The IITians complement
Five point someone by Chetan Bhagat is the exact complement of The IITians. It touches upon the lives of three friends, Hari Kumar, Alok Gupta and Ryan Oberoi. All three are, as Sandipan Deb has described in his book, marginals; miscreants in the eyes of the professors, loafters in the eyes of Hari's girlfriend, and fivepointers, who without any hint about their future, try to find solace in grass and vodka.
Hari, Alok and Ryan enter IIT Delhi, seeking to graduate as Mechanical Engineers, and find themselves in trouble from day one. The ragging episode bonds them, and from then on they are almost inseparable. The book describes their pursuits in IIT from getting low grades, to inventing C2D, or Co-operate to Dominate, to wooing the HOD's daughter, and to trying to steal question papers from the prof's ofice.
The book is also about IIT life - about making friends you cherish for your life, about bonding with hostelmates, about academic pressures, about daaru and grass and C2D, which is quite common in most IITs.
The book is highly entertaining, almost on the lines of The Inscrutable Americans. In fact, Anurag Mathur has been an inspiration of sorts to Bhagat. He has tried to follow a similar way of writing, replete with witty anagrams, although not as entertaining and as memorable as Mathur; the IIT lingua is not used to very good effect, and the fact remains that IITians hardly ever talk in English in their halls. Also at times, the book becomes almost unreal, and shows incidents, which, I, as an IITian, can vouch can never be true. For instance, no body goes paper-hunting into a prof's office. And if you study even 1.5 hrs a day regularly, you are sure to get a nine-point, unlike the trio who manage a 5 point after 3 hrs a day. I do not agree with Bhagat's image of ninepointers. We have loads of them, and they are very friendly, and I have never seen anyone look down upon others with lower grades. Venkat may be an exception; he is certainly not a rule.
However, the book still is great; worth a read. And at 95 bucks highly affordable.
You can find more about the book at FivePointSomeone
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"I have a dream" --- only when i'm sleepin'
Hari, Alok and Ryan enter IIT Delhi, seeking to graduate as Mechanical Engineers, and find themselves in trouble from day one. The ragging episode bonds them, and from then on they are almost inseparable. The book describes their pursuits in IIT from getting low grades, to inventing C2D, or Co-operate to Dominate, to wooing the HOD's daughter, and to trying to steal question papers from the prof's ofice.
The book is also about IIT life - about making friends you cherish for your life, about bonding with hostelmates, about academic pressures, about daaru and grass and C2D, which is quite common in most IITs.
The book is highly entertaining, almost on the lines of The Inscrutable Americans. In fact, Anurag Mathur has been an inspiration of sorts to Bhagat. He has tried to follow a similar way of writing, replete with witty anagrams, although not as entertaining and as memorable as Mathur; the IIT lingua is not used to very good effect, and the fact remains that IITians hardly ever talk in English in their halls. Also at times, the book becomes almost unreal, and shows incidents, which, I, as an IITian, can vouch can never be true. For instance, no body goes paper-hunting into a prof's office. And if you study even 1.5 hrs a day regularly, you are sure to get a nine-point, unlike the trio who manage a 5 point after 3 hrs a day. I do not agree with Bhagat's image of ninepointers. We have loads of them, and they are very friendly, and I have never seen anyone look down upon others with lower grades. Venkat may be an exception; he is certainly not a rule.
However, the book still is great; worth a read. And at 95 bucks highly affordable.
You can find more about the book at FivePointSomeone
===
"I have a dream" --- only when i'm sleepin'
posted by kpowerinfinity @ 1:40 pm
1 Comments:
At 12:12 pm,
Nitzee said…
Any guesses who is the nine pointer around here!!
>:)
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