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| Ratika and Omair longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize |
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| 24th July 2009 |
Ratika Kapur, debut novelist and wife to myself, has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009 for her debut novel Overwinter. Also, my friend Omair, author of The Storyteller's Tale has been longlisted for his manuscript Jimmy the Terrorist. Wait for these two upcoming books. I promise you, you won't be disappointed. |
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| The storyteller's tale |
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| 13th February 2009 |
| Omair Ahmed's new book is in the stores now. I'm going to get my copy today. Watch this space. |
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| Pages from The Failure Handbook |
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| 14th September 2008 |
So here's a brief primer on what to do when your book has not won an
award it was shortlisted for. The first thing, when the winner's name
is announced, is to put on your least fake happy face and raise your
hands where the entire room can see them. Clap. The second thing is to
reach into your pocket and make sure that the acceptance speech you
had hurriedly scribbled that afternoon is still in your pocket, and
push it further in so that it doesn't fall out to be picked up
later. By the time you've done this your close friends will have
turned to you and inquired if you're okay. It's normally difficult to
have something witty ready for this unless you're one of those people
who prepares for failure, or one of those Kipling-inspired folks who
can actually treat those two imposters, failure and success, just the
same. So say something lame, like "maybe next time" or "it's okay, I
knew I wouldn't win". The judge who announced the winning book's name
is now listing its qualities. You will probably take each strength of
the winner, invert it and take it as an implicit weakness of your own
book, but if denial is your strong suit, conclude that one of the
other losing books has this particular shortcoming. Ensure that you
accept at least one of the strengths of the winner as your own
weakness. Not doing so might cause your denial mechanism to collapse
altogether.
Now comes the hard part, or the easy part: please join us for
cocktails. The wine might taste a little vinegary, the kathi rolls too
spicy, and the dessert not chocolaty enough. If you're lucky, one of
the judges might come up to you and privately whisper that they liked
your book in an attempt to make you feel less disheartened. If you
aren't that fortunate, the judges will either avoid you or just smile
when you pass by on the way to or from the snacks. Don't throw the
wine in their face, unless it's really vinegary.
Line up for the photo-op with good humour. Try not to be irritated
when the winner is delayed by a mob of autograph-seekers and
hand-pumpers. When the photo is finally taken, congratulate the winner
with a broad smile. Don't strain your cheek muscles too much; the last
thing you need right now is an aching jawbone.
The evening will finally end. You will return to the guesthouse and
begin to reflect on the nature of awards, and of writing. I don't
write for awards, you will tell yourself. I write because I must. I
write because I love language. But still, you will find yourself
thinking, it's good to get a little recognition. I don't think they
get my book, they don't really really get it. It will be quiet in the
room, just the soothing clatter of a fan overhead, and you will
perhaps fish out your acceptance speech from your pocket. You will
find yourself thanking quietly the people you were hoping to thank in
public, you will feel love for them that is perhaps stronger than you
might have felt if you were saying their names out in front of a
crowded room. You will feel again the power of the lessons you have
learned along this hard way. And as you are remembering everything
that this writer's life has brought to you, sleep will come and it
will be peaceful and dreamless.
The next day you will call the organizers on your way to the airport
and thank them profusely, and you will mean it. When you finally make
it to security check, the scanner will find a metal feather--the
memento the organizers thought fit to give you--and your bag will be
put to the side. The khaki-wearer will ask you what it's for. You'll
tell him that it's for a novel you wrote. He will then look up at you
and say: 'Aap Ekta Kapoor ko jaante hain?' You'll admit that you
haven't met her but suspect that you might somewhere done the
line. 'Kya aap unse sahmat hain?' he'll ask. You'll look at his face
and find the right answer: absolutely not. "Ye sab saas-bahu aur
machine gun. Is se ladies par psychological effect padta hai. Yeh
theek hai kya?" You will shake your head no. "Aap kuch kar rahe hain
iska?" Me? you will think. "Ek vakt ka khana miss ho jaye, serial
nahin miss hona chahiye. Mein bhugat raha hoon, na." Then he will
pause and again say: "Aap kuch kar rahe hain iske baare main?" Here's
someone who sees literature as something bigger than reviews and
awards and advances on royalty, you will think, someone who sees
writing as something that can solve his domestic problems. "I write
things the way they should be written," you will say, "and readers can
judge for themselves what is better." He will consider this for a
moment and then say: "Isse kuch nahin hoga."
