(I began writing Speaking Volumes around 1996-97. Tony Joseph, who was then the features editor of the Business Standard, suggested a weekly column on books after it became glaringly obvious to the paper that I was challenged, to put it politely, where number-crunching was concerned.
Since then, the column has run without a break for years, except for a week in 2005 when I was travelling in Sri Lanka and had no access to the Net, and a three-month time out in 2008-2009 because of health problems.
It's been wonderful writing Speaking Volumes, but I'm taking the next six months off to work on a personal project. Thanks for all the mail and all the support over the years, and I hope, when the column comes back, that it will be the better for the break.)
What is your definition of good English? For a certain generation of Indians, Macaulay’s children and grandchildren, “correct” English was defined by clear markers.
The BBC accent and the Oxford accent were prized over an American or a local Indian accent. The Booker Prize was followed with more zeal than the Pulitzer, though Indian interest dropped sharply in years when subcontinental authors didn’t feature on the list. We were supposed to read Nobel-winning literature laureates, Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, and the Latin American authors dominated our imaginations far more strongly than, say, contemporary writing from the US.
And we dreamed about having access to English the way we dreamed about owning real estate. In both cases, the markers for what we wanted would change sharply over time. The yearnings of property owners shifted from the ersatz British country house nestled in a corner of the hills to the defiantly faux-American mansionette in Gurgaon or Ludhiana.
English as a language still stands for many things in the Indian mind—access to more and better jobs, a sign of modernity, a way of announcing one’s aspirations to be a global citizen. But the kind of English we think of as acceptable has changed.
This week, the Vodafone-Crossword book award shortlists were announced. The Crossword is now over a decade old, and has been grappling with the problem of which writers to include in the pantheon of Indian English writing--only Indian citizens or only persons of Indian origin. This year was no exception, as the Prize left out some of the best and most original books of the year, especially in the field of non-fiction—too many good authors were disqualified because they held the wrong passport. This is likely to damage the Crossword in future—no prize can continue to ignore the best literature produced in the year, no matter how pure its motives.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Crossword shortlists was the wide gulf between the literary fiction shortlist, and the popular fiction shortlist. In previous years, the literary and the popular have often overlapped, as when Namita Devidayal’s acclaimed memoir The Music Room won the popular award. This year, the books that featured on the popular award shortlist included works by Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Karan Bajaj—there was absolutely no overlap with the literary fiction list, which included novels by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Omair Ahmad and others.
Tripathi, Sanghi, Bajaj and company are part of a larger trend of home-made bestsellers. The Indian Express dubbed some of this writing “aliterature” in a story the paper did on the success of books like Love Via Telephone Tring Tring and similar works. And the Indian English-language publishing industry, after years of hunting for local crime and pulp fiction bestsellers, is more than a little taken aback at the new wave of writers, for whom a racy plot matters much more than either intelligible story-telling or good grammar.
One way to understand the phenomenon of the new bestsellers is to put them through the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed to judge levels of comprehension difficulty, based on factors like word length and sentence length. While not foolproof, the scale provides one way to measure intangibles such as reading ease.
Authors like Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie tend to come in at a Reading Ease of 56 % or lower. If you don’t have a long history as a reader, or you came to English late, in other words, these books might be challenging. Chetan Bhagat and Aravind Adiga weigh in, surprisingly, at similar levels—Bhagat has a reading ease of 86 %, Adiga 76 %.
Unlike more literary authors, Bhagat, Tripathi, Sanghi and other authors use almost no passive sentences in their work, making their books much easier for the reader whose English is a functional, acquired second or third language. The pure pulp bestsellers excoriated by critics, including Love Via Telephone Tring Tring, have an almost uniform reading ease score in the 90th percentile—meaning that they could be read even by those who have very limited English and who experience difficulty with the language.
The Flesch-Kincaid test is only indicative, not definitive. To me, what these scores suggest is the obvious: that we’re producing bestsellers the way the Victorian pulp fiction market once did, to cater to thousands of readers for whom English is a functional, usable but still alien tongue. The Victorian penny dreadfuls were written for readers who had literacy, and who had imagination and a love for storytelling in plenty. What they lacked was a history of reading, and a home-grown canon. In that absence, they turned, as Indian readers are now doing, to pulp fiction as comfort food and junk food, rather than literature. And the gap between them and readers who think of books as literature, rather than a bag of chips, is likely to become even wider over the next decade.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Slutwalking
The really dangerous part of Slutwalk Delhi is dodging media cameras and avoiding the mikes thrust in your face. When it starts, the media-aam junta ratio is 3:1, which leads to the spectacle of a reporter trying to persuade a younger colleague from another magazine to give her soundbytes. "You're marching too, no? Say something as a woman, na?" The younger reporter declines.
By 11 am, the pace has picked up; I'm estimating a conservative 500 or so people--young girls, a healthy and heart-warming number of men, auntyjis and several stalwarts of the gay rights movement in Delhi--have joined in. Depending on when they join in with the Slutwalkers, the media has the numbers at 200--far too low, even if you subtract the organisers and Asmita's street theatre troupe--or at 700, which seems optimistic. I see a young lesbian couple wade through the crowds, swatting TV mikes like flies.
The media is all over Slutwalk, which is turning out to be a plain vanilla, sedate Jantar Mantar protest. Most of the marchers are carrying banners with slogans attacking Delhi's history of violence against women: "Soch badal, kapre nahin", "I have been HARASSED at least once in my life", "Ab toh bol", "Proud to be shameless". One woman, carrying a banner that speaks of child abuse, is stopped several times. "I've lost count of the number of women who say this happened to them too, who were 12 or 14 the first time they experienced harassment and abuse," she says. "It's amazing, sharing our stories."
This is so different from the skimpily-clad marchers dreamed up by the media and by the kind of leering men who've been trolling Slutwalk's FB page. These few hundreds are nowhere near the kind of turnout Toronto had, with thousands of women taking to the streets in anger, but being here feels surprisingly good. The women police officers guarding the march tell me and another young woman: "Do this every year, then maybe the men will start to listen."
