The 3 Mistakes of my Life by Chetan Bhagat: Book Review
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Headshot, Readable Enough, School Life
This one was long anticipated. The best-selling Indian novelist brings together another installment in showcasing the everyday life of some of the most common, unassuming and inconspicuous people of India. Titled 3 Mistakes of my Life, but disappointingly, has nothing to do with Mr. Bhagat’s life in itself. Anyway, its something fictional, but an entertainer in all. Before I consume your patience with vague descriptions like these, let me get started with the review…
The plot is pretty simple, 3 average students, Govind, Ish and Omi having a hard time living think of entrepreneurship. In middle come an entire big hoard of people, problems and pressures. Its about how they react, solve and live with those problems. Just like his older books, he chose a batch of people who truly represent a good proportion of urban India. This book is picturised in the older and slightly lesser developed part of Ahmedabad, Gujarat and features loads of Gujjus(Read: Hindi slang to refer to Gujaratis). Although no vernaculars could be observed in the book to make it funny in the slapstick sense, the very style of writing makes it really funny and entertaining. Many things that might feel Gujju there might be references to several places or locations in Ahmedabad, Gujju food, and of course, names that truly sound Gujju. But then, I really missed the name Jigness Kumar and a whole bunch of *readable* Gujju vernaculars there! 
After reading the book, I kind of felt that it had just one major objective. Making the Indian youth vigilant and aware of some of the biggest problems that plague its society. The list of problems could be very long, but well, Wordpress’s tinyMCE editor does have a bullet/numbering functionality for some reason, right? Feel free to scroll down and continue reading the rest o the review. I just wanted to point out that Chetan covered the following problems in his book…
- Expensive Education
- Lack of development in smaller towns
- Conservative mentality
- Extremism in politics
- Sick politicians
- Religious extremism
- Bias towards agnostics and atheists
- Poverty amongst the brighter lower-middle class youth
- Extreme competition in entrance exams for college admissions
- Success is hard to get
- Offbeat ideas receive suppression
- Lack of sports education/infra-structure in schools, etc
- Completely study oriented schools
- Small-scale businesses are extremely risky
- Advanced coaching for exams is expensive so only the upper-middle class receive that
- Drift between religions, castes, etc
- Conservative mentality of parents
- Hypocrisy among public, politicians, and everyone alike
- Lack of awareness, foresight and ideas due to lack of quality education
- Smaller schools lack funds and money in everything, just bigger school students get everything
- Bad quality contraceptive devices that don’t allow Indians to get bold early
- Heavy mugger-friendly curriculum
- Monotonous books, pathetic teachers, result oriented study
- Lack of scientific temper
- Students prejudiced about certain subjects and losing interest
- People just want to earn, and passion for anything is dead
- Prodigies and talented folks are mostly unrecognized and all that dies away as unharnessed potential
- Expensive international air tickets, nice food and even good reference material
- Stereotyped mentality of 99% of parents …. I had enough of it and I guess you did too. Just know that it had many more of it…
Oh well, I could go along all my life just covering the problems Mr. Bhagat put on those measly souls. But then, he makes a point clear. Indians live with many of these, even most of the readers do. The story was just a nicer way of illustrating the most extreme faces of these problems. In some places, the book does seem a little cliched with a few situations seeming too obvious in the setting. Like there is this bloke named Ish, who is a talented cricketer who didn’t go anywhere thanks to his involvement with cricket. So well, it was too obvious that his parents, especially his stereotypically grumpy Indian Dad always taunting against his failures, sometimes, simply for the heck of it! And simply for the heck of covering many of these problems, Bhagat creates or sets up certain scenarios a tad too forcefully… He even chose the best possible time-span to set the story in. Between 1999-2002, India faced the worst of all. Worst of riots, the worst of earthquakes and there were a hoard of problems especially in the part of India he spotlighted on. So well, the book in the end seems a little more than a detailed study of these problems… The book did go pretty much on the over-board side, especially in the ending. Seriously speaking, it did feel like a wonderful plot to a hindi movie with Chetan Bhagat trying to keep the book as riveting as possible.
