So here’s what happened. Narayana Murthy, the big chief at Infosys, complained that the standards of IIT students were going down and held coaching schools responsible. Nothing particularly earth-shaking about this pronouncement, in every generation, those that have grown old have complained “when we were your age, things were so much better.” Chetan Bhagat, thought-leader and best-selling author and an IIT alum himself, felt sufficiently piqued by this to retort that he who runs body-shopping company should not comment on the standards of others. Such a rap-battle, of course, generated a lot of heat and light in the popular media. Of course then Mr. Bhagat’s new book released to glowing reviews and insane sales and he kind of apologized for his previous statement and all was right with the world again.
Now this is the not the first time the word “bodyshop” has been used in a pejorative sense for an Indian IT company, nor will it be the last. Look at bulletin board postings of displaced American workers or the latest article by some serious men and you will find this “Indian IT companies are about as skilled as those who scout for prospective camel jockeys” disparaging strain running through them.
If “innovation” of the Apple, Cray and Google type be the sole criterion for excellence and anything less be considered “mediocre” then yes definitely Infosys and the others are guilty as charged. But unfortunately that is a very restrictive metric for assessing excellence in the technology industry. Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc are not “product” companies but vendors of services. In other words, they are not in the business of making general-purpose consumer products like music players, tablet computers or yes even search engines. The way they work is that clients provide them certain requirements and then based on these they deliver customized, technical solutions that satisfy certain quality parameters while meeting time and budget constraints. Comparing them to product companies is like comparing apples with oranges or more precisely comparing Shakti Kapoor with Ajit Agarkar.
In their respective niches, Indian IT companies have consistently maintained their leadership well past the Y2K which, if you are old enough to remember, was when the naysayers had said that Indian IT would go bust . Performance-wise thus, there is absolutely nothing middling about them in any way. For those who would say “Hah even supplying contract laborers to the Gulf is profitable”, it is the height of ignorance to presume that what Indian IT companies do is move cheap technical labor around the globe. If it was that simple, then anyone from any country could do it. That a company from Malaysia or China or Vietnam (low cost centers) have not beaten them at their model of business over two decades should be proof enough that there is something that these companies (the management and the engineers) have that others do not. Being excellent in this domain means, among other things, leveraging the technical skills of a complex heterogeneous workforce and organizational knowledge to provide IT and software services in a predictable and cost-effective manner. And yes, belying the pervasive image of software coolies doing rote work , there are also intellectual challenges in delivering IT solutions (cut testing effort by half through the creation of re-usable test automation templates for example or do a data migration for Client B using knowledge gleaned doing something similar for Client A). These, while not as sexy-sounding as coming up with “Google Wave”, are no less important, difficult and brain-cycles-consuming.
The irony in this is that the man who called Infosys “mediocre” has himself, in a pot-kettle kind of way, been accused of being “mediocre” and far worse. If “innovation” in literature be the sole criterion for quality, then that assessment of mediocrity would be true—-Chetan Bhagat does not blaze any new trail in terms of content, structure, characterization or language.
And here is the thing. He does not have to.
Bhagat is in the business of writing best-sellers and he does it better than any author in the history of Indian writing. And when one does exactly what one set out to do, book after book, it would be immensely churlish to dismiss that success with a flippant wave of the hand. He consistently engineers successful books by crafting stories that strike a chord in his target audience using language that does not tax their comprehension skills and then prices and markets them perfectly. Sure this is a different set of skills than what Milan Kundera possesses, but that does not make it any the less worthy of admiration.
Call them “mediocre” or whatever else makes you feel good, but the truth remains that Murthy and Bhagat have both developed and internalized non-obvious ” business knowledge” that has enabled them to maintain their leadership in their respective niches.
And ultimately, in the market-place of products and services where profit remains the only objective criterion for gauging excellence, that’s all that matters.
The Greatbong Blog & Podcast 
1st?
