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 :)

Have you heard of Surender Mohan Pathak? Perhaps you've seen his name at Railway Station book stalls, the way I've been seeing since childhood. But here are ten things I hadn't known about him until a few months ago.

1. He writes about 4 novels a year. For each of these, he gets about 4 lakh rupees for the initial print run.

2. He's been writing since 1959. His first story, 57 Saal Purana Aadmi (The 57-year-old man), was published then. And his first novel, Operation Budapest, was published in 1969.

3. So far he's written 268 novels. The last was a murder mystery named Jaal, starring his popular press reporter character, Sunil Chakraborti. The book had the current economic downturn as a backdrop element.

4. The average print run of the first editions of his books is one lakh. That is, one lakh copies of each of his books are printed on first release.

5. Though Pathak had written about 50 books before he hit big time, his first claim to fame were translated versions of James Hadley Chase novels. Pathak's writing style - crisp, detail-oriented, and fast-paced - suited these books so well that other publishers began marketing their own versions of Chase in Hindi with his name on the cover as translator. Pathak took about 3 or 4 days to do each book during his free time in his office at a Telephone company.

6. Along with translating the Chase books, Pathak also translated Ian Fleming's James Bond books. Having done that, he wrote his own series of James Bond novels!

7. His 'Vimal' series of books, beginning in the 70s, was the first in Hindi pulp to feature a Sikh hero. The success of this series prompted many imitations, none of which did as well. Many fans consider this series, which has 38 books so far, as his best so far.

8. Pathak was the inventor of the word 'Company', as used to describe an underworld organization, in his Vimal series of books. So, the 'D Company' owes it's name to him.

9. Looking for a closure to the Vimal series, Pathak at one point killed off his wife to trigger a final confrontation. The public outcry at this was so huge that Pathak was forced to resurrect her. The method he used to do so was suggested by a fan in an impassioned letter to him - a double role. :)

10. Hindi pulp books get published on cheapo, thick, newsprint paper. Considering Pathak's popularity, his publisher, in 2008, decided to print his works on good quality white paper, with a higher price for the book. Popular opinion in the publishing industry was against this move since the market is deemed to be very price sensitive. However, Pathak's first book on white paper, Midnight Club , sold as well as if not better than the older versions. The plan now is to reprint the best of his work on white paper as collector's editions.

11. Yes, a bonus fact : In 2006, a young man named Sandeep Bhatnagar pretended to be a human bomb in order to loot a branch of UTI Bank. He was caught, and confessed that he'd picked up the plan from Zameer ka Qaidi, a book by Surender Mohan Pathak. "He probably hadn't read the whole book," Pathak told us(*) later, "Or he'd have known that the guy trying it gets caught in the book too."

(*) Who's us? Wait for the next post!

[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 :) ]

Like most other things, it takes a while to polish one's responses to the standard questions: What do you do? Where are you from? What are your hobbies? Moving to a new company in Bangalore has forced me into creating simple, one-liner answers to these questions, even if not totally accurate.

For instance, when someone asks me what my hobbies are, my standard reply is, "I'm interested in everything except sports and politics."

I had someone ask me last week about it: It's a good thing, isn't it, to be so enthu about everything? Must be fun!

After thinking over it for a while, I have an answer to that: I don't know. At least, it isn't fun in the way you think it is. Here's what I went through when I was reading the newspaper - the leisure section - yesterday morning. My thoughts are in italics.

The back page has an article about Prince... they talk about his new album being a worthy successor to When Doves Cry and among his good stuff. Haven't heard Doves properly - I need to hear it. There's an article about Van Morrison performing Astral Weeks live somewhere. Aargh, haven't heard that either - I've heard nothing but Brown Eyed Girl.... The books page talks of a new collection by Arun Kolatkar. I need to get Jejuri soon and read it. Also this new one, The Boatride. And he mentions Nissim Ezekiel.. When am I going to start reading that collected poems set of his?

On to the movies section, and I go nuts. Wong Kar-Wai! I need to watch more of his stuff. Oh boy, how can I miss The Eiger Sanction? Clint Eastwood! Oh, Yojimbo's based on Red Harvest... I need to read more Hammett. Apparently, N.N. Kakkad was a big poet in Malayalam who combined tantric tradition and a modern sensibility. I need to find out about this guy.

On to the next page. Chettinad looks like a lovely place to visit. So does Mangalore. Wow, Skiiing at Auli. When can we go? Man, they're doing amazing stuff with resorts in Rajasthan - more heritage resorts! Do they serve Daal-Baati as well?

Wow, two new restaurants in Bangalore! Oh, one is all kebabs, so no point in going. But this other place serves stuff I don't know about! What are we doing next weekend?

