Five reasons why Hari, Ryan and Alok’s lives are in a complete mess:
They’ve messed up their grades big time.
Alok and Ryan can’t stop bickering with each other.
Hari is smitten with Neha who happens to be Prof. Cherian’s daughter.
As IITians, they’re expected to conquer the world, something they know isn’t likely to happen.
They are with each other.
This is not a book to teach you how to get into IIT or even survive it. In fact, it describes how bad things can get if you don’t think straight. Funny, dark and non-stop, Five Points Someone is the story of three friends whose measly five-point something GPAs come in the way of everything- their friendship, their love life, their future
I can?t possibly give a review of this book. Why? It has no fixed story line! Now is that a bad thing? Nu-uh!
Its the story of three IIT students who refuse to make that trade-off, choosing instead to study less and play more. Hari, Alok and Ryan sleep, stumble and cheat their way through Manufacturing Processes and Applied Mechanics to leave room for bigger priorities: vodka, weed and Pink Floyd.
Throw in a love affair with a professor’s daughter, and you’ve got every Indian teen’s dream. ’’It’s amazing how happy one can be, ’’ realizes narrator Hari, ’’with low expectations of one’s self.’’
Parental pressure, familial obligations, gender roles, dating, sex, drugs, suicide?just about every teen issue is addressed, and the book has struck a chord in India.
It’s about the life of typical college youngsters, who have that anti-establishment anarchist’s feel, feel sick of the system, and think they can change it with excessive drinking and bunking classes :)
More than that .... it?s about these three guys who get into IIT and their daily capers and adventures, or should I say mis-adventures. Does it give you an insight to life in IIT? Nope, not really (anybody has any other views?). Does it tell you about IITians? Maybe, maybe not, they are just bunch of regular guys who sometimes have too weird ideas (isn?t that allowed in fiction?) who can be found in any college you name undoubtedly including IIT (again, other views most welcome).
So, what exactly is the charm here? How about one-liners like this:
?There are times when you just wish that the dinosaurs weren?t extinct and one would come by and swallow you?- or something like that, take or put one or two words.
On the whole .... the narration is humorous, it hits that Indian mentality right at the
epicenter. I never laughed so loud ever, while reading a book. And above all the book has that bond which makes it synonymous to college life of us all. The main characters in the book are very carefully crafted, so that the reader can at least co-relate to one of them. Its a must read I say. Buy it now, and retro back to those cherished days.