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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Fast paced book....lack of content

Reading 'One night @ Call center' was a been there done that for me...The accomplishment was reading a complete book in a single day...Well for some this would sound absurd coz.....I know ppl who can finish a 500 page novel in a matter of hours.....But given that I have a penchant for dragging a book for months...this was quite an accomplishment. The earlier record was 3 days for 'Five point Someone' by the same author.
Lets get to the book now.....'1 nite...' has been on my shelf for a couple of months now. Finally I decided to get it over with. Given the fact that Five point someone is one of my favorite books ( I agree with ppl when they say its too amateurish...but I do like independent low budget films as much as a like a Spielberg epic)...I had a lot of expectations from this baby.....and maybe I expected Shamita Shetty to be as ravishing as Shilpa Shetty...(I suck at metaphors don't I? Couldn't think of another one if not a better one)...It was not to be though......The book has a few great things about it...The best thing is the way Chetan Bhagat creates a scene with elaborate dialogues and settings....You actually feel like you are watching a movie with the characters as real as real can be.....The next would be the message put across...which is to follow your heart always....Last but not the least the crisp editing....Editing??? A Book???...Well I have come to realize, Chetan does not write books....they are more of screenplays....coz if I made a movie out of his books...(I wish I could make a movie....) I would not change the scene placement one bit...Its a pre-edited version.....
Now onto the sad part....the perception of a call center job is completely one sided...well of course there are better jobs than a call center....But then again....a voice BPO was just the beginning for the bigger and better KPO (Knowledge process outsourcing...go look that up wikipedia...duh)...It was the same as the Indian software industry which started with fixing a '00' to a '2000' when Y2K struck.....as years went by, it climbed the value chain and are doing cutting edge stuff now.....Last but not the least....there are subtle ways of saying things and keeping points of view against a group of ppl. and these are always better than brash ways of demeaning a particular group.....the book opts for the latter on the pretext of sounding patriotic...a bit on the lines of Gadar's Sunny paaji.....All in all, it maintains the tempo set by the earlier book and is certainly a 'cantputitdowner'..(hey i actually came up with a new word)

2 comments:

PN said...

ohhh!!! Chetan Bhagat books are not tolerable..i couldnt understand his idea of God in second book...

SR said...

well PN, I wudnt go to the extent to say his books are intolerable...they sure are not literary marvels...but for dilettanteish indian reader they are fairly amusing...