Author Chetan Bhagat on being an unlikely role model for young people

Teenage girls repeat his name, while little boys stare at the stage, desperate for their idol to appear. Behind the hordes of excited children, parents wait patiently, just as eager for a glimpse of the star. No, this isn’t the latest Justin Bieber concert in Dubai. The jostling fans are, in fact, at Sharjah Expo Centre waiting for Chetan Bhagat to speak. The star, a mild-mannered, bespectacled 39-year-old man, suddenly appears at the back of the hall. He smiles and looks slightly overwhelmed as he shakes hands with fans and signs autographs while struggling through the throng to the stage.

India’s most popular author and the script writer of the successful Bollywood film Kai Po Che (based on his third best-seller, The 3 Mistakes of My Life) is here to address 2,100 uniformed schoolchildren from Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman. The fact that adults have gatecrashed the event shows his popularity across the age groups. The students are here for the hour-long morning session – Chetan’s talk titled ‘Real Cool vs Fake Cool’ – organised by DC Books at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival earlier this month.

Chetan, cannily enough, shows the short video clip of a song sequence from Kai Po Che. It’s the third of his scripts to be filmed by Bollywood and one in which his eight-year-old son Ishaan acted. The reason for showing the clip? The sequence encapsulates the recurring theme in all of his writing – middle-class values and youth rebellion. It also reiterates Chetan’s new-found status as a sort of rock star among writers and his burgeoning connection with Bollywood. The audience goes into a frenzy at the end of the video begging for more. He begins his talk with, “My greatest achievement is that 2,100 children got to bunk school today because of me!” Another bout of uproarious applause from the teenagers.

If the teachers feared they had let their wards in for an irreverent, anti-establishment speech, they must have been reassured when Chetan made an about-turn to talk to them about the issue of the universal need of youth to be cool at any cost. He urges students to analyse their perceptions on what being popular is, and what the implications can be.

“For me, being cool is being original, genuine and, most of all, compassionate,” he says. “It doesn’t mean owning the coolest gadgets, or being cool in appearance.”

It’s easy to see why he is such a hit with young people – he talks to them in their language, touching on topics close to their hearts.

One of the fastest-selling authors – the Guardian called him the “paperback king of India” – in 2010 Chetan was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 people “who most affect our world”. That’s not all. The New York Times crowned him “the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history’’.

Rupa and Co, the publisher that has brought out all of Bhagat’s novels since 2004, said over one million copies of Five Point Someone were sold since its release in 2004. In 2011, his novel Revolution 2020 sold 600,000 copies, and Rupa ran out of stock a day after release.

The appeal of films over books

But his secret smile reveals this could be part of his game plan. Though Chetan won’t comment on this, it appears these exercises are his way of broadening his audience base as well as giving back to society. That is the reason why Chetan is now concentrating on writing for Bollywood. “My books will only be read by the educated. Films, on the other hand, cater to the vast majority,” he says. “I’m experimenting to see how I can extend my reach through films. If I can put the values I spoke about with these children into a film that reaches millions, think of the impact.”

His first attempt at writing a film that is not based on one of his books, the Salman Khan-starring Kick, is likely to broaden his base beyond anything literature has done for him. But there are those who deny his books the status of ‘good literature’. Though his stories may be engaging, reviewers have sometimes called his writing “crass”.

Celebrated writer and artist Manjula Padmanabhan voiced the feelings of her contemporaries when she said, “His significance has less to do with what or how he writes than the fact that an audience exists for his kind of writing.”

So what is it about his books – six so far over a span of nine years – that gives him this superstar status that’s usually reserved for Bollywood stars? “I don’t really know,” he says disarmingly. “The youth may not see me as the best author, but they’ll say ‘he’s my author’. They feel a connection, probably because they see I am an ordinary person, a boy next door. They don’t feel much of a gap between them as readers, and me as the author. “Usually an author who writes in English is quite intimidating for a kid in India, but I’ve had 10-year-olds standing up and asking me questions. I suppose they feel I understand them. They are quite relaxed and not intimidated by me or my writing.”

He, in turn, is not intimidated by his reviewers and critics anymore. “I’ve come to the stage where I feel that if they like my work, great; if they don’t, that’s OK. How does it matter when you reach millions of people?

“Until then everybody had classified my writing as pulp, something like Mills & Boon. But I don’t think so. If it was, why is it still being talked about years later? It’s something more; though it’s difficult to put a finger on what that is. There is a connect; otherwise why is a 10-year-old girl in Dubai asking me a question about it?”

A long and winding path to success

As he grew up, storytelling faded into the background. He picked up culinary skills from his mother, and wanted to be a chef. “I really enjoyed cooking, I still do, though I don’t get the time now,” he says. “I have the knack and I would have been a good chef, but my father, an army officer, didn’t encourage me. Initially there was even some pressure on me to join the army, but I guess they realised that I was just not cut out for it. I was more of a daydreamer than a person who loves to do physical stuff.”

But he was a daredevil in his own way, climbing up lamposts to retrieve kites stuck at the top, shimmying up roofs to pick up cricket balls hit there... “Yeah, but I was not the disciplined kind of daredevil required for the armed forces!” he grins. “The problem is that I am too much of a rebel while the army requires conformity. I thrive on change, and would have been a total misfit in such an atmosphere.”

But then he proved a conformist when it came to college. He chose to study mechanical engineering at one of India’s premium schools, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, and later acquired an MBA from the India’s premier management school, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad.

It was at this time that he first began to dabble in writing. Three of his books – all of which were hugely popular – were written while he was an investment banker.

From there to becoming youth icon was accidental. “People used to invite me to give talks at small local functions,” he says, explaining this was because he was an achiever in that he had been to IIT and IIM – both prestigious institutions in India. “I gave a speech titled ‘Sparks’ at a college in India, and when I put the text of it on my blog it went viral. Soon, I started getting lots of invitations, and now it’s become a part of my life.”

While it has got him the youth icon tag, Chetan doesn’t claim that it’s always his way of giving back to society. “I can’t claim that, because I do charge as a professional speaker for corporate audiences,” he says candidly. “But with audiences such as this at government festivals where I talk to children, I don’t.”

Chetan considers himself different from other motivational speakers. “The idea is to give something to students to think about,” he says. “I keep my talks light, personal and honest. Mothers sometimes ask me to tell their children not to do drugs, because they listen to me. Strange! But I have to do that.”

Makes perfect sense. That’s perhaps why he’s not just a youth icon, but loved by parents too.