Random House buys One Night rights

Chetan Bhagat should've had call centre industry executives running after him "" to wring his neck. Instead, he had foreign publishers after him, for the global publishing rights to his novel, One Night @ the Call Center, India's (or is it the world's?) first fictional account of a love life set amidst the call-centre craze.

Well, the running's over: Random House, UK, has snapped up the rights to the book that first hit bookstores in India back in October 2005, published by Rupa & Co.

Advertised on TV with catchy straplines (and with hints of much steamy prose), the initial print run of 50,000 copies sold out in less than a week; sales in India ran into a couple of lakh copies in just two months.

The book will be published in the UK in March 2007 under the Black Swan imprint. Back home, the book is to be turned into a Hindi film. Plus, expect Marathi, Hindi and Bengali translations soon.

Whether the book will sell in America, young India's relationship with which is part of the book's plot, is yet unclear, however.