One Night @ the Call Center
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| one night @ the call center | |
 |
|
| Author | Chetan Bhagat |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Chetan Bhagat and Samantha Holyoak |
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Fiction |
| Publisher | Rupa & Co. |
| Publication date | October 2005 |
| Media type | print (paperback) |
| Pages | 291 pp (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 81-291-0818-6 (Paperback edition) |
One Night @ the Call Center or ON@CC is a novel written by Chetan Bhagat and first published in 2005. The novel revolves around a group of six call center employees working in Connexions call center in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon in Haryana. It is filled with a lot of drama with unpleasant things happening to all of the leading characters. The story takes a dramatic and decisive turn when they get a phone call from God.
This is the second best-selling novel from the award winning author.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis
The story begins with a train journey from Kanpur to Delhi, During the journey, the author meets a very beautiful girl. The girl offers to tell the author a story on the condition that he has to make it his second book. After a lot of hesitation, the author agrees.
Claimed to be based on a true story, the author chooses a person named Shyam Mehra (alias Sam Marcy) as the protagonist, who is one among the six call center employees featured
[edit] Characters
[edit] Shyam
The narrator of the story, he lives in Gurgaon, Haryana with his parents. He is portrayed as an average Joe, someone who can be easily related with. His ex-girlfriend Priyanka works in the same call center as he does. He loves her even after breaking up and is quite frequently shown dreaming about the good and bad times he spent with her.
One of the main reasons for his break-up was that Priyanka's mother did not approve of Shyam as she felt that in order to wed her daughter, he should at least be a team leader. Shyam tries hard to become a team leader, but his current manager Bakshi disapproves of him on the contention that that Shyam is not a go-getter. Shyam feels that Bakshi is a poor boss, yet he continues to work for him for lack of options. Shyam works with Vroom on a Troubleshooting Website, a project that he hopes will showcase his capabilities to be Team Leader. He is confused as he doesn't know who he hates more, his boss Bakshi or Priyanka's mother.
Shyam also has a temporary girlfriend Shefali whom he doesn't approve of completely, but still hangs on to so that he can go ahead with life. She is a hopelessly romantic girl and quite stereotyped.
[edit] Priyanka
Priyanka loves Shyam, the protagonist of the story, but breaks up due to their differences of opinion and her mother's constant disapproval of Shyam. Priyanka is frustrated with her mother and has a difference of opinion on almost everything. Priyanka is a woman who strongly stands against whatever she feels is irrational and wrong, i.e. a pure form of feminist who can become the president of a women's liberation society. There are two incidents that justify her behavior: 1) During a date with Shyam, she reprimands an old lady who curses her daughter-in-law. 2) When she slaps Vroom for abusing Esha. Priyanka later breaks up with Shyam due to his incompetence and "too compromising" attitude. She still continues to work with him, to see him go strong one day and when he finally does, she approves of him once again.
[edit] Headline text
[edit] Vroom
Vroom's original name is said to i. He likes the name Vroom because of his fascination with high speed and cars. A media person at heart, he stands for what he feels is right and rebels against whatever he finds unethical. His call centre alias is Victor Mell. He is portrayed as a confused but patriotic person, who is dissatisfied with himself. Vroom has strong anti-American feelings. He is infatuated with Esha, but she doesn't encourage a relationship with him as she wants to go ahead with a career in modeling. Later he finds out that she slept with a fashion designer in order to get a favor from him. In a fit of rage he belittles her in front of his team. Later on he apologizes to her after being seriously reprimanded and slapped by Priyanka. Varun worked with Shyam on a Troubleshooting Website which happens to be a big success but he eventually finds out that his boss Bakshi has taken all the credit for it and he plans for revenge.
[edit] Esha
Esha's full name is Esha Singh and her call center alias is Eliza Singer. She is shown to be a highly attractive girl with aspirations for a modeling career. Esha has trouble getting assignments as she is not considered tall enough to be a good model. Though she has feelings for Vroom, she disapproves the relationship fearing that he might find out about a past misdeed and might eventually ditch her.
[edit] Radhika
Radhika is a married woman trying hard to keep things together at her home. Her husband often works away from home. She takes care of her demanding and extremely traditional in-laws during the day and does her work at the call center at night. Although this tends to get too demanding, she never complains as she loves her husband. Later she finds out that her husband is seeing another girl behind her back and she plans for divorce.
