Five Point Some One - What not to do at IIT - ***

Ok! So by now all of us have watched the movie "3 Idiots", haven't we? and most of us are in love with the movie and how well Amir Khan and Company have portrayed the life of an Engineering Student. But do we know that the story of "3 idiots" resembles alot with a novel named "Five Point Someone" written by Chetan Bhagat in 2004, an alumnus of IIT himself?

I happened to get my hands on this novel by chance, and after reading the first few pages I was pretty sure of the similarities between the novel and the recent Indian Blockbuster "3 Idiots". So I thought of dropping the novel as I had already seen the movie more than once, but then there were some variations between the two and curiosity made me read this novel to the very end.

The plot of this novel is based on 3 freshies in IIT (India's Premier Engineering Institute) Hari (the narrator of the story), Alok (the pessimist poor boy with paralyzed father and unmarried sister) and Ryan (the smart, handsome & creative boy). These 3 friends stick with each other through thick and thin, suck at exams and get GPA's around 5 out of 10, and thus get the name of Five Point Someones, ones who enter the system but do not belong to it. Rest of the plot you people know already.

So now let's come to the interesting part, the variations between "Five Point Someone" & "3-Idiots";

• Hari, who is hardly handsome and narrating the story, gets the chick (Neha, Daughter of Dean of Mechanical Engineering) and not the smart/creative Ryan.
  
  
• Alok, the poor fatso, is the artist in "Five Point Some One" not the narrator, as in the movie.
  
  
• Neha has both parents, no elder sister, she kisses Hari before the climax and there are no vacuum pulled babies (Thank God for that!)
  
  
• Venkat the crammer (The infamous Chattur in "3 Idiots") does not return to IIT to see who is more successful in life.

In other words, while watching the movie all the scenes that you didn't like and felt unreal to you were never a part of "Five Point Someone" and were included only to add the "Bollywood Masala". The producer of "3 Idiots" Vidhu Vinod Chopra claims that there is not even 10 % similarity in "Five Point Someone" and "3 Idiots". I strongly suggest to go through this entertaining novel and see for yourself if there is any similarity in the Super hit novel and the Super hit movie.