“Bhagat is in the business of writing best-sellers and he does it better than any author in the history of Indian writing”.Concrete.True.And Fair.
2nd!!!iphone 4Smay be 4….:)
Being a part of the IT world myself, I’ll say it was a pretty balanced article. Yes, working for the IT giants of India namely Infy, TCS is no world changing and truly gratifying experience of say working fire a google or Apple but it has its challenges a
I frankly expected more from CB. He kind of fizzled out after a little bit of whining. I expected a lot of “abbey guroor ke mitti se bana hua ghamand ke murti…” type dialogue bazi…
That being said, I still think, CB can’t be compared to Murthy. Not in business acumen, not in class, not in merit.
CBag is an utter disappointment. And yes, VERY mediocre.
Very balanced article. Would have prefered a few more parallels from bollywood and cricket though:-)
Very well written, Arnab. Love your clarity of thought. As always.
Best Article on the issue. Somebody twitted that people hate Chetan Bhagat becuase they think they are more intelligent than him still he end up being more wealthy and famous.
Your post explains precisely how one should measure success of this kind.
Thank you very much.
This whole Bhagat-Murthy debate has coaching classes as one of the major points.I don’t quite understand how coaching classes are reducing talent of students.
Preparing for IIT-JEE is not quite the same hat as preparing for board exams. There is no formula for it. What the coaching classes do is make studying somewhat compulsory. And their success lies in the fact that they help student focus in a stage of life which is very distracting.
Other than that it is wholly upto the student to crack the exams.
There have been suggestions that to reduce the effect of coaching classes, 12th board marks must be taken into consideration.This seems self-contradictory. If coaching classes hamper a student’s intellectual growth. They can continue to do so with higher efficiency if 12th marks are considered as benchmarks.
In the 1990s when there was no exam such as AIEEE , in Maharashtra 12th marks were needed for admissions into NITs and private colleges. Those days the coaching classes had a field day hampering the talents of students by training them for 12th exams.
Coaching classes can do relatively less damage in tough exams such as IIT.
Of course, their ads sell false dreams to some students but that is another issue.
Frederick Forsyth rocks !!! And Arnab_da does as well.
Your IIT coaching class poster above reminds me of a coaching class prof in Madras advertising himself as ‘God of Physics’, with no hint of irony. and his target audience bought his self promotion, too.
One of the main factors diving the popularity of coaching classes is that the ratio of seats available in good colleges/ students has become very low. If there were more quality institutions of higher ed, coaching classes wouldn’t do such booming trade.
Well what have all those novelists with “good English” contributed? With their recycling the same old jaded leftist postmodernist garbage, arrogating the “intellectual” tag for no reason other than facility for language etc., their contribution to the intellectual climate in India, and to foreigners’ understanding of India, have been purely negative. As Jagdish Bhagwati observed, in US no one is considered an authority on politics on the basis of their novels. On the other hand, Indian novelists get to write in NYTimes etc. on India, solely on the basis of their being novelists. They are pampered and paid undeservedly, just to trash-talk about India, and thus deprive more qualified people from commenting on India.
Chetan Bhagat on the other hand at least entertains a lot of people.
froginthewell: I am not a fan of the intellectual writers commenting on politics, but at least their writing shows they have put thought before putting pen on paper. CB does not even seem to show the effort. He can justify eveything with ‘the masses like what I do’. That’s why I consider his writing mediocre, though of course none can argue with his sales.
GB: To give CB his credit, he did tell Pagalika Ghose on CNN IBN in an interview that he deliberately called Infy a bodyshop to hurt Narayan Murthy, and that he knew Infy was better than that. And same stuff as not Google or Apple, but does something else better.
froginthewell: I am not a fan of CB, because of the content he churns. Just cause he churns stuff that sells well, does not mean he has right or credibility to talk about things. Also, a novelist can never be judged only on the criteria of sales. Savita Bhabi sure sells more than Shakespeare. But novelists and authors have a duty towards civilisation, towards society. They can’t just write stuff which is bad, really bad, just because they sell. He can just write raunchy pulp fiction to be sold near train stations, why have this messiah complex?
