My next will not be about three friends: Chetan Bhagat

New Delhi, July 24 (IANS) After writing youth-based books like "Five Points Someone", "One Night @ The Call Center" and "Three Mistakes Of My Life", of which two dealt with a group of three friends, author Chetan Bhagat has no plans to base his next book on the same theme.

"I am not going to write anymore dark novels and surely my next book will not be about three friends. It will be about something else about which I am still unaware as of now," said Bhagat.

The author was in the capital for the 10th Osian's-Cinefan Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema that ended last week.

Bhagat's "Five Point Someone", published in 2004, is being made into a film by Rajkumar Hirani of "Munnabhai" fame. The movie is titled "Idiots" and Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor are expected to lead the cast.

His other bestseller "One Night @ The Call Center", which hit the stalls in 2005, has already been made into a film titled "Hello". Directed by Atul Agnihotri, it stars Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sharman Joshi, Isha Koppikar and Amrita Arora.

"Storytelling and humour comes easy to me. I generally write about young people and my stories always have friends. That is mostly because it is impossible for young people to imagine their lives without their friends," said Bhagat, an alumni of Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT).

The author lamented the fact that a young country like India is being run by old men, leading to utter confusion in the entire system.

"The youth of this country is a storehouse of energy, but the main problem is that 80-year-old people are taking decisions for them and therefore their exuberance and energy goes waste.

"I have seen young college going students spending four hours travelling to seek an internship. I have seen kids fighting for admissions after scoring even a 92 or 93 percent - in fact some of them even drop one precious year to get admission in a good engineering or medical college. And all of this rat race for those old people who hold the platter?"

Bhagat strongly believes that it is not necessary that an 80-year-old's experience is better than that of a 25-year-old youth's energy.

"At times experience can also turn into baggage," he said.

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