And on and on - All that was only from one newspaper. It goes on all the time. The more you're interested in, the more you have left to do. There's no way to catch up and all you can do it to keep running, keep experiencing.

Doesn't mean I'd give any of this up, of course :).

Several things got together over the past year or so, to push me towards reading more Hindi. It started with me buying a bunch of novels by Vrindavanlal Varma about 2 years back, but it really snowballed into a huge thing about 4 months back, when I picked up some thrillers by Surender Mohan Pathak in response to a discussion with friends. From there it went to several other pulp writers, and thence to poetry by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. And now the situation is that I hardly get the time to read anything in English.

It's turned out to be easier than expected. My Hindi reading speed was faster than the average thirtyish software yuppie anyway because we've been taking a Hindi newspaper at home for a long time and I used to follow at least the jokes and corny articles in it regularly. But it's taken barely ten books to get to a sustainable sort of reading speed, enough to follow the story while picking up the vocabulary where required. I would seriously think of reading a Hindi book now for pleasure, something I couldn't have dreamed of only 6 months back.

So does it feel any different? Reading Dinkar and Vrindavanlal Varma takes me back to my school days when we had excerpts of poems and stories in our text books. Some parts strike chords, some have nice wordplay or descriptions. They're nice reads, yes. The Dinkar poetry is especially nice at times.

But it's been the pulp stuff that has really hammered home that this is *my* language, with bits that ring true and that use words that I would never identify with in an English book. There's this line in a book : Woh chaar gilaas aur lota bhar ke paani le kar aaya. Meaning, he brought over four glasses and a lota full of water. I can't think of any exact english word for lota. And more importantly, I don't want to. When I sat down to dinner with my family, we used a lota to drink water out of. There are a dozen places in my life where I've used this vessel. [Please, I know what you are going to think at this point. Let's stick to the topic. Thank you.] Calling it a jug takes away all those associations.

There are dozens of other minor things in the books. What I'm trying to say is that for a guy who's grown up in India and who speaks Hindi as his mother tongue, good fiction in Hindi is going to have a resonance that no other language can have. Replace Hindi with your mother tongue if it's different. You can relate to the places, incidents, people, descriptions, in a way that you simply cannot, with Sidney Sheldon or Dan Brown or any of the English stuff. I'd say that even Indian writers, writing in English about folks in India, cannot give you the feel that Hindi can.

It's well worth the effort to practice reading in it, to pick up books that look interesting - not necessarily very difficult works - and struggle through the first few. It's only the beginning that's difficult. But the rewards are worth it. Try kar ke dekho...

A few more small Bangalore experiences...
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"Corporates" are a different kind of creature here. Our team went to play Paintball a few weeks back, and the instructor was telling us, "these guns have been modified to fire with a little less force, because we have mostly corporates here as customers, and they don't like it when it hurts." Every hotel worth its salt (excuse the pun) has "special offers for corporate parties." When we - my office gang - go to a movie, we're offered special "corporate packages". All these are basically offers for people who are on expense account but must not be asked to take any pains or suffer the tiniest discomfort. Something tells me investment bankers were the first 'corporates', before us IT folks went that way.

---------

Went to a lovely Udupi place called Mahalaxmi Tiffin Room over the weekend. It's close to National College, in the Basavanagudi area, in case you're interested. They serve something called a Kali Dosa, which is worth going all that way for. There's no menu and no billboard, so the only way one would know they serve it (the way I did), is if a local resident has raved about it to one (the way my boss did, to me). Go there, enjoy it.

On a related note, my wife's now mortally terrified of going to Mavalli Tiffin Room - the famous MTR - because, get this, they have food that's TOO delicious. After a recent excursion at lunch time, her exact words were, "Badhiya khaana khilaa khilaa kar maartey hai yeh log. Ban kar dena chaahiye inhey." it was just coincidence that they happened to be serving both Pongal and Bisibelebath in that same meal - each of these are dishes my wife usually eats as a complete meal.

Somehow a lot of people who don't belong to Bangalore - Delhiites, Puneites, Mumbaikars - have zero interest in going to these traditional parts of the city. Part of the story is that most new-generation types aren't interested in the traditional parts of their own cities, either. Finding your way around the old city anywhere can be quite a chore. But I think it's also to do with the Americanization of the average IT guy in Bangalore - he's even less likely to be interested in going into tiny places full of lungi-clad uncles eating dosas. Comments?

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The one item that comes into discussion every single day, in 90% of the conversations with friends and coworkers, is buying a house. Several times I'm the one bringing up the topic. Even though committing to paying a huge loan for years on end gives me the jitters, somehow I can't get the inevitable step out of my head. It's made worse because all my colleagues who shifted to Bangalore in recent times are searching for places to buy - some of them have houses in their own places, but they've looking here, too, either as investment or just to have another base. Perhaps it's part of the Bangalore effect.

