(Carried in The Indian Express, May 2006)
Londonstani
Gautam Malkani
Fourth Estate, London
UK Price POUNDS 11.99, 343 pages
This is supposed to be The One: an "electrifying debut", a searing look at masculinity, the Asian scene and the new tribes of London, topped off with the huge advance (POUNDS 300,000) without which no self-respecting first-time novelist today would get into the game.
Get past the patois the book's written in—a blend of Asian street slang, txt spk and gangsta rap lyrics (think imitation Irvine Welsh with an updated Peter Sellers accent), and Londonstani is a smooth ride. Gautam Malkani takes you from the first line--"Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck'd, shudn't be callin me a Paki, innit"--to the last word--"Shukriya"—without too many speed bumps.
The narrator of Londonstani is Jas, who combines the attributes of class wimp and class nerd in one. He's saved by an instinct that tells him to shut up about the books he furtively enjoys reading, and by his honorary membership in an Asian gang, where the other three rudeboys are easily defined. Hardjit's muscles abet his obsession with racial purity; Amit has a domineering mother who's trying to wreck his brother Arun's engagement; and all you need to know about
Ravi is contained in two lines of dialogue: "I jus mouthin off cos I got me a high sex drive, dat's all, man. I can't help it if I is a wild fuckin beast."
With three of them having failed their A-levels, their lives move in a predictable groove from fights to flash cars to fit women, until they get pulled into a complicated scam involving mobile phones that takes the rudeboys to a higher level of gangsterhood than they're really capable of handling.
I'm not going to give away the rest of the plot, except to say that there's a twist in the tail, delivered right at the end that's supposed to land as hard as one of Hardjit's punches. It works, forcing you to go back to the novel and read it again—which might have been Malkani's biggest mistake.
Londonstani comes apart on second reading like a cheap clockwork toy, revealing that its closest literary cousins are more Tanuja Desai Hidier and Nick Hornby than Irvine Welsh and company. Two key plot points involve an Indian family imploding around a marriage where the groom's mother feels "disrespected" by the lack of brownnosing by the bride's family and the perils of a relationship with a Muslim girl whose three brothers would carry out the Hounslow equivalent of an honour killing if she went out with someone from another religion.
There are pages and pages of (very useful) shopping advice for men: this covers clothes, bling, mobile phones and cars (from the ones that resemble piranha fish to the ones that resemble Beyonce and Snoop Dogg). There's a nicely done primer on how to get into
London's hippest clubs and restaurants and what to do once you're there. And behind all the gandah lines and the overuse of fuck as a punctuation mark until it makes you want to oolti, I was delighted to discover that this was, at heart, a story with several morals. If you want the Porsche and the posh flat with the latest Bang & Olufsen system, plus the company of soni kudhis, do your A levels, apply to
Cambridge, get an MBA. And if at the end of this you've turned into a corporate gangster in an Armani suit whose most terrifying weapon of choice is his ability to deliver long and tedious lectures on the complex workings of the black market and VAT rebates, get back to the basics: love your mom and dad, don't disrespect your family.
Forget the stuff about Londonstani being a brilliantly subversive work and showcasing an "authentic", raw, original voice; don't even get into the debate over whether it's the politics of race or gender that lie at the heart of this book. Gautam Malkani's real achievement is that this cheerfully mongrel novel is the product of a successful mating between the contemporary clean-cut Bollywood family film and Hornby-style Lad Lit, with an Asian Dub track playing somewhere in the background. That’s what happens when you go chasing after the Great White Whales of literature; you find Moby Dick Lit instead.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The BS column: SAPs and WIMPs
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, May 7, 2006)
Along with every other reader in the world caught between publishing hype and authorial reality, I think it's time we had a stock exchange for authors. Call it the Writers Index of Marketing Performance (WIMP).
WIMP would take these factors into consideration: the amount of hype generated before the publication of the New Original Volume of Entertaining Literature (the NOVEL, for short), plus the size of the advance, along with a weightage for special factors, which would cover the author's age, pulchritude, ethnicity, awards won and general blurbability.
This would be balanced against not just book sales and media coverage generated, but also against a special reader's index measuring any Feelings of Extreme Disappointment Upon Perusal. To put it simply: the more Fed-Up the reader, the more the writer will have Wimped out.
Many reviewers already use an early version of WIMP--the Sardonic Critical Exercise of Protective Trashing and Intuitive Caution—and some have been accessing their inner SCEPTIC for years. If you're sceptic-trained, you would know exactly how to read the twin tales of Kaavya Viswanathan and Gautam Malkani; I firmly believe that WIMP would allow ordinary readers to come up with their own evaluations.
With access to WIMP, for instance, you could scan the database for young, first-time authors who received large advances and/ or huge doses of publishing hype in order to make sense of the career paths of both Kaavya Viswanathan and Gautam Malkani.
Kaavya's story is simple: a young teenager, approached by a book-packaging company and shepherded by a respectable literary agent, writes a first novel with considerable assistance. Her lack of previous publishing experience, her youth, charm and brightness ensures that she could, marketed properly, be the chicklit product category leader of the year.
Unfortunately, Kaavya performs the equivalent of Google theft on a term paper, and rips off material from her reading list. What happens next is a massive market correction: the volume of condemnation and opinion about Kaavya's plagiarism in the media is almost exactly equivalent to the volume of fawning media reports before the scandal.
Gautam Malkani's case is far more WIMP-worthy. Malkani is a thirty-year-old financial expert whose first novel, Londonstani , sold for POUNDS 300,000, and has received very mixed reviews. I suspect the problem here is really product mis-labelling: Malkani has been marketed as the brand-new literary Asian voice, when he's really doing the classic Boy's Own story (Chicklit's equivalent, sometimes rudely known as Dick Lit), to an Asian Dub soundtrack.
What would his WIMP ratings be? The positive case studies first. In 1997, we heard about a young, 21-year-old genius who had sold her first novel on the strength of just 80 pages for roughly POUNDS 250,000. Zadie Smith lived in a media spotlight for the next decade; White Teeth did brilliantly, her second novel, The Autograph Man , was faintly damned, but she silenced most of her critics with last year's On Beauty .
In 2002, Hari Kunzru picked up POUNDS 1.25 m for The Impressionist . Like Smith, Kunzru survived the instinctive scepticism of several sections of the media, and pulled off a mesmerising second novel with Transmission a few years later. But he indicated just how high the stakes get for anointed authors when he said in an interview that The Impressionist had sold 100,000 copies, but there was still a lot to prove.
If you looked only at similar case studies, the unwary reader would conclude that Malkani might struggle with the rigours of punishing book tours, tons of badwill sent his way by less lucky writers and the odd negative review, but still emerge with a flourishing writing career.
