Sulk factory

Ramachandra Guha writes on V S Naipaul in the Hindustan Times:

In the middle of last year I was asked to review Naipaul’s new book, A Writer’s People. I found it a disappointing and at times even obnoxious book. He could not, it seems, mention another writer without putting him down (thus Philip Larkin was dismissed as a “minor poet”, and Derek Walcott accused of insinuating himself into the good books of the Americans). The subliminal and at times open message of this silly little book was: Once there was Mahatma Gandhi, who transcended the boundaries of caste, religion, and nation to become a Universal Being. After him came VS Naipaul, who did likewise. In between lay a barren desert of under-achievement.

Referring to his early novels and the brilliant non-fiction books of his middle period, Guha says that VS Naipaul did enough to count as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But, he says, his more recent works are another matter altogether: "They are unmemorable; lacking in warmth and empathy, and in insight and understanding as well. The once great writer has become a pompous bore."

What explains it?

How to explain this discrepancy between the early/middle Naipaul and the late Naipaul? A publisher friend attributes it all to the Nobel. This greatly esteemed and cherished prize, he tells me, is the kiss of death for the creative writer. There has been a perceptible decline in the quality of the novels published by JM Coetzee after he won the Nobel Prize. Even Naipaul’s great contemporary and rival, Derek Walcott, has not published much good poetry after being dignified by the award. Naipaul’s later trajectory is of a piece with this trend, with the caveat that in his case it has been a descent not so much into banality as into vanity.

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Three cheers for Bardem and the Coens

In Sunday's Oscars, Javier Bardem's win was a certainty. I had seen the film, No Country for Old men, only last Friday and everything was fresh in my mind: I could not stop thinking about the character played by Javier Bardem in that twisted western. I kept wondering about the scenes that I had seen with near apnea, how the Coens had worked out every minor detail (the shot where the crumpled piece of a polybag unwinds itself, and nothing else moves in the mis en scene) in the film, how the sheriff was being outfoxed by this mysterious and ghostly criminal in a changing world. I was enthralled by the nihilistic vision of the directors. I will never forget the humourless dignified baddie (Bardem) in this film, who is even better than the Bill in Kill Bill.
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Update: The New Yorker's David Denby describes the work as "lethal cool." Yes, that's the right expression I guess. Read the first two paras of his article on the Coen brothers and their works, and he says, in precise words, the words and images that I wanted to capture as my own reaction to No Country for Old Men.

The Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” casts an ominous and mournful spell from the first shot. Over scenes of a desolate West Texas landscape, an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), ruminating on the new viciousness of crime, says that he’s not afraid of dying. But, he adds, “I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.” Without transition, we see Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an odd-looking man in a modified Prince Valiant haircut, murder first a deputy sheriff, then a stranger whose car he needs. (He strangles the deputy and shoots the stranger with some sort of gun attached to what looks like an oxygen tank.) The movie jumps again, to Llewelyn, an early-morning hunter (Josh Brolin) who’s out in the desert tracking antelope. In the distance, he sees five pickup trucks arrayed in a rough circle and some dead bodies lying on the ground. He moves in slowly, rifle held low. His attentiveness is so acute that it sharpens our senses, too.

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Islam and terrorism

A recent gathering of Indian Muslims declared terrorism un-Islamic. They should have done it a long time ago, but as the saying goes, der aayad durust aayad (it is never too late):

A large gathering of Muslim scholars representing different schools of thoughts and Muslims organizations unanimously declared that terrorism has no place in Islam and all terror activities are un-Islamic.

The anti-terrorism conference organized by Darul Uloom Deoband and attended by about 10,000 scholars from all over India issued a declaration at the end of the conference, here today. "Killing of innocents is not compatible with Islam. It is anti-Islamic," read the declaration.

Declaration stated that "Islam is a religion of mercy for all humanity. Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism. It has regarded oppression, mischief, rioting and murder among severest sins and crimes."

Various fatwas have been issued in the past against terrorism but this is the first time that such a large gathering of scholars have came out strongly against terrorism. This is also a first attempt to define terrorism in light of Islam.

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Another piece of interesting news:

Here's something for Maharashtra Navanirman Sena's Raj Thackeray as well as his uncle and inspiration, the founder of Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray, to chew on: If class X students from across the country were to take a common exam, who would perform the best?

Believe it or not, students from Bihar's madrassa board would stand high, second only to students of the ICSE board in Delhi.

Comparing the performance of educational boards across India, the HRD ministry has just released a report on student performance in various states in class X.

The results have the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination in Delhi topping with the highest pass percentage of 94.3%, followed by Bihar State Madrassa Board with a success rate of 91.4%. The Central Board of Secondary Education, Delhi, stands third with a pass percentage of 86.4%.

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Life of a blog post

Have you ever wondered what happens to your blog post once you have posted it online?

Came across this interesting infographic in Wired magazine, that will show you what happens to your blog post after you have clicked "publish post" on your blog:

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers...

Fun stuff. Check it out.