The boys marching quietly, banners raised, watching politely as Asmita performs a street play, listening to Slutwalk's young organiser, Umang Sabharwal, speak, are very clear about why they're here. "It's an issue for us," says Deepak, a young college student. "Delhi men have the worst reputations, and many of us are here to say we're not like that, and men shouldn't be like that." The mothers marching in Slutwalk, two of them side-by-side, are bemused by the media. "They only want to photograph the foreigners and that one woman in small clothes," says one of them. They're here because a) they're sick of being pushed around on buses and the Metro and b), because as Mrs Kumar says, "Why should only the young women march? We can also come out, this issue affects all of us." Were they not put off by the name--Slutwalk, Besharmi Morcha? Mrs Kumar glares at the reporter who asked her this question. "You have time to waste thinking about names. Think about why Delhi is so unsafe for women, no? National capital, and look at the crime rates!"
The young women melting in the heat as we do the ritual march around Jantar Mantar, escorted by bands of police personnel, are clear about why they're here, too. "I'm tired of the TV shows saying think about female foeticide first, think about dowry deaths first," says Rina. "We have to live in this city and move around and you know, our fathers aren't rich men that they have chauffeured cars. Doesn't our safety matter? Look at the rapes, look at the harassment, aren't Indians ashamed of what women have to face in Delhi?"
The men from the Greater Cooch Behar Association, on hunger strike in the cheerfully open-to-all protest bazaar that Jantar Mantar offers, are being steered back to their own tents by a reproachful minder. One of them is arguing that he should be allowed to join in the Slutwalk, but he's being accused of wanting to sneak off to have an illicit ice cream on the side. Unfortunately for his protestations of innocence, his mouth is stained orange from a Kwality's Orange Bar.
I'm thinking of the first Blank Noise protest in Delhi, a walk at night for which less than 20 women showed up, where a police escort was necessary to ensure the safety of that small, tentatively activist band. This is just a start, and the debate over the name and the meaning of Slutwalk almost hijacked the issues behind the walk. But it seems like a good start, to me, and to the people who've gathered here in the July heat. I'm reminded, by the numbers and by the conversations in the crowd, of the early, tentative beginnings of the Gay Rights parade a few years ago. There, too, there had been fears that the movement would be too insular, too self-referential and too niche. Here, the crowds are very different from the media's expectations; this isn't just the usual South Delhi protest veterans crew. "Where are the celebs, yaar?" a TV reporter is demanding. "There are no celebs, only ordinary-shordinary people. How will I get my bytes?"
I get stuck between two streams of marchers. One woman, to my right, is carrying a banner protesting female foeticide. She catches my slightly startled eye and shakes her head: "I didn't make that," she says. "I'm just carrying it for a friend, and no, I don't know what it has to do with Slutwalk."
To my left, though, is a hand-drawn banner that has drawn attention all through the march with a particularly baffling message. "Boys just eat grape and stop Girl Rape," it says.
Despite the intensity of the media scrutiny, the number of police personnel who've thrown a cordon around the marchers because of threats from a Hindutva rightwing group, and the quietness of the march, this is a good way to begin. "I want to come back next year," says Samira. She's 27, and has had enough of Delhi. "It's not about the clothes I'm wearing, it's about the violence we face every day in this city. I'm so sick of it, but I'm here because it's my city, and if I want things to change, then maybe I have to be here and be part of the change instead of just whining." Would she want the name of the march changed? She shrugs. "Call it Slutwalk or anything you like," she says. "So long as we have a regular protest, does it matter?"
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Book review: The Groaning Shelf, by Pradeep Sebastian
(Published in Biblio, July 2011.)
The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book love
Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India,
Rs 395, 295 pages
ISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3
In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might grant you a brief, tantalizing darshan, a quick glimpse of what it meant to be in the presence of the strange god called the Internet.
Pradeep Sebastian and Sven Birkerts occupied very different imaginative spaces in that year. Sebastian, the Hindu’s articulate, incisive, gently brilliant literary columnist, wrote about his love for the printed word, with the accent heavily on the “printed”. First editions, secondhand bookshops, the love of the musty, distinctive scent of books—these were what he celebrated in his column, as much as the richness of literary content.
For Birkerts, 1994 was the year when he published The Gutenberg Elegies, which would become a landmark collection of essays marking the advent of ebooks (and the presumed death of print). The Internet had already changed the way Americans read, understood and processed the world, and Birkerts was one of the first to chart—and comprehend—the order of change upon us. We were shifting from a print culture to an electronic culture, he said, much as there had been a shift, centuries before, from an oral literary culture to a written literary culture. However, this shift would take less than fifty years, not centuries, to come about; and this shift would also involve a transition in how we understood the practice of reading and writing. Birkerts was prescient in many of the fears he expressed in The Gutenberg Elegies—language would erode, becoming less complex; readers would have to “incessantly reposition the self within a barrage of onrushing stimuli”; we would experience a waning of the private self as we became more and more enmeshed in electronic webs.
In just 17 years since Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, these are some of the trends in publishing and reading that have changed. E-books have grown in popularity and availability and e-readers from the Sony E-reader to the Kindle and now the iPad have encountered less resistance than many champions of the book accepted. Language erosion has, according to some experts, happened; but this has also been accompanied by the rise of what might be called e-creoles, often complex sub-dialects used on services like Facebook and Twitter, rich in their own ways of combining symbol, smileys and text, expressive and constantly morphing. Traditional bookstores across the world have been under threat, with independent bookstores and large chains alike going under; the cult of the bestseller and the mass-market paperback dominates a great deal of reading. There is a question mark against the concept of territorial copyright; and there are fears that between them, Google and Amazon might own too much of the world’s electronic libraries and bookstores.
That is, of course, a paragraph of over-simplifications, and it is also a demonstration of the limitations of print. In its current form, flat on the printed page you are reading, the previous paragraph conveys only a limited authorial summary of almost two decades of complex, fascinating and challenging arguments. In its electronic avatar, it would have been possible to link the first sentence to the predictions or analyses of Marshall McLuhan, Zizek or Nicholas Negroponte; to link the second sentence to stories from, say Wired or BoingBoing on the rise of e-reading; to link the third sentence to blogs like Language Hat and Language Log, and so on. Deprived of the backbone of the electronic world, of the potentially intense engagement and architecture of the Internet, what you have left in this paragraph is just an unsatisfactory skeleton. (Note: Since this version is online, I've included some links as illustrations.)
• * *
According to the formidable Nicholas Negroponte, the end of the book in its current, physical avatar is closer than we think—he gives it about five years. Observers of the Indian publishing scene believe we have a little longer than that—the physical book will probably never phase out entirely in a country known for its ability to exist in several centuries simultaneously, and even where it does, the process is likely to take ten to 15 years.
