Jarhead

A few weeks ago when I ventured into a local cineplex, I was not sure which film to watch. What I had in mind was Jim Carrey's Fun with Dick and Jane but when I saw the poster of Jarhead with the 'Directed by Sam Mendes' tag, I knew where I was headed for. I knew it was not going to be a fun film but I was ready for some thought-provoking fare.

I was rewarded. I was watching a war movie with hardly any war happening (yeah, there were some bombing shots and the hero, a trained sniper scout, yearns for some action but gets nary a chance). There is a moment when the action-hungry protagonists almost break down when they don't get an opportunity to 'kill' their enemies. That is as satirical as one could get.

Jake Gyllenhaal, playing Anthony Swofford, is brilliant. I was watching this guy for the first time, and was not even aware that he was playing the (co) lead in the much-admired Brokeback Mountain. Others such as Jamie Foxx and Peter Sargaasard have turned in admirable performances.

I loved Jake when he mouthed lines like these (off screen):

"Suggestive techniques for the marine to use in the avoidance of boredom and loneliness. Masturbation. Re-reading of letters from unfaithful wives and girlfriends. Cleaning your rifle. Further masturbation. Re-wiring Walkman. Arguing about religion and meaning of life. Discussing in detail, every women the marine has ever fucked. Debating differences, such as Cupban VS Mexican, Harleys VS Hondas, left VS right-handed masturbation. Further cleaning of rifle. Studying the mail order bride catalogue. Further masturbation. Planning a marine's first meal on return home. Imagining what a marine's girlfriend and her man Joey are doing in the alley or in a hotel bed."

More quotable quotes are here.

'Jarhead' is based on former Marine Anthony Swofford's best-selling 2003 book about his pre-Desert Storm experiences in Saudi Arabia and about his experiences fighting in Kuwait. Filmed in the Imperial Valley in Southern California, which features conditions very similar to Iraq. Marines did use one of the local towns, Brawley, for training purposes due to similarities to Iraq. Interestingly, some desert scenes were also shot on a Universal sound stage with lights doubling as burning oil wells. The lights were later replaced with burning wells courtesy of ILM.

Why I love Woody Allen?

Call me whatever you want, but I can't stop loving Woody Allen. Why? His brand of humour (middlebrow?), full of people from the literary world, is hard to find anywhere else. That's why.

I loved this piece by PRADEEP SEBASTIAN in The Hindu Literary Supplement. He says on Allen:

"Some critics now see Allen as a middlebrow sensibility masquerading as highbrow. But that's exactly why we like Allen, that's why we relate to him more than any other intellectual comic. This middlebrow sensibility is the strongest connection we have with him. It's baffling why critics valorise the lowbrow and the highbrow while mocking the middlebrow."

"Many of us intellectual, sensitive, arty types are middlebrow in our tastes and middlebrow in our sensibility. Like Allen, we too regard high culture with awe. If we can't drink deeply from it, we want to at least partake of it, want it to rub off on us."

"But often the closest we come to it is a peek at it: surrounding ourselves with Penguin classics we've never read and will probably never get to read — at least not all of them. What we possess is a smattering, a sampling of culture: we seem to know what Kafkaesque means without having read too much of Kafka, and we catch up with the great classics via movie versions of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. This, of course, is a caricature of the cultural aspirations of a middlebrow but that's what Woody Allen is all about. Allen won't be funny if this tension between the middlebrow and highbrow didn't exist."

Read the entire piece here to enjoy the discussion on "The Whore of Mensa" and "The Kugelmas Episode." Not to miss.

How do you write?

So how do you write? Standing up, sitting down, in the bathtub, on the back of your lover...

