One Night At The Call Center (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
This is the part of the reading experience that I have shared on a mail. I really loved reading the book, it waslike a movie & I can see the characters playing there part, their wayof talking, the sophisticated pretension, friendly concern, all ofthem were like the regular peoples we meet in our day to day life, butas it is said "heroes are not born, it is the situations they face &the way they deal them, make them one!". I would like to clear it thatI am not comparing a book to a movie, or anything like that, but itslike I can visualize them. The very childish behavior, the desperationto be on hype, the greed to steal some adventurious moment out of theroutine life, everything that presents a glimpse of a youth strugglingto wake up from the dreams of happy go merry life style, & to catch upwith the real world where dreams are meant for those who have power &money. I think that's the worst part of our living, one has to turnits face into a smiling emoticon & put goggles on, so as to stop eyesto reveal the truth. "I'm sorry", these words are easier to say whenyou don't really mean them, or when they aren't needed as well, butpretty hard to use them when one would feel really, to be. Dating partmay seems to parents, a reason enough to reject the book to be calleda good reading stuff, but for me it always depends on the us what partto opt as a learning. I always believed the fact so far that "everyperson, who walk in your life, has a lesson to teach & a story totell", but the last chapter when the writer was stunned with fact, thegirl was non of Esha, Priyanka or Radhika, made me to think do wealways have to let us fall till the depth of anything and then lookoutfor a helping hand to get a move towards light…why cant we try toachieve our goals, the way we want them to fulfilled. But then I cameup with my own solution, without falling once no one can have a senseto discriminate between going down n rising up, for which "no pain nogain" theory works well, though d "pain" & "gain" proportion may veryfor each individual & does help to categories peoples who make theirfailures, a great success & asset of their own. And at this point Ihave to commit that, even I was taking the real narrator as Esha, &the end of the book made me to realize the truth again, that I havealready taken as a magical phrase to success, that…"good thing doesn'thappens to those who are good, but to those who can dare to rebel justat one call of their conscience". World is just addicted of followinga leader, if one think he have good motive considering every commonbeing around, one is just too enough to lead, regardless lettingeveryone to know the real cause or the need of justice. And writingcould be, the one way, to make the mass realize the real aim of one'sown.
I'm really hungry which means I'm in a really bad mood and I will be until I eat something. There is pasta on the stove. Do not fear my hatred. Embrace it. It is hungry, it is the truth. I hated this book in a complete way, like where you go on a journey of hatred to be able to clearly and openly hate it. I hate people that like this book, which is apparently a large portion of India. I hate that I sat on the freeway in traffic thinking "well, I guess it's for a certain sort of reader that doesn't read a book for its beautiful language or interesting characters, it's a pop parable designed for shallow, ignorant people, and shallow people deserve books too, especially when the parable has the message of staying true to yourself" but you are pandering prejudiced poorly written trash and the fact that you don't even know you're trash makes me even angrier. Nobody deserves books this bad. I don't understand how someone could read you if they were not being paid to do so. You make me realize that I actually don't wish people would quit their boring jobs and write the book inside of them, because sometimes the book inside of them is this shit. It should have remained inside you, Chetan Bhagat, inside you where it is too dark to read. The only thing I got out of you was this sentence: "I just had to hear that ass woo my ex-girlfriend with the promise of expensive cars." ass woo. HAHAHAHAH. You were good for a booty call, ONATCC, and nothing more. And you didn't even know that's what you were good for. Fuck you. --I'm still angry, because I actually think this book DOES know that it's trash, and I can't believe this book had the balls to be so bad AND THEN have an epilogue where the author talks to a character, a girl who apparently told him the story, and says "Wow! Some story that was!" "So, did you like it?" "Yes, it was fun. But it also made me think." "There you go. It's one of those rare stories that's fun but can help you as well." Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so lazy and manipulative that you have to have a character mention what they think of the story so that those lines will go around and around in a reader's head after they're done with the story?
What do You think about One Night At The Call Center (2007)?
I finished this book in single night which, at the end, made me feel that the night was simply wasted. The meekly existing veil of inclination towards chetan bhagat's books too simply burned up to ashes after reading this book. No worthy content, no enticing plot and nothing. May be he showcased the woes of call centre people but it's no way narrated genuine and placid. He tried adding some spice to the story but failed. He tried to include a fragment of philosophy by bringing God into context but it ended up like ridiculous. Instead of wasting time on books like these, there are plethora of others in the world that really make literature, for reading which not even a life time is sufficient. Intelligently try to spend time on such books.
—Eti Mishra
Like a Douglas Coupland book set in India, this novel follows a group of six people working the night shift at a failing call center on Thanksgiving Day. They have to deal with Americans who don’t know how to work their appliances, but they also have their own personal problems—families, romances, career woes—to grapple with.I liked Bhagat’s characters a lot; I enjoyed their somewhat meandering conversations and their relationships with each other. I also, for the most part, like the marriage of whimsy and realism in the text. The book’s tone is light, never uproarious but occasionally amusing—with a bitter undercurrent running throughout. I never stopped being intrigued as to how the night would play out.However, Bhagat’s characters' hatred for Americans really bothered me. I mean, hate on American policy all you want—especially Bush-era policy—but the characters in this book hate Americans, average people, and they go on about it at length. Americans are stupid and lazy! They have it so easy! They are dumber than Indian 9-year-olds! And these aren’t just the characters’ opinions; there’s authorial agreement, too, to the point where the novel’s resolution depends on Americans being the stupidest people in the world.If an American wrote a novel that expressed these opinions about the people of India, it would be immediately identified as racist and vile. So why is the opposite mostly considered okay?By me, too, almost. While I was reading the novel, the anti-Americanism mostly just made me feel mildly uncomfortable. When I questioned this, I thought to myself: Well, I guess we deserve it. And, okay: there are a lot of things about this country’s policies toward the rest of the world that suck. There are without a doubt a lot of individual Americans’ attitudes toward the rest of the world that are appalling, also. But accepting and endorsing the idea that it’s okay—and in fact, good for fun and profit!—to hate Americans is just as icky and wrong as it is for people from the U,S. to promote the idea that the rest of the world is backward and scary or whatever. We all need to be better toward each other. It’s a two-way street.This feels far weighter and more complicated than something I can adequately address here. But rather than just swallow my discomfort (liberal guilt is actually pretty useless), I thought I’d try to talk about it. We’ll see how that goes.
—Trin
This is the only book I have ever read where the author thanks Microsoft and MS Word in the acknowledgments section.Pretty thin soup, overall. I picked it up because it's been very popular at the library, and I was interested in the depiction of what it's like to be a young person in India working at a call center. Those day-in-the-life details were the highlight of the book for me. Bhagat's main thrust is that his group of five characters need to face reality, stand up for themselves and have the courage to succeed -- and that India needs to do the same thing. They come to this realization after God calls them. And if you've read the above sentence, you can pretty safely skip the book.
—Kate