But then, I did find the book an entertainer, but not for the same reasons why I found his previous books, Five Point Someone and One Night@the Call Center. Story and setting did slack off at places, but the writing style simply caught my mind. Several one-liners, witty metaphoric comparisons and unique usage of words with examples plucked from lives of all of us living in the sub-continent did have me bowing down at the same time munching at the food for thought he provided. A few things that he wrote in the book were such that, we might always have it in our mind, but then never have we ever managed to phrase that situation out into a clever statement… At times, he feels just so right. But then at times, it feels that parts of this book were just Chetan speaking out to the public and having his opinion read. And the pricing of the book makes it affordable for even those people documented in the book and even piracy-proof!
There are lofty many things that make Chetan Bhagat a wonderful writer targeting Indian youth. His writing isn’t the same as H2G2, where enjoying the humor means inclination to something, isn’t the same as fantasy writers, who spend a large portion of their publications just explaining the jargon and commodities that they imagined, and neither is it like those philosophical but anecdotal ones like say Sudha Murthy… It just feels almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Me, and many others who are a part of the growing India. The way he managed to put the un-phrased thoughts sitting in the minds of many of us is something that brings me to no surprise to have his third book soaring for success. I would be waiting to read more from him… I wish he updated his so-called blog more often!
Price: Rs. 95/- although ask for discounts in leading book stores.
PS - The book doesn’t have as much of cricket or the fanatic kind of cricket you might assume after looking at the cover, which does look pretty neat.
Attempt at Photography #2
Posted by Uma Damle | Filed under Photography, School Life
I know I repeated that disappearance act of mine again but well… can’t help it. Plus the computer was itching to be formatted so it was out of action for a while now.
Prash lent me his copy of H2G2 wrapped in what appears to be an ordinary polythene bag day before yesterday and tearfully told me take good care of it. Considering his repeated instructions of returning the book to the polythene bag once I’ve finished reading it I am beginning to suspect that it might not be polythene after all but some material that’s fire, water, weather and coffee stains proof. Too bad my mom parceled it off with the morning garbage before I could investigate further.And yeah I am in love with Marvin already.
Another batch of pictures from my side. Feel free to go through the EXIF data. Currently I am just playing around with colors and the macro mode as you can see in the pictures.
Since I am through with most of my major entrances, these days I am on an extended vacation. But being in accord with my theory that one only wants to do whatever they want to do when they can’t do whatever they want to do (Ah pearls of wisdom…should have gone to the flotsam) I am really getting tired of it all.I am dying to learn something new which means learning something that I haven’t started learning and left halfway already.
That’s all for now I guess. Wonder if my mounting pile of half written drafts would ever see the light of the day.
Bluegenemaid
<afterthought> This is a not-so-old memory from DynamiX 2007.For reasons best known to him, Prashanth made two pointless posts on the making of the event and none on the event itself. Although public interest is short lived and it’s too late to narrate the entire event now, there is one incident from day 2 which is too priceless to be forgotten.
Day 2 was a blur. I had absolutely no idea what was happening in the rest of the symposium cause I was engaged throughout the day for CodeX, Quiz and Crossword.
We began with CodeX (Whose questionnaire, I humbly add, was made by me) which was in form of a *.pps file with each clue in form of visuals that had to be connected to something in technology. Now, one particular visual was in form of a picture of Pamela Anderson with the question as “What would you call the space between the ahem…assets of the woman shown in the picture” <Tries and fails to keep a straight face>. Now we had somehow managed to make sure that no teacher entered the lab while the event was in progress ’cause as expected most of the sexually frustrated participants were giving a lot of attention to that particular clue. Although I was slightly on the edge out of fear of being caught, we were all perfectly relaxed otherwise… UNTIL Principal ma’am herself walked into the lab WITH a battalion of foreign visitors in tow.
Boy was I terrified. Of all the events she could have visited she had to pick this one. She has a knack for sniffing out trouble, I’d say. We went to each team and pleaded them not to bust us (pun totally intended 
) by opening the slide while the Principal was prowling about. My name was there in the slide show as the paper maker. If the Principal had had any intentions of showing the visitors a copy of the questionnaire I would have been screwed big time. Fortunately she was in a hurry and did nothing apart from asking me to brief the visitors about the symposium, although I swear my heart leaped out of my mouth when she summoned me across the room to do that.
