Word: indianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much more like an overworked investment banker (in fact he is one, and has been for 15 years) than a best-selling author (which he has been for the past four). The success of his first book, Five Point Someone, a campus novel following three best friends at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, took him by surprise. "I didn't have the baggage of other Indian authors," he says. "I just wanted to write a fun book...
...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...
...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...
...city are the usual heroines, wrestling with what it means to be an independent woman in a country where premarital sex is still considered shocking and the vast majority of women live with their parents until they get married. A boxed set of recent popular novels by Indian women could be called "Every Girl's Career Guide," says Rupa Gulab, who wrote Girl Alone based on a dating column for the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. "Between the lot of us, we've covered advertising, marketing, p.r., the hotel industry, Bollywood, TV serials, gosh, even beauty pageants!" she says. This...
...uncompromising modernity of the new writing is also uplifting. Speak to any of these authors, and there is a sense of defiance in choosing to 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...