being his third novel. But this time he is tackling a far more sensitive theme than campus or call center life.

Set in the northeastern state of Gujarat soon after the bloody sectarian riots of 2002, it deals with issues of tolerance and the confusion Bhagat maintains that young Indians feel about religious values.

"India is a very religious country, and older people have extreme views on religion," he said. "Young people are not able to relate to it."

True to his form, the story will have a "very modern twist, Bollywood comedy sort of format," he said. "If you read my books they are comedies, but very dark."

The Web chatter and e-mails Bhagat receives about his books suggest that the dark social messages, wrapped in what he described as "quick reads" in the style of the humorous British writer Nick Hornby, have been getting through to his young audience.

But it is a balancing act, Bhagat said. His is an audience that grew up with Bollywood and wants a story that "tugs at the emotions" rather than moralizes or betrays serious literary ambitions. Bhagat said he develops his plots using a computer spread sheet before he sits down to write.

Initially, he did get some literary praise, winning a Publisher's Recognition Award and a Society Young Achievers Award in India in 2005 for "Five Point Someone." But the first flush of critical success has worn off. Ravi Rao, a critic writing in The Times of India, said Bhagat had gone from "candor, easy wit and tight structure" in his first book to "a dud" with his second.

Bhagat and his publisher, Kapish Mehra of the company Rupa, have an easy retort to the critics: The books sell.

"He is not a literary writer," Mehra said. "But, more importantly, he is a successful and popular writer."

Source: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11084160