Here is an interesting article by diplomat-cum-novelist Navtej Sarna on the several odd ways of writing that famous writers have adopted from time to time. Some examples:

"Honore de Balzac would try and write 24 hours at a stretch and then take a five-hour break before starting over again. He consumed huge quantities of black coffee to beat fatigue and actually became a victim of caffeine poisoning at age 51. Alexander Dumas suffered from indigestion and the pain would wake him up in the small hours. He would then work on his writing desk till breakfast that usually consisted of a solitary apple under the Arc de Triomphe. His poetry would be written on yellow paper, fiction on blue and non-fiction on rose-coloured. Victor Hugo would give away all his clothes to his servant with instructions that he should not return until Hugo had completed his day's work. Ben Franklin and the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand, preferred to work in their bathtubs. Mark Twain and R. L. Stevenson could only write when lying down and Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe and Lewis Carroll had to stand up to deliver. Thomas Wolfe, at least, who confessed to finding it easier to add 75,000 words than cut down 50,000 must have been very tired on finishing Look Homeward, Angel. D. H. Lawrence found stimulation in climbing mulberry trees in the nude. Voltaire used his lover's back as a writing desk."

"The poets, of course, had favourites of their own: Coleridge is said to have dreamt up the scene for "Kubla Khan" under the influence of opium; Eliott would revel in writing if he had a head cold; Poe liked to have his Siamese cat on his shoulder and Schiller liked sniffing at rotten apples every once in a while."

May I add one more from my side? Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri used to write all naked in a room after getting drunk. Interesting, isn't it?

I do it like any normal pen pusher. What about you?

To become a writer you must embrace failure

Hell, no, I'm not saying this. Ha Jin is saying this. If I did, in the first place, you won't believe me. Some think I'm nuts any ways.

I came across this interview of Ha Jin just by chance. Here he makes an important point, and I have all along been bogged down by the feeling that he describes so well:

I read something you said in an online interview [at collectedstories.com] that intrigued me. Basically, you said that to become a writer you must embrace failure. What did you mean by that?

The more ambitious you are, the stronger the sense of failure, because there are so many [laughs] great books that have been written. When I was at Emory University I often taught a story by Kafka: “The Hunger Artist.” That story explains the psychology of a writer. Very often we write not because we want to achieve—maybe there was that desire, but so much has been accomplished. We can’t do anything better. On the other hand, you have to go on and continue.
That’s why I think some sense of failure is essential to a writer from the very beginning.

How true! Read the whole interview here in Agni.

Agni also has a terrific interview with late Saul Bellow. It is a must read.

One Night@Bollywood

Today I read in the ST that Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel, One Night @ The Call Centre has been optioned for filming by Bollywood director Rohan Sippy. Great news for Chetan! Very few Indian filmmakers opt for making films out of modern novels and when they do, they hardly succeed in hitting the bull's eye. Anurag Mathur's all time bestseller The Inscrutible Americans was a box office (bo) dud as a movie. Dev Benegal had adapted Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August with great elan and some bo success. Mira Nair is adapting Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. Hope it does well.

But Chetan's news gives me a sense of deja vu. His first novel, Five Point Someone, was also rumoured to have been optioned for filming. But we are still waiting for the film...Any way, good luck Chetan!

The World is Not Against You

Sounds like the title of the next 007 movie, doesn't it?

But hey, it is just a word of advice. From Vikram Seth. To an aspiring writer. Mark Vender. The full line: "The world is not against you. It is only indifferent."

Read this ravishing rant on "getting published" (Hay Fever) in The Guardian. If you already have, read on ahead.

Indian writer Samit Basu (author of The Simoquin Prophecies and now The Manticore's Secret) commented on this aspect of the writerly life (stirred by The Sunday Times publishing saga) in an interesting article, Fishwrap. He wrote:

It’s an interesting question – despite the emergence of a generation of writers, artists and filmmakers in India who are perfectly content creating work for a growing and engaged audience without ‘explaining India’ being an overriding consideration, we still look to the West for validation, and not just in monetary terms. How justified is this outward-looking approach if the West is so insecure about its own ability to appreciate literature and the arts? For every Rupa Bajwa and Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi racking up impressive advances and literary awards worldwide, how many quality works of Indian literature are consigned to dustbins every time publishers and agents decide to clear up the slushpile? How many masterpieces never see the light of day because their writers aren’t sexy enough? How long will we have to wait before any art form (except film and music) finds a large enough market within the country for the sad state of affairs abroad not to be a factor in the lives of the artists concerned? When can we stop having our own literary scene messed up for us by people abroad and, instead, mess it up ourselves in our own special Indian way?

