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| Then there's the internet |
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| 25th March 2007 |
And so the book has hit bookstores around the country. Reviews have appeared. People have interviewed me. Photographers have come and taken a large number of photographs so that they can
have one picture to accompany the piece that will come out maybe this week, maybe next.
Not normally a reader of magazines, or even newspapers apart from the weekend edition of the one that my parents get, I have now discovered how many different business newspapers there are, what's the difference between a tabloid and a broadsheet, which two large media houses collaborated when to bring out which tabloid to compete with which one and where to get Time Out Mumbai in my neighbourhood.
Then there's the internet. It turns out that setting a google alert for news items or new searches to a particular string can be very useful, you get to know the moment someone mentions your book in a blog or on a newspaper. It can also be very frustrating: the same article gets indexed many different times and each time you click to open the email it's fairly likely that an old link is being offered to you again. There are conversations on orkut which mention your book occasionally but not as often as you'd like. Some people don't get it, some do. Your hands are tied: you are the author, yaar, the author shouldn't get into arguments on orkut, looks really despo.
One blogger feels that because a character in my book denigrates Roorkee, that means I think poorly of Roorkee. This occasions a long post talking about his college and his feelings about it's recent elevation to IIT status. He's from the set of people who entered University of Roorkee Engineering college and graduated from IIT Roorkee. It's a liminal state, and like many other liminal states, it has generated anger. He directs this anger at me. I say that I have nothing but high regard for Roorkee. He says that I should have clarified this in the book. Sigh.
In the meantime I continue to experience pinpricks of surprize at the thought that complete strangers are reading my book. A set of files on my laptop, a set of files that was my closest companion for many many years, is now out in the world on it's own in book form landing in the hands of some who will care for it and some who won't, some who will nurture it and some who won't. And while it meanders on its journey, I sit here with my laptop. And I watch. |
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| Yokohama, Valparaiso, San Diego, London |
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| 3rd March 2007 |
Everyone has wanted to run away, at some time in his life if not from a bad school or an unhappy home, then from something equally unpleasant.
(Ruskin Bond, Adventures of Rusty, pp 50, NBT, 1995)
The second part of Ruskin Bond's Adventures of Rusty is entitled "Running Away." Rusty and his friend Daljit decide that life in their school in the hills has become unbearable and so they head for Jamnagar where Rusty's uncle's ship is docking for a few weeks, a brief break in it's perpetual perambulation around the world. Daljit is the son of a rich East African Indian and feels school is unnecessary while Rusty wants to see the world, wants to make his way to the glamourous destinations his uncle mentions in his letters. Those destinations become an incantation that appears in the book several times: Yokohama, Valparaiso, San Diego, London. And it was this incantation that remained in my memory decades after I had lost my original hardback of this book. Reading it again last week, I was struck by how lively and exciting the descriptions of the landscape Rusty seeks to escape are. His partner and he travel through Old Delhi, share the back of a truck with a buffalo on the way to Jaipur, run into dacoits and have their clothes stolen among other things. And these adventures, these first rate adventures, are what Rusty wants to leave behind as he travels the world. A very early version of Above Average referred to Rusty's magical list of faraway places. But that got edited away and I forgot about it in the course of the writing. Then, much later, writing the scene where Arindam goes to check his IIT result, I wrote the following: But there was a part of me that knew even then that for people like me safe harbours were an illusion; you could stay but you would inevitably become the only one left behind, lonely and dissatisfied.
(Above Average, pp 176)
And around then I understood better what the relationship between Rusty and Arindam, the differences and the similarities. Let me end with this quote, which appears on the same page of The Adventures of Rusty as the lines I quoted above: Most great men have run away from school at some stage in their lives; and if they haven't, then perhaps it is something they should have done.
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| Ancestral |
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| 20th February 2007 |
"Hum middle class logon ki sabse badi problem hai ki humein kuch ancestral nahin milta."
Sitting in a South Indian restaurant two days ago I was listening to the conversation at the next table. There was a man who sounded older and experienced, but didn't look more than thirty five when I finally saw him. He was talking to a younger man who, from what they talked about, sounded like a suitor for the older man's sister.
They talked at length about how they both came from families who believed in saying what they felt. They talked about how it was difficult to live in Delhi on one salary, and so the need to start your own business. They talked about the difference between running a coaching class and a school: you can still run a school after you turn forty but coaching is too hectic. They talked about how land was cheaper in Chandigarh but opportunities more plentiful in Delhi.
