Skip to main content

Book Review - The Girl In Room 105

There are couple of reasons why I pre-ordered Chetan Bhagat's latest - its price is less than a cup of decent coffee making it an impulse purchase and more importantly the book's claim that it is an "unlove story", whatever that means. Bhagat had pioneered the trend of bubblegum IIT college love stories targeted at teens and college-going population which inspired a generation of wannabe writers. But you can chew bubblegum only for so long. After some time you have to spit it out. With this book Bhagat threw away the bubblegum only for it to stick to his shoes.

The story starts the same way as have Bhagat's previous books - in a college and more specifically in an IIT. For initial few chapters you would be forgiven if you think you have picked up one of Bhagat's previous works by mistake. Bhagat is still obsessed with fair skin, women's churidar kurta and how she arranges her hair. The English is still pedestrian which Bhagat justifies as this is how real people talk only na! But wait, there is a twist - or rather a murder.

The protagonist is an IIT ex-graduate who drinks bottles of whiskey sulking about the girl who broke up with him four years ago (putting Max Payne to shame), eats nothing but packets of maggi but is still able to maintain a six-pack! He also has a sidekick friend - an overweight, computer wizard who sticks with him through thick and thin despite being humiliated for his weight multiple times. The duo set out on an adventure to solve the whodunnit mystery of our hero's ex-girlfriend murder with appropriate brand placements in between. Its almost as if the story was written so that it can be made into a Bollywood movie.

The story is full of more cliches - a studious-but-selfish Tamilian who becomes a successful businessman, families belonging to different religions (remember "2 States"?), an incompetent police inspector etc. Bhagat tries to include a Kashmir angle but gives up even without trying so as not to offend anyone. With the terrorist and religion plot conveniently set aside, the story contains plot holes so huge that a Boeing 747 can fly right through it.

Despite the book's claim of being a thriller, you never feel invested in the story. Generally a thriller ratchets up the tension and relieves it with few laughs in between. The laughs are there; the tension is missing. Towards the end, I just wanted the story to get over so that I can get a good night's sleep.

This might be Chetan Bhagat's worst work till date. The mish-mash of Bollywood's cliches, lazy writing and an eagerness to not offend anyone might be this book's undoing. If you are looking for a decent detective story, stay away from this. If you are a Chetan Bhagat fan, no amount of fore-warning would stop you from picking it up. Just remember that this isn't the girl in room 105 you are looking for.

(Rating - 2 out of 5 stars) Buy on Amazon

Comments

  1. But this fact can't be changed thattBhagat is young generation hero..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes a hero who is accused by the #MeToo movement

      Delete
  2. So this is another IIT love story. Thanks for the warning. 😄 I have read all his other books. But can't buy another geared-towards-Bollywood book!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can you send me the book as pdf format bcz I want to read this
    I ordered already but flipkart can't deliver as my expectation date and time...
    Please sir
    My email id Samirsingh250@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice and essential information, this information is very useful and informative which you have shared here. It is very knowledgeable information and beneficial for beginners to develop their knowledge. Thanks for sharing it. Bunn coffee makers parts

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

As far as possible, please refrain from posting Anonymous comments. I would really love to know who is interested in my blog! Also check out the FAQs section for the comment policy followed on this site.

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating React with SonarQube using Azure DevOps Pipelines

In the world of automation, code quality is of paramount importance. SonarQube and Azure DevOps are two tools which solve this problem in a continuous and automated way. They play well for a majority of languages and frameworks. However, to make the integration work for React applications still remains a challenge. In this post we will explore how we can integrate a React application to SonarQube using Azure DevOps pipelines to continuously build and assess code quality. Creating the React Application Let's start at the beginning. We will use npx to create a Typescript based React app. Why Typescript? I find it easier to work and more maintainable owing to its strongly-typed behavior. You can very well follow this guide for jsx based applications too. We will use the fantastic Create-React-App (CRA) tool to create a React application called ' sonar-azuredevops-app '. > npx create-react-app sonar-azuredevops-app --template typescript Once the project creation is done, we

Creating a Smart Playlist

A few days earlier I was thinking that wouldn't it be nice if I had something which will automatically generate a playlist for me with no artists repeated. Also, it would be nice if I could block those artists which I really hate (like Himesh Reshammiya!). Since I couldn't find anything already available, I decided to code it myself. Here is the outcome -  This application is created entirely in .NET Framework 4/WPF and uses Windows Media Player Library as its source of information. So you have to keep your Windows Media Player Library updated for this to work. It is tested only on Windows 7/Vista. You can download it from here . UPDATE : You can download the Windows XP version of the application here . Please provide your feedback!

Add Git Commit Hash and Build Number to a Static React Website using Azure DevOps

While working on a React based static website recently, there was a need to see exactly what was deployed in the Dev/Test environments to reduce confusion amongst teams. I wanted to show something like this: A quick look at the site's footer should show the Git Commit Hash and Build Number which was deployed and click through to actual commits and build results. Let's see how we achieved this using Azure DevOps. Git Commit Hash Azure DevOps exposes a variable called  $(Build.SourceVersion) which contains the hash of the commit. So I defined a variable in the Build Pipeline using it. Build Id and Build Number Azure DevOps also exposes two release time variables  $(Build.BuildId) and  $(Build.BuildNumber) which can be used to define custom variables in the pipeline. So we have a total of 3 variables defined: Next we use these variables in our React App. I created 3 global variables in index.html and assigned a token value to them. < script   type = "text/JavaScript&quo