Thoughts on Kai Po Che! as an adaptation

The process of comparing a film with the book it was adapted from is often ridden with simplifications; such comparisons also tend to have an inbuilt bias towards the book, being premised on the condescending idea that cinema is merely illustrated literature. But I think most people who have seen the new film Kai Po Che! and also read the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of my Life will agree that the film is a more fully realised work, and it may be worth looking at where its strengths lie vis-a-vis the source text.

At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:

Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.

Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.

“Mama, no,” Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.

“Stop Mama,” Omi said.

Even if Mama wanted to, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum. The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.

“Oh...oh,” Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.

Even a moderately well-directed and well-performed movie sequence would be an improvement on the above passage (a competent sound designer might also replace the “dull thud” when a sharp weapon enters human flesh with a more appropriate sound), and Kai Po Che! is more than a moderately good film. It is wonderfully acted and has a real sense of character development. The screenplay – on which Bhagat collaborated with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor – is more focused, and the dialogue more authentic-sounding, than the often flat prose in the book. The decision to remove the novel’s framing device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”.

In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.

With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.

The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.

Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.

[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]

On "liberal extremism" (and soft oppositions to freedom)

I’ve had a cordial relationship with Chetan Bhagat for a long time; there are things I like about him, as a person and – yes – as a writer too. I once faced flak in literary circles for saying mildly nice things about his early work, and I still often have arguments with friends who make condescending remarks like “Why has Chetan Bhagat been invited to a literature festival?” But I’m deeply disturbed by the position he has adopted on the Salman Rushdie-Jaipur issue, especially his repeated endorsement of the bizarre idea that the whole mess was jointly caused by “extremists on both sides”.

Two exhibits. First, some samples from Chetan’s Twitter feed:

“When extremists on both sides turn a festival into an activist venue, there's a security risk.”

“In a fight between extreme fundamentalists and extreme liberals, the sufferer is the beautiful jaipur litfest, the gainer an appeasing govt.”

“Extreme fundamentalists. Extreme liberals. Extremely difficult to deal with either.”

“If you are truly religious, you believe in forgiveness. If you are truly liberal, you respect other points of view. Sadly, don't see it much.”

A response to that last Tweet: sure – if you’re truly liberal, you respect other points of view. (Since the meaning of “respect” is often hazy in this context, a clarification: it means that you believe people should have the freedom to peacefully express their views, no matter how strongly you disagree with them.) What you emphatically DO NOT respect – or condone – is the demonstration of those views through threats and violence, which curtails the similar rights of other people. And it’s the religious extremists who have been curtailing rights in the Rushdie case; the “liberal extremists” have been responding to the bullying with non-violent protests. This is an important distinction. Even if you find it convenient (for whatever reason) to think of strong-voiced liberals as extremists, do have the grace to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between these two forms of “extremism”.

Exhibit 2: this CNN-IBN video featuring Chetan, Ruchir Joshi (who was one of the four authors who read from The Satanic Verses in Jaipur) and Asaduddin Owaisi, who called for the arrest of the writers.

On view here is Chetan as the “balanced” diplomat-cum-moderate who is willing to listen to both points of view and who badly wants the two parties to find a middle ground – “because otherwise this whole controversy is kind of useless”. I will not comment on individual actions, he starts by saying. Then, “As an artist you have full freedom to write whatever you want to. However... Should you be exercising the right to hurt people?” And to Owaisi, “I request you to withdraw your case”, followed by this astonishing statement: “We are all Indians here – we will not let someone who is not Indian [meaning Rushdie] affect our unity.”

“This is a great issue to unite the country,” he says – apparently “uniting the country” means ensuring that no one says or does anything that might be perceived as offensive to any community’s God, be it Allah or Krishna or Saraswati. “We Indians are believers. Our value system is not the same as London or Paris or Amsterdam.” (Incidentally, Amsterdam was where Theo van Gogh was murdered by a religious fanatic not so long ago because he made a film – and it should be clear to any thinking person that no corner of the world is safe from the extremisms of the “value system” Chetan is so proud of – but let that pass for now.)

------------

In this piece, Chandrahas Choudhury lists three types of opposition to freedom of speech in India. The third of these, he says, is an “insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas”:

“... what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship [...] that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that ‘religious sentiments should always be respected’ and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred”

I have had dozens of encounters with “soft opposition” of this sort. These typically involve conversations with well-meaning family members or acquaintances who might very loosely be described as “liberals” (or at least as “cool” or open-minded people). When the subject of an artist offending religious sentiments comes up, they usually say: “Yes, but was it necessary to write that article/do that painting/make that cartoon? Couldn’t he have been more sensitive?” Or “I agree that he has the right to do or say this. But should he have done it?”

