aditya kumar's weblog

I remember Uma once wrote a post about the worst books ever written (worse still, published!) and Anurag Mathur’s “The Inscrutable Americans” fitted the bill for quite a few, including yours truly. Now, it would be almost ridiculous to compare the likes of Mathur to modern Indian literary giants like Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri but the fact is that Mathur’s story telling was, in the end, good for the financial health of his publisher. That he writes prose which is in no way exquisite and miles away from being called “good literature” is a different matter altogether.

Such is also the case with Chetan Bhagat, author of “Five Point Someone”, who has “One night at the Call Center” as his latest offering. I feel here is a new breed of writers emerging and they are quite content not being in the same class as contemporary English writers. Their prose is not poetic and surely you can keep the dictionary at bay. In fact, at times, their writing style is almost swaggering and often full of dark humor. They strive by making the reader flip pages by exploiting the plot, the storyline, rather than employing an effective use of the prose. (A good example would be Dan Brown, who, with his ordinary writing in the highly overrated “Da Vinci Code”, must have smiled all the way to the bank while we were left chasing the holy grill.. or was that the grail? You may not like what I say, but I thought that book was a pure waste of time.) Comparing Anurag Mathur’s (or for that matter, Bhagat’s) prose to Rushdie’s or Jhumpa Lahiri’s would be comparing a David Dhawan movie to Meera Nair’s. Almost a crime.

It’s an altogether different style of story-telling. For starters, books like these are often read in one go. People who have not read a book in ages complete it in a matter of hours. Read alright but read by whom? Teenagers, young adults, in fact just about everyone. From a literary sense, these is nothing to gain from books like these. Nightmare for readers who cherish the flawless prose of authors like Salman Rushdie, Rohin Mistry. In fact, Bhagat’s target audience is not that class of readers. But the most startling fact about these kind of books is that in a society where reading is a dying culture, they are like a shot in the arm. That is the only reason why I am not cynically critical about authors like Bhagat and Mathur. (Or am I?)

The rain kept on pouring on the bus, in all forms. There were brief periods when the breeze had some private moments with the bus, but overall, the rain intruded most of the time. I could see the windshield and have the driver’s view on some occasions. The wipers kept working overtime.

The view on the Driver’s rear view mirror often revealed the grinning face of our driver. The smile showcasing the bright white set of teeth in the darkness. The smile that also managed to hold a lit bidi that was an important accessory with this man who had already driven us close to 300 kilometers. The same smile that probably had a few hundred stories behind it. Stories that were an important aspect of his life (and probably someone else’s life too), for they fuelled the fire in him to drive 17 hours a day.

I chose to turn my face towards the window. Droplets of water decorated the brown glass pane on my right. The city cars zoomed past, leaving behind a tail of colorful lights, owing to which, the droplets of water, for a moment or two, acquired the effect of hundred mini-rainbows.

And when not mini-rainbows, they were the stars. Small, silvery, glittering and existing within my hand’s reach. I was so much in my own little world. Isn’t that what everyone wants? Isn’t that what you want?

But then the bus stopped, and the imagery acquired a different shape. A beggar child, in the bare minimum of clothes, both hands on the window of a car. His workplace, this muddy, traffic congested road. His plea, in his eyes. His desperations, too many to count. His thoughts, he could not afford.

His hands on the window’s glass were taken to be intrusions into another world. His gestures were met with hatred. On an open window, the glass made way up, securing the world of someone inside. Nothing, but a pure matter of convenience.

If I could make eye contact with the child, all I had to offer was another pair of cold eyes.

The difference between his world and mine? A Glass Pane.

Then I noticed, it was only the breeze now — the rain had gone and so were the droplets. My world looked so bleak without those stars.

My little world now ceased to exist.

PS: Thank you, Mr.Nair, for your suggestions on this.

I am not (yet) a fan of Vikram Seth, simply because, and forgive me for this, I have not read his work. But yes, over the years I have seen his books in almost all the bookshops that show some interest in the prose of Indian authors. One of them, “The Suitable Boy”, is the longest novel written by an Indian (The author took a decade to write it) and according the Wikipedia, its the 7th longest novel ever. But frankly, length of any book has never impressed me — infact, to me it is of the least significance.

For Indian writing, two events of prime significance happened earlier this month. Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown” and Vikram Seth’s “Two Lives” were published. Seth’s new work almost made a silent debut amidst the fanfare Rushdie received.

But now, it appears, with all the interviews that Vikram Seth has given, add to it, his sense of humor and timing, I have a feeling he would end up impressing more people than any Indian author has done so in a long, long time.

