12 Years: My Messed Up Love Story by Chetan Bhagat
So, Chaitan Bhagat has come up with a romance novel after a while now. People have been curious, to say the least. When the PR team came up with this whole package of selling the book with age-gap romance as its front and centerpiece, yeah, we had our problems. The way they were positioning the book was, I would say, not in the right taste of how to handle this nuanced topic.
As a reader community, we have changed a lot. We have embraced a lot of sensitive topics in romance. We now read about age-gap romance by white authors and other authors. We do accept second-chance romance after marriage, single-dad tropes, dark romances — we read all of that. So, it’s fair to say this is not out of the scope of what people read now.
But since it is very sensitive and since the girl here, the FMC, is 21 and the guy is 33 — yeah, that’s what’s causing most of the uncomfortable feeling readers are having. For me personally, the moment I started reading it, I felt scared by the MMC. This guy gave me creepy vibes right from page one. And by page 70, they were in bed. That wasn’t even after their first proper date — he just tried it with her.
So, there was this red flag that went off for me right from page 70. This is a 400+ page book, and I don’t know what the hell they’re doing all this time. But let me gather my thoughts and start from the beginning.
Objectively talking about it, let’s start with the story. The story is about Pile, Pile By Jane, whose whole personality is that she’s Jain. She’s 21, has cracked the private equity job market, and has a great job at Blackwater Company. She meets Sake, a 33-year-old divorced Punjabi from Silicon Valley who had to give half his wealth to his wife due to alimony and divorce settlements. He’s trying out stand-up comedy, and in the comedy club on his first show, he meets Pile during a crowdwork session.
They meet, and instantly he is attracted to her. It’s not that he doesn’t know how old she is — he finds out very early that she’s really young. But he still falls for her, pursues her, gets her phone number, messages her, and tries to go out with her. It’s not even after months of interaction that they reach that stage — it’s just after a few conversations and text messages that they go on a dinner date and end up in bed together.
I can justify the actions of the female main character because she’s 21 — she doesn’t know better. But the guy is just the worst character you can write. I’ve read a lot of books with morally gray main characters who you’re not meant to like, but that’s the intent. Here, this guy is supposed to be the hero of the book — the one we’re supposed to like. But he’s written so poorly that it doesn’t come out right.
So, instantly, you don’t like the guy. And when you have to follow the monologue of a guy you don’t like for 400 pages, it is not a good time. There’s just one portion in the end where you hear Pile’s POV, but even that is hard to sit through. She’s so naive, and nothing justifies their actions. They don’t feel like real people — it’s still very cinematic, like what you’d expect in a Bollywood movie.
Clearly, it was intended to be a movie script — it has all the ingredients: a supportive friend for the main character, a toxic friend for the girl, overbearing parents from the Jain community, and multiple glamorous locations — Mumbai, the US, Paris, Dubai. It has the perfect recipe for a poorly executed Bollywood movie.
If that was the goal, well done. But otherwise, you’re not going to enjoy this. If you’ve fallen in love with reading again and have been consuming books by newer authors, you’ll wonder why this guy writes like the audience is only 18 years old.
There’s no meaning in how the guy goes through life — no metaphors or allegory. It’s just 400 pages of dialogue, with no prose or depth. The writing is plain and amateurish, as if the reader can’t handle complex vocabulary. Again, that might be a stylistic choice, but for a 33-year-old protagonist and an adult audience, it doesn’t fit.
About the characters — we have Palak, Palak’s friend Akanga, Sake’s friend Mudit, and Pile’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jane. Then we have a few sugar babies later when our main guy turns 40 and decides to become a sugar daddy.
There are going to be spoilers here. When the main guy turns 40, his dating life includes sugar babies who are 20–24 years old. So the guy still has a thing for young girls. The characters are two-dimensional. We barely know what Pile looks like — fair, maybe straight hair, traditional clothes or pantsuits. Sake is a six-pack guy in middle age. That’s all.
They don’t grow as characters. Pile maybe grows a little because she’s naive and immature. There’s a fiancĂ© named Pimal who has the emotional maturity of a cartoon — clearly written to make the breakup inevitable.
The plot is not new. You can name at least three Bollywood movies with the same plot — guy and girl fall in love, parents find out, convince the girl not to marry him, she marries someone else, moves abroad, it doesn’t work out, she divorces, comes back, and realizes he was her true love all along. That’s the plot.
In between, there are pages of business negotiations, company acquisitions, ESOP dilution — none of which add to the story. It feels like filler. The writing style is still the same as Bhagat’s Revolution 2020. It’s not smart writing — it’s about a man’s shallow inner monologue. He slanders the girl constantly, and you know he doesn’t respect her.
There’s a line early on: “Mumbai is a vibrant city full of options. However, it offers limited choices when it comes to committing suicide…” That’s how the book opens. And surprise, the main character is an IIT graduate — again.
The number of times the author mentions “onion and garlic” to remind us that the girl is Jain is excessive. Every five pages, it’s repeated. The guy calls the girl he loves “bored” so many times — if that’s not a red flag, I don’t know what is.
The book tries to justify that he’s not grooming her, but then he becomes a sugar daddy at 45, still chasing young girls. So, overall, this was not an age-gap romance handled well. It actually endorses problematic characters we don’t need in mass media.
If this ever gets made into a movie, I hope they change the girl’s age to a more mature one. Because portraying a 21-year-old girl romantically involved with a 33-year-old man who grooms her unknowingly and romanticizing it is not good. Media influences people, and this could easily influence them the wrong way.
So that’s my opinion on 12 Years by Chaitan Bhagat. I’m definitely going to give away my copy. If you were thinking about reading it, and after listening to everything I’ve said you still want to, go ahead. If not, you can thank me later.
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