Paper- 13 One Night @ Call Center as a Self-Help Book and The White Tiger as criticism of Self help culture

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Topic : One Night @ Call Center as a Self-Help Book and The White Tiger as criticism of Self help culture

Prepared by    : Komal Shahedapuri

Roll No   : 13

Paper- 13 New Literature

M.A (English):  Sem -4

Enrollment No: 2069108420170027

Batch    :  2016-18
Email     : komaltara1311@gmail.com
Submitted to   :  Smt .S. B Gardi, Department of  English,                                  MK Bhavnagar University.

Introduction

A self-help book is one that is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. The book take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-seller by Samuel Smiles, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. Self-help books moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century. For better or worse, it is clear that self-help books have had 'a very important role in developing social concepts of disease in the twentieth century', and that they 'disseminate these concepts through the general public so that ordinary people acquire a language for describing some of the complex and ineffable features of emotional and behavioral life' (Self-help book

Self-help books are only as useful as they are relevant to your problem or goal.  So, if you need general help/understanding what's wrong in your life situation or deciding what it is you really want to accomplish, talking to a licensed mental health professional recommended to you by someone you respect is usually the best place to start. (Buckley)

Self help books are the celebration of the disease and cure it easily. It is like the instructional literature that gives instruction to the people to be better and succeed in life.

History of Self-Help books

Self-help has been around for thousands of years, and it has been loved and hated for just as long. The earliest progenitor of self-help books was an Ancient Egyptian genre called “Sebayt” an instructional literature on life (“Sebayt” means “teaching”). A letter of advice from father to son, The Maxims of Ptahotep, written circa 2800 B.C., advocated moral behavior and self-control. Ancient Greek texts offered meditations, aphorisms, and maxims on the best ways to live. (Lamb-Shapiro)

Characteristics of Self help book

•  Self help book is considered as Popular Psychology such as romantic relations or human mind/behavior, it is easy to read and provide some kind of encouragement and motivation to live life in a better way. There are many self help books available in the market like ‘How to stop worrying and start living’ by  Dale Carnegie, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change By Stephen R. Covey, The Last Lecture By Randy Pausch, The Prophet By Kahlil Gibran and many more.

• Self-help books typically advertise themselves as being able to increase self-awareness and performance, including satisfaction with one's life. They often say that they can help you achieve this more quickly than with conventional therapies.

•  In the self-help book story about problems of the life and how they live in their life. Writer use characters who suffer in their life. Characters sharing experience and enables them to give each other support. In these books we find that writer present the real life situation of the people. (Solanki, 2015)

Now in this 21^st century, many literatures are giving this self help features or reflecting its culture. Actually, all types of literature has power to teach or change but it’s depends on the understanding of the people that they can’t get true message that literature really want to provide.

One Night @ the Call Center as a self help book

Chetan Bhagat has written this novel about the problems of six young Indian middle class call center workers and how they psychologically suffering from exploitation of the corporate world, bossism and their personal anxiety of different broken relations. He wrote on the contemp orary issues relating to the young people and gives them solutions and way to come out of that problems that we can see in the scene of God’s call.

Chetan Bhagat has written very interesting Prologue and Epilogue with acknowledgement in the beginning of his novel where he has given the self-evaluation exercise where he asked reader three questions and give space to write answers which allows readers to look inside them and think about themselves. Such thing give thought provoking insight to the readers’ mind and self evaluation must be done. 

               

In above image, you can see that which three questions asked by writer as a part of self evaluation on the side of the readers where he asked questions that 1. What you fear ? 2.

What you make angry ? & 3.One thing that you don't like about yourself ?, these questions will test the readers that what are they knowing about their owmself'

Phone Call from God (God’s message/ inner call)

This episode of God’s message to six young call center workers on how to get success in life is the climax of the novel when they are just returning from nightclub and because of Vroom’s drunkard state, car trapped and hanged at construction site where they can’t get network to ask for help and suddenly God’s call came, maybe it is real or only technique Deux ex Machina that is used there. He speaks to all of them and gives them suggestions to improve their life.

God’s message: God first ask everyone about their life and everyone has their own personal problems. God give advice to them that ‘nothing depends on me or on destiny; it’s only your Karma’ and also said that ‘I always with you but you all ignore me, you all ignore your inner Voice’, this suggest that we need to listen our self/our inner voice, don’t listen anyone. God said them that ‘many times you all can’t get my voice because of modern busy life of networks’,God’s call consider as Inner call that everyone should listen carefully. God suggests four important features to be successful in life.

1) Bit of Imagination that every human have

2) Intellectuality

3) Self-confidence

4) Too painful – Failure (is key to success)

‘One should experience it, feel it and taste it and then there is nothing which make you afraid’

This message inspires all six call center workers as well as many other young people who are facing same problems in life, they encourage and motivate from this advice which is self help feature of this novel. We can say that Privilege of health over disease is subverted in this novel. After that, God also advises them on how to get their vehicle out of the construction site. The conversation with God motivates the group to such an extent that they get ready to face their problems with utmost determination and motivation. Meanwhile Vroom and Shyam hatch up a plan to throw Bakshi out of the call center and prevent the closing of Connections call center, whose employees are to be downsized radically. When they emerge out of danger, they have clear-cut goals in their mind. On returning to the Call Center, they carry out their plans with dexterity.