It is in this context that Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf, a compilation of writings on the book and on bibliophilia, must be read. This collection of brief, engaging essays—many of them drawn and reshaped from his columns for The Hindu and the Deccan Herald—is at once a nostalgic elegy for the physical book, and a stirring defence of its virtues. Sebastian represents one end of the ebook-versus-printed book debate; he stands for everyone, every reader and writer, who believes that our world would be diminished if we could no longer hold bound volumes in our hands.
The Groaning Shelf is really the distilled essence of one reader’s love affair with books, complete with the inevitable moments of darkness and disillusion. It opens with a description of a condition common to those who live their lives in reading, publishing and writing—a moment of turning away from reading itself, becoming, in Sebastian’s phrase, “a lapsed reader”. For him, this is the moment when he shifts from a deep engagement with the content of books to a deep fascination with the form. “The pleasures of bibliophily for me lie in fully embracing the book as material object: its bibliographical aspects—binding, edition, condition, rarity, and typography matter to me as much as their literary content.”
In the first few sections, Sebastian moves through all the complex and beloved rituals of the true bibliophile. Like Walter Benjamin, he derives pleasure from unpacking his library, aware that in describing the humble and yet intently engaging process of rearranging books on a shelf, he is joining a long line of writers from Benjamin to Geoff Dyer to Anne Fadiman. Alberto Manguel and Coleridge share his search for the perfect bookshelf; Baudrillard and Sontag help him understand the romantic richness that lies behind the process of becoming a book collector, an obsession that goes beyond the merely acquisitive. First editions—the hunt for them, the joy of possessing an untouched, perfectly preserved first edition of a Nabokov or an RK Narayan—lead him to the very Indian neglect of these aspects of book-love. He will, later, meet Bibi Mohamed, an antiquarian book dealer in Manhattan who is one of the very few experts in her field of Indian origin; and he will also write with some feeling of the relative absence of book history in India.
Perhaps the only disappointing section in this collection is ‘Writers’, which offers a series of short profiles of writers from Pico Iyer to Ayn Rand, Pankaj Mishra to JD Salinger. The short essay form, with some pieces just two or three pages long, works very well with Sebastian’s bibliophilia—by moving from the joys of reading in bed to the tale of obsessive collectors, he creates a map of the reading world, and a timeline of the development of the kind of reader of books Anne Fadiman would have classified as courtly rather than carnal. But while these brief profiles are necessarily limited—they must have been written for magazine or newspaper publication—they work only as introductions, and often leave the reader wanting a great deal more.
This is the danger of any collection of essays by a columnist, especially one as sensitive and as thoughtful as Sebastian—the truncated length of the essays whets the reader’s appetite, but leaves it unsatisfied. Even within these, though, there are moments of recognition and pleasurable insight. Writing about Pico Iyer (“Thomas Merton on a frequent-flier pass”), Sebastian instinctively does what any committed reader will do when he comes to Iyer’s novel Abandon. He places it among its natural family: “Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway—the story of CS Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham—and of another little known, astonishing book titled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken…”
All of his instincts are of this order—the instincts of a disciplined, accomplished reader—and this collection is perhaps the first in many decades in India to celebrate books and reading. The Groaning Shelf has the same directness and ease as Sebastian’s columns: it was written by a reader for other readers, and that is its greatest strength. The moments of serendipity compensate for the inevitable disappointment of wanting more than just this collection of essays, however valuable in themselves; there was a deeper book, the personal history of an Indian reader, waiting to be written, and though it is unfair to criticize Sebastian for not having written it, it is tempting to ask him to write it some day.
As a reader, I am on the other side of the divide from Sebastian, wedded more to the content of books than to their form. Many of us “carnal readers”, to use Fadiman’s elegant division, are fascinated by the promise of the ebook revolution, and are happy to jettison the paraphernalia—the groaning shelves—that accompany being a book lover. Sebastian’s essays are a reminder of courtly love, and all that it can bring: the frisson of learning the arcane terminology of the book trade, the joyous serendipity of browsing in secondhand bookshops and finding what you didn’t know you needed.
Perhaps one of the loveliest essays in The Groaning Shelf is about a visit Sebastian makes to “the bookshop that every bibliophile secretly fantasizes about… an entire bookstore full of just books about books.” Behind that deceptively simple phase lies a lifetime of the love and passion that only the true, dedicated reader knows.
The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book love
Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India,
Rs 395, 295 pages
ISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3
In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might grant you a brief, tantalizing darshan, a quick glimpse of what it meant to be in the presence of the strange god called the Internet.
Pradeep Sebastian and Sven Birkerts occupied very different imaginative spaces in that year. Sebastian, the Hindu’s articulate, incisive, gently brilliant literary columnist, wrote about his love for the printed word, with the accent heavily on the “printed”. First editions, secondhand bookshops, the love of the musty, distinctive scent of books—these were what he celebrated in his column, as much as the richness of literary content.
For Birkerts, 1994 was the year when he published The Gutenberg Elegies, which would become a landmark collection of essays marking the advent of ebooks (and the presumed death of print). The Internet had already changed the way Americans read, understood and processed the world, and Birkerts was one of the first to chart—and comprehend—the order of change upon us. We were shifting from a print culture to an electronic culture, he said, much as there had been a shift, centuries before, from an oral literary culture to a written literary culture. However, this shift would take less than fifty years, not centuries, to come about; and this shift would also involve a transition in how we understood the practice of reading and writing. Birkerts was prescient in many of the fears he expressed in The Gutenberg Elegies—language would erode, becoming less complex; readers would have to “incessantly reposition the self within a barrage of onrushing stimuli”; we would experience a waning of the private self as we became more and more enmeshed in electronic webs.
In just 17 years since Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, these are some of the trends in publishing and reading that have changed. E-books have grown in popularity and availability and e-readers from the Sony E-reader to the Kindle and now the iPad have encountered less resistance than many champions of the book accepted. Language erosion has, according to some experts, happened; but this has also been accompanied by the rise of what might be called e-creoles, often complex sub-dialects used on services like Facebook and Twitter, rich in their own ways of combining symbol, smileys and text, expressive and constantly morphing. Traditional bookstores across the world have been under threat, with independent bookstores and large chains alike going under; the cult of the bestseller and the mass-market paperback dominates a great deal of reading. There is a question mark against the concept of territorial copyright; and there are fears that between them, Google and Amazon might own too much of the world’s electronic libraries and bookstores.