[edit] Military Uncle
The only elderly person in the team, he handles clients via chatting. He does not speak much. He stays away from the other characters in the book. He lives on his own after parting ways with his son because his daughter-in-law used to work and go to parties at night even though he wanted her to be at home. This caused the separation of the family but Military Uncle now regrets it and wants his family back.
[edit] Bakshi
His full name is Subhash Bakshi and he is shown to be a bad person in the book. He tries to show off his management skills by using lots of management jargon. Bakshi is a typical bad boss who thrives on the achievements of his team members and constantly demotivates them with all types of rhetoric.
[edit] Major themes
One of the salient features of this novel is that all the characters experience a dramatic and disturbing event during the night when they receive a call from God.
- Shyam's woes
Shyam is very upset to learn that Priyanka is engaged to a person called Ganesh Gupta, who works at Microsoft in the US. To add to his woes, he is horrified to learn that Bakshi had cheated him, and Vroom, by submitting the Troubleshooting Website to the Boston centre as his own without crediting himself and Vroom.
- Priyanka's goog girl
Priyanka is first happy when she is engaged to Ganesh Gupta, who works for Microsoft but becomes furious when she hears that her parents have planned her marriage the very next month, which she feels is too early. Both her mother and Ganesh press her to agree to this proposal. She is even more saddened by the fact that Shyam was eavesdropping on her conversation with Ganesh. When Vroom and Shyam show her that Ganesh had forged his pictures to hide his baldness, she disapproves Ganesh for having cheated her.
- Esha's woes
Esha had earlier done a compromise by sleeping with a designer to get a modeling contract. However the guy turned out to be opportunistic as he betrays her by telling her she can't become a model due to her height. He also tries to console her by sending her some money. Esha feels terribly betrayed and tries to suppress the mental pain by inflicting herself with physical pain by purposely cutting her skin.
- Vroom's woes
Vroom is shocked to learn that Bakshi has cheated him and Shyam by submitting their work as his own. To add to his miseries, he overhears Esha telling the other girls that she had slept with a designer to get a modeling contract.
- Radhika's woes
Radhika, who loved her husband very much, is shocked to learn about his dark side. When Vroom calls up her husband portraying as a radio jockey and asks him to dedicate roses and a song to someone special, he chooses his girlfriend Payal over his wife. Radhika who listens to this gets terribly upset as her husband has betrayed her.
- Military Uncle's woes
Military Uncle tries to be nice to his son and grandson. But when he sends some pictures via mail to his grandson, his son loses his cool and asks him to keep out of his life. This leaves Military Uncle heartbroken.
[edit] Phone call from God
The phone call from God is one of the salient features in the novel. The author has represented God as a friendly figure rather than a boss. He is shown as speaking in modern English rather than the stereotypical pure English or Latin commonly used for God. The circumstances in which the characters of the novel get a phone call from God are discussed in the book issued by Chetan Bhagat.
In order to cheer themselves up, all the lead characters of the novel decide to go and enjoy themselves at a night club. After having fun for a while, they leave for office. Midway through the journey, Vroom starts to feel nauseated after drinking alcohol and so they stop and venture out. Vroom throws up and also breaks the window-pane of a shop, setting an alarm off. They rush out of the place in fear. While returning, they face a life-threatening situation when their Qualis crashes into a construction site hanging over a mesh of iron construction rods. As the rods began to yield slowly, they start to panic. They are unable to call for help as there is no mobile phone network at that place. In this situation, Shyam's mobile phone starts ringing.
The phone call is from God. He speaks to all of them and gives them suggestions about how to improve their lives. After that, God also advises them on how to get their vehicle out of the construction site. The conversation with God motivates the group to such an extent that they all plan together to teach their boss a lesson. ..l.j.
[edit] Translation
This book has been translated into Hindi and is published by Prabhaat Prakashan [1].
[edit] Film adaptations
Noted Bollywood film director Rohan Sippy had bought the rights from the author Chetan Bhagat, but later Sippy let the rights pass on to director Atul Agnihotri, brother-in-law of Salman Khan. The movie version of the novel is titled as Hello starring Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Arbaaz Khan, Amrita Arora, Katrina Kaif, Gul Panag, Sharman Joshi. Hello was released on 10 October 2008 to average to bad reviews and did poor to average business especially in multiplexes of big cities and declared a hit as it did 5 crore business in the first 2 days itself. Sohail Khan's performance was appreciated and so were Gul Panag's and Sharman Joshi's.
[edit] See also
- Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT
- The Three Mistakes of My Life
- Hello (film) - The film based on the story.
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: One Night @ the Call Center |
[edit] References
[edit] External links
|
||||||||