And just because India produced some writers who are self hating leftist poverty porn exporters with good english, doesn’t mean that good english is something to be hated or looked down upon. Its our mindset that socialism sells more in India. Doesn’t mean someone has right to rape english…or any language for that matter.
@ GB
Praise for Chetan B? Nahin Greatbong Sahib Nahin… Gang war ka kya huya?
Et tu brute…
I agree with a lot of commenter here. This article was fair to all parties concerned.
An interesting bit I had read somewhere (unable to locate source) , a lot of pseudo-intellectuals bash the caste system. These same people nonetheless, criticise Indian IT firms for doing a lot of maintenance and enhancement of regular systems, compared to the more “brahminical” high value product creation. Somewhere in their minds, they don’t see the contradiction.
As you perfectly mentioned, making a regular honest profit by utilising the non-obvious insights you possess is the only objective criteria here. And by that criterion, indian IT is still doing well. No one knows what the future brings, but I have a feeling they will continue to do ok.
why do we need to discuss on everything said by “rich and/or famous” people. if not for these articles and some medial coverage hardly anyone would have known it including CB fans or NRN fans (yes 99% of CB and/or NRN fans would not have known it forget about rest of india).
On a complete offtrack note, I think the criticism of Indian IT companies is valid and its right to call them bodyshops because they have never ever been employee centric and always driven by profits. An employees career goals matter nothing to them. A new joinee is thrown into any stream of technology as per requirement irrespective of the skillset. There is no freedom to choose your own projects. The try to make the organization robotic. This is an insider perspective as I have previously worked in an Indian IT company and have friends in the other IT companies who say the same. These companies have no doubt brought India in reckoning on the International stage, but the above reasons are why they are looked down upon so much vis-a-vis say a MindTree or Accenture, leave alone Google and Microsoft, trend setters in Job satisfaction index.
~My first comment on your blog Arnab da
~Have read this blog regularly since the last 2 years
~Too lazy to comment, but this time couldn’t stop myself as I have been a victim 🙂
Agree wt GB and most of the comments. If there is “Fortune at the middle of the pyramid”, what’s wrong in aiming for it? Striving to go up the value chain is admirable, and that’s what both CB and NRN are trying to.
One of the best insights on NRNs comment was a comment by an IIT student (in Times Crest) was – “how will NRN know abt current quality of IIT students? Infy pays so less that it not even invited to IITs for recruitment, and even if they do then they get ppl from the bottom of the class!”
backhanded compliments?
It is not what Narayan Murthy does or Chetan Bhagat does. Both have been successful in atleast two things – making money and being publicly known. But it is the shifting stand that Murthy takes that makes it difficult for others to digest – recently he had made a statement in US that his son had to go to MIT because he couldn’t get admission to IITs in India.
@Deep3rdMan : Okay, may be these guys put more thought in. But – so what?
No one would deny that Infosys, TCS et. al. are one of the best body shoppers in the world. Even the smartest student can not get into good engineering colleges because there are very of them hence they end up getting into these bodyshoppers wings.
So if Mr. Murthy has made so much money and fame its purely because there are not many good colleges like IIT in India. Had there been more Mr. Murthy would have been hiring BSc. and B.A. students not engineers.
A good and balanced article. Some information I have come across when I studied in NIT. I had got a state rank of 20(Karnataka) and an all India rank of 1000.. I took no coaching for IIT/AIEEE. But I had a classmate from Andhra who had a state rank of 6 and an all India rank of 20. So, there were 6 gults in top 20(30%). I have information that around 30-40% of IITians are gults. Surely Gults are not the only intelligent people in the country. The plethora of coaching classes and a superior syllabus has resulting in such a situation. So, there is nothing wrong in what NRN is saying.