That is, of course, a paragraph of over-simplifications, and it is also a demonstration of the limitations of print. In its current form, flat on the printed page you are reading, the previous paragraph conveys only a limited authorial summary of almost two decades of complex, fascinating and challenging arguments. In its electronic avatar, it would have been possible to link the first sentence to the predictions or analyses of Marshall McLuhan, Zizek or Nicholas Negroponte; to link the second sentence to stories from, say Wired or BoingBoing on the rise of e-reading; to link the third sentence to blogs like Language Hat and Language Log, and so on. Deprived of the backbone of the electronic world, of the potentially intense engagement and architecture of the Internet, what you have left in this paragraph is just an unsatisfactory skeleton. (Note: Since this version is online, I've included some links as illustrations.)
• * *
According to the formidable Nicholas Negroponte, the end of the book in its current, physical avatar is closer than we think—he gives it about five years. Observers of the Indian publishing scene believe we have a little longer than that—the physical book will probably never phase out entirely in a country known for its ability to exist in several centuries simultaneously, and even where it does, the process is likely to take ten to 15 years.
It is in this context that Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf, a compilation of writings on the book and on bibliophilia, must be read. This collection of brief, engaging essays—many of them drawn and reshaped from his columns for The Hindu and the Deccan Herald—is at once a nostalgic elegy for the physical book, and a stirring defence of its virtues. Sebastian represents one end of the ebook-versus-printed book debate; he stands for everyone, every reader and writer, who believes that our world would be diminished if we could no longer hold bound volumes in our hands.
The Groaning Shelf is really the distilled essence of one reader’s love affair with books, complete with the inevitable moments of darkness and disillusion. It opens with a description of a condition common to those who live their lives in reading, publishing and writing—a moment of turning away from reading itself, becoming, in Sebastian’s phrase, “a lapsed reader”. For him, this is the moment when he shifts from a deep engagement with the content of books to a deep fascination with the form. “The pleasures of bibliophily for me lie in fully embracing the book as material object: its bibliographical aspects—binding, edition, condition, rarity, and typography matter to me as much as their literary content.”
In the first few sections, Sebastian moves through all the complex and beloved rituals of the true bibliophile. Like Walter Benjamin, he derives pleasure from unpacking his library, aware that in describing the humble and yet intently engaging process of rearranging books on a shelf, he is joining a long line of writers from Benjamin to Geoff Dyer to Anne Fadiman. Alberto Manguel and Coleridge share his search for the perfect bookshelf; Baudrillard and Sontag help him understand the romantic richness that lies behind the process of becoming a book collector, an obsession that goes beyond the merely acquisitive. First editions—the hunt for them, the joy of possessing an untouched, perfectly preserved first edition of a Nabokov or an RK Narayan—lead him to the very Indian neglect of these aspects of book-love. He will, later, meet Bibi Mohamed, an antiquarian book dealer in Manhattan who is one of the very few experts in her field of Indian origin; and he will also write with some feeling of the relative absence of book history in India.
Perhaps the only disappointing section in this collection is ‘Writers’, which offers a series of short profiles of writers from Pico Iyer to Ayn Rand, Pankaj Mishra to JD Salinger. The short essay form, with some pieces just two or three pages long, works very well with Sebastian’s bibliophilia—by moving from the joys of reading in bed to the tale of obsessive collectors, he creates a map of the reading world, and a timeline of the development of the kind of reader of books Anne Fadiman would have classified as courtly rather than carnal. But while these brief profiles are necessarily limited—they must have been written for magazine or newspaper publication—they work only as introductions, and often leave the reader wanting a great deal more.
This is the danger of any collection of essays by a columnist, especially one as sensitive and as thoughtful as Sebastian—the truncated length of the essays whets the reader’s appetite, but leaves it unsatisfied. Even within these, though, there are moments of recognition and pleasurable insight. Writing about Pico Iyer (“Thomas Merton on a frequent-flier pass”), Sebastian instinctively does what any committed reader will do when he comes to Iyer’s novel Abandon. He places it among its natural family: “Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway—the story of CS Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham—and of another little known, astonishing book titled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken…”
All of his instincts are of this order—the instincts of a disciplined, accomplished reader—and this collection is perhaps the first in many decades in India to celebrate books and reading. The Groaning Shelf has the same directness and ease as Sebastian’s columns: it was written by a reader for other readers, and that is its greatest strength. The moments of serendipity compensate for the inevitable disappointment of wanting more than just this collection of essays, however valuable in themselves; there was a deeper book, the personal history of an Indian reader, waiting to be written, and though it is unfair to criticize Sebastian for not having written it, it is tempting to ask him to write it some day.
As a reader, I am on the other side of the divide from Sebastian, wedded more to the content of books than to their form. Many of us “carnal readers”, to use Fadiman’s elegant division, are fascinated by the promise of the ebook revolution, and are happy to jettison the paraphernalia—the groaning shelves—that accompany being a book lover. Sebastian’s essays are a reminder of courtly love, and all that it can bring: the frisson of learning the arcane terminology of the book trade, the joyous serendipity of browsing in secondhand bookshops and finding what you didn’t know you needed.
Perhaps one of the loveliest essays in The Groaning Shelf is about a visit Sebastian makes to “the bookshop that every bibliophile secretly fantasizes about… an entire bookstore full of just books about books.” Behind that deceptively simple phase lies a lifetime of the love and passion that only the true, dedicated reader knows.
Speaking Volumes: Reading on rent: ebooks
(Published in the Business Standard, July 25, 2011. Will probably do an expanded version of this soon, with a greater focus on reader's rights and how we stand in danger of losing them.)
It takes less time than you might guess to convert a reader wedded to the idea of the physical book into a Kindle or an iPad enthusiast.
As most ebook newbies have discovered over the span of the last few years, the switch to reading on a device is smoother and easier than anyone would have predicted. The smell of the pages, the feel of the physical book, the pleasure of flipping through a book; these are easily, and seamlessly, replaced by the screen experience.
I read faster on a Kindle than I do on the page; the e-ink and the ability to format the size of the font to my preferences on the page work beautifully for me. Scrolling through pages is automatic, and while I missed page numbers and think ebooks should offer both options, it’s interesting to use the percentage method.
Percentages make me evaluate more sharply whether I want to continue reading or not, in a way that page numbers never did. At 42% of the way through a tedious, limply written family saga, evaluating whether you want to spend precious hours of your life struggling with the remaining 58% becomes surprisingly easy. This can also be daunting: who wants to know that days of reading have taken them a mere 16% of the way through Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake?
