Tanay Sukumar, January 7, 2011

A young writer has lost all his female friends after he tried to emulate Chetan Bhagat while writing a light campus novel presenting girls, love and relationships in bad light.

At bookstores as well, Saurav Ahluwalia’s novel Hey, I Love You ‘Coz You Are Damn Hot is getting no buyers, as its copies are easily lost in the crowd of other similarly-named novels. Ahluwalia, 21, is a student of IIT Kanpur and is doing a B. Tech. in English Grammar Engineering. The 278-page novel, his first, was published two months ago.

“I seriously didn’t expect this kind of response,” he said. “I dream of becoming a successful writer, but this one has backfired. I don’t know why, but my female friends are suddenly upset with me. It took me three years, eleven girlfriends and close observation of dozens of girls to be able to write this, but it seems to have paid off nothing! Even copying Chetan Bhagat’s whole paragraphs in a chapter seems to have not worked.”

The book’s first edition was published with the label “No. 1 Bestseller” on its cover. Ahluwalia considers Bhagat, a bestselling author, his idol, and following his example, he had joined IIT only to be able to become a writer.

“Even bloggers are more popular than Saurav Ahluwalia,” said a bookstore owner. “Such books don’t sell at our store much. If someone picks them up, it’s only teenagers who read specific paragraphs in groups. Yesterday only, a schoolboy came and asked for a copy of Hey I Love You… and took out a chapter, which his friends read and giggled out a lot.”

A female friend of the author talked to us, saying she thought him to be a clean person, but the way he described several erotic scenes in the novel show how dirty he is. She felt disgusted, she said.

Chetan Bhagat himself, who reads books by the new young authors to take inspiration for his later books with filmy content, said about Ahluwalia, “He is just another guy who didn’t realise that shit makes its presence felt only once. After that it goes down the pipe and in the drain. I was the shit who people read first. So these guys better sell their stories to me, and I’ll write them.”