I was under the impression that Infosys had a product and wasn’t just about services. What about Finacle? That’s their banking product. Isn’t it?
nice stuff
Both Infosys and Chetan Bhagat have a marketing led approach to their activities. While this is expected in the business world, it certainly sticks in the craw when taken to its logical conclusion in the “creative” sphere. We had Shobha De writing soft porn and being berated roundly by everyone for spoiling our morals while her books went into reprints.
Chetan Bhaagat’s target segment is the time poor young crowd and his books resonate well with them – so who cares if they are not literature. It is good that people are at least reading something (instead of passively watching TV!) – maybe on the shoulders of Bhagat they will ascent to Milan Kundera and know what real literature is!
Hi GB,
I am yet to see a major goofy up by any of the Indian IT companies. Isnt it commendable that the project slippages and over runs are significantly minimal compared to other majors like IBM / Atos or Accenture. Wish the so called best seller writers understood that when they accuse indian IT companies esp Infosys of being sweat shops.
Sunil
“Sure this is a different set of skills than what Milan Kundera possesses, but that does not make it any the less worthy of admiration.”
I understand your point. But considering them worthy of equal admiration is taking it too far, no? 🙂 That’s like saying Michael Bay and Ingmar Bergman are equally admirable.
I too have been part of the Indian IT system with some of the so called ‘body shops’. To be fair, a lot of the criticism brought on them as being profit centric and not caring about career aspirations of employees is true.
However, I believe their greatest contribution, although unwittingly perhaps, has been the immense creation of decent work opportunities for educated Indian youth. I don’t think I will be wrong if I say they have been the biggest drivers of growth in India over the last 15 odd years.
Compare this to the bleak and disheartening situation that prevailed for a large part of 70’s and 80’s and the difference is too obvious. In a way I tend to support their business model as this enables the companies to continue driving growth in India and generate employment direct and indirect, without which the problems would be far more critical than the present bunch complaining about intellectual mediocrity.
Its time we stopped expecting the moon from the IT industry and the IITs. Automatically the importance given to sundry comments will go away. IT and ITES did its bit in pulling the country out from the PSU and Lala mindset. We as a country need to move on and encourage other industries and encouragement doesn’t stop at holding trade shows or taking industry delegations abroad. However this is easier said than done. It requires a huge attitude change in the population, which no single government or organization can achieve. No one tries to analyse if the standard of education at JNU or BHU or AMU or any other university has fallen on improved, because we as a nation are so engineering college centric. There are a lot of jobs which do not require engineering skill. Its another thing that a huge majority of IIT-ians go on to do MBAs and then work as Investment Bankers, PE fund managers, Noodle brand managers and Management Consultants. One shouldn’t therefore bother much if IIT is not producing great engineers anymore.
Ghanta IIT Physics…omg, where’d you get this from?
GB – Request you to write a separate article on your take on coaching institutes. IMHO good coaching institutes are no different from the likes of NRN or CB themselves. They understand the need and respond to the demand of market. I don’t think how giving weightage to academic score wud solve the problem. Private schools with some repute will increase the fees in the name of special coaching, govt school teachers wud concentrate on giving private tuition.
In my state the boom of coaching institutes in last 8-10 yrs was actually at the cost of private tuition of teachers. Wait wait not really!!! 90% faculty in the coaching institutes are our good old school/college sirs. Only change I see is bicycles in front of our sirs’ house have now become bikes in front of coaching institute.
NRN has given crores to IITK, served on the board of directors of IITK, gives out scholarships to students, pays half of the mess expenses. He has genuine interest in the well being of IITs.
Chetan Bhagat, well he tweets..
The fact that we are even talking about those two in same article is sad.
I so wish it was not this balanced! Balance is to play safe. Bhagat Chetan is not even an author as per my dictionary.
#_#
The Blunt Blog
Apart from the one Shakti Kapoor/Agarkar reference, not upto the usual GB standards 🙂
Valid points and balanced article though.
