Kafka and Orwell on China: My first ebook of essays available online now

Last month, Amazon.com announced that for the first time in history, the sales of ebooks have surpassed the sales of printed copies of books at the world's largest online retail store. I knew this was going to happen but it would happen so soon, the scales would tip in favour of ebooks so soon, that was a surprise. And what a pleasant surprise it was. Because, like in most other areas, the web has changed the game and has pushed the gatekeepers to the margins. This does not mean the end of mainstream publishers and agents. The structure of market-oriented publisher-agent complex (like the military-industrial complex) would not die anytime soon. As long as there is media, there will be celebrity makers and spin doctors. Editors are always important in this process but they are mostly faceless.

In this new scenario, the opportunity for writers like me (in terms of expressing myself, and not dreaming of minting millions) is immense: I can publish any book at any time, and share it with those who would be interested in reading it. I can publish long essays as ebooks and make them available to readers (Who the hell wants to read you? Good question. Answer is, I don't care. When Friedrich Nietzsche self-published Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he published only 40 copies and had difficulty selling them). I don't have to wait for the approval of the Grantas and New Yorkers of the world. Of course, they will keep publishing prestigious writers, but in an age when education is democratic and everyone is a writer and filmmaker, the game isn't the same anymore. As of commercial writers, many are already going down the ebooks route and doing very well.

Beyond the issue of accessibility is the other factor of class. I don't have the Oxbridge or Ivy League background nor any support from a network of movers and shakers of the publishing world. So, I am on my own. The kind of work I am doing and I want to do will not appeal to most publishers (unless they are enlightened enough). I don't see myself as a commercial writer. I write because I see injustice in the world and I see people being pushed in the path of disaster. I write because I can't sleep if I don't. Money has nothing to do with it (That's why I have a day job).

While my novel is still looking for a home (thanks to my hardworking agent), I thought I would collect my long pieces and essays as ebooks and make them available online (no one publishes long pieces of journalism in Asia, right?). I am happy to share with you that the first of my ebooks is available online now. It's titled
Kafka and Orwell on China: Essays on India and China. Since this was my first try, there might be some formatting issues but so far my readers have not complained. The ebook sells for US$1.99 (If you really want to buy it, try this code AN62L to avail of a 30 per cent discount until June 10). If you want to read it for free, write to me. I plan to put out more ebooks at Smashwords in the coming months.

Here is the description of my ebook:

This book contains four well-researched original essays that deal with India and China. In the opening essay, "The unmaking of the East—India and China in the age of globalisation", journalist Zafar Anjum examines the high-octane economic growth of India and China in the light of the wisdom of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. "The West would have us believe that post-globalisation, India and China are on a collision course in their race to develop themselves," writes Zafar. "Who should it bet on—that is the West’s dilemma. But the question for the East is this: whose race is it to lose?" In this essay, Zafar Anjum argues that the debate itself is wrongly framed and with some help from Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose 150th birth anniversary falls this year, argues that the race is deeper than it appears.

The second essay is about George Orwell’s reflections on the attitudes and interactions between the West and China over the centuries.

In the third essay, Zafar discusses Czech fabulist Franz Kafka who never set his foot in China, yet he wrote a masterpiece, The Great Wall of China. John Updike counts this story belonging at the summit of Kafka’s oeuvre. Zafar Anjum tries to examine what motivated the European genius and one of the most influential of 20th century writers to write a short story set in an unseen land.

In the fourth essay, Zafar wonders why India and China, two of the world’s oldest civilizations, are so near, yet so far from each other. Can Bollywood and other cinemas of India, ambassadors of India’s culture and emblems of our soft power, take India to the Chinese?

Richard Crasta

An interesting writer to explore at Smashwords is Richard Crasta (remember his famous novel, The Revised Kamasutra?). Please do look up both "Massage No Boom Boom" and "I Will Not Go The F**k to Sleep" on Smashwords. They seem to be absolutely fun, daring, original, and worth the money.

Crasta has been at Smashwords for a while now. He has some good advise to share with writers who want to try this route. "With both Smashwords and Amazon, you have to do your own publicity," he says. "Amazon is bigger and better organized, but Smashwords is much faster (uploads)."

Talking about your book is important too. "It is not enough if you just upload a book, it just sits there," he says. "A lot depends on such things as tags, reviews, keywords, and so on, and also on right book descriptions and categories, and also doing a lot of networking on the Net."