Moving from the physical book to the ebook, the switch is both sharper and less threatening than I would originally have guessed: like moving between cities, rather than shifting from one house to another. The Kindle, the iPad, the Sony Reader and other devices answer the big fears we all had about shifting to ebooks. Yes, the ebook is portable; the few situations in which battery life or screen brightness are problematic are rare in real life. As I adapted to the fact that the Kindle allowed me to have a portable library, not just a portable book, my reading habits changed. It was easier to browse through six books on similar subjects when you didn’t have to hunt through your physical shelves to locate them.
Nostalgia for the printed word on the physical page ebbs fast, in the face of the very real conveniences of ebooks, the ability to make marginalia which will never deface the books, to customize the page, to buy books that are hard to find in India. Kindle readers downloaded George RR Martin’s Dance with Dragons two weeks ago—it is yet to arrive in Delhi’s bookstores. The ebook version of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower was available three weeks before the first Indian reviews came out. Unless publishers enforce a deliberate territorial lag on ebook versions, this is one of the joys of reading the virtual book: you don’t have to wait for weeks, sometimes months, for the books you love to come into your library.
But there is one thing missing from the ebook experience, and it’s a big one: a sense of ownership over your virtual library. In order to prevent piracy, the industry doesn’t allow owners to download books onto your hard drive. Looking at my virtual shelves, I am struck by the knowledge that these books are in effect, there on rent: Amazon, or the publisher, could delete them from my library faster than you can say “disapparate”. (This is one of the reasons why Richard Stallman militates against ebooks—he thinks that in their current form, ebooks offer readers diminished rights over their own libraries.)
For those who think that this is unlikely to be a problem, consider possible situations: a publishing house may recall editions, or replace a virtual edition with a cleaned-up, or bowdlerized, version. A regime may demand censored editions of certain books, before it will allow Amazon or other ebooksellers to set up shop.
Those paranoid about government interference point out that one’s Amazon wishlist or virtual library may be used as evidence against you, much as suspected Maoist sympathizers were recently being prosecuted on the ridiculous charge that they owned copies of Bhagat Singh’s speeches, in Chattisgarh. And there are far less sinister, more plausible, scenarios, where a customer’s dispute with Amazon or other booksellers might lead to their accounts and virtual libraries being frozen.
There are far too many benefits to e-reading for people like me to abandon the ebook.
There’s the not insignificant pleasure of knowing that you’re saving paper, dead trees and acres of shelf space. There’s the pleasure of cross-referencing within your virtual library, and access to the excellent Kindle Singles—standalone longform articles, hard to get anywhere else. Buying ebooks allows me to buy the most obscure, the hard-to-find, the out-of-print; or to get my hands on a favourite writer’s book faster than Delhi bookshops can get the book to me.
It’s not nostalgia for the physical book that we should be debating; that argument, sadly, is unlikely to move generations who are growing up reading on screen and on Kindle. But ebooks raise a whole set of questions about reader’s rights. At present, the shift from the physical book to the ebook has resulted in a loss of ownership, and a potential loss of privacy and other rights, for readers. That’s where the debate should shift, in the next five years.
It takes less time than you might guess to convert a reader wedded to the idea of the physical book into a Kindle or an iPad enthusiast.
As most ebook newbies have discovered over the span of the last few years, the switch to reading on a device is smoother and easier than anyone would have predicted. The smell of the pages, the feel of the physical book, the pleasure of flipping through a book; these are easily, and seamlessly, replaced by the screen experience.
I read faster on a Kindle than I do on the page; the e-ink and the ability to format the size of the font to my preferences on the page work beautifully for me. Scrolling through pages is automatic, and while I missed page numbers and think ebooks should offer both options, it’s interesting to use the percentage method.
Percentages make me evaluate more sharply whether I want to continue reading or not, in a way that page numbers never did. At 42% of the way through a tedious, limply written family saga, evaluating whether you want to spend precious hours of your life struggling with the remaining 58% becomes surprisingly easy. This can also be daunting: who wants to know that days of reading have taken them a mere 16% of the way through Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake?
Moving from the physical book to the ebook, the switch is both sharper and less threatening than I would originally have guessed: like moving between cities, rather than shifting from one house to another. The Kindle, the iPad, the Sony Reader and other devices answer the big fears we all had about shifting to ebooks. Yes, the ebook is portable; the few situations in which battery life or screen brightness are problematic are rare in real life. As I adapted to the fact that the Kindle allowed me to have a portable library, not just a portable book, my reading habits changed. It was easier to browse through six books on similar subjects when you didn’t have to hunt through your physical shelves to locate them.
Nostalgia for the printed word on the physical page ebbs fast, in the face of the very real conveniences of ebooks, the ability to make marginalia which will never deface the books, to customize the page, to buy books that are hard to find in India. Kindle readers downloaded George RR Martin’s Dance with Dragons two weeks ago—it is yet to arrive in Delhi’s bookstores. The ebook version of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower was available three weeks before the first Indian reviews came out. Unless publishers enforce a deliberate territorial lag on ebook versions, this is one of the joys of reading the virtual book: you don’t have to wait for weeks, sometimes months, for the books you love to come into your library.
But there is one thing missing from the ebook experience, and it’s a big one: a sense of ownership over your virtual library. In order to prevent piracy, the industry doesn’t allow owners to download books onto your hard drive. Looking at my virtual shelves, I am struck by the knowledge that these books are in effect, there on rent: Amazon, or the publisher, could delete them from my library faster than you can say “disapparate”. (This is one of the reasons why Richard Stallman militates against ebooks—he thinks that in their current form, ebooks offer readers diminished rights over their own libraries.)
For those who think that this is unlikely to be a problem, consider possible situations: a publishing house may recall editions, or replace a virtual edition with a cleaned-up, or bowdlerized, version. A regime may demand censored editions of certain books, before it will allow Amazon or other ebooksellers to set up shop.
Those paranoid about government interference point out that one’s Amazon wishlist or virtual library may be used as evidence against you, much as suspected Maoist sympathizers were recently being prosecuted on the ridiculous charge that they owned copies of Bhagat Singh’s speeches, in Chattisgarh. And there are far less sinister, more plausible, scenarios, where a customer’s dispute with Amazon or other booksellers might lead to their accounts and virtual libraries being frozen.
There are far too many benefits to e-reading for people like me to abandon the ebook.
