One Indian Girl: One and a Half Love Stories

 

One Indian Girl:

One Indian Girl is Chetan Bhagat’s seventh novel, with all the earlier ones being placed in the best-selling charts in their respective publication periods. However, once again proving myself to be always late in the line, I had rather forced myself to read this one as his very first novel, partly because of his mounting popularity as a novelist with a majestic storytelling skill and especially because of Three Idiots, the true classic in the Indian Film Industry. The iconic film was the adaptation of his novel Five Point Someone (with so many changes in the film script though), which raises questions about the grading system itself. However, as of One Indian Girl, it seems to be apparent that, especially from the conversation between Radhika and her mother, she wouldn’t be happy to consider a five pointer for her life partner. “Mom, see the qualifications. BA from some random university. No. Next.”

Chetan Bhagat, the paperback King of India, has dedicated the novel, One Indian Girl to:

All the Indian Girls

especially the ones

who dare to dream

and live life on their own terms.

Living the life on one’s own terms is always a challenging job, particularly for the women in the Indian-subcontinent, with the deeply rooted ideology defining the norms of what it takes to be a girl. And the protagonist of the plot, Radhika, has been challenged by this at the very beginning of the novel. The prologue gives its readers about the chaotic uneasiness and turmoil storming the mind of the bride, who is clearly not ready yet for the grand destination wedding in Goa. And with all the odds against living her life on her own terms she was on the verge of being carried away by all those pressures of being married and settled down.

 

The Feministic Note

The dedication part, the prologue and then the first person narrative style in the voice of Radhika herself clearly point out that One Indian Girl is going to be a feministic novel. 

The feministic tones can be identified at the very beginning of the plot:

You are the girls’ side, so you have to adjust to the 30 rooms available at the hotel while the boys’ side will be allotted with the promised 50 rooms with as many guests as the girls’ side. Radhika couldn’t accept the ‘gender thing’ but was stopped by her typical mother or other family members with the deeply rooted ideology of compromising as the girls’ side in a marriage function.  

“Beta, these are norms. You don’t understand. We have to keep them comfortable. Girls’ side is expected to adjust…”

The unraveling tone of feminism keeps kicking on with the development of the plot. In making the profile for the matrimonial site, a girl shouldn’t give the true picture of her success in the job. The notion that a girl with a most wanted job can drive away a lot of prospective grooms who are not ‘man enough to handle’ the huge salary of their wives.’

“If they see a girl who is too independent-minded, too qualified, doing too well, they get scared……I am hiding my daughters achievements. So we get more boys to choose from. That’s all.”

And Radhika’s mother was not wrong anyway. The first one from their ten short-listed potential grooms was a doctor based in Boston, USA. With his third consecutive inquiry about the salary she makes, Radhika had to disclose that she made half a million USD last year, which was a damn jolt, enough to make him nearly fell down from his chair.    

“Nothing… Okay, I will tell you. This is not going to work. Your salary is too high.”

Okay, with the above-mentioned explanation made by Radhika’s mother, it’s quite clear now how the protagonist of the novel is: too independent-minded, too qualified, doing too well. Highly talented high achievers or under achievers always play a big role either as protagonists or antagonists in the novels of Chetan Bhagat. In One Indian Girl, Radhika is highly talented high achiever and here we go with her one and a half love stories.

 

The Love Story

As a pure mugger, Radhika hit about 98 percentile in CAT to make it to the IIMA and then joined Goldman Sachs, New York as a fresh recruit and which is where she wanted to leave behind her nerdy, unfashionable and virgin life behind and which is how she met Debashish Sen. The first love story apparently begins with the enthusiasm and determination for a new life style of the still virgin Radhika. With the long-cherished consummation of her dates with Debu, they started having a live-in relationship in her expensive apartment. She wanted to take it the next stage with the mounting pressure from her family to get settled with a married life, as an unmarried marriageable girl in the family - no matter how successful she is- is still a burden to the family. While the typical Aditi, her sister is a well-set example, to the pleasure of their mother, for finding herself a good match with hardly any degrees comparable to that of Radhika, with a fairer skin and an attitude.

Radhika was really serious with her first love affair with Debu, who was never in the intention of taking their relationship to the next level. He was apparently unhappy and a little jealous with the achievements of Radhika. He couldn’t imagine of her as a motherly figure to take care of his babies. Radhika was even ready to quit her job and do anything to present herself as a caring and motherly figure.

But Debu, apparently being panicked with the idea of marrying a girl he was never considering as his future wife, abandoned her, leaving her shell-shocked, enough to leave the city, so adorable to her with so many beautiful moments they shared together.   