If you are a writer and you are planning such a move, let me know what you think. Any advice? If you are just a reader, tell me if you are going to read the sample chapters from ebooks or even buy them. Will be grateful. Thanks.

Crasta Sutra

[From Kitaab.org]

Among the bunch of famous Indian novelists and writers, Richard Crasta’s name might not be as widely recognized as that of a Seth or a Rushdie, but few would come close to him in being funny, witty, satirical and daring–all at the same time. If you don’t believe me, I can get American legendary novelist Kurt Vonnegut to vouch for him who found his first novel, The Revised Kama Sutra, “very funny”. After Khushwant Singh (who is 90 plus old but still active as a below the belt heavy hitter), if any Indian writer has pushed the boundaries of satirical writing, with dollops of sexual humour (and satirical writing on a lot of other serious stuff) in his own distinctive style, it’s Richard. But, in fairness, his writing is more than that, and multifaceted, covering areas as wide as, in his own words, “autobiography, humor, satire, political critique, sexual critique, and literary criticism.”

In the early 1990s, when a new breed of Indian writers in English were taking birth (most of them midwifed by Penguin Books, India, under the watch of David Davidar), bursting forth with all kinds of coming of age or cultural or exoticised tales from Indian life, Richard Crasta chose to take a daring look at Indian sexuality. One of the funniest and most talked about novels to come out of India, he subtitled The Revised Kama Sutra, as a “Novel of Colonialism and Desire with Arbitrary Footnotes and a Whimsical Glossary”. It was one of the most talked about books when it came out, and was loved as much, if not more, as Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. By the way, both the novelists are from Indian Civil Services, the only difference is that Crasta is now an ex (civil servant).

Richard’s writing is uniquely hilarious, and believe me you, this is not a hyperbole. But in terms of recognition, the man was just a blip in India’s literary firmament. For years, he has been out of the Indian mainstream media’s radar. What went wrong? Plenty, we are told. He was embroiled in controversies. Mainstream publishers shunned him. He became a writer without a platform.

But Crasta did not feel crestfallen. He was in the USA, doing his own stuff–writing more books and publishing them from a publishing house that he owns. And ever since, he has kept at it. After writing 6 full-bloodied books, his latest book is The Killing of an Author, of which veteran journalist Kuldeep Nayar says that this is a must read.

In this exclusive freewheeling interview with Kitaab’s editor Zafar Anjum, Crasta not only talks about his new book but also looks back at his past, his beginning as a writer, his tribulations and his future plans. For the readers in South East Asia, the good news is that one of his in-the-works novels is based in Thailand and Indonesia, and is, in his words, “almost as funny and sexually daring as The Revised Kama Sutra.”

True to his name, Richard in this interview is bitingly honest, lucid but insightful, funny and provocative. Here is the transcript of the interview. Have fun!

When your first novel The Revised Kamasutra appeared in India , it made quite a splash. Is it fair to say that the books that followed your debut novel did not get that much attention in the country of your birth? Was there any particular reason for this kind of reception?

I feel gratified that the huge response to my novel came from common readers and middle-class reviewers. It was not engineered from the top, or from London or New York; Indians found themselves loving the book, though they were shocked and sometimes embarrassed by the title or the contents, and its reputation spread by word of mouth. With many later writers, the hype started with a megabucks Western advance. Hype has a way of becoming self-fulfilling, and one can never be sure how those books would have performed had the huge advances and media coverage not preceded the reading of the books themselves.

To be fair, I spent eight years on The Revised Kama Sutra and an average of 18 months for the subsequent books, so the former is naturally richer, denser, and more multi-faceted. Having noted this, there was still, for other reasons, a difference between the reception for the first book and subsequent books: Because The Revised Kama Sutra is fiction, and some people—including my Penguin India editor—thought the book would become a worldwide sensation, and make plenty of money, they could wink at its anti-Establishment tone, which did not directly target either my publisher or his Indian friends. Also, the humor was a cloak, which allowed you to treat the book as a joke. This changed with the second and third books, Beauty Queens and Impressing the Whites; the latter is a no-holds barred satire on the culture of sycophancy and subservience and of giving white people and Western honors far greater legitimacy and respect than equivalent Indian ones. Once my second and third books hit home, my fourth, fifth, and sixth books, especially What We All Need and The Killing of an Author, simply didn’t have a chance.

Read the complete interview here