…because they have never ever been employee centric and always driven by profits. An employees career goals matter nothing to them.
Utkarsh, do you have any idea what it is to work in a modern corporation anywhere in the world? All companies are profit/outcomes/results-centric. Employees are treated well as long as times are good, when things head South the CEOs, fire 1000s, sell the company, take their golden parachutes and punch out. Bank of America has announced that it will layoff 30,000 while the two executives who could not meet profit targets making the layoffs necessary will be walking out with $30 million. That’s how companies in the Anglosphere have worked for years. In comparison our homegrown entrepreneurs have still some decency left. Charitable trusts own over 60% of Tata Sons, the key Tata holding company. Azim Premji runs a charitable trust that funds primary education (no fancy colleges, but simple primary schools that’s why there’s no hoopla), Sudha Murty runs a trust herself that funds womens self help groups. Mohandas Pai, a director of Infosys is a trustee of Akshaya Patra, the world’s largest school meal caterer.
Our “IT” industry – a better term would be management consulting – has brought the current generation of Indians together, cutting across all distinctions of language, jati, region etc. that have divided us before. Infy runs the world’s largest corporate training center and invests in training its employees in a time when much of the Western world is flattening corporate hierarchies in order to reduce them to a twin layer form of masters controlling serfs.
think of people like govinda, mithun in bollywood or dhoni, kapil in cricket .. these people broke a template, a stereotype, a glass ceiling at some point. in each case there were certain expected and accepted norms in their fields. and in each case these people broke through and ‘democratized’ the field a bit further.
mithun – an unlikely person to make it big in movie industry dominated by khannas, kapoors and bachchan.
govinda – a virar ka chokra with only break-dance as a tool at his disposal
kapil – a haryanvi jat who made it during a time when players were from gymkhana clubs and elite clubs
dhoni – a small town boy who became india’s captain. technically imperfect, flamboyant dude who held his bat like a guitar to piss off shoib-rawalpindi-akthar..
the point is chetan bhagat made it big in a field dominated by the st. stephenians type, UK educated English .. who could sell books only in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkatta.. and get rave reviews from their fellow snobs..
bhagat democratized this field. and even though i am not a fan of his “writing” he deserves some credit on breaking this glass ceiling.
Very true.
But I’m still within my rights to think people who poo-pooh CB are infri-dig
Very true.
But I’m still within my rights to think people who poo-pooh CB are infra-dig 🙂
Chetan Bhagat is by no means a sadak chhap type making it big in English writing. He’s been to the Army Public School, IIT-IIM, I-Banking in Hong Kong before he took to writing. Pre-University English instruction in India (outside the ICSE) emphasises structural correctness over flow and flourish. Chetan is not grammatically challenged, but sounds terse and stiff. He is also not given to extremes – another characteristic of the Indic tradition. He’s also a lot more entertaining to read than an ignoramus like Manu Joseph or hyped up mediocrity like Arvind Adiga. From what I have seen of him on youtube, Chetan makes his points without waffling and is forceful without being a pain in hte wrong place.
“Chetan Bhagat is by no means a sadak chhap type making it big in English writing. He’s been to the Army Public School, IIT-IIM, I-Banking in Hong Kong before he took to writing.”
Doesn’t change a damn thing about the fact that he acted like a reactionary idiot. He just displayed that IIT-ians are cultists in their own way.
What man you seem jealous about Bhagat. You dish out the same crap in your blog but yet you are not even half as much popular.
And yes.. CB is an ass and Infy is a body shopping industry run by people with peanuts for brains
Good to see a balanced article on the whole controversy! Score one for GB..
As an alumnus, I can state that there are no differences in “quality”, defined as the skills/capability needed to get through the JEE, between then and now. There is a large pool of students who have got the basic IQ, and depending on their access to study materials, support structure, peers, motivation etc., some number will get through. I don’t think that has changed..