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 14th September 2008. |
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| Is it all about the money? |
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| 10th August 2008 |
A bestselling author, let's call her Ms X, is out browsing furniture
when she comes across a gorgeous black leather armchair. She
flops down on it, immediately feeling her body being nurtured in its
sturdy, comfortable warmth. The salesperson smiles indulgently:
``That's forty thousand rupees.'' She stands up like she's been poked
with a cattle prod. Later relating this story to a colleague at his
house she delivers the punchline. The colleague and his wife laugh,
but a sister-in-law who is visiting them from Seattle is
puzzled. ``Aren't you a bestselling author?'' she asks.
Let us back up a little. Ms X spent about a year and a half writing
her novel. Of this the first six months she was working, then
realizing it wasn't possible to commute and work and look after the
house and write, she sat down with her supportive but not high-earning
husband and they decided she must quit her job. With the long-term
investment payments to be made and the car loans still trickling out,
it will be a tight situation, but for one year we can do it. All goes
as planned and one year later a manuscript is ready. They heave a sigh
of relief, she goes back to work, and they start making the rounds of
publishers. This isn't a horror story, so within nine months of
finishing the manuscript a contract is signed. This is fiction, so nine
months from the contract being signed the book is in the stores, three
years after she began. This is a fairy tale, and so her book becomes a
``bestseller.'' This means that she sells about 10,000 copies, each
of which is priced at Rs 200, of which she gets 10 per cent. In other
words, she makes a neat Rs 2 lakh, apart from having her picture in
the newspaper and people calling her for quotes every time Salman
Rushdie takes a new girlfriend. The slight problem is that the
publisher makes payments only once a year and her book just happened
to come out in June so she won't get any money till one year later
when it will be paid with tax deducted. So here is Ms X, the queen of
2008's literary scene, one lakh eighty thousand rupees to show for
four years of waiting. People keep asking her about her second book
now, and she says that she's finding it hard to write with the home
and the kid (yes, that's happened in these four years) and if she
could only quit her job she would be able to write full time. Why
don't you quit your job, they say. I can't afford it, she replies. How
come, they ask. Aren't you a bestselling author?
Ms X wants her book to be published overseas. That's the only way to
make real money. A 10,000 dollar advance from a US publisher, or 5000
pounds or 6500 euros, would be almost a year's salary. She could
write. She could spend more time with the baby. But the agents take
months to reply (which is odd because every so often she reads of how
so-and-so was picked up by some big-name agent who flew specially to
Coimbatore or Imphal to meet her.) When they do reply they talk about
how they liked the book a lot but how American/French/Dutch audiences
would find it hard to relate to. She remembers the time, now almost
five years ago, when she made a principled decision to write a book
without any glossary or words in italics, a book which would be an
arrow aimed at the heart of an Indian English-speaking
audience. Dragging herself back to her keyboard she writes a reply to
the agent, talking about how Stenbeck is read all over the world
despite being quintessentially American, as is Faulkner. The universal
comes out of how people deal with their specific, she writes. Then she
deletes everything, writing instead a polite email thanking the agent
for appreciating her potential and assuring him, as she has assured
three others, that she will share her next manuscript with him.
Getting up from her desk she sinks into her sofa and thinks about how
much she used to despise writers who wrote books for Western
audiences. But suddenly she no longer sees it as a despicable act. She
sees those writers, sitting alone at their desks, wondering how they
can take the turmoil that is within them and bring it to
publication. They all want a little success, that little money that
can buy them that little time they need to go to their laptops and
write. It doesn't seem like too much to ask, she thinks. Then her eye
falls on the thinning upholstery on the sofa's arm and she thinks of
how leather furniture is so much easier to maintain.
