Teenage Wasteland

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Graduates from India's prestigious technology universities get good jobs, make great money and are eagerly sought-after marriage partners. But according to Chetan Bhagat's charming debut novel Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT, they end up in a Faustian bargain: students at the seven India Institutes of Technology sacrifice their youth for the sake of a successful adulthood.

Five Point Someone tells 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. Chat rooms are buzzing, and sales have topped 15,000 in just six weeks (making the book a best seller in India's small English-language fiction market). A Bombay-based production company bought the film rights in June.

Bhagat's irreverence stops short of tearing down the ivory tower: all three of his main characters manage to graduate, and all seem poised to follow in the successful footsteps of the author himself, who graduated from New Delhi's IIT in 1995 and now works in Hong Kong for an investment bank. Bhagat was the mastermind of a website promoting the book, offering a monthly contest and his own e-mail address for fan letters. In that sense, even a critical alum like Bhagat makes IIT proud.