Around India In 80 Trains

It’s impossible to walk past any station bookstand and not have this thrust at you, so I figured I would finish the set. Two States is Chetan Bhagat’s most recent book and is a continuation of the frolics of Five Point Someone, but this time it’s a semi-autobiographical story about how Bhagat and his wife fought to bring together the north and south Indian divide so that they could get married.

Having met at university, the two MBA students, one a Punjabi boy, and one a Tamilian girl, flirt, fall in love, have sex, graduate and get engaged. But the only problem is that their families haven’t met, nor do they even know their children are in a relationship. At graduation they manipulate situations to bring their families together with horrendous complications that cause mass fallouts and a complete breakdown in any hope of getting married.

This is the one of Bhagat’s books that came across as exaggerated and ludicrous at points, given his vicious portrayal of money-grabbing Punjabis and their hatred towards the southern black-faced ugly people who eat with their hands. However, having been offered a couple of facial-bleachings myself in the past couple of months, the obsession with skin colour seems to play a more serious role than I ever realised. And after a chat with a twenty-something girl on the train from Vasco da Gama to Londa, she laughed and said that that was very much how the elder generation can and do view eachother. So who knows, maybe Bhagat was bang on in his story, but this is definitely the weaker of his books, despite the rather sweet, if unexplained ending.