Upward mobility prescription

11 rules for life: Secrets to level up Chetan Bhagat HarperCollins Rs.250 Pages 226 By way of advice to an over-educated under-employed youth, the author provides a useful upward mobility prescription to ‘level up’ and succeed Chetan Bhagat has all the qualifications of a heavyweight public intellectual. An alum of IIT-Delhi and IIM-Ahmedabad, a former banker with Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, he is also the author of five best-selling novels some of which have been adapted into hit Bollywood movies. Besides, he writes intelligent op-ed page essays in the Times of India. Yet to an above-average intelligence reader, Bhagat’s novels are embarrassingly naïve and gauche. This is not a criticism of Bhagat from a failed novelist (Succession Derby, 1991). Bhagat is a widely read public intellectual with — as his essays on current events and social mores testify — socio-economic reform on his mind. On the contrary, it is criticism of India’s obsolete, and failing education system that churns out millions of under-educated youth and adults who need simpleton novels and matching Bollywood cinema. Bhagat can’t be blamed for the multiplication of the unthinking classes who love talk-down novels. In 11 Rules for Life, Bhagat ventures into a new genre, combining his elementary story-telling skill with a life skills prescription for a Zomato delivery boy — an educated youth with a Masters in history who has been abandoned by his girl-friend for failing to get a better job. The prescription is delivered by way of advice to follow the 11 Rules prescribed by the author for the vast majority of educated under-employed youth like Viraj (a prototype of Bhagat’s core readers) to learn to “level up” and succeed. Quite pragmatically, Bhagat advises readers to disregard fanciful propaganda about our wonderful world suffused with democratic and egalitarian ideals in which governments and people are ever ready to lend youth such as Viraj, a leg up. According to the author, society, as shaped by post-independence India’s faux socialist-secularists, is pyramid shaped. At the apex of the pyramid, there’s Class I, the elite 1 percent who own 90 percent of the country’s wealth. No matter what they say, they are content with the status quo and want to retain it. The next segment comprises 9 percent “elite protectors, and slave minders” typically doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, the bourgeoisie struggling to make it into Class I. The wide base of the pyramid is inhabited by “drones, workers and slaves” comprising the lower middle and working classes. In the author’s perceptive analysis, each class has erected “iron gates” — rules, regulations and social norms and cultural mores — to make upward mobility from one class to the next near-impossible. “You are expected to remain in the area of your class mountain. Try to climb up and you will stumble against the iron gates,” says Bhagat, who as he often reminds us has successfully stormed the iron gate and made it into Class I with the New York Times proclaiming him as the “the biggest…