Confessions of an Epic Indian

BEIJING — In gymnastics today, the odds-on favored Hamstrovakian team took the gold in the Women’s Synchronized Dangling. Pictured here, from top, are teammates Uvula Stolichnaya, Ivana Hugankissya and Olga Reallylongfunnynameski.

Caption and pic from Cute Overload

As promised, here are some recent pics of Willow with a couple of friends. Different days, different times…and yes, different dogs.

Excuse the blurry pics–if you’ve spent time around puppies then you know that trying to take pictures of them is similar to taking pictures from a moving ST bus on a back road of Maharashtra (or anywhere else). They tend to be hyperkinetic, and just getting them in the frame is tough. I guess using an iPhone camera doesn’t help because the iPhone camera (like most cellphone cams) can be a bit slow in responding. So I get a lot of pics with nobody in the frame! These are relatively good ones, as puppy pics go.

The first few are of Willow and Magic, a cocker spaniel, and they’re taken on the Lokhandwala back road on a monsoon morning. Both Willow and Magic basically turn into blurs when they meet, leaping and jumping around like crazy. It’s a treat to watch, and no easy job taking pictures of them in action while still holding on to Willow’s leash. Willow has this thing she does: she circles the other dog, crouches, barks like crazy (Basset Hounds have a disproportionately loud bark for their size), then leaps forward to kiss (licking is kissing among dogs) the other dog, then leaps away before the other dog can kiss/lick her. Repeat ad infinitum till both dogs are exhausted. Incidentally, there are three cocker spaniels named Magic in our area, so I guess it’s a popular name among cockers, the way ‘Bruno’ seems to proliferate among Labs.

The next few are of Willow and Weed, the retriever-mix puppy that lives in the same building. They’re taken downstairs on one of Willow’s evening ‘walks’. (She much prefers playing with other puppies to walking in the evenings. Walking is for mornings.) And the rest are all of Weed and Willow on one of Weed’s visit to our place. They get up to a bit of mischief, and Weed harasses the life out of Willow at time. She’s so sweet, she rolls over on her back and lets him dominate her, which is not always a good thing with male playmates, for reasons obvious to anyone who’s owned a female dog in heat.

But Weed is a sweetheart, even if he is a typically dominating male alpha dog (you can delete the ‘dog’ and the rest would apply to most Indian males, present company excluded). I call him ‘Weedu Weenod Chopra’ for that reason. I won’t be surprised if he tries to get his crap nominated for an Oscar. (!) :~)

The last few are pics of Willow in the municipal ‘garden’ opposite our building, which is water-logged with rain puddles and hugely overgrown grass (way above my head in some patches). The black dog is Son of Skid, a stray that lives in the newly constructed building and whom I named SoS because he looks so much like a possible offspring of a black lab that lives in our building (and who’s since been neutered, so can’t procreate more). Of course, I don’t have the results of the DNA paternity test, so maybe he’s not SoS after all, just a good-looking stray. But I wonder…

This review appeared on Abhinav Kishore’s blog and was brought to my attention by Abhinav himself who wrote in to me. As the 16,000th reader to write to me (since 2003), Abhinav receives a free signed copy of one of my books from me.

If you would like to see your review of one of my books featured on Confessions of an Epic Indian, please write in to me on the Readerswrite Page.

Every so often, we hear stories of good triumphing over evil, stories of men and women who inspire us or stories that are beyond the realm of mankind and earth-kind and yet inspire us. But there’s one story that ecompasses all this and more - the epic tale of ramayana.

But what, pray tell, is left to be told of this epic tale that has been narrated time and again in the form of books, teleserials, cartoons and theatre? Nothing ? Thats what I thought till I chanced upon a gem titled “Prince of Ayodhya” by Ashok Banker (published by Penguin). It was first of the collection of 6 books kept in a desolate corner of my institute’s library. Apart from the (highly) abridged version of the Ramayana that I’d studied as part of my school’s Hindi curriculum, I never really had a detailed exposure to this monumental epic. The book looked inviting.. and well.. since it was only one of the 6 books that I’d have to read to get the entire story of Ramayana, I’m sure it must have been pretty inviting for me to actually pick it up and read in between the hectic MBA schedule.