That would be taking into account only half the data, though. Think of Bidisha, who wrote Seahorses at the precocious age of 16, in 1998. Her advance for the book was a relatively modest POUNDS 15,000, but her youth guaranteed huge waves of publicity. Seahorses did only modestly, though, and while Bidisha has stayed in the market—she has published three more novels since then—her career has been strictly average since that early burst of publicity.
Or think of Amy Jenkins, even though her publishers try very hard not to. Jenkins had the classic fairy tale story: she wrote a book proposal in 48 hours, and picked up a POUNDS 600,000 contract for her first novel, Honey Moon . The general reviewers' consensus can be summed up by the critic who wrote of the book that it "makes Bridget
Jones read like Tacitus"; the book tanked at the cash registers, too.
On balance, Malkani has an even chance at becoming the latest in the increasingly rare line-up of Successful Authorial Products: it's not easy, but it's far better to be a SAP than to WIMP out.
Along with every other reader in the world caught between publishing hype and authorial reality, I think it's time we had a stock exchange for authors. Call it the Writers Index of Marketing Performance (WIMP).
WIMP would take these factors into consideration: the amount of hype generated before the publication of the New Original Volume of Entertaining Literature (the NOVEL, for short), plus the size of the advance, along with a weightage for special factors, which would cover the author's age, pulchritude, ethnicity, awards won and general blurbability.
This would be balanced against not just book sales and media coverage generated, but also against a special reader's index measuring any Feelings of Extreme Disappointment Upon Perusal. To put it simply: the more Fed-Up the reader, the more the writer will have Wimped out.
Many reviewers already use an early version of WIMP--the Sardonic Critical Exercise of Protective Trashing and Intuitive Caution—and some have been accessing their inner SCEPTIC for years. If you're sceptic-trained, you would know exactly how to read the twin tales of Kaavya Viswanathan and Gautam Malkani; I firmly believe that WIMP would allow ordinary readers to come up with their own evaluations.
With access to WIMP, for instance, you could scan the database for young, first-time authors who received large advances and/ or huge doses of publishing hype in order to make sense of the career paths of both Kaavya Viswanathan and Gautam Malkani.
Kaavya's story is simple: a young teenager, approached by a book-packaging company and shepherded by a respectable literary agent, writes a first novel with considerable assistance. Her lack of previous publishing experience, her youth, charm and brightness ensures that she could, marketed properly, be the chicklit product category leader of the year.
Unfortunately, Kaavya performs the equivalent of Google theft on a term paper, and rips off material from her reading list. What happens next is a massive market correction: the volume of condemnation and opinion about Kaavya's plagiarism in the media is almost exactly equivalent to the volume of fawning media reports before the scandal.
Gautam Malkani's case is far more WIMP-worthy. Malkani is a thirty-year-old financial expert whose first novel, Londonstani , sold for POUNDS 300,000, and has received very mixed reviews. I suspect the problem here is really product mis-labelling: Malkani has been marketed as the brand-new literary Asian voice, when he's really doing the classic Boy's Own story (Chicklit's equivalent, sometimes rudely known as Dick Lit), to an Asian Dub soundtrack.
What would his WIMP ratings be? The positive case studies first. In 1997, we heard about a young, 21-year-old genius who had sold her first novel on the strength of just 80 pages for roughly POUNDS 250,000. Zadie Smith lived in a media spotlight for the next decade; White Teeth did brilliantly, her second novel, The Autograph Man , was faintly damned, but she silenced most of her critics with last year's On Beauty .
In 2002, Hari Kunzru picked up POUNDS 1.25 m for The Impressionist . Like Smith, Kunzru survived the instinctive scepticism of several sections of the media, and pulled off a mesmerising second novel with Transmission a few years later. But he indicated just how high the stakes get for anointed authors when he said in an interview that The Impressionist had sold 100,000 copies, but there was still a lot to prove.
If you looked only at similar case studies, the unwary reader would conclude that Malkani might struggle with the rigours of punishing book tours, tons of badwill sent his way by less lucky writers and the odd negative review, but still emerge with a flourishing writing career.
That would be taking into account only half the data, though. Think of Bidisha, who wrote Seahorses at the precocious age of 16, in 1998. Her advance for the book was a relatively modest POUNDS 15,000, but her youth guaranteed huge waves of publicity. Seahorses did only modestly, though, and while Bidisha has stayed in the market—she has published three more novels since then—her career has been strictly average since that early burst of publicity.
Or think of Amy Jenkins, even though her publishers try very hard not to. Jenkins had the classic fairy tale story: she wrote a book proposal in 48 hours, and picked up a POUNDS 600,000 contract for her first novel, Honey Moon . The general reviewers' consensus can be summed up by the critic who wrote of the book that it "makes Bridget
Jones read like Tacitus"; the book tanked at the cash registers, too.
On balance, Malkani has an even chance at becoming the latest in the increasingly rare line-up of Successful Authorial Products: it's not easy, but it's far better to be a SAP than to WIMP out.
The BS column: John Kenneth Galbraith, novelist
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, May 2, 2006, the week Galbraith died)
"For some seventy years my working life has been concerned with economics, along with not infrequent departures to public and political service that had an economic aspect and one tour in journalism," wrote the late John Kenneth Galbraith in one of his last works, The Economics of Innocent Fraud .
He was in his nineties, a long way from the days when he had been famous for his unabashed championship of liberal economics. Disciples still genuflected at his name, and in India, his ambassadorship was still remembered fondly, but he was often seen as a force from the past.
Better-informed minds than mine will be able to place Galbraith's importance, who died this week at the age of 97, more accurately in the pages of history. For ordinary readers like me, Galbraith's works were memorable because he was one of the first, and one of the few, economists who wrote for a general audience. The Affluent Society became a catchphrase; we have assimilated Galbraith's thesis so thoroughly that we can barely remember how pathbreaking his insights were.
Perhaps it's because he was such a comfortably prolific writer—Indophiles might remember in particular his book on Indian painting and his affable Introduction to India -- that it's easy to forget that Galbraith also wrote three novels. He is possibly the only economist to have had a novel reviewed by Gore Vidal in the New York Times Book Review !
This was in 1963; The McLandress Dimension came out under the name of Mark Epernay, a pseudonym Galbraith employed when he wrote spoof articles for Esquire . In his review, Vidal, who clearly enjoyed the book explained: "[This is] a 'book' consisting of seven magazine articles, each based on a single joke. For instance, the McLandress Coefficient 'is the arithmetic mean or average of the intervals of time during which a subject's thoughts remain centered on some substantive phenomenon other than his own personality.' That's all there is to it. We learn that Miss Elizabeth Taylor can think about something other than herself for three minutes (theater people have low coefficients). …At twenty-nine minutes, the President's coefficient is relatively high. … Richard Nixon's three seconds is unusually low. Professor Galbraith clocks himself in at one minute fifteen seconds which seems fair. But then what is one to make of: 'both Mr. Arthur Miller and Mr. Tennessee Williams have a rating of thirty-five minutes. Mr. Gore Vidal, by contrast, has a rating of twelve and a half minutes?'"
