Margaret Atwood on mortification

From Curious Pursuits:

(Atwood's US publisher arranges for her to get on an American talk show.) It was an afternoon show, which in those days--could it have been the late seventies?--meant variety. It was the sort of show at which they played pop music, and then you were supposed to sashay through a bead curtain, carrying your trained koala bear, or Japanese flower arrangement, or book.

I waited behind the bead curtain. There was an act on before me. It was a group from the Colostomy Association, who were talking about their colostomies, and about how to use the colostomy bag.

I knew I was doomed. No book could ever be that riveting.

WC Fields vowed never to share the stage with a child or a dog; I can add to that, "Never follow the Colostomy Association." (Or any other thing having to do with frightening bodily items, such as the port-wine-stain removal technique that once preceded me in Australia.) The problem is, you lose all interest in yourself and your so-called 'work'--'What did you say your name was? And tell us the plot of your book, just in a couple of sentences, please'--so immersed are you in picturing the gruesome intricacies of...but never mind.

The BS Column: A Nobel for Mr Dylan

(Published in the Business Standard, September 29, 2009. I wrote this yesterday, unfortunately before someone sent me the link to this piece today-but it's nice to know we had the same idea.)

How many roads must a poet walk down before he is awarded a Nobel? The odds on the Swedish Academy announcing in a week’s time that Robert Zimmerman is the 2009 Nobel Literature laureate are low-25/1, according to Ladbroke’s.

That gives the tambourine man little leverage over this year’s best bets. Amos Oz, Philip Roth, the poet Adonis, Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon make it to the top of the betting lists each year, with many saying Oz might get the nod. Given the Academy’s penchant for awarding the Nobel in literature to the obscurely erudite, Ladbroke’s and other Nobel-watchers always add in a handful of sternly literary contenders, just so that the rest of us can say “Le Clezio (or Jelineke) who?” when Nobel hour rolls around.

But Dylan’s stock, Nobel-wise, has been rising over the last decade—the current odds place him ahead of Salman Rushdie (80/1, and if they give him the wreath, can we please unban the Satanic Verses in celebration?), on par with Alice Munro (who’s already picked up the Man International Booker), and a hair ahead of Chinua Achebe, Carlos Fuentes and Mahasweta Debi (all at 50/1).

Dylan’s Nobel chances are often treated as a joke; it’s assumed that the austere guardians of the universal literary fame would never unbend far enough to award the Prize to a song-writer. Especially a successful one. And there’s the question of how Dylan, with his twin aversion to formal dress and formal speeches, would react to receiving the Nobel.

The reason why Dylan deserves the Nobel has nothing to do with his popularity, or the fact that his works are actually still quoted, discussed and in wide circulation today. Doris Lessing and Dario Fo, for instance, are classic examples of writers who earned their Nobels in terms of literary merit, but received the accolade perhaps a decade late, at a time when their best works no longer have the same impact as they once did.

The argument for Dylan would rest squarely on the quality and influence of his work over the years, and the fact that they have now become classics of modern poetry, decades after they were first composed. It’s not just that Dylan wrote great songs—he wrote songs that were deeply rooted in the history of his times, and in a musical and verbal folk tradition that goes back for decades.

The only reason he’s been kept out of contemporary compilations of world poetry is because of a kind of cultural blindness, a refusal to see that a song, however popular, however well-known, however frequently hummed, can be poetry as well. This is in many ways a bizarre barrier: poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Dylan’s fellow versifier, Adonis, have, like him, recited their verses in front of massive gatherings of fans, and have heard their lyrics chanted by thousands of voices.

Not convinced? Consider these two examples:

“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind…”


And:
“Now in the final act,
disaster tows our history
toward us on its face.
What is our past
but memories pierced like deserts
barricaded by what we see,
marching under clouds that move
like mules and cannon.”

The first is written by Dylan (from ‘Chimes of Freedom’), the second by Adonis. Both are poems that ask, in different ways, for justice and revolution—and you could argue, on the basis of metre and imagery, that both are equally powerful.

Try two more examples:
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread…”


And:

“I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.”


The first is W B Yeats, the second Bob Dylan—but the Irish poet and the American troubadour reach for a similar rhythm, a similar rhyme scheme and achieve the same effect of intimacy. Both are excellent poems; currently, only one of them is written by a Nobel laureate.

I know, it’s knocking on heaven’s door to ask that the Swedish Academy take Bob Dylan seriously, but you could make the case that he remains one of the most brilliant and enduring chroniclers of our times. It could happen. All it would take is a simple twist of fate.

