Abstract: Chetan Bhagat in One Night at the Call Center, throughout the exposure of recurrent problems faced by the Indian youth, has created a philosophical room centering round the inner voice of an individual. As Bhagat seems to be more concerned about self-realisation and self-understanding than religious morals and customs, it becomes important to think whether the inner voice of a person is the voice of God Himself. Apart from incorporating the distinct philosophical dimensions in the religious scriptures and the different ideological stances of some explorers of God in human souls, this paper suggests a space for rethinking ‘realizing the existence of God’ and ‘the rise of one’s inner-self.’ Through initiating the telephonic conversation of God where He advocates some psychological notes for a group of young people in India, this young novelist opens up a bunch of debates amidst many a significant but unanswered question: How does a materialistic being feel the touch of God? How can one feel the spirit of one’s own? Is it allegorically represented as the ‘sense of conscience’? Is it self-understanding or self-realisation through which breeds self-resistance, self-respect and self-confidence? This paper throws light on such queries and tries to arrive at an understanding of how ‘the study of self’ becomes the answer script for many up-to-the-minute problems.
Anselm’s ontological argument demonstrates the reality of God where he distinguishes the existence of God considering the term ‘most perfect conceivable being’ in the mind and in reality (qtd. in Neal 1) From this view to the most popular theistic arguments, there has been a series of efforts to strengthen the ground on the existence of God in reality. Taking the word ‘probable’ into consideration, it becomes impossible for the scholars to establish either the existence or the nonexistence of God by recognized and logical arguments based on universally accepted infrastructure. A lot of concepts and rational belief dig up their end in the very personal feelings and perceptions of one’s own. From the ancient time to today, people haven’t found any carriage except the ‘very understanding of self’ to reach the apex regarding this concern. When one is in danger or in complexities, s/he tries to hear the voice of his/her own and act accordingly. Bhagat’s easy-going narrative, where he apparently addresses a lot of tribulations of Indian new generation, leaves a theoretical frame by interpreting the spirit of one’s own as that of God.
While discussing the pragmatic arguments in the chapter “Belief in God,”Abdul Matin in the book An Outline of Philosophy, states that “the existence of God is proved by the fact that belief in God is highly useful in our life” (313).
Matin further argues:
Ideas are verified by their workability or practical satisfactoriness. The idea of God is a great source of satisfaction and effective stimulus to the struggle for noble living. The idea of God, therefore, works. Hence God exists. (314)
Religious scriptures and religious customs encompass the concept of God and His revelation. The way God and His features are presented, clarified and explained in the prevailing doctrine of religion is prominently dependent on some beliefs. Actually, the system human beings live in is two folded: one is physical body and the other is a kind of subconscious area of thought whose perception is only felt but cannot be described perfectly (many psychiatrists, philosophers have tried and are still trying to explain this in different ways). We feel that the thoughts and the sense come from somewhere ‘inside’ which we can realize only but cannot grasp the origin.
God is prominently remembered when one does not have anyone to rely on. While speaking deliverance from hardship by praying to God, people generally try to get closer to God by exploring God’s prevalence over human minds. So, when people look forward to God’s aid, they subconsciously look into their own minds. The ‘inner self’ is formed with the surroundings, thoughts, their core beliefs, and the environment they live in. The ‘spirit’ of one’s own is formed in such a way. Landau says that, “The knowledge of oneself is the knowledge of the world inside us and the road to truth and thus to God is shortest when we search for Him within ourselves” (291).
In Bhagat’s story, God doesn’t come in reply to the prayer of an ardent devotee. Rather He appears (through telephonic conversation) before a group of people who are indulged in pompous ways of life. Bhagat indicates that it is not religious customs or something like that but through spirit or deep meditation God can be attained. No prayer is as effective as the prayer when someone reaches to the face of death. But in the true sense, when one reaches to the dark end, he has to rely on the decision of his ‘own.’ Bhagat’s story suggests that if God really exists, He speaks at this stage. Whether this ‘own’ is ‘self’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ they work together and get unified as a distinct form. The ‘spirit’ which is felt at this stage and the long reliable ‘God’ have mixed up and emerged as unified source of solution and perhaps the best ever solution for a man’s life.