In 1968, Galbraith published The Triumph , which did well enough to land on several bestseller lists. The plot was nicely devious: the US government is secretly supporting the son of a Latin American dictator whose aim is to prevent the establishment of a democratic government in his country. It's only when he succeeds, backed by the blessings of the US, that it's revealed that the young dictator-in-the-wings is really a communist after all. Galbraith was no John Le Carre, and his characters remain unmemorable, but The Triumph had enough of his trademark asides to make you smile—especially if you're reading it today, in the light of what we know about the Iraq war, East Timor and other areas of the world which have kept the Americans busy.
Economics and politics prevented the professor from returning to more literary pursuits until 1990, when he published A Tenured Professor --this still stands on its own merits as a darkly funny campus novel, to my mind. The novel's protagonist, Professor Montgomery Marvin, is the inventor of the Index of Irrational Expectations, or IRAT. IRAT , which allows him to profit from the wrongheaded optimism of the market through comfortable statistical means. Marvin and his wife use their well-gotten gains for altruistic, liberal purposes, while Galbraith gets in his digs at everyone from the Wall Street raiders to Ronald Reagan to Camrbidge's intellectuals: "No one has ever been known to repeat what he or she has heard at a party, only what he or she has said."
It would be a pity to remember the economist and forget the novelist: how could we, living in Delhi, do without his Sociometric Institute, which assigned a "prestige horizon" to everyone that allowed for comfortable seating according to exact social rank at any sort of gathering whatsoever? Galbraith never explicitly said that he took his literary ambitions seriously, but he left a hint in the original author's blurb for A Tenured Professor . It left out all his other credits—that impressive roll of publications, awards, the ambassadorship, the honorary professorships—and identified him only as John Kenneth Galbraith, author of two previous works of fiction.
"For some seventy years my working life has been concerned with economics, along with not infrequent departures to public and political service that had an economic aspect and one tour in journalism," wrote the late John Kenneth Galbraith in one of his last works, The Economics of Innocent Fraud .
He was in his nineties, a long way from the days when he had been famous for his unabashed championship of liberal economics. Disciples still genuflected at his name, and in India, his ambassadorship was still remembered fondly, but he was often seen as a force from the past.
Better-informed minds than mine will be able to place Galbraith's importance, who died this week at the age of 97, more accurately in the pages of history. For ordinary readers like me, Galbraith's works were memorable because he was one of the first, and one of the few, economists who wrote for a general audience. The Affluent Society became a catchphrase; we have assimilated Galbraith's thesis so thoroughly that we can barely remember how pathbreaking his insights were.
Perhaps it's because he was such a comfortably prolific writer—Indophiles might remember in particular his book on Indian painting and his affable Introduction to India -- that it's easy to forget that Galbraith also wrote three novels. He is possibly the only economist to have had a novel reviewed by Gore Vidal in the New York Times Book Review !
This was in 1963; The McLandress Dimension came out under the name of Mark Epernay, a pseudonym Galbraith employed when he wrote spoof articles for Esquire . In his review, Vidal, who clearly enjoyed the book explained: "[This is] a 'book' consisting of seven magazine articles, each based on a single joke. For instance, the McLandress Coefficient 'is the arithmetic mean or average of the intervals of time during which a subject's thoughts remain centered on some substantive phenomenon other than his own personality.' That's all there is to it. We learn that Miss Elizabeth Taylor can think about something other than herself for three minutes (theater people have low coefficients). …At twenty-nine minutes, the President's coefficient is relatively high. … Richard Nixon's three seconds is unusually low. Professor Galbraith clocks himself in at one minute fifteen seconds which seems fair. But then what is one to make of: 'both Mr. Arthur Miller and Mr. Tennessee Williams have a rating of thirty-five minutes. Mr. Gore Vidal, by contrast, has a rating of twelve and a half minutes?'"
In 1968, Galbraith published The Triumph , which did well enough to land on several bestseller lists. The plot was nicely devious: the US government is secretly supporting the son of a Latin American dictator whose aim is to prevent the establishment of a democratic government in his country. It's only when he succeeds, backed by the blessings of the US, that it's revealed that the young dictator-in-the-wings is really a communist after all. Galbraith was no John Le Carre, and his characters remain unmemorable, but The Triumph had enough of his trademark asides to make you smile—especially if you're reading it today, in the light of what we know about the Iraq war, East Timor and other areas of the world which have kept the Americans busy.
Economics and politics prevented the professor from returning to more literary pursuits until 1990, when he published A Tenured Professor --this still stands on its own merits as a darkly funny campus novel, to my mind. The novel's protagonist, Professor Montgomery Marvin, is the inventor of the Index of Irrational Expectations, or IRAT. IRAT , which allows him to profit from the wrongheaded optimism of the market through comfortable statistical means. Marvin and his wife use their well-gotten gains for altruistic, liberal purposes, while Galbraith gets in his digs at everyone from the Wall Street raiders to Ronald Reagan to Camrbidge's intellectuals: "No one has ever been known to repeat what he or she has heard at a party, only what he or she has said."
It would be a pity to remember the economist and forget the novelist: how could we, living in Delhi, do without his Sociometric Institute, which assigned a "prestige horizon" to everyone that allowed for comfortable seating according to exact social rank at any sort of gathering whatsoever? Galbraith never explicitly said that he took his literary ambitions seriously, but he left a hint in the original author's blurb for A Tenured Professor . It left out all his other credits—that impressive roll of publications, awards, the ambassadorship, the honorary professorships—and identified him only as John Kenneth Galbraith, author of two previous works of fiction.
The BS columns: The Kaavya affair
(The first column was written the day before news of the Kaavya plagiarism scandal broke, and was carried the day after...)
The really interesting thing about Kaavya Viswanathan's novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life , has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. The story of Opal Mehta, serious American teenage nerd with a one-point agenda—Get Into Harvard—is sweetly and funnily told.
Opal's Harvard interview goes off the rails when her interviewer asks her: "So, what do you do for fun?" She drops the ball, forcing the Mehta parents to switch track from HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) to HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). Kaavya Viswanathan understands teenagers, which might be because she was one herself not so long ago—she is now in Harvard, preparing for a career on Wall Street.
It's a book I was perfectly happy to pick up, and just as happy to put down: until the warm-hearted, fun-filled film version is released, I won't have to think of Opal Mehta again, though it was nice knowing her while it lasted. But what puzzled me was How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Agent, Got Advance and Got the Big Hype Machine rolling.