Gluttony: Pandelicious

(Quickie on Puja pandal eating for the Business Standard; it came out last week, just in time to let the gorging begin.)


Despite opinions to the contrary, Durga Puja isn’t an occasion for senseless gorging. The true gourmand’s responsibility is to pack in as much good eating as s/he can in this week—and that’s harder than it seems.

For many, the most insistent taste memories of Puja come from the legendary pandal “bhogs” served for lunch and dinner at these places, some of which can boast of third-and-fourth generation master chefs. For others, Puja food is snack food, as Bijoli Grill, Benfish, Nizam’s and a dozen redoubtable biryani joints put up stalls that sell everything from fried fish to Mughlai paratha.

And for the last decade, restaurants have joined the Puja feeding frenzy, offering special menus for each day of the festivities. This is, even for the intrepid Bengali armed with a cast-iron, bottomless pit for a stomach, not an easy labyrinth to negotiate. Here’s a day-to-day guide to navigation.

Sasthi: Most puja pandals kick off the first public day of Durga Puja with a local Ananda Mela tradition. In Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park and Calcutta’s larger pandals, the Ananda Mela is a near-corporate affair with some of the city’s biggest Bengali sweet-and-savoury makers participating. The smaller pandals offer a far more home-style experience, with the local Mashimas bringing in home-cooked delicacies for sale. Look for the great Mughlai-style specialties and the old coffee-house/ adda classics.

Aside from the jhalmuri and bhelpuri sellers and the omnipresent biryani and kabab rolls, fried fish and fried chicken chops are big on the menu. So is fish orly and kabiraji cutlets with their frills of egg. If you’re in luck, there’ll be home-made ghugni—a chickpea-and-mutton concoction in a thick sauce (with vegetarian versions)—or dimer devil (devilled eggs) and mochar chop (banana flower chops) besides an array of sweets.

Saptami: This is a good day to stick to vegetarian delights, and sample the overlooked labra. This is a classic vegetable curry, the Bengali equivalent of the Gujarati undhiyo (I say this at the risk of setting both communities at each other’s throats) and requires the skill of a master chef in terms of combining the different kinds of pumpkin, spinach and other leaves in just the right proportion. Timing is everything: a mediocre cook could end up with a messy pulp, but a great cook will stun your palate with a complexity of flavours, no one spice or vegetable overpowering the other.

Ashtami: This is a great day to take advantage of the restaurant specials. In Calcutta, Kewpie’s Kitchen runs classic and delectable menus during each day of the pujas. Tero Parban, Bhojohori Manna and 6, Ballygunge Place in Calcutta have their own set of faithful followers. In Delhi and Bombay, Oh! Calcutta chains have been running puja buffet lunches--good value for money. I associate Ashtami with khichudi, which bears the same relationship to everyday khichdi that a Tagore poem does to doggerel. This is a day of sumptuousness—gorge on the more sinful Bengali sweetmeats—but also a day to celebrate the simple goodness of begun bhaja, perfect quarters or rounds of aubergine fried just as you sit down to eat.

Nabami: Fish rules Nabami, no question. Chital maacher muthai is a dish venerated for its taste as much as for the difficulty involved in scraping the flesh off the very bony frame of the chital fish. Unabashed fish lovers prefer the classic—and hard to get in most restaurants—fish-head curry with moong dal. If you’re wimping out, do it in some style with a smoked hilsa paturi or a prawn malai curry.

Dashami: Cauliflower curry sounds like the most boring vegetable dish on earth, but only the Sikh langars and the Bengali pandals make it as it should be—masses of cauliflower, introduced to quantities of oil and spices, and allowed to get their sizzle on. But Dashami, the final day of the pujas, is also luchi-mangsho day—puri with meat curry to North Indians. Ideally, the meat curry should be kasha mangsho—only very young goats need apply to be the key ingredient for this dish—and the supply of luchis should be inexhaustible, with one cooling luchi held in reserve as a scoop for your post-meal kheer.

For those of delicate stomachs, following this five-day plan might bring other things than satiety in its wake. The hardcore Bengali would have two words for you: Isabgol, and Gelusil. Trust to this combination (and a few prayers in between meals) and all should be well.

