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| C of P |
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| 10th June 2008 |
I sat with the writer Mukul Kesavan out on his lawn on a winter evening and talked about the scene in The Shadow Lines where the narrator opens his atlas, places the point of his compass on Khulna and the pencil end on Srinagar, and draws a large circle. The novel revolves around a riot that occurred at the centre of this circle caused by the disappearance of a relic of the prophet at its periphery; a forgotten riot that happened many years before the rusty compass came out of the drawer. The narrator's uncle, Amitav Ghosh's most compelling character Tridib, died in it. And as the narrator draws the circle, there is an incantation of names: Rann of Kutch, Kandy, Phnom Penh, Hue, Chunking, Inner Mongolia. "It was a remarkable circle," the narrator says. "More than half of mankind must have fallen within it.'' The narrator dwells on the "tidy ordering of Euclidean space'', on the fact that the happenings on some points of the circle could lead to mayhem and death at the centre, while other points in the circle lived on unaffected. He talks of his perplexity at the current of emotion that flows so directedly, and destructively, in such narrow channels. We are a people at war with ourselves, he concludes, a people who have forgotten that we are people, people who have become nothing but states and nations.
It's an incredible scene, I told Mukul, with the nerdish excitement that often erupts in conversations with fellow nerds. And he pulls it off, said Mukul, making me suddenly aware--many years after I first read the scene, some time after I had poked fun at it in my own novel --of the risk involved in writing something so earnest and heartfelt.
That compass is a particularly poignant lens to look through. It is found conveniently lying at the back of a drawer "forgotten'' there by the previous occupant. Perhaps Ghosh's narrator does not want to admit that a grown up man who can make sweeping and important conclusions from old newspapers found in the Teen Murti archive, is still enough of a Bengali schoolboy to own a compass. It reveals something important, that compass, about the place from which the world is being surveyed, and about the person doing the surveying. When you think about that compass long enough, you begin to see that research student's hostel room, somewhere up north near Delhi University; you see the whitewashed walls and the tubelight, the crowded desk, the mosquito coil on its stand near the bed, and you see a young man bent over a map, trying to make sense of the past in an effort to deal with the present. Even if you had not read the interviews and the essays in which Ghosh has talked about how writing The Shadow Lines was his way of coming to terms with his experiences during the 1984 riots, when you think about that compass hard enough you begin to see that this novel of Calcutta and Dhaka and London reflects the way our subcontinent's traumas have been filtered through the consciousness of those who have lived and studied in Delhi. The Shadow Lines is, in some fundamental way, a novel of Delhi.
Reading Philip Roth made me want to be a writer, but it was reading The Shadow Lines that gave me permission to write. I know this now and perhaps I knew it intuitively back in 1994--when I first laid hands on The Shadow Lines six years after it was first published--that there was a thread of wonder and joy at the vastness of the world that ran through Ghosh's work. It may have been an inheritance from the likes of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyaya or Tagore. And to the
insatiable and wonderful curiosity of his forbears Ghosh had added a powerfully contemporary and equally beautiful awareness of a shared pain; the thing Iqbal was talking of when he ended his celebrated and celebratory taraana-e-hindi by saying "Iqbal koi mehram apna nahin jahaan mein / maalum kya kisi ko dard-e-nihaan hamara'' (Iqbal, we have no confidant in this world / who knows the pain we hide inside.) I don't think it was just me. I suspect that back in the nineties there was more than one young Indian person who was seduced by that combination of pain and wonder, who thought after reading The Shadow Lines that there was nothing better you could do in this world than to be a writer.
It's been twenty years since The Shadow Lines was first published, in simple elegant hardback by Ravi Dayal. In these twenty years Ghosh has continued to write books that are true to that pain and that wonder. And as we celebrate the coming of Sea of Poppies this month, I cannot help but think of the time when Amitav Ghosh first put his compass down and drew me--and Mukul, and the winter evening we spent together out on Mukul's lawn, and my city, and this subcontinent, and the suffering of each and every person who has ever lived--into his arc.