I think that NRN is referring to a lack of intellectual curiosity, creativity, other talents like leadership skills etc. Previous generations of IITians had the time and resources to cultivate interests and talents outside of the books. But things are a lot more aggressive, careerist and hypercompetitive nowadays, with many parents pushing their children from an early age to aim high. There is an element of class warfare with the new prosperity in India, which means lots of families are looking to make that leap in socioeconomic status that comes with producing an IIT or IIM alumnus. The kids who get into IIT nowadays have put their nose to the grindstone from an early age and have had no space to explore and develop other interests and talents.
Doesn’t change a damn thing about the fact that he acted like a reactionary idiot. He just displayed that IIT-ians are cultists in their own way.
No it shows you have a limited attention span and can’t read anything beyond Twitter. Explains why CB is a best selling author and you are a sorry excuse of a web user hiding behind some sorry whining name.
And yes.. CB is an ass and Infy is a body shopping industry run by people with peanuts for brains
And this attitude of yours also explains why you are an ex-Infy employee. You have a jumbo attitude with nothing to show for it. when you consider that NRN started with a few 1000 rupees and 25 years later is a trustee of Cornell University rubbing shoulders with Ratan Tata none less, it shows you up for an ignoramus. https://trustees.cornell.edu/members.cfm
JRD grew the wealth his family had built. As did the Kasturi family with their newspapers. GD Birla, Dhirubhai, Ramnath Goenka built a conglomerate in their own lifetime. And so did NRN and his friends who worked out of an insignificant office in Jayanagar as late as 1988 when TCS was already an international player and even Patni CS was a bigger company than that! Somehow jealous ignorant whiners never learn.
Funny how Kaangeya who also hides his sorry ass behind a name not his own snaps at someone else who does the same because “IIT-ians” have been insulted. Note how he mentions nothing about someone accusing GB of writing crap because GB is not from IIT. Here is my suggestion Kaangeya: why don’t you look at the mirror to see a sorry ass, considering you have nothing better to do than to come and crap here?
“No it shows you have a limited attention span and can’t read anything beyond Twitter.”
You’re funny :D. Does it even change the fact that he apologized for his outburst hence making his initial statement nothing more than a reactionary diatribe laced with ad-hominem? FTR, I’m castigating CB for his reactionary outburst…obviously stemming from a group-defense mentality.
“Explains why CB is a best selling author”
I thought it was his ability to write well that made him a best-seller, not MY attention span or inability to read beyond a Twitter feed. Lame attempt at a zinger, c0ck-boy!
“and you are a sorry excuse of a web user”
That’d be “sorry excuse FOR a web-user.”
And what are you, besides some CB-fanboy who talks trash and behaves like a stark-raving-mad cultist dolt, ON THE INTERWEBS? Smell your hypocrisy.
Pray tell me…does CB-anna offer you a biscuit every time you defend his honor?
“hiding behind some sorry whining name.”
My real name IS Anand, Kurangeyaa.
Well said Pritam and Kautilya
Let’s look at this twin water pistol attack Anon and Anand,
Anon is the one who is hiding behind an Anon and spewing gibberish, all the while puffing up his sorry apology for a reputation. Still doing it.
Anand knows even bigger words than Anon and knows how to use his prepos. And Anand still has a v.limited attention span, and would be challenged even with a goldfish! Anand also knows how spoof GB’s XXXX filter by mixing up characters.
And Anand and Anon are still two sorry little whiners who can’t read through posts.
And where’s that ex-Infy guy?
Here I am.. It is hilarious here. Not the blogs mind you. They are total garbage anyways but people…. You guys have no etiquette and no sense about how to behave and conduct yourselves in a debate. Each person takes each line from another and launches a personal attack. It is shameful and yet you blame politicians back home for throwing shoes at each other.
