The BS column: Teenage wasteland/ What to read before you get old

(This is a longer version of this week's Speaking Volumes column, carried in the Business Standard, September 1, 2009)


Teenagers watch movies and play online games, but they don’t read any more. Today’s children aren’t interested in books. Familiar complaints, often voiced in “readers are an endangered species” arguments, but they miss two crucial points.

Most literate cultures lose readers in the teenage years. Though most teens continue to be highly connected to reading, narrative and textuality—through Twitter, social media networks, graphic novels and comics, films, and new technospeak argots, they seem to move away from books.

In India, we could hardly complain that teenagers don’t read any more, if we had so little to offer them to read. But there’s been a sharp shift over just the last few years, though, with writers like Siddharth Sharma (The Grasshopper’s Run, which blends action adventure and contemporary history), Shazia Omar (Like a Diamond in the Sky--crossover fiction) and others joining writers like fantasy veteran Samit Basu, who has considerable crossover appeal, or Paro Anand and Anshumani Rudra, whose writings increasingly appeal to teens.

This week, four publishing insiders share their views on the young adult writing scene in India: Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Hachette India; Sayoni Basu, Publishing Director, Scholastic India; Anita Roy, Commissioning Editor, Zubaan Books; and Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, Editorial Director, Puffin Books.

Is there a growing demand for young adult fiction?

Sayoni Basu (Scholastic): There’s a very definite age group between the Enid Blytons, Nancy Drew and the Sidney Sheldons! To an extent, the classics fill that gap, but that gets quite boring. Young adults—roughly between the ages of 14-18, have their own interests and issues--first love, growing up, career choices--which few children's or adult novels deal with. So they’re looking for reading that’s greater in complexity and ideas than a children's book--but that’s still not quite about marriage or jobs or suchlike.


Sudeshna Shome Ghosh (Puffin): Young readers want books that are written for them and that feature their thinking; Puffin is actively looking to commission original fiction for this segment.

Anita Roy (Zubaan): There is undoubtedly both a need and a demand for YA Fiction - you only have to look at the sales for this sector to know that it's healthy and growing. The growth has been a relatively recent phenomenon - previously you just had "adult" and "children's" literature: the huge commercial success of writers like J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman and Stephanie Jordan has been due, in no small measure, to the fact that their series have been read by adults as well as kids. They have pioneered the term "cross-over fiction." If you're a pessimist, you might put this down to the fact that adults are less inclined to read serious, grown-up, 'high' literature in the modern day, and see this as a kind of 'dumbing down' of literary tastes. If you're an optimist, you could see this - as I'm more inclined to do - as the fact that really good writers are telling really gripping stories which appeal to readers regardless of their age.


Thomas Abraham (Hachette): We’re seeing a huge sales spurt in this category, but that’s fuelled by one or two series—Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series, the House of Night series. These are huge phenomena worldwide, but the rest of the category is as dead as it always was. We have a whole imprint that caters to YA with top notch writers in it like Jordan and Scott Card, but these don’t sell at all. So one is faced with the old problem that once teenagers cross the 15+ threshold (with rare exceptions), we seem to lose them where leisure reading is concerned (to parties, internet, hangouts, TV?). A lot come back when they are early 20s mainly for non-fiction that ‘must be read’ (read career advancement reading which will include some trade reading too that will stand them in good stead in interviews), but this at one level is the biggest demographic challenge being faced today by the Indian trade publishing industry. Children’s writing is seeing a sort of resurgence, but unless we have initiatives to get the teen segment reading for pleasure, this whole young populace that we’re rolling out in economic surveys (50% of India is below the age of 30 etc) will be a non-reading population even if it is a literate one.

What does this age group want to read? And what challenges do Indian writers face?

Sayoni: Parents are still uncomfortable with the idea that their children might be interested in knowing about sex or relationships. I find it quite interesting that some school teachers have no problems with Mills and Boon but do with Judy Bloom. I think the 12 to 18 year-old has any many diverse interests as an adult. So a similar range of genres, and perhaps themes and treatments that are more relevant to their lives. Also stories which relate to their lives or stories with protagonists of a similar age group.

