An Investment Banker Finds Fame Off the Books

By DONALD GREENLEES
Published: March 26, 2008



HONG KONG — Until about four years ago, Chetan Bhagat was an investment banker distinguished from the suited phalanx in this city’s crowded financial district only by his secret hobby.
Samantha Sin/Agence France-Presse
Chetan Bhagat, an Indian investment banker who wrote two popular novels, “Five Point Someone” and “One Night @ the Call Center,” which already has international editions.
While others planned weekend excursions to the golf course, Mr. Bhagat, then employed by Goldman Sachs, indulged a passion for writing, laboring in his private time on a racy, comedic little novel about life on the campus of an elite college in his native India. In the early morning, before going to the office, he would work on draft after draft of the book, trying to get it right. He did 15 drafts in all.
Today Mr. Bhagat is still an investment banker, now with Deutsche Bank. But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history, according to his publisher, Rupa & Company, one of India’s oldest and best established publishers. His story of campus life, “Five Point Someone,” published in 2004, and a later novel, “One Night @ the Call Center,” sold a combined one million copies.
Less than three days after the release in 2005 of “One Night,” another slim comedy, about love and life in India’s ubiquitous call centers, the entire initial print run of 50,000 copies was snapped up, setting a record for the country’s fastest-selling book. And Ballantine has published a paperback edition of the novel in the United States.


Mr. Bhagat, who wrote his books while living here, has difficulty explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare time has had such phenomenal success reaching an audience of mainly middle-class Indians in their 20s. The novels, deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket — just 100 rupees, or $2.46 — and have won little praise as literature.
“The book critics, they all hate me,” Mr. Bhagat said in an interview here.
But he has touched a nerve with young Indian readers. Mr. Bhagat might not be another Vikram Seth or Arundhati Roy, but he has authentic claims to being one of the voices of a generation of middle-class Indian youth facing the choices and frustrations that come with the prospect of growing wealth.
“I think people really took to the books mainly because there is a lot of social comment in there,” Mr. Bhagat said. “It’s garbed as comedy.”
Mr. Bhagat’s choice of subjects for his first two books — life at a highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology and at a call center — allowed him to explore some perennial themes: the pressures, many of them parental, to get into a top school, earn high grades, get a good job and find the right partner, while still taking time to enjoy one’s youth.
He described the members of the country’s current young generation as “more gutsy” than their parents, and as interesting as the generation that led India to independence in 1947.
But the competition among them is severe. Mr. Bhagat said that only 1 out of 700 applicants now gets into the Indian Institute of Management he attended in Ahmedabad, compared with 1 in 200 when he applied in 1995. That experience and his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi are the inspiration for “Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT,” the title a reference to the struggle his three main characters have with low grades.
The pressures to succeed are part of what is making India a vibrant, fast-changing economy and society, Mr. Bhagat said. But “competition has its limits,” he added.
Recently, after more than 10 years here, Mr. Bhagat moved with his wife, also a banker, and their 3-year-old twin sons back to India, where he is a director in Deutsche Bank’s distressed assets team in Mumbai. When he left India with an M.B.A. to start a banking career here, just before the 1997 Asian economic crisis, there were fewer opportunities at home, even for graduates of the best colleges.
Mr. Bhagat now wants to be a part of the historic changes taking place as India awakens to its potential.


Still, he sees a lot wrong with the model of economic success. His “One Night @ the Call Center,” destined to be a Bollywood film, is, beyond its story line about frustrated office romance, a critique of a nation climbing to prosperity by answering phone calls from American consumers.
With each new book Mr. Bhagat is trying to toughen his social criticism. He has just finished writing “Three Mistakes of My Life,” a pun of sorts, this being his third novel. But this time he is tackling a far more controversial theme.
Set in the western state of Gujarat soon after the bloody sectarian riots of 2002, it deals with issues of tolerance and the confusion Mr. Bhagat believes young Indians feel about religious values.
“India is a very religious country, and older people have extreme views on religion,” he said. “Young people are not able to relate to it.”
But true to his form, the story will have a “very modern twist, Bollywood comedy sort of format,” he said. “If you read my books, they are comedies, but very dark.”
The Web chatter and e-mail messages Mr. Bhagat receives about his books suggest that the dark social messages, wrapped in what he described as “quick reads” in the style of the humorous British writer Nick Hornby, have been getting through to his young audience.
But it is a balancing act, Mr. Bhagat said. His is an audience that grew up with Bollywood and wants a story that “tugs at the emotions” rather than moralizes or betrays serious literary ambitions. Mr. Bhagat said he developed his plots by using a computer spread sheet before he sat down to write.
Initially, he did get some literary praise, winning a Publisher’s Recognition Award and Society Young Achiever’s award in India in 2005 for “Five Point Someone.” But the first flush of critical success has worn off. Ravi Rao, a critic writing in The Times of India, said Mr. Bhagat had gone from “candor, easy wit and tight structure” in his first book to “a dud” with his second.
Mr. Bhagat and his publisher, Kapish Mehra, of Rupa & Company, have an easy retort to the critics: the books sell.
“He is not a literary writer,” Mr. Mehra said. “But, more importantly, he is a successful and popular writer.”