Thinking Activity: Unit 4, Documentation: Preparing the list of work Cited:
Hello everyone, I am Nidhi Dave, a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is a response to my thinking activity given by professor Megha ma'am. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the book review revolution 2020.
What is Citation?
A citation is a reference to the source of information used in your research. Any time you directly quote, paraphrase or summarize the essential elements of someone else's idea in your work, an in-text citation should follow. An in-text citation is a brief notation within the text of your paper or presentation which refers the reader to a fuller notation, or end-of-paper citation, that provides all necessary details about that source of information.
Direct quotations should be surrounded by quotations marks and are generally used when the idea you want to capture is best expressed by the source.
Paraphrasing and summarizing involve rewording an essential idea from someone else's work, usually to either condense the point or to make it better fit your writing style.
You do not have to cite your own ideas, unless they have been published. And you do not have to cite common knowledge, or information that most people in your audience would know without having to look it up.
In-Text Citations:
In-text citations alert the reader to an idea from an outside source.
What is book review?
A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews.
Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Book review: Revolution 2020:
Chetan Bhagat goes to GangaTech, a private engineering college in Varanasi to give a motivational lecture and meets its Director, the very young and very lonely Gopal Mishra. Gopal has an obvious drinking problem as well as an urge to tell his ‘story’, something which turns out to be very convenient, since Gopal’s story forms the rest of this novel. Since Gopal is lonely, it’s obvious that he didn’t ‘get’ the girl, the girl being the very pretty Aarti. However, Bhagat is such a good story teller that he keeps his reader on tenterhooks till the end of the book, open to a number of possibilities, wondering how exactly the story would reach the end already revealed at the beginning of the story.
Chetan Bhagat has very well portrayed the life of students having different aspirations in life. Gopal, who happens to be the son of a poor school teacher falls in love with a beautiful and rich girl Aarti .However, for Aarti Gopal is only her best friend with whom she could talk her heart out and share all her feelings with? Raghav, Gopal’s childhood friend happens to be a rich guy but with a golden heart. Though Gopal and Raghav were preparing for their IIT entrance exam, they both had different aspirations. Raghav’s dream was to be a journalist and fight for corruption whereas Gopal wanted to be rich.
Revolution 2020 as the name suggests provides a solution to the youths in reducing corruption and to bring a revolutionary change. The author has clearly stated the exploited Indian Education system due to corruption. Gopal’s cribbing about not getting enough marks to get enrolled in engineering and most of us may have crossed that path in our lives. So , the fate of our lives is chosen according to the ranks we get rather than we ourselves choosing it.
Thus, the protagonist Gopal settles his own business with the help of an MLA. So he pays bribes to everyone he comes across to keep the engineering college running from government officials. Thus, he finally achieves his dream of becoming rich.
On the other hand, Raghav becomes rich and successful business journalist and starts his own newsletter called Revolution 2020. As for Aarti, she is caught between the love of both her friends, switches from one to another due to the twists that arise in the story. The three friends then resolve the ending wherein Aarti gets married to Raghav whereas Gopal moves ahead for their happy future life.
Revolution 2020 has all the usual Bhagat ingredients. It has clichés, a half-decent plot which creaks just a little bit, parts of which could have come from a Harold Robbins or Jeffrey Archer novel, politically incorrect characters who shoot from the hip and could belong to any town in India, drama and a large dose of reality. I just can’t emphasise the last bit sufficiently enough. Clichés notwithstanding, Revolution 2020 takes the reader into the dark underbelly of India’s private education sector, where almost everything involves a bribe or something equally unsavoury. At times, I felt that Bhagat went overboard with this depiction of how bad things can be with private unaided colleges structured as trusts, which which are in reality full-fledged business enterprises. However, a friend did confirm that HR managers at certain large companies do ask for kick-backs from private colleges, ones that are at nowhere at the top of the rankings, to hire from those campuses.
Bhagat’s characters date, kiss, party and sleep around (furtively). Atleast some of them do so. Though this novel is set in small-town India, I did not find this to be unrealistic, given the genuineness of Bhagat’s narration and the changes that are sweeping across India's social landscape.
Bhagat’s language is not spectacular and I did notice at least one grammatical mistake, but on the whole, the English is good enough to convey the story. If you are not too snobbish to watch and enjoy a Bollywood movie, or any other Indian language movie for that matter, you could enjoy Revolution 2020.
Work Cited :
https://www.marian.edu/docs/default source/marian's-adult-programs-documents/what-is-citation.pdf?sfvrsn=76a375fd_2.
“Book Reviews.” The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 23 Sept. 2021, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/book-reviews/.
Bhagat, Chetan. Revolution Twenty20 : Love . Corruption. Ambition. India, RUPA PUBLICATIONS INDIA PVT Limited, 2014.
Pandey, Shreeya. “Revolution 2020: Book Review .” Revolution 2020: Book Review, https://dwitnews.com/archive/article/12641-2#:~:text=Raghav's%20dream%20was%20to%20be,Education%20system%20due%20to%20corruption.
Winnowed. Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat – Book Review, 1 Jan. 1970, http://winnowed.blogspot.com/2011/12/revolution-2020-by-chetan-bhagat-book.html?m=1.
Thank you.....
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