In her interviews, Viswanathan comes across as a bright, interesting, self-assured young woman who lucked into the kind of book deal many older and more literary authors can still only dream about. But she and her interviewers actually have very little to say: the story is self-explanatory, there are few deeper meanings you can dig around for, and Viswanathan's own life is pleasantly ordinary. The interviews can only celebrate her success; we reviewers can only be pleased that Opal Mehta is kind of cute, kind of fun, the book kind of a good read.
The puzzling thing is that there are several authors writing for the same market who have produced work at least as good as Opal Mehta --Anjali Bannerji with Maya Running , for example—who haven't cracked the same deal. Kaavya Viswanathan is, at the very least, a competent writer: but she is also very much a product of today's market, a contemporary success story where the key elements are packaging and media managing, and where the book itself is just the content.
This is usually the point at which a reviewer is supposed to snort, paw the ground and tear into the bad, bad marketing machine that treats literature like burgers: all bestsellers have the same basic formula, tweaked a little bit for local palates. And I do understand Amit Chaudhuri's impatience with the Indian literary world for treating books as success stories, yet another mark of the India Shining brand conquering the world, the author as the son-in-law who's done so well.
But for the first time in publishing history, as several commentators have been pointing out recently, it has actually become possible for anyone to be a writer. There is no formula for great literary fiction, which is a bit of a problem; but then the market for literary fiction is a niche market, a boutique market, so the mainstream reader doesn't have to worry her head over that particular issue. It is often seen as a bad thing that more and more novels are being produced—I use that word deliberately—today; that creative writing courses allow anyone with a smidgeon of talent access to a wider market, once they've polished their skills; that any reasonably bright person can hammer out a book in six months and have a decent shot at being published.
The obvious argument against applying the laws of the marketplace to literature is that sales are far more important in publishing terms than quality. If you look at what's been resold to India as the great Indian novel in recent years, if you look at the world's bestseller lists, it's hard to disagree that publishing is no longer about looking at the literary qualities of a book.
But there's another way of looking at this: for the first time in the history of writing and publishing, it is possible for everyone to be, or contemplate being, an author. In the initial stages of this exercise in democracy, books will almost by definition be written for the moment; a lot of what "succeeds" will be only average; a lot of books will be written by many for a very few readers. Give it time, though, and if novel-writing becomes as much a pastime or occupation as music lessons once were, we could end up with strange and compelling new stories. I'm willing to applaud the Kaavya Viswanathans of this world while we wait to see exactly what the new democracy will bring—a wave of well-written trash, or something rather more lasting, more durable.
(...which meant interrupting a vacation in order to write an update, which Business Standard kindly published in the same week.)
This should really be called "How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Caught, Got Nailed and Ruined This Columnist's Vacation". Yesterday's column referred to the young sophomore's book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life , but came out just before accusations of plagiarism were made against Kaavya Viswanathan. Many thanks to all of you who wrote in with links and comments, and generally forced certain idling columnists back from the beaches of Goa.
The story broke when The Harvard Crimson cited a dozen-odd passages from Opal Mehta that seemed strikingly similar to passages found in two of author Megan McCafferty's books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings . McCafferty is an odd choice for a plagiarist: her books came out in the last six years, and she's a fairly well-known author in the teen market.
Here's a sample of what The Crimson found, and there was passage after passage like this one:
"From page 213 of McCafferty's first novel: "Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go."
From page 175 of Viswanathan's novel: "Sean stood up and stepped toward me, ostensibly to show me the book. He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the book toward me.""
The New York Times says that the similarities are more extensive than even The Crimson indicated—they counted 29 passages to the Crimson's dozen. Kaavya's defence is that she did it, but she didn't know she was doing it—the classic unconscious plagiarism plea. She was "very surprised and upset" to learn about the similarities; she "wasn't aware of how much" she may have "internalized Ms McCafferty's words". There is much scope for irony here: when it was revealed, before the scandal broke, that Kaavya Viswanathan's original debut novel had been massaged into shape by editors as well as something called a "book packaging company", her editor asserted staunchly that the writing of Opal was "1,000 per cent" Kaavya's work. Make that somewhere around 900 per cent.
What makes Kaavya's plagiarism, unconscious or not, such a burning issue that the Malaysian Star, the People's Daily of China and the New Guinea Gazette would all consider it front-page news? This is a book from a genre not especially known for its originality—boy meets girl plays out against the battlefield of SAT scores, teen friendships and fashion bloomers.
It's a first novel that was massaged and pummeled into shape—again, long before the plagiarism storm broke, Kaavya's editors were comfortable admitting that Opal Mehta needed more work and more "inputs" than most manuscripts, though they gave her credit for an "original" idea. Given that one of Megan McCafferty's novels is about a young girl trying to get into Columbia, and that Kaavya Viswanathan's novel is about a young brown girl trying to get into Harvard, the only thing original about Opal Mehta lies in the fact that it features an Asian protagonist. In other words, we may not have known how much of Opal Mehta had been borrowed, accidentally or not, from another published writer; but we did have a fair idea of the many processes that went into the manufacture of this book, complete with the advance, the hype, the deal.
Years ago, I remember reading Elizabeth Goudge's The Rosemary Tree alongside the late Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen's Crane's Morning with shock, and dismay. Aikath-Gyaltsen was a minor but fine literary talent; she plagiarized her entire second novel from Goudge's work; and reading those paragraphs, I felt my heart sink in genuine, terrible sadness.
Looking at the similarities between Megan McCafferty's work and Kaavya Viswanathan's work was like reading a sobering checklist, nothing more: this may be snobbish, but I cannot care as much about moderately well-written teen stories as I do about fiction that is genuinely original. Genuine acts of plagiarism force us to see things we would rather not see, like the despair and hubris of a talented mind spiraling into its own darkness. In the brand-new world of publishing as it stands today, even plagiarism has become a simulacrum, a pale imitation of the real thing.
The really interesting thing about Kaavya Viswanathan's novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life , has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. The story of Opal Mehta, serious American teenage nerd with a one-point agenda—Get Into Harvard—is sweetly and funnily told.
Opal's Harvard interview goes off the rails when her interviewer asks her: "So, what do you do for fun?" She drops the ball, forcing the Mehta parents to switch track from HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) to HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). Kaavya Viswanathan understands teenagers, which might be because she was one herself not so long ago—she is now in Harvard, preparing for a career on Wall Street.
It's a book I was perfectly happy to pick up, and just as happy to put down: until the warm-hearted, fun-filled film version is released, I won't have to think of Opal Mehta again, though it was nice knowing her while it lasted. But what puzzled me was How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Agent, Got Advance and Got the Big Hype Machine rolling.
