Annie, Zigzackly, and all of you poets out there who occupy the letters of the alphabet in between, this quote's for you:
"Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, 'It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it's coming along shortly...' We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat....and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I've lost so many I can't count them. I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don't, it sings us awake, it's irresistible, it's contagious."
--Barbara Kingsolver, 'Stealing Apples', from the collection Small Wonder.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Book review: First Proof
(This was written for Time Out Mumbai, about the only magazine I've ever worked for where the editor has mastered the art of screaming with EXTREME POLITENESS whenever I overshoot my deadlines, which is pretty much all the time.)
First Proof
The Penguin Book of New Writing From India: 1
Penguin India, Rs 295,
218+202 pages
Has Indian writing in English ever been formally taken off the Endangered Species List? There are only a handful of R K Narayans, people said just before a guy called Salman Rushdie quit advertising to become a writer. There’s only one Midnight’s Children , I was told just before A Ghosh, V Seth, Sealy and company took centrestage. The new generation has produced no one like A Ghosh and company, we were informed the year before The God of Small Things and the boom in big advances ushered Ruchir Joshi, Pankaj Mishra, Raj Kamal Jha, into the spotlight. Roy’s Booker was a flash in the pan, said doomsayers a few months before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer. There was a brief, and we hope, embarrassed, silence, before a brand-new refrain came up: see, the best writing will come from the diaspora, everything in the homeland is dead.
It doesn’t take a First Proof to tell us that reports of the demise of Indian writing have been greatly exaggerated. As the editors write: “The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise).” They’ve got a mixed bag of allsorts to back up the claim. Of the 17 short stories and 13 essays, travelogues, and assorted pieces of non-fiction here, there’s little that stands up and demands to be called a classic—but even less that doesn’t deserve to be here at all.
First Proof is planned as an annual event, and if it’s meant to showcase the best of new, original and brilliant writing from India, the editors have a tough job ahead. The Little Magazine and a few others of its kind aside, there are few forums where you can publish original short fiction, and fewer still where an editor will push hard enough to coax a brilliant story from the author of a merely adequate one. Civil Lines got past the problem of acquiring sterling writing from writers who’re seldom allowed to break the 300-word or 900-word barrier by delaying publication until the editors felt they had a good enough set; this led to magisterial delays, two-and-a-half years between volumes in one case.
This hits the journalists hardest: Nirmala Subramaniam has a great subject in Prabhakaran as does Saba Naqvi Bhaumik in a more legally acceptable Don, and both of them do a solid reporting job—but they don’t produce great writing. Sankarshan Thakur’s controlled rage leads to something more memorable in his foray into “the heart of Backward country”, as does Mishi Saran’s focused passion on the distant journeys of a long-dead monk. The lack of experience also mars the fiction, where the quality wobbles from the spectacular to the devastatingly mundane.
But First Proof scores in its variety. Some writers here have familiar bylines, but, like Mitali Saran or Anuradha Roy, are making their first foray into fiction; some, like Ranjit Hoskote, are better known in other fields; some are seasoned authors, like Indrajit Hazra or at a more austere level, Andre Beteille. None of them lack confidence. The fiction ranges from the wildly experimental, as with Sarnath and Rana Dasgupta, to Arun John’s quiet, moving tale of a young man setting out in search of the parents who disappeared years before into Africa, to Renuka Narayanan’s florid imagining of Vaak, the deity of speech. The non-fiction takes in the familiar—grandmothers, boarding school odysseys, the world post 9/11—and the unusual—colonial bibis, vamps, Cuba. What comes through is absolute confidence: postmodernism, no problem; journeys to the centre of the human heart, coming up; the markets of Matunga, Fidel sightings in Cuba, Turki in North Bihar—it’s all accessible, none of it beyond imagination.
It’s a bumpy, uneven ride, with more than a few potholes thrown in. But what First Proof says is, buy the ticket, take your chances, come on board—the view’s pretty good from where we sit. This anthology is a brave attempt; and even if it’s a bit of a chalta hai collection, we’ll use the oldest Indian mantra of them all, and simply adjust.