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 10th August 2008 under the title It's all about the money. |
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| The secret of writing revealed |
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| 19th July 2008 |
From an interview of Paul Schrader in the Hindustan Times by Praveen Donthi
"What you can do is reach deep into yourself, pull out something unique and meaningful to you, then take that raw material and make that into a screenplay.”
and also this:His approach to screen writing is this: the most important thing is identifying the problem. Then finding a metaphor that’s not too close to the problem holds the key. Succinct and true. Only a screenwriter could boil it down to basics this way. |
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| The Indian campus novel |
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| 13th July 2008 |
There is probably a memo floating around the offices of one of the bookstore chains right now suggesting that a sign proclaiming ``Indian Fiction: Campus Novels'' be affixed atop a suitably chosen shelf somewhere near the front of the store. Right on top of this shelf, the memo possibly continues, will be placed twenty-five copies of Five Point Someone, next to which will be displayed ten copies each of Chetan Bhagat's other two books (that aren't set on campuses, but, yaar, he is identified with college fiction.) The remaining few IIT books will be represented by a copy each on the flanks. Below this will be three IIM shelves. At the bottom will be space for books about medical colleges, fashion design institutes, army training institutions, design schools, dentistry polytechnics and radical leftist campuses. Novels set in degree colleges and otherwise unremarkable universities will be displayed here only if they have some interesting angle, like if the narrator is from the North-East or is a lesbian. If this shelf is not entirely filled in the next six to eight months, it can be used to accommodate some of the overflow from the IIM shelves.
Why are all these people writing campus novels, yaar? That's me, not the memo. You can ask the other question: why are people reading these books? Interviewers do, and authors respond fatuously: ``They want to relive their college days''; ``they want to know what college is like before they get there''; ``they want to see if their own college experience is anything like what it used to be.'' Yawn, yaar. It makes much more sense to ask why these books are being written in the first place.
Debut novels (and most of these college novels are debut novels) are often an exercise in locating the writer's self. The setting of the book provides an important clue to where the writer was formed and, more broadly, from where a generation or a class of people are deriving their notion of identity. And the notion of identity I am thinking about here is not a bag of cultural identifiers--that's a red herring at best and plain incorrect at worst. Identity is the set of questions whose answers we will seek all our lives.
The protagonist could be Bibhutibhushan's Apu, unable to choose between the nature-suffused beauty of Nischindipur and the grey urbaneness of Calcutta. Or it could be Jack Kerouac's narrator, unable to do anything with his appetite but express it in broad gasoline-drenched brush strokes. Or it could be Upamanyu Chatterjee's August, unable to comprehend the India outside of the city and bewildered at having to make terms with it. These early works are just some examples of a formative trope that is the making of the writer, that forces--or allows--a person to become a writer. And a sensitive reading of these works can lead you to those important questions, those unresolvable dilemmas that lie at the heart of their writing and, we can conjecture, at the heart of their lives.
But, yaar, what has all this to do with a bunch of chalu page-turners written by people who believe that the best way to capture campus slang is by using the word yaar liberally? Everything. These authors aren't writing about how they grew up in Malviya Nagar or Mulund; they aren't writing about how their village had only one handpump and no swasthya kendra; they aren't writing about how their parents trekked over the border from Pakistan and camped for days at India Gate. They're writing about the places where they were taught how to be citizens of a global economy. They're writing about how they learnt to want the things that citizens of a global economy want.
These people may have come to IIT or IIM from many different places, but they were being groomed to plug themselves into the same three or four, at most five, different professional sockets. To be a banker or a consultant or a civil servant or, for that matter, a professor you need to acquire certain life skills, and you need to unlearn some other things. And that tension between what you once were and what you need to become to survive in urban India circa 2008 is the aloo in the samosa that is the urban Indian campus novel circa 2008.
But I don't think these writers were thinking sociology when they thought of writing their books. I know I wasn't. When I set out to write my own little piece of this puzzle all I was looking for was a compelling story. But I was looking in solitude, far from my eventual audience, far from the notion of an audience. So I chose the story that compelled me. In that pre-Chetan Bhagat era I often wondered why anyone would care about some kids running around moping about what appeared by all accounts to be already successful lives. Finally I wrote the book not because I thought someone else would care. I wrote it because I cared.