In her interviews, Viswanathan comes across as a bright, interesting, self-assured young woman who lucked into the kind of book deal many older and more literary authors can still only dream about. But she and her interviewers actually have very little to say: the story is self-explanatory, there are few deeper meanings you can dig around for, and Viswanathan's own life is pleasantly ordinary. The interviews can only celebrate her success; we reviewers can only be pleased that Opal Mehta is kind of cute, kind of fun, the book kind of a good read.
The puzzling thing is that there are several authors writing for the same market who have produced work at least as good as Opal Mehta --Anjali Bannerji with Maya Running , for example—who haven't cracked the same deal. Kaavya Viswanathan is, at the very least, a competent writer: but she is also very much a product of today's market, a contemporary success story where the key elements are packaging and media managing, and where the book itself is just the content.
This is usually the point at which a reviewer is supposed to snort, paw the ground and tear into the bad, bad marketing machine that treats literature like burgers: all bestsellers have the same basic formula, tweaked a little bit for local palates. And I do understand Amit Chaudhuri's impatience with the Indian literary world for treating books as success stories, yet another mark of the India Shining brand conquering the world, the author as the son-in-law who's done so well.
But for the first time in publishing history, as several commentators have been pointing out recently, it has actually become possible for anyone to be a writer. There is no formula for great literary fiction, which is a bit of a problem; but then the market for literary fiction is a niche market, a boutique market, so the mainstream reader doesn't have to worry her head over that particular issue. It is often seen as a bad thing that more and more novels are being produced—I use that word deliberately—today; that creative writing courses allow anyone with a smidgeon of talent access to a wider market, once they've polished their skills; that any reasonably bright person can hammer out a book in six months and have a decent shot at being published.
The obvious argument against applying the laws of the marketplace to literature is that sales are far more important in publishing terms than quality. If you look at what's been resold to India as the great Indian novel in recent years, if you look at the world's bestseller lists, it's hard to disagree that publishing is no longer about looking at the literary qualities of a book.
But there's another way of looking at this: for the first time in the history of writing and publishing, it is possible for everyone to be, or contemplate being, an author. In the initial stages of this exercise in democracy, books will almost by definition be written for the moment; a lot of what "succeeds" will be only average; a lot of books will be written by many for a very few readers. Give it time, though, and if novel-writing becomes as much a pastime or occupation as music lessons once were, we could end up with strange and compelling new stories. I'm willing to applaud the Kaavya Viswanathans of this world while we wait to see exactly what the new democracy will bring—a wave of well-written trash, or something rather more lasting, more durable.
(...which meant interrupting a vacation in order to write an update, which Business Standard kindly published in the same week.)
This should really be called "How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Caught, Got Nailed and Ruined This Columnist's Vacation". Yesterday's column referred to the young sophomore's book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life , but came out just before accusations of plagiarism were made against Kaavya Viswanathan. Many thanks to all of you who wrote in with links and comments, and generally forced certain idling columnists back from the beaches of Goa.
The story broke when The Harvard Crimson cited a dozen-odd passages from Opal Mehta that seemed strikingly similar to passages found in two of author Megan McCafferty's books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings . McCafferty is an odd choice for a plagiarist: her books came out in the last six years, and she's a fairly well-known author in the teen market.
Here's a sample of what The Crimson found, and there was passage after passage like this one:
"From page 213 of McCafferty's first novel: "Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go."
From page 175 of Viswanathan's novel: "Sean stood up and stepped toward me, ostensibly to show me the book. He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the book toward me.""
The New York Times says that the similarities are more extensive than even The Crimson indicated—they counted 29 passages to the Crimson's dozen. Kaavya's defence is that she did it, but she didn't know she was doing it—the classic unconscious plagiarism plea. She was "very surprised and upset" to learn about the similarities; she "wasn't aware of how much" she may have "internalized Ms McCafferty's words". There is much scope for irony here: when it was revealed, before the scandal broke, that Kaavya Viswanathan's original debut novel had been massaged into shape by editors as well as something called a "book packaging company", her editor asserted staunchly that the writing of Opal was "1,000 per cent" Kaavya's work. Make that somewhere around 900 per cent.
What makes Kaavya's plagiarism, unconscious or not, such a burning issue that the Malaysian Star, the People's Daily of China and the New Guinea Gazette would all consider it front-page news? This is a book from a genre not especially known for its originality—boy meets girl plays out against the battlefield of SAT scores, teen friendships and fashion bloomers.
It's a first novel that was massaged and pummeled into shape—again, long before the plagiarism storm broke, Kaavya's editors were comfortable admitting that Opal Mehta needed more work and more "inputs" than most manuscripts, though they gave her credit for an "original" idea. Given that one of Megan McCafferty's novels is about a young girl trying to get into Columbia, and that Kaavya Viswanathan's novel is about a young brown girl trying to get into Harvard, the only thing original about Opal Mehta lies in the fact that it features an Asian protagonist. In other words, we may not have known how much of Opal Mehta had been borrowed, accidentally or not, from another published writer; but we did have a fair idea of the many processes that went into the manufacture of this book, complete with the advance, the hype, the deal.
Years ago, I remember reading Elizabeth Goudge's The Rosemary Tree alongside the late Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen's Crane's Morning with shock, and dismay. Aikath-Gyaltsen was a minor but fine literary talent; she plagiarized her entire second novel from Goudge's work; and reading those paragraphs, I felt my heart sink in genuine, terrible sadness.
Looking at the similarities between Megan McCafferty's work and Kaavya Viswanathan's work was like reading a sobering checklist, nothing more: this may be snobbish, but I cannot care as much about moderately well-written teen stories as I do about fiction that is genuinely original. Genuine acts of plagiarism force us to see things we would rather not see, like the despair and hubris of a talented mind spiraling into its own darkness. In the brand-new world of publishing as it stands today, even plagiarism has become a simulacrum, a pale imitation of the real thing.
Spam, spam, beautiful spam
(I don't usually post my Time Out columns about cyberspace--they go out of date too fast--but this one on spam was kind of fun to write. Carried in Time Out, Mumbai, April 2006)
Dr Mariam Abacha, look what you went and did. Though the infamous Nigerian '419' scam wasn't the first rip-off scheme to go viral on the Internet, it was one of the more tenacious scams—and it provided a blueprint of sorts for future scammers and spammers.
The Nigerian scam was simple: emails arrived from people purporting to be the wives of politicos (that was "Mariam Abacha"'s USP), retired generals, aides to unseated dictators and the like. The pitch was the same: they had access to bank accounts containing untold wealth that they would gladly share with you if you would help them get the money out.