There’s the not insignificant pleasure of knowing that you’re saving paper, dead trees and acres of shelf space. There’s the pleasure of cross-referencing within your virtual library, and access to the excellent Kindle Singles—standalone longform articles, hard to get anywhere else. Buying ebooks allows me to buy the most obscure, the hard-to-find, the out-of-print; or to get my hands on a favourite writer’s book faster than Delhi bookshops can get the book to me.
It’s not nostalgia for the physical book that we should be debating; that argument, sadly, is unlikely to move generations who are growing up reading on screen and on Kindle. But ebooks raise a whole set of questions about reader’s rights. At present, the shift from the physical book to the ebook has resulted in a loss of ownership, and a potential loss of privacy and other rights, for readers. That’s where the debate should shift, in the next five years.
Speaking Volumes: An epic wait
(Published in the Business Standard, July 18, 2011)
“Spent a morning writing and we are now in sight of Minas Morghul,” JRR Tolkien wrote cheerfully to his son Christopher in 1944. He was happily occupied, despite the tendency of the book to grow almost of its own volition, and believed he would finish soon.
It would take a full nine years before Tolkien was writing to his publisher to finalise the titles of the book: should it be The Return of the Shadow, or would The Fellowship of the Ring fit better?
Readers of JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy were fortunate. The three books that made up The Lord of the Rings were published between 1954 and 1955. There was little gap between reading about the hobbits of the Shire, and the siege of Minas Tirith--the relatively small delay was caused by the post-war paper shortage in Britain.
Reading the two great epic fantasies of our time—George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books--has been a process closer to reading in the days of serialization, when you had to wait for the next month to find out what had happened to your favourite character. Fantasy fans will complain that I’m leaving out Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and several other epic-length works, including Terry Pratchett’s beguiling Discworld saga. This is true, but one could argue that these two modern sagas have made the most impact on the public imagination.
Rowling’s world defined the imagination of an entire generation, and perhaps the luckiest were the readers who were pre-teens when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in 1995. They grew up along with Potter, Hermione, Ron Weasley and company, and that is a rare, truly magical experience for any reader.
But it’s the Game of Thrones series, created by George RR Martin, that is likely to be far more influential in its impact than the Potter books. The forces of evil and good in Harry Potter’s world are predictable, and despite the deaths of beloved characters, there is still something childish and safe about a saga set chiefly in boarding school.
George RR Martin’s books are like a bloody history of a world and a set of countries you know intimately and believe in implicitly—despite the fact that the kingdom of Westeros exists only in his mind. For fans of the Song of Ice and Fire series, the wait between each Game of Thrones novel has tested their patience. Perhaps no other modern author has had such an intense relationship with his audience, with many fans becoming upset, almost abusive, at the long delays.
The first volume in the Song of Ice and Fire series came out in 1996, and immediately drew readers in. Martin’s tale of warring kingdoms in Westeros and Essos includes some classic fantasy elements—dragons and direwolves—but the appeal of the books to adult readers stems from the fact that they work in the same way that a history of the Mughal Empire or the Tudors works. From the first book, A Game of Thrones, to the recently released A Dance With Dragons, Martin has held his readers in thrall through a 15-year period.
The rewards and frustrations of reading a saga through that length of time are unlike any other reading experience. I caught up with Martin just after book two, A Clash of Kings, came out in 1998 and only had to wait two years for book three, A Storm of Swords. It took five years till book four, A Feast for Crows, came out, and another six before I and a million other fans could get our hot little hands on A Dance With Dragons.
Why didn’t we abandon the books, given that there are so many great historical sagas and fantasies out there that have the merit of being already published, in complete sets? Part of it has to do with Martin’s storytelling, and the complex, utterly gripping world he’s created, where the unlikely hero in a series that has few heroes may be a manipulative, scarred, amoral dwarf called Tyrion Lannister. But part of it has to do with understanding that the slow, often frustrating process of following an author from one book to another makes us, witnesses to publishing history.
Tolkien’s readers were lucky that they didn’t have to wait for nine years while he worked out the kinks in his saga. But in a way, all those readers who kept faith with Martin over 15 years are lucky, to have watched the evolution of one of the greatest modern epics of all time. Martin’s legion of fans will have to console themselves with that thought for the two, or five, or six, years it will take before the next book, The Winds of Winter, comes out.
“Spent a morning writing and we are now in sight of Minas Morghul,” JRR Tolkien wrote cheerfully to his son Christopher in 1944. He was happily occupied, despite the tendency of the book to grow almost of its own volition, and believed he would finish soon.
It would take a full nine years before Tolkien was writing to his publisher to finalise the titles of the book: should it be The Return of the Shadow, or would The Fellowship of the Ring fit better?
Readers of JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy were fortunate. The three books that made up The Lord of the Rings were published between 1954 and 1955. There was little gap between reading about the hobbits of the Shire, and the siege of Minas Tirith--the relatively small delay was caused by the post-war paper shortage in Britain.
Reading the two great epic fantasies of our time—George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books--has been a process closer to reading in the days of serialization, when you had to wait for the next month to find out what had happened to your favourite character. Fantasy fans will complain that I’m leaving out Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and several other epic-length works, including Terry Pratchett’s beguiling Discworld saga. This is true, but one could argue that these two modern sagas have made the most impact on the public imagination.
Rowling’s world defined the imagination of an entire generation, and perhaps the luckiest were the readers who were pre-teens when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in 1995. They grew up along with Potter, Hermione, Ron Weasley and company, and that is a rare, truly magical experience for any reader.
But it’s the Game of Thrones series, created by George RR Martin, that is likely to be far more influential in its impact than the Potter books. The forces of evil and good in Harry Potter’s world are predictable, and despite the deaths of beloved characters, there is still something childish and safe about a saga set chiefly in boarding school.
George RR Martin’s books are like a bloody history of a world and a set of countries you know intimately and believe in implicitly—despite the fact that the kingdom of Westeros exists only in his mind. For fans of the Song of Ice and Fire series, the wait between each Game of Thrones novel has tested their patience. Perhaps no other modern author has had such an intense relationship with his audience, with many fans becoming upset, almost abusive, at the long delays.
The first volume in the Song of Ice and Fire series came out in 1996, and immediately drew readers in. Martin’s tale of warring kingdoms in Westeros and Essos includes some classic fantasy elements—dragons and direwolves—but the appeal of the books to adult readers stems from the fact that they work in the same way that a history of the Mughal Empire or the Tudors works. From the first book, A Game of Thrones, to the recently released A Dance With Dragons, Martin has held his readers in thrall through a 15-year period.
