Introducing Tender Leaves

[Here's what I've been up to for the last few months. Pliss to pass on to your Pune based friends.]

Tender Leaves

It’s more than just a library

Introducing Tender Leaves – a unique book rental service that delivers books to your offices. What’s more - you can read at your own pace. There are no due dates, no late fees.

Books for You. Delivered to You.

Hand-picked recommendations and must-read lists to help you choose from thousands of books in English and Telugu across 43 categories. Based on your wishlist, books will be delivered at your office, Monday to Friday. When you are done reading, you can return the books by dropping them in the drop-box at your office. As soon as your books are received, your next shipment of books gets automatically scheduled.

With a combined experience of over 20 years, the founders B V Harish Kumar and Sudarshan Purohit have worked in IT companies like Persistent Systems, Infosys, BMC Software and Intuit. Sudarshan has also translated Hindi pulp fiction novels into English. Their passion for books brought them together.

Libraries were never so convenient and cool

• Free Delivery of books all over Pune
• No Due Dates. No Late Fees
• Thousands of books in English and Telugu (Hindi, Marathi and Bengali coming soon)
• Reviews and Ratings to help you choose books
• Win badges and goodies for reading
• Choose a subscription plan that suits you best
• Plans starting at Rs. 200/- per month. Attractive discounts on half-yearly and annual plans.
  
• Secure online payment using CCAvenue – India’s leading payment gateway. Or pay by cheque.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up Now!

P.S. Do remember to use the promo code FIRST100 to avail a discount of Rs. 400/- on all half-yearly and annual plans.

What the cyclist did

[This is the unedited version of my review of The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules, by Manohar Shyam Joshi , published a few days back in Deccan Herald. They changed the title to "A man's gradual descent into insanity". I think I like my title better :) ]


What the cyclist did

It takes a while for you to realize that there’s no one narrator in The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules. The narrator of the story is the collective we, the entire clan that Hariya belongs to, the family who talks about him and the events surrounding him. There is no truth, no untruth, nothing marked believable or incredible – all you hear is what the family talks about and how it interprets what it knows. The whole cacophony of the family is captured here – the superstitious uncle, the greedy, alcoholic nephew, the doctor in the family, the press reporter cousin, the know-it-all teenager.

The plot is simple on the surface, but difficult to categorize. Harihar Dutt Tiwari, better known as Hariya Hercules, lives with and cares for his paralyzed, blind father, “Rai Saip” Girvan Dutt Tiwari. It’s a miserable life – Rai Saip is temperamental and difficult to care for, and Hariya has a low-paying job. Their social life consists of Hariya cycling over to relatives’ homes on weekends on his Hercules bicycle (hence the nickname), reporting about his father’s health to them in excruciating detail (“Today I couldn’t get all [his shit] out even with my hand.”), and getting updates from them to report back. When his father dies suddenly, Hariya looks through his belongings and finds evidence of his father getting “cursed” by a priest. He decides to set off to find this priest and temple, and never returns. An aunt who accompanied him reports a strange sequence of events that transpired, which don’t exactly match other witnesses’ versions.
But this is only the basic plot. Hariya’s story can be looked at as a man’s gradual descent into insanity. Or it’s a spiritual tale revolving around a curse. Or it could be about a simpleton bilked by greedy relatives. It all depends on who in the family is telling the story. And the family itself recognizes the multitude of meanings, and is conscious that it should select the version that makes it feel good about itself. In the broader sense, the story is about how a family creates and assimilates its own folklore.

Joshi has given us a family that talks sort of like ours, but still has that little strangeness to it. The modes of address are different – “Ija”, “Kainja”, “Bhinju”. It is some time before we figure out that this is a Kumaoni family, with their own dialect. One feels sort of like a non-Hindi speaker reading a book with the normal Hindi addresses – “Chacha”, “Bapu”, etc. – we have the same experience when we read it as Indians of a different community.

It’s also nice to see that there’s no glossary or other attempt to translate the unfamiliar words into English – whatever you understand, you understand through context. There’s also no attempt to use exotic or unfamiliar words in the translation just because it’s an Indian book. The language comes across as very earthy and day-to-day, the rhythms of Hindi are captured and made to feel a part of the English text.

Manohar Shyam Joshi is probably best known as the writer of the TV serial Hum Log. I was too young to appreciate the serial when it first aired, but this book demonstrates anew that Joshi knew how Indian families behave, and I felt an urge to go back and watch the serial. The brief introduction to Joshi’s other books on the flap reveals a very interesting repertoire. This, perhaps, is the biggest success of this book – introducing the English reader to a multi-faceted literary personality and making him want to read more.

Press Coverage part 3, and some random thoughts

As you'd expect from a nerd like me, I've been googling for "65 lakh heist" three times a day for the past month. Which has shown me a few interesting things. First, that the number of results changes every hour or so. Doesn't necessarily go up, though. There seem to be websites that just aggregate all possible search terms and populate junk pages with them, and Google finds them a couple of times and then somehow removes them from search results. So you see 712 results now, and 715 results in an hour, and back to 690 the next morning. Fortunately, Google removes most of these dummy results so you don't have to wade through them.

