Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat

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.