The rewards and frustrations of reading a saga through that length of time are unlike any other reading experience. I caught up with Martin just after book two, A Clash of Kings, came out in 1998 and only had to wait two years for book three, A Storm of Swords. It took five years till book four, A Feast for Crows, came out, and another six before I and a million other fans could get our hot little hands on A Dance With Dragons.
Why didn’t we abandon the books, given that there are so many great historical sagas and fantasies out there that have the merit of being already published, in complete sets? Part of it has to do with Martin’s storytelling, and the complex, utterly gripping world he’s created, where the unlikely hero in a series that has few heroes may be a manipulative, scarred, amoral dwarf called Tyrion Lannister. But part of it has to do with understanding that the slow, often frustrating process of following an author from one book to another makes us, witnesses to publishing history.
Tolkien’s readers were lucky that they didn’t have to wait for nine years while he worked out the kinks in his saga. But in a way, all those readers who kept faith with Martin over 15 years are lucky, to have watched the evolution of one of the greatest modern epics of all time. Martin’s legion of fans will have to console themselves with that thought for the two, or five, or six, years it will take before the next book, The Winds of Winter, comes out.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Speaking Volumes: The Yossarian Effect
(Published in the Business Standard, July 12, 2011)
Perhaps the most sympathetic portrait of the censor’s hard lot in life is to be found in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, where Yossarian is assigned the task of censoring letters while he’s in hospital. It is a monotonous job, and Yossarian does his best to innovate:
“To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the.”
For the hundreds of citizens employed as censors in China, the Yossarian Effect is inescapable. In 2009, a list of words and phrases banned in China was leaked, and offered a somewhat unsettling picture of what the regime considered dangerous or threatening. The banning of words like “democracy”, or phrases like “Falun Gong”, “Tiananmen Square”, “dictatorship”, “brainwashing” and “do not love the party” is to be expected. Some phrases are less explicable: “lonely young woman” is apparently as much to be abhorred as “toilet slave” and “bondage”, and I am unclear why the regime decided that its citizens should not search for either “take the kidney in vivo” or “Li Hong hemorrhoids”.
But the logic of censorship also dictates that euphemisms and veiled references must be censored, which can lead to bizarre twists. With every successive anniversary of Tiananmen, the phrase “16 years ago” or “18 years ago” would be censored. As rumours of Premier Jiang Zemin’s death circulate, the word “Jiang”, which means “river”, is censored — and so is the phrase “Jiangsu Province”. A few months earlier, fears of a growing “Jasmine Revolution” in China led to search engines censoring searches for jasmine tea, and in the offline world, the sale of jasmine flowers was briefly banned.
Getting past the censors in China has become a complex, almost pleasurable game. Many micro-bloggers and bloggers are quick to grasp the essential truth of censorship — unless you shut down all speech, reducing the Internet in China to a space where everything is blacked out except “a”, “an”, and “the”, people will find creative ways of getting around any block. “Writing on the Internet,” says a Chinese blogger who asks for anonymity, “is double-edged. You can find ways to say things that would never make it into print. But you have to be very dexterous to get past the censors online, and sometimes what we write is impenetrable to anyone outside a small circuit, because we have to use so many unusual euphemisms.”
Back in India, a more conventional publishing dilemma made me ask questions about how much the presence of ebooks and the Internet complicates censorship. The author Siddhartha Deb spent several years working on a book about contemporary India, The Beautiful and The Damned. One of the chapters in his book is about the founder of Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), Arindam Chaudhuri, and Deb took a careful but critical look at Chaudhuri’s empire.
The essay was carried in The Caravan magazine a few months ago, and last month, IIPM filed a lawsuit against Deb, The Caravan and his publishers Penguin India. They also sued Google, the search engine, on the grounds that Google had been the means of spreading Deb’s IIPM essay — an unusual, and risible, step that generated much mockery. Caravan and Deb are fighting the libel charges in court, and many legal observers feel they have a strong case.
But Deb’s book was due to be launched this summer, which presented his publishers with a problem — to hold off the release until the case is decided makes no sense. So Indian readers of The Beautiful and the Damned will, according to some reports, receive a copy of the book without the IIPM chapter —which is a key part of Deb’s observations about wealth, aspiration and the new millionaires in India. This is an awkward, but understandable, solution, though it’s unclear whether the UK copies of the book will contain the offending chapter — they should, since the lawsuit pertains only to India.
In the age of the Internet, though, it’s not that easy to censor a writer. The Caravan has pulled the article off their site, in compliance with the lawsuit filed by IIPM. But it is cached on Google, and the flurry over the suit against Deb, who is greatly respected for his two previous works of fiction (Surface, Point of Return), meant that more Indians had read the cached article. Another magazine, n+1, had withdrawn the issue containing the same article — and recently put it back in the public domain, as a way of protesting the lawsuit.
For either China or parties like IIPM, the question is whether it’s at all possible to censor the Net. The physical book is relatively easy to censor, and so perhaps is the ebook version. But Siddharth Deb’s case illustrates the power of the hivemind and of the online cache. The Web might end up creating multiple versions of the same book, from uncensored to emasculated, for different constituencies.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Department of Rants: The 2 am rule for rapists
"If you travel alone after 2 am and become victim of a crime, the police alone can't be blamed. It is advisable that a relative or friend is with you at odd hours." Delhi Police chief, BK Gupta, on crimes against women in the capital.
I'm assuming the Delhi Police chief, Mr BK Gupta, is a conscientious man who often patrols the city at 2 in the morning, remarking on the astoundingly high number of women out on the city's streets. I'm also assuming that his Delhi is significantly different from the city we live in, where most women who work in offices and shops will try to get back home at a "decent" hour, where it can be actively dangerous for women to walk around the city after 7-8 pm, and where it's scary taking the Metro or a bus after 9 pm, when the number of women travelling by subway seems to fall sharply.
I'm also assuming that Mr Gupta's access to Delhi's rising rape figures reveals a pattern none of us had suspected--the only reason for the Delhi Police chief to imply that women would be safer if they didn't insist on wandering the city at 2 am, after all, would be if he had noticed a distinct pattern of rapes and assaults on women occurring after 2 am.