Listening To Grasshoppers

In my most recent post, I was talking about Arundhati Roy and how she was discovered by lit agent David Godwin. Today I want to talk about her in the light of one of her essays on Genocide, a hair raising piece on what's happening in India in the name of progress and unity (two of the key words used by her in the essay), especially with reference to India's poor (which includes the adivasis and Muslims).

Whenever I think of her, I think of former President Kalam's book title: An Ignited Mind. Arundhati fits that description to a tee.

In the essay, Listening To Grasshoppers , she proposes that
Genocide, Denial And Celebration go hand in hand, that it's an old human habit, genocide, that it's a search for lebensraum, project of Union and Progress:

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse.

She even criticises the Amitabh Bachchan video, a campaign to inspire people to leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over pessimism. The superstar says in the video: "There are two Indias in this country."

One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.

To her, this is an example of a "counterfeit universe".

Then, she dissects it:

It tells us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'. They're already ghosts.

"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost natural."

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You may agree or disagree with her views but this essay is a must read if you haven't already.

This agent is more cool than James Bond

His motto is: Rob the publisher and enrich the writer.

Hmm...so many writers love him. And for the aspiring writers, he is the god of many big things.

He is the one who got the spunky Arundhati Roy's first book out and created a publishing sensation.

He is David Godwin, the legendary lit agent, the literay Robin Hood, as this Mint article describes him.

But apparently, he started small. When he got Roy in his stable of writers, he says he just had a table and chair in his office and nothing else. He took the next flight out to India to meet her and sign her up (perhaps, worried, had she seen him in his lacklustre office, she might have changed her mind):

After he was fired by Aitken in 1995, Godwin decided to set up an eponymous agency with his wife, Heather, looking after the business side. A friend who was a shipping agent offered him a desk and a phone at his office. “I was in my early 40s. I had no money. No salary. I had to live off what I had sold,” recalls Godwin.

Then everything changed. Godwin’s friend Patrick French (who would go on to write Liberty or Death) dropped by. “Patrick told me that Pankaj Mishra (then working for HarperCollins) had told him about a manuscript he had come across which was ‘the biggest thing since Midnight’s Children’,” says Godwin. It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy.

The manuscript arrived the same day. Later that night, half-way through The God of Small Things, Godwin made a call across the world. He loved the book, he told Roy. He was taking the first flight out to meet her.

A bemused Roy told Godwin to calm down, finish the manuscript and then call her back, if he was still interested.

Two days later, Godwin was flying out to a country he had never before visited—an event that has become so much a part of the folklore surrounding The God of Small Things that it is sometimes referred to simply as the “dash”.

But Godwin is less romantic about that dash and says with a sense of pragmatism: “I only had a desk in London. I thought it would be better for me to see her in India.”

There are two new things here, at least for me. I had read that Pankaj Mishra himself had called up Godwin. Turns out no, not him, it was through Patrick French that Godwin came to know of Roy's manuscript. Also, what is intriguing is that if the book was so good, and it was as time would prove, why didn't Pankaj buy it for Harper Collins for whom he was working at that time (am I right?).

"It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy." Well, I had heard of her. In fact, I had read one of her pieces, in the then Vir Shanghvi edited mag, SUNDAY. She had written protesting against Shekhar Kapur making a film on the life of India's bandit queen. The lady was always a fighter, and courted controversy right from the beginnning. I hope I am not getting the timeline wrong here.

Yeh hai Mumbai meri jaan

When I see pictures like this coming from India, I feel angry at the atavistic nature of our politics in my motherland. So much progress, yet regressive ideas like provincialism (and casteism and communalism...) are still potent enough to move some elements of the society to hooliganism. Anand Giridharadas reports:

It was just another cosmopolitan Sunday in this city by the sea.

Tie-clad men and women in floral hats, dressed like English gentry at Ascot, streamed into the race course in Mumbai for the Indian Derby. They air-kissed. They sipped Champagne. They ogled visiting Brazilian samba dancers. Then they settled into their seats to watch a colt named Hotstepper gallop to victory and a $200,000 prize.

But as many of them returned to the suburbs on the afternoon of Feb. 3, they bumped into a traffic jam whose origins could not have been more remote from the glamorous, globalized Mumbai they inhabit. The roads had clogged because squads of local political cadres were beating migrants from northern India in the latest explosion of nativist violence in this city, inspired on this occasion by a rightist politician named Raj Thackeray.

Mumbai is a city of open arms. More than any other South Asian city, it has lured Muslims, Jews, Christians, Parsees and Hindus, aspiring taxi drivers and wannabe actresses, and melted them into an industrious whole. In a certain elite realm, freedom reigns; women dance on tables in nightclubs, and gays and lesbians flock once a month to a rather uncloseted party called Gay Bombay.

But Mumbai is also, today, teetering between its tradition of liberality and new tendencies toward intolerance.

In recent years, activists have driven into exile famous artists who offend them, closed down museum exhibitions and agitated to have movies banned. A minority of upper-caste Hindus has lobbied to cordon off whole sections of Mumbai as vegetarian zones, effectively excluding Muslims. And now politicians have revived a perennial cause: ridding Mumbai of migrants.

