Book Review : Five Point Someone // Chetan Bhagat

And am back with another review! Woohoo!

Sypnosis :

Five Point Someone is a story about three friends in IIT who are unable to cope.

The book starts with a disclaimer, “This is not a book to teach you how to get into IIT or even how to live in college. In fact, it describes how screwed up things can get if you don’t think straight.”

Three hostelmates – Alok, Hari and Ryan get off to a bad start in IIT – they screw up the first class quiz. And while they try to make amends, things only get worse. It takes them a while to realize: If you try and screw with the IIT system, it comes back to double screw you. Before they know it, they are at the lowest echelons of IIT society. They have a five-point-something GPA out of ten, ranking near the end of their class. This GPA is a tattoo that will remain with them, and come in the way of anything else that matters – their friendship, their future, their love life. While the world expects IITians to conquer the world, these guys are struggling to survive.

Will they make it? Do under performers have a right to live? Can they show that they are not just a five-point-somebody but a five-point-someone?

Rating : 3.4 / 5 «

Review :

First off, this book reminded me of the movies 3 idiots (Bollywood) and nanban (kollywood) and the first thing I did after reading it was google it to see if my hunch was right. The movies were inspired by the book. 

Although the movies, which I loved, were mostly comedic the book was more realistically dark. The three main boys all had issues of their own. Alok was poor. Ryan was the last in class. And Hari, the narrator, basically worshipped Ryan.

This book is about the lowest students in class and how they try to survive in a college they thought was their dream home. It’s about the struggles of completing assignments on time and scoring well during tests. And how low five point something GPAs could mess up with everything in their lives. Because in IIT the professors judged you by your GPA and if you screwed up in the first semester then you were always going to be screwed up.

I didn’t really enjoy it to the point where I might want to reread it again and I didn’t like the romance portrayed in the book. It wasn’t beautiful. I found it chopped and I don’t even know what to call it.

However, I did like how the story was narrated. It wasn’t very deep or beautiful or emotional but sharp and straight to the point.

And that is all.

Till next time

=)©sammy