Chetan Bhagat's Imaginary World

Chetan Bhagat's Half Girlfriend( Rupa, 2014) is a story about a basketball player and his making a half girl friend even while he is waiting for the basketball trials for admission to st.Stephen's College in Delhi.The Girls' trials are on at the Basketball courts and it is here that he meets Riya Somani, also a basketball player.The novel tells the story of Madhav Jha, from Dumraon royal family in Bihar, and his quest for his ultimate Holy Grail: Riya Somani. While  Bhagat manages a passable story, he makes hash of an opportunity of doing a decent campus comedy.

The last time Bhagat was writing a campus book, Five Point Someone (Rupa,2004), he was able to at least give glimpses of the life inside an IIT. From Ragging sequence to the competitive atmosphere and difficulties faced by his characters add to the thematic complexity of that novel and rounds off a  love story. However,there is no attempt to enter the class rooms or show the protagonists actually studying or for that matter taking part in any meaningful basketball match or tournament.This is a shortcoming which becomes obvious as the writer harps on St.Stephen's college and its elitism so much from the admission interview stage itself, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Yet, the author introduces us to only three each of Riya and Madhav's friends and that too in a very sketchy way. Even Madhav is presented in a manner in which we do not know how much of Sociology, he has picked up in the three years.

Sociology Honours is the course Madhav is supposed to be doing at St.Stephen's. As Delhi's St.Stephen's College has never taught the course, the college in question becomes purely fictional.If it is so, Bhagat's naming of a residence block after Principal Rudra of St. Stephen's college appears to be very creative indeed.However, it is obvious that Bhagat wants to focus on St.Stephen's but he has not done any research. Research has not been  done about the way interviews are conducted or the sequence of Sports quota interviews. However, Bhagat talks about the novel being about Bihar. Even then, no research has gone into how a Madhav Jha could be found in Dumraon. The Dumraon Royal family belongs to an entirely different caste than what Jha would signify.Moreover, the Dumraon Royals went to schools like Doon and Rajkumar College, Rajkot. A scion of the family would have come to St.Stephen's after 10-12 years of English medium education and the whole novel actually ends up reflecting a lazy and arrogant attitude in showing a slice of Indian life not the way it is but the way Chetan Bhagat imagines it to be.

One of Bhagat's least successful novel which comes apart at every place and there is no underlying theme as even the love is not described properly.If Madhav actually loved the girl, he would scarcely be talking clinically about her with his friends.Half Girlfriend, then is an attempt to cobble together a novel without giving too much thought to either the real world or the fictional worlds of Delhi's University enclave and Buxar's Dumraon.