So I'm reading this book in the cab as I ride to work, and the bookmark I use is something I got from Landmark, with an ad for a social networking site on one side. The ad shows messages from three hip, young folks :

Jay: Hey! Nice book u r reading.

Saurabh: How would u rate dis book?

Priyanka: Can I borrow it after u r done?

The language they use, however, along with the fashion sense they display in their photos, (along with the reactions of my colleagues to the book) makes me think they would really not want to read the book I'm reading: Sanchayita, a selection of poetry by Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar'. :)

PS. My blog feels kind of dirty for having SMS lingo on it, even in passing...

By now my wife's fairly used to my smartassery. She's also seen some of my pigheadedness when chasing an idea. What she finds hard to handle is those two qualities together.
Consider last night.
My body was aching from an exercise session and we'd decided to go to bed early. My wife was reading a book while I tried to go to sleep. As is usual in this situation, I and the missus were exchanging random thoughts, and she happened to mention Sodexho Food coupons at the same time as I mentioned Landmark.
For the few who don't know what Sodexho coupons are, they're a way for companies to give you tax-free money, as long as you only use it for food/beverages. Only grocery stores and restaurant take them instead of money, and only when you're actually buying food.
"Wouldn't it be nice if we could use Sodexho coupons to buy stuff from Landmark", I mused. She kind-of nodded, aware that in such a situation, the whole stack of coupons would be gone before she even saw 'em.
I kept on musing. Pretty soon I was into territory that my wife would rather I stayed away from.
"Waisey, I can think of one thing you could buy from Landmark with Sodexhos."
"What?"
"Manoj Kumar's Roti."
She clucked with exasperation.
"Then there's Andaaz."
"Stop that."
But I couldn't, of course.
"Bean."
"Bheja Fry," she said with the air of ending the conversation.
"Kandaa Pohe, though the name's changed to something else now."
"Never heard of it."
I was silent for a long time. Wife thought I was asleep and went back to reading.
Ten minutes later...
"Garam Masala."
"GO TO SLEEP."
Another silence.
"Sandwich."
"SHUT UP. I'm going to sleep now." She turned off the light and covered her head with the blanket.
Half an hour later, or was it more? I was still drifting along movie names...
"Chocolate!"
"Mmmmm?"
"Chocolate!"
"OOOF!" Even when administered by a sleepy wife, shoves can hurt.
"And NOT A WORD out of you, if you want to sleep in this room!"
"Em..."

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?

Paul Graham posts a good essay on his site, about the character of cities. Reading through it makes me want to go live in Berkeley right now. After reading this, I began to think about what characters we could assign to Indian cities. Delhi would, as far as I know, be all about connections and power, the way Graham describes Washington D.C.. Mumbai's character would have been like New York - all about Money - except that the film industry is there, too, so being big in that industry becomes a viable substitute for money for most. No doubt you folks could explain the characters of a dozen other India cities.

So where does that leave Bangalore? As my recent posts indicate, I wasn't too impressed initially by the place - a lazy sort of local population coupled with many, many people anxious to earn and spend money in vapid interests. Then, the other day (at a Mall's food court, if you must know), it came to me. This place is like a frontier town, like the Wild West, or a prospecting town like the Klondike. Making it big is the priority here for most. Skimming off their shares from these get-rich-quickers is the priority for a darker underbelly, whose form changes in every frontier town but who remain the same sort of people. There's the simpler, easygoing people who lived in the area before some outsourcer mined gold here and started the rush. There are the million saloons - or should I call them Malls and North Indian Restaurants - which are almost entirely frequented by these outsiders, springing up shiny and overpriced among the smaller sedate watering holes for the natives.

So what are they prospecting for? What is this the frontier for? Money, perhaps, or a chance to shine, or the good life. Perhaps they all bring their dreams with them, whatever they wanted in their own towns, and try to find them here. The smell of this city is too varied, too mixed up, too fresh, to have one single flavour yet.

Moving into a new place is like sleeping on a new coir mattress - It looks and feels generally great, but there are tiny coconut fibres poking you where you least suspect it. The right thing to do, of course, would be to pull out those fibres, or else ignore them, and enjoy sleeping on the new mattress. That's not how people work, though.

Went to an office party last week. It was at an amusement arcade, with bowling and beer and games. The games weren't free. Someone called me over to join in a Foosball game. He inserted tokens into the system and we began, four of us. After the first goal, we realized that the game would be over once all five available balls were eaten by the game, and we stole menu cards from nearby tables and blocked the goal-holes with them. "If it hits the menu card, we'll consider it a goal. We could go on playing all evening this way!" Someone said. At this the guy who'd bought the tokens said,"There's no need to be this kanjoos - a game is just 40 bucks, man! We'll just get more tokens..."