I generally pride myself on my selection of books - I read very little but I’ve thoroughly relished and enjoyed every book that I’ve read. This one didn’t let me down either.

From the very initial pages detailing the source and the history of various versions of Ramayana, Ashok Banker gives you a sense of the richness of the magnum opus that would unfold in the books to follow. The story that has been told and re-told again and again is told YET again.. but this time with the finesse of an artist who lends new colours, vibrancy and imagination to the same old portrait. This is Ramayana like never before - The dialogues, settings and events are realistic enough to teleport you to the Ayodhyan era, the sorcery and the witchcraft is binding enough to keep you glued to the pages and the emotions are touching enough to melt your heart.

My heart skipped a beat when Manthra shot a green flame of light from her forked tongue, it sank when Rama used the Brahma-astra to elimiate the asura forces and it almost stopped beating when Parasuram’s axe touched Rama’s neck only to dissipate concentric circles of sound evergy leaving Rama unscathed !

With every page I turned, there was just one thought that crossed my mind - If this book were to be adapted scene by scene in the form of a movie, won’t it put the likes of ‘The Matrix’, ‘Lord of The Rings’, ‘Spiderman’, ‘Superman’ and ‘Star Wars’ to complete shame? My guess - Yes ! It would !

Till Next Time..

Cheers..

Here’s a neat new online gimmick.

There’s a service called Odiogo that lets you set up a feed for your blog. Once you do that, Odiogo converts all your blog’s new posts into audio mp3 files. The files are read aloud by computerized voice sampling software, so it’s not really a living person reading your posts, just a software program. But they’ve tweaked the settings so the reading sounds pretty decent. It’s a bit weird listening to my own words read aloud by some disembodied American voice software. But it is a pretty neat new way to experience a blog.

You can subscribe to the Odiogo feed to ‘Confessions of an Epic Indian’ in iTunes, Juice, Mail, or any other podcast software of your choice. It’s basically like any podcast or RSS feed.

I’m even thinking of trying it out as a reader for some of my short stories…and who knows, maybe novels too?

Why not?

Click here to subscribe to the Odiogo feed for this blog.

My agent, John Jarrold, has been the biggest help of my writing career. He gives indispensable advice, and knows the industry inside out. He’ll not only help knock a book into shape, but will work hard behind the scenes to make sure an editor is actually keen to read a submission. He’ll even guide me as to making a book more commercial. He understands audience. Then there’s the whole stack of jobs an agent does once you’re lucky enough to get a deal. I don’t want to dick around with contracts and small print, I just want to write the book, and my agent allows me to get on with that. Sure, there are some dodgy agents out there, those that charge spurious reading fees, or some who are plainly not that good at their job; but for the majority of new writers they are the only way of securing a book deal. It always seems to be that tiny percentage of unagented authors who get some publicity, but I think it’s dangerous to begin advising writers that they shouldn’t bother. Agents are a massive reality-check. They’re there to earn money from your talent, which shows huge amount of faith, and it’s wonderful for your peace of mind to have someone believe in your abilities as well as have the knowledge to tackle any problem you might come across.

The quote is from a recent post on Solaris Editor and debut novelist Mark C. Newton’s blog. It’s in response to a post by author-journalist Mark Liam Piggott which appeared on the blog of prestigious UK newspaper The Guardian here. You can also visit the website of publisher Legend Books which accepted and published Piggott’s book here.

So do you?

Need a literary agent?

Well, on one hand, the answer’s clear.

If you want to build a career as a commercial author, sell books over and over again to publishers, and tailor your writing to meet that publisher (and agent’s) assessment of what they feel you should be writing, and generally deliver consistent and paying books that meet a market need…

Yes. You definitely need an agent.

In fact, though the Guardian blog post refers presumably to UK publishing, where some publishers still do consider un-agented work, if you’re looking to be published in the USA, or even by major commercial publishers in the UK, you can’t afford to not have an agent repping you.

Because most publishers today don’t accept un-agented manuscripts.

