Book Review: 2 States by Chetan Bhagat

Many book reviews of this latest product from the Chetan Bhagat factory suggested a good read… many strongly recommended the book as well… So, it was not surprising that I picked it up on my recent trip to Landmark.

Story

Book is the story of a Punjabi boy from Delhi and a Tamilian girl from Chennai. How they fall in love and how they convince their parents for marriage. The start is good. The author takes us into a trip to the dorm rooms of IIMA. How the budding friendships gallops into love, sex and then the time when the guy has to take a stand and commit to the girl. Now is the time for the parents to meet. Their parents meet and yes sparks fly. They cant stand each other. And thats when the journey starts.

They manage to convince their parents, get married and live happily ever after.

My 2 cents on the book

• Start is good and captivating.
• The protagonist of the book is supposed to be Hari from Chetan Bhagat’s first book, 5 point someone. He is battling a screwed up family and a haunting past.
• The attempts of the guy to patao the girl’s family reminds one of DDLJ, only a really bad attempt at that.
• The struggle of the couple to convince their parents seemed sinfully lopsided in the favor of the girl – The guy had to suffer a lot more to convince all the members of the girl’s family, while the girl had a cake walk.
• The whole story kind of brought the character of Ananya in a very bad light. She is shown to be this smart, intelligent girl… and throughout the book, Krish has only one arguement in her favor: She is from IIMA and she works for HLL!
• Towards the end of the book, the guy slogs and slogs… handles his parents, his parents-in-law and his girl friend… all in the same vein.. while the girl happily sits back and enjoys. In the end, she gets all she wants. The guy slogs for 6 months, while she gets everything done in a week!! Wow!! A little too hard to believe.
• The author has tried his best to give our hero the charm of DDLJ’s SRK. He does make him seem convincingly lovable, but with reservations, due to loop holes in the story and some unanswered questions towards the end – For instance, Krish’s dad is shown to have a very shady character. Why he is physically and mentally abusive towards his wife and son is not made clear even towards the end.

With all due respect, I think Chetan Bhagat has now started writing novels, not for the love of the art, but in hope that after Aamir, some other big time director will want to make a movie out of this novel… which is not bad… but these ulterior motives take away from what could have been a good entertaining novel.

On, the whole I will not strongly recommend this movie book!!