Technical Ecstasy

It was originally said of Harvard and MIT that in the first, the hard bit was getting in; while in the second,it was getting out. This essentially, if a little crudely, sums up the difference between an elite liberalarts college and an elite tech school.

The problem of getting out is as serious at any of the Indian Institutes of Technology, as it is at any of thehandful of comparable engineering colleges elsewhere in the world. This really isn't an issue for theastonishingly smart students who do make it to the right end of the grading curve. Some of these people aretruly rocket scientists in every sense of the term. Their successes have been well documented in recent years.This book, however, is not about them.

For everyone else--and almost every one of these people has spent much of his (well, there are a few women)childhood being used to the idea of being the smartest person around already--it can be the white-knuckle rideof their lives.

Some don't make it through at all. Many others discover that not only are they not the smartest people around,there are also people around who can and do make them look utterly silly. The blow to their egos can becrushing, but they are still extremely bright people, and most of them keep a clear look out for ways totackle the system.

Five Point Someone is about three such young men. Hari, Ryan and Alok meet as freshman mechanical engineeringstudents at IIT Delhi. After an ill-timed watching of Terminator results in a disastrous performance in aquiz, they realise that "difficult" in an IIT context has a weight of meaning that's much largerthan anything they might encounter in the outside world. The initial shock of this discovery gives way to adetermination to work out a way to get the most out of the system with the least possible work.

Of course this grand plan is doomed to fail, though our three friends do not realise that the price they willeventually pay for this misadventure will be rather more than mere indifferent to poor academic performance.

On the way to this realisation, they will have to encounter important, if painful, lessons on life, love,friendship and self-awareness. Bhagat's novel isn't perfect, and there are several places where it's clearthat this is a first novel. Yet Five Point Someone (the title refers to the poor grade point average out of apossible ten that its protagonists achieve) does several things right.

It gets the sex right, but more of that later. It also manages to cover the heavy ground of life's lessonswithout the horribly earnest moralising and navel-gazing that is the bane of so much Indian writing in English.In fact for much of the narrative, Bhagat sustains a darkly funny tone that anyone from India's topprofessional colleges will instantly recognise. Before moving on to business school at Ahmedabad and work atGoldman Sachs in Hong Kong, Bhagat himself studied at IIT Delhi, and the book's argot is largely faithful tohis undergraduate days.

Several of its characters resonate nicely with reality. Ryan is the laid-back, underperforming bright studenteverybody remembers from the sports field or college canteen on campus. Alok is the boy from anunderprivileged background who's trying to make the most of a world where his brain is his only chance for abetter life.

The professors, from the frightening Cherian to the accessible and inspiring Veera, will have most engineeringstudents remembering their own experiences with men who could take innocuously-named subjects like Circuitsand Systems and reveal them to be fiendish Fourier Transform sodden tests of how to make grown men weep.

And ah, yes, the sex. Critics have offered several highly speculative explanations for why Indian novelistswrite such ridiculously inept sex scenes.   The unkindest possibly being that only a virgin's feveredimaginings could have produced such tortured (and tortuous) tracts.  So who would have thought that oneof the very few books where the sex is treated convincingly would be a first time novelist, and a gearhead-turned investment banker at that. Yet Hari's sexual encounter with his girlfriend Neha does all the rightthings. It's entirely plausible, even if the specific circumstances might seem a bit improbable, it's sensualwithout ever getting bogged down in the sticky mechanics of the act, and it's utterly integral to the plot.

Where Five Point Someone seems slightly let down, though, is in the editing of the beginning and the end ofthe novel. A more experienced editor would have fought a lot harder to keep out the author's explanations ofwhat he is all about from the beginning and the end of the book. Apart from the very rare instances where itis done well, and this isn't one, alas, it smacks of the heavy-handedness of that cheapest of cinematiccop-outs, the voice-over.

It jars particularly in the context of a book where the author makes hardly any attempt to explain collegeslang or dumb down the technology that can hardly afford not to appear in a novel set in one of the world'sbetter engineering college.  Bhagat seems to believe that an explanation shouldn't come in the way of anarrative when it's flowing well, which is an entirely good thing.

That's why Five Point Someone may be the first novel to successfully capture the unique ethos, especially thecheerful insanity, of India's elite institutions.