Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Book review : 3 mistakes of my life, Chetan Bhagat



Finished this one last night. The book starts off dramatically like the other two Chetan Bhagat books. The author presents a scenario to grip the reader and introduces what made him actually write this book. The story starts beautifully. Three friends, cricket fans, high on each others company, worrisome about the future. Then starts the entrepreneurial part. They actually start a profitable business and the protagnist shows astute business sense. They diversify, expand their core comptencies and are successful.

But like any other business, the story is not completely rosy. The infamous Bhuj earthquake of 2001 occurs and the boys lose all their money as a mall collapses in which they made a huge deposit to book a prime location shop. Following this loss, the protagnist falls ill and is dissappointed. However the friends, who were a little clumsy till now rise to the occassion and keep the shop running. Things even out finally and they get into whole sale business and make lots of profit.

Nice read. Uptil now. But catering to ‘formula best seller ‘ genre, the author digresses from this well crafted theme to actually throw in romance, guilt, a gifted underdog and the fight between friends over a family matter. The ending is horrible in which a actual screenplay of a movie is written (Our heroes defend the underdog from a mob during the Gujarat riots - one of them dies in the process). The last 60 pages of this 260~ page book are horrible.

Apart from the end part, it makes for some good light reading, if you are not doing much on a lazy sunday afternoon. :-)

2 comments:

selvester said...

I agree with you that the ending of the book was horrible, like all other chetan bhagat's book. Except of course one night at the call center in which the starting was equally bad. But over all I real enjoyed this one. It was like watching an old hindi blockbuster.

veikiin said...

Yeah. Its better than the One night.. one. Ending could have been handled in a much better way though, like you said.