"...a cloudy suspension in all that clear amazement and disbelief that could only be called envy as if a fellow prisoner had been released and he left behind to serve his sentence." this is a part of a sentence from Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others( London: Chatto and Windus,2014), chosen at random. To the readers who are familiar with the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" coined in 1817 by Coleridge it will perhaps suggest that the writer read English while at the University.Even a trained reader has to carefully interpret what the writer has written.When compared to the writings of a close contemporary also writing in English, Chetan Bhagat, one wonders who these writers are writing for. Chetan Bhagat, perhaps has even this group of liberal arts graduates as his readers in mind but Neel Mukherjee?
While this question would require a longer study, the fact that Chetan Bhagat in his extra literary pursuit talks about the serious writers, the lit crits and so on means that he is also concerned about a group of people who while some were trying to get into an IIT were reading a book a week, often more and talking about them.This group has always been there. From Ravi Babu with his zemindari to Amitav Ghose with his day job.Even Chetan Bhagat started as an investment banker. If Neel Mukherjee went to Don Bosco School and Jadavpur followed by both Oxford and Cambridge, Bhagat went to an IIT followed by IIM and lived in HongKong and Singapore.So what essentially makes one different from the other?There have been writers like Saul Bellow who have studied engineering but have written what is taken as serious fiction. There have also been writers like Dan Brown and John Grisham who while professionally trained have written for a larger popular audience.
Yet, when one reads Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee in the same week, one realises how much liberty Bhagat takes with facts and the use of a language.While he is writing fiction, facts in his fiction often far from actual facts. Harbhajan Singh gets his hattrick in the wrong innings, Sociology is taught at St.Stephen's College, the Dumraon Royals are shown as having a Maithil Brahmin surname and so on. The lack of research and not getting facts right are perhaps what make the lit crit unhappy with Chetan Bhagat but also restricts his readership if not in serious numbers, then definitely in its width among those who have grown reading books, Harry Potter to Dan Brown and on to Rushdie and Coetzee.
While this question would require a longer study, the fact that Chetan Bhagat in his extra literary pursuit talks about the serious writers, the lit crits and so on means that he is also concerned about a group of people who while some were trying to get into an IIT were reading a book a week, often more and talking about them.This group has always been there. From Ravi Babu with his zemindari to Amitav Ghose with his day job.Even Chetan Bhagat started as an investment banker. If Neel Mukherjee went to Don Bosco School and Jadavpur followed by both Oxford and Cambridge, Bhagat went to an IIT followed by IIM and lived in HongKong and Singapore.So what essentially makes one different from the other?There have been writers like Saul Bellow who have studied engineering but have written what is taken as serious fiction. There have also been writers like Dan Brown and John Grisham who while professionally trained have written for a larger popular audience.
Yet, when one reads Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee in the same week, one realises how much liberty Bhagat takes with facts and the use of a language.While he is writing fiction, facts in his fiction often far from actual facts. Harbhajan Singh gets his hattrick in the wrong innings, Sociology is taught at St.Stephen's College, the Dumraon Royals are shown as having a Maithil Brahmin surname and so on. The lack of research and not getting facts right are perhaps what make the lit crit unhappy with Chetan Bhagat but also restricts his readership if not in serious numbers, then definitely in its width among those who have grown reading books, Harry Potter to Dan Brown and on to Rushdie and Coetzee.
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