That is, they will not even look at a manuscript if it’s not sent in by an agent. Ideally, it should be an agent with a good reputation, whom they know personally, and whose judgement they respect. But first and foremost, it should be an agent who sends in the manuscript. Not the author himself.

In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there are no major publishers in the USA who accept un-agented submissions. And the handful of UK publishers who still do, rarely take un-agented subs seriously, and are almost certainly moving towards an ‘agents only’ policy very shortly.

Why is that?

Well. The main reason is the sheer volume of submissions received by such major publishers. Some imprints will receive thousands of manuscripts each year. Simply to read all those ’slush pile’ manuscripts would require more full-time (or part-time) staff than those companies employ right now.

And the sad truth is that almost all those submissions aren’t worth reading, let alone publishing.

Agents, especially the good ones, filter out the publishable manuscripts and authors from the crowd. In fact, these days, it’s so hard to get a good agent, that authors have to submit their work for consideration to agents, and are rarely accepted. Some agents who are known for their success rate, often receive as many manuscripts as publishing houses!

Good agents do several other things: They take care of all the nitty gritty of contracts, collecting advance payments, keeping the relationship between author and editor well-oiled and running smoothly, and most of all, they negotiate far better advances than most authors can manage on their own. In fact, it’s a safe bet to say that agented manuscripts fetch far higher advances than un-agented manuscripts.

On the other hand…

While agents may be necessary, even essential, to get a manuscript read, let alone published, these days, that necessity itself is not always a good thing.

Agents are primarily concerned with earning money.

That means, everything they say or do is geared toward getting their authors bigger advances, more contracts, and bigger advances.

As I said, if you’re looking for a career as a commercial novelist who writes to meet market requirements, or tailors his or her writing to meet those requirements, then you’ll certainly be happy with an agent.

But that also means that agents are driving the publishing business.

Because editors depend on them to pick out publishable manuscripts and authors who are good boys and girls and will continue to deliver what the publisher wants, when they want it, the way they want it, agents are often dictating what’s written–or at the very least, how it’s written.

I’m not just talking about commissioned books. Or franchise novels, media tie-ins, spinoffs, novelizations and other ’sharecrop’ cash-in books that are written-to-order to meet a marketing need.

I’m talking about authors whose entire careers are guided by their agents’ decision-making. Who actually write what their agent suggests they should be writing, or at the very least, put aside manuscripts that the agent doesn’t think they should publish or even submit, and take up projects that the agent feels are more viable.

I’m talking about books that wouldn’t exist if that agent hadn’t said to his or her authors: “So-and-so kind of book is selling, so-and-so is not. You should do something along those lines.”

Is that a bad thing?

Not necessarily.

Earlier, editors had this power. And of course, they still do, except that, with the agent becoming a ‘pre-editor’, and editors themselves finding more and more of their time taken up with other matters such as pitching their books and authors in-house, overseeing the complexities of marketing a book in today’s fiercely competitive publishing arena, and various production and publicity matters, the agent really does wield the scepter of power.

That means that to some extent, or in the case of some authors, a greater extent, agents actually decide what an author should write, how he or she should write it, who should publish it, and how much he or she should get paid for it.

That’s where I would draw a line.

A pencilled line perhaps, and with various caveats and footnotes.

But a line.

Yes, agents can be a good thing, even a necessary thing.

Yes, they can help sell your book, build your career, get you big advances, keep those contracts coming.

But ask yourself this one question: Should that much power be in the hands of a person whose only real goal is to earn a percentage of someone else’s income?

Not a creator of original content.

Not a publisher.

Not an editor.

(Even though many agents are often ex-writers, ex-publishers, ex-editors, or even all three.)

But simply a commission-earner.

Because of course a commission-earner would need to sell manuscripts in order to keep earning that commission.

Would have to sell more manuscripts each passing year, at higher advances, in order to increase his or her income.

Would have to make sure that the authors from whose work he or she earns those commissions keeps writing what sells (to publishers first, readers come into the picture much later, if at all), and that they write it without question or comment, deliver it on time and neatly packaged by commercial standards, and are always smiling and holding out that bowl and saying “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

As I said, if all you want from a writing career is to meet a market need, do it well, and earn well for doing it, you’re very well off with an agent. You will enjoy yourself and have a great time while earning better than you ever could on your own. Besides, you really have no option.