Being a student of IIT, Chetan Bhagat is presumed to be a man of science. His characters do not seem to go to temple or perform religious rites but surprisingly, his story is flavoured with God and the beginning, ending or even the segments of his story revolve round God. This is a sort of anti-foundational idea of exploring God. It is apparent that Bhagat is not the one who searches the indication of God in traditional and established manner. This is interesting to note that there is no ardent devotee, not a single indication of temple or religious customs but God is the ‘center’ of the story. What Bhagat has done is that he has made a relationship between materialistic way of life and manifestation of God. He shows that dress or way of life can’t be an obstacle to reach that superpower. Even for American transcendentalists the fundamental objection to the popular belief of the existing religion is that everyone does not need to go to the church or temple or mosque to feel the touch of God. Rather they emphasize on the principle that every individual is to be valued because everyone has a portion of the ‘oversoul’. This concept of ‘oversoul’ is directly linked with that of God in the sense that human souls and other souls must return to this soul after death.
As the outcome of excessive impact of capitalism and globalisation, the potential young men and women get attracted to the over-materialistic lives. Multinational companies and thousands of firms stretch out their big mouth to fill their appetite with them. Considering the present world, over-materialistic surroundings wipe out smoothness of one’s liberalism. Almost all the major characters in One Night at the Call Center suffer from such confinement of thoughts. This young generation suffers from ‘helplessness’ from all possible angles.
Here all the characters are covered with a kind of canopy which hides their real identity. Bhagat carefully depicts a wall between the inner intentions of Shyam, Vroom, Priyanka, Radhika or Esha and what they have to do in reality. Bhagat’s suggestion is to take off the shawl and try to find the ‘own’ of them. There should not be any wall between their inner-calling and their activities. The generation is fully obsessed with outward materialism. Their tendency of being focused leads them to a total destruction.
The novel starts with a significant nightmare of Shyam Mehra. The youths are pushed down in the darkness where there is no room of free-thinking just as Shyam is submerged in water by the hands of Bakshi. This ‘nightmare’ is the ‘nightmare’ of a generation out of self-judgment, self-assessment and self-exploration. In this ‘drowning’ situation, there can’t be any ‘rising of self’ or no ‘spirit’ can come into being as there are series of materialistic obstacles which hinder one’s ‘self’ from manifestation. Shyam is presented as an obedient employee who spends most of his innovative power to pay for Bakshi, his boss in the call center. He has already failed to survive in love. He doesn’t know what is in store for him for the future days but still waits for ‘a break’ gifted by Bakshi. Whatever the cause is, the world of Shyam is out of self-respect, self-control, self-realization, and self-confidence. Bhagat detects in Shyam a strong craving for ‘getting established in life’, which longs for two things: one, a spontaneous flow of love, and second, a liberated soul.
Vroom, as he dominates the novel at the last phase, plays an important role in the setting of the novel. In fact, he lives in extreme materialism. Vroom possesses a bold personality with sheer frustration at the personal as well as professional level. He doesn’t like what he is doing right now. Vroom says: “I want to have a life with meaning, even if it means a life without Bed or daily trips to Pizza-Hut. I need to quit this call center. Sorry, calling is not my calling” (205).
Radhika sacrifices her state of comfort for the sake of her in-laws’ family as she tries her best to convince them. At one stage, she comes to know that her husband cheats her. Though she leaves no stone unturned to retain her relationship with her husband & his family, nothing can make it stable. Esha’s thoughts always center round her career but she is not concerned about her ultimate goal. Her realization comes at the great sacrifice to life. Priyanka loses her ability of justifying herself for the excessive influence of her mother on her own life.
Just before beginning of the text, Bhagat asks his readers to write down something that they fear, makes them angry and they don’t like about themselves. He has not cleared the purpose of this exercise but any thoughtful reader smells the exploration of one’s ‘own self’ as it takes one to the deep down of one’s ‘own’ to some extent.
