Sangam House residencies: last date July 31

The applications for the Sangam House Residencies for 2012/ 2013 are online. The last date to apply is July 31.

I spent two weeks at their Tranquebar residency last year. It was a beautiful place, and we were lucky enough to have huge rooms at Neemrana’s Bungalow-on-the-Beach. I wrote all day, and went for long, peaceful walks, listening to the sea break over the black jagged rocks of the shoreline, watching the fishermen mend their nets. In the evening, a loose coalition of Danish and Indian writers shared conversation, and food, and stories.

But it wasn’t just a memorable experience. The Sangam Residency is perhaps the only working writing residency in India. Everyone wants to run literary festivals, companies want to sponsor literary prizes, but fewer people want to work on the unglamorous bits--the building of good public libraries, the steady running of writing residencies, all of that back-end stuff that goes into the making of writers.

It was the first time in my life that someone had given me the freedom to write. The deadlines, the cooking, the niggling business of daily life were erased for two weeks. After years spent pleasantly enough as a hack journalist, here was the luxury of someone else giving me the time I needed to work on writing that wasn't intended for a newspaper or a magazine. After Tranquebar, I learned, as everyone does, to make that time—by waking up an hour earlier, or doing fewer columns, or letting the books on the shelves go undusted so that you might write your own book for a change. But without that gift of space from strangers, I would never have made the time, because until then, it had seemed so indulgent to take time off to write for myself.

And I would never have met Arshia Sattar and DW Gibson. Arshia—writer, editor, translator, actor in her own right—hung around at the airport for two hours to greet all of us personally, and then handed each of us the biggest snack pack I’ve ever seen. There were sandwiches and cake and chips and bananas and fruit juices and Bombay khara biscuits and oranges and Coke and lemonade and patties and more fruit and – well, she was worried we’d be hungry on the drive.

DW Gibson, who’s just finished his book Not Working, ambled around, settling all of us in, never letting on that he, his wife and Arshia had taken the smallest, shabbiest rooms, leaving the large, comfortable, sea-facing or garden-facing ones to all of us. I’m sure there are fancier five-star residencies elsewhere in the world, but there is only one residency I know of where two writers will give up their own precious writing time in order to make a bunch of strangers feel at home. Go apply.

Speaking Volumes: Fifty Shades of Gah

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2012)


By the end of June, Fifty Shades of Grey had become such a runaway bestseller that EL James’ Sadism 101 manual had reached the most unexpected places. It was on sale in a Mapusa supermarket, at all airport bookstores, available at Delhi traffic lights where young children hawked copies: “Grey, Darker, Freed—take all together for discount, madam!”

Were these volumes of cleverly packaged bondage fantasies feminist, in their exploration of middle-aged Fantasyland soft porn, or anti-feminist, in their insistence that the woman’s role be essentially submissive? If you, like me, fondly call the book Fifty Shades of Gah in tribute to the scenes where the English language is tied up, flogged and ruthlessly dominated by the excessive use of exclamation marks, are we disastrously out of step with the mainstream?

It doesn’t matter, because the key to the surprising success of Fifty Shades is that it isn’t about the quality of EL James’s writing. As a bestseller, it’s surprising only because it’s succeeded in print; it’s an indicator of how powerful fan fiction/ reader-driven fiction has become in the last five to seven years.

Fan fiction began as an Internet phenomenon, where viewers of TV serials, films or engaged readers contributed their own homages to the series. Fan fiction writers might rewrite the plot of some episodes of a TV soap, or use characters made already famous—Harry Potter, Mr Spock—to create their own mashup. Soon, sites devoted entirely to fan fiction began to attract large and active communities, but there was more to this Internet phenomenon than just the homage to TV serials.

Think of it this way. In the pre-Gutenberg era, the power of the written word rested in the hands of those who controlled monasteries, and the scribes who laboriously copied manuscripts. Post-Gutenberg, power shifted first to the publisher and the printer, and then, as printing presses became less rare and more ubiquitous, power transferred to the writer. (The writer would argue that in the 21st century, it shifted back to agents and large publishing conglomerates, but that’s another discussion.)

For more than two centuries, to be a writer meant that you had started your apprenticeship as a reader. Most writers had the required 10,000 hours worth of writing under their belts when they began publishing, in the shape of unpublished short stories and abandoned first drafts of novels. But they also, for the main part, had 10,000 hours worth of reading behind them.

This view of writing is based on the idea that skill is essential, craft important.
But in order to enjoy the best that literature (which means no more or less than “things made from letters”) has to offer, the ideal reader would also have his or her 10,000 hours of reading. Without that apprenticeship, few of the greatest writers are accessible—not Tagore and Premchand, with their long descriptive passages, not Coetzee’s challenging ideas, nor Pamuk’s playfulness, nor Murakami’s magical landscapes.

