Impressions : Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat

REVOLUTION 2020

 

Chetan Bhagat is a modernist writer , in simple terms , his writings reflect the social upheaval post 1991.
It may be presumed that pre 1991, India was a liberal communistic social economy and with the collapse of USSR , a new world order emerged which changed the status quo of the patriarchal society long enmeshed in the cultural fabric of India. Revolution 2020 mirrors this change , which in a very brief time of 20 years, has went through a very rapid  and successive cultural and ethical mini revolutions.

The opening of the Indian Economy and end of licensing Raj meant that people for the first time in their life were more freer to pursue dreams since independence. The skewed ratio for a common man to have a shot at the riches were now more favourable than it had been earlier in the past. The story mirrors those aspirations in a comical narrative and records change of vicissitudes of fortune that the protagonists find themselves in and stands tribute to the infinite possibilities that the common people of India is now faced with in their lives.

ANALYSIS
 The story centers around five primary characters, Aarti, Gopal, Raghav, Shukla and Baba(Gopal's ailing Father).

The main setting is the holy city of Varanasi and the story is told as a flashback through the eyes of Gopal to the author in a hospital after regaining consciousness from a drunken stupor at his home.

GOPAL

The character of Gopal is well sketched out, and Mr. Chetan has clothed him in flesh and blood adding more teeth to his character than any other in the book. It is primarily around him that the story evolves and stirringly revolves. Aarti is the soul of this story and the prime motivating reasons for Gopal to embark on a lifelong quest for her love that had started in his childhood.
The character mirrors the majority of people in India and can therefore be readily identified by anybody as to be his own.

In him, Mr Chetan has tried to convey that what an aspiring student goes through if he/she somehow doesn't end up qualifying to premier educational institutions in India, the myth that these Institutes have created for themselves in the minds of students and parents alike and how it is being perceived as being a shortcut way to riches. The desire to land the coveted seat runs too high and Gopal is swept off his feet in this mad rush all the time pinning for the love of Aarti and jealous of his once best friend's success. He perceives that getting into the hallowed halls of any IIT , would make his beloved fall in love with him again, therefore the decisions of Gopal , goes down many level which is quite effectively brought out by the author and gets you hooked  and immersed into the story. What follows next effectively mirrors the hapless drowning of multitude of students who are forced to pursue a dream not of their own liking and eventually throw in the towel after a brief struggle.

Further down the narrative, we behold the epic failure of Gopal and when the magnitude of his failure sinks in,he decides to somehow fulfill the dream of his father. The prose of Chetan Bhagat delicately captures
the burden that most parents thrust onto the shoulders of their children of their own unfulfilled dreams and achievements and we see a young Gopal rushing off to fulfill it without having the maturity to understand the complexity of this decision or its consequences. A chanced encounter with a suave marketing executive, suddenly see the luck changes in his favour for the first time and we are treated to the complex business of setting up a college in India. The labyrinthine laws which are malleable enough with the right amount of cash and persuasion never ceases to amaze the reader and one finds Gopal again swept off into the maelstrom of hyperactivity of setting up a college , slowly making inroads into the life of his beloved and making cat footed efforts of tearing her away from the object of her affections.

Somehow Gopal's college gets inaugurated and he settles down to run it all the same time trying ways to get closer to Aarti. After many encounters he manages to quite a major degree to change the perception of Aarti about Raghav. Love can make people do silly things and try harder when the odds are stacked against you. We see Gopal incessantly making the effort and are treated to some very good conversations which shows the deep insecurities that women in India live in with all the time.

The jealously so strongly felt for Raghav for stealing away the love of his life has slowly,with time, metamorphosed into revenge and with Aarti safely secured, Gopal is impulsed in getting even with Raghav. Basically , deep down , Gopal is fighting a duel with himself, he cannot let go of his past failure of not able to break into the ranks of IIT  and holding a lifelong grudge against his friend. Now that he has won back some respect for himself , he tries to face his own guilt , rather the guilt which he owns to his father. But the encounter with Raghav changes psychologically and emotionally and the sense of grudge and feelings of revenge gives way to respect.
This change of outlook in life and the sense that he should do something to change the tide of corruption , as his bitter experience while setting up the college, Gopal decides that the right course that needs to be followed is to take a step back from the life of his beloved , whom he chased for his entire life, and let the affections of his once estranged friend grow back into her. Here I wish Mr Chetan Bhagat should have contrived a better alibi rather than sticking and glorifying a cliche.

The premise to make his plan work is ordinary which we still so often see in Bollywood masala films , of sacrificing the most cherished of one's values for the greater good thereby making a show of one's altruistic side of one's pathetic selves. I feel the shoddy plan of Gopal to drive away Aarti into the life of Raghav could have been more innovative and original and therefore consider it to be the low point of the entire book. In the end Gopal is back to square one emotionally trying to find solace in alcohol for his self inflicted wound which is seconded as good by the author. Perhaps Mr Chetan Bhagat has a moral obligation of letting the generation of Youngsters who believe in his words that it isn't a crime to hold onto values and one is perfectly moral of not sacrificing it for the greater good. It is the weakness of Gopal as a person which made him step back and passed up the gauntlet to his  friend whom he found far more capable than him to be the agent of change that he years but lacks the courage to do it himself.