First Proof
The Penguin Book of New Writing From India: 1
Penguin India, Rs 295,
218+202 pages
Has Indian writing in English ever been formally taken off the Endangered Species List? There are only a handful of R K Narayans, people said just before a guy called Salman Rushdie quit advertising to become a writer. There’s only one Midnight’s Children , I was told just before A Ghosh, V Seth, Sealy and company took centrestage. The new generation has produced no one like A Ghosh and company, we were informed the year before The God of Small Things and the boom in big advances ushered Ruchir Joshi, Pankaj Mishra, Raj Kamal Jha, into the spotlight. Roy’s Booker was a flash in the pan, said doomsayers a few months before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer. There was a brief, and we hope, embarrassed, silence, before a brand-new refrain came up: see, the best writing will come from the diaspora, everything in the homeland is dead.
It doesn’t take a First Proof to tell us that reports of the demise of Indian writing have been greatly exaggerated. As the editors write: “The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise).” They’ve got a mixed bag of allsorts to back up the claim. Of the 17 short stories and 13 essays, travelogues, and assorted pieces of non-fiction here, there’s little that stands up and demands to be called a classic—but even less that doesn’t deserve to be here at all.
First Proof is planned as an annual event, and if it’s meant to showcase the best of new, original and brilliant writing from India, the editors have a tough job ahead. The Little Magazine and a few others of its kind aside, there are few forums where you can publish original short fiction, and fewer still where an editor will push hard enough to coax a brilliant story from the author of a merely adequate one. Civil Lines got past the problem of acquiring sterling writing from writers who’re seldom allowed to break the 300-word or 900-word barrier by delaying publication until the editors felt they had a good enough set; this led to magisterial delays, two-and-a-half years between volumes in one case.
This hits the journalists hardest: Nirmala Subramaniam has a great subject in Prabhakaran as does Saba Naqvi Bhaumik in a more legally acceptable Don, and both of them do a solid reporting job—but they don’t produce great writing. Sankarshan Thakur’s controlled rage leads to something more memorable in his foray into “the heart of Backward country”, as does Mishi Saran’s focused passion on the distant journeys of a long-dead monk. The lack of experience also mars the fiction, where the quality wobbles from the spectacular to the devastatingly mundane.
But First Proof scores in its variety. Some writers here have familiar bylines, but, like Mitali Saran or Anuradha Roy, are making their first foray into fiction; some, like Ranjit Hoskote, are better known in other fields; some are seasoned authors, like Indrajit Hazra or at a more austere level, Andre Beteille. None of them lack confidence. The fiction ranges from the wildly experimental, as with Sarnath and Rana Dasgupta, to Arun John’s quiet, moving tale of a young man setting out in search of the parents who disappeared years before into Africa, to Renuka Narayanan’s florid imagining of Vaak, the deity of speech. The non-fiction takes in the familiar—grandmothers, boarding school odysseys, the world post 9/11—and the unusual—colonial bibis, vamps, Cuba. What comes through is absolute confidence: postmodernism, no problem; journeys to the centre of the human heart, coming up; the markets of Matunga, Fidel sightings in Cuba, Turki in North Bihar—it’s all accessible, none of it beyond imagination.
It’s a bumpy, uneven ride, with more than a few potholes thrown in. But what First Proof says is, buy the ticket, take your chances, come on board—the view’s pretty good from where we sit. This anthology is a brave attempt; and even if it’s a bit of a chalta hai collection, we’ll use the oldest Indian mantra of them all, and simply adjust.
Border song
(This piece was written for The Kolkata Telegraph, which runs a small section on offbeat travel stories every Sunday. I should point out that the idea of frontiers being strange and meaningless constructions is hardly new: read Amitav Ghosh if you want to know just how much a simple pair of compasses and the circles you draw on the map can challenge your sense of national boundaries. And read Kai Friese if you want the grown-up take on borders...hell, just read Ghosh and Friese anyway.)
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
The BS column: Murdering your darlings
(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, May 24, 2005)
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
The BS column: virtual books
(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, MAY 17, 2005)
(This week, two new giant-sized bookcases arrived in the house and we finally unpacked the last three cartons of books, taking us back to square one: there are no books in the cartons, ergo, there is no space on the new bookshelves, but in the brief interval between acquiring the shelves in which to stack the books from the cartons, we have...bought more books. Roughly half of the books on my shelves fall into the category of books I don't re-read often, but that I need to have around for reference. Most of this is Indian fiction, and the reason I need the books in person, so to speak, is because most of them are out of print now and are unlikely to ever be reprinted. This might explain why I would be very, very happy if publishers started offering at least the backlist in ebook/ digitised form. Otherwise, me and my husband are doomed: the future involves moving every three years to larger and larger houses, buying more and more bookcases to store all the books I can't bear to donate, dump or discard...)