I guess there are no easy answers. It is the market, be it in India or Malaysia or Singapore, or anywhere, that decides everything--in the larger sense. Even books. Marketing is over-riding art, as it were. As Walt Whitman would have said: Poets are not in-charge here. It is the bankers and the manufacturers, the publishers and the marketers.

Last year, The Straits Time had brought out a special Saturday report on the publishing scene in Singapore. I guess Sharon Bakar had covered it in her blog. The gist of the story is that even in a small country like Singapore, there are a large number of writers (of all kinds) looking for publishers but there are very few of them who don't see any market for budding local writers. Many writers have, in desperation, turned to self-publishing, and almost all of them are yet to recover what they had invested in their dream ventures. Forget about profits!

Nothing surprising about it!

I guess in an age when most readers are aspiring writers, the barriers to publishing will rise higher up. And those who will get published may not be necessarily the best writers of our age, but those who persist and try on will surely make it one day. When the best of the lot will give up and turn to a more profitable business, the mediocres will sure have a chance. Let's stay optimistic then, even at the risk of sounding simplistic, even foolhardy. What do you say?

Kaleidoscope of Rhythms

Ustaad Zakir Hussain and the accompanying musicians held a riveting concert last Sunday in the Esplanade Concert Theatre. Singapore's President Nathan was also there to enjoy the show. Apart from the music, it was the Ustaad's sense of humour that had the audience in rapture.

My impressions of meeting with the Ustaad has been published by Malaysiakini. Read the piece here.

Two new articles

Here are two new articles:

Raising the Asian Flag: Asian filmmakers rebel against Hollywood

AMU at the Crossroads

Enjoy and send me your comments!

(Photograph: Zafar Anjum)

Meeting Ustaad Zakir Hussain

Ustaad Zakir Hussain is one of the most charismatic musicians of India. I had seen him act in movies, or playing the tabla on tv, or promoting Taj Mahal tea in commercials. But nothing beats the experience of meeting the man in person.

Jan 8. Sunday. Noon. I reached the New Age Indigo Bar in Boat Quay braving the incessant rain. Ustaad Zakir Hussain was to meet the presswallahs there. He was on his way to the USA where he was teaching music at the Princeton University.

The Ustaad is holding a major show "Kaleidoscope of Rhythms" (World Fusion Music) on Feb. 5, 2006 (7: 30 pm) at the Esplanade Concert Hall. The show will also feature percussionists and musicians such as Terry Bozzio, Giovanni Hidalgo, U Shrinivas (Mandolin), Fazal Qureshi (Tabla), Salim Merchant (Keyboard), Vijay Chauhan (Dholki), and Kala Ramnath (Violin).

The press meet was meant to brief the journos about the show. The turn out was good--who could resist the charm of Zakir Hussain, even on a rainy day.

From the moment he burst into the room (an informal setting of low laying Indian style furniture), Zakir Saheb took over the scene. After personally meeting everyone, he started talking about the gig and the musicians. His talk was so lively and so full of erudition, and at the same time, he was able to present his knowledge and his sense of Indian music in such a simple manner that I was thoroughly bewildered. He was articulate like a professor. No wonder he is teaching at an Ivy League university.

His talk ranged from his own musical inspirations to Bollywood and Hollywood music. I will write about it in a different piece. But from the discussion, I am sure the Feb gig in Singapore is going to be a mind-blowing experience. Those who cannot come to Singapore can catch the ensemble at Bombay and Dubai around the same time. Not to be missed. (Tickets are on sale through SISTIC Hotline and outlest islandwise)

Interest in Indian authors declining?

Meet novelist Vikram Chandra, after a long time, here. He is off with his beard now. He took many years to hit the bookstands again. His last book was a collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay.

For his new novel, loosely based on the Bombay mafia, he got a million dollar advance and naturally hit the headlines.

In this interview, here answers at least two interesting questions:

Do you think that getting a huge advance puts pressure on a writer to "perform"?