Guys get a life
So ex-Infy having learned how much his one time boss has achieved has decided not to get into an argument about it. Nice work. Arnab and I (if he remembers my rare postings here) have agreed and disagreed as well. And we can trade barbs and stay classy. Although GB has talent I don’t. If you haven’t achieved much in decades of working for a living, like me, you still can criticise and pan bigshots for being foolish or whatever (when I met Nilekani in the years gone by, when they used to sell telex cards among other things) he kept referring to every other company as a joker, and I sniggered at his ignorance. Unfortunately all I have 25 years after is a anonymous handle, and my integrity. And believe me everyone of those companies Nilekani lambasted is an unknown today. Remember Computer Point? And that day I watched NRN hailing an auto for his pregnant colleague – not one of his IT staff, but the custodian who had just done her work for the day. So it helps to be humble. I have also had the delight to meet another IT star of the days gone by, chain smoker who some years back went through something to claim the family fortune. None of them are around today. Also for everyone’s FYI, several US based magazines and journalists who predicted the end of cheap offshored firms like Infy are out of a job or out of print today. Dash it, 20 years after the Rao-Singh reforms only 3 companies from then are listed on today’s Sensex! And Infy wasn’t even public when 1991 happened.
Hi Guys,
I respect NRN because he is one of the guys who helped change western perceptions about India, and through his company brought good corporate culture much different from then LAla run companies. I believe he should be respected for all this. He was the first to distribute ESOPS at a time when employees were not treated as professionals but simply as skilled labours! It was interactions with infosys and NRN that to a significant extent changed the perception of US geek entrepreneurs and gave confidence to Billu Bhai(Bill Gates) to start *MS I.D.C.(*heard from a respectable geek , and have not done Googling )
All the guys who are complaining about Infosys, they are neglecting lot of things.
I agree current situation at these IT companies is totally different, and with all the US product companies opening lot of so called ‘R&D Centers’ and ‘I.D.C’ in India along with the various start ups, it is easier to compare, criticize and drift across jobs. Also all these short comings are not only of “infosys,tcs vs Rest of world et al” but in “fact services company vs product companies” debate.
All the guys who are smart and who think they are smart feel free to switch to the product companies but for God’s sake stop criticizing NRN. FYI not all the product companies do hi- end creative work in India. In fact most outsource high volume work to these so called R&D. What they do is pay more money then infy,wipro etc.
In fact all the bitches who are crying about quality of work, let me ask your topcoder ranks?Have you heard about it? Ohh you have not heard :P.
CB has also done a good job, at least he is making Indians read something better then reading Prof M.RAm and Savitha Bhabhi.At least 2 states was something good. You do not like it, do not read his books, he is not forcing you to! I feel his criticizing NRN was too strong and may be profit driven! The problem is lot of people have become so international in taste and self proclaimed literature critics as all of them have read the great classics of Shakespeare, Dante, Divine Comedy,Godan, Geetanjali. Half of these idiots have read Grahshobha and Femina in childhood, in college read so called good English literature by Jeffery Archer and associates. Most of the morons are guys who somehow made it too a decent college, are now wannabe smooth talking snobs trying to criticizing an easy target CB.
Its also true quality of IIT JEE has suffered. See people being selected through objective exams and mains exam have certain differences, any testing expert can tell you that. IIT JEE coaching’s have been enabler for lot of people from small towns who did not get great schooling. But now it has become a social menace as it is beating the school system.
I m really sleepy, ignore the crappy grammar etc. Every one has an opinion like Dogbert, so there was mine. s
NRN is right. So is CB to an extent. However what is not right is how CB used that as an argument against NRN. Classic case of shooting the messenger when you don’t like the message.
You photoshopped the picture to change GHATAK COACHING CLASSES to GHANTA COACHING CLASSES. THough GHANTA is more entertaining. You can join NDTV
I loved this article.After months I got back to your page & found this one..very balanced & true 🙂
I have written a blog post on Chetan Bhagat and his new book R2020. I have taken quotes from your post as well as the comments above. The link to the post is given here http://www.tsr.net.co/profiles/blogs/revolution-2020-or-saagar-2011