In Chetan Bhagat’snovel Revolution 2020, Gopal’s ailing father mortgages/sells his properties (since this is a paraphrase from memory chances of inaccuracy will be there) to support his education. He has childhood friends in Raghav and Aarti. Raghav is from a well to do family who wants to weed out corruption from the society while Gopal wants to become a rich man. Raghav and Gopal as they grow up they are separated by their ‘ambitions and passions’. However, they cannot completely separate themselves for they both love the same girl—Aarti. After some years Raghav, the journalist succeeded in winning Aarti’s heart but the harsh reality of life continues to haunt him even as Gopal, after the failure in getting through JEE and AIEEE exams becomes a blue eye boy of a politician. What inspires the readers is Raghav’s perseverance, patience, determination to revolutionise India and his cool. He struggles to keep his small newspaper alive (by now he is no more a rich man). Raghav continues to fight the issue against all odds till the end of the story while rich Gopal disgraces himself by sleeping with prostitutes. Raghav inspires a large number of readers but that is in reel. Definitely in real life many will envy Gopal, a disquieting trend. This is because wealth commands envy and respect. The guilt of thriving on the extreme desperation of the people is attenuated or swarmed by the opulent lifestyle, a perfect form of ghettoisation where the suffering of your fellow beings is a high privilege for you. There is no deeper sadness than this act of vacuity and assault on morality witnessed today in our much maligned society.
Nevertheless, the kind of efforts put up by Chetan Bhagat is appreciable. The novelist himself is a vocal crusader against corruption in India. Through his motivational talk programmes in colleges and other institutions and also through his novels he campaigns against corruption. Chetan aims to convey how a large number of young Indians feel about corruption and how they want to address the issue. According to Chetan Bhagat, the novel Revolution 2020 came from his travels across India. “As a motivational speaker, I have visited more than 50 cities in the heartland of India. The youth in these smaller cities, their dreams and aspirations inspired me to do a story on them. I also saw disturbing levels of corruption in the education sector, which can have profound effects on the quality of education we are giving to our new generation, and wanted to bring that to people’s attention,” Chetan Bhagat has to say in one of the talk programmes.