This piece first appeared under the title Circle of Life in Brunch on Sunday, 8th June 2008. |
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| Going back, going in |
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| 13th April 2008 |
The newspapers are buzzing with big literary news nowadays. One big book after another, spaced as carefully apart as a Shah Rukh starrer from an Aamir Khan film, is hitting the papers. Books that must and will be talked about. In such a time it seems contrary to return to old books, but sometimes contrary is the better way to be.
I've been writing in Hindustan Times' Sunday supplement Brunch, a column called Simply Read that is to appear on the second Sunday of each month. The third edition, a piece on Ruskin Bond's Adventures of Rusty (it began as a blog post here some time ago) appeared today. Go out and get a copy of HT and read it. Or wait a few days and I'll post it in the other writings section of the website. For now that section has two of the pieces I wrote for Brunch, one they published in February and one they didn't publish in March (because it was too "main paper.") |
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| The great Indian book tour part four |
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| 13th February 2008 |
The Chennai reading was followed by an intelligent discussion. The perpetrator of this outrage was Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, lecturer in politics and law at Southampton University who is currently guest lecturer at the Asian College of Journalism. Arvind decided to read Above Average from a sociological point of view and raised critical questions about the idea of masculinity raised in the book. It was so refreshing, so surprising, that I was caught unawares. I realized that over the last year since the book has come out I have spent so much time fending off inane questions about "campus novels" and "IIT novels" that I have almost forgotten the questions that drew me into the writing in the first place.
Arvind was particularly interested in talking about the gradual growth of Arindam's self-awareness. He found that very interesting and apt and was not fully convinced, I think, that I had done that deliberately. I had to confess that I hadn't planned it in the beginning but, once I was aware that it was happening, had taken it on wholeheartedly.
The audience rose to challenge. After I talked about how the character of Kanitkar framed a critique of the way professors in India often talk down to students, one person asked me how I was different as a professor. That was a hard question and I tried to answer it by saying that I try never to insult a student or tell them they're stupid. I think this is pretty much true but every day of every semester is an opportunity to slip up on this count, and I can't say for sure that I haven't slipped up in these last three years.
There was a lively discussion of ragging, sexual harassment, men and women in India. I tried to make the point that a genuine engagement with those issues involves trying to understand the development of a person who thinks it is okay to grope a woman in public. Above Average doesn't set out to do that, but it does try to explore the development of men in India, and so, to my mind, is part of that effort.
I left the Nungambakkam Landmark store wishing my book got more readers like Arvind, and that I could do more readings in places where people aren't too lazy to think, where people are willing to look part personalities and personas and engage with ideas. |
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| Happy Kumar |
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| 14th November 2007 |
There's nothing worse than loving your job says a clever commercial for a job portal. In this ad film we meet Happy Kumar. Happy signifies his contentment by going through his morning routine with an imbecilic expression on his face. His taxi driver looks a little zoned out, the liftman appears resigned. The paper boy (do those exist?) is fairly miserable in his streetbound job. But Happy is unaffected, not just by the various postings for great opportunities that appear in all kinds of places, but also by the fact that these other people around him are not particularly contented in their work. It's as if he bears them a responsibility. "How can you, Happy Kumar, capable of rising to the top, disappoint me taxiwallah/liftman/paper boy - incapable of moving up in life - by ignoring your opportunity to rise," they seem to say.
It's an interesting twist on the old middle-class parental tactic of getting your children to be ambitious by scaring them that they will end up nowhere if they are not. But there's something more here. The idea that contentment is for morons. The feeling that happiness is stagnation.
Absent in the ad but implied is Neurotic Kumar. He jumps from one job to the other just because it promises him a "foreign" posting or a slightly higher salary. He gets frazzled if the taxi door doesn't open. He wakes up unhappy and stressed because he hates his job, and, by extension, his life. And he never never smiles. He is, we are made to understand, the ideal white collar worker.