I'm mostly done with the book, so in this case no. I'm very grateful but finally it is an external event I have to keep at a distance in the same way you maintain a distance from reviews or praise. Because your job finally is to imagine and you do your storytelling because you love to and want to. If it interferes with you sitting alone in front of the blank screen then it is damaging.

Despite there being many more Indians writing in English, why is there lesser interest in the West in Indian authors?

No, I don't think there is a real decline. May be they've just got over the initial bubble. The excitement that happened in the late 1990s with people in the West getting very excited and publishers pouring money into one or two books; that kind of artificial or frenzied bubble inevitably flattens out. I think what is happening now is that there is a constancy and at least I see in the United States more people than ever reading Indian authors.

For more, go to The Hindu website.

Patna Roughcut/Siddharth Chowdhury

These days, apart from Chetan Bhagat and Samit Basu, one more name is doing the rounds of the litblog world in India. The name is Siddharth Chowdhury. The cause: his debut novel, Patna Roughcut (Picador).

First about the novel. And I quote from Kolkata's The Telegraph:

Patna Roughcut (Picador, Rs 250) by Siddharth Chowdhury is about nothing in particular. Ritwik Ray is a small-time reporter in Patna, and recounts nostalgically his growing-up amid the Bengali diaspora in Patna colonies and Delhi University campuses. There is Harryda, his dreams in technicolour, Iladi who attained at 13 the wisdom “very few women attain even at menopause”. Then there are those typical years in college, full of love and idealism. And finally Mira Verma, who Ritwik meets again as wife of his professor. A rather tame start for a first novel.

Forget the last sentence. The book has received praise from reviewers such as Jabberwock and Hurree Babu. J wrote:

Patna Roughcut shows its hand early on; the very first paragraph of the book ends an overwrought analogy with the observation: "The poor shouldn’t dream. They can’t afford it." The remaining 180 pages are an illustration of this statement. Cynical though the idea is, it defines the lives of untold millions in this country - people who reach for greater intellect and "culture" and find that it destroys their pragmatism; that they are still unable to escape the vicious circle of their existence. Chowdhury’s achievement is that he filters this pessimistic worldview through a style that is tender, empathetic and even humorous when appropriate. This is crucial to the book’s success as a story of the aspirations and dashed hopes of young Indians caught between different worlds.

Being a fellow Bihari, I was intrigued as I did not know much about Siddharth. I wanted to.

I could connect with his book's theme as well and it sounded even a little familiar. My own first novel, Of Seminal Fluids, covered the similar ground of dream and reality, though with much less demonstrable success. I will admit that.

So, bending to my curiosity, I searched about Siddharth. This is what I found out about him:

Born in Patna in 1974, Siddharth Chowdhury earned an M A in English literature from Hindu college, University of Delhi before drifting into publishing. His stories have been published in The Brown Critique, Debonair, The Asian Age, The Sunday Observer and the Tehelka Literary Review among other places. He lives in Delhi and works as an editor with the house of Manohar. He is presently working on a short novel.

The Week has this to say about Siddharth:

Of the dozens of Indian writers in English whose debut novels are scheduled for publication in 2005, the one most likely to make a splash is Siddharth Chowdhury. His publishers, Picador, cannot stop talking about their lucky catch. Even Pankaj Mishra, not known for effusive compliments, raved about Chowdhury’s earlier collection of short stories for its brilliance in capturing "the bittersweet irony of our compromised modernity". The novel Patna Blues is being hailed as even better.

Chowdhury describes his own work as "charting the socio-political landscape of Patna and Bihar from the 1950s to the 1990s". As the newspapers testify daily, Bihar’s socio-political landscape is indeed tumultuous, but no English novel has so far sought to capture it. Chowdhury does so through the eyes and experiences of three men and two women who grow up in Patna during these four decades. But the book, says Chowdhury, is also about "literature and art, and the role they play in defining our lives".

Not surprisingly, Chowdhury himself grew up in Patna, though he presently lives in Delhi where, until recently, he worked with a publishing company. He began writing at 19 ("Rather late," he says, "most writers seem to start at 10 or earlier") but was soon publishing short stories in Indian and foreign publications. His first collection of stories, Diksha at St Martins, appeared two years ago to immense praise.