Most Indians are familiar with “bookless libraries”: they’re the ones you find in officially backward areas of the country where the books on the shelves have fallen to pieces or been stolen and sold to the raddiwallah.
It’s going to take a little time before we catch up with the contemporary definition of a bookless or digital library, the kind that university libraries in the US, Google worldwide, and the EU are separately trying to build. The NYT recently reported that the University of Texas is experimenting with a library which has a “24-hour electronic information commons”. This makes sense; the new generation of students is umbilically attached to the mobile phone and the mouse. Publishers have been putting more books into e-text format, and there’s an increasing demand for libraries to have computer bays and always-on access to the Net.
Google is building its own vast virtual library—it plans to digitize books from Harvard, Stanford, a few other US universities and Oxford University. This online repository will be open to all Google users, subject to the normal restrictions of copyright for now—readers will be able to search restricted portions of a currently copyrighted text and download the entire text, if they choose, of books that are out of the copyright domain.
This seems a worthwhile enough project, but it’s led to a rare show of unity among the nations that make up the European Union, who are worried that knowledge itself might end up US-centric. In the EU view, Google comes across as an evil wannabe master of the universe who plans nothing less than world domination. The EU plans to combat Google’s “cultural domination” with a digitization project that will bring together works from the libraries of six countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Poland.
When the first e-books came out, many commentators wondered what this would mean for plain vanilla publishing and the humble book. Some of us predicted that this would change publishing, but mainstream publishers have been very resistant to e-text initiatives—they fear a Napsterisation of books, where readers would download texts for free rather than buy actual books. This is unlikely; even if e-book readers improve beyond the current clunky ones available, there is something about the physical book that we love and remain loyal to. William Crossman, a futurist and scholar, predicts that the written word as we know it will die out by 2050, but even he suspects that the book will not die out so much as assume new form.
Some assumed that e-books would open up a new market for emerging authors; but if you cut out the services of the editor, you’re left with the world’s largest slushpile. Even if publishing does warm up eventually to e-books, you’re not going to do away with the editor, the agent and the various other middlemen involved in the bookselling business quite that easily. But the real face of the ebook revolution might actually be Google’s digital library and other versions that involve the mass digitization of books. The biggest problem with the Net as a source of information is its built-in unreliability: “I found it on the Net” has become shorthand for lazy research, and few users are willing to explore the online world enough. It’s possible to find good, even great, repositories of information online, but it requires more browsing of the virtual stacks than most readers are comfortable with.
The thing about digitization is that it involves an initial high cost, but relatively low maintenance subsequently. Well-ordered virtual libraries might not replace the real-world model in a country like the US, with its history of excellent and easily accessible public libraries in every city. But the virtual library will change the browsing experience for the next generation of Net users, and it will change the ways in which we spread—and assimilate—knowledge.
India, like many Asian countries, does a terrible job of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, and an even worse job of making this knowledge freely available to most of its citizens. The libraries that work are not open to all; the libraries that are open to all don’t work very well. It would take a combination of tremendous philanthropy and unflinching support from the state to build a network of truly public libraries—and building libraries is only half the job, the other half is maintaining them properly. But given the software expertise in the country, we’re in a position to catch up with the rest of the world now.
It wouldn’t take that much effort to build virtual libraries that might either become part of a network like Google’s, or form part of say, a Southern Hemisphere network. But it would require a different approach to books, manuscripts and other forms of knowledge. We tend to neglect books and archives to death, often letting them crumble into dust, or we hoard knowledge jealously and appoint guardians to determine who has access. Building a virtual library would require the kind of vision and willingness to collaborate that goes against the grain for many scholars. It would also require imagination: virtual libraries can be carried anywhere a laptop can go, but beyond that you’d have to be willing to print out texts and carry them into places that have no electricity, no plugpoints, no conception of the Net. In this country at least, the printed word is likely to have a tenacious grip on life.