And finally just as I myself was about to leave, the older man wrapped up the conversation by saying "The biggest problem we middle class people face is that we get no ancestral property. Whatever we get we have to make ourselves."
So there I was, curd rice and samabar vada alone at a South Indian restaurant the day that Above Average hit Delhi stores, listening to this man stating simply and wisely the problematic that lies at the heart of my book.
I have always been attracted to those works which pay homage to the wisdom people possess, and pay homage by adopting it, adapting it. This book, Above Average is my attempt to glean wisdom from our frenetic and anxious middle class lives.
The book is in stores now, and as I was writing this entry it struck me that maybe that man who ate lunch at a table near me this Sunday might find a copy and might look at it. I don't think I can tell him anything he doesn't already know, but I do hope he will nod agreement a few times as he reads. |
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| Leaving Irvine |
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| 12th February 2007 |
We flew America West from Baltimore to Irvine. It must have been through Phoenix although I don't remember clearly but I know it wasn't Vegas and that was the only other option. I'd have remembered if it was Vegas, slot machines at the gates and what not.
There was a manicured blonde sitting next to me who was a lawyer flying to Irvine to work. She expressed awe at our mathy talk and at the fact that we were moving across coasts right then, right in front of her. She answered my polite questions in a full and real manner. But when the flight landed she got up and walked without turning to say goodbye. It was my first encounter with Orange County.
"This is going to be our BWI,'' you said when we got off the plane at John Wayne airport. And for two years it was. There were other places-people-things which would substitute for places-people-things we had known in Baltimore. But you didn't name them. We didn't tally them in the hurried departure from Irvine and now the accounting is blurred.
It was really sunny when Sumit Gupta drove us out of the airport onto the road which we would learn was called MacArthur, and we saw the first of several rows of palm trees. It was bright and sunny when he parked the car outside his apartment in Verano. The weather remained largely sunny during the day for the two years we were there but what I remember was how dark Huntington Beach was that night we drove there a couple of days before you left: the rigs in the distance and the ocean breaking on the shore, it's surf shining like the teeth of a really dark person at night.
Finally, what do all these things mean, all these memories of sun and light, this lingering smell of the sea, the sight of mountains from the bridge across Campus Drive. They have to mean something; I have exchanged vital moments of my life for them, they are all I have to show for those two years out of the time I am given. I don't feel shortchanged, that's not what I am saying. I just want to make a collage out of the shells I picked up at the beach, perhaps make a seaweed border to frame it.
You have another BWI now and so do I. Our travelling days aren't done. |
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| Shameful shortcomings |
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| 4th February 2007 |
We long for connection, yet we also strive to keep some parts of ourselves - the weakest, most compromised parts of ourselves - hidden from the world. Reading Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire (Women Unlimited, Delhi 1999), her own transcreation of her 1959 Urdu classic Aag ka darya, I came across this passage:According to Sufi tradition, during the Mystical Night Journey of the Lord Prophet from Jerusalem to the highest of heavens, Allah gave him a metaphorical khirqa or robe of spiritual authority and said `Bestow it on one of your Companions who gives you this answer.' Then God whispered the answer to the Prophet. On his return to earth Mohammed asked his companion, Abu Bakr, what he would do if he got this khirqa. Abu Bakr said he would spread truthfulness in the world, Omar said he would establish justice, Osman said he would abolish poverty. Finally Ali was asked and he gave the answer that Allah had whispered to the Prophet. He said he would hide the shameful shortcomings of individuals from their fellow-beings. He was given the robe of valayat, spiritual eminence. (pp 94-95, italics original)
I was stunned by this story and, at first, couldn't quite get myself to agree that this should be the correct answer to God's question. But the story stuck with me and troubled me till I told a friend of mine about it and she pointed out that perhaps it is better that we deal with our shortcomings on our own. If our fellow-beings find out about them then they sometimes pressure us in ways that make it harder to deal with those shortcomings rather than easier.
And then I realized why I was troubled by this story. One of the main themes of Above Average is the relationship between what we know about ourselves and what we are willing to reveal. And then you see a division of people into two: those who deny that weak inner self, and those who are always aware of it. This may be where humility springs from. I know I have always thought of humility as an indication of the knowledge of inner failings, and I have found it difficult to respect people who are not humble.