AARTI

She reminds me of  'lara' of  Dr. Zhivago but heavily toned down in beauty and appeal. Not for even once , Mr Chetan refers to her physical beauty and so one is left to imagine as one pleases. There is not a single direct premise of her goodness or chastity that will get Gopal hooked onto her. So in a sense Mr Chetan has perhaps deliberately avoids the physical description of each of his creations and in doing so he has made it a tale of generic characters that one can easily identify with ,without being typecast to be someone else.
Aarti is fashioned generically without special attributes , coasting , like many of her generations , through choices . Had Mr Chetan was solely interested to expose or show the scourge of corruption that seeped into one's life as a de-facto truth , Aarti could have been done away with without her being so intense and enchanting. Aarti steps in to fill this would have been a void in narration does so beautifully without coming across a bitch. She surrenders to powerful men , men who lust ,long and cherish her. You are treated to her insecurities , her aspirations , her loneliness and her expectations which mirror the average girl next door but she is educated , ambitious and intelligent and like the modern generation of her times still subservient to her family wishes and to generic Indian sensibilities and traditional values. So in a sense SHE is much more that what meets the eye. Aarti is the epitome of Indian cultural and traditional values regarding women. The patriarchal values have slowly given way to accommodate an educated girl, freedom to pursue her dreams and tolerance of her sexual needs. So Aarti is an embodiment of partially free women of India obedient enough to uphold the traditional values of a patriarchal society and intelligent enough to pursue one' desires and dreams.

In all Aarti stands out as the glue which holds together the framework of the narrative and it wouldn't have been far fetched if the Novella would have been renamed as "Aarti".

RAGHAV

Well you now have guessed it , the entire revolution is resting on the shoulders of Raghav and the author intends to start a revolution and subjectively and objectively uses the character to further his arguments. Raghav is a engineer turned journalist with a peculiar kind of firebrand journalism that we one saw in the initial publications of Al Jazeera.
Like any idealist , the system isn't very kind of his particular taste in exposing corruption and thus begins his quest for understanding of his self. The author could have infused much more passion into the character but perhaps it was beyond the scope of the novella. Therefore it  becomes an exercise of self indulgence and I'm sorry Mr. Chetan Bhagat it doesn't work. The character fall flat with a bloodied nose to show for itself.
The narrative is lopsided because it is being recounted by Gopal, so all the characters that grace this novel are recounted as what they mean to Gopal. So the characters are the projections of Gopal only and how he perceives them to be is the essence of the novella. Sadly the Author could have taken the liberty to make his characters to be more authentic and hard hitting. Perhaps Mr. Bhagat is in need to exercise his grey cells more often and his future efforts should be rich in imagination not some run of the mill work that is dismissed to obscurity as soon as it published.

SHUKLA

The premise of the character of Shukla shows promise but is fizzled away to just being a angry reactionary voice over telephone. It could have been more dark which would had made his fall from grace that more gratifying. When Shukla falls to shame one wonders that he wasn't perhaps the epicenter of corruption but just a pawn in larger scheme of things. Raghav in his zealous mission of getting rid India of corruption brings down Shukla but the satisfaction & the significance of his achievement isn't monumental and in the end it doesn't stir much emotion in you & one feels a sense of vacuum and often wonders why?

In all I would have preferred Mr Bhagat to have waited enough for the story to have matured in his head before dishing it out to his fans. Like any good work of literature or fiction , it pays, if the premise and facts are researched thoroughly , an area in which we observe Mr Chetan to falter on quite a few occasions.
Nonetheless , it is good passive read and the dull witted jokes will keep you hooked on a dull rainy Sunday afternoon.

BABA

Perhaps He is the most important character which influeneces the storyline significantly that sets the pace and the unfolding events. He towers in the sense that he sends his hungry son to the same school also attended by the Daughter of a top bereaucrat. Gopal was conceived much later in his life for by the time Gopal passes out of school , he stands retired and ill.
The force fullness of the character becomes evident when on his insistence Gopal unwillingly  travels to Kota for the coaching class to take another shot at IITJEE even sacrificing his health to fund the studies of his son. This is the best character created by MR Chetan Bhagat in this novella and effectively shows the sad state of affairs in sub-urban,rural and urban India where the performance counts and the success in one life is determined by its results. It aslo brings out that to what great lengths parents can go to fund the causes that they believe in.
BABA is believable , bewildering,melancholic ,hateful and compassionate all at the same time to his only son.
So BABA is a quintessal Indian post liberalization, and the only means to alleviate their engulfing poverty lies in the belief of his son cracking the IITJEE. What a skewed logic!, but a bitter truth nonetheless.

FINAL WORD

Rent the book , if you haven't yet bought it or spend it on something else. It is a light read and would not appeal to cerebral or intellectual bent of mind. Otherwise, if haven't yet planned to read it, might as well skip the trouble and I gurantee you wouldn't miss much.

For the Chetan Bhagat Fans , finally the magic is weening off. Commercially, Revolution-2020 might have braved the tide of failure by sheer marketing gimmicks, but if such futile exercises continue, his wildly raving female fans might feel let down along with a multitude of readers who have taken a liking for his easy prose and simple compelling story lines of his earlier accomplishments.

Au Revoir.