 

The Half Love Story

With the suggestion of one Goldman Sachs partner, the devastated and heart-broken Radhika decided to move into another country operation of Goldman Sachs instead of quitting the job. She landed in Hong Kong throwing away her new iPhone set into the East River in the desperate attempt to throw away her past with Debu and met Neel Gupta, the dashing and iconic partner of Goldman Shacks. With Neel it was never meant to be a love story any way and it was the last thing in her mind to be involved in any kind of unofficial relationship with a partner. However, with the attraction of his charming personality and dashing look she was just carried away with a special and unpredicted moment in a business trip to an island resort. In a dark night on the cool lonely beach with the escaping glows of the Moon over their heads, she shared the moment of wild pleasure with the damn handsome Goldman Sachs partner- older than her by twenty years, and also with a wife and couple of kids.

But they couldn’t resist the temptation of carrying on the relationship; at first only on the business trips to make it feel less guilty in a remote city than doing it in the same city he had been living in with his wife and kids. But, with their explicit knowledge of no future, Neel, eventually started making regular visits at her apartment, mostly because of the sexual attraction they feel for each other.

However, soon, enough she started being concerned about the possible future of their relationship with a kind of guilty conscience for his wife and family, which she never felt with Debu. And sooner than later she was apparently blown out by a comment blurred out of the careless mouth of Neel:

‘It’s just I never thought of you as the maternal type. I don’t know if you were even meant to be a mother.’

Neel never felt her as the girl with a family of her own. It just didn’t come to his mind, just like the way Debu felt her to be.

The Climax of One Indian Girl

In fact, in the gendering world, a girl with the most wanted jobs and an enviable career with so many successes and lots of money is deliberately, though unconsciously, judged to be a girl solely focused on the career. She can’t possibly hold the image of a family woman with motherly affection and care.

However, at the climax of the novel, the author makes both the serious lover and the half lover begging her hands, this time not only as a partner in bed, but as a wife to start a family: one in a presidential suite in the five star Goa Marriott with a chartered flight to take her away and another one directly from New York.

Until then, she was uncertain of herself regarding her ability to attract someone as a prospective wife to begin a family with her true self. She was losing confidence with her previous one and a half relationships; one in New York and the other one in Hong Kong. As her mother would say, ‘I can’t have anything better than this one…no prince on a horse will come.’

 

The Choice of Free Will

And finally the great lesson for everyone: as long as you are not sure about marrying someone for the rest of your life, not sure enough to enter a new life with an individual you are sure about, there is always a choice left for you to step back before the marriage is done, even if costs you a lot of money, an insult to your family members by the boys’ side, and all the rebukes from the family members and relatives as well. Just forget about all those pressures, stay calm, ask your ‘mini-me’, what she really wants, go for your free will and be the decision maker in taking the most important step in your life. And move on…

Moving on in one’s own wish was the thing happened to the novelist himself. He himself was in the Goldman Shacks too with one of the most wanted jobs in the world. And then he switched to Deutsche Bank, Hong Kong. He was a vice president in its Strategic Investment Group before quitting to pursue the career as a fulltime writer, which undoubtedly demands a huge courage to fight the pressures both from inside and outside. Being well-settled is the big thing in the sub-continent, one can hardly avoid. 

And in his novel, One Indian Girl, Radhika did the same thing. She had the dream of living the life in her own terms and she couldn’t just go with the flow to be in the mess of a grand wedding she wasn’t feeling okay with. She was able to calm down her mind, pick up the pieces together and manage Brijesh Gulati, the bride from San Francisco, even in the confusion with the return of her one and half lovers. And finally she got herself out of the mess she was feeling terribly uncomfortable about. She called off the marriage which eventually created a scene that resembles more with a funeral one in the five star luxuries. But, she was out of the mess!

 

The post Credit Scene

By rejecting the proposals from her past lovers, Radhika was finally able to move aside her past with them. But she wasn’t in the present either. She was really nowhere. In a big void around her, Radhika was in desperate need of finding herself back. And the best way to pick up the pieces together is to set yourself absolutely free with no pressure to go anywhere, with no pressure to chase anything and with no pressure, either internal or external, to do anything. A long journey without any specific destination, a vacation to find yourself back, to calm down your soul, to feed your mind can be really a good choice.

Radhika was probably able to do all those things at the post-credit scene of the novel, One Indian Girl, and by the end of her long vacation from works she started seriously thinking about Brijesh Golati, the software engineer working with Facebook in San Francisco.  Brijesh, the tech guy with a vision to initiate his own start-up, didn’t blame her for the foiled marriage program. He was the one who truly understands her situation and saved both the parties from an awkward situation. But he regrets not being able to marry a girl with whom he would be able to live a crazy life with full of madness like the moments they spent together by riding on a bike without a license and testing the puffs of marijuana available in the Goa beach. Radhika finally finds the courage to meet him again in San Francisco in a settled mind.