But I cannot think of these shameful shortcomings as defining or permanent. It is in the struggle against these that people are made, that lives are shaped. That brings me to a point where I can quote the other passage from River of Fire that moved me immensely. The protagonist is Mirza Abdul Syed Kamaluddin, from whose Strange Tales and Marvels of Hindustan the quote above is taken. His patron is defeated, his lady love has been kidnapped, he's homeless and has given up the last of his money for passage on a ship:
Kamal sat down in a corner with his travel kit which contained his unfinished Strange Tales and Marvels of Hindustan. Suddenly he had an urge to throw the book overboard. Then he recalled the Quranic precept - to lose all hope is kufr, denial of the existence of God. |
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| How to find a publisher for your first novel |
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| 25th January 2007 |
I have typed the title of this blog entry into google more than once in the last few years. It's not particularly useful. But desperation makes you do silly things. Firing complicated and vague queries at google is probably neither the silliest nor the least common of these things.
In my previous post I talked about the years spent looking for an agent in the US. These years overlapped with the years spent running after publishers in India.
An important editor at one big publishing house looked at some early chapters and said they were interesting, but he'd have to see where I was going with all this. A year later he said the development was interesting but some of the middle chapters were dragging. A year later he stopped replying to my email.
One prominent Delhi publishing house simply said they didn't feel the book fitted their publishing schedule. I read that as "we don't think your manuscript is worth taking the time to explain what's wrong with it."
Another Delhi publishing house took a few months to get through it - quite legitimately - then very professionally wrote back with comments on structure and characterization. I appreciated the fact that they made the effort to explain their decision, but strangely enough by this point the more people said things were wrong with the book, the more I began to feel that things were right with it.
A particularly interesting response came from a southern publisher who sent the manuscript to a reader then rejected it because the review was negative. The reader was obviously ticked off by Chetan Bhagat's success and decided to take it out on me:
No doubt books by students of the IITs (with their alma mater as the backdrop) are in fashion, and [this] is one such book. Unfortunately, it reads more like the self indulgent ramblings of a student who wants to get it all off his chest. It might have been cathartic for the writer, but most readers are not likely to relish the idea of substituting for a psychiatrist's couch.
The reader then went on to praise my writing for being "grammatical" and "showing some potential."
I was running out of options. Amitav Ghosh's praise for my writing (plastered on the front page of this website so that no one can miss it) had felt like a brahmastra when I first got it. I had thought I would conquer the world of Delhi publishing with his three sentences. That line of thinking had been terminated. In the meantime friends and acquaintances kept asking me how my search for a publisher was going. This was not making the process easier.
Finally a person I knew directed me back to HarperCollins, India. The first of my essays had appeared on outlookindia.com and they were beginning to feel they shouldn't have rejected the manuscript when it first came to them. Some nerve wracking weeks later I signed a contract. |
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| Literary agency |
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| 13th January 2007 |
In August 2003 I was around sixty percent done with the manuscript. I still didn't know how it would end but I had stopped getting the feeling that I would never finish. And so I started thinking of finding an agent. If I had been living in India at the time I would not have gone through the long and emotionally draining rigmarole that ensued. There are no literary agents in India.
It began like everything else begins, with a google search. The search term was "literary agent." Running that search today throws up pages of several literary agencies, everyone seems to have one, but at that time the top hit was a poorly organized page run by some guy I would have linked to but I didn't bookmark his page then and now it's not to be found. (The way time moves on the internet, you can talk about three and a half years ago the way other people talk about three and a half decades ago.) This guy gave a list of addresses and names and good advice on how to write a query letter, how to write a synopsis and how to approach an agent. He also linked to this page which talked alarmingly about fake agents who were out to cheat gullible and vulnerable wannabes. Despite being a paid up member of the gullible and vulnerable wannabe club, I took my courage in both hands and wrote a synopsis and a query letter.
Early in the process I got a response which expressed interest. They liked my style, they wanted to see the first fifty pages. My stomach clutched at the sight. Was it going to happen? Was I prepared for fame and fortune? I rushed to my office in the university, dashed off a fifty page printout and ran to the post office. Those who know the post office near UC Irvine know that there's always a half hour wait. It felt like two hours that day. That evening I checked the tracking information about four times on the internet. The packet had only moved as far as the regional sorting facility in Santa Ana and, inexplicably, stayed there all evening.