The fact why Bhagat feels intimate with the lifestyle and emotions of the modern young Indians is that his spirit springs from his own surroundings where he can share their feelings and emotions by closely observing them and by being one with them. Though Bhagat’s characters seem to be living amidst apparent sense of materialism, they experience different roles in their ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ They undergo a range of torments owing to the society they live in; they struggle for self construal; they desire directly or indirectly to break free to become ‘well thought of’ individuals. Bhagat deliberately shows his characters rebelling against the customs and pretensions that confine their individual freedom of picking up the meaning of life. An internal collision is manifested in the contradiction between their thoughts and actions, imposed sense of youth culture and nationalistic attitude, consequentiality and inconsequentiality.
Bhagat senses that the generation is highly obsessed with some imposed cultural traits of the west. Reminding the glorious history of Indian subcontinent, he calls upon Indian youth to rise above the level of this obsession. To ensure it, Bhagat depends on the spirit of the youth which is mainly derived from the individual spirit of the inner-self. At the last stage of the novel One Night at the Call Center, Vroom’s inspiring speech includes:
And then big companies come and convince us with their advertising to value crap we don’t need, do jobs we hate so that we can buy stuff—junk food, colored fizzy water, dumbass credit cards and overpriced shoes. They call it youth culture. Is this what they think youth is about? Two generations ago, the youth got this country free. Now that was something meaningful. But what happened after that? We have just been reduced to a high spending demographic. The only youth power they care about is our spending power. (226)
For this disaster-prone generation, Bhagat feels the necessity of a guide who, importantly, has to show the conduit of reaching their goal as his sense of optimism results from extreme pessimism. Bhagat rejects the self-revealed guides, therefore, doesn’t conceal his disgust over politicians:
All kinds of people—students, housewives, businessmen, employees and even film stars—commit suicide. But politicians never do. That tells you something. Suicide is a horrible thing and people do it only because they are really hurt. This means they feel something. But politicians don’t. So basically this country is run by people who don’t feel anything. (42)
Bhagat, tracing out no other way, brings God as He, according to the belief of billions of people, is the ultimate resolver. Bhagat’s art of depicting God is suggestively unique in the sense that He appears in a telephonic conversation and approaches one of the most desired queries of human beings-‘how to feel the existence of God’. The leading characters not only seem to be very frustrated at the beginning of the novel but also remain unconcerned about ‘what they actually want in their life.’ Though they seem to be smart enough to handle some white-coloured sensible individuals, they are as if they were floating in an aimless boat. They actually want to get rid of the clutches of materialistic outcome but what actually happens is that they cannot hear the inner voice, as Bhagat marks, the voice of God.
Bhagat emphasizes on ‘self-guiding’ with a sense of stability of thoughts and patience. So, one has to be guided by oneself. Our inner voice can instruct one to move forward and to lead a decent life as it is something which has the ability to guide one. Reality is structured with the way self-thought is proceeded on. Arberry says: “It is the thought that brings us. The thought of a garden brings us to the garden. The thought of a shop brings us to the shop” (13).
The spirit of one’s own links the idea of ‘self’ in many respects. The term ‘self’ has different layers of connotations of psychoanalysis. It links a convoluted fabric of psychic roaming of an individual who is shaped with multi-dimensioned physiological and socio-cultural strata. Critical study of ‘self’, most commonly, conceptualizes one’s own insightful realization and its projection always seems to be incomplete and dubious as there is an existence of self-accepting as well as self-defying inner configuration in every human being. As the source of cognizant acuity, one’s ‘own’ actually governs unique nature of his or her feelings and actions. In his book, Neurosis and Human growth, Horney refers to an instructive idea of ‘self’:
The actual self is an all inclusive term for everything that a person is at a given time: body and soul, healthy and neurotic. We have it in mind when we say that we want to know ourselves as we are. The idealized self is what we are in our irrational imagination, or what we should be according to the dictates of neurotic pride. The real self, which I have defined several times, is the “original” force toward individual growth and fulfillment, with which we may again achieve full identification when freed of the crippling shackles of neurosis. Hence it is what we refer to when we say that we want to find ourselves. (158)
Religious exemplification creates a notion that the existence of self in human beings helps them to work out even on the bits and pieces prevailing in the universe. One’s ‘self’ cannot step properly if he or she turns out to be a part of a group or becomes predisposed by the group directly or indirectly. It is just like as the situation when many of our friends speak at the same time, we don’t hear anyone’s voice clearly. As the characters in One night at Call Centre are influenced by the group, their steps are not proved right.