"There is increasing evidence that the pluralist foundations of this country, which are guaranteed by the Constitution, are being subverted by narrow-minded, sectarian zealots," Jug Suraiya, one of the most widely read columnists in India, wrote last week.

India’s first international movie stars?

Looks like Anupama Chopra's (who recently did the biography of Shah Rukh Khan) next book will be on Aishwarya Rai.

Just as Jodhaa Akbar is poised to release this Friday, she has penned a cross-over piece on Aish and her co-star, Hrithik Roshan, in the NYT. She describes the two stars in a special way: "Both actors, to steal the phrase Pauline Kael invented to describe Michelle Pfeiffer, are “paradisically beautiful,” and are consummate superstars. With their ethnically indeterminate looks and impeccable English, Ms. Bachchan and Mr. Roshan could be India’s first international movie stars."

Here's the intro which is as dramatic as it gets:

LAST October Aishwarya Bachchan grappled with a tough choice. The Bollywood star could either stay in Los Angeles to pursue a lead role in Will Smith’s new film, “Seven Pounds,” or she could return home to Mumbai to celebrate Karva Chauth, a daylong ceremonial fast that some married Hindu women observe as a prayer for their husband’s health and long life. (The observance is a new one for Ms. Bachchan; in April she married Abhishek Bachchan, an actor and the son of the Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan, a union that prompted Time magazine to describe the three as “Bollywood’s Father, Son and Holy Babe.”)

Ultimately Ms. Bachchan chose to return to Mumbai and starve with a smile. National television channels covered her first Karva Chauth as headline news. Two months later she shrugged off her loss in an interview. “You do what you have to do,” she said. “Feeling torn and thereby unhappy, confused or guilty is not something I want to feel. So you make your choices and go with it. You get some and some you don’t.”

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Eastern promises

The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (Book)
By Kishore Mahbubani

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony (Essay)
by Parag Khanna in the NYT

Is India a superpower or will it become one, along with China, as America's status wanes in the coming time?

While some have no doubts about it, others are not very sure.

Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's and one of Asia's best-known diplomats (dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore), argues in his new book, “The New Asian Hemisphere” that China and India (with Japan) will emerge (are already emerging) as the new superpowers and America needs to cede power to these Asian giants through sensible steps such as: "Chinese and Indian membership of the G8; an end to American and European hogging of the top jobs at the IMF and the World Bank; reform of the UN Security Council to give permanent, veto-holding status to more Asian countries."

The problem, however, is that, argues Mahbubani, the West (America and western Europe, plus Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and, more controversially, Japan)—has become so used to dominating and controlling the world to serve its own interests that it has ceased to recognise even that it does so. “If you deny you are in power, you cannot cede power,” he argues.

The Economist, in its review of the book, says that "Mr Mahbubani's Asian triumphalism is as futile and unconvincing as the Western triumphalism he deplores." It finds a lot of issues with Mahbubani's arguments. Here's more.

Now the other view.

Just a few days ago, I had read this seminal essay by Parag Khanna in the NYT in which he argues that India won't be a superpower in the new world order (Waving Goodbye to Hegemony):

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

I am sure the arguments are not over yet, and in time, the speculations will be out of the way if India joins an expanded G8 or the UN's security council as a veto-power-wielding permanent member.

Making an advance

I recently read this article in the Outlook magazine that enthusiastically talks about The Big Fat Indian Advance (Words worth millions).

Sheela Reddy mentions all the hefty advances Indian publishers are doling out to writers like Nandan Nilekani, Dev Anand and Amitav Ghosh these days:

Something funny is going on in the famously tight-fisted circle of Indian publishers. For the past few months, they have been punting dizzily on manuscripts by untried Indian authors, coughing up millions of rupees in advance royalties. The buzz about the boom in Indian advances has spread so fast that publishers and literary agents heading West with Indian manuscripts are swerving right back home, demanding five and six-figure dollar advances that rival those in the UK or Europe.

Here's a list of authors and their chunky advances (Thanks Saja).

Palash Mehrotra - The Butterfly Generation - $20,000 (Rs 8 lakh)
Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger - $35,000 (Rs 14 lakh)
Tarun Tejpal - The Story Of My Assassins - Rs 22 lakh
Dev Anand - Romancing With Life - Rs 15 lakh
Nandan Nilekani - Imagining India - $35,000 (Rs 14 lakh)
Amitav Ghosh - Sea Of Poppies Trilogy - $110,000 (Rs 44 lakh)
Tony D’Souza - The Konkans - Four to Five thousand pounds (Rs 3-4 lakh)
Shrabani Basu - Victoria & Abdul - $16,000 (Rs 6.3 lakh)

Interestingly, as SAJA has noted, Tarun Tejpal's Indian advance was larger than what he reportedly was offered by an Italian publisher. And for literary fiction, $20,000 to $30,000 for a first time author, even in the U.S., is nothing to sneeze at.

Apparently, the increased advances are generating great buzz. For example, a bidding war broke out over rights to Aravind Adiga's (photo, above) White Tiger. Harper Collins finally won. I am not surprised. Arvinda is a high profile guy: he was (?) a book reviewer for the Time magazine. And a good writer.