Suddenly my interest in the game had vanished. For some reason the number 40 haunted me. I went through the rest of the evening in a blue funk, doing miserably at bowling and downing a Sprite without tasting it. Somehow, though, I couldn't figure out the reason.

It came to me much later that night. It was all about this time my dabbawala had quit on me...

Towards the end of my first semester of college, someone pulled down a Mosque in UP, and suddenly everyone was rioting. My dabbawala, who used to bring me my lunch and dinner from across the city, decided to stop operations suddenly. With curfew in the town, I couldn't get out of my room to eat. For a while, I starved, surviving on Tomatoes and Fruit Bread.

At this time, a classmate who lived in the same colony took me to this nice Andhra lady nearby who made meals for a small number of students. "Aunty, can't you take on just one more person?"

Aunty thought a bit. "I could give you a dabba in the afternoons, I think. Some of my boys only take dabbas in the evening, so it's possible in the afternoon."

I agreed enthusiastically. "I need it only for a few days, I think. My normal dabbawala should be back once the riots are over." (which never happened, by the way. I wound up taking a dabba from this aunty during all the remaining years of college. )

"No problem," she said. "Pay me for the week in advance. It's eight rupees a meal, so for 5 meals, that will be 40 Rupees."

I went through my pockets and gave her the money. It was expensive - my older dabbawala used to charge me 5 Rupees a meal. But I had no option right now.

Half an hour later, I bought my empty dabba, had her fill it, and went back to my first proper meal in ages. I can still remember what it tasted like. It was worth paying so much for it - it tasted home cooked.

I've been in Bangalore for about 3 weeks now, so it's time for the inevitable "First impressions" post. Here we go.

1. Any Taxiwalla - be it a taxi from the hotel or the office cab, has a mobile phone, supposedly so you can call him up if he's late. In practice, though, if you're late and you call him, there's only one catch-all explanation: "Junction par hoon, sir", followed by "Lane ke andar turn kara raha hoon." Never mind that he actually trundles into the parking about half an hour after he's "turned into the lane", or that he never really says which junction he's at. I had the illuminating experience of my taxiwalla answering a phone from his sister, and replying to her with a cheerful "Junction par hoon", when he'd only just picked me up from the office and there was atleast a 20 minute drive ahead before we reached the hotel.

2. When you drive along any of the main roads, you inevitably cross some shops that look interesting - Chocolate shops and Bakeries for me, and clothes shops for my wife. Bangalore roads and traffic, however, conspire to make sure you can never stop suddenly while driving. There are no gaps in the traffic to ease into and stop, there's no vehicles parked anywhere nearby where you can add you own mount. And if the shop happens to be on the other side of the road, it would mean a kilometre's drive ahead searching for a break in the divider, so you just give up right there.

3. Continuing from the last one, there are waaaayy more interesting shops here in Bangalore than there were in Pune.

4. Nearly all of the out-of-towners who arrive here have no interest whatsoever in learning about the place, the language, the food, or the sights. I suppose that's true for any place, which is why you have Maharashtra Mandals in every city, and India Clubs in every town in the Bay Area. Still, it's a little disheartening to hear Hindi-speaking folks dismiss Andhra/Udipi/Kerala restaurants entirely and focus on finding 'authentic' Punjabi food, and to find out that none of my friends had heard of MTR, Kunda, or Girish Kasaravalli. But again, maybe that's just me.

So I've shifted.

To Bangalore, to a product company.

Yes, me and my wife. My parents are in Pune.

Yes, we've found a flat to stay in.

Yes, we like the city so far.

Oh yes, it is expensive, but there are small shops where you get affordable stuff, if you look.

Yep, I have some friends and relatives here.

No, I don't know how long I'll stay here.

Just a minute, let me put another rupee coin in.

Well, I expect to make a simple life here for myself. Naive hope, I know. I want to make time for reading and writing and exercise and talking and relaxing and generally feeling like I know where my life is headed.

Yeah? Ha ha ha, I know, that last one was a bit much.

All right then, I'll hang up. Be seeing you sometime.

Gotta go, there's some sort of dust in my eye. Probably a crumb from a Shrewsbury biscuit.

So there's this question that has bugged me (and many others) for a while: why isn't there 'genre' fiction in India? Why no science fiction, no fantasy, no noir, no horror? Or cyberpunk, splatterpunk, steampunk, alternate history, space opera? Why are Indian writers so dumb, why can't they write in all these cool genres that we read about on Boingboing?