The BS Column: Meenakshi Mukherjee: The Death of a Critic

(This was a week of loss and funerals; and memories. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught me years ago at JNU, and helped me make the key decision to pursue freelance writing instead of a PhD; I think her acute eye saw what a misfit I'd have been in academia. We stayed in touch sporadically over the years, calling each other to discuss new books, reviews, translations, ideas. "You lead a much more productive life away from the Delhi social whirl," she told me when she moved some years ago to Hyderabad. "Most of it is distraction. I enjoy not being distracted these days."
She died of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, on her way to Delhi for a book release, in a year when she was on the panel of judges for the Shakti Bhatt prize and at 72, was humming with the productivity she'd wanted so much in her sixties. "What have you been reading?" she asked in our last conversation. I told her; she listened. "So many good books! We're lucky to have time to read, aren't we? Which ones should I buy first? Have you read this? And that?" That energy, that appetite, that freewheeling curiosity: I'll miss all of these.)

The Prospectus of the 19th century Mookerjee’s Magazine declared that, “Our Magazine will be a receptacle of all descriptions of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, vers de société, Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology…” and so forth for another two ambitiously inclusive lines.

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, scholar, critic and writer, who died last week at the age of 72 of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, sometimes quoted the Prospectus; in some ways, it reflected the contents and broad scope of her own formidable mind. (She gave vers de société a wide berth, but was open to the rest.)

Criticism of Indian writing in English suffers from two major problems. Much of it is unintelligible, especially criticism as practised by followers of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and requires the skills of an expert in linguistic forensics to decode. Much of it is invisible, relegated to obscure academic journals or to the thriving but insular seminar circuit. Very little of it is actually influential, or lasting, but Meenakshi Mukherjee’s contributions are likely to fall into this category.

There was no sense, in her presence, of reading literature as dead texts from a distant past. Her years in research, and her long partnership with her equally distinguished husband, the late translator and academic Sujit Mukherjee, gave her a holistic view of Indian writing in English that few other practitioners possessed. Meenakshi Mukherjee could trace the lineage of IWE much further back than Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—considered the first true novel written by an Indian in English. Through her scholarship, she offered a much more interesting history than the accepted one of a novel, imitative of its Western counterparts, that sprang out of nowhere from Bankim’s mind.

In her excavation of history, the Indian novel had been emerging in unusual form well before the 19th century. The first two books that snagged Meenakshi Mukherjee’s attention dated back to 1835 and 1845 respectively—both were works of alternate history, imagining an uprising against the British, and a future without English rule.

Years later, when she translated Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat, she was fascinated by the question of imagination. The Indian expression of it may have been influenced by magic realism, or by the European novel, but it had a different fountainhead, in her opinion. Bhattacharya’s novel, for instance, is set in an imaginary prison where the inmates have the “freedom” to explore sexuality. But it’s the guards who decide on the pairings of prisoners, and erotic exploration soon becomes just another fatigue-inducing prison ritual. The narrator of The Virgin Fish of Babughat is bound by different rules—he must commit his thoughts to paper, by order, and he is rendered frantic by the fear of losing language, the necessity of facing blank page after blank page every day.

In one of the last conversations we had, just before Meenakshi Mukherjee was supposed to come to Delhi for the launch of her biography of R C Dutt, we discussed the Indian writer’s love for fantasy, for the picaresque and for alternate histories—all these exerted a powerful fascination for the early pioneers, before the conventions of the middle-class novel took over.

It’s sad that one set of writers will remember only the skirmish between the professor and the writer Vikram Chandra, which he documented, memorably, in an essay called The Cult of Authenticity. Meenakshi Mukherjee had noted the tendency of some Indian writers in English to exoticise India unnecessarily, to produce the modern equivalent of sadhus and maharajas in an attempt to establish their authenticity.

Mukherjee picked on Chandra’s collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, as an example of this trend, for his use of words like Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha in the titles. In retrospect, she was right about the anxiety of writing India that infected a certain group of writers—and perhaps still does. But she was dead wrong in her selection of offenders—Chandra couldn’t be accused of this particular crime. When some of us taxed her with evidence to the contrary, years ago, she was delighted. “A proper argument!” she said, and settled to it with her trademark relish and acumen. Neither side succeeded in convincing the other, but we, at least, retired with a far broader sense of our literary history once she was done with her examples.

This isn’t my favourite Meenakshi Mukherjee memory, though. That would be one shared by generations of students at JNU and the many other universities where she taught: the memory of engaging with “MM” as she opened up our forgotten literature and unexplored past to us via Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, inviting us to claim Indian English, in all its richness and complexity, for ourselves. To borrow from the title of one of the many anthologies edited by her, there was another India out there, and she wanted every reader to make their own explorations of that familiar and unknown country.