The same sort of situation happens for book sales in the real world. My info on whether the book is doing well comes from Blaft, who get it from their distributors, who get it from... dunno, bookshops and regional offices and whatnot. So I still don't know whether or not the book's doing well enough. Oh well. At least all the reviews so far have been positive.

Speaking of which:

Chandrahas Choudhary wrote a glowing review of the book for Mint, and also posted it on his blog, The Middle Stage. The same post also became the first syndicated column of his that featured on Ultrabrown. Going by Google results, this dude is (justly) awesomely popular - more than half of the genuine results of my daily search are folks who list him on their blogroll, and so have a link to his review on one side of their blog.

Ullah Faiz, over at the UTVi site, writes a post in which he reviews both Daniyal Mueenuddin and 65 Lakh Heist. Good to hear 65 Lakh Heist get mentioned in the same breath as the newest literary sensation :).

The Global Post is an American agency that runs a website featuring articles by independent reporters. Several of these articles get syndicated by mainstream media. Mark Scheffler posts a video interview and short article on Global Post featuring Pathak ji reading from the book, and also comparing his writing to toothbrushes and pizzas (?).

The Global Post article makes its way to the blog of The Complete Review, a world literature site.

Besides all these, Blaft takes an interview of Surender Mohan Pathak himself, recording a long video, and turning it into a proper interview on YouTube. Watch this one!

Sridhar Raghavan, yes, *the* Sridhar Raghavan, mentions The 65 Lakh Heist as his most recently read book in an interview with Tehelka magazine. Hope he passes it on to Anurag Kashyap too...

There's one more interesting development. Deccan Herald asked me to write something about pulp fiction last week, which got published in their Sunday edition. Will post the text of that article in a separate post.

Now if only I could figure out how the book itself is doing!

Invitation to a Reading

Here's where I'll be this Friday:

From 65lh

If you'd like to come, let me know. It should be interesting!

The 65 Lakh Heist: Press Coverage, Part 2

A few more newspapers/mags have mentioned The 65 Lakh Heist over the past month. Here's a summary.

First, a couple of online-only links: BusinessWorld has a nice long review of the book on their web site. The reason they gave for not printing it in the mag itself is that we sent the book to them too late (?).

My friend George Thomas has talked about the book on his blog, here. Thanks, dude!

On to print mentions: Indian Express and Screen both carried the same story about Blaft, with some mentions of the book. The Screen story is here.

Timeout, all three Indian editions of it, carry a review of the book in their 3rd April edition. Here's the link to the Bangalore site.

For some reason, The Hindu's Trivandrum edition features the book in it's weekly reading list in its 12th March edition. Waiting for the remaining editions of the paper to pick it up.

Finally, one offline-only mention: Time Asia, THE Time Asia, has mentioned The 65 Lakh Heist as one of '5 Picks of the Week' in it's March 23 edition. Other picks are a Wong-Kar Wai movie and Eminem's newest album. Interesting company! :)

The 65 Lakh Heist: Press Coverage

I woke up yesterday, the 1st of March, at 7 AM, and bounded to the front door to check out the newspaper. Rifled through it, didn't find what I was looking for. Tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. Decided to check my mail.
There it was - a mail from a friend with links. The articles had been published in the Indian Express (which doesn't get to Bangalore), and the Delhi edition of Times of India (and not any other edition). So, one way or another, no one in Bangalore knew of any of this. Oh well.

But the Indian Express had a nice huge article, in all its editions. The link I got: http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2009/03/01/index.shtml . Scroll down about halfway through the right-hand list of pages, click on the page labelled "The Word". There you go. And in case you want to read the actual text: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pulping-hot/428885/0 .

The Delhi ToI had a smaller article, more focused on Pathak himself, and on the experience of reading Hindi pulp. The epaper version is at http://epaper.timesofindia.com . Select the date as March 01, and go to page 10. The article is on the lower right side. If you just want the text : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-4206344,prtpage-1.cms .

Stay tuned for more self-congratulatory lists of links :).

At Kala Ghoda

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is, I'm told, a great place to hang out, see stuff and meet people. As a direct consequence of The Sixty-five Lakh Heist, and the discussions around it, I've been invited to participate in a panel discussion there. Yes, me, of all people. There are some very interesting folks on the panel, and Jerry Pinto is moderating.

One thing that should interest folks is that we'll be playing a short set of excerpts from an interview with Surender Mohan Pathak during this panel. There'll also be some talk about pulp covers in Hindi, Tamil and others.

In short, if you're in Mumbai on the 9th Feb, make sure you make it to the David Sassoon Library, by 8:30 PM. Would be nice to have someone in the audience who knows me, too ;).

Though it's not final and requires a bit of touch up, here's the cover page of the most important book of the year (as far as I'm concerned, anyway):



Painsath Lakh ki Dakaiti was a landmark in Hindi pulp fiction, when it first appeared several decades ago. It's been reprinted 15 times by 7 different publishers, and has sold more than 3 Lakh copies. It kickstarted a new genre in Hindi pulp thrillers - a hero who is a wanted felon, who's broken out of jail and continues to commit crimes.