To answer this question, we'll have to step back a little. You'll notice that the second list of genres above - starting from cyberpunk - sounds somewhat unfamiliar. That's because these are comparatively modern additions to the 'genre' set. Cyberpunk was popularized by William Gibson, Steampunk by China Mieville and co., Alternate History by Philip K Dick and many others, Space Opera arguably by Star Wars and E.E. Doc Smith, Splatterpunk by Clive Barker. These are very rough pointers, so no nitpicking, please. My point is, we're able to generally identify one or more writers as creators of a 'genre' here. These were good writers, and the concepts appealed to people, and they formed a genre.

What does it mean when a concept appeals to people? As a layman, I'd answer that it suggests answers to the questions that a society is currently asking itself. Cyberpunk is an answer to the question, "Is new technology really going to make the world a better place?", for example. As an member of society, I want to know this and will want to explore possible storylines around this topic.

Look at the 'original' genres for confirmation - sci-fi, horror, fantasy, noir. Do they follow the same pattern? They do. Fantasy as we know it today was almost completely defined by Tolkien. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne were the original Sci-fi writers. Poe, Lovecraft, M.R. James, Sheridian Le Fanu kickstarted the horror genre, which really didn't exist as a genre before then. Detective fiction - Doyle, and before him, Somerset Maugham. Go look up these names on wikipedia or something - hardly any of them are more than 200 years old - which sounds surprising. And all of these were as equally a response to the public opinion of the day, as Cyberpunk is. Science fiction has always been a response to the technology of the day, fantasy explores all the 'what-if's that don't fit under science, and perhaps alternative social histories and hierarchies. Horror? Look up the monsters in M.R. James' work, and the ones in, say, Bentley Little's work, and work it out.

During these past 200 years, what were the concerns of the average Indian? Everyone will have a different answer, but I doubt it was extra terrestrial beings or a recreation of a heroic past. Why, then, would anyone expect these genres to take root in India? The way the very word 'genre' is understood today is extremely eurocentric and amru-centric (if I may coin a phrase). We have our own genres, probably multiple genres per language, though they aren't a part of any ISBN classification scheme. What 'genre' does Manohar Kahaniyan publish in? What about the mountains of religious literature published in Gujarati? Dada Kondke movies? It would be unfair to coerce these into the categories that English literature is broken up into. If anything, there should be new names for these.

Let's take a somewhat parallel example: Japanese literature. To make the issue easier, let's focus on only the Manga/Anime. There's one category of manga that I personally enjoy: what's called seinen manga. This is 'mature' manga, not 'mature' as in sexual or violent content, but as in complicated themes, realistic scenarios, darker subject matter. There's no real equivalent in the English classification spectrum. Yet, because this style of manga is popular in the US, American publishers publish it in translations, with a ridiculous genre notation like 'fantasy/conspiracy/horror/scifi' on the back cover. The Japanese don't distinguish between these so-called different genres - there are seamless blends of all of these and more, in most long-running manga series. I don't see (perhaps because I can't read Japanese) teenagers there decrying the lack of hard science fiction stories the way the Americans have them.

Another example, again Japanese, is the Godzilla movies. These were a direct response to the fear of Atomic bombs, then prevalent in the common public, and thus became very popular. The 'Giant Monster movie' genre was picked up from the Japanese and turned into hundreds such, by Hollywood - Cloverfield being only the latest of them. But they're a novelty, an offshoot of science fiction, in the US - Godzilla represents something much deeper to the Japanese, something that can't really be classified.

The literature market in India is expanding currently, in all languages, along with economic prosperity. Expect a stratification in the years to come - a deepening of the market, along with a clearer distinction between different readers' tastes. There is also a commercialization happening in the market, the way it has happened in the American market over the past 50 years or so. What commercialization did in the US was to create writers who wrote for a specific market rather than writing for themselves - books intended to be read only by the horror market, say - which created the genre conventions that today seem to be ironclad for each genre. I can't say whether the same will happen here - perhaps it already is, with buzzwords like 'Campus Novel' and 'Chick Lit' already making the rounds. The genres will deepen as the market expands.

This is a good time to be a writer in India - or a film maker, or a singer, or a poet. Expect interesting things to happen over the next few years.

PS. The past few days, whenever tunes into IBN7 (or is it 24x7?) they seem to be showing mysterious objects seen in the sky and reported by viewers, along with speculation about aliens. News channels have a knack for reporting what people like to hear. Are we then heading for a desi science fiction age?

I'm back. I think.

Happy New Year, by the way.