Three months later a reply, this book doesn't fit our list.
They were professional and polite. They read my work although they didn't know me from Adam. Some of them gave me suggestions on how to improve the work. A couple asked me to send a complete manuscript. The first time that happened it forced me to write the last fifteen thousand words in one week. One, a well known and powerful agent, even asked me to get in touch when I wrote my second book. He didn't mention how I would summon the confidence to write the second one if the first one was still sitting unpublished.
The manila envelopes kept going out and the manila envelopes kept coming back in.
This isn't a story of eventual success, so if you were hoping for a denoument involving a bidding war and a large advance, you're probably on the wrong writer's website. My search for an agent ended when I moved away from the US, back to India. There are no literary agents in India. |
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| Like an Urdu newspaper in a tea stall |
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| 7th January 2007 |
I didn't discover Bashir Badr by accident. But it wasn't quite by design either. In 1998 or 1997 I was in Delhi for the winter and I'd gone to the bookshop at the Sri Ram Centre looking for Urdu and Hindi poetry - not the first or the last English-speaking Indian to discover a love for Indian languages after leaving India. The attendant at the bookstore helped me find Ghalib and Daagh and Mir and other rock stars of the Urdu poetry world. Then, he suggested Bashir Badr. At that time the only way Devanagri readers could get to Badr was through a selection of his verses chosen by Nida Fazli and rendered in Devanagri.
I didn't know what to make of it at first. There was some mystical Kabir-style verse:
maaTi ki kachchi gaagar ko kya khona kya paana baba
maaTi ko maaTi rehna hai maaTi mei.n mil jaana baba
(you can't gain or lose a mud vessel, baba/mud remains mud, goes back into mud, baba.)
And there was some which sounded like straight-up right-thinking politics:
log TuuT jaate hai.n ek ghar banaane me.n
tum taras nahii.n khaate bastiyaa.N jalaane me.n
(making one home can break a person/you feel no pity in burning entire settlements)
There was sardonic social commentary:
sau Khuluus baato.n me.n sab karam Khayaalo.n me.n
bas zaraa vafaa kam hai tere shahar vaalo.n me.n
(they speak courteously and are generous in thought/all your cityfolk lack is fidelity)
And some things which sounded suspiciously gul-o-bulbul, like they could have been written fifty years before they were:
kabhii to aasmaa.N se chaa.nd utare jaam ho jaaye
tumhaare naam kii ik Khuubasuurat shaam ho jaaye
(the moon should come down from the sky and become a glass of wine some time/there should be a beautiful evening dedicated to you some time.)
All this was elegant and powerful but not unexpected. What surprized me was the confident blending of directness with eviscerating depth:
aaj suraj ka ruKh hamaaii taraf
yeh badan mom ka hai pighal jayegaa
(the sun is facing us today/this body is wax, it will melt away)
And, of course, the elegaic beauty of his most famous sher:
ujaale apanii yaado.n ke hamaare saath rahane do
na jaane kis galii me.n zindagii kii shaam ho jaaye (let the light of your memory stay with me/who knows in which street evening will fall on my life)
Some time over the next couple of years I learned how to read the Urdu script and, on another visit to Delhi, acquired a copy of Aamad, the collection Bashir Badr released in 1985. I had not read a lot of poetry before, but as I read through this collection I realized it was the work of a poet at the height of his powers. There is so much to say about this volume that it would take several blog entries and someone more competent than me, but there are a few shers which just stunned me with their assured grasp of everyday beauty, with their casually brilliant assemblage of simple images:
bevakt agar jaoo.nga sab chau.nk pade.nge
ik umr hui din mei.n kabhi ghar nahii.n dekha
(I'll surprize them all if I go at an odd time/it's been an age since I saw home during the day.)