I’m okay with all that.

But the part that worries me more than a little, the part that makes me actually wrinkle my brow, and scratch my balding head, is that so much power is concentrated in the hands of people who don’t actually contribute content in what is essentially a content-driven business.

Perhaps that’s because publishing, especially the commercial, US-led variety of mass market publishing today, isn’t content-driven anymore.

It’s concept-driven.

Pretty packaging.

Big ideas.

Trends.

Genres.

And sub-genres.

And sub-sub-sub-genres.

Media brands.

Celebs.

And other things that sell quicker, better, and bigger than the most beautifully written, elegantly edited, and marvelously published books.

In short, it’s an industry now where individual writers are replaceable and agents are not.

Where publishing lists are slots to be filled by smart agents with willing authors.

Where readers are given more of the same endlessly, till they tire of those groaning shelves of me-too titles and finally move on to another trend or sub-genre, at which point agents quickly jump (carrying their authors under their arms) to fill those slots as well.

It’s a commercial world, and not an entirely bad one. There’s a lot of great entertainment to be had out there. Some truly good literature too.

But it’s not the same as a publishing world driven by authors who write good, even great books, for no other reason than that they feel driven to write those books. Where editors buy those books and publish them because they’re good books. Where marketing departments at publishing companies find a way to sell those good books, not merely demand that they’re given more of what already sells. Where readers can go into stores and find those good books and discover them and enjoy them, even cherish them.

Where individual talent counts for something more than merely a ’style’ to be tweaked and corrected and used as a minor talking point.

Where books are books, not merely commercial products.

To be honest, I don’t have an issue with agents per se. Or even with the commercial side of publishing. I’m all for it in fact.

But I just wish there was an alternative too.

An alternative that was driven by more than just the desire to earn bigger commissions year after year.

An alternate that cared about the 85% percent of the business, rather than that 15%.

And I’m just a little sad that there is no alternative.

This is a slideshow of pics taken by me on one of my early morning walks with Willow on the Lokhandwala Back Road, near where I live.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not an early morning walker. I prefer to go to the gym to get my tri-weekly exercise, and for some reason, my body seems to respond better to resistance training–weight lifting with or without the use of machines–rather than just cardio to stay in shape. Or, well, as much in shape as I am at this point in my life. Which is fit bordering on fat, I guess!

But Willow loves her early morning walks. Well, she loves walks any time of the day. She gets walked at least thrice a day, in a round-robin arrangement between myself, Ayush, Yashka, and our maid. I usually get the early morning walks, and when I say early morning, I mean early.

These pics were taken at around 6:15 am on an August morning. I was actually out from 5:45, dropping Yashka off for her tuitions at Lokhandwala, and then, when Willow and I reached the back road, it was too dark and there were no other ‘friends’ around yet, so we drove for a while, with the windows down and 94.3 FM playing their usual early morning mix of western tracks and the usual Bollywood filmi songs.

The Lokhandwala Back Road is one of the reasons why I love living in this part of Mumbai. It’s very green. There’s a huge mangrove swamp skirting the coast, and even penetrating the land. I have some really cool pics of Willow and me exploring the labyrinthine innards of the mangrove ‘forest’ that’s outlying the back road–pretty creepy area, because there are still jackals roaming around there (though sadly, none of the monkeys, panthers, and wolves that once proliferated in Mumbai) as well as some packs of wild dogs and the area is pretty much a swamp-forest.

The are a LOT of trees on the main back road itself. And everytime we have a storm, which is almost every fortnight or so from mid-July to mid-September, a major branch or even a full tree comes crashing down. The day before these pics were taken, one came down, blocking one side of the road and destroying a Maruti Swift (or so I’m told, the car was gone) but nobody was around to get hurt, thankfully. It took them two days to clear the debris, because it meant cutting the fallen dead wood up into pieces small enough to truck away, and apparently they had only one power saw. So they called in the fire brigade who used axes to help clear the rest.