The author launched his book in the 5 major cities of India. Starting from Chennai and ending it in Delhi, covering Bangalore, Kolkata and Mumbai in between. He gave interviews and came up with interesting and funny quotes like “I’m a slow writer and I respect trees” (when asked why he spent six years writing his latest book) and, here is more, “I will pretend to read from the book for a while and you take your photos,” (when asked for a photo session) and the best quote of all, here:

“what is important for a writer is when a reader is gripped by a book and delays his dinner to read a few more pages.”

That is just so true.

I have always believed that reading is something that helps build a better society, it is much more than just a way to ward off boredom. I hope the efforts Vikram Seth undertook will make people get up, take notice and read. We need more authors coming out, talking to people and signing autographs.

We need more of this.

Postscript: If this post interests you, I suggest you to please check out the links above.

I dug up this from the rediff.com archives.

In a link that I will soon reveal, Amitava Kumar, in a column written in 1999, asserts that most Indian writers in English, are reporters to the west.

Barring Arundhati Roy, of course.

Now, I hope that you have read Arundhati Roy’s essay “The End of Imagination”.

An excerpt:

The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition?

It is not anything else that I wish you read but this. Please take some time out and read it if you still haven’t. See for yourself, what you missed for 7 years.

And here, Amitava Kumar praises Roy’s stance and is also “slightly” critical of her.

If you shall need more matter on this subject, and something less emotional than Roy, please read about this book here.

Okay, a couple of things here.

For good writing lovers, check Outlook Magazine’s 10 years: anniversary special.

It has columns by Pankaj Mishra, Tarun Tejpal (of tehelka.com), Sagarika Ghose , Pico iyer, Sham Lal, Khushwant Singh and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to name a few.

And trust me on this, at Rs 15, it’s a steal.

Secondly, for all those lucky souls who have not upgraded their “yahoo messenger” to the new, “yahoo messenger with voice”- please stay away from this new version. It has lots of bugs. To name a few:

1. Sign in, Sign off and then Sign in again- and zap, the application crashes. I have checked this on both WinXP and Windows 2000 machines.

2. Late message delivery. The messages, for some strange reason, are not delivered on time. It takes a while for the message to appear on the other side. It is not because of any firewalls, routers etc because till last month when I was using the old messenger, anything like this never came up.

Now, you might ask how do I know that the messages are sent late.

I talk with my colleagues on Instant messengers all the time, even though they are seated a couple of feet away from me.

I arrived here in the evening on a train that runs on meter gauge track. It takes almost 8 hours from Indore to reach here. The official time table indicates a little more than 6 hours, but I do not care since my train to Goa arrives past midnight. Whether this train pulls in at 5 PM or at 6:30 PM, I am hardly bothered since I have a lot of time to kill anyway.

I have travelled enough in this long, wide country to conclude that travelling by train in India is an important part of your syllabus if you think of India as a “full term course”. All the theory learned like “The diversity of the land”, “the different dialects in the speech” come to life when you travel in the train, second class. But meter gauge track is different. It’s like specialising in “small town India” and the villages. The usual trains pass by them with speeds of 110 km per hour as if flipping pages of the book and skipping small, not so important chapters. At the small railway platforms of these very same villages, the meter gauge track trains spend hours.

So we start our journey from Indore and pass on, the two of us, my friend $D and me, passing by stations like Mhow, where we have a stop of 45 minutes. A man sells Kachoris in a cardboard box. It is a long journey and food could be a problem so we eat what we get. By early afternoon we reach Kalakand. Everytime that I have passed through this station, I am reminded of the sweet. I am told the village name is Kalakand because it is famous for the sweet with the same name.

Lucky Ali sings “kitni haseen zindagi” in my ears.

The train stops at the slightest excuse it finds. We do not get annoyed, all this was expected. But we observe. We see villagers carrying huge loads of vegetables in the train. One corner of the coach smells of coriander. On the outside of the windows, hooks are attached, one by one. Some of these hooks carry small logs of wood while the rest carry big cans of milk.

We reach Khandwa at 6:15 PM. According to the timetable we should have been here an hour back.

$D’s train is a good 3 hours late so I have company before I catch the train that will take me to Goa at midnight. Our first stop is the railway canteen run by a bespectacled man who seems well educated and a nice person. Dressed in a simple, clean full sleeve shirt and a little stocky. We order tea and in addition, I order bread and omelette. After a journey like this, where there are no big stations and no food stalls, this is a treat. The man behind the counter continues to read his newspaper while his son, probably 10 years old, tries to engage him in conversations. His trials go in vain.