For a long time I've been trying to figure out why I haven't been writing. Two years back, I was flying like the Rajdhani, struggling just to keep up with the ideas springing to life in my brain. A novel, the novel, just bubbling over inside, building up it's flavours so fast it was a full time job just to put them all down on paper. Short stories, like little rivulets of excess story, trickling down the cauldron of Novel.

Then, somehow,the fire went out. The cauldron bubbled for a bit, throwing out a few last precious sputters, and settled into a seething mass that tormented but produced no output. Everything I wrote since has been flat and lifeless. Attempts at pushing myself have been worthless - I myself can see the poor quality of my writing, I can see that my older stuff was better, why be surprised at anyone's rejection?

It took me this long to see what was happening. What it was, was that the input to the pipeline had dried up. If your output is supposed to be prose, your input really needs to be prose. Whereas what I've been doing for a while now has been something else altogether - reading comics by the scores. Watching movies, TV serials. Reading web pages by the thousands, yes, thousands. This stuff probably helps me if I want to write for comics or make movies (indeed, ideas for movie plots have begun to bubble up these days). But that's not what I set out to be - I chose writing, long before I realized that it was a choice I was making.

All it took a couple of weeks of full-blown reading - 4 books in 3 weeks, and counting, to start building up the Writing Cauldron again. Reminded me of how long it's been since I read books like that, in great gulps, every spare minute I got. The cauldron hasn't yet reached boiling point - it'll probably take another few weeks of the intense reading - but I can feel something happening there.

Let's hope I can keep it going.

PS. In case anyone, (I'm referring to you, George) notices, yes, I've been finishing a Palahniuk book. Shows up in the writing, doesn't it?

Me: No, no, let me think of something decent to write about first, then I'll post to the blog.

Seinfeld ka bhoot: Abbey idiot, start writing, something, anything. Do you expect to be writing masterpieces the day you get struck by inspiration? What about practice, what about honing your craft and all that?

Me (a little scared by the outburst): But Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was only 23. And it was her first book.

Seinfeld ka bhoot:So you want to write saas-bahu stuff like McCullers? Want to describe the anguish of your neighbourhood dhabawala and the mali who comes to your place? Is that what you want to write about?

Me: Er, no.

SkB: Because if you're just going to keep writing about the people about you, you could do it today, too.

Me: Really?

SkB: NO, you Schmuck! You think anyone churns out whole books in one shot? McCullers probably spent years writing that book! You think I came up with the Soup Nazi in two minutes?

Me: Er, wasn't he based on a real person, there was a question about him in the last BCQC quiz, did you see it, there was...

SkB [Tearing out his hair in frustration]: Well, is that all it was? Just think of a person to base a plot on, and you're done? Do you have any effing idea how long it takes to write a plot, to set it up to flow right, to think of the right dialogues? You think I could have written any of those episodes without practicing first? Writing is like an airplane, not like a helicopter! It needs a takeoff strip!

Me: What about one of those VTOL jets? You know, the ones that have these engines on a hinge, see, so they can take off...

SkB [Suddenly turning serious]: Are you always this dumb, or are you just playing at it so that you don't have to listen to me?

Me: Huh?

SkB: Let me just say it in very plain words. Unless you put in very sincere efforts to write, unless you put in a little time every day on your book or stories or whatever it is you want to do, you're going to wind up doing nothing but reading about Samit Basu's success story while you work on your job. Do you understand?

Me: Yes. Yes, I do. But I get so tired, so depressed, every evening, I don't think I can...

SkB: So do you ever get so tired you forget to breathe? Or forget to eat your dinner? Or have you ever been so tired you couldn't be bothered to go to the loo? Because writing's like that - you have to do it somehow, you have to express it somehow. Unless you approach your writing that way it ain't gonna happen.

Me: But I don't feel that way all the time. Like, the urge to write isn't that strong all the time, only sometimes.

SkB: Listen, buddy, you've made me up out of some web page, and you've been putting words in my mouth all through this blog post. You didn't make me up so that I can justify your laziness. Now that I exist, I'm going to listen to any of these silly excuses. The urge to write gathers strength, the more you write. It never appears full blown - like, look at me, you read that article yesterday, yet it took you a day to even write this much. As long as you're willing to listen to me, I'll be there, I'll be your 'urge to write'. All you have to do is write something, anything, even if it's a joke, every day. Write it down proper, okay? No thinking it over. You are going to put it down in black and white. The day you don't, I'm going to laugh at you all night long.

Me: Yes, Bhoot Unkle.

SkB [Talking to an audience in a nightclub]: The other day I talked to this aspiring writer-type. To tell you the truth, he wasn't worth shit...

Me: HEY!

SkB [Ignoring me]: Though he thought he was India's answer to Caleb Carr and Charles de Lint. Kept making up excuses about how he couldn't write...