There was also a police van; oddly enough it was a van belonging to the Crimes Against Women and Senior Citizens task force. I suppose an old tree qualifies as a senior citizen so that makes sense in a way!

There are pics of the remnants of the debris at the end of the slideshow. Mostly they’re just pics of the long empty road, Willow walking. Willow climbing a massive pile of dirt that I think was surreptitiously dumped there by some unscrupulous construction site contractor on the side of the road–it was still there even a week later, so I guess they didn’t have big shovels either–and some of her near the car and in the car sitting in that lovable upright position enjoying the blast from the a/c. And an early morning delivery vendor (neither a doodhwala nor an andawala, and I didn’t see what he was carrying) cycling past. Willow got in a quick lick to his foot as he passed by, which made him wobble with surprise, but he survived. Yenna Rascala, she is!

We did meet many friends that morning, and other mornings, but I’ll post those pics separately.

If there's one documentary that you must watch, it's BBC 2's The Power of Nightmares.

I feel so strongly about it, that after watching it this week, I don't feel ready to write about it just yet. It's that good. It's that important.

If you care about what’s happening in the world today, the so-called “war” against terror, the growing threat to the world from an increasingly belligerent and aggressive American military-industrial complex, you must watch this three-part documentary.

At some point, I will write a longer blog post about it. For now, I’m only going to recommend that you watch it. And watch your understanding of the forces dominating and manipulating world politics expand exponentially in the span of the 2 hours and 45 minutes it takes to watch this brilliantly researched, scripted, and assembled audiovisual non-fiction treatise.

You can click on the Google viewer above to see a short low-res excerpt. I think the whole docu is available on Google and other video hosting sites but I would recommend that you download the whole via bittorrent and watch it at one go.

Get the Mininova torrent of the whole documentary here.

Read the original BBC page announcing the series here.

Read the updated BBC page with news and further developments here.

This page will give you more detailed info about the documentary as well as provide links to a Google Video page that lets you watch the entire docu online.

Caution: Explicit language and powerful sentiments ahead.

When I write, dear reader, I don’t want to build a careful tale for you to discuss with a smile in a sunny place, I want to own you. I don’t want to be The New TV Series, I want to be pornography: to thrill you so hard you’re ashamed but can’t help yourself crawling back for more.

I want to write a whole novel that invades you. I want to control what you think and feel, to put you right there, right then, killing and being killed, fucking and being fucked, cooking and starving, drinking and thinking, barely surviving and absolutely thriving. I want to give you a life you’ve never had, change the one you live.

How? I will take control of your mirror neurons. I will give you tastes and textures, torments and terrain you might never find in your real life. I will take you, sweep you off your feet, own you. For a while. For a while when you’re lost in my book you will be somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

I control the horizontal, I control the vertical. Sit back, relax, enjoy. When you’re done, take a breath, smoke a cigarette, figure out who you are now, and come back for more.

Nicola Griffith is the author of six wonderful, luminous books, at least two of which are among my favourite books of all time. Slow River and Ammonite are science fiction in the way that Ursula K. Le Guin’s work is SF: powerful intense fiction by an author working at the height of her talent to tell a story about characters so real, they’re people, not characters.

If you haven’t read Slow River and Ammonite, or, more likely, haven’t even heard of them till now, I urge you to read them and discover their simple, heart-stopping beauty for yourself.

She has also written three other novels and a memoir, none of which I have read yet. I intend to, soon, and have all four on order.

I’ll read anything by her. Because, like the greatest fiction, she doesn’t hesitate to let her own politics come to the fore in writing. Her sexuality. Her worldview. Her everything.

As the quote above spells out very clearly, she puts everything she is and she has into her writing. When you read Nicola Griffith, you ‘get’ Nicola Griffith. And that pleasure, of meeting a mind, a personality, a person, through the work, is what makes her writing extraordinary for me at least.

Because I believe in the same approach: Throw yourself into your writing, heart, body and soul. And all those other parts too, even the ones we don’t talk about in polite society. Because writing, the best writing, isn’t about being polite. Or about selling copies. Or garnering great reviews.

It’s a meeting of minds. And a writer owes it to the reader to show whatever he or she has at that point in time, through the mirror of that story.

