21st Century Indian Youth: Impressions of Daniel Goleman’s domain of Self Awareness and Chetan Bhagat Traits in his Novels

Abstract

The recent emergence of Emotional Intelligence as a subject has involved scientists, academicians, psychologists and philosophers to explain their findings through various theories. Though Wechsler, Thorndike have written on social intelligence in the first half of the 20^th century, the most popular and widely accepted model of Emotional Intelligence has been proposed by the former Harvard University professor, Daniel Goleman. Among all the theories on EI, Goleman’ s theory covers both the personal and social competencies of an individual. This theory includes five main competencies which also comprise of sub competencies. The first competency, self-awareness relates to the ability of an individual to recognize a feeling like anger. This competency includes the abilities of emotional awareness, self-assessment and self-confidence. This article focuses on Chetan Bhagat’s portrayal of youth in his novels with the impressions of Daniel Goleman’s first domain of Self Awareness. It also throws light on the three traits Bhagat tries to bring out through his characters in the novels. Chetan Bhagat’s novels have known to shake Indian sensibility, by giving interesting bits of knowledge as a result of diving into the regularly changing ideal models of human conditions that think that it’s trapped in the labyrinth of affection, corruption and desire. It has been rightly observed that while children constitute the future of the country, youth constitutes its present.