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 13th July 2008. |
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| C of P |
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| 10th June 2008 |
I sat with the writer Mukul Kesavan out on his lawn on a winter evening and talked about the scene in The Shadow Lines where the narrator opens his atlas, places the point of his compass on Khulna and the pencil end on Srinagar, and draws a large circle. The novel revolves around a riot that occurred at the centre of this circle caused by the disappearance of a relic of the prophet at its periphery; a forgotten riot that happened many years before the rusty compass came out of the drawer. The narrator's uncle, Amitav Ghosh's most compelling character Tridib, died in it. And as the narrator draws the circle, there is an incantation of names: Rann of Kutch, Kandy, Phnom Penh, Hue, Chunking, Inner Mongolia. "It was a remarkable circle," the narrator says. "More than half of mankind must have fallen within it.'' The narrator dwells on the "tidy ordering of Euclidean space'', on the fact that the happenings on some points of the circle could lead to mayhem and death at the centre, while other points in the circle lived on unaffected. He talks of his perplexity at the current of emotion that flows so directedly, and destructively, in such narrow channels. We are a people at war with ourselves, he concludes, a people who have forgotten that we are people, people who have become nothing but states and nations.
It's an incredible scene, I told Mukul, with the nerdish excitement that often erupts in conversations with fellow nerds. And he pulls it off, said Mukul, making me suddenly aware--many years after I first read the scene, some time after I had poked fun at it in my own novel --of the risk involved in writing something so earnest and heartfelt.
That compass is a particularly poignant lens to look through. It is found conveniently lying at the back of a drawer "forgotten'' there by the previous occupant. Perhaps Ghosh's narrator does not want to admit that a grown up man who can make sweeping and important conclusions from old newspapers found in the Teen Murti archive, is still enough of a Bengali schoolboy to own a compass. It reveals something important, that compass, about the place from which the world is being surveyed, and about the person doing the surveying. When you think about that compass long enough, you begin to see that research student's hostel room, somewhere up north near Delhi University; you see the whitewashed walls and the tubelight, the crowded desk, the mosquito coil on its stand near the bed, and you see a young man bent over a map, trying to make sense of the past in an effort to deal with the present. Even if you had not read the interviews and the essays in which Ghosh has talked about how writing The Shadow Lines was his way of coming to terms with his experiences during the 1984 riots, when you think about that compass hard enough you begin to see that this novel of Calcutta and Dhaka and London reflects the way our subcontinent's traumas have been filtered through the consciousness of those who have lived and studied in Delhi. The Shadow Lines is, in some fundamental way, a novel of Delhi.
Reading Philip Roth made me want to be a writer, but it was reading The Shadow Lines that gave me permission to write. I know this now and perhaps I knew it intuitively back in 1994--when I first laid hands on The Shadow Lines six years after it was first published--that there was a thread of wonder and joy at the vastness of the world that ran through Ghosh's work. It may have been an inheritance from the likes of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyaya or Tagore. And to the
insatiable and wonderful curiosity of his forbears Ghosh had added a powerfully contemporary and equally beautiful awareness of a shared pain; the thing Iqbal was talking of when he ended his celebrated and celebratory taraana-e-hindi by saying "Iqbal koi mehram apna nahin jahaan mein / maalum kya kisi ko dard-e-nihaan hamara'' (Iqbal, we have no confidant in this world / who knows the pain we hide inside.) I don't think it was just me. I suspect that back in the nineties there was more than one young Indian person who was seduced by that combination of pain and wonder, who thought after reading The Shadow Lines that there was nothing better you could do in this world than to be a writer.
It's been twenty years since The Shadow Lines was first published, in simple elegant hardback by Ravi Dayal. In these twenty years Ghosh has continued to write books that are true to that pain and that wonder. And as we celebrate the coming of Sea of Poppies this month, I cannot help but think of the time when Amitav Ghosh first put his compass down and drew me--and Mukul, and the winter evening we spent together out on Mukul's lawn, and my city, and this subcontinent, and the suffering of each and every person who has ever lived--into his arc.