Are you Neurotic? |
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| Scene from a Puja pandal |
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| 19th October 2007 |
I stepped away for a drink of water while the indomitable MC pestered the guitarist and the singer to return to the stage for the second encore. Instead of going back to my seat I just stood at the back as the guitarist started playing an alaap of some sort on his guitar. Three boys in the front stood up, and I thought that the second encore was being proved to be a wrong decision. Then some other people stood up and I realized that the first three had not moved. Then more and more people stood up, as the alaap wound it's way forward. And I am still thinking that maybe they've liked the show so much, they're standing for the finale. But when some really old people stood up, that explanation began to seem less plausible. Then one particular note was struck and I realized what was going on: the national anthem. A still solemness filled the pandal. The scene of noisy public religiosity played host to a scene of silent public patriotism.
I was beginning to formulate the stirring yet quiet sentences with which I would describe this scene later when the song ended and one guy standing somewhere near the front shouted "Chak de, India." |
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| The great indian book tour part three |
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| 9th October 2007 |
Kolkata was a disaster. Not the food, that was excellent. Not the grillworked facades or the colonial architecture, those were charming. The event was a disaster.
It was easily the best of the four events I have done outside Delhi. The singer-songwriter, filmmaker, actor, filmmaker Anjan Dutt was the chief guest. And although he had not finished reading the book, he had made an emotional connection with it. He talked about how his own career had developed because rock music had attracted him when he was growing up in a boarding school in the hills. And how the journey that began by playing guitar had taken him to many different places. It was touching to hear him make the connection between the struggles the book's characters go through and his own formative experiences. And he read from the book himself, getting into the cadence of the dialogue. In a small effort to pay him back I told him, and the audience, about the time I had played drums on Ranjana at a desi music show at UC Irvine.
The audience was small but lively. They asked me again and again about my plans for translating the book into Bangla. I didn't have any plans at the time. I have some now. They asked me about whether I felt that as a writer I should also be a social activist. I was struggling to explain that I felt that my book does contain a critique of the world we live in and that I felt that as a writer that was how I could contribute. Anjan Dutt came in forcefully in my defence and said that earlier he felt that marching in the streets was necessary, but now he felt that an artist's primary contribution is through art. Later when I told him that I appreciated he had said so, he sheepishly admitted that he was on his way to meeting in support of the struggle for justice for Rizwanur Rehman,
Another nice thing was that I got to meet Rimi Chatterjee who wrote this very intelligent review of Above Average.
So why was Kolkata a disaster? None of the papers had carried notice of the event, so very few people came. I gave one interview, as opposed to the four or five at all the other places. Neither the bookstore nor my publishers did the kind of preparatory publicity or media outreach they should have. A lot of time, effort and money was spent (a good fraction of all three were mine) and in the end it was largely wasted.
So, here it is, the life of a first time author in India. And if this is how it goes when your book has sold almost 15,000 copies and been called a bestseller by all and sundry, imagine how it must be for those writers who work years to put out a few hundred pages only to see them sink without a trace. On the other hand, if you're a big name then everyone is falling over themselves to give you the best possible stage and ensure the best possible audience and the most comprehensive media coverage possible. |
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| Attuned |
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| 18th August 2007 |
A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street.
says Luc Sante in his article on the single-scroll manuscript of Kerouac's On the road. An interesting thing to say, easily contradicted by the vast numbers of writers who go about painstaking research, sometimes lasting years, to ensure that their novel is accurate.
Perhaps, to soften Sante's blow, it is better to say that a writer not attuned to an idea cannot fill the gap with research. And there are writers I have read who have put out novels full of so much research that the idea, and the feeling, that they must have begun with has been obliterated.
Above Average required almost no research. All the factual elements marshalled for it came straight out of memory. As a result I made some mistakes (there's a mistranslation of a Ghalib ghazal in there somewhere), and ended up feeling a little unprofessional, while also realizing that the lack of external inputs somehow helped make this book a direct and heartfelt work. This is not to say that I feel this is how books should be written. Nor is to say that my next book will be written in this way. It's just that this conundrum - research for writing, or write what comes from within - makes itself known in a world where books are commodities, and being willful as a writer might mean leaving the customer unsatisfied.
