Word: bhagat
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...Bhagat recently for dinner in Mumbai. He brought with him his assistant, a chatty, young aspiring actress whose main responsibility is answering the thousand or so fan letters he receives every week. They were preparing for his next speaking engagement, an address at a university in Baroda in western India where he expected a crowd of at least 8,000. It is hard to imagine any author - besides, say, J.K. Rowling - as the object of so much adulation. In his rumpled white shirt, and with a slight paunch and wire-rimmed glasses, Bhagat looks much more like an overworked investment...
...Bhagat could have written a postgraduation sequel (his fans still ask for one) but instead he tried to get closer to the average young Indian by setting his second book, One Night @ the Call Center, in a workplace familiar to many of them. In his most recent novel, released in May, he ventured out to the provinces, following three cricket-mad friends who start a business in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. Entitled The Three Mistakes of My Life, the book has already sold 500,000 copies, thanks to a text that is accessible to readers whose first language...
...pile is Chetan Bhagat, whom fellow pop author Anirban Bose calls the "Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary of Indian mass-market publishing." Bhagat's three books, the first of which was published in 2004, have sold more than a million copies. One has been made into a Bollywood film and another is in production. "Chetan Bhagat's success demonstrated that there was a huge market for Indian fiction, with everyday Indian characters acting out everyday Indian stories," says Bose. "Publishers took note that homegrown talent was finding a voice, and that publishing authors like us was not only not risky...
...love him or hate him, but Chetan Bhagat's big contribution to Indian publishing has been to bring out of the woodwork a whole segment of readers that publishers had traditionally believed never existed," says the agent Chatterjee. She describes them as "college and high school students, the under-25s, whom we all liked to believe would rather buy a pizza or go disco-dancing than spend money on a book." But they will buy books relevant to their own lives. Amitabha Bagchi, author of another IIT novel, Above Average, says young Indians want to read about themselves "not entirely...
...write about the present - an insistence that the stories of how Indians live now are just as worthy of being told as the more self-consciously literary sagas set in some supposedly more romantic past. Indian pop fiction might be banished to second-class status by critics, says Bhagat, "but it's not that to the people who read it." For them, it tells the stories of their own lives, and looks ahead to India's thrilling if uncertain future...