The episode on the competition for rights to Amitav Ghosh's trilogy is also very interesting: "Ghosh's agent, Barney Karpfinger, asked the six major rival houses here to not only read the manuscript of the first in the trilogy, Sea of Poppies, but demanded a presentation from each of them: on editing, marketing and positioning on their lists. After that, the bids. It was perhaps the most fiercely fought bidding war on Indian soil for an Indian book, soaring to new and unprecedented heights. It closed—or rather, was brought artificially to a close—somewhere in the region of 1,10,000 dollars (Rs 44 lakh). For the first time, the winning bid was slightly lower than the losing one. After a point, as the winning publisher, Ravi Singh of Penguin, puts it, "It's not only about money, but what you bring to the table in terms of editing and marketing."

Reasons cited for this leap in advances are the changing market conditions brought on by a middle class readership of some 300 million people, along with higher prices for some books. Though I am not sure about this middle class surge thing (as a research paper by two MIT economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, cited in The Economist, has shown how even a shopkeeper with a few bars of soap and some other basic stuff on the racks qualifies to be a part of this so called Indian middle class), I think it was time the advances caught up with India's working class's salary rises and inflation. Ten years ago, people who were earning Rs 10,000 are now earning 5 to ten times more in the metros. This change needed to be reflected in the book industry. Moreover, as a young aspiring India gets better educated (a large chunk of the Indian population is under 25 and getting literate), demand for books will grow (with growing disposable income). That's why foreign firms have set up businesses in India. Good for Indian writers.

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Read on rising advances for homegrown talent in "The Dollar-Rupee Conversion:"

In theory, the growth of bookchains and at least seven major publishers in the trade should mean fierce auctions for new books by authors based here. But, in practice, it's mostly diaspora writers who are rushing in to fill the gap. For instance, Singapore-based writer Preeta Samarasan's novel, Evening is the Whole Day, got publishers here into a bidding war. HarperCollins finally bagged the manuscript at around Rs 3 lakh.

Race in the centre

Hanif Kureishi, discussing the social influences on The Buddha of Suburbia , talks about the influence his novel exerted on the literary scene:

Cyril Connolly once said that if a book you've written is still in print 10 years after it was published, it's an achievement, so at least I've managed that. But I guess also that when The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette and Midnight's Children appeared, they opened the door for multiculturalism. Writers who in former times were thought to be marginal began to enter the mainstream. Whereas before you only heard English names, you began to hear Rushdie, Kureishi, Mo, Ishiguro - and it became clear that race and its ramifications were to be the central issue of our time.

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Twilight of the books?

I have often wondered about this: most of my friends, who are not into writing or journalism, hardly read books. If they ever would, it would be Who Moved My Cheese or Blink kind of books, which gives them instant gyan and practical advice about life or careers. Women who used to read books or magazines have had their attention taken up by the soaps. Men have their gadgets, DVDs, video games or the gym, then they would head for the bar to talk about soccer or cricket.

In India, because there is a large, educated young population, even if only a few people are reading, it looks like a big market. There is a lot of excitement about this market, aided by the constant rise of new writers (mini-celebs) but most others feel the frustration. A friend of mine recently wrote to me:

"The more I interact with editors etc here and see the kind of new authors getting published, it seems to me that publishing fiction is a totally commercial venture. A 'product' is packaged for marketing, depending on what the publisher thinks will sell. A couple of professional editors candidly told me that many of these new writers submit manuscripts with major anomalies in plot, characters etc, and dont care about changing names of the hero halfway through the story even. I also get the feeling that the Indian scouts want ad jingles and blurbs, the catchier the better. They dont seem to have the patience to carefully read two pages of real writing.
Dwindling attention spans, I'm afraid."

I think this dwindling attention span thing is true, at least in the case of most readers/should-be readers today. I am sure you know about the theory of fractured attention. Google it if you don't.

Apparently, something nasty (am being lazy here) is happening in America in this regard. Let me quote this piece of fact from The New Yorker: "Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult's skill in reading prose slipped one point on a 500-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient -- capable of such tasks as "comparing viewpoints in two editorials" -- declined from 15% to 13."

Not just that, here is one more terrible piece of stats: Only 40%of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. But in reality, it could be even less: say 27%, argues Mike Elgan. But there is something far more worrying.

In Will cell phones save books? Mike Elgan says: "To me, even more alarming than the loss of reading skill -- and probably related to it -- is that many young people have lost interest in books."

Moot point:

I don't have the data to back this up, but I'm convinced that young people today are reading more than any other generation in history. By that I mean they're passing their eyes over and "processing" more words. But the words are coming in the form of IMs, text messages, blogs, social networking messages and other nonbook material. They gravitate to this not because it's trash, but because it's participatory. They're reading as part of a dialog that involves writing.

"Literacy" isn't about passively reading, it's about reading and writing. If we want to increase the reading of books, we'll need to figure out how to increase the writing of books, especially novels.

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How? What do you think?