Self, which is often regarded as personal identity, surrounds the level and scale of consciousness that exists in one’s own. A series of recent studies have showed that self-awareness is such a level of one’s mental state which generates competence functions like carrying out recollection, dealing out speed and way of thinking. From the concept prevailing in The Geeta, Lord Krishna emerges as the transcendent structure of all stuffs and all immaterial individual selves as the one unifying absolute self. In the chapter “Spirit and Matter” of The Geeta, Lord Shrikrishna tells Arjuna: “The body of man is the play ground of the self; and That which knows the activities of Matter, sages call the self” (84). From this point of view, the concept of self-control, self-realization has been derived. Bhagat actually emphasizes on self-realisation which actually interlinks the ‘inner-voice’. True self-realisation comes with the help of God. While analyzing ‘self-control’ in The Geeta, Lord Shrikrishna further suggests that “Let him seek liberation by the help of his highest Self, and let him never disgrace his own Self. For the Self is his only friend” (42).
What needs to be pointed out is that the link between ‘immaterial’ and ‘self’ is very significant in the sense that material view limits the modern beings to take notice of any inner omen.
It would be a worthwhile study to find out how the concept ‘self-knowledge’ is embedded on a specific question ‘what am I like?’ As for psychology, the idea of ‘one’s own’ can be expounded with cognitive self, affective self and executive self. Self-thoughts or self- instructions are derivatives of one’s cognitive self and cognitive self is formed and guided by a mental framework governed by a superpower. Bhagat indicates this superpower as God. Landau in his God Is My Adventure puts forward:
Only through self-knowledge can we hope to understand the world as it actually is and not as it appears through the veils of our imagination. The Greeks with their distinctively spiritual consciousness clearly perceived the reason for that paramount truth. In their opinion, Only One Being exists always and fills eternity—that is God, who gives life to all things and who dwells within man. This is why Apollo says to his worshippers “Know thyself. (291)
At this point, the notion of ‘thyself’ points forward in many ways to the subject of many proceedings in the ‘inner-self.’ To hear the voice of God or to be instructed by inner-self, one has to exclude all the links of material obsessions so that the sound can become clear and unrestricted. Materialism, lack of commitment etc are the conspicuous obstacles of this journey. To pick out the guidance of God, we have to make our ‘own’ clear and transparent. God in One Night at the Call Center tells:
Yes, the little voice inside that wants to talk to you. But you can only hear it when you are at peace – and then too it is hard to hear it. Because in modern life, the networks are too busy. The voice tells you what you really want. Do you know what I am talking about? (203)
God continues:
And the voice is easy to ignore—because you are distracted or busy or just too comfortable in life. Go on, ignore it—until you get tangled in your own web of comfort. And then you reach a point like today, where life brings you to a dead end, and there is nothing ahead but a dark hole. (203)
Heideggar, one of the prominent German existentialists, indicates that one can understand his or her ‘own self’ when s/he comes very close to death. Paradoxically, Bhagat indicates the same path to hear the voice of one’s ‘inner self’. Even from before the time of ancient civilization, the efforts to uncover the confusions encircling the origin, existence, surviving, objective, destination of human beings have already been present within the developing of modern thoughts. The incomprehension also includes the mystery of shaping the body of human beings and their relationship in terms of life and the world. Lack of transparent evidence leads to the dissatisfaction regarding human beings’ thirst for knowledge. Ultimately, people don’t have any choice exploring such questions except depending on his or her deep inner-feelings. Correspondingly, God’s revelation or His instruction can only be sensed through the profound inner-feelings, not by customs or rituals.