Sudeshna: We’re looking at books that are based on the reality around us today—relationships, friends, peer issues--or at highly popular fantasy adventure books. Suchitra Krishnamoorthi’s Swapnalok Society series, for instance, are set in a residential society in Mumbai and follow the trials of a group of children 12 years and over. Faces in the Water by Ranjit Lal, set in modern Delhi, offers a surreal take on female infanticide.

Anita: Basically, good writing. Sounds simplistic, but it's the only answer I can really come up with. Stories which capture the imagination, and don't talk down to the reader; strong characters, gripping plots, books which reflect young lives and are not afraid to tackle difficult subjects. There has been much hand-wringing in the West about the very dark and difficult books which feature on today's YA lists - The chair of judges and the Guardian's children's books editor Julia Eccleshare says of this year's Guardian Children's Book Prize: "This longlist shows there is absolutely no subject which children's authors aren't willing to tackle... there is nothing which is not capable of being dealt with in a children's book."
Indian writers, I feel, too often hamper their own creativity by deciding what 'can' and 'can't' be written about for children. And publishers, too, prejudge what will get past the "gatekeepers" - librarians, teachers, parents - which can lead to erring on the side of the 'safe'. I see signs that in the next few years, however, we'll see more and more writers and publishers taking risks - and those leading to a healthy crop of Indian books for young adults which challenge, delight, disturb, entertain and provoke. The field is wide open right now, and the next few years are going to be exciting!

Thomas: Vampire and paranormal romance fiction has obviously sunk its teeth in! Abroad, this category offers perspectives on growing up and discussions on major political and social themes. We have, for instance, Arjun Rao’s Third Best coming out, a gritty, almost hard boiled look at life within a residential school that we will market to teens. Unfortunately, the top teen bestsellers would probably still be the guides to SAT, and IIT-JEE etc. Leisure reading needs to catch up.

Recommendations, aside from books already mentioned: Ranjit Lal: The Battle for Number 19, Paro Anand’s Weed and No Guns at My Son’s Funeral, Kavita Daswani: A Girl Named Indie, Michaela Clarke: The City of Jewels, Siddhartha Sarma: The Grasshopper’s Run, Subhadra Sen Gupta: Double Click, Arun Krishnan: The Loudest Firecracker (disclaimer--this was commissioned and published by Tranquebar, my former publishing house) and the works of writers like Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Sarnath Banerji, Amruta Patil.

The BS Column: The care and feeding of book bans

(This is a longer version of the piece published in the Business Standard, August 25, 2009)




In Delhi’s Coronation Park, you’ll find a circle of empty plinths. These pedestals were intended for the statues of viceroys past, and a few, like Willingdon and Hardinge, have found their perches. But by and large, the crumbling figure of George V presides over a neglected graveyard of pedestal-less statues—the men who ruled India, now abandoned.

Perhaps politicians should be given a mandatory tour of Coronation Park, just to remind them of the futility of trying to keep the past on its pedestal. Propping up the past doesn’t work, either, as Upamanyu Chatterjee noted in English, August, where the cheerfully corrupt sculptor Tamse makes his Gandhi statues from such shoddy materials that the Mahatma must be supported by a bamboo protruding from the rear.

Over the last week, the debate over Jinnah—India, Partition, Independence, the book by former foreign minister Jaswant Singh, resulted in the author’s expulsion from the BJP. In Gujarat, chief minister Narendra Modi announced a statewide ban on the book. He felt Jinnah insulted the memory of Gujarati icon Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by examining whether the freedom fighter carried some responsibility for Partition. (Someone should remind him that Jinnah, too, was Gujarati.) Proving that stupidity is not a prerogative of any one political party, Congress MPs in Madhya Pradesh asked for a ban on Jinnah—Patel is an icon in Madhya Pradesh too—but the CM in that state (and the Karnataka CM) declined to oblige.

In recent years, the “state ban” rather than the nationwide ban on books has become a symbolic ritual. In 2003, the Left Front government banned Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, Dwikhandita, for fear that it might offend the Muslim community. (The Kolkata High Court subsequently lifted the ban.)

