One Night @ the Call Center

Hello friends,

Do you help others? Has anyone helped you in your life till this date? Of course, answer is so obvious and certainly 'yes' only. If your answer is yes, then you must be aware of the importance of helping. We must mention here, to help is not just connected with helping others. This is connected with helping the self also and as we know no one can be true friend rather than books, especially literary books.

In this blog, blogger discusses one of the self help book by popular writer- Chetan Bhagat, entitled as 'One Night @ the Call Center'.

Although there continues to be a lively debate within the social psychological literature about the relative contributions of each factor, it is clear that helping is both part of our basic human biological nature and also in part learned through our social experiences with other people.  Helping others is not only good for them and a good thing to do, it also makes us happier and healthier too. Giving also connects us to others, creating stronger communities and helping to build a happier society for everyone. And it's not all about money - we can also give our time, ideas and energy.

Why self-help books are important? 

Self-care encourages you to maintain a healthy relationship with yourself so that you can transmit the good feelings to others. You cannot give to others what you don't have yourself. While some may misconstrue self-care as selfish, it's far from that.

A self-help book is one tht is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. The books 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.

Types of self help book:

Self-help book contains some of the interesting types and in that accordance it helps to its readers. In another way we can say that all books or say literature itself is the self help yet there are some of the important and distinct characteristics which makes it different than other literary works.

Types of self-help book are as below:

How self-help books help

Self help books provide powerful lesson in personal change. It allows us to think and grow rich. If we go some what much deeper, then we can say that it improves our power of habit. It indicates slight edges.

Another one interesting thing related to this is, it dispenses the new rules of working. It can also be considered as the modern playbook to navigate so that very advantage of this is they can not ignore its readers. It helps us in finding the quest for the love itself to its readers' wok.

Worthily we can quote here,

Self- help book brings counterintuitive approach to live a fresh life.

Dangers of reading self-help book

There certainly is no shortage of self-help books. Thousands of them are available and new ones appear every day. And they are popular too. Millions of copies have been sold

Despite their popularity, though, there is a lot of criticism on self-help books. These can be grouped into three categories:

1. Bad effect: Self-help books give wrong and sometimes harmful advice, they give false hope, they make uncertain people just feel worse about themselves, or they make people refrain from seeking professional support.

2. Placebo effect: If they already work, it is not because of the advice given in the self-help books, but because of the fact that people pay attention to something that they didn't pay attention to before.

3. No effect: Even though people may find self-help books interesting to read (or just have), they don't work because the advice is just common sense or overly simplistic and people don't do anything with them.

One might say that on these parameters all literature is self-help books, then why have we studied Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center only?

Answer lies here!

One Night @ the Call Center and Self-help book

In India it was when outsourcing and call centers were in trend & providing great opportunities of earning. Bhagat is keen observer of trends and finds it is easy to present it as book and fictional form as he is reader centric, he presents such small matters that any common people can easily connect with it. The atmosphere he creates makes it quite similar to the atmosphere of call centers. It's the microcosm of the corporate culture developing in India. Not just in call centers but also in other corporate sectors such exploitation and bossism is common practice. Honesty  is considered as sycophancy and creative ideas are laughed at. This is also well expressed in Chetan Bhagat’s novel.   

Activity page

The very first page of on@tcc is interestingly filled with the activity page. 

Direct teaching

All literature teaches lessons or morals directly or indirectly yet indirect teaching is something which is implied. Grasping this demands readers also of high quality. Literature can be useful in the language learning process owing to the personal involvement it fosters in the reader.Once the student reads a literary text, he begins to inhabit the text. He is drawn into the text. Understanding the meanings of lexical items or phrases becomes less significant than pursuing the development of the story. 

The student becomes enthusiastic to find out what happens as events unfold via the climax; he feels close to certain characters and shares their emotional responses. This can have beneficial effects upon the whole language learning process. At this juncture, the prominence of the selection of a literary text in relation to the needs, expectations, and interests, language level of the students is evident. In this process, he can remove the identity crisis and develop into an extrovert.

 

Repo:

“Now enjoy the story.” and yet the story is not  getting started. There comes acknowledgement.  It tends to be more realistic. It tries to see the same thing in a novel way. This story is coming out of a real book. It depicts ‘call center life as a real life”. 

Prologue

It gives readers exposition that explains their world without having to use info dumps in the main story. It  Shows a key event, setting or situation that is significant for the remainder of the story.  It creates a single event that casts a veil of mystery and lingering questions over the following story.

Epilogue

An epilogue, like a prologue, is a section of a book that stands outside the narrative. Except the epilogue comes after the main narrative. It introduces a new, suspenseful development. Chetan Bhagat’s epilogue had something of this effect as it showed characters after much time had passed.  It also emphasizes the narrator’s final reaction. 

Here we see that all characters present the real life situation of the people. In the story we see that character of Shyam, who almost lost his love. Character of Radhika is in an unhappy marriage with a demanding mother-in-law. Character of Military Uncle, who wants to talk to his grandson. Character of Mr.Bakshi, who is the boss of the call center, all hate them because of their cruel and somehow sadistic behavior.

 

We see that all characters suffer in their life. Also these are all problems we find in our real life and also in society. With help of this type of book we find a solution to the problem. Chetan Bhagat’s present the real life situation of the people and how they all manage their lives.

Call of God or inner call

Four obvious things 

Click here to view the blog on Youth and ON@CC

Yet we should not be addicted to these kinds of books. Why? As we discussed earlier also, there are some of the negative effects of these kinds of self-help books as it develops need of unnecessary help - which should not be done. Sometimes it also creates dependency level and it works negatively as one remains under this falsified influence and supports just to excuses. If books from these genre, self-help book helps in developing the 'self-help culture' then this may achieve its' real success and goal.

Thank You.

References

“Self-help.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-help. Accessed 13 Feb. 2021.

 Kraaijenbrink, J. (2019, July 05). Why self-help books don't work (and how to nevertheless benefit from them). Retrieved February 16, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeroenkraaijenbrink/2019/07/05/why-self-help-books-dont-work-and-how-to-nevertheless-benefit-from-them/?sh=570e10b45f91

Pollock, Thomas Clark. “The Direct Approach to the Teaching of Literature.” College English, vol. 8, no. 1, 1946, pp. 33–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/370446. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.

Chambers, M. M. “The Literature of Youth Problems.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 194, 1937, pp. 207–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1022158. Accessed 21 Apr. 2021.