To fire those mirror neurons in a way that causes sentient beings to twitch with empathy.

To feel what you feel, smell what you smell, see through your eyes–which in turn are seeing through the eyes of your characters, our people as I like to call them. To be them, if only for a while. A wonderful, delirious while.

If minds could have sex, it would be called fiction.

And, like Nicola Griffith, I’d like to promise you, my readers, that…

With my next novel, I’m going to run my software on your hardware. You’ve been warned.

Upgrade your hardware. It’s about to be run to max capacity.

Check out Nicola Griffith’s website and blogs here.
Read more about Slow River, Ammonite and her other books here.

War.

Violence.

Bias.

Prejudice.

Racism.

Sexism.

Jingoism.

Fascism.

Capitalism.

May we forge our own identity from our own materials and using our own talent, to prove to the world that one of the greatest nations is indeed one of the greatest nations.

That’s if we have to play this ‘nation’ game at all. Personally, I think we’re all (obviously) one nation, not just all countries, races, religions, creeds, colours, sexes, but all things animate and inanimate. Part of one glorious world, universe, creation, call it what you will. Existence.

And we’re all one.

These beautiful words from the great Rabindranath Tagore have always inspired and moved me:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

And here’s a quote (or a quip) from me, made up specially for the occasion. Forget flag-waving and nationalism. Let’s wish for the real thing. An India of the people, by the people, for the people…

JANATA UUNCHA RAHEIN HAMARA!”

Most of our laws, including the outdated draconian Indian Penal Code are the legacy of the British “Empire”. Some years ago, I was rereading Kautilya’s Arthashastra as part of my ongoing research for my Epic India series, and was struck by how logical and common sensical much of it was, although it was clearly relevant to those times rather than today. On an impulse, I looked up my copy of the Indian Penal Code and tried to compare sections. I was nonplussed to find that the IPC was often completely arbitrary, irrational and often quite vague in its phrasing.

The reason is simple: Kautilya, or Chanakya as most of us now prefer to call him, was a man of genius who had a simple, direct, no-nonsense vision of united India, a peaceful, cohesive, crime-free India of the future. He cared about the country, the people, and about its prosperity.

The British, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn what happened here after they were gone. Everything they did was primarily to enable them to “rule” more effectively, keep the ‘bloody natives’ under control, and to milk this rich sub-continent for all the profit they could suck out of it. Their laws were not just draconian, they were deliberately kept vague in order to leave room for their judges, who were always of the aristocratic ruling class, to pass their own judgements based on what was expedient at that moment. In short, they created a bureaucratic and judicial system that was less concerned with justice, as Chanakya had been in an earlier age, and more with keeping power in their hands and out of the hands of the lower classes and Indians.

Section 377 of the IPC is one such terrible, unfair, imbalanced, and biased law. The law criminalizes private consensual sexual acts deemed to be against the order of nature.

I quote verbatim from the law:

377. Unnatural Offences.
Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

Note that this is not merely a law against homosexuality but even against sex between man and woman that happens to be “against the order of nature”. But what does that mean? What is “against the order of nature”? I’m a straight man with a single life partner. But I strongly and staunchly support the right of any individual to live life freely and without the state telling them how to live or not to live. I’m against policing of all kinds, be it by the police, moral police or even the media police of today’s celeb-obsessed times.

Section 377 is in itself a law against the order of nature. Its vague, generalized phrasing puts far too much power of interpretation into the hands of the judicial system, the legal system, and the police. It is frequently and repeatedly misused to punish the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and in fact, has no place or relevance at all, except as a quotation frame in a museum as a reminder of how the British once invaded us under the guise of trade and stayed on to establish an unjust, unfair, and ruthlessly exploitative oppressive regime.

Recently, even the courts have begun condemning the law. People of all walks of life have been speaking out against it. Contemporary historians and scholars have been working to reveal the iniquities in the IPC as well as the efforts of their predecessors to suppress and cover up British atrocities and oppression across the Empire. Many have commented on how such laws were in fact meant to curb their own British officers from engaging in illicit liaisons with locals, since by their standards, for a white British man or woman to engage even in consensual sex with an Indian (or any other race) was in itself against nature. And of course, the notorious British upper class predilection for “buggering” helpless little Indian children.