In 2004, the scholar James Laine discussed Shivaji’s parentage in his book; in an retributive act of carefully planned spontaneous outrage, "defenders" of Shivaji’s reputation sacked the Bhandarkar library in Pune. In the process, they destroyed several historical manuscripts, including rare documents about the life of Shivaji, but the irony of their actions was lost on the mob. Laine’s book was banned in Maharashtra. In 2008, Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati banned Jaishree Mishra’s Rani, because the book—clearly identified as historical fiction—suggested a romantic friendship between Rani Lakshmibai and a British officer. Very recently, Chattisgarh has banned the Habib Tanvir play Charandas Chor, on the grounds that it "hurts the sentiments" of a particular community. This "hurt" has been discovered after the play has had successful runs for over three decades. The late Tanvir would have been amused at one small point--the play was banned on the eve of a statewide "book reading week".

Those who asked for the ban had caught on to a fairly simple trend: it's much easier for any special-interest group to swing a statewide ban on a book today than it was just two decades ago. With each successive ban, we set more and more of a precedent for both a particular state and the Indian state to silence anything that doesn't fit with the preferred version of history, that offends and hurts the sentiments of a religious community, or that is just inconvenient. These are dangerous precedents to set, and with each uncontested ban, we give away a little of our own freedom.

The state ban crosses all party lines, and one could argue that the practice of banning books was embraced eagerly by a new, free generation of Indians. The British taste in book bans reflected a certain prudishness and insecurity: most books banned under British rule were either sexually explicit or openly seditious.

Post-Independence, books we banned included Aubrey Menen’s gleefully bawdy retelling of the Ramayana (Jawaharlal Nehru felt it might offend Hindus), works by and on Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, and biographies that questioned national leaders (Bertrand Russell’s China book was banned in part because he was scathing about Nehru). Over the decades, it became apparent that freedom of speech was offered, but not guaranteed, in India. If your opinions offended religious sensibilities, or offended our urgent and unexamined need to sanitise national icons, they would be censored.

The banning of a book, especially by a particular state, works wonderfully well in practice. It's much easier to organise a statewide rather than a nationwide ban, and even if the courts overturn the ban a few years later, the political point has been made. It allows politicians to express their willingness to defend a national figure or a religious belief—ignoring the fact that in most cases, that figure or belief is being questioned by the author, not attacked. It keeps the cadres happy, offers fodder for a string of stirring speeches, and is a cheap, easy gesture. The only constituency that is upset is the very narrow band of readers, publishers, and authors. We don’t constitute a vote bank, so our “right” to free speech is effectively irrelevant.

What we do lose with each ban, though, is the right to examine our own history. The bans against Nasreen and Laine had scholars and writers re-examining their work, for fear that they might attract the next ban—or angry mob. Publishing houses should be above the fear of lawsuits, so long as they believe in the author’s honesty and integrity—but many will now avoid anything too controversial. This has a devastating impact on research into the freedom movement, where few will now write about leaders as if they were more than statues on pedestals. And, contrary to what politicians believe, few readers want to read about statues.

The ban on Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah in Gujarat may well be lifted for political reasons. That won’t stop the BJP, or the Left Front, or the Congress from demanding a ban on the next book that happens to “offend people’s sensibilities”.

Perhaps they might profit from considering two outlandish, and ultimately ineffective, book bans. For many years, China banned Alice in Wonderland--because it raised animals to a human level, thereby insulting humankind. If you must ban a book, find a more splendidly moronic reason. More tellingly, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the most discussed books in Europe after its ban in 1933 because he had “insulted and offended the Wehrmacht”. The Reich rose and fell; Remarque’s books can be found in every German bookstore, even today.

(See also: Banned books in India: 1970s-2006)
And: The Complete Review's coverage of the James Laine/ Shivaji book
Salil Tripathi on the recent ban on Charandas Chor
Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee on the history textbook controversy

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2009 shortlist

It's not on the website yet, but sources say this is confirmed--fiction-heavy this year:

Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf
Mimlu Sen: Baulsphere
Mridula Koshy: If It Is Sweet
Palash Krishna Mehrotra: Eunuch Park
Parismita Singh: Hotel at the End of the World
Preeta Samarasan: Evening is the Whole Day.