That would make us want to assume that this attempted rape of a child, which took place at 3 pm, or this case of rape, which began well before 2 am, or any of the cases of molestation and assault that happen in the Metro or on public transport during the day, are statistical outliers. The fact is that except for call-centre rapes--often crimes of opportunity, where the rapist(s) will wait for a car to drop off a BPO worker late at night--rapists don't keep to Mr Gupta's timings, nor do men who're into harassing or assaulting women.
The truth is that Mr Gupta and his police force have been unable to make the capital a safe place for women, and part of the reason why the police repeatedly fail may have something to do with this attitude, this expectation that women should always take the blame. It's our clothes that get us raped, or the fact that we're out in public spaces, or that we have the temerity to be out without a (male) guardian: there is no parallel analysis of male behaviour in the city.
But it's not Mr Gupta's ridiculous premise--logically, he's arguing that women are more often at risk of violence after 2 am--that we need to get angry about. It's the belief behind his statements, that somehow, just by insisting on being out and about in public space, women bear the responsibility for the attacks perpetrated on them. It reinforces a powerful view of Delhi as a man's city, with public space defined as masculine by default, women defined as interlopers and intruders as a matter of course.
It's one thing to be told this, in harsh ways, by some idiot who'll brush up against you on the road, or follow you back from the bus stop. It's another thing to be told, by the police chief in your city, that if you're out after 2 am without a male protector, you get what you deserve. You don't see BK Gupta addressing men in this city, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves for treating women with disrespect. You don't see him lecturing the boys and men who're out looking for victims, before or after 2 am, on the evils of their ways. You don't see him saying that as the police chief of India's capital, he has a zero-tolerance policy towards men who harass or offer any kind of violence to women.
Instead, he's effectively endorsing the old arguments that women, somehow, ask for it, by being where they shouldn't be, by having the temerity to travel the city without that all-important protector. The stereotype of violence against women that he's promoting is an old one, too: a crime visited upon those who in some way transgress the norms, who call violence upon their heads by "dangerous behaviour". This ignores the facts about rape and violence in the city, the fact that a slum dweller is at higher risk for being raped because of her unsafe surroundings and the perception that she has no means of redressal; the fact that neighbours and family relatives are often the ones who offer violence towards women; the fact that our streets can feel, to women, like battle zones, regardless of how you dress and when you're out.
But all of this is too complex for Delhi's police chief, who might then have to admit the truth--about the relatively low reporting of rape as a crime, the lack of seriousness with which we treat sexual assault and verbal harassment, the low conviction rate in cases of assault and rape, the unthinking aggression of many (not all) men in Delhi. He might actually have to ask his police force to change the way they treat women who are out and about at 2 am, or even at 2 pm. He might even have to change his own mind about the way he sees violence against women in this city. And if Mr Gupta can't do this, he doesn't really deserve to keep his job.
(The views expressed here are personal.)
I'm assuming the Delhi Police chief, Mr BK Gupta, is a conscientious man who often patrols the city at 2 in the morning, remarking on the astoundingly high number of women out on the city's streets. I'm also assuming that his Delhi is significantly different from the city we live in, where most women who work in offices and shops will try to get back home at a "decent" hour, where it can be actively dangerous for women to walk around the city after 7-8 pm, and where it's scary taking the Metro or a bus after 9 pm, when the number of women travelling by subway seems to fall sharply.
I'm also assuming that Mr Gupta's access to Delhi's rising rape figures reveals a pattern none of us had suspected--the only reason for the Delhi Police chief to imply that women would be safer if they didn't insist on wandering the city at 2 am, after all, would be if he had noticed a distinct pattern of rapes and assaults on women occurring after 2 am.
That would make us want to assume that this attempted rape of a child, which took place at 3 pm, or this case of rape, which began well before 2 am, or any of the cases of molestation and assault that happen in the Metro or on public transport during the day, are statistical outliers. The fact is that except for call-centre rapes--often crimes of opportunity, where the rapist(s) will wait for a car to drop off a BPO worker late at night--rapists don't keep to Mr Gupta's timings, nor do men who're into harassing or assaulting women.
The truth is that Mr Gupta and his police force have been unable to make the capital a safe place for women, and part of the reason why the police repeatedly fail may have something to do with this attitude, this expectation that women should always take the blame. It's our clothes that get us raped, or the fact that we're out in public spaces, or that we have the temerity to be out without a (male) guardian: there is no parallel analysis of male behaviour in the city.
But it's not Mr Gupta's ridiculous premise--logically, he's arguing that women are more often at risk of violence after 2 am--that we need to get angry about. It's the belief behind his statements, that somehow, just by insisting on being out and about in public space, women bear the responsibility for the attacks perpetrated on them. It reinforces a powerful view of Delhi as a man's city, with public space defined as masculine by default, women defined as interlopers and intruders as a matter of course.
It's one thing to be told this, in harsh ways, by some idiot who'll brush up against you on the road, or follow you back from the bus stop. It's another thing to be told, by the police chief in your city, that if you're out after 2 am without a male protector, you get what you deserve. You don't see BK Gupta addressing men in this city, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves for treating women with disrespect. You don't see him lecturing the boys and men who're out looking for victims, before or after 2 am, on the evils of their ways. You don't see him saying that as the police chief of India's capital, he has a zero-tolerance policy towards men who harass or offer any kind of violence to women.
Instead, he's effectively endorsing the old arguments that women, somehow, ask for it, by being where they shouldn't be, by having the temerity to travel the city without that all-important protector. The stereotype of violence against women that he's promoting is an old one, too: a crime visited upon those who in some way transgress the norms, who call violence upon their heads by "dangerous behaviour". This ignores the facts about rape and violence in the city, the fact that a slum dweller is at higher risk for being raped because of her unsafe surroundings and the perception that she has no means of redressal; the fact that neighbours and family relatives are often the ones who offer violence towards women; the fact that our streets can feel, to women, like battle zones, regardless of how you dress and when you're out.
But all of this is too complex for Delhi's police chief, who might then have to admit the truth--about the relatively low reporting of rape as a crime, the lack of seriousness with which we treat sexual assault and verbal harassment, the low conviction rate in cases of assault and rape, the unthinking aggression of many (not all) men in Delhi. He might actually have to ask his police force to change the way they treat women who are out and about at 2 am, or even at 2 pm. He might even have to change his own mind about the way he sees violence against women in this city. And if Mr Gupta can't do this, he doesn't really deserve to keep his job.
(The views expressed here are personal.)
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