This is a law that is against the very spirit of the law.

It’s time we flushed these outdated vestiges of British rule out of our body politic.

One small way to do so is the Open Letter against 377. Read it and sign it if you like. I just did.

I really like this online comic. The art, the colours, the writing…oh, man, I love online seqart. (That’s my crunchification of ’sequential art’. And yes, crunchification is a technical term.) It’s the first online comic at the terrific new Tor.com website, about which I’ll post separately soon. Click here to start reading The Leviathan at Tor.com(Pages take a while to load but they’re worth it.)

I love this book trailer created by author Alethea Kontis for her new book, Beauty & Dynamite. I also love the idea of book trailers and the fact that they empower authors to communicate things they’d like to communicate about their books in a new and innovative medium, using images, music, words in almost any way they like. And what I like most about the medium is the fact that, unlike conventional advertising, which is thrust upon us, internet book trailers have to be clicked on to be viewed. So in a way, the medium empowers the viewer as well.

This particular book trailer is simple: everything is communicated through the use of music and title cards. It reminds me of a favourite song that is not a song, Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Sunscreen’. Which not only I, but both my teenage kids love to death–it used to be their favourite song request on long car drives when they were younger. I think they also loved the part where the song within the song goes, “Brothers & Sisters, together forever…” This book trailer has the same way of touching on the simplest, most beautiful things in life, and reminding us of the things we love, and why we love them. And that, in my book, is something to live by.

And like all really good advertising, it’s a thing unto itself: Whether or not I buy and read the book, I love the book trailer. Though, after reading more about the book and the author (who happens to be a “friend” on Facebook which is how I got to know about the trailer) I just might pick it up after all. It’s a book of essays, and I’d like to spend some more time with the mind that created such a heart-felt yet simple book trailer.

Read more about Alethea Kontis here.
Check out Beauty & Dynamite here

This is an editorial page essay by me that appeared in The Times of India in 2006. I thought it appropriate to reproduce it here in its entirely (un-edited, and exactly as it appeared) in the context of my recent posts on Racism and Cultural Bias in American SFF publishing. You can also find the essay on TOI’s website.

Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make it disappear. Nor will cleverly couching it in cultural sophistry and erudition, as Harold Bloom does. Browbeating those of us who have experienced it first-hand won’t make us shut up either.

Bias, prejudice, discrimination. It’s a problem faced by Indian English authors today that is almost never talked about. Often the discrimination begins with the very classification of the work as ‘Indian English writing’. Notice how effectively that shunts such authors into a minority with ethnic overtones?

It’s the old ‘divide and conquer’ mindset still persisting. While we might ourselves use the term ‘Indian English’ to distinguish English-language writing from other Indian languages, foreign publishers and media often use it as a means of subtly implying that this body of work is separate from the mainstream of Euro-American literature.

Are white European authors or American authors referred to by their original ethnicity? Rarely. Yet even the Jhumpa Lahiris, Zadie Smiths, Hari Kunzrus, Salman Rushdies, et al, of the literary world are invariably pegged into the post-colonial slot.

We’re not unique in this segregationist name-calling. Other cultural minorities serve the same cracker master just as well: African American literature, Native American writing, Asian literature.

It would take a truly geographically challenged mindset to call Kerala born-and Delhi-resident Arundhati Roy an ‘East Indian writer’. Yet, the term has been used to describe her more than once.

Shashi Deshpande has often decried the doubly-damnable label attached to her work ‘Indian English woman writer’. As if the literary merit of a work varies according to the sex and nationality of an author! A brave few refuse to be cowed down by this covert pogrom of bias.

Amitav Ghosh delivered an impassioned rejection of the Commonwealth Prize for Literature when he was declared the Eurasia region winner in 2001: “So far as I can determine, The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it is written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain.”

He ended by saying: “I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialisation of Empire that passes under the rubric of the Commonwealth.” Not all authors are as quick to condemn the problems of being ghettoised by our former Imperial masters.