Omissions of interest:
Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night, Neel Mukherjee's Past Continuous, Amit Varma's My Friend Sancho. Unless they've all written first books that we don't know about.

(This was a nostalgia piece on the Maruti 800 for Forbes India's August 2009 issue.)



All of us in Chanakya Puri knew the Pitts S-2A biplane, could pick the tiny speck out of the sky, ducked when the pilot flew a shade too close to the shallow rooftops or did a risky set of roll-and-dives over Palam Airfield. On that June day in Delhi, the insistent mosquito buzz of the biplane could be heard by the last of the morning walkers as it brushed the tops of the gulmohar and amaltas trees. It took a few seconds for us to register the sudden absence of sound, a pause that opened up and then never ended, that marked the end of the Sanjay Gandhi era.

None of us in the neighbourhood actually saw the plane go down. We did see the stately lady who arrived in an official Ambassador—these were the days before VIPs travelled only in entourages—and looked out with grief-reddened eyes over the fields where her maverick, risk-taking son had crashed, searching for something, a twist of steel, wreckage, not visible in the hard stubbled grass.

This was 1980, and later that June, my father took us out to India Gate for ice-cream. We travelled as we always did, a bunch of the neighbour’s kids packed in with me and my siblings like squirming minnows in the capacious belly of the family Ambassador. There was no traffic, as it is understood now; just a smattering of Premier Padminis trundling behind the ample, rounded elephant sway of the Ambys, the monotony of these two cars broken by the occasional appearance of a Baby Austin or Studebaker.

In 1980, the year Sanjay Gandhi crashed, the Maruti project was nine years old. It had been handed to Sanjay around the time of the Bangladesh war, and there had been muted criticism that he’d received the exclusive licence to manufacture what was being touted as the People’s Car. Within a year of his death, Maruti Udyog was formally established in February 1981. By 1983, the first Maruti had rolled off the line. Like thousands of Indians, our family rushed to join the queue for a new Maruti.



These days, if you’re coming back from a Rajasthan vacation, a business trip to Jaipur, you’ll see them on the last lap of the long highways snaking into Delhi: the massive, hulking shapes of the car-carriers, like frigates steaming into harbour. Every other vehicle on the roads will stop to let them through, and one of these monsters, carrying 20-odd shiny new cars at a go, can tie up a toll gate for hours on end.

There are at least 26 car manufacturers in today’s India offering everything from Range Rovers to Hyundais to dinky little Revas, and more knocking at the gates, a dazzling smorgasbord of models laid out in front of India’s consumers, with the promise of more to come. We take it for granted. We grumble that we don’t have the full banquet, just the appetisers and a small selection from the vast main courses available in other parts of the world. When we do make our choices, Hyundai versus Honda, Toyota versus Mercedes, we expect delivery the next day, a few sweeteners from the showroom guy.

Back in 1983, the main feature of the average Indian’s life was the queue and the long wait. You queued for black Bakelite phones, and then you queued for the privilege of meeting the linesman who would finally activate it, and then, at home, you queued for prebooked Demand or Lightning calls to another city and counted yourself lucky if the call came through in 24 hours. You queued for gas connections and for a token at the bank that would allow you to step up to the counter in ten or thirty minutes or an hour if you were unlucky to collect your cash.

The big surprise about queuing for a Maruti is that you got one in just months rather than years, which was unnervingly rapid progress for that generation of Indians. I remember a friend’s parents paralysed by choice, slowly scanning the selection of colours—black, white, red, dark blue, light blue and I seem to remember a sickly green—in disbelief that anyone would actually ask them what colour they wanted their car to be. And Maruti was, under R C Bhargava’s management, stunningly fast for the era—by 1985, they had rolled out not just the 800 but the Omni and the Maruti Gypsy. It is hard to explain just how dazzling it was to have three models to choose from, how rich it made the average office-goer with his State Bank of India account feel.

