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The spelling mistakes are on purpose
Broken English On Purpose
The book is first-person, so the boy's thoughts are on the page too. On his first day at St. Stephen's College, he thinks and talks in broken English. As he learns English, the language improves. What looks like a spelling error is being authentic to the character.
Editing Intentional Errors
Seven editors with decades of experience sit on Chetan Bhagat's books at his publishers, most recently HarperCollins. It is their biggest book of the year, a genuine error would land on the editor, and the editor would get yelled at by the boss. So his books are hard to edit, because sometimes the mistakes are intentional.
A Mirror To Society
Indians do not speak in correct grammatical order. What is your good name is not proper English, and it is the English of the masses. The books hold a mirror to society and are not an English grammar book. And no English teacher has ever written a bestseller.
How do novelists write dialect on purpose?
Authors have used deliberate misspelling to build character for a long time. Mark Twain opened Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a note saying its several dialects had been used with painstaking care and not by guesswork. Irvine Welsh wrote Trainspotting in Scots dialect, with spelling bent to match the sound of the speech.
How does fiction show a narrator learning?
Daniel Keyes's 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon is told through progress reports written by Charlie Gordon, a man with an intellectual disability who undergoes an experimental surgery. The early reports are full of misspellings and missing punctuation. As his intelligence rises, the spelling and grammar correct themselves, and they decay again when the effect fades.
Why is English in India so varied?
English arrived with British rule and stayed as a language of administration, education, and law after 1947. Under the Official Languages Act of 1963, English continued as an associate official language alongside Hindi. Speakers blend it with local grammar and vocabulary, producing forms such as prepone, which Indian English uses for moving an event earlier. In 2017 the Oxford English Dictionary added many words from Indian English.
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