In epilogue, we see one line like:

             

 ‘It is true thought; we all have a dark side – something we don’t like about ourselves, something that makes us angry and something we want to change about ourselves. The difference is how we choose to face it.’ Here Chetan Bhagat connects to us with all character, and says that how we handle these types of situation in our life, that depends on our self not on destiny or god but we are maker of our own self.

The White Tiger as a criticism of self help culture

Balram’s journey to be “rags to riches,” transforming from a village tea shop boy into a Bangalore entrepreneur“rags to riches,” transforming from a village tea shop boy into a Bangalore entrepreneur which introduce new morality (Amoral) where the way of Balram to get success in like is not true as compare to the way of Shyam and Vroom’s way to get success by their own hard work. Balram is not a class warrior, and his claims on the truth are thin. Balram only escapes the poverty of the Darkness and the corruption of the Light by killing his boss, stealing his money and identity, and becoming a “self-taught entrepreneur,” a narrative which not only moves him outside of the halo of reliability but also transforms him into the very object of his critique. Betty Joseph sees the appropriative maneuver of speaking through the poor as a part of the novel’s “neoliberal allegory”: “Adiga brilliantly satirizes neoliberalism through ventriloquism. When the White Tiger is the mouthpiece, we hear neoliberal entrepreneurial shibboleths as criminality”. (Shingavi, 2014)

This critique of liberal humanism is isomorphic with twenty-first-century ideologies of India’s economic liberalization and antagonistic to the caste based system of reservations for public sector jobs. It bears underlining that this ideology is doubly self-serving: the rich maintain their wealth in India only by cleverly erasing traces of their own criminal corruption. The politics of the novel turn on whether Balram’s murder of his boss is justifiable, whether the novel gives a bleak enough picture of poverty to make the murder not only moral but also necessary. But if the novel spends most of its time worried about the dead boss, it intentionally leaves the murder of Balram’s family (itself a kind of caste atrocity) off-stage. And even though Balram uses the implicit threat against his family to steel his rage against his employer, he needs his family to die so that he can escape the quicksand of caste. As a result, becoming an entrepreneur in the context of the novel requires two symbolically dense murders: the murder of the employer (and therefore murder of the self-as-laborer) and the murder of the family (murder of the caste-bound self). (Shingavi, 2014)

Blaral’s family murdered because Balram killed his old master, a crime he talks about in the beginning of his narrative in a boastful and self-congratulatory tone:

‘Calling myself Bangalore’s least known success story isn’t entirely true, I confess. About three years ago, when I became, briefly, a person of national importance owing to an act of entrepreneurship, a poster with my face on it found its way to every post office, railway station, and police station in this country’ (Adiga 11).

Balram talks about his wanted poster for killing his master. That is his first “act of entrepreneurship.” His confession of his crime comes early in his narrative, not in a regretful, somber register, but in a cheerful tone. (Haitham, 2013)

In recent decades, virtual cults have evolved around entrepreneurs especially in technology related fields that hail them not only as components of economic systems, but as champions of social change and self-liberating breakers of the status quo. The White Tiger depicts a de-glorified entrepreneur, a crude version of the international entrepreneur who is still in a position where he can stain his hands with the blood of a victim he can see eye-to-eye. Balram Halawi is not a bad entrepreneur: he is just an entrepreneur. He is anyone who makes it and keeps everyone else down; for entrepreneurship is a tool the system uses to renew itself. (Haitham, 2013)

                  

Conclusion

Thus, there is vast difference in both books where the journey of Shyam & Vroom and Balram to be successful in life, in first book there is self help features which motivates Indian youth to listen their inner voice and find their own true way to get success in life by their work hard which proves it as self help book while other text criticize the self help culture that what readers will learn from the Balram’s journey to became entrepreneur where he killed his boss to be rich or successful entrepreneur which somehow gives the real image of India. This book diverts people in wrong way which is not true as a self help book.

Works Cited

Buckley, Elizabeth. "Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blog." typepad.com. <http://selfhelpbookblog.typepad.com/self-help-book-blog/>.

Haitham, Hind. "Discourse of Entrepreneurship in The White Tiger." (2013).

Lamb-Shapiro, Jessica. "A Short History of Self-Help, The World’s Bestselling Genre." Publishing Perspective. <https://publishingperspectives.com/2013/11/a-short-history-of-self-help-the-worlds-bestselling-genre/>.

"Self-help book." Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-help_book>.

Shingavi, Snehal. "Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger." 9 (2014).

Solanki, Binita. "One Night @the Call Center as a Self-help Book." 19 March 2015. Blogger. 2018 April 1 <http://binitasolanki10.blogspot.in/2015/03/one-night-call-center-as-self-help-book.html>.