🇮🇳 Chetan Bhagat

He was born in 1974 in Delhi to an Army officer and a Punjabi homemaker. He studied at the Army Public School and then at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where he graduated in mechanical engineering in 1995, followed by an MBA at IIM Ahmedabad in 1997. He spent eleven years in Hong Kong as an investment banker with Peregrine, then Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, where he learned to wake up at four a.m. — a habit that would later let him write entire novels in the hours before he left for the office.

Five Point Someone, his debut novel, was published in 2004 by Rupa Publications. Loosely based on his IIT years, it told the story of three under-performing students at the institute and their attempt to game a brutal grading system. It sold over a million copies in India and was bought by Vidhu Vinod Chopra for the film adaptation that became Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots in 2009 — one of the highest-grossing Hindi films ever made. A bitter public dispute over the screen credit followed for years.

He followed with One Night @ the Call Center (2005), The 3 Mistakes of My Life (2008), 2 States (2009), Revolution 2020 (2011), and Half Girlfriend (2014). Each book was adapted into a Hindi or regional-language film. 2 States, drawing on his own marriage to Anusha — a Tamil Brahmin classmate from IIM Ahmedabad — sold close to two million copies in India. By 2015 his cumulative sales had crossed eleven million copies, more than any English-language Indian novelist in history.

Critics — including Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times, Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph and writers in The Caravan — dismissed his prose as flat and his ambitions as small. Bhagat agreed, more or less. He has consistently argued that India needed a writer who would sell books rather than win them, and that the literary establishment had failed the country's first-generation English readers. The argument has earned him both an enormous readership and a permanent place at the bottom of every literary critic's list.

He left investment banking in 2009 to write and consult full-time. He became a columnist for The Times of India in 2008 and has since written weekly Hindi and English columns syndicated nationwide. He has also been a vocal commentator on politics — initially supportive of Narendra Modi during the 2014 campaign, later more sceptical, depending on the year and the column. His pivots are tracked closely on social media and rarely defended at length.

He has written and co-written screenplays for Kai Po Che!, 2 States, Half Girlfriend and others, and dipped briefly into television as a judge on the singing competition Nach Baliye. He has been involved in two plagiarism rows — one over the 3 Idiots credits in 2009 and another over a 2019 column on a woman writer's blog post — both of which he has rejected. He continues to publish a novel every two to three years.

He lives in Mumbai with his wife Anusha, an investment banker, and their twin sons. He continues to write a book every two years, all of them still on the trolleys of Indian railway stations, all of them still priced low enough that a college student in Patna or a clerk in Hubli can buy one without thinking twice. Whatever else his books are, they remain, two decades on, the entry drug for English fiction in India.