Repairing Brindavan: by Ruchir Joshi

(Reproduced with permission from Tranquebar and Ruchir Joshi, the introduction to Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories. Copyright with Ruchir Joshi.)


Repairing Brindavan — An Introduction

In asking writers to contribute to this book we laid out criteria that were loose to the point of being promiscuous: there was a dearth of good erotic writing in the Indian Subcontinent (by which please read ‘writing in English’) and we wanted to try and start to counter that absence; the writing had to be around and about the erotic, the sexual, and it could be as graphic or not as the writer liked; it had to be a work of fiction and it had to be previously unpublished.

The responses were varied and interesting.

One senior Indian writer, who writes brilliant erotics, disdained to even answer my email. Three others did variations of spluttering into their beer, ‘Me write porn for you!?! No fucking way!’ and promptly crossed their legs, all three. One star of the firmament smiled very sweetly and said, ‘If I find the time, I’ll certainly think about it.’ If I had such a thing as a Wall of Rejections, and if there had been a way to collect that smile, it would certainly have had pride of place. Another writer couched his refusal in the form of a tough question: if it wasn’t to be porn, surely a passage about sex and desire had to be an organic part of a larger narrative about something else? In setting out this model wasn’t I, in fact, inviting sex writing for the sake of sex writing, i.e. that highly undesirable substance called ‘bad sex writing’?

While the putting together of this book, I’ve kept that question firmly in mind because it is a very good question.

When I got the tough question, I had several arguments crowding my head:

What’s wrong with a piece of writing that’s written primarily or solely to excite sexual desire? Surely, as in the eating of puddings and the making of love, the proof lies in the actual experience of the act rather than any a priori idea or theory? Surely, if the writing was good enough, it could transcend grosser examples of whichever genre? Some of our greatest miniature paintings are the porn comic-strips of their day; Anais Nin wrote The Delta of Venus to pay the rent, at the rate of so many francs per page, and it’s a fulcrum work of twentieth-century literature; one of the best film directors working today, Pedro Almodovar, cut his teeth in the Spanish porn film industry and imported many of the industry’s tropes into his mainstream films; and so on and so forth.

Would you, I wanted to ask, have had the same problem if I’d written to you and asked for a story centred around food and eating, or about music and sound, or about the pleasures and traumas of driving in the Subcontinent? And what if I’d said recipes and sheet music and detailed descriptions of gear-boxes were most welcome but not strictly necessary?

How do you know what will emerge if you put your mind, memory and imagination to thinking about desire and sex?

I had all these returns of serve and more, but I also had an idea that the only way to properly answer the challenge was by producing a book that would hold a serious reader. For all those who said ‘no’ there were more writers who said ‘yes’ — again, in equally varying and entertaining ways — and they have produced, each in her or his own style, what I hope is part of a satisfactory reply to our fellow storyteller.

When I spoke to a friend in British publishing about doing this book, his response flickered between disinterest and mild horror. Both the ennui and anxiety came from the fact that even the best bookstores in the UK now have ‘Erotica’ sections overloaded with graphically sexualised versions of Mills & Boons and autobiographies of porn stars with titles like ‘How to Give Great Blowjobs’. Around, above and below these archaic repositories of the printed word is the net, with its ceaseless traffic of virtual bodily fluids, with its elevator-musak of groans, grunts and gasps, with its Calipornification of everything from small animals to large forklifts.

I wanted to tell my friend a story to explain where I was trying to come from: a Baul singer was taken on a tour of Germany in the late ’80s. The man, let’s call him S-Baba, was also one of the greatest living exponents of the millennium-old Bengali folk-music tradition that he represented. But S-Baba, then in his fifties, was also famous for his unceasing libido. One of his hosts, who knew this, thought it would be a lark to take S-Baba into a sex store. For the longest time S-Baba silently wandered around the aisles, staring at the dildos, vibrators, whips, leather suits and crotchless panties. After a while, with great sorrow on his face, he spoke. ‘My god, is this what they’ve done to Brindavan?’

When I first heard the story, twenty years ago, I roared with laughter. The image of the King of Randiness, the one who was willing to chase with his charm any woman between sixteen and sixty, being gobsmacked out of his sex-drive was impossible to resist.

I don’t laugh at the story any more.