As with the Lottery Scam ("Congratulations! You have won a million gazillion dollars by doing absolutely nothing at all!") and its more recent variants, such as the Publishing Scam ("We will pay you a zillion trillion dollars if you help us edit two short stories"), the story is unimportant: the aim is to get the sucker at the end to cough up his or her bank account numbers and other personal financial information.
The scary thing about online scams isn't just how many people fell for them—the Nigerian scam briefly turned deadly, when a few people who'd been ripped off decided to go to Nigeria to investigate and were bumped off. It's that the Lottery Letters, the Nigerian Scam and the Psychic's Emails became the template for spammers. Every pitch that landed in our mailboxes after 1998 had the same feel to it, whether the spammer was selling university diplomas, time-share resorts, horny Asian babes or entire pharmacopeias of drugs guaranteed to improve your sex life.
By end-2005, spam blocking filters had improved, forcing spam into more and more creative alleys. The discovery that randomly generated phrases would usually get through firewalls and filters led to oddly beautiful spam: imagine fragments of poetry emerging in random order from the brain of a brilliant and disturbed alcoholic. In 2006, spam is moving towards the creative use of images and voices. And there's a slow shift in attitudes to spam: while we still see it as the biggest nuisance on the Net, a small group of enthusiasts are beginning to see the creative possibilities in spam.
Spam poetry has been around as long as spam itself: purists insist that to qualify, poems cannot simply be about spam, but must use lines from genuine spam. (To get your spam, assuming you're not satisfied with what's coming through the usual channels, try The Incredible Spam Museum or The Spam Letters.) Spam Radio offers a nonstop feed of spam, with particularly choice selections being The Toilet Seat and The Polite Nigerian.
And now spam provides the building blocks for art. At Spamgraffiti, exhibits use randomly generated lines from specific spam to create an oddly beautiful, if slightly limited, pastiche of scrolling lines in different colours. Key phrases leap out from this spam quilt in a way that becomes more than a little menacing after you've done three exhibits or more. Elsewhere, digital photographer Adam Harvey has been making waves with a far more ambitious exhibition: he digitally maps the subject lines of spam emails into huge pornographic forms, using porn sites as his inspiration. What he's emerged with is more art than titillation, grotesque and beautiful at the same time. I can see how this might be the wave of the future, with artists spurning offline junk in favour of virtual trash for their palettes.
Go visit:
Adam Harvey's SAVE AS mixes porn sites, digital photography and spam email subject headers to spectacular effect.
Spamgraffiti: Freefloating lines of spam are used in a series of oddly beautiful collages.
Spamradio: You've seen enough of the Nigerians, the Viagra peddlers, the lottery holders: now listen to them.
SatireWire's pathbreaking Poetry Spam contest from 2001, featuring the classic 'Enlarge Your Boss'
Spam Letters and Spam Museum: can't get enough spam? Go here.
Dr Mariam Abacha, look what you went and did. Though the infamous Nigerian '419' scam wasn't the first rip-off scheme to go viral on the Internet, it was one of the more tenacious scams—and it provided a blueprint of sorts for future scammers and spammers.
The Nigerian scam was simple: emails arrived from people purporting to be the wives of politicos (that was "Mariam Abacha"'s USP), retired generals, aides to unseated dictators and the like. The pitch was the same: they had access to bank accounts containing untold wealth that they would gladly share with you if you would help them get the money out.
As with the Lottery Scam ("Congratulations! You have won a million gazillion dollars by doing absolutely nothing at all!") and its more recent variants, such as the Publishing Scam ("We will pay you a zillion trillion dollars if you help us edit two short stories"), the story is unimportant: the aim is to get the sucker at the end to cough up his or her bank account numbers and other personal financial information.
The scary thing about online scams isn't just how many people fell for them—the Nigerian scam briefly turned deadly, when a few people who'd been ripped off decided to go to Nigeria to investigate and were bumped off. It's that the Lottery Letters, the Nigerian Scam and the Psychic's Emails became the template for spammers. Every pitch that landed in our mailboxes after 1998 had the same feel to it, whether the spammer was selling university diplomas, time-share resorts, horny Asian babes or entire pharmacopeias of drugs guaranteed to improve your sex life.
By end-2005, spam blocking filters had improved, forcing spam into more and more creative alleys. The discovery that randomly generated phrases would usually get through firewalls and filters led to oddly beautiful spam: imagine fragments of poetry emerging in random order from the brain of a brilliant and disturbed alcoholic. In 2006, spam is moving towards the creative use of images and voices. And there's a slow shift in attitudes to spam: while we still see it as the biggest nuisance on the Net, a small group of enthusiasts are beginning to see the creative possibilities in spam.
Spam poetry has been around as long as spam itself: purists insist that to qualify, poems cannot simply be about spam, but must use lines from genuine spam. (To get your spam, assuming you're not satisfied with what's coming through the usual channels, try The Incredible Spam Museum or The Spam Letters.) Spam Radio offers a nonstop feed of spam, with particularly choice selections being The Toilet Seat and The Polite Nigerian.
And now spam provides the building blocks for art. At Spamgraffiti, exhibits use randomly generated lines from specific spam to create an oddly beautiful, if slightly limited, pastiche of scrolling lines in different colours. Key phrases leap out from this spam quilt in a way that becomes more than a little menacing after you've done three exhibits or more. Elsewhere, digital photographer Adam Harvey has been making waves with a far more ambitious exhibition: he digitally maps the subject lines of spam emails into huge pornographic forms, using porn sites as his inspiration. What he's emerged with is more art than titillation, grotesque and beautiful at the same time. I can see how this might be the wave of the future, with artists spurning offline junk in favour of virtual trash for their palettes.
Go visit:
Adam Harvey's SAVE AS mixes porn sites, digital photography and spam email subject headers to spectacular effect.
Spamgraffiti: Freefloating lines of spam are used in a series of oddly beautiful collages.
Spamradio: You've seen enough of the Nigerians, the Viagra peddlers, the lottery holders: now listen to them.
SatireWire's pathbreaking Poetry Spam contest from 2001, featuring the classic 'Enlarge Your Boss'
Spam Letters and Spam Museum: can't get enough spam? Go here.
The BS column: Muriel Spark
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, April 18, 2006)
In 1953, eight years before The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published, Muriel Spark typed up her curriculum vitae; these two paragraphs will give you a flavour of the whole.
"1947-1949: edited "Poetry Review" and changed the policy, rather too abruptly, to include younger "modern" poets who had previously been anathemised by the journal. This caused a fuss… but otherwise the job was fun while it lasted.
Took up full-time literary work. First publisher went bankrupt. Second publisher also went bankrupt. Lived on tinned soup, and did fine on it, until I found a third publisher, who was solvent, to take on the books. Have rather gone off soup since."