Before Patna Roughcut, he debuted with a collection of short stories, Diksha at St Martin's (Srishti).

As a fellow writer I wish him all the best and do look forward to reading his novel.

Naipaul's 'disguised' book rejected by Agents/Publishers

I first read it in Kitabkhana, and it amused me no end.

You take a famous manuscript (book) by a famous writer and send it out to agents/publishers with an unknown name for their kind consideration. Chances are they will not only not recognize the content (even Booker prize-winning content!), they will even reject it with complete professional sanity. It was done before with perhaps a Thackery or Dickens novel. I don't remember exactly. The Sunday Times has done it again like a sting operation:

Top novels in disguise rejected by publishers

THERE is no greater award for a writer than the Nobel prize for literature. Five years ago the accolade went to VS Naipaul in recognition of his 50-year writing career.

Naipaul, born in Trinidad, also won the 1971 Booker prize (now the Man Booker) in Britain, where he has lived since 1950. It was awarded for In a Free State, his novel about displaced colonials on different continents.

Dennis Potter, the TV dramatist, praised its “lucid complexity”. He wrote: “Do not miss the exhilaration of catching one of our most accomplished writers reaching towards the full stretch of his talent.”

Surely the special qualities of such timeless prose would be recognised by today’s publishing industry? Surely a first-time novelist who matched the standard of Naipaul at his best would be snapped up?

The Sunday Times sent out the opening chapter of In a Free State to 20 agents and publishers to find out. Only the names of the author and main characters were changed.

None of the agents or publishers spotted the book’s true pedigree. And instead of experiencing Potter’s exhilaration, they all sent back polite rejections.

Laugh):

The box office heavyweight

I was all excited to see Peter Jackson's King Kong on the big screen (I had not seen the 1930's one) and when the sneak shows were announced, I bought a ticket and gleefully entered the movie-hall like a child.

King Kong! Oh, what a love triangle!

Peter Jackson has done a clever job. The film is a potent mixture of so many mise-en-scene seen earlier. It has Chicago (the struggle of an actress), Titanic (love blossoming on a ship), Jurassic Park (The island with the big lizards), and Godzilla (the big creature wreaking havoc in New York)--all rolled into a single snazzy package! The special effects are too good. The impact on the box office is, no wonder, gigantic.

Mangal Pandey--A wasted effort?

The year's biggest disappointment was Ketan Mehta's Mangal Pandey--The Rising. Amir had given four years of his life to this film and he famously grew a trademark sepoy moustache for this film. Despite all best intentions, the film lacks a narrative unity. The stoy being told through the ballad of Mangal Pandey does not work and the first few scenes are so disjointed, they are more like 'Episodes in the life of Mangal Pandey'. The problem is with the script. Mangal's character is not well-developed. We have not been given any glimpse into Mangal's personal life which is very important from the pov of character development. Amir and others have acted well. The second half is tauter but at the end of the film, one feels dissatisfied. Rahman's music is very good but has often been wasted in the film.

The New Year

Today is the first day of 2006 and I am writing my first post of the year. My new born daughter has practically kept me awake the whole night, and this morning only after quarter to six, when she was finally lulled to sleep, I could do some work. After that, this post. So welcome again and let me say it to you: Happy New Year!

First things first. Any new year resolutions? None. And I have not smoked for the past one week. Before that I had taken a smoking break for a while, in a smoking, non-smoking career spanning over a decade now. Writing-wise any new plans? Yes, sure. There is a novel ms to polish, and another ready to be written. The idea is ready and I should start writing a few paragraphs everyday from today onwards. Should. That's a dangerous word!

2005 was unique for me. I did not write a single short story. I started writing one and it is still unfinished. Was I trying to be a perfectionist? Maybe. You could say that. I want to achieve the kind of balance and beauty that I felt in Hemingway's The Indian Camp. I personally like stories that have both soul and brevity. Long short stories? I generally keep a distance from going to such lengths unless necessary.

The highlight of 2005 was the launch of Kitaab.org. I started it as a resource window on Asian writing in English. So far it has done fine. Some of my friends have been kind enough to support the site with content. I had expected many others to join me in this endeavour. At times I suffered disappointments. Turns out that people are not as interested in literature as in their own selves, which is understandable.