Me: HEY! JERRY! Sorry I called you anything associated with Jackie Shroff, okay? Stop it!

SkB [Returning to normal state]: That's better. Now get to it.

It was much, much later that I found out that Power Lords were actually toys to be launched in the wake of the He-Man fever. To stir up interest in these toys, Revell collaborated with DC Comics to create a comic mini-series featuring the characters.

I have no idea whether this shrewd marketing move worked. I only know that the first issue of this Power Lords series was the one with the most attractive cover of the lot when I, an impressionable 9-year-old, first went into a bookshop in Trivandrum to buy a 'foreign' comic. I'd read other DC comics at the time - Justice League and so on, not knowing that they were DC Comics. I knew the difference between the desi Phantom/Mandrake/Tinkle comics and the glossy Superman/Batman type 'foreign' comics, and I knew that if I cribbed long enough, my father would eventually cave in and get me some of the good stuff. And so, here I was.

Power Lords #1 turned out to be the first DC comic I bought by myself. I don't remember most of the other comics that were in that bin - There was a Conan comic there, I remember, but that's it. I must have read this story of Adam Power hundreds of times. It was the acme of storytelling for me - for quite a while after that, whenever I daydreamed of becoming a comic book writer I would plot of storylines that looked suspiciously like the Power Lords plotline. And when I realized that the protagonist actually dies at the end of this issue, I was shocked. It took me quite a while to realize that this was a series - that the story doesn't end here, unlike all the Phantom comics I had. There were multiple trips to book shops after that, and on every trip I would root through the small bunch of 'foreign' comics, hoping to find further parts of the story. Hopes receded as the years passed. I shifted to Pune, where more DC and Marvel comics were available in the stores (but no Power Lords). I'd lost hope by this point.

Surat has a fascinating chor-bazaar called Shaniwari, so called because it happens on Saturdays. My uncle used to look around this place every once in a while, trying to find old electronic items he could salvage parts from, curiosities like brass lamps, and every once in a while, cheapo T-shirts to wear around the home. He took me there, too, several times, when I was in college.
The first or second time I went there, an enterprising raddiwala was displaying his wares - old Ellery Queen hardbacks, mouldering old paperbacks of Wilbur Smith and Salman Rushdie, and a bunch of magazines. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, and I set to, sorting out the books in hopes of finding some rare items. A colourful corner peeked out from the pile of magazines, and I idly pulled it out, hoping for a Batman comic. It was - you guessed it - the second of the Power Lords set. For a moment I just stood there, unable to believe my luck. With as casual a voice as I could manage, I asked the old vendor for the price. Ten bucks! I added the comic (in almost perfect condition I might add) to my set of James Clavells and Salman Rushdies. I read the comic while sitting on my uncle's bike, on the way home, and again and again over the next couple of days. This issue, it seemed to me, went downhill from the excellent first one. Not only was the art worse, there was this annoying cartoony character who turned out to be powerful for some wierd reason (****Ahem***Jar Jar Binks****). But never mind - it was a book I'd expected never to find, and the cachet of serendipity it bought with it was enough to make me treasure it.

Years pass. College years end, and the painful daily grind known as 'working on a job' begins. I still hunt down and read DC Comics whenever I get the chance, but shopkeepers all around Pune now realize the value of these books and raise the price to an unsustainable level. I curse them silently, waiting for the day when everyone stops buying these books and the prices come down again. Amazon.com happens just around the time I start working, and I search on it for the Power Lords. They don't have it - why would they stock a flop comic from 1982? I use all the free gift certificates I can wangle out of Amazon and order anything I can get for free - Harry Potter, Ray Bradbury, a few anthologies, children's books. I also learn of how powerful searching on the net has become, and find that here and there, comic book shops do stock old comics, and yet, Power Lords #3 is among them. But $5 for a comic, and 'shipping only to the US and Canada' deter me.

Until two things happen together. A friend of mine happens to be in the US for a few months, and I go there for a week. The friend asks me whether I want him to buy something for me. Up comes Google on my machine, and out comes the address of a comic shop in his area. Eventually, it turns out that the shop doesn't have Power Lords #3, but my friend then generously pays the $1 for the comic at an online place and the $9 for the shipping, and I get the book in a neat cardboard package, the day before I'm due to return back to India. The third book is the absolute worst in the series, and I toss it onto my shelf after barely one or two readings. Or perhaps I've gotten older and have read more Batman comics. But I still have all three books, the first nearly in tatter by now, and they've survived several house changes, bedroom renovations, spring cleanings, and marriage.
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Nearly all of our generation has some such stories of chasing after some hard-to-find media, more for the rarity than the quality. Beatzo alone has enough stories for half of his generation, I reckon.

