In this rat racing mad world driven by the spirit of the desire for comforts and dominance corruption becomes a popular vehicle because it takes you to the point through the shortest route. In practicing corruption there are only interests and interests alone and one will find no foes and friends, a disquieting trend indeed. Such practices are very popular in an unfair society like ours because it rewards the corrupt. But it is also quite encouraging to see in this bleakest of situations that, some nerve-of-steel elements going against the trends and tides while safeguarding and promoting morality. Anna Hazare, Medha Patkar and our own ACAUT are some phenomena in the fight against these rots. They are raising modest hopes of an upturn in the movement.They are the Raghavs in Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020. Novelist Chetan Bhagat himself is a vocal crusader against corruption in India. Through his motivational talk programmes in colleges and other institutions and also through his novels he campaigns against corruption. When we talk about corruption it is worthwhile to discuss Chetan’s novel Revolution 2020 which aims to convey how a large number of young Indians feel about corruption and how they want to address the issue. According to Chetan Bhagat, the novel Revolution 2020 came from his travels across India. “As a motivational speaker, I have visited more than 50 cities in the heartland of India. The youth in these smaller cities, their dreams and aspirations inspired me to do a story on them.I also saw disturbing levels of corruption in the education sector, which can have profound effects on the quality of education we are giving to our new generation, and wanted to bring that to people’s attention,” Chetan Bhagat has to say in one of the talk programmes. In the novel Revolution 2020, one of the characters Gopal is from a poor family whose ailing father mortgages/sells his properties (Since this is a paraphrase from memory chances of inaccuracy will be there) to support his education. He has a childhood friends in Raghav and Aarti. Raghav is from a well to do family who wants to weed out corruption from the society while Gopal wants to become a rich man. Raghav and Gopal as they grow up they are separated by their ‘ambitions and passions’. However, they cannot completely separate themselves for they both love the same girl—Aarti. After some years Raghav, the journalist succeeded in winning Aarti’s heart but the harsh reality of life continues to haunt him even as Gopal, after the failure in getting through JEE and AIEEE exams becomes a blue eye boy of a politician. What inspires the readers is Raghav’s perseverance, patience, determination to revolutionise India and his cool. He struggles to keep his small newspaper alive (by now he is no more a rich man). Raghav continues to fight the issue against all odds till the end of the story while rich Gopal disgraces himself by sleeping with prostitutes. Raghav inspires…