This just doesn’t work for readers who deal with present-day challenges. One of these is the easy availability of less demanding entertainment, from the glass tit of television to the micro-stories of the Twitter feed. Another is the stressed attention span; recent studies show that contrary to popular belief, we cannot really multi-task.

Take the average intelligent person, force him or her to fragment their attention across the insistent demands of 21st century life, and what you have is someone who lacks the time or the attention demanded by the most challenging books. Add to this an unpopular but true fact: even as people develop better social media skills, gaming skills and visual skills, the average vocabulary level drops sharply, unless you make an active effort to sharpen your verbal skills.

The number of writing communities and story sharing sites on the Internet make a few basics clear. There is no lack of demand for stories in this age, and there is no lack of readership. But today’s readers are more comfortable following intricate plot twists than they are following stories that require engagement with a complex internal world, or writers who use very complex language. Fifty Shades of Grey reads like an omnibus of fantasies easily available online, compiled in one place by a writer who understands that today’s Marquis de Sade would have to communicate differently, in simpler, more basic language, to reach the same audience.

And if it has a lesson—aside from the basic one about not wearing leather in the Delhi heat unless you’re a practicing masochist—it’s a useful one. For those who insist that popularity is an index of literary worth, Fifty Shades of Grey is the only rebuttal you need. Reading it was chastisement enough. I am now hard at work on a piece of fan fiction in tribute to plumbers (so difficult to find in Delhi), called Fifty Shades of Grout.

Speaking Volumes: The Happiest Bloomsday Ever

(Published just after Bloomsday, in the Business Standard)


The official menu for Bloomsday is not kind to vegetarians. To celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in the manner of Leopold Bloom, start with thick giblet soup and nutty gizzards, move on to “a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes”.

The grilled mutton kidneys (which gave Bloom’s palate, memorably, a “fine tang of faintly scented urine) are optional for the squeamish, but then the squeamish are rarely among Joyce’s fans. This Sunday, when Bloomsday was celebrated in Ireland and elsewhere, the diehard Joycean had an excellent excuse to stuff himself—this is the year when Ulysses, and all of Joyce’s works, become public property.

Never was there a more jealous guardian of a literary work than Stephen Joyce. He was not so much heir to Joyce’s work as the dragon at the gates. He refused permission for scholars, biographers and dramatists to quote any more than the parsimonious allowance of words set down by the Copyright Act. He refused permission for James Joyce’s papers to be read or scrutinized, and he waged long and acrimonious battles against those who went ahead and wrote about Joyce, or Dubliners, or Molly Bloom, or Finnegan’s Wake anyway.

Under Stephen Joyce’s reign, few writers—even a newspaper columnist—would have felt free enough to quote passages from the works long enough to incur Stephen Joyce’s bitter wrath.

The end result, though Joyce’s books remained easily accessible, was to chop up his work into memorable phrases: “They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.” “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” “Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!”

In much of the public imagination, this is what remained of Ulysses, these slivers of Joyce—the gimmicks, but not the heart and the swift juxtapositions that made him such a great, sensitive writer. Here is Stephen Dedalus, thinking of his mother, now dead, no more than “an odour of rosewood and ashes”. In his mind, he continues: “A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.”

So many years after it was first published (and reviled, and then reclaimed), Ulysses remains surprisingly fresh, untarnished by time. The writers Joyce spawned did less well; Joyce, who was begat by Tristram Shandy, begat far too many bad imitators, who rise up in experimental flares every decade and are rapidly forgotten. Some, like GV Desani, whose Hatterr received permission for his linguistic exuberance from Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, have survived and are still admired. But All About H Hatterr, for all of its wonders, has dated and acquired a creaky patina that Ulysses never did. Molly Bloom stirs in bed, Leopold Bloom buys a cake of soap that smells of sweet lemony wax and eats the liver and kidneys, stately, plump Buck Mulligan bears his bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed; and the story Joyce tells, against the background of the ancient story of Odysseus, Greece dissolving into Ireland’s streets, remains sharp and clear.

The ones who did well among Joyce’s literary descendants weren’t those who tried to imitate his style, but those who understood why he had moved from the straightforward, hungrily observed stories of the Dubliners to the structural heights and freedom of Ulysses, until he finally demolished language itself in Finnegan’s Wake. The first school spawned a rash of writers who turned out passages of the “Thrash, kick, bite. Thrash, kick, slap” sort under the impression that they were being Joycean. Which is a little dangerous, like assuming you bought madeleines at the bakery and can now write like Proust.