I’ve heard the old Baul sing the song many times now: I want to find the road to Brindavan, who’ll show me the way? Nominally, Brindavan is, of course, the woodland of lore where the cowherd Krishna played with the Gopis, stealing their clothes while they bathed, making love, moving from one to the other, pulling everyone around him, women and men, into the dance of love. But the Brindavan for which the song searches is a space that can only be found inside oneself. For me, the denudation of that Brindavan, that ancient subcontinental psychic forest of erotic freedom, where love and physical desire go hand in hand with tenderness, grace, laughter, mischief and the worship of the ecstatic that resides in all our beings, is no less a tragedy than the drying up of our rivers or the inundation of our coastlines.

What I wanted to tell my English friend was that we in the Subcontinent are now sandwiched in a double rape of our Brindavan. If, out of one direction, comes the inexorable rumble of the bulldozers of mostly male-driven hard porn, from the other direction comes the snap and crackle of people setting fire to the forest from inside. This project was conceived in the shadow of the exiling of M.F. Husain on a ridiculously spurious ‘charge’ hatched by the Hindu fascists, and the beginnings of the resurgence of the Taliban goons in Afghanistan; the volume comes out in the shadow of the assault by the Hindu Taliban on young women drinking in a pub in Mangalore. Hopefully, in its own small way, this book will join the resistance against those and other such depredations.


Recently, when I described some of the stories to a friend, they said, ‘Oh, so are you going to call it “Erotica Designed to Disappoint Horny Teenagers”? My reply isn’t printable, even in this preface, but the serious answer is: no, I hope sexually avid subcontinental youth do get some kicks out of reading this; God knows they deserve some home-grown excitement after all we went through when we were ourselves fighting our way through puberty, hiding under our beds everything from low-level, pirated porn to high-level, impenetrable nineteenth-century gumball prose, none of it having anything to do with our lives, which were of course supposed to be sex-free zones in the delusionary chapel of our parents’ world-view.

But, equally, I hope older readers will also feel their boats floating every now and then, boats both sexual and literary. Looking through the stories, I’m happy to argue that this is an anthology which contains some of the most exciting writers working today in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus the one from suburban South London.

In the composite picture that comes together, we have sex and desire, anti-sex and the despair that comes from unfulfilled desire, we have great detail and subtle allusion, we have more humour than sorrow, and we definitely have more love than we do hate. This is a collage of a book that works on its own terms. For instance, it is not a representational sampling of the region: people unfamiliar with the Subcontinent will hopefully avoid concluding that there is no same-sex love in these parts, or that Sri Lankans and Nepalis either can’t write about desire or don’t have sex at all; equally, since lust and desire are essentially about keeping rules and other things slightly flexible, we have one extract from a novel that’s beaten this collection to the press, we have stories that do not fit into a strict definition of ‘sex writing’, where other narratives over-ride the sexual without quite managing to lose the undercurrent of desire; in other words, we have a mix and, inshallah, we have a match.

As you open this book and explore it, I hope there will form the charge and bond that should happen between writer and reader, an erotics of discovery which, while being different from the current that passes between two lovers, is not entirely unrelated.

Ruchir Joshi

Calcutta 2009

Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories

This one's personal.
Back in the late 1990s, a friend in publishing asked me to scan the manuscript of an anthology of Indian erotica. It was a magnificent anthology, accurate in all respects, containing excerpts from every key ancient and medieval Indian manuscript on the subject--the Koka Shastra, the Ananga Ranga and of course, the Kama Sutra (non pop-up version).
It was also the least erotic book I have had the honour of reading. As I ploughed through the grimly earnest taxonomy and the stern injunctions of our ancients, what came through was the sense of sex as yet another social duty and domestic chore to be studied alongside the granary yield figures or the household accounts. Indians had the answer to the population problem in their own backyard--if we taught the ancient erotic shastras in school, burdening young minds with the 15 different kinds of permissible fingernail marks you can leave on your lover's body and the correct occasion on which to make the cry of the peacock as opposed to the moan of the jungle cat, no one would ever have sex again in this country.
Years passed, I joined publishing briefly, and one of the first things I heard was that Ruchir Joshi was doing a contemporary erotica anthology for a rival house. My colleagues and I suppressed a moan (the low moan of the twice-kicked street dog, not the full-throated moan of the langur at dusk, if you're wondering) and came to terms with our jealousy--it was the right editor/ author for the right book at the right time. Chiki Sarkar at Random House did a superb job of setting the book on its way, but for various reasons, the book moved on from Random, and we at Tranquebar were lucky enough to get it.
Electric Feather is out; the launch is at the serendipitously named Love Hotel, Ai, tomorrow (17th September) at 7 pm (Delhi, MGF Mall--please RSVP Tranquebar if you'd like to attend); and I'm very happy that Tranquebar brought the project to term despite my departure.
Because of the zealousness of the moral police in India, and their touching insistence on peering into the bedrooms of the rest of us, we've had an odd gap in Indian writing. There is bad literary sex (Indians find themselves nominated for the Bad Sex award on a routine basis), Ye Ancient Indian sex as diligently classified by the dry quills of the sages of the past, any erotic sting drawn by time, and oceans of bad Bhabhi Porn. Contemporary lust, and love, and all those many in-between shades, has been left in a dusty file marked "Not For Public Consumption", and as authors from Paromita Vohra to Samit Basu, Jeet Thayil to Sonia Jabbar, Ruchir himself to Abeer Hoque prove, what is in there is rich, and alive, and filled with a kind of crackling electricity. Of all the books that I commissioned or that came to me as gifts at Tranquebar, this is the one I'm most pleased to see in print. Read it, preferably in bed.