Titlepage

I had suggested Deepika and Chris Mooney Singh to host a book show on the internet: either as a podcast or a webcast. But now the idea has taken an American birth (and I have nothing to do with it). It is well worth doing it here though:

Daniel Menaker, who left his post as executive editor in chief of the Random House Publishing Group in June, is moving online in March to be the host of a new Web-based book show.

Daniel Menaker is to be the host of “Titlepage,” an online show.
The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

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The Adventures of Amir Hamza

Reviewing THE ADVENTURES OF AMIR HAMZA: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (Translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, see the blog here), William Dalrymple talks about the tradition of dastaangoi (storytelling). Most of the stories in this tradition, the remnants of which I experienced as a child, came from the stories of Amir Hamza or the Arabian Nights. All these stories fascinated me as my grandmother, my aunts or even clever-tongued servants in the house narrated these stories of adventure in the hurricane-lamp-lit semi-darkness of hot nights in my village. Perhaps that's why I can never feel the same excitement for a Harry Potter or the adventurers of the Middle Earth:

The “Hamzanama” was once the most popular oral epic of the Indo-Islamic world. “The Adventures of Amir Hamza” is the “Iliad” and Odyssey” of medieval Persia, a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga. Born as early as the ninth century, it grew through oral transmission to include material gathered from the wider culture-compost of the pre-Islamic Middle East. So popular was the story that it soon spread across the Muslim world, absorbing folk tales as it went; before long it was translated into Arabic, Turkish, Georgian, Malay and even Indonesian languages.

It took particular hold in India, where it absorbed endless myths and legends and was regularly performed in public spaces in the great Mughal cities. At fairs and at festivals, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, the “street of the storytellers” in Peshawar, the professional storyteller, or dastango, would perform nightlong recitations from memory; some of these could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. The Mughal elite also had a great tradition of commissioning private recitations. The greatest Urdu love poet, Ghalib, was celebrated for his dastan parties, at which the Hamza epic would be expertly told.

“The Adventures of Amir Hamza” collected a great miscellany of fireside yarns and shaggy-dog stories that over time had gathered around the travels of its protagonist, the historical uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Any factual backbone the story might once have had was through the centuries overtaken by innumerable subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, jinns, simurgh, sorcerers, princesses and, if not flying carpets, then at least flying urns, the preferred mode of travel for the tale’s magicians.

Across the Persian-speaking world, from Tabriz to Hyderabad, people gathered around the dastango as he told story after story of the chivalrous Hamza and the beautiful Chinese-Persian princess he longs for, of the wise and prophetic vizier Buzurjmehr and of the just emperor Naushervan. Then there were Hamza’s enemies: the ungrateful villain Bakhtak, whose life Hamza spares, only for Bakhtak to work unceasingly for the hero’s demise; and the cruel necromancer, giant and archfiend Zumurrud Shah. In its fullest form, the tale grew to contain an astounding number of stories, which would take several weeks of all-night storytelling to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was finally published in 1917, filled no fewer than 46 volumes, averaging a thousand pages each.

Dmitri's dilemma

My friend Simar sent me this article from Slate. It's an interesting dilemma, I'd say:

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

It's a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father's genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?

The politics of Facebook

I am on Facebook and so are you (if yes, have you found me there yet?). But have you wondered what kind of politics the people behind Facebook pursue?

I chanced upon this piece by Tom Hodgkinson in The Guardian, With Friends Like These. A thought-provoking piece that gives you the big picture of a social networking site like Facebook, which already has 59 million users, with 2 million new ones joining each week.

The article basically investigates the thoughts and philosophy of Peter Thiel, one of the early investors in Facebook, a co-founder of PayPal, that created a borderless economy. Peter is also one of the backers of Room 9 Entertainment, the film company behind the movie, Thank You for Smoking. Peter, together with Larry Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University, has now supported Big Think, a new Web 2.0-style site that bills itself as a conduit between global thought leaders and the public for sharing ideas on topics ranging from alternative energy to subprime mortgages, launched in beta on Monday. If you read the piece on Facebook, you'd know why Big Think has been spawned.

Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. The article also claims that one of Greylock's senior partners is Howard Cox, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. But what is In-Q-Tel?

Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

Big secret, huh?

Anyway, here's the intro to the piece:

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Though one needs to be cautious about Tom's arguments (is he reading too much in a social networking site?), there are ample things in there to stir our thoughts. If you read the entire piece, the next time you would want to throw sheep on someone, you'd think again. I bet.

Scenes from a Lit Fest

Crossings, Singapore's Writers Festival 2007, celebrated literature in its myriad forms with over 50 writers from 16 countries in over 100 programmes between 1-9 December.

For me, the entire festival was an exciting mash-up of scenes from writers' lives, off and onstage. It was an opportunity to see many players in action: moderators, writers, bloggers, festival organisers. There were many international writers setting the scene abuzz. The queues were the longest for the famous Chinese writers such as Jung Chang and Bei Dao. There were enough NRI and Indian names in the marquee to make the whole festival a la Rang De Basanti. David Davidar, Kunal Basu, Madhur Jaffery, and Anita Nair, among others.