Those were the soup years, the coffee-and-Dexedrine years. Muriel Spark never romanticized that period of her life, nor did she ever embellish it: the life of a starving artist was grim and dreary, and she had far too clear a vision not to recognize the dullness that went hand-in-hand with poverty. Some of her experiences came through in The Girls of Slender Means , a novel that succeeded so well in being amusing about the trials of hostel life for young girls that its essential harshness could escape the careless reader. In later years, when she built her massive personal archives from not just letters and manuscripts, but every conceivable scrap of paper—bus tickets, concert programmes, household bills—it was hard not to wonder whether that obsession for saving everything stemmed from that early experience of having so little.
Graham Greene sent her money, on condition that she would neither thank him nor pray for him. At a time when she suffered delusions, and hallucinations, and increasing self-doubt, a priest gave her shelter, and through his offices she returned to faith. In religion she found freedom, a release from doubt; she found religion as a ship finds safe harbour, and she gave something of that to Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .
That book, her sixth novel, towers in the public imagination over the rest of her oeuvre. I can understand why it has such a hold on us. Through the small enclave of a convent school in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark took us mercilessly into the mysteries of childhood and the betrayals of middle age, examining wars, doubt, passion, friendship and obsession along the way. Many readers forget, or never knew, that Muriel Spark was primarily a poet—that is how she came to writing, and her poems accompanied her prose throughout her life. It is hard to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and not see the poet's hand in those lines.
If I have a caveat about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , it is simply that it overshadows the rest of Muriel Spark's work, and what the work itself had to say about writing. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), featured a young girl who is herself writing a first novel, and who is not pleased when an omniscient narrator puts her into a first novel, typing out her life from above, so to speak. Her last novel, Finishing School (2004), took a long, hard look at the contemporary cult of the writer: it pitted a writing teacher at the College Sunrise against a teenage wunderkind whose first novel seemed set for success.
"Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative-writing class, whose parents' money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around 16 to 17 years of age, some more, some a little less. "So," he said, "you must just write, when you set your scene, 'the other side of the lake was hidden in mist'. Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, 'The other side of the lake was just visible.' But as you are setting the scene, don't make any emphasis as yet. It's too soon, for instance, for you to write, 'The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.' That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don't want to make a point as yet."
The Finishing School is regarded as a slight novel, a relatively minor Spark. But Muriel Spark's work has a way of illuminating the unexpected, with different novels, short stories and poems being "rediscovered" by each generation. Twenty years ago, it was The Girls of Slender Means ; today, Miss Brodie rules. It might be too early to dismiss The Finishing School , though; when they finally write the farcical history of literature in the 21st century, Muriel Spark may well turn out to have the last word on the subject.
In 1953, eight years before The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published, Muriel Spark typed up her curriculum vitae; these two paragraphs will give you a flavour of the whole.
"1947-1949: edited "Poetry Review" and changed the policy, rather too abruptly, to include younger "modern" poets who had previously been anathemised by the journal. This caused a fuss… but otherwise the job was fun while it lasted.
Took up full-time literary work. First publisher went bankrupt. Second publisher also went bankrupt. Lived on tinned soup, and did fine on it, until I found a third publisher, who was solvent, to take on the books. Have rather gone off soup since."
Those were the soup years, the coffee-and-Dexedrine years. Muriel Spark never romanticized that period of her life, nor did she ever embellish it: the life of a starving artist was grim and dreary, and she had far too clear a vision not to recognize the dullness that went hand-in-hand with poverty. Some of her experiences came through in The Girls of Slender Means , a novel that succeeded so well in being amusing about the trials of hostel life for young girls that its essential harshness could escape the careless reader. In later years, when she built her massive personal archives from not just letters and manuscripts, but every conceivable scrap of paper—bus tickets, concert programmes, household bills—it was hard not to wonder whether that obsession for saving everything stemmed from that early experience of having so little.
Graham Greene sent her money, on condition that she would neither thank him nor pray for him. At a time when she suffered delusions, and hallucinations, and increasing self-doubt, a priest gave her shelter, and through his offices she returned to faith. In religion she found freedom, a release from doubt; she found religion as a ship finds safe harbour, and she gave something of that to Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .
That book, her sixth novel, towers in the public imagination over the rest of her oeuvre. I can understand why it has such a hold on us. Through the small enclave of a convent school in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark took us mercilessly into the mysteries of childhood and the betrayals of middle age, examining wars, doubt, passion, friendship and obsession along the way. Many readers forget, or never knew, that Muriel Spark was primarily a poet—that is how she came to writing, and her poems accompanied her prose throughout her life. It is hard to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and not see the poet's hand in those lines.
If I have a caveat about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , it is simply that it overshadows the rest of Muriel Spark's work, and what the work itself had to say about writing. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), featured a young girl who is herself writing a first novel, and who is not pleased when an omniscient narrator puts her into a first novel, typing out her life from above, so to speak. Her last novel, Finishing School (2004), took a long, hard look at the contemporary cult of the writer: it pitted a writing teacher at the College Sunrise against a teenage wunderkind whose first novel seemed set for success.
"Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative-writing class, whose parents' money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around 16 to 17 years of age, some more, some a little less. "So," he said, "you must just write, when you set your scene, 'the other side of the lake was hidden in mist'. Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, 'The other side of the lake was just visible.' But as you are setting the scene, don't make any emphasis as yet. It's too soon, for instance, for you to write, 'The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.' That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don't want to make a point as yet."
The Finishing School is regarded as a slight novel, a relatively minor Spark. But Muriel Spark's work has a way of illuminating the unexpected, with different novels, short stories and poems being "rediscovered" by each generation. Twenty years ago, it was The Girls of Slender Means ; today, Miss Brodie rules. It might be too early to dismiss The Finishing School , though; when they finally write the farcical history of literature in the 21st century, Muriel Spark may well turn out to have the last word on the subject.
The BS column: The Kitab festival
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, April 10, 2006)
The first day of the Kitab festival, a group of students hover uneasily outside the Stein auditorium. "We don't have passes…" one of them says uncertainly. "You don't need passes. Just come on in," they're told.
By this Sunday, the last day of the festival that brought together Indian and British writers, publishers, magazine editors, journalists, politicians and the odd film star, word had gone around. Kitab, like the annual Katha festival and a handful of other literary conclaves, actually meant it when it claimed to be "for everyone".
Four years ago, at the same venue—Delhi's Habitat Centre—a very different festival of letters had taken place. It was a sarkari festival, put together with a lot of hard work and good intentions, and it brought together an astonishingly wide range of Indian writers from "home" and the diaspora. At least a score of India's languages were represented, including English.
