One Night @t the Call Centre; by Chetan Bhagat.

This was a comparatively serious attempt by the author to write about a contemporary situation and its not so well known realities, but he mixed a few things up.

When this book came or at least when I saw it on bookshelves in popular bookstores, media was speaking out about the various stresses the workers in the much celebrated new phenomena of economic rise of India were going through, what with the work hours disrupting the biological rhythm - having to work hours when the clients in the various countries around the globe would be awake and receptive - and the racist abuse they had to take from those that they connected on phone to.

This work gives the strange and the weird, the silly and the abusive - in short. It mentions the other, the life the call centre workers live on the whole, whether at work or away from it.

There is some truth to every story of the lives he mentions, in all likelihood, but on the whole if you like to know about how those call centre workers live, what they think and feel, perhaps this is neither comprehensive nor typical of most.

On the other hand, these characters could very well be out there and their stories too - in a nation of over a billion with a few million in this line of work, anything might be possible.

All one can say is much does not ring true here and it seems more like an assembly of specific ingredients to titillate the reader.

Bhagat with a little effort, a lot of restraint and some aspiration could be a lot better, although one would never suspect it from his other works. Here, too, he cannot avoid the temptation to be glib instead and provide a mash of much from here and there.