A narrative story of ‘Revolution
2020’ by Chetan Bhagat drives your imagination to a set up of Varanasi but overall
doesnot seem to be much impressive as expected. The triangle love story of Gopal,
Raghav and Aarati reminded me of a typical bollywood lovestory where both
heroes love heroine and heroine end up loving the most sincere, down to earth
and true hero while the other hero sacrifices his love for the sake of his
herione’s happiness.
Revolution 2020; love.ambition.corruption
plots the story in very holy place of India, Varanasi. The story begins like a
true story narrated himself by the writer, Chetan Bhagat, who attends a program
as a Chief Guest in an inauguration of an Engineering College, Gangatech
University, where Gopal is the director. The story then continues with the
flashback of three friends with the narration by Gopal.
Raghav and Aarati are the
childhood friends of Gopal; Aarati, love of Gopal considers him as nothing more
than a best friend. These three individuals come from different economic
background. Aarati’s father is a bureaucratic officer; Raghav is from a middle
class family while Gopal belongs to a poor farmer family who has land issues
with his uncle.
These three individuals have
their own ambitions in life. As Gopal’s father struggles with fulfilling day to
day needs, Gopal dreams of earning lots of money and his father believe that the
only way is by becoming an engineer by getting degree from a top University.
Gopal fails both exams of IIT-JEE (Indian Institution of Technology Joint
Entrance Exam) and AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination), one of
the most competitive engineering entrance examinations and disappoints his
father. Then he is forced to move to Kota, where intensive coaching classes for
entrance are given. But after he found out that his love, Aarati and his
childhood friend, Raghav are sharing romantic love affair, he gets devastated
and end up failing the entrance for second time. Gopal’s father, Baba, unable
to bear this failure and passes away leaving Gopal an orphan. Soon, he gets
support from MLA Shuklajee, a politician who later is found with lots of corrupted
activities through investigation done by Raghav as a reporter. Though Raghav
passes AIEEE examination and also finishes his engineering from the top
university IT-BHU, follows his ambition of becoming a journalist and bring
revolution in the country. He works in a top media house Dainik, from where he
gets fired for writing about news of corruption done by MLA Shukla. He then
opens his own media house and starts his newsletter continuing the story of
corruption. While Aarati dreams to become an airhostess, finds the job as Guest
Relation Manager in Ramada Hotel.
In this way, the story twists and
turns with the life of these three people and narrates the story about love,
ambition and corruption. In a way it can also be said that these three
characters are set up with each of these adjectives; Aarati as love, Raghav as
ambition and Gopal as corruption, though they donot exactly match the
adjectives in the story. The story shares the real world scenario about how
corruption has dwelt under politics and the way medias are getting sold under
these corruption. Likewise, on the other hand, it also tells how medias are
fighting back to bring revolution from such corrupted politics.