The demand for the fulfillment of human necessities derives from the instinctiveimpulses and strong desires. Bhagat clearly shows that if one can successfully understand himself, he/she can get the meaning of life. For Bhagat the desired tone of the story is generated through the voice of God as He tells: “Knowing what you want is already a great start” (206).
Bhagat’s narrative development circles the sense of mystery and the notion of deep morality. At the beginning, he starts the story-telling with dimness and ends with a deep moral note. The identification of the girl, who co-ordinates the story, remains undisclosed until the last phase of the story. The way Bhagat brings God as a character in the novel and makes use of language to weave the string of the story and deals with psychological shape of the characters clearly expresses his assessment of rejecting excessiveness of customs and values than the real beliefs on God Himself. In One Night at the Call Center, God appears more as an instructor than as an expected figure.
‘God’ as a live character in the fictional work is always a challenging task considering His dialogues and the way of movement as it appears as the most sensitive issue to most of the readers. The concept of God as well as religion encircles some particular beliefs of the people. So putting dialogues in God’s mouth in the novel is quite difficult to consider. However, Bhagat seems to be willing to take this risk.
The concept of God is always linked with the sense of believing the soul. The relation between God and human beings is always marked with the understanding of soul. In Transcendence and Self-Transcendence on God and the Soul, Westphal opines:
Long before either modernity or postmodernity, the believing soul has understood the God relation as a call to abandon the project of being the alpha and omega of its own existence.(5)
Materialistic attitude and passion for wealth make an essential luxury in the very core of human being which moves one far away from self-understanding.
Rumi said:
It is all because of your lofty spiritual aspirations. The higher and greater your rank and the more you become occupied with important, exalted worldly affairs, the more you consider yourself to have fallen short of your spiritual purpose. You are not satisfied with what you have achieved thinking that you have too many obligations. (Arberry 34)
The ending of the novel imparts a complete sense of mystery circling round the essence of God and His existence. The narrative development of the novel gets its ending with a symbolical image of the girl who progresses this ‘breath-taking’ story and sets the focus of the narrator on a few lines on the page that lay open.
Always think of Me, become my devotee, worship Me and offer your homage unto Me. Thus you will come to Me without fail. I promise you this because you are My very dear friend. (257)
The girl telling the story at the outset of the novel is not identified by the author in any part of the book. This is one piece of ambiguity the readers come across in the novel. Bhagat’s idea leaves a controversy in the sense that the idea of God residing in the minds of humans is not a universally granted notion. Lots of people uphold this thought while a huge portion of people across the world don’t believe in anything like this.
If one asks the question— whether the spirit of one’s own can unravel all the toil and sorrow of human life— the answer must be in terms of perfect realization in an unambiguous situation to justify all that has happened on the way to it. One has to rise above the level of all sorts of material obsessions and meaningless roaming for ensuring the absolute indication of the ‘self.’ To realize this fact is not by any means to be in possession of ethical concepts or religious customs but of a deep meditation. In the course of examining the characters in One Night at Call Center, Bhagat stresses on detecting the instruction of God through sensing one’s absolute ‘self.’ His claim is that this spirit renders manifestly worthwhile all the pain and travail of the long journey of human life. It helps an individual to make himself or herself free from inner-segmentation, inner-segregation, to be confident and to feel the heart’s content about taking decision.
Works Cited
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Landau, Rom. God Is My Adventure. London: Faber and Faber, 1942. Print.
Matin, Abdul. An Outline of Philosophy. Dhaka: Adhuna Prakashan, 2006. Print.
Neal, Gregory S. “Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Existence of God.”
www.Revneal.org.N.p.n.d.Web. 15 January 2015.
Rumi. Discourses of Rumi. Trans. A.J. Arberry. Iowa: Omphaloskepisy, 2007. Print.
Swami, Purohit. The Geeta: the Gospel of the Lord Shri Krishna. London: Faber and Faber, Print.
Westphal, Merold. Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and The Soul. Bloomington.
Indiana University Press, 2004. Print.