(This week, two new giant-sized bookcases arrived in the house and we finally unpacked the last three cartons of books, taking us back to square one: there are no books in the cartons, ergo, there is no space on the new bookshelves, but in the brief interval between acquiring the shelves in which to stack the books from the cartons, we have...bought more books. Roughly half of the books on my shelves fall into the category of books I don't re-read often, but that I need to have around for reference. Most of this is Indian fiction, and the reason I need the books in person, so to speak, is because most of them are out of print now and are unlikely to ever be reprinted. This might explain why I would be very, very happy if publishers started offering at least the backlist in ebook/ digitised form. Otherwise, me and my husband are doomed: the future involves moving every three years to larger and larger houses, buying more and more bookcases to store all the books I can't bear to donate, dump or discard...)
Most Indians are familiar with “bookless libraries”: they’re the ones you find in officially backward areas of the country where the books on the shelves have fallen to pieces or been stolen and sold to the raddiwallah.
It’s going to take a little time before we catch up with the contemporary definition of a bookless or digital library, the kind that university libraries in the US, Google worldwide, and the EU are separately trying to build. The NYT recently reported that the University of Texas is experimenting with a library which has a “24-hour electronic information commons”. This makes sense; the new generation of students is umbilically attached to the mobile phone and the mouse. Publishers have been putting more books into e-text format, and there’s an increasing demand for libraries to have computer bays and always-on access to the Net.
Google is building its own vast virtual library—it plans to digitize books from Harvard, Stanford, a few other US universities and Oxford University. This online repository will be open to all Google users, subject to the normal restrictions of copyright for now—readers will be able to search restricted portions of a currently copyrighted text and download the entire text, if they choose, of books that are out of the copyright domain.
This seems a worthwhile enough project, but it’s led to a rare show of unity among the nations that make up the European Union, who are worried that knowledge itself might end up US-centric. In the EU view, Google comes across as an evil wannabe master of the universe who plans nothing less than world domination. The EU plans to combat Google’s “cultural domination” with a digitization project that will bring together works from the libraries of six countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Poland.
When the first e-books came out, many commentators wondered what this would mean for plain vanilla publishing and the humble book. Some of us predicted that this would change publishing, but mainstream publishers have been very resistant to e-text initiatives—they fear a Napsterisation of books, where readers would download texts for free rather than buy actual books. This is unlikely; even if e-book readers improve beyond the current clunky ones available, there is something about the physical book that we love and remain loyal to. William Crossman, a futurist and scholar, predicts that the written word as we know it will die out by 2050, but even he suspects that the book will not die out so much as assume new form.
Some assumed that e-books would open up a new market for emerging authors; but if you cut out the services of the editor, you’re left with the world’s largest slushpile. Even if publishing does warm up eventually to e-books, you’re not going to do away with the editor, the agent and the various other middlemen involved in the bookselling business quite that easily. But the real face of the ebook revolution might actually be Google’s digital library and other versions that involve the mass digitization of books. The biggest problem with the Net as a source of information is its built-in unreliability: “I found it on the Net” has become shorthand for lazy research, and few users are willing to explore the online world enough. It’s possible to find good, even great, repositories of information online, but it requires more browsing of the virtual stacks than most readers are comfortable with.
The thing about digitization is that it involves an initial high cost, but relatively low maintenance subsequently. Well-ordered virtual libraries might not replace the real-world model in a country like the US, with its history of excellent and easily accessible public libraries in every city. But the virtual library will change the browsing experience for the next generation of Net users, and it will change the ways in which we spread—and assimilate—knowledge.
India, like many Asian countries, does a terrible job of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, and an even worse job of making this knowledge freely available to most of its citizens. The libraries that work are not open to all; the libraries that are open to all don’t work very well. It would take a combination of tremendous philanthropy and unflinching support from the state to build a network of truly public libraries—and building libraries is only half the job, the other half is maintaining them properly. But given the software expertise in the country, we’re in a position to catch up with the rest of the world now.
It wouldn’t take that much effort to build virtual libraries that might either become part of a network like Google’s, or form part of say, a Southern Hemisphere network. But it would require a different approach to books, manuscripts and other forms of knowledge. We tend to neglect books and archives to death, often letting them crumble into dust, or we hoard knowledge jealously and appoint guardians to determine who has access. Building a virtual library would require the kind of vision and willingness to collaborate that goes against the grain for many scholars. It would also require imagination: virtual libraries can be carried anywhere a laptop can go, but beyond that you’d have to be willing to print out texts and carry them into places that have no electricity, no plugpoints, no conception of the Net. In this country at least, the printed word is likely to have a tenacious grip on life.
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