You may have heard of One Night @ the Call Center, an Indian novel attempting to ride the call center trend. 
It’s sold multitudinous copies and is being made into a movie. The script will be penned by the same author, an i-banker whose author’s voice brags about not being a writer.
He’s right. The story has an interesting premise, but it’s one of the worst-written books I’ve ever read, falling somewhere between bad high school love poem and sixth-grade book report. You’ll laugh out loud. The hilarity will be entirely unintentional.
The best review of a book this bad is to quote from it liberally. Enjoy the stank. Spoilers below.
The author writes groaners rivaling the one from Notting Hill:
‘Deep inside, I am just a girl who wants to be with her favorite boy. Because like you, this girl is a person who needs a lot of love.’
There are even more lines straight out of a Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:
‘It is time to face the real world, even if it is harder and painful. I’d rather fly and crash, than just snuggle and sleep…’‘Do you have a dark side, Shyam?’ … ‘I have so many—like half a dozen dark sides. I am like dark-sided hexagon [sic].’
Then he pats himself on back for minor-league wordplay:
‘Sorry, but calling is not my calling,’ Vroom said. I thought his last line was quite clever, but it wasn’t the right time to appreciate verbal tricks.
Telling, not showing — the author can’t write action, so he grasps at a voiceover:
‘We’re hanging above a hole, supported only by toothpicks. We’re screwed,’ Radhika said, summing up the situation for all of us.
He stoops to the cheap, Hardy Boys suspense close:
Like a drunk tramp, the Qualis stagggered down and into the site of a high-rise construction project. [Chapter ends suddenly.]
Here’s a vague generality (‘gross’) with a dangling antecedent (what’s outside the entrance: the toppings, the pizza or the puke?):
‘Unnh…’ Vroom said as he threw up. Puke spread around like a 12”-thin crust pizza with gross toppings outside the entrance.
He shares his deep insight into female psychology:
The effort it sometimes takes to make women speak up is harder than interrogating terrorists…When girls call a guy a ‘teddy bear’, they just mean he is a nice guy but they will never be attracted to him. Girls may say they like such guys, but teddy bears never get to sleep with anyone…
The prose drips with sexual repression:
It is never easy for a guy to work with a hot girl in the office. I mean, what are you supposed to do? Ignore their sexiness and stare at our computer? Sory, somehow I don’t think men were designed to do that…
Here’s the no-good, really bad insult which sets a character off on a bout of tremendous violence. Oooh, severe:
‘Yeah, I’ll change the dust bag. What about you guys? When will you change your dusty country?’
He includes lots of anti-American racism:
‘Remember,’ the instructor said to the class, ‘a thirty-five-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a ten-year-old Indian’s brain. This will help you understand your clients… Americans are dumb, just accept it…’
The novel does have a few highlights:
Apart from blonde threesomes, hitting your boss is the ultimate Indian male fantasy…According to Priyanka, a door-bitch is the hostess who stands outside the disco. She screens every girl walking in, and if your waist is more than twenty-four inches, or if you were not wearing something right out of an item number, the door-bitch will raise an eyebrow at you like you are a fifty-year-old aunty.
But maybe he should’ve just unconsciously internalized something created by a writer.
