One Night @ The Call Centre -- Chetan Bhagat

One Night @ the call centre is a 289 pager from Mr.Chetan Bhagat who graduated from IIT, Delhi in 1995 and IIM, Ahmedabad in 1997.He currently lives in Hong Kong and works in a prominent Investment Bank.

The author starts the story by recalling his journey to Kanpur.In an empty train compartment, he meets a beautiful lady who offers to narrate him a story, provided he was ready to frame his next book around it.

The story is a fictional account of one eventful night at a call centre called Connexions located in Gurgaon, Haryana. It peeps into the life of six call center agents, three men and three women, who are a part of the same call handling team. Its a story of their pain, sorrows, ambitions, love, personal trauma and the happiness that they share together. These characters are:

Shyam Mehra (Sam Mercy): He is the host n dost of the story.

Varun Malhotra (Victor Mell): He is very smart and quite a dude.

Military Uncle: An ex- military official, oldest of the lot and an odd man out.

Priyanka: She is the heroin of the story.

Esha Singh (Eliza Singer): An aspiring model.

Radhika Jha (Regina Jones): A housewife slogging between her home and job.

Plus, there is Mr. Subhash Bakshi – their difficult, shrewd and cunning Boss.

Their turbulent and messed up personal lives, low self – esteem and their boss, whose mismanagement had led to the downfall of the center take a huge toll on them. In the midst of all this madness, one dramatic night, their lives fall apart and they suffer from existential crisis. However, their crisis is resolved by a divine intervention i.e., a phone call from God. This God is cool, he doesn’t preach them but simply asks them to listen to their inner call, a little voice inside ‘em.The call becomes a turning point in their lives. They regain their confidence, work out a master plan and finally succeed to save all the jobs at Connexions.

The author has tried to portray the world of call centers that has become a symbol of India’s newly globalised economy. While the traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young group of highly skilled, articulate professionals work through the night where the normal human body clock is completely reversed. These faceless Indians take on western names and fake accents to provide client services to millions of foreign customers, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they have never actually experienced and earning salaries that were undreamt by their previous generation. The author has effectively depicted their lifestyles that’s a cocktail of premature affluence and westernization transplanted to the Indian setting wherein they keep unsocial hours, neglect their family obligations and date each other with a horrifying casualness. However, they are a part of a social and economical revolution that is transforming and enriching India, mostly for the better.

The story unfolds in a night span at the call center and ends early morning – hence the title. It’s a compulsory quickread, with writing style and the flow of language being very simple, clear and light. The author has written in a comfortably natural style which keeps the narration pretty lucid and smart. Its a young, fast and gripping story that’s not very verbose; full of witty remarks and loaded with subtle humour – especially the one-liners that are just awesome. The author’s ability to breathe life into all his characters makes the reading quite pleasurable. The fun is about the interaction among his six protagonists and that’s where the book scores the most. The realistic characterization and the ease with which the IITian author makes the characters from different backgrounds seem so real in each other’s company, yet retain the distinct streak of individuality, is very impressive.

Indeed, the author has struck a right chord with the Indian youth.

However, the book has its own share of flaws. It isn’t a great literature; on an out and out literary basis, the book may not go well with the purists.

The flashback interludes of the courtship between the characters and their date sequences test the patience of the readers at times, because the grip of the main narration is lost due to that. Moreover, the book has invited comparisons with the formulaic Bollywood films that throw in generous doses of romance and fantasy. The ending is stretched and looks melodramatic written with a view of celluloid possibility in near future and that’s where I feel, it dents. Nevertheless, despite the fun, it deals with a real contemporary issue of today’s Indian youth that one finds to be very relative. In my opinion, the punch of the story lies in the motivational phone call from the God. The response of the characters to the call reflects a strong undercurrent of sense of justice and determination in Indian youth. Its due to the motivational element that the irrational aspect of God’s involvement finds a flavour with me.

Indeed, the book is a touch ahead from other contemporary books.