December 8, 5 pm
The Singapore Tea Party

As Sharon Bakar and I enter Earshot, the famous cafe in the Arts House by the Singapore River, Sharon spots A. Samad Said, a writer from Malaysia.

"How good to see you Sharon," says Mr Said with a chirp in his voice. His small saintly figure, complete with a flowing white beard, is preched on a chair. In front of him, there is a plate of half-eaten sandwiches. Sharon aka Bibliobibuli, herself a famous Malaysian blogger, is pleased to get the attention from the Malaysian laureate. "Oh, he is the biggest writer in Malaysia," she tells me later.

The laureate talks about his upcoming session. Sharon promises to attend his session the next day and we break for a cup of tea.

Both of us are hungry and a little tired after our session on blogging (World Wide Web of Words--Literary Blogs). Moderated by the spunky and energetic Singapore journalist and blogger Deepika Shetty, Sharon and Ivan Chew (a Singaporean librarian who maintains a books blog) had shared their insights on literary blogging in the session. While for Ivan, blogs were platforms for verbal diarrhea, it was a compulsion (to write) for Sharon. She often had to tell herself to stop posting (and occasionally feed her husband).

So, exhausted there we are with our English breakfast tea. Sharon has ordered a pizza which is yet to arrive. We had met before in Kuala Lumpur (KL) in one of the readings that Sharon had organised. So, we try to reconnect. Sharon talks about the books nominated for this year's Booker Prize. Then the discussion veers off to Tan Twan Eng, Malaysia's latest literary sensation. Tan Twan Eng, the Booker longlisted South Africa and KL-based Malaysian novelist, had shot to fame with his debut, The Gift of Rain. His sessions in the beginning of the festival were good draws, clearly pointing out how popular he had become. When asked how his life had changed after the Booker Prize nomination, he quipped: "It feels the same but things are a lot easier for my publishers and agents. Their phone calls are returned."

Even before we finish our discussion, we are joined by Elmo Jayawardena and his spouse, Dill. Elmo is a Sri Lankan writer but more of him later. We talk about his his book launch that is to follow the same day in the early evening. Elmo is a sharp wit, so he regales us with his jokes and one-liners while sipping on his latte.
Soon, we are joined by Deepika Shetty and Kunal Basu. Kunal had met Elmo in Ubud Writers Festival and I had inroduced myself to him earlier in the day, so he turns to Sharon. "Where are you from?" he asks. "Birmingham," says Sharon, "but I have been living in Malaysia for 20 years now."

Novelist Kunal Basu is an Oxford don--he teaches business and writes fiction (The Miniaturist, The Opium Clerk, The Racists). "How did you end up living this dichotomous life?" I ask him. "I always wanted to write and when we were growing up, there were no Indian role models as full-time writers," he explains. "There were Indian writers but most of them wrote on the side and had a full-time job to support themselves. So, I thought I too had to follow this model but I chose teaching as a career because it gives me control over my time."

Deepika and Sharon start talking about cyber stalkers. Kunal joins in, citing his experience of stalking. A research student, who met him first for a PhD thesis and later wrote an essay on his work, began to stalk him with hundreds of emails every day and would appear wherever Kunal went for his readings or talks. "It became so bad that we had to send her a letter through our agent to put a stop to it," he says.

I congratulate Kunal for couragiously writing in support of Tehelka's latest expose on Gujarat massacres. "I wrote a piece in Tehelka after the Gujarat riots which I think was even better than this," he says. The piece came as a reaction after a journalist asked him why he wrote a 'Muslim novel' (The Miniaturist, based in Akbar's court) despite being a Hindu. "I was angry at this question, which was like an accusation," he says, promising me to send the article.

December 8, A few hours ago
Ideas, Identities and Indian Writing

A little earlier on the same day, David Davidar, head of Penguin Books Canada, and a pioneering publisher of Indian writers in English, now also a novelist, tries to explore the misuse of religion through his novel, The Solitude of Emperors. Mr Davidar’s first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, was published in 2002. It was translated into 16 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense Pick.

His session is titled, A Tale of Two Cities. The other panelist is Kunal Basu. Predictably, there are not many audience questions on communalism, David's theme of the novel. People are more interested in knowing about his publishing experience. David rues the fact that these days editors are editing less and less, resulting in poorly produced texts.

Kunal discusses how many of his stories took birth in his journeys. The idea for The Opium Clerk came to him, he says, while trekking in Bangkok. His guide told him: In the 19th century, Calcutta was the centre of the world's drug business. That sentence triggered in him a curiosity about that period in Calcutta and he began to research for his novel, he says.

Shobha Bhalla, the editor of India Se, asks why are David and Kunal, despite being NRIs, are mentioned as 'from Canada' and 'from UK' respectively in the festival's publicity brochures. Kunal says in reply that "we don't write the brochures." But Kunal does not see any problem in the description as he thinks that he is a global citizen as well as Indian. "When it comes to identity, I am carpetbagger," he says. "If I can get under anyone's skin, I would be happy to do that. And that's why I am not happy with the term Indian Fiction too. It does not exist. Look at the range of our writing. Rushdie is so different from Davidar and so on. So, I don't believe there is anything called Indian fiction."