This piece first appeared under the title Circle of Life in Brunch on Sunday, 8th June 2008. |
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| Going back, going in |
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| 13th April 2008 |
The newspapers are buzzing with big literary news nowadays. One big book after another, spaced as carefully apart as a Shah Rukh starrer from an Aamir Khan film, is hitting the papers. Books that must and will be talked about. In such a time it seems contrary to return to old books, but sometimes contrary is the better way to be.
I've been writing in Hindustan Times' Sunday supplement Brunch, a column called Simply Read that is to appear on the second Sunday of each month. The third edition, a piece on Ruskin Bond's Adventures of Rusty (it began as a blog post here some time ago) appeared today. Go out and get a copy of HT and read it. Or wait a few days and I'll post it in the other writings section of the website. For now that section has two of the pieces I wrote for Brunch, one they published in February and one they didn't publish in March (because it was too "main paper.") |
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| The great Indian book tour part four |
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| 13th February 2008 |
The Chennai reading was followed by an intelligent discussion. The perpetrator of this outrage was Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, lecturer in politics and law at Southampton University who is currently guest lecturer at the Asian College of Journalism. Arvind decided to read Above Average from a sociological point of view and raised critical questions about the idea of masculinity raised in the book. It was so refreshing, so surprising, that I was caught unawares. I realized that over the last year since the book has come out I have spent so much time fending off inane questions about "campus novels" and "IIT novels" that I have almost forgotten the questions that drew me into the writing in the first place.
Arvind was particularly interested in talking about the gradual growth of Arindam's self-awareness. He found that very interesting and apt and was not fully convinced, I think, that I had done that deliberately. I had to confess that I hadn't planned it in the beginning but, once I was aware that it was happening, had taken it on wholeheartedly.
The audience rose to challenge. After I talked about how the character of Kanitkar framed a critique of the way professors in India often talk down to students, one person asked me how I was different as a professor. That was a hard question and I tried to answer it by saying that I try never to insult a student or tell them they're stupid. I think this is pretty much true but every day of every semester is an opportunity to slip up on this count, and I can't say for sure that I haven't slipped up in these last three years.
There was a lively discussion of ragging, sexual harassment, men and women in India. I tried to make the point that a genuine engagement with those issues involves trying to understand the development of a person who thinks it is okay to grope a woman in public. Above Average doesn't set out to do that, but it does try to explore the development of men in India, and so, to my mind, is part of that effort.
I left the Nungambakkam Landmark store wishing my book got more readers like Arvind, and that I could do more readings in places where people aren't too lazy to think, where people are willing to look part personalities and personas and engage with ideas. |
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| Happy Kumar |
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| 14th November 2007 |
There's nothing worse than loving your job says a clever commercial for a job portal. In this ad film we meet Happy Kumar. Happy signifies his contentment by going through his morning routine with an imbecilic expression on his face. His taxi driver looks a little zoned out, the liftman appears resigned. The paper boy (do those exist?) is fairly miserable in his streetbound job. But Happy is unaffected, not just by the various postings for great opportunities that appear in all kinds of places, but also by the fact that these other people around him are not particularly contented in their work. It's as if he bears them a responsibility. "How can you, Happy Kumar, capable of rising to the top, disappoint me taxiwallah/liftman/paper boy - incapable of moving up in life - by ignoring your opportunity to rise," they seem to say.
It's an interesting twist on the old middle-class parental tactic of getting your children to be ambitious by scaring them that they will end up nowhere if they are not. But there's something more here. The idea that contentment is for morons. The feeling that happiness is stagnation.
Absent in the ad but implied is Neurotic Kumar. He jumps from one job to the other just because it promises him a "foreign" posting or a slightly higher salary. He gets frazzled if the taxi door doesn't open. He wakes up unhappy and stressed because he hates his job, and, by extension, his life. And he never never smiles. He is, we are made to understand, the ideal white collar worker.
Are you Neurotic? |
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