I wasn’t old enough for a driving licence when DBA 872 came home, but I was old enough to fall in love. Except for the very few Indians in that generation who had lived abroad, driven something other than a “Fiat” or an “Amby”, most of us had grown up with a sense of a car as an unruly, clattering beast with an awkward temperament and more sturdiness than grace. In our eyes, the tiny powder-blue 800 was a miracle of speed and fluid lines, a gazelle weaving its way through a herd of cows and buffalos.

It took time to see how deeply and inexorably the Maruti 800 changed India. The Fiat and the Amby were lumbering cars, the steering wheels requiring power and force. My mother drove an ancient World War Two Ambassador, my grandmother in Calcutta zipped around in her ornery Premier Padmini, and over the years, both of them had developed the kind of upper arm muscles that today’s gymming crowd would kill for. Even the frailest of women could handle the 800’s light, inviting steering, though, and the low seats gave you a different view of the world, of the road, a sense of immediacy and excitement where the Amby gave you distance and enclosure.

And there was the chauffeur factor. In a country where you measured your importance by the distance between master and servant, the Maruti 800 forced an unruly democracy. It was built for families, for teenagers gingerly exploring this new concept called dating, for couples with the requisite two kids; the most comfortable seats were the driver and passenger seats in front, and those in the back had to put up with a certain amount of jouncing, especially when the driver daringly pushed the speedometer past 80 kmph. Besides, a chauffeur-driven Maruti looked silly. It just did, and that forced a social change—it became slowly acceptable, even fashionable, for even senior bureaucrats and corporate chieftains to drive themselves. (This would reverse itself in a generation, when other car companies opened shop in India offering bigger, more luxurious salons.)

DBA 872 and I got on well right from the start. I drove her illegally as a 16-year-old, taking her for short spins around the neighbourhood, tasting freedom like so many of the drivers in my generation who grew up in the Maruti years. We didn’t know, and didn’t care, that the plastic-and-rexine innards of the Maruti 800 were tacky, that it wasn’t by any standards one of the great cars.

It slid into a very Indian gap, between the sarkari years of the Ambassador’s reign and the flashy, consumer-driven decades of the BMW and the Merc. It was the first car that promised my generation a kind of freedom that had been unimaginable; the freedom to do long hill drives, to spend a romantic evening out just driving around your city, to party-hop because you could, to cram, improbably, 15 friends into the car on the way back from college.

I drove DBA for 17 years; she accompanied me into my marriage and saw us safely through the first years of houses-with-water-problems and jobs-with-desperately-anorexic-cheques. By her tenth year, the 800 had become ubiquitous on Indian roads, referred to derisively as the “macchar” by bus and truck drivers who hated the little car’s ability to zip around them on the highways. By the time DBA 872 was 18, she’d been left far behind on the fashion charts, overtaken by a smart new generation of cars from America and Korea and Japan.

Most of my generation of drivers have moved on, most of us upgrade our cars every two years in the same way that we efficiently remodel our careers, reshape our marriages, rework our retirement plans. We have our dream cars, and then a new wave of models comes in, and we have another set of dream cars, and we have the safe, acceptable backups that will do even if the Lamborghini stays out of reach. Those who’re buying their first Nano are already looking ahead, hoping for the Honda years, the Toyota years. Very few of the bright young Indians I know would consider driving the same car for 17 years, and that’s a sign of progress.

But when I think of DBA 872, what comes to me is a memory that has little to do with nostalgia. It’s a memory of the first time I took that old blue car out for a spin on roads that were sparsely populated, almost bare by today’s standards, the fierce thrill of pride that we felt as a generation in our new Marutis, the jolt of touching the accelerator gently and feeling the car speed up to a dashing 70 kmph.

Twenty five years down the line, I know that there was a measure of naiveté in that pride—we boasted of our 800s in such innocence, because we had no idea that there could be better, faster, sleeker cars in the world.