At the much smaller Kitab fest, I missed many writers—Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Shrilal Shukla, Kiran Nagarkar, U R Ananthamurthy, Sitanshu Yashchandra, M T Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zachariah, Githa Hariharan, Vikram Seth, V S Naipaul, Ved Mehta, Khushwant Singh, to name a handful. And I missed the buzz of that festival, too, with its multiple events being held simultaneously.
But Kitab had the three ingredients that the ICCR festival lacked, and these three were key. It made conversations happen. It allowed editors, journalists and publishers from outside India to meet their counterparts here, and perhaps get a slightly wider picture of the shifts taking place in publishing. And it was a festival that threw open its doors; unlike the ICCR festival, which was deeply unwilling to allow authors and readers to meet outside an invisible cordon sanitaire.
The conversations at Kitab had a way of carrying on long after the official sessions had ended. On the first day, William Dalrymple introduced his forthcoming series of books on the last four of the Mughal emperors, and read a section from the Bahadur Shah Zafar book, The Last Mughal .
It captured the shift, over just two decades, in interactions between the Indians and the British in India: what had been, in his view, a close and complex relationship moved in twenty years to a state where the "natives" and the Raj led separate lives. He mentioned the wealth of untapped material in India, the archives of unread manuscripts, untranslated documents; on a panel two days later, he would speak eloquently of the need for Indian writers to use that rich source material to write more non-fiction, more biographies.
The same day, two speakers referred back to Dalrymple's lecture, speaking of the need to keep conversations between countries, peoples and hemispheres alive—and the growing need to ensure that these were not just one-way. On a panel featuring Claire Short, Rory Stewart and M J Akbar, it was tempting to analyse the American invasion of Iraq as an example of a failed, one-way conversation between two countries. Much later, C P Surendran pointed out that it wasn't the will or the impulse to write non-fiction that was missing: if Indian publishers could afford to pay authors million dollar advances, he noted sardonically, the diaspora writers would move back home.
At a morning reading on Sunday, Amit Chaudhuri offered his tongue-in-cheek vision of the writer and the writer's double: the writer is the person responsible for the work, and he has nothing to do with his double, who's the one who goes out and writes papers, makes public speeches--and attends literary festivals. That afternoon, Rana Dasgupta offered another view of the writer, speaking of an encounter with an Indian journalist who was disappointed at Rana's size. "I expected you to be bigger," he told the author several times during the interview. It was the first time, said Dasgupta, that he had been confronted with a vision of the writer not just as a successful figure, but as one who must be physically robust, muscular: a vision of big men, writing big books.
By Sunday, the Habitat Centre had become, quite casually, a hub where people from the trade and authors and ordinary readers hung out. I missed a few things: more bookstalls, perhaps a space for the little magazines; I missed many, many people who should have been there. But for three days, Kitab had brought together disparate people and disparate themes. The discussions ranged from the Iraq war to Muslims in the media, from snake charmers and call centres to, self-referentially, the running of festivals. The writers may have ranged in size from small, slight or compact to lanky, large and big: the conversations, however, were suitably muscular.
The first day of the Kitab festival, a group of students hover uneasily outside the Stein auditorium. "We don't have passes…" one of them says uncertainly. "You don't need passes. Just come on in," they're told.
By this Sunday, the last day of the festival that brought together Indian and British writers, publishers, magazine editors, journalists, politicians and the odd film star, word had gone around. Kitab, like the annual Katha festival and a handful of other literary conclaves, actually meant it when it claimed to be "for everyone".
Four years ago, at the same venue—Delhi's Habitat Centre—a very different festival of letters had taken place. It was a sarkari festival, put together with a lot of hard work and good intentions, and it brought together an astonishingly wide range of Indian writers from "home" and the diaspora. At least a score of India's languages were represented, including English.
At the much smaller Kitab fest, I missed many writers—Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Shrilal Shukla, Kiran Nagarkar, U R Ananthamurthy, Sitanshu Yashchandra, M T Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zachariah, Githa Hariharan, Vikram Seth, V S Naipaul, Ved Mehta, Khushwant Singh, to name a handful. And I missed the buzz of that festival, too, with its multiple events being held simultaneously.
But Kitab had the three ingredients that the ICCR festival lacked, and these three were key. It made conversations happen. It allowed editors, journalists and publishers from outside India to meet their counterparts here, and perhaps get a slightly wider picture of the shifts taking place in publishing. And it was a festival that threw open its doors; unlike the ICCR festival, which was deeply unwilling to allow authors and readers to meet outside an invisible cordon sanitaire.
The conversations at Kitab had a way of carrying on long after the official sessions had ended. On the first day, William Dalrymple introduced his forthcoming series of books on the last four of the Mughal emperors, and read a section from the Bahadur Shah Zafar book, The Last Mughal .
It captured the shift, over just two decades, in interactions between the Indians and the British in India: what had been, in his view, a close and complex relationship moved in twenty years to a state where the "natives" and the Raj led separate lives. He mentioned the wealth of untapped material in India, the archives of unread manuscripts, untranslated documents; on a panel two days later, he would speak eloquently of the need for Indian writers to use that rich source material to write more non-fiction, more biographies.
The same day, two speakers referred back to Dalrymple's lecture, speaking of the need to keep conversations between countries, peoples and hemispheres alive—and the growing need to ensure that these were not just one-way. On a panel featuring Claire Short, Rory Stewart and M J Akbar, it was tempting to analyse the American invasion of Iraq as an example of a failed, one-way conversation between two countries. Much later, C P Surendran pointed out that it wasn't the will or the impulse to write non-fiction that was missing: if Indian publishers could afford to pay authors million dollar advances, he noted sardonically, the diaspora writers would move back home.
At a morning reading on Sunday, Amit Chaudhuri offered his tongue-in-cheek vision of the writer and the writer's double: the writer is the person responsible for the work, and he has nothing to do with his double, who's the one who goes out and writes papers, makes public speeches--and attends literary festivals. That afternoon, Rana Dasgupta offered another view of the writer, speaking of an encounter with an Indian journalist who was disappointed at Rana's size. "I expected you to be bigger," he told the author several times during the interview. It was the first time, said Dasgupta, that he had been confronted with a vision of the writer not just as a successful figure, but as one who must be physically robust, muscular: a vision of big men, writing big books.
By Sunday, the Habitat Centre had become, quite casually, a hub where people from the trade and authors and ordinary readers hung out. I missed a few things: more bookstalls, perhaps a space for the little magazines; I missed many, many people who should have been there. But for three days, Kitab had brought together disparate people and disparate themes. The discussions ranged from the Iraq war to Muslims in the media, from snake charmers and call centres to, self-referentially, the running of festivals. The writers may have ranged in size from small, slight or compact to lanky, large and big: the conversations, however, were suitably muscular.
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