October is a good time of the year. For Chetan Bhagat, in particular. Around this time in 2005, he released his second novel, One Night @ A Call Centre. And as its turns out, it'''s that month of the year again, when the soft-spoken author is out with its big screen version, Hello, where he's credited for the story, screenplay and dialogues.

Its urban premise circled around the call centre milieu, about six distinctive individuals, caught in a moment of divine intervention was a hot-selling success, a topic of widespread blog discussions and arguably the longest toast in the season of Indian fiction in English.

Now I haven't read the book, not all of it anyway, but I was most curious about its cinematic adaptation. For one, it's a healthy trend, in my opinion. Rather than steal scripts from outsourced DVDs, it is far more exciting and challenging for a filmmaker to interpret someone else's free-flowing, published imagination while giving it a sprinkling of his own personality without tampering the original source.

Director Atul Agnihotri is certainly no pioneer of this movement.

Previously too, filmmakers like Bimal Roy, Vijay Anand, Pamela Rooks, Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi, Mira Nair and Dev Benegal, to name a few, have revisited classics like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas,  R K Narayan's The Guide, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan , Amrita Pritam's Pinjar, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August respectively, for celluloid inspiration.

What distinguishes the former IITian from the afore-mentioned luminaries is his everyman sensibility and fancy-free penmanship.

Sadly, this is the one thing Agnihotri doesn't fully convey in his second directorial venture since -- Dil Ne Jise Apna Kaha. Obviously, he's a great fan of the book, but the chemistry between him and writer doesn't translate into a memorable movie.  

Having said that, Hello isn't half bad. It's just a tad too filmi. I would have gone with surreal what with God playing an important kahani mein twist and all.

For one, what's with the wardrobe, guys? Leopard print leggings, micro minis, patch-work jeans, camisole-revealing shirts, it's got Bollywood wannabe written all over it.

Again, take a look at this guy Shyam (Sharman Joshi). One minute he's all kicked about starting life on a refreshing, new note, even rejecting the object of his constant fascination (Gul Panag) when she promptly goes down on her knee to propose, taking off one of her diamond earring to do the needful. After she storms out in humiliation, Mr Indecisive goes crazy in h