"One, I make a lot of money. Two, I have an opinion on everything," says Radhika Mehta, the protagonist in author Chetan's Bhagat's upcoming book "One Indian Girl".
In a teaser released ahead of the book's official launch on October 1, 2016, Radhika adds another point to the list of why people may not like her. "Three, I have had sex before."
"One Indian Girl" will be Bhagat's seventh fiction book (he has also authored two non-fiction books).
Interestingly, this book has been written in a female voice.
On his blog, Bhagat states that the book is about "an Indian girl who is intelligent and successful, because of which she finds it difficult to get love".
Bhagat says that he had wanted to write in female first person for several years now. "Not only that, I wanted that book to be about women, and deal with feminism. To do all this as a male writer was a huge challenge. I didn’t have the confidence earlier that I could do it. After writing for over a decade, I finally attempted One Indian Girl."
An excerpt from the book is available on Bhagat's website.
The prologue reads, "Some people are good at taking decisions. I am not one of them. Some people fall asleep quickly at night. I am not one of them either. It is 3 in the morning. I have tossed and turned in bed for two hours. I am to get married in fifteen hours. We have two hundred guests in the hotel, here to attend my grand destination wedding in Goa. I brought them here. Everyone is excited. It is the first destination wedding in the Mehta family.
I am the bride. I should get my beauty sleep. I can’t. The last thing I care about right now is beauty. The only thing I care about is how to get out of this mess. Because, like what often happens to me, here I am in a situation where I don’t know what the fuck is going on."
You can read the rest here.
In an interview to Shinie Antony for Firstpost.com, Bhagat said "One Indian Girl" is different from his previous works as in this book the "female lead changed everything".
Speaking about the difficulty he faced in writing the sex scenes in the book, he said,
"To be a man and write about sex from a woman's view was challenging. It required me to keep my male ego aside and let the character do the talking."
The book is already up for pre-order and has broken all records in Amazon's pre-order history, the e-retail giant said in a statement.
. @chetan_bhagat's new book #OneIndianGirl has created history by breaking the record for pre-order sales on @amazonIN! Pre-order now!
— Amazon.in (@amazonIN) August 19, 2016
"Launched under the exclusive online partnership between Amazon and Rupa Publishing, the pre-orders went live on Amazon at 2pm yesterday and in just the first two hours, it has created history by becoming the leading title on pre-orders the site has witnessed since its launch in 2013," the online shopping site said.
Correction: The headline of the copy earlier erroniously mentioned the name of the book as "One Indian Girlfriend". The error has been rectified.