The Asia Pacific Writers Network also registered its presence in 2005. It is a great development for Asian writing.

The year gone by was strong in non-fiction. I did manage to write a few non-fiction pieces here and there. It was a great experience, especially working with some of the American editors. In 2005, I also read more of non-fiction than fiction. Here is a representative list:

Non-fiction: All the President's Men, Liberty or Death (Patrick French), The Idea of India (Sunil Khilnani), Maximum City, The Jaguar Smile, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Literary Occasions, Desperately Seeking Paradise, Holy War, The Crisis of Islam, The New Jackals, The Art of Fiction, Naked Woman, etc. (You could see a lot from my backlog)

Fiction: Shantaram, Woody Allen--The Complete Prose, The O.Henry Prize Stories 2003, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, Tropic of Capricorn, Psychoraag, Transmission, Away, Be Cool, etc.

In movies, I must would have seen over 200 films this year (all languages, both new and old). This year's some of the best movie experiences were: Black, The Downfall (German), The 400 Blows (French), The Decalogue (Polish), Nine Queens (French), Madadayo (Japanese), Melinda and Melinda, Pather Panchali, How Green Was My Valley, In the Mood of Love (Chinese), Farewell, My Concubine (Chinese), Bunty Aur Bubly, Paheli, Sarkar, No Entry, Cyrano de Bergerec, Sideways, The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou, King Kong, Main, Meri Patni Aur Woh, Spanglish, Maria Full of Grace, Man on Fire, etc.

Truffaut's The 400 Blows will remain an unforgettable film for me. Was it the precursor of all those great Iranian films?

I was really impressed with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black but when I saw The Miracle Worker, I lost some of the respect for the filmmaker, at least in terms of orginality. But to be fair to Bhansali, his work is glossier and he has taken the story foreward in his version of the Hellen Keller story.

Chandan Arora's Main Meri Patni Aur Woh is simply delecious. There is a Basu Chatterjee kind of old world charm here. Hazaroon Khwahishen Aisi was also remarkable. Chocolate was high class trash. How could Vivek Agnihotri shamelessly copy the supercool Usual Suspects? More than that, how could a talented actor like Irfan Khan agree to play Bollywood's version of Kevin Spacey? I am yet to see Maine Gandhi ko Nahin Mara but I hear it is really good. Apharan is also supposed to be good.

Hopefully, Bollywood would try to be more original in 2006. And there would be great novels to read. I am already running a huge backlog... God help me!

My Recent Writings

All these weeks and months, I have been busy writing and publishing stories here and there. Some of my latest writings that you can check out are listed here (with links):

Indians Roar in the Lion City (Little India, USA)

Hollywood's Indian Adventures (Asia Times, Hong Kong)

From Lantern to Lights (Outlook, India)

Salaam Mira! Tribute to a Global Talent (Jamini, Bangladesh)

BTW, Jamini is an exquisite arts journal published from Dhaka with excellent articles and pictures. I was really impressed by its quality. The Mira Nair profile is not available online but if you want to read it, I could send you a pdf. So, quite a lot to delve in there. Happy reading! And comments are always welcome.

Who is Preeta Krishna?

Preeta Krishna (India) is the winner of the 2005 Commonwealth Short Story Competition (administered by the CBA or Commonwealth Broadcasting Association) for her story 'Treason', which deals with the loss of innocence in a harsh world. Three other Indian (or PIO) writers--Mareet Sodhi Someshwar (Hong Kong), Swapna Kishore and Suchitra Ramadurai--have won in the category of Highly Commended stories.

Did you know about this competition?

I guess many have not heard about it. I am sure with time and more exposure, literary prize watchers will put it under their radars as they do about the Commonwealth Writers Prize (for the novels and administered by the Commonwealth Foundation, an intergovernmental organization). Remember the controversy about the Commonwealth Writers Prize for a novel by Amitava Ghosh. Ghosh had refused to take it for political reasons.