A shorter version of this report appeared in India Se, Jan 2008.

Om Farah Om

She is the daughter of a mother so obsessed with films that she watched a movie on her way to the hospital to deliver a baby. Her father was a filmmaker and her brother, now a director, earns a living making fun of Bollywood's hamming actors. She is married to an editor-filmmaker husband who edits all her movies.

Judged by the filmlore dictum that you are as good as your last film, Farah Khan can lay claim to be the hottest director in Bollywood at this time. She directed the blockbuster of the year, Om Shanti Om (OSO) (Red Chillies Entertainment), beating the much hyped Saawariya (Bollywood's first Hollywood-backed film, financed by Sony Pictures) in the box office battle. The two films were pitted against each other, releasing on the same day during Diwali last year.

Saawariya was directed and produced by one of the most celebrated directors of Bollywood, Sanjay Leela Bhansali. While Om Shanti Om has emerged as the highest grosser of the year (netting in over Rs 100 crores in 5 weeks), Saawariya has been declared a flop (grossing some Rs 38 crores in the same duration).

(Update: Even though Sony Pictures maintains that they are not disappointed in Saawariya's box office performance, Mahesh Bhatt writes in his India Se column, Jan 2008, that "according to experts and insiders, Saawariya is going to lose not less than Rs 30 crores. And this is a conservative figure").

OSO, headlined and produced by Shah Rukh Khan, has been such a commercial hit that it is being dubbed as the most successful Bollywood film ever. And despite its being based around hackneyed themes of reincarnation and double role, it has won appreciation from both the masses and classes of India, a feat in iteself.

"After watching Om Shanti Om, I felt that the spirit of Manmohan Desai has been reborn as Farah Khan," said a film buff from Varanasi, referring to the one of the most successful directors of the 70s and 80s Bollywood, Manmohan Desai, who was well-known for his lost and found formula films that have now become legends of Hindi filmlore.

Writing in his column in Mint, India's top journalist and columnist Vir Sanghvi said that films like OSO have made the elite of India drop their snobbish notions about Hindi cinema. He said: "There was a time, not so long ago, when India was divided into people who saw Hindi movies and those who saw Hollywood movies... (These days) It’s entirely acceptable to want to see Bollywood and Hollywood films on the same weekend. And even when the film is an unabashed, joyous retread of Hindi film clichés and a homage to the movies of the 1970s—say Om Shanti Om—it becomes such a rage that its appeal cuts across all socio-economic groups."

The Feminine touch

In the last 100 years or so, Bollywood has produced scores of capable directors but Farah Khan, 42, is the only 'woman' director to have got nominated for the 'Filmfare best director award', India's one of the most established film honours. That was in 2004 for her debut directorial venture, Main Hoon Na (MHN). MHN, a masala potbioler headlined by superstar Shah Rukh Khan, was huge commercial hit. This year, Farah Khan outsrtipped her earlier success with Om Shanti Om.

In an industry where men rule and females just provide the backdrop, the question to ask is this: How did this 42 years old choreographer-turned-director make a superhit movie, a feat no female director in Bollywood could achieve so far?

Though Bollywood has had female directors like Sai Paranjpaye, Aparna Sen (though based in Kolkata) and Kalpana Lajmi who have made sensitive films but they mostly worked in a, if you will, a parallel universe, Bollywood's mainstream being shut off for them. They have made some important films like Rudaali (1993), Chashme Buddoor (1981), 36 Chowringhee Lane (English, 1981), to name a few, but they were never counted among the top directors in Bollywood. The qualification needed for getting the top billing is determined by the commercial successes of their films. In recent years, veteran lyricist and filmmaker Gulzar's daughter Meghna Gulzar (a film grduate of New York University who debuted with a commercially flop, Filhaal, 2002 ), Tanuja Chandra (Dushman, 1998; Sangharsh, 1999), Leena Yadav (Shabd, 2005), and Reema Kagti (Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., 2007) have donned the directorial hat too but they haven't tasted much success. If there was any doubt that women cannot deliver box office blockbusters in India, Farah's success has disproved it byond doubt.

But like any 21st century woman, Farah does not take the gender-tinted compliment. “I’m a choreographer, and a director. That I’m a woman too is incidental,” Farah stated. Her point is that she’s different from her male counterparts “perhaps not in directorial skills but definitely in organisational abilities”.

As they say, the devil is in the detail, Farah's shoots encompass much detailing and a woman’s touch. “I do make an extra effort to put flowers and fruits in the actor’s van...That could qualify as a “woman thing” to do...Or blaming my temper on PMS... Or coping with morning sickness while shooting a funky number like Dard-e-disco,” she told The Hindustan Times. Interestingly, Farah is expecting triplets in Februray and she was was going for checkups between shoots, at times taking four injections and then returning cheerfully to the sets. “How many men can boast of that?” she asked.

Pregnancy. Cinema. Pain. Melodramatic moments. All these are not new to Farah. In a weird sense, life has been imitating art in Farah's case.