Sri Lankan writer Mary Anne Mohanraj commented online that while the interest shown in Indian subcontinental writing by British publishers and the media is often largely due to our former colonial relationship, yet this legacy, and the subsequent interest, is “often grounded in good intentions in some hearts”.

She adds quickly, “though certainly not all”. Others may ask whether we can honestly escape the legacy of history at all? Ghosh certainly thinks so, as do I.

But try telling that to American publishers, whose interest in Indian English authors is often blatantly restricted to books that serve up a suitably exoticised version of the India they want to read about.

In this context, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games is a welcome arrival, heralding, we hope, a more mature publishing perspective wherein we are read by American readers not for our jungle dreams and themes, but for our realistic literature as well.

We need to re-examine our attitudes with regard to our own writers and their place in the context of a changing multi-cultural world that is becoming increasingly globalised even while it clings fiercely to its ethnic roots.

Until we’re willing to acknowledge that the problem itself exists - as Amitav Ghosh did so boldly and forthrightly - we’ll all remain victims of this hangover of what Nobel winner JM Coetzee aptly calls ‘the slave-trading colonial mentality.’

I haven’t read Enchantress of Florence yet. To be quite honest, I’m not particularly a Salman Rushdie fan. Although I’ve read and enjoyed a few of his books–I loved The Ground Beneath Her Feet, liked the bits of Midnight’s Children that I was able to read over the years, and was blown away by the sheer imaginative vigour of his writing in The Satanic Verses–I don’t share the ‘God’ complex that most critics and readers suffer from with regard to his work. But I always find the man himself engaging and worth watching or reading.

In this two-part interview with my favourite interviewer, Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column, I delighted in the sparkling wit and repartee of Rushdie. To put it mildly, he had the audience in splits. This is something most people often overlook, the mischief and wit of the man. It’s very much on display in these very enjoyable interviews, and whether or not you’ve read Rushdie before, you simply must listen to them. It’s rare to find an author of such stature so relaxed, self-assured, and secure in his own intellect to speak so candidly about himself, his career, his work, religion, and a variety of topics.

It’s the best audio interview of Rushdie I’ve ever come across. Do give it a listen.

Click here to listen to Part I of Rick Kleffel’s interview with Salman Rushdie
Right-click to download the mp3 file
Click here to listen to Part II of Rick Kleffel’s interview with Salman Rushdie
Or right-click to download the mp3 file

This is a series of pictures I took on my last trip to Kolkata. They feature the entire series of displays of the Mahabharata section at the Kolkata Doll Museum. These are a series of glass-fronted installations that retell the main highlights of the story of the Mahabharata through dolls. Isn’t that a lovely idea? There are captions on the wall outside to explain each installation.

The pictures are taken by me using available light and a flash, with a whole horde of schoolkids swarming around, people getting in the way, and the general chaos of any public museum. They’re not great quality, but they’re decent enough to get a sense of the displays.

Got me thinking…what if someone attempted a puppet-show Mahabharata along the lines of old TV shows like Fireball XL5 (loved that one)? I think it would be a pretty cool show to watch!

Meanwhile, enjoy the show. It’s in 3 parts. You can watch each one in the mini-flash browsers or you can click through to see the slides in full-res on the Slide.com website. You can also use the - ” and + buttons to slow down, pause or speed up the slide show.

Feel free to share the slideshows anywhere or anyhow you like. Just remember to credit me for the pictures!

This is Part I. Will upload II & III over the next couple of days.

After proving that Papa knows best, with the success of both the recent Hulk remake and the huge hit that was Iron Man coming out of its newly formed Marvel Studios, parent company Marvel continues its spree of creative abandon with a comical new project…chimp versions of some of its most famous super-heroes.

That’s a nice twist in the tail!

Any resemblance to real American leaders (we can hardly call them ‘heroes’) is purely coincidental.

(Which rhymes with “genetic”.)

Read more about it at CBR, the Comic Book Resources website.

Lol.

An indispensable resource for the acquisition of valuable (but free) globospherical data on the confabulations of 2 legged creatures with hilariously pointless existences. Worldwide cross-platform rights just acquired by Sony Pictures.