Rushdie wrote a scathing essay on the idea of Commonwealth literature in his collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands. The title of his essay was "Commonwealth Literature does not exist." Rushdie makes his point very clear in these words:

"The nearest I could get to a definition sounded distinctly patronizing: 'Commonwealth literature,' it appears, is that body of writing created, I think, in the English language, by persons who are not themselves white Britons, or Irish, or citizens of the United States of America..."

He further says: "By now 'Commonwealth literature' was sounding very unlikable indeed. Not only was it a ghetto, but it was actually an exclusive ghetto. And the effect of creating such a ghetto was, is, to change the meaning of the far broader term 'English Literaure' ...into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist."

One may agree or disagree with Rushdie's observations, but the fact remains that such venues are big confidence boosters for the young and fledgling writers.

Seems a lot of people from the Commonwealth countries participated in it. The winner, Preeta Krishna, is joined by twenty-five other writers from across the Commonwealth who have won prizes in the competition. Their stories are being published in a CD-Rom format.

Before you jump to type Preeta Krishna in your google search engine, let me tell you that there isn't much info on her on the net. In case you find something on her, don't forget to share it with me.

Remembering Nirmal Verma and Amrita Pritam

In the last few weeks, India lost two literary figures: eminent Hindi writer Nirmal Verma and Punjabi poetess and novelist, Amrita Pritam.

While I did not have the pleasure of reading Amrita's novels or poetry, I had the good fortune of reading some stories and novels by Nirmal Verma. For the uninitiated, Nirmal Verma is among the most significant names in contemporary Hindi literature. He shot to prominence with his first collection of short stories, Parinde ("Birds," 1959), which gave a major boost to the Nayi Kahani (New Story) movement in Hindi literature. He reinterpreted and reshaped the short story in Hindi, India’s national language. His "art powerfully communicates the elusiveness and complexities of emotions and sensibilities in a way that no narrative can," it noted. Verma has several short stories collections, novels, essays, and travelogues to his credit. I have done a profile of Verma in my latest column in Kitaab. Check it out here (see under Columnists).

For Amrita's profile, there's one by Khushwant Singh (An Stamped Ticket; Outlook) whose "uncharitable remarks" about the deceased poetess has kicked a mini literary storm in the Punjabi literary circles. Excerpts from Mr. Singh's appraisal:

"Amrita was a woman of modest education and wrote only in Punjabi. She could barely read any other language and was therefore unsophisticated in her writing. She was besotted with Bollywood. For her, the ultimate in success was to have some of her novels and short stories filmed. Her first novel to be translated from Punjabi into English was Pinjar (The Skeleton). I did the translation, purely out of love for her. I gave her all the royalties on one condition: to repay me with a candid account of her love life. She did over many sessions. The only passion she admitted to was for the film lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi whom she had never met. But she had corresponded with him. I was disappointed. "All this could be written on a postage stamp," I told her. So when she wrote her autobiography, she called it Raseedi Ticket (Postage Stamp)."

The piece gets more frank as you read further. I am not surprised as it comes from a writer who had written his own obituary!

Roy and Bunty Aur Babli

In the recent months, a Hindi film, Bunty Aur Babli, starring the father-son duo of Amitabh Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan, did very well on the box office in India. The critics also appreciated the film for its portrayal of the aspirations of the youth of today's middle class India. I was pleasantly surprised when Arundhati Ray quoted a line from this film in her interview in the weekly Tehelka:

"There is the danger, especially for a writer of fiction, that you can become somebody who does what is expected of you. I could end up boring myself to death... It can be maddening, and I want to say like Bunty in Bunty aur Babli, ‘Mujhe yeh izzat aur sharafat ki zindagi se bachao…’"

Save me from this life of honor and gentlemanliness!

The interview is really interesting. In fact, all of Roy's interviews are thought-provoking. She has a fascinating way of putting things together, building a context, making a point. I quote some more--my favs from the same interview.

