Mittal, Amit - Book Review

Three mistakes of my life

nospam@example.com (Amit Mittal) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:37:34 +0530

Did ever occur to you the political game played by our leaders using the religious and communal differences?

That's what exactly shown in the book titled "Three mistakes of my life" by Chetan Bhagat. Of course, as mentioned earlier the same writing style.

After looking at the biography of the writer, I realized that all of his books are related to one of another incident of his life. It is not like other writers who take the plunge to do research on a topic before start writing on paper. Parts of all of his books till date has got experiences from his personal life. That is fine till one extent but I guess this is the time, he should start thinking out of the box and come up something innovative if he is looking for a good career in writing.

Though this book keeps the reader attached to it (specially if he is an Indian) as it has so much common to our real life in the country. Over all, a good read!

2 states - the story of my marriage

nospam@example.com (Amit Mittal) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:19:28 +0530

This book was referred by one friend while discussing during my Diwali holidays. On my way back to Bangalore on October 19th, I saw this book in a book store on Delhi airport. I had couple of hours to board the plane and then around 2.5 hour journey. Thought of utilizing time while reading this book.

The book started with a nice college incident and soon I indulged myself in the characters and story of the book. The writing style of Chetan is same as it was in his earlier books. My familiarity with his words helped me in getting involved in the story. No need to say that he did very good research on the topic and on two cultures.

The rituals and the community behavior captured in the book are very near to the reality. I lived one culture throughout my life and closely associated with other culture from last 12 years or so. I could read my experience in the book. The type of show-offs, materialistic thinkings, superiority complexes etc. are some common things in these two cultures.

We claim that we are walking with the world but when it comes to our children, we are still way behind. I guess, it is a long way to go. I agree with Chetan on his thoughts about love marriage. It is not so easy when it comes to India and even tougher if it involves two different backgrounds and communities.

His piece of work is very good with one little flaw . He talks about NIT at one place and talks about mobile phones being new gadgets in India after 2-3 years of first incident. As NITs got named in 2002 so I don't see that it was a big deal having mobiles in 2005. He would have mentioned REC in the first incident than NIT.

Another thing bothered me is the way he progressed the story of Krish and Ananya, specially their marriage episode. During marriage events, he mentioned that Bride's father asked Groom's family for gifts and all. This behavior shows that CB believes in this custom to some extent. According to me, it shouldn't be the case. Two people tie themselves and their families in a relationship because they respect and love each other. I don't see any reason of treating one party superior/inferior than other.

May be he wrote in such a way to make the story more practical.

To Kill a mockingbird

nospam@example.com (Amit Mittal) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:36:00 +0530

Well, it was pending for long from my side but couldn't concentrate to write it till I saw movie "Chak De India" yesterday on TV. The movie inspired me to write book review.

To Kill a mockingbird is a nice fiction story that shows us about racial discrimination in mid 20th century. Overall, it is a nice portrait of the reality and the response of society for any rebel. The way Mr. Finch stood for the Black community and supported it irrespective of threats from others in the village is appreciable. It is very rare to see such kind of courage in today's world when we are more open-minded.

Other than the center point of the story, I took two other this story. One is from the incident when Dill attends a hearing in the court and notices the way lawyer addressing a witness from Black community. Upset from this, he comes out of the court room and talks to a man sitting there. The man says the you are thinking in this way because you are a child. We have grown up listening all these so it hardly matters to us.

Isn't it happening in our society too?

We use such words unknowingly in our daily conversations like the person it from state X, speaks language Y etc. Did we ever think what would have been the impact of same on a child standing next to us and listening?

I remember an incident when I was watching a reality show with my nephew. As soon as the person on the show completed his item, he asked for votes mentioning that he is from state X so please vote for him. Suddenly, my nephew told, " I am not going to vote this guy because he is not asking it based on his performance."

Did any of us think in the same way the little kid thought?

The other takeaway from this book is to become "Practical" rather than to become "Perfect". In the last when Bob gets killed by Jem, all the characters agreed to show it as an accident considering image of Bob.

But do we all have a rational thinking like this? Don't we get influenced by our selfish motives while taking such decisions?
Once one of my friend told that "Krishna bano, Ram nahin" (Try to be like Krishna rather than to be like Rama)

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