The plot is so thin it sounds like a movie stretched to its limits. Yet it’s not a movie script but Chetan Bhagat’s “2 States”, the tome which is supposed to recount his own private troublesome tale of love.[break]
Anyone else would’ve made a botch of this. It’s a tough task to drag a predictable story in likeable ways. But Bhagat has just enough flair and panache to pull it off this one time. Barely, though. Because the author seems to be carried away by the idea that his novels were modified into silly movies, he seems to be aiming for another shaky movie deal with this one.
He begins the novel with a young man raging at the psychiatrist whom he’s been referred to. The reason for his depression is his girlfriend who has dumped him. And from this interesting point, the guy, Krish, goes into a flashback, benefiting both the psychiatrist and us, the readers. That’s how we get to know of his initially dysfunctional love life.
The best part about the novel is that nothing has changed in Bhagat’s style. He is still funny, intelligent, creative, and energetic. And it shows. His trademark is stamped all over – there’s drama as well as melodrama, exaggerated mannerisms, dialogues and events. The sparks flying between the two families as they interact for the first time can be felt even outside the book. The author’s descriptions, especially about people, food and clothes, are pat on. When he draws a dress in broad strokes, like, “peach chiffon sari with a skinny silver border”, or murukkus as “fossilized snakes”, they jump out in front of our eyes.
And the worst part about the novel is that, well, nothing has changed. The author is still obsessed with using a numeric in his book title. Many of the descriptions and events are repeated from former novels of his. There’s his compulsion to include philosophy in some form, which he does by making his protagonist travel to the Aurobindo Ashram. There’s almost no progress in terms of characters. The characterization of the girls is getting especially tedious. The girl in Bhagat’s novels has been wearing the same old dupatta that has ‘little bells at its ends’ which ‘tinkle whenever she moves’. Wonder if one girl hands it to the other as she steps out of the book. The girls invariably look pretty while crying; they bat their eyelashes, and do pointless things while studying. In short, however intelligent or fiery they might be, Bhagat still needs to identify and classify them as members of the female species.
Boys don’t fare much better, either. The male protagonist is a slightly sardonic twenty-something smart aleck with feeble family ties who has been borrowed from Bhagat’s first novel. What’s more, he has even passed out from IIT, where he was studying the last time we met him. Krish may be clever, but he’s meaner and more selfish than all of Bhagat’s protagonists. He’s obnoxious, sarcastic, and even dangerous with that razor-sharp tongue of his. Kudos to Bhagat, for he hasn’t shied away from sketching a grey hero. But it’s also unconvincing how exactly a commitment-phobe suddenly turns into the most devoted boyfriend and a determined to-be-husband on earth. What makes the readers identify with him is his ordinariness, and how, in the end, he’s just one more struggling soul on earth, and it wouldn’t hurt to sympathize with him.
The tone of the entire novel is well and truly mirthful. The task of bringing together two headstrong families may be a Herculean task, but it’s carried out with élan. Humor is discovered and retained at every nook and cranny, every normal act of life.
“Leave me alone as I drown my suffering in mango juice,” someone says, as a mother exclaims elsewhere, “(She is a) Good friend? What, you have bad friends also?’ The conversation between two Punjabi families trying to get their children married is especially riotous.
The characters constantly degrade Punjabis and Tamils by turns. This sounds hilarious in the surface but is cause for much concern, even alarm, if it’s carefully considered.
“These black people have done their black magic,” a character says, and this is more malicious than funny.
The author has been careful enough to clarify in the preface that he loves Tamilians, and obviously he must. But the repartees between north and south Indians do reflect the mutual distrust, prejudice and intolerance existing in other communities even in present times. However, credits go to the author, for he does make laudable efforts to weave in the issue of national harmony.
The theme in the novel is somehow more concentrated and intense this time around. It may encompass oddities of two whole states, but finally, it boils down to lovelorn individuals. And that’s a time-tested, adorable concept. The actual marriage proposal – how Krish really says it to Ananya’s family – must be the most dramatic dialogue ever. Like this dialogue, the rest of the novel is also cheesy, corny, over the top. Yet it’s inexplicably sweet – and warms the heart in more ways than one: Because it’s bound to remind every single one of us about our hormone-ruled college days.
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