The answer to that question was Silicon Valley, by the way…
</afterthought>
@the Pinnacle #1: The Transition…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under FIITJEE Pinnacle, It's My Life, School Life, Technology
Quite a few things have been changing in life for me lately. The biggest one being an year old fact which is yet to be documented properly. The recent one being that I managed to pass class XI and I am in class 12th since 2 weeks… What I actually want to talk about here is this huge turn over that happened to me approximately an year ago on the 7th of April, 2007. I officially became a student of FIITJEE Pinnacle, which I did mention in bits and pieces in my posts, as well as in a vague post here.
So this post is all about my transition to FIITJEE Pinnacle, a fairly new concept of education in this part of India as I see it. What this means is that now instead of going to school, I would be going to a full time coaching center. But then before I analyze that part, there was another transition with greater implications that I want to talk about. That is, my transition from class X to class XI. I have had a talk with quite a few of my seniors in class X and before when they moved from class X to XI. Many people I know felt really really nostalgic about class X and IX which I used to then hate and things ironically haven’t changed much even now… The same people said that I would prey pray to get back to class X again and would not have a good time at all. I have little idea about what made them say that, perhaps might be the school, pressures of coaching classes, or just the feeling of change or most probably the loss of easy-ness. Things have been a little different in my case may be because I am @the Pinnacle!
For once, let me make it very clear to you that I am very far away from even thinking about my class X forget missing it. I do miss my class classmates and my old school Ramjas, but not the academics. I wanted to get out of the mess of general studies way back in class VIII itself when Sansshit Sanskrit was first introduced to me. Social Sciences seemed pointless albiet interesting as I had decided to make my career in the science stream. But then lots of factors, especially those pertaining bad teaching and menial jobs such as copying stuff from the text book and submitting notes just for the heck of it, my interest in Social Sciences which included Geography, History and Economics faded big time. I had to be the happiest person on earth on the day when my Social Sciences bored exam got over. Coming to sciences, I had problems with the way CBSE narrowed down on the whole syllabus and literally showed no flexibility in the nature of problems. I was disgusted to find students mugging up methods to solve say - Problems of type #1, and then the next and actually scoring a lot! Understanding and analytical abilities played little role in the class X bored exam scores. All my score card of a so-called embarrassing 86.4% says is that I could just mug up that much portion of the syllabus. But then in reality, I mugged very little writing almost entirely correct answers (in my opinion atleast) only to get beaten in other stupid stuff like formatting the paper, maintaining order and presentation, etc. I used to and still feel pissed of the unnecessary emphasis CBSE puts on such criteria instead of core concepts.
Enough of CBSE bashing for now (will dedicate another post for this!) but then class XI at FIITJEE Pinnacle felt just great! For the first time in my 12 years of so-called education, I was actually tested for how much I understood stuff. Problems were far more elastic and flexible than many rubber bands and hence my mind was opened up to think, form new techniques of my own, develop short cuts and understand the concept in a much broader scope. That was something no plain CBSE student might have got a privilege to do. CBSE restricts a persons aptitude by limiting the methods you could use in the exam hall. Now all that mattered is how effectively I could think. This freedom of thought wasn’t just good for me, but also for the entire batch of extremely brilliant students who study along with me. It feels great when almost every student in the class is thinking and aiming to come up with something neat in the class. And finally, I have the same quality of classmates that I once dreamt of having earlier. No more nonsensical stuff that waste time and piss everyone off. Stiff competition constantly keeps filtering out ensuring that the quality of the batch remains.
But then, as the old saying says… there is another side to this coin. And another reason to post again…
Speaking of transition, I just shifted to Wordpress 2.5 and I am facing a few problems as I even migrated to Firefox 3 beta 5. The fluidity factor for the WYSIWYG editor seems to be working only till 1024*768 resolution for me. But otherwise, I guess I do see some neat changes. The AJAXed-WP plugin doesn’t work with version 2.5, or atleast my installation as yet.
Also, notice the change of template? I guess I needed some emphasis on typography and readability.
Some globally acclaimed (chuckles!) web designers suggested me that the images on the sidebar (especially the one on the left!) and the bright header images along with prominent sidebar text made reading the blog a difficult task. So well, we both have now gone down to the ‘widgetized’ footer where the pics seem to be better placed than those sidebars. Speaking of sidebars, the text is greyed out a bit to increase prominance on the main content part… I am totally open for improvement suggestions and would love to hear more of them in the form of comments… for now, since I have even moved to class XII, books seems to be missing me more than they did a few weeks before!
