I borrowed Revolution 2020, the new book by Chetan Bhagat. I didn’t buy it because my friend said that I could keep it after he reads it (Thanks Sathish.. :-D ). Also partly because of the reviews it received online. As most of them pointed out, this novel is more like a cinema script than a novel. Most importantly the climax. I would not be surprised if this book was made into a bollywood movie in the near future, who knows Chetan himself can play Ragav.. ;-)

This is a good book to read once. I would give 2/5 for this book. Among all his books 2 States is still my favorite book. :-)

I do have one minor issue with this book. When New York Times recently pointed out the degrading quality of English in Indian novels, Chetan was quick to criticize them saying that,

And I try to catch authentic dialogue that matches the character. even if that isn’t correct queen’s English. Duh! [sic] (src)

I accepting his logic, I can go on-board with characters ending English sentences with ‘no‘ in an unreasonable manner or other errors inside quotes. But there are some errors which which confused me and made it difficult for me to understand the book. For example:

FlyingAarti: Of course. See, Raghav has ditched me for Chak de India all week. (Pg. 87, last couple of lines)

From the above sentence, if you thought Ragav ditched aarti and went to see the film Chak de India, you are wrong. In-fact he didn’t go to the movie and that was her point.

There are numerous other errors in grammar, tense and sentence patterns, But I am not going to go into that.

In the same twitter conversation about the NYT, Chetan also went on to say that he has four editors who corrects his book. (src) I seriously doubt that.

Mr. Chetan , English Language has grammar for a purpose. Please do follow at-least the basic rules. Trying to focus on the language style in order to bring reality into the characters is good. But when you push it too far, you will miss the point you wanted to make in the first place.

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