The BS Column: Should Google own the world's words?

(Published in the Business Standard, September 14, 2009. I ducked writing on Google Book Search for as long as I could--it's a complex issue, and if you're writing at this word length, you're not going to do more than reiterate the basic arguments--but finally had to put my two cents in. Oh well.)

Who owns literature? And would you be comfortable if the answer to that was: “Google”?



This is only a slight oversimplification, and it’s the key question in the ferocious debate raging currently over Google Book Search. In late 2004, Google kicked off the Google Print Library project. The search engine behemoth announced plans to partner with some of the world’s biggest libraries in order to digitize books.



Many of us saw this as a potentially good thing at the time, especially with regard to hard-to-find books, books that are out of copyright, or rare books that might not be easily accessible otherwise. A vast, worldwide, easily accessible electronic library is everyone’s Borgesian dream come true. But as early as 2005, fears surfaced that this might give Google too much power—and would the company be able to digitize books currently within copyright, or “orphan books” (books for which copyright is under dispute or hard to trace)?



By October 2008, Google had 20,000 partners in what was now known as the Google Book Search project—and had digitized over 7 million books. This sounds, again, like a good thing—the world’s largest library, the rescue and recovery of forgotten or lost books, perhaps even a shift in the power equation between authors. Instead of being biased, inevitably, towards books published in our current time and age (bookshops will carry far more recently published works than classic works), we gain access to the work of the human imagination down the centuries.



Here’s the catch. As the Google Books Search Settlement goes to court, one of the key issues at stake is whether Google will effectively own the world’s largest library. As author Cory Doctorow explains, thanks to an ill-judged class action settlement between the Authors Guild and Google Book Search, “Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books [including orphan books] in search results... The real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.”



I like Google as a company. But do I trust them with this much power? Consider this, too: Google’s tools are fairly (if quietly) invasive. The reason why authors like Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow are protesting this settlement before the hearing on October 7, and why several publishers have joined hands with them, is that Google Book Search has a dark side to it. Google’s system can monitor not just what books you buy, but what you search for, what you read, down to how much time you spend on a particular page. This may seem paranoid, but to give one company this much power when their databases also include tools on the lines of Google Maps and Gmail is insane.



That’s an awful lot of information that could be compiled in a way that is deeply invasive of your privacy. Imagine, for instance, that for excellent reasons, the courts might want the right to monitor the reading and online search habits of released paedophiles on probation. Google has that information. Should it assist the courts, especially if x paedophile’s probation officer suspects that he may be about to commit another crime? Now imagine a slightly different scenario, where you’ve fallen foul of say, an IT official in India, and he decides to ask Google for your reading records, discovers a lot of searches for erotica, and had you prosecuted under anti-porn laws.



These are simplistic examples, but there is a chilling effect to giving one company this much access and control over your personal information. And there’s a very human factor to be considered here: most people object to invasions of their privacy—but they object a lot less when that invasion is discreet and almost imperceptible. If Google Book Search was to come into our homes every week and demand to see our reading lists, as well as install security cameras to monitor exactly what we read, we would protest. But this is an online, invisible invasion. There aren’t going to be that many protests.



Google argues that the project is intrinsically good, and points to their reasonably strong track record at respecting the privacy of individuals—except in China. But I’m not comfortable with the idea, as a reader, of giving one company that much control over my life—and no, Google’s Privacy Policy isn’t enough of a reason to trust them. Add the invasion of privacy issues to the massively large database of literature that would now be in Google’s hands, and you have a big problem. The world may still need and use a digitized library. But there are very good reasons not to hand over the keys to that library to one company. Even if it is Google.