The second school includes an enormous range of writers, from Arun Kolatkar to David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami, who sensibly cultivated their own particular, indelible styles, but understood what Joyce was trying to do in Ulysses—to capture all of life, instead of interpreting it. He crafts Ulysses with such skill that it seems to present life as it happens, in all of its inescapable, tangled, human messiness.

There are two ways to look at your existence, said Joyce in Ulysses. One is to see it as a short, nasty business: “Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled.” The other was to celebrate the “warm beds: the warm fullblooded life”. He gave both of them to his readers, in dense paragraphs that ran on for two pages or fragmented sentences, and let them choose.

And on this Bloomsday, this year, with an end to Stephen Joyce’s petty tyrannies, the choice was easy. “Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out.”

Speaking Volumes: Ray Bradbury, October Country

(Published in the Business Standard, a few days after Ray Bradbury's death.)



In 1938, the pulp magazine Imagination! carried a story by a new and very young writer. Ray Bradbury, who died last week at the age of 91, was just 17 when he wrote Hollerbochen’s Dilemma, and neither he nor the title character survived this experience unscathed.

Hollerbochen was blown up. Bradbury discovered that when you’re writing for the pulps and your story stinks, readers will let you know. Bradbury survived. He even put Hollerbochen back together so that he could rescue the author, who was in this sequel held captive at his typewriter by legions of disappointed fans. For the next few years, Bradbury would continue to write terrible stories, until he started to write slightly less terrible stories. He ran a magazine of his own for a brief while—Futuria Fantastica, shortened to FuFa.

By the early 1940s, he had honed his craft; if pulp magazines like Weird Stories or Astounding Science Fiction gave him a sense of the technical tricks required, reading Steinbeck gave him a feel for the epic, which he would later use in the Martian Chronicles. He earned his place among the ABC of SF writers—Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke, shapers of imagination who were as influential as Heinlein or Philip K Dick.

The pulps are too easily dismissed today. Their lurid covers featured menacing aliens, improbable planets, space cowboys and the occasional wench of dazzling, interstellar comeliness. Many of the stories they carried were leftover werewolf trash or recycled tentacle terror. But as much as the New Yorker or Esquire, two US magazines that were also opening their doors to short story writers, pulps like Amazing or Weird Tales were excellent nurseries for a certain kind of writer. Bradbury wrote some of his best horror for pulps in the 1940s—many of these were later collected in October Country.

By the 1950s, his style had shifted, and many of the stories he wrote in the late 1940s and the early 1950s still carry resonance, especially for fellow writers. Junot Diaz found in Bradbury’s stories an echo of the experience of being an immigrant, a resident alien—Bradbury knew both kinds of alienation, the kind that came with having green tentacles, and the kind that came from being so different that you might as well have had green tentacles. His aliens were seldom repulsive (“dark they were and golden-eyed”, he writes of the Martians); Bradbury understood that just being different was enough to bring forth hostility.

For Neil Gaiman, who wrote a touching tribute on his blog, Bradbury’s realm of fantasy and alternate realities just beyond the human horizon opened up brave new worlds. (And sometimes, Bradbury’s world bleeds into Gaiman’s, or into Atwood’s, as though for a brief space, these very different writers occupied the same alien planet in a galaxy far, far away.)

The short story collections have an unusual quality, shared only by the very best science fiction and fantasy writers—from The Illustrated Man to The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, they have dated well. Some readers today know Bradbury for his love stories, or for his exuberant Irish stories.

Many know him by the science fiction of his early and middle years, where an eager hunter travels back in time to bag a dinosaur, and discovers the butterfly effect in action or where children manouevre a pair of adults into an early, eerie version of a virtual reality game with a very nasty ending. And many know him for Fahrenheit 451, the novella with its dark refrain and with its warnings of a world where burning books for the ideas that they carry is institutionalised: “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner.”

In the same period, he wrote The Pedestrian, less well-known but equally terrifying in its vision of a time when men might be arrested simply because they don’t fit in, and because they make the police uneasy. “Business or profession?” the (robot) police car asks Leonard Mead. “I guess you’d call me a writer,” he says. “No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself.”

Bradbury wrote this in 1951, anticipating a time when writers wouldn’t be writing because television had taken over. “Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, [Mead] thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”

After the soaring heights of the pulps, where he could take a reader to Mars and back, this was the grey reality he thought might lie ahead. But Bradbury’s dark future did and didn’t come true. The police states, the free expression debates, the iron rule of television, all of these happened; but the books didn’t die. It will always be October country, somewhere.