Farah comes from a film family. Her father Kamran Khan was a successful producer of small-time films. Her mother also came from a film family, her sisters were the once-famous child artists, Honey and Daisey Irani (the former a successful film scriptwriter, the latter now a TV producer). Life was idyllic with "swank cars and plenty of homes". Then suddenly things took a bad turn. Writes Shoma Chaudury in Tehelka: "In 1973, the inevitable happened. Kamran Khan tripped in the casino of life: he made a film that was a colossal disaster. The failures began to cascade after that. The money disappeared, the houses disappeared, the cars disappeared. True to the ironies of Bollywood, the film was called Aisa Bhi Hota Hai."

The idyllic childhood turned into a nightmare. Farah's father took to drinking and never recovered. The family moved to a small space in a relative's house. While still a student, Farah began to work to help the family. She would work "at whatever she could lay her hands on: colony surveys, tuitions, teaching Mithun Chakravarty’s son Michael Jackson dance steps. One time, she won a dance competition prize to Mauritius but she had the ticket converted to money to help her mother keep the household going."

The turning point in her life came with Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikandar (1992) when producer Nasser Hussain took her on as an assitant director, and when the film's choreographer walked out of the project, she was asked to do the dance direction. Thus was born the choreographer Farah Khan who redefined dancing in Bollywood, making it hip and happening. Since then, she has choreographed for over 70 films, including for superhits such as 1942, A Love Story, Dil Se, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and Dil Chahta Hai. She has also done international projects such as the broadway musical, Bombay Dreams, and choreography for Latin Singer Shakira for her performance at the MTV Music Video Awards.

Now a successful filmmaker, Farah does not want to do much choreography and wants to focus on film direction. Who can contest that idea?

However, Farah's critics argue that Farah's success at the box office is more to do with her being backed by the king of bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan. The superstar banrolled and acted in both her films. Though Farah's talent and ingenuity cannot be discounted, there might be some merit in this argument. But only time can test the veracity of this criticism. And for that, we will have to wait for her next few projects. But more than an individual success, Farah's success can inspire other upcoming women directors to buck the trend in Bollywood . Like Farah, they too can raise money and market their films, which has discouraged many women from helming films in the past.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Weekend Today, Singapore dt. Jan 5-6, 2008. In the print edition, it was wrongly mentioned that Daisy Irani is based in Singapore. The error is regretted.

The year that was

We are saying goodbye to 2007 today. So far, things were going fine--despite the subprime crisis in the US, the news was good for Asia. The Asian economies have been doing well. Things were looking up. Though there were some immediate issues that bothered us all--Modi's win in the Gujarat elections, Pakistan's and Thailand's political turmoil, the Indian discontent in Malaysia--we were hopeful that in time the issues will be resolved. People will learn to live with them or create better conditions.

Then came the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

That evening I came home after watching Wang Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights. I had enjoyed the movie and thought that it was such an assured work. Wang Kar Wai's earlier films had a lot of energy in each and every frame, the stories were so pulsating--but here, with this film, he had shown to have matured a bit. The characters seemed to deal with their situations in a calmer manner (even though some scenes betrayed the director's restlessness). Was it because this was a film about American characters? And in many of the scenes and characters, I could see how there were overlaps with what we had seen in some of his earlier films. But I was generally happy with my experience.

My wife was watching the BBC World and Benazir's news was just being broken. I was suddenly engulfed with a sense of grief. My immediate reaction was to share it with others I knew. I sent out some smes. Some of my friends expressed dismay at the news. "Oh, don't tell me this," said one. What?!, said another. Those who were aware of the news sent me cold, resigned smes.

I remembered, when Benazir was Pakistan's PM, she was regularly connected with India's then PM Rajiv Gandhi--both were young, descendants of slain national leaders and were now they were leading two big countries. Who had imagined both will die the same way, as victims of terrorism.

There are many things to talk about today (like how I recently took my two-year old daughter to watch the film The Golden Compass and how she got bored within half an hour in the theatre) but I leave you with these questions from filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, and I will talk to you again next year:

Who killed Benazir ? Suicide bombings were unheard of in Pakistan before 9/11. And before the US ordered Musharraf to send his army against his own people in Pakistan's western regions to flush out the Taliban. Why ? The supposed reason was to look for Osama Bin Laden. But that was EIGHT years ago, and Osama could be dead of natural causes by now. No one talks about him anymore in any case, and the Keyword has become Al Quaeda, about whom no one knows very much. Because Al Quaeda has now becomea 'philosophy of terrorism ' as an acceptable tool of warfare, rather than a cohesive organization anymore. It is the usual construct of the Western World looking for simple answers to vastly complex problems of cultural divide, religious divide and harsh economic disparities......

And if Al Quaeda is now a philosophy of warfare, then how is it helping that Musharaf sends his troops to fight his own people, and causing huge alienation by killing civilians and calling it collatoral damage ? The philosophy of suicide bombings is merely being exported out of the region by alienating people and encouraging them towards terrorism.

Bolly'Obama

(Courtesy Saja Forum)