Tuesday, February 07, 2006

One Night@Bollywood


Today I read in the ST that Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel, One Night @ The Call Centre has been optioned for filming by Bollywood director Rohan Sippy. Great news for Chetan! Very few Indian filmmakers opt for making films out of modern novels and when they do, they hardly succeed in hitting the bull's eye. Anurag Mathur's all time bestseller The Inscrutible Americans was a box office (bo) dud as a movie. Dev Benegal had adapted Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August with great elan and some bo success. Mira Nair is adapting Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. Hope it does well.

But Chetan's news gives me a sense of deja vu. His first novel, Five Point Someone, was also rumoured to have been optioned for filming. But we are still waiting for the film...Any way, good luck Chetan!

1 comment:

Manzoor Khan said...

English, August was a good movie, indeed. After I happen to see the movie starring Rahul Bose (one of my fav actors), I was tempted to read the book.

Of late, I learnt that Upamanyu Chatterjee was only 24 when he write the novel. Probably, that's why EA was bubbling with very amateurish and youthful humor. I am, for quite some time, reading the EA's sequel: Mammaries of the Welfare State - a good book, but somehow not that interesting. Perhaps because so far no movie starring Rahul Bose is made on the sequel.