On the politics of resistence

"The facts are there in the world today. People like Chomsky have made a huge contribution to that. But what does information mean? What are facts? There is so much information that almost all becomes meaningless and disempowering. Where has it all gone? What does the World Social Forum mean today? They are big questions now. Ultimately, millions of people marched against the war in Iraq. But the war was prosecuted, the occupation is in full stride. I do not for a moment want to undermine the fact that unveiling the facts has meant a huge swing of public opinion against the occupation of Iraq, it has meant that America’s secret history is now street talk, but what next? To expose things is quite different from being able to effectively resist things."

On fame

"At the end of the day, fame is also a gruesome kind of capitalism, you can accumulate it, bank it, live off it. But it can suffocate you, block off the blood vessels to the brain, isolate you, make you lose touch. It pushes you up to the surface and you forget how to keep your ear to the ground. "

On money

"As for money, I have tried to take it lightly. Really, I have tried to give it away, but even that is a very difficult thing to do. Money is like nuclear waste. What you do with it, where you dump it, what problems it creates, what it changes, these are incredibly complicated things. And eventually, it can all blow up in your face. I’d have been happier with Less. Yeh Dil Maange Less. Less money, less fame, less pressure, more badmashi. I hate the f***ing responsibility that is sometimes forced on me. I spent my early years making decisions that would allow me to evade responsibility; and now…"

On the culture of celebrityhood

"People are constantly in search of idols, heroes, villains, sirens — in search of individuals, in search of noise. Anybody in whom they can invest their mediocre aspirations and muddled thinking will do. Anyone who is conventionally and moderately ‘successful’ becomes a celebrity. It’s almost a kind of profession now — we have professional celebrities — maybe colleges should start offering a course.It’s indiscriminate — it can be Miss Universe, or a writer, or the maker of a ridiculous TV soap, the minimum requirement is success. There’s a particular kind of person who comes up to me with this star-struck smile — it doesn’t matter who I am — they just know I’m famous; whether I’m the ‘BookerPrizeWinner’ or the star of the Zee Horror Show or whatever is immaterial."

On failure

"In this freak show, this celebrity parade, there’s no place for loss, or failure. Whereas to me as a writer, failure interests me. Success is so tinny and boring. Everyone is promoting themselves so hard."

On search for perfection

"I think we all are just messing our way through this life. People, ideologues who believe in a kind of redemption, a perfect and ultimate society, are terrifying. Hitler and Stalin believed that with a little social engineering, with the mass murder of a few million people, they could create a new and perfect world. The idea of perfection has often been a precursor to genocide. John Gray writes about it at some length. But then, on the other hand, we have the placid acceptance of Karma which certainly suits the privileged classes and castes very well. Some of us oscillate in the space between these two ugly juggernauts trying to at least occasionally locate some pinpoints of light. "

To read the entire interview, click here.

A Converstaion with Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth is touring the world promoting his latest work, Two Lives. A few weeks ago, he was in India and lots of his interviews appeared in the Indian media. Outlook magazine even published an interview in which Seth's mother also played a part (she also wrote a book that was published one or two years ago).

Now Seth is in the US and SAJAers Sreenath Sreenivasan, SAJA co-founder and Aseem Chhabra, SAJA board member, caught him in a web, err, a live webcast! The webcast is archived here. If you would rather read the conversation, go here.

I am quoting some interesting comments here:

On A Suitable Boy: "… the publisher asked, can we have a few more foreign characters to appeal to the foreign market… that’s why I was rather surprised that the… interminable book about a rather obscure period of Indian history in the ’50s… without war, without the assassination of prime ministers, without… much in the way of sex… without even a glossary… was successful outside India…"

On how does a small town writer make him- or herself heard? "I’m sorry, I don’t really know… the first book I wrote… [describes how his dad told him to go to the library and look up publishers, and he mailed unsolicited manuscripts which died unheralded and unmourned on the slush pile]… Finally an editor looked at a chapter or two… I didn’t have an agent in the beginning, and I didn’t know how to get one… when I wrote The Golden Gate, I didn’t think I could sell something as strange as that [a novel in verse] through an agent…
Try to write what you’re [compelled] to write, not what the market tells you… the market didn’t tell me to write a 300-page novel in verse. Selling a 60-page novel in verse would have been impossible, so why 300?… my own method of entering print was rather unorthodox…"

Got the point?