We broke coconuts over their bonnets when, the long, patient wait over, they came home. We revelled in the fact that any mechanic, anywhere in India, could repair a Maruti with a piece of string and a little faith. We boasted when we floored pedal to metal and managed to cross the 110 kmph barrier—the car’s panels juddered in warning at 120. We treated the Maruti 800 like it was the best car ever made in the world, and for a while, it felt like it was.

The BS Column: All in the family

(Published in the Business Standard, August 18, 2009)

Make me an offer I can’t refuse. Ask me to explain why, 40 years after a boy from Hell’s Kitchen--Italian immigrant, government clerk, hack writer--wrote a book about a squabbling family that settled its feuds with guns, we’re still reading The Godfather.

My first copy of Mario Puzo’s fourth and most successful book was pre-censored; one of the many readers who’d borrowed it from the local library had neatly razored out the scene where Sonny Corleone and the bridesmaid get it on, a few other mildly pornographic sections, and the famous scene where a businessmen who turns down an offer he shouldn’t have refused wakes up to find his horse’s severed head on the bedsheets.

A few months later, reading an unabridged version, I had to admire the bowdleriser’s impeccable sense of the book’s high points—the unknown wielder of the blade had also exercised the quietly drawn scene where Don Corleone dies, not struck down by a hail of bullets, but in relative peace, a Mafia don seeing death among the tomato plants.

By Puzo’s own admission, The Godfather was not intended to be high literature. He had aspirations to literary writing, though. The best book Puzo ever wrote had come out three years previously; The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw remains one of the strangest and most compelling evocations of growing up, a child’s book by an adult who had not forgotten what it felt like to think like a child. That book remains in print, but Puzo made his bones and his reputation with The Godfather.

He’d spent a decade hacking out adventure stories, payment by the word, for True Action magazine, in between living a clerk’s life, and he’d seen three books—The Dark Arena, The Fortunate Pilgrim and Davie Shaw—published to general indifference. He intended his fourth book to be a commercial success, and said famously that if he’d known it was going to an enduring as well as financial success, he would have written it better. It’s remained iconic, the automatic point of comparison for any other novel or film featuring the Mafia, organised crime, violence and murder. And over time, its weaknesses—the bald, unembellished story-telling, the quick introduction of characters—have been overcome by its strengths, the compelling central story, the tightly woven plot.

But there are two points of great interest about The Godfather. The 1960s yielded a clutch of bestsellers that have endured the ravages of time. Much to the dismay of literary purists, we’re still reading James Michener, Irving Wallace, Ian Fleming and Harold Robbins, to mention some of the popular pulp fiction authors of the day. But there’s a massive difference between the reading habits of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reading habits of the 1990s and the 2000s.

Today’s bestseller lists are, and have been for the last two-three decades, over-run by the professionals—pulp and popular fiction writers like Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell. Once in a very long while, a Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco breaks through the ranks of the branded pulp writer, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Back in the 1960s, when The Godfather came out, pulp writers shared space with some of the finest literary writers of the time—J D Salinger, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow held their own in the popularity stakes. And it’s interesting to note that The Godfather comes in at number two on the list of 1960s bestsellers—not number one.

The other point is that Puzo himself didn’t see The Godfather as a book about crime and violence and the Mafia. He saw it as a book about the family: business is just business, something you shouldn’t take personal, but betrayal of family ties, loyalty to the family, the upholding of family values—these are the strongest and most insistent themes of The Godfather. Italian-Americans have had a complex relationship with the book, but for readers across the world, The Godfather is beloved in part because it is the saga of the classic large, warm and utterly dysfunctional family. (Small wonder that Puzo has so many fans in India, where the Corleones, with a few tiny shifts, could so easily be the Capoors.)

As a final aside, the book that outsold The Godfather was also about a man from immigrant America, torn by guilt because of his complex relationship with his parents, rendered practically impotent by the grinding and contradictory demands of the family versus his personal freedom. The number one bestseller of the 1960s was Philip Roth’s classic Portnoy’s Complaint—a book that in a very different way from The Godfather, but with similar intensity, features a renegade son in search of a solution to his problems. Michael Corleone finds his by taking over the reins of the “family business”; Alexander Portnoy finds his on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and forty years down the line, we still read both in search of our own answers.