Is writing fiction inherently a professional activity the way reading the news or being a flight attendant is a professional activity? Every job draws on the individuality of the individual, but writers often claim uniqueness of expression in a way that flight attendants probably do not. While I try to figure that out I should probably stop blogging and get back to reading the books I need to read for my next novel. |
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| The great Indian book tour part two |
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| 16th July 2007 |
- In Hyderabad a book reading does not have to feature a model or an actress to make it to page three.
- Despite their desperation for page three stories, photographers and city supplement editors in Hyderabad remain discerning. My face was absent from the two page three stories that appeared.
- The Andhra Jyothy covered the reading. The first news item about me in a language I can't read or understand.
- Taking advantage of the fact that I can't read or understand Telegu, the Andhra Jyothy writer quoted me as saying that I appreciate the fact that Hyderabadis respect their fellow human beings. Not that I don't think so.
- After more than ten years I spent a couple of nights in a boy's hostel.
- There was an attached bathroom with a complimentary towel in the room. This made the experience somewhat different from the decade old one I was trying to compare it with.
- Palatial houses in Hyderabad are more palatial than palatial houses in Delhi.
- Sridala Swami calls it Gult Gothic.
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| Being Raju Shrivastav |
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| 5th July 2007 |
I've always wanted to be a halwai. And not the owner who sits behind the counter snapping a dirty rag at flies (although that's cool too) but the guy with the big stomach and the dirty vest who sits at the big kadhai with a huge karchhi in hand, deep frying. He doesn't squiggle his own jalebis or strain out his own boondi or dunk his own samosas, he has a helper for that. He monitors brownness, he drains excess oil. He is the king of the hot-oil-splash, the most important link in a crunchy chain. But although these jobs proliferate no professional college teaches it.
Till I was six I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Then Sanjay Gandhi died.
When I was younger I wanted to be Prime Minister. But after I had read Yes Minister for the fourth time I got horribly depressed and realized that political office was not for me.
There was even the time when I daydreamed about inventing a wood substitute that would make me rich and save the trees of the world (though not necessarily in that order.)
None of these things have happened but what did happen was that Madhur, on his blog, compared me to Raju Shrivastav. Favourably. Finally, someone understands. |
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| Give me a meow |
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| 5th June 2007 |
Here's number one on the top ten sentences I did not expect anyone to say to me: Come on Amitabha, give me a meow.
Yesterday I found myself in the studios of Meow 104.8, India's first fm station dedicated to women. And also mainly staffed by women, I learned. While I waited my turn, I was treated to an enthusiastic discussion on whether men were better drivers or women. Answer: women. Later the host, Ginny, asked me on air if I thought men were better drivers or women. There are times when "depends on what you mean by better" is not a good answer.
I appeared on a one hour show around books and authors. "We had Tushar Raheja last week." This was supposed to be an inducement.
Near the end of the show we got a call from Sakshi. She sounded 15 to me and 18 to Ginny. So I am guessing she must be 18. Her brother's copy of Above Average had found it's way to her and she was reading it. She had read about half and the protagonist was just like her brother. And she wanted to know why he was like that. "Men are weird, aren't they Sakshi?" asked Ginny. "Yes, men are weird," came the reply. So I found myself, quite unexpectedly, having to defend men against the charge of weirdness. I was fumbling with that task when Sakshi adds "Men are from Mars." That was a little easier to refute. "Sakshi," I said. "There's no recorded evidence of life on Mars. They found some ice or something, but no life."
On the car radio on the way back home the discussion on the subject "women are better drivers than men" was in full flow.
"I fully agree with whatever you are saying. Women are much better drivers than men."
"That's great. Do you drive?"
"No."
Absolutely unrelated: In fulfillment of the blogdharma that I have severely neglected since I started blogging here's a link to a video of Amadou and Mariam playing live in Argentina. The song is Toubala Kono from Sou Ni Tile and the guitar solo near the end is quite something. |
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