And the cover above is of the translated English version, published by Blaft, coming out by the end of Feb.

Okay, so why is this the most important book of the year for me?

Forunately for me, the folks at Tehelka magazine have published the answer on their site, saving me the trouble. See for yourself.

So now I'm famous, apparently :)

[Part 1 of the Whole Story of how I came to doing this.

A few months back, I wrote this post on my blog, describing a book I picked up on impulse and loved. Towards the end, I wondered why no one tried a similar project for Hindi pulp. The question was prompted by a rather selfish motive - I'd seen these pulp books since childhood, and even read one or two by Colonel Ranjit - but had never had the courage to jump in. My reading speed in Hindi, anyway, was much less than English, and my vocabulary wasn't that great. It would nice to have someone find out about the Hindi pulps, especially the ones that had attracted my attention from the beginning - the detective novels and the horror and fantasy books, choose the best of the lot and translate them for me to read.

Rakesh Khanna of Blaft responded to my post almost immediately (see the comments on that old post). Was I interested in taking up such a translation project?

I was really taken aback. But thinking over it, it seemed like a god sent opportunity. I'd done some translation from Hindi to English for movie subtitles before, and had even helped my mother with Gujarati to Hindi translations. If interest in the books counted as a criterion, I was definitely the best guy for the job. I said yes.

The first chance I got, I went down to the Bangalore Railway station, and the bus stand next to it, to try and find some Hindi pulp to look over. Would you believe there's not a single shop in all of Bangalore that sells the stuff? It's either Kannada or English. Not enough readers to justify selling Hindi, apparently, though there are a couple of shops that sell serious Hindi literature.
I called up my relatives in Pune, Mumbai, Indore, Delhi to see if they could look up and send me some books. At the same time, I made another discovery - Surender Mohan Pathak has a fan club on Orkut! I joined the club and asked folks about which of his books were good and so on.

By then, I'd gotten a few books from folks in better-placed cities - one each of Surender Mohan Pathak, Ved Prakash Sharma, and Raj Bharati. Reading them through convinced me that Surender Mohan Pathak was the best of the three for a translation project. I also managed to get 'best-of' book lists from the Orkut group, from which I selected one good candidate to start with.

This was 'Painsath Lakh ki Dakaiti'.

Deciding that this would make a good translation was one thing. Actually figuring out what to do next, and how to start, was another thing entirely. How do I know whether I can do this? How do publishing rights for translations work? Would Pathak be interested in letting me do this? How do I get to him?

[The saga continues... wait for the next part, to be posted whenever my boss isn't around the office :) ]

It's become very rare in recent times for me to see a book I haven't heard of before and buy it - if I see a new book, I prefer to go back to the net, read reviews, ponder over it for a bit, then decide whether it's worth it.

A couple of weeks, back, though, I bought a book - first-hand - that I hadn't heard of before. Not only was the book new, I'd never heard of the publisher either. This book was The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.



This was a translated collection of stories and novellas by popular 'pulp' writers in Tamil, along with reproductions of book covers and some Q&A sessions answered by these same popular writers. Genres included romance, sci-fi, thrillers, and lots of detective fiction. But what sold me at first sight was the blurb on the back cover:

MAD SCIENTISTS!
HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES!
VENGEFUL GODDESSES!
MURDEROUS ROBOTS!
SCANDALOUS STARLETS!
DRUG-FUELED LOVE AFFAIRS!

Who wouldn't want to buy a book like that? :)

I bought it and devoured the book in about 4 days. The stories are fairly good, though necessarily short and abruptly-ended. The whole thing leaves you wanting more - if only Blaft would publish full-length novels by these guys, showcasing their skill better. I for one would jump to buy anything by Indra Sounder Rajan or Pattukkottai Prabakar, based on their plotlines and genres as revealed by this book.

The translation is all done by one person, Pritham Chakravarthy, which means that while the quality is good, there's a sense of sameness around the stories, as if they were all written by one person. Not that there's anything wrong with that person - quirks of Tamil street language do come through. Did you know that 'Nashik Paper' is Tamil slang for money, because the Indian current printing press is in Nashik?

In an ideal world, this would be the beginning of a trend. Why do the Indian translation publishers (Katha and their ilk) focus on the literary fiction alone? How many more copies would they sell, and how many more people would be interested, in reading fun, fast, quirky stuff like this? Every reader of Indian-language fiction I know reads a lot of pulp stuff - whether as serialized novels in newspapers, or stories in Manohar Kahaniyan, or even the actual pulp-paper printed Surendra Mohan Pathak books - vastly more than they read serious lit stuff. It's true for *every* Indian language, not just Hindi or Tamil.

Blaft, here's a deal - if you'll publish more translated pulp fiction, I'll be first in line to buy it. If it's in affordable editions, I'll even get copies for my friends. Heck, if you're interested, I'll even join in and translate Hindi pulp for you - how's that?