$D is bored. Unlike me, he does not carry a Walkman. Amidst of all the trains that come and go in front of us, he picks out Bangalore-Delhi Karnataka Express and goes in to roam inside the train while it stands on the platform. “The girls are beautiful inside”, he arrives at the conclusion after he comes back with a wide grin. Evidently, the Bangalore-Delhi culture is in full form inside the coaches. That is the only glimpse we see of the metro culture in one of the busiest rail junctions of Central India. I see $D enjoyed his short lived adventure.

The much sought after train to Bhagalpur arrives. $D finally leaves at around 9 PM. This main part of his journey shall take a good 36 hours more. He has a waiting list ticket. That means no guarantee of a seat. I do not have a confirmed seat for the journey either but Deepavali is around the corner and we are going to our homes to celebrate. Nothing else matters to us. Homecoming could not get better than this. That is the biggest joy.

I stay there, on the platform, sitting on a bench while listening to Six Pence None the Richer’s “Kiss me”. I just heard, my train is on time, a quarter past midnight. This train coming from Delhi and going to Ernakulam in Kerala, will go through the Konkan route and drop me home, Madgaon, in the next 24 hours.

The year was 1999. In the next two years that I went home from Indore via Khandwa, things did not change much. The meter gauge train to Khandwa continued to stop at the slightest excuse and continued carrying logs of woods stuck outside the window. The man behind the counter at Khandwa Station’s canteen continued to indulge himself with late evening newspaper reading while I always ordered my favorite Bread and omelette with tea. I looked at him and wondered if he ever recognised me. Don’t know why, but I hoped for that. But I do not think he ever did. And whenever he noticed me for those 3-5 seconds, each time, it appeared as a mere interruption in his evening newspaper reading project.

$D told me, nothing much has changed there, even now.

Things don’t change much in small town India.

From the Truman Archives.

This post, was originally written on Sunday, the 23rd of January 2005. It has nothing much to offer but an account of my almost ninety minutes stay at a cafe, during which I almost completed a really wonderful book, while keeping a keen eye on the surroundings. Some of the readers might have gone through it before since I had circulated this on email.

Sunday was good to spend. I was about 100 pages away to end Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide” and thought it would be nothing better to read the ending pages over a coffee. So I went to MG Road and there Barista has an open air cafe.

I have developed this habit of stopping by at every bookstore that I see. Be it a street vendor or a big bookshop I visit it, if it’s on my way and if time permits. If I have a book in my hand, the bookstore owner always(well, almost) requests me to let him have a look at it. While he looks at it, his face expression changes to give the impression that he is an expert in literature, a scholar who spends more time reading than anything else. While he flips the pages of the book, it seems he is understanding every word that flew by, every page flipped achieved something for him that previously he could not. And maybe it really did. Trying to keep himself updated about the business he is in. Trying to be with the times I guess. Nothing wrong in that. In fact, Its amusing that street vendors who, it seems, don’t even know English, talk to me, sometimes in broken words, ask about how the book is. They listen with keen interest and try to memorise the name of the author (If it is an author they are not aware of) and sometimes they come up to me, pointing to the book I hold. It’s a brilliant book, I am told. Has it been read by you, I ask, wondering about the authenticity of his last statement. The answer is (surprisingly) affirmative, to some extent. Read in parts only, so as to suggest the reader something. Typical book store owners mentality. And a good one at that by the way.

There are less better things in life than reading a book in the warm afternoon winter sunshine with the breeze blowing with your hand holding a cuppa latte. On the table next to mine, a girl with 4 guys, cribbing about life while smoking a cigarette. I do not know, but there was something strange about it.

A couple on the right, who seemed to be meeting each other for the first time. “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky”, quoted the guy, from the song by R.Kelly, loud enough to be heard across the table. Pretty strong words on your first day out, I guess. Let the lady judge you lad.

Then another girl holding a red rose, waiting for someone. I could see that in the brief moment when I took the liberty of looking in her eyes, which were quite oblivious to surroundings, expecting that known face any moment from the evercoming and never ending tide of people on the sidewalk. Biting her lips, cursing inside maybe, that men are always late.

Enough for a day I thought. And the book was coming to an end anyway. As the writer rightly puts,

“Words. What are they afterall. Like a wind blowing ripples on the water surface. The real river flows beneath. Unheard of, Unseen. With a story never told.”