Our parents and grandparents get all mushy when they hear a tune from Aradhana, or Shree 420 or a riff by the Beach Boys. Perhaps they have a soft spot in their hearts for Kishore Kumar or Cary Grant or Geeta Dutt. There's soon going to be a generation of old guys who grow all misty-eyed when Glo Friends are mentioned, who know who Avinash Waghwan was (even if they don't like him), who get all defensive when someone disses the Spiderman movies, and who refuse to accept that these new-fangled rappers are any better than Vanilla Ice. Well, there's already such a generation, but we aren't old guys yet (I hope). And my grandkids can expect to hear a lot about my personal saga of the Power Lords while they unsuccessfully try to read their newfangled 3-D moving comics in peace.

PS. I haven't bought any comics in nearly a year now. Don't intend to, for quite a while now, ever since Gotham Comics stopped publishing in India. The 'net and ...ahem... you know... has opened my eyes to the world beyond DC and Marvel, the stuff that has never been available at any raddiwala round these parts.

Yes, yes, we've been receiving these emails about online peititions for quite a while now. "538 people have already registered for this petition against long toenails!" "105 people have registered to protest against politician X's policies!" ... And of course, nothing ever comes of them. How many toenail non-clippers or acolytes of politican X read the net anyway?
Two headlines in the past two days caught my attention though :

Source behind Internet attack on Clinton revealed

and

New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps

Go on, read them. Neither are about India, yet. But there will soon be such stories in the desi papers, too. The 'net can and does make a difference. And there's a lot of difference waiting to be made hereabouts.

Long time no post, I know, I know. This post more than proves my devotion to blogging.

I'm sitting here in a FabIndia kurta. My left-hand fingers are coloured in mehendi. The remains of a scarlet teeka are still on my forehead, from the khetpaal ceremony of the morning. I'm not allowed to leave the house now, until the baraat starts off. My Kakas, Mamas, other badey-log, are having dinner right now. Too nervous to sleep, eat, or sit at peace, I'm all set for my marriage tomorrow.

Yes, there are those little things left over. My bag needs one more going-over. Perhaps I need to pack one more pair of socks. My bride-to-be's sister is trying to get the two of us some time to talk, perhaps in a coffee shop. (Certainly my folks at home are going to find this idea strange, unconventional.) My cousin still hasn't arrived from Bangalore, she'll be here at eleven. My brother and Mom have gone to some mandap-guy for more last-minute arrangements.

[My buaji's now urging me to eat, else dinner will be cold. This narrative continues after dinner.]

So now my father's gone to the airport to pick up my cousin. They're slathered one more layer of mehendi over my left hand, so I'm typing this with my right hand now. Just finished with a pooja dedicated to my poorvaj. The house is in bedlam, now more than an hour ago.
We, the baraat, are leaving tomorrow morning for Mumbai. Before we leave, we need to perform the Ganesh pooja, so we're all getting up at 4 AM. Added to all the relatives coming in, there will be little time for sleep tonight. Not that I could have, even if I had the time. By this time tomorrow, I will be a married man. The girl who has been in my dreams for the past few months, with whom I spent every evening, every morning, on the phone, and with whom I felt truly not-alone for the first time in my life, will be my wife. Nabokov himself would be at a loss for words at this point.
I spent today thus: Woke up with black woollen fibres in my nose (I HATE those black kambals the mangal karyalayas hire out). Talked about The State Of Social Work In India with a -

So the second coat of mehendi is now off. The luggage is packed, I'm shaved, all we're waiting for is my cousin to arrive from the airport. To resume my narrative.

-with a cousin. Underwent the Peethi - this is when you sit wrapped in only a towel on a verandah, shivering, while your aunt slaps on cold gobs of umtan all over you and then rubs them off, to 'make you fair'. Underwent the Khetpal ceremony. This is where you pray to the 'Earth Gods' and to your ancestors to make your Union successful. Had lunch. Copied a bunch of Garba CDs in preparation for the Sangeet ceremony, which will be immediately after my wife - yes, my wife - arrives here. Composed a poster saying Sudarshan weds Payal, for the Qualis' in the baraat. Redid same four times. First coat of mehendi on hand. Slept with an old newspaper spread out under said hand. Woke up to phone from fiancee. Pottered around doing other stuff.

Now my father's given me an ultimatum. I really must sleep, since I'm waking up by 4. The cousin still hasn't arrived; I'll meet her in the morning now. No matter. Tomorrow's going to be a long, eventful journey.

Don't know when I'll blog again. This exercise too was mostly useless; I haven't been able to express how I feel. Suffice it to say I'm looking forward to this big adventure, to be conquered with my wife by my side.