Pradipta Sarkar's delectable post on 'How not to impress a publisher'. Required reading for anyone with a manuscript in hand and a gun in his pocket.

The BS Column: Don't sue the science guys

(Published in the Business Standard, August 10, 2009. My apologies for not updating this blog more frequently; I'm trying to finish a project by August-end, and hope to be back to bloggishness in September.)


Simon Singh authored the first book about mathematics to become a number one bestseller in the UK, Fermat’s Last Theorem. His next two books, The Code Book and The Big Bang, are among the most lucid and precise examples of science writing you might read today. He’s a great entertainer, electrocuting gherkins on stage as an example of the “red shift” effect that helps prove the universe is expanding.

He’s also at the centre of a growing debate about science writing, libel laws and the rise of pseudoscience. About a year ago, Simon Singh wrote “Beware the spinal trap”, an article that examined the claims made by chiropractors. In the piece, Singh evaluated the risks involved in undergoing chiropractic treatment, and dismissed some claims—that chiropractors can treat children with asthma, colic and other ailments—as “utter nonsense” and “bogus”. This seemed to be a routine, if well-researched piece; Singh offered evidence of the links between bad chiropractic techniques and heart strokes, and seemed to back up his scepticism with facts.

The British Chiropractic Association sued Singh, claiming that he had defamed their reputation, and as of 4th August, the writer was fighting for the right of permission to appeal in what has become a key libel case. Libel suits are feared in the UK—they are expensive, with costs for the defence usually running well over POUNDS 100,000, and the burden of proof rests with the defence. Though much of the case concerns Singh’s use of the word “bogus”—to the delight of language scholars who’ve been blogging learned definitions and word origins—the broader issue is whether libel laws should apply to science writing.

The reason why Simon Singh is willing to go through the long, grim and financially draining process of a court case rather than issue a general apology is because he believes that science writers should be free to question dodgy science or pseudo-scientific claims. Libel suits are an easy way to prevent science writers from tackling certain subjects—as the pharmacological industry well knows. Over time, the threat of libel acts as a deterrent, preventing public inquiry into subjects that affect us at a very basic level. The pressure group Sense About Science has been running a very successful Keep Libel Laws Out of Science campaign, and is now in touch with PEN and other free-speech groups.

As an illustration of how important it is to promote freedom of speech in science writing, consider the case of Dr Ben Goldacre. His book, Bad Science, is on the Aventis Science Writing shortlist for 2009, and includes Goldacre’s debunking of vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath’s dangerous claims in a campaign in Africa that anti-Aids drugs were poisonous, and that his vitamins were the true cure. Goldacre writes, “This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.”

There’s a chilling lesson to be drawn here. Had Goldacre been more easily intimidated, or had the Guardian been less willing or able to fight such an expensive court case, the truth about Rath’s claims may never have come to public attention. Much of science writing today is pressed into the service of debunking pseudoscience—as with the patient and necessary attacks on creationist “theories” of evolution, or with examining the claims made by the pharma, food and alternative therapy industries. Many scientists are employed by these industries, and it’s for the independent researcher/ writer to offer the other side, or to examine claims more carefully.

It would have been so easy for Simon Singh to offer a ritual apology, and to save himself the trouble he’s been put to over the last twelve months. But he believes that his article addressed an important area of public awareness, especially with regard to children’s health—and he believes he did not defame chiropractors by drawing attention to the risks of the practice itself. “As a journalist,” he writes in a recent statement, “I have always been aware of the libel laws, but I don't think I ever fully appreciated the chilling effect they have on journalism - important articles are withdrawn and other stories are simply not commissioned because of the fear of libel.” It’s this absence, this rarely discussed silence, that Simon Singh and others like him are defending, in the UK and elsewhere.

Links:

From Ben Goldacre's site--the Matthias Rath chapter. Great reporting, and a frightening story.
From Sense About Science: Simon Singh's account of the trial