ye ek pe.D hai, aa is se milakar ro le.n ham
yahaa.N se tere mere raaste badalate hai.n
(this is a tree, come let us hold it and cry/this is where our roads part)
shaam tak kitne haatho.n se guzroo.nga mei.n
chaikhaane mei.in urdu ke akhbar sa
(how many hands will I pass through today?/like an urdu newspaper in a tea stall)
In 2002 I found a Devanagri anthology of all of Bashir Badr's major poetry collections, released under the name Culture Yaksan by Vani Prakashan. And for the next few years it became the one book always on my bedside. So, it wasn't surprising that I found an epigram for my novel in this book. It's from Bashir Badr's most famous ghazal but it's not the most famous sher, and in an attempt to make amends for all the bad translations I have made above, I will not translate this one:
mujhe maaluum hai uska thikaana phir kahaa.N hoga
parinda aasmaa.N chhuune mei.n jab naakaam ho jaye
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| Pre-history |
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| 24th December 2006 |
How does it happen that a computer science professor writes a novel? How does an IITian begin to see himself as a writer? I can only speak for myself.
In school I came third in an inter-section writing contest in class nine. We had eight sections. I wrote a little when I was in college, especially at the writing competitions which took place at LSR. I even took a creative writing class offered by Makarand Paranjape who used to teach at IIT at the time.
My first few months in America, where I went to do a PhD after graduating from IIT, I spent most of my time writing email to friends back in India. Long detailed emails. It was correspondence on a scale I had never attempted before and I attempted it then partly because I was scared and lonely and partly because I sat in front of a computer all day and writing email was one of the few good ways of passing the time.
Some months into my PhD I got an idea for a short story. When I started to write it I found that all the email I had been writing had made it easier for me to write prose. Writing fourteen or fifteen hundred words in a three hour session didn't seem that difficult. They weren't always good words, but they were words. I quickly discovered Unix's word count utility (wc for those not in the know) and used it between bursts of writing, watching the volume grow.
At a class on writing about film I met some people who were enrolled in the writing program at Johns Hopkins. Tony Macris, Chris Hallman and Jenny Smith read my writing and gave me detailed comments. They showed me how to turn stiff verbose prose into less stiff, less verbose prose. Later, in 2000, when I wrote the first chapters of Above Average, I sent them to Tony who gave me technical advice which served me very well. In 1997, just being taken seriously by these published and soon-to-be-published people encouraged me. I started sending my short stories out.
By the summer of 2000 I had a grand total of one literary publication - in a local journal called The Baltimore Review - and more rejection slips than I cared to count. I was checking my mailbox obsessively, feeling frustrated when nothing came and getting depressed when small white envelopes with my name on them written in my hand appeared. But even before the last story got rejected, I would have written a new one.
Then in the summer of 2000 I wrote a piece about a guitarist in Mayur Vihar. The voice was quite different from anything I had written before. It was direct. I showed it to a close friend who liked it a lot. Suddenly it appeared that this may be the seed of something longer. I started thinking hard about it and it's scope began to expand.
There would be Mayur Vihar, there would be IIT, there would be rock music. That I knew. Some of the characters came too, but not all. Some of the situations I could see, but not how they would develop or how they would be resolved. It was all very nebulous and scary. But at that moment it did not matter. Neither did it matter that it would be another two years of thinking and procrastinating before I began writing in earnest. At that moment I realized - without ever saying so to myself explicitly - that I was free now from writing short stories and sending them out. I was working on a novel. |
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| Welcome to aboveaveragebook.com |
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| 18th December 2006 |
Welcome to the official website for my forthcoming novel Above Average.
I've tried to make this site as entertaining and informative as possible. Let me just run through the things you can find here. The links are available from the navigation bar to the left of the page. There are, of course, a synopsis and some extracts - linked under The Book. There's also a Q&A about the book and the themes it explores. My friend Ashima Sood was nice enough to read the book and talk to me about it. I've put that conversation up as Q&A under The Book. Also there is a link to Audios and Video. I have a couple of clips of me reading from the book under that link. On one of them musician Pankaj Awasthi has played along on guitar. I've done an interview with Pankaj which I plan to post soon. Under Meet Amitabha you'll find a brief bio and a small Q&A section where I talk about how the book and writing relate to my life.
The really special thing on this website can be found under the tab called Extras. There you will find some DVD style deleted scenes. Scenes which I really like but had to cut because they were slowing down the book or talking about things which weren't directly related to the flow of the book. I've put up one right now, I'll be putting a few more out in subsequent weeks.
I hope you have a good time on this website. The book itself should be out in January or February latest. Till then this is where you can get a preview of what it offers.
Enjoy! |
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