This type of conversation sometimes reaches a critical point if you reply: “Agreed - it might have been nicer/more sensitive to do things in another way. But what if the artist politely hears you out and then says he has chosen to disregard your advice – that he will go ahead and do this anyway? What will your response be then?” I've found that the mask of unequivocal “liberalism” can slip off very quickly in this situation.

It’s worrying that so many people in India seem not to understand what good art can be all about, and the conditions necessary for its meaningful survival. As Ruchir Joshi writes in this piece in The Hindu (bold-marks mine):

I have memories of writers, artists, film-makers being pushed into narrower and narrower pens by people who had no interest in literature, art or cinema other than to use these as excuses to expand their own illiterate, illiberal, poisonous power under the guise of identity politics...

And Amit Chaudhuri in The Hindustan Times:

In India, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a 'free speech' issue. Indians know how to talk about writers, but not about writing.

Little wonder that artistic liberty is among the first things to be held hostage (or made conditional, which is the same thing) when "sentiments" are deemed to have been hurt. A friend told me not to write a post about Chetan Bhagat because “he’s such a soft, easy target”. Well, maybe, but here it is anyway, because I think his stance tells us something about the level of discourse around us today. It’s a pity that one of India’s most popular writers seems unwilling to acknowledge that one of the oldest functions of art is to disturb people and encourage them to look with new eyes at everything they hold sacred. We already see too much of that apathy and ignorance in people who don't work in the creative field.

3 items on "naïve" readers

Item 1: Chetan Bhagat often gets letters from readers who don’t understand what a novel is – for example, the person who sorrowfully reprimanded him for revealing the name of a girl who engages in pre-marital sex in Five Point Someone: “You’ve ruined Neha’s life; her family and others will guess who she is; who will marry her now?” (More in this post)

Item 2: Aarushi Talwar’s father tells a policeman that his murdered daughter had been reading Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life. The cop responds: “Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What were the three mistakes?” (As reported by Patrick French in India: A Portrait; also excerpted here.) A case of a policeman clumsily bullying a suspect? Probably, but also possible that the man had little understanding of a book as a work of fiction unconnected to the circumstances (or mental state) of the person reading it.

Item 3: Orhan Pamuk discussing certain types of literal-minded readers in his new book The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist: "Completely naïve readers always read a text as an autobiography or as a sort of disguised chronicle of lived experience, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading a novel."

But at the other extreme, Pamuk tells us, are "completely sentimental-reflective readers, who think that all texts are constructs and fictions anyway, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading your most candid autobiography. I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels."

Notes from Bhutan: haiku readings, blogging politicians

Had a good time at Mountain Echoes. Didn’t attend all – or even most of – the sessions, but I still spent more time listening to discussions than I’ve done at any lit-fest in the past three years. The festival wasn’t stuffed with heavyweights but it had a respectable collection of names, a decent-sized hall with good acoustics, and enthusiastic (but not overwhelming) attendance from Indian invitees as well as Bhutanese book-lovers. Very efficiently organised by Mita Kapur and the Siyahi team too. In some ways it reminded me of the first edition of the now-carnivalesque Jaipur Literature Festival, which, believe it or not, was once an intimate event where it was possible to attend a discussion without getting in the way of a stampede. (For more on this, see the January 2006 archives.)



A few notes:

- Many of us were knackered on the first evening, when we were required to attend the inauguration and sit through speeches at India House, Thimphu. Being in a headache-y haze, I barely registered anything of the Bhutanese prime minister’s lengthy speech about “Gross National Happiness” (note: happiness can be found in simple things like not listening to lengthy speeches), but the highlights of the evening were the short poetry readings that followed. There was a wonderfully sardonic recitation by the Khasi poet Kynpham Sing of his cynical yet strangely affectionate poem “Shillong in Haiku”, about the degeneration of a place that doesn’t know if it’s a town or a city. Here are samples of the haikus that make up the poem:

Scotland of the East–
roads pockmarked by jumbo pits,
cars do twist dancing.

Cars over potholes–
gut-jerking see-saw, always
full of expletives.

Famed Umkhrah River–
reeking serpent of sewage,
bodies and drowned gods.

Iewduh Flyover:
hanging garden of the world’s
second-hand garments.

Multi-lane by-pass:
amazingly by-passing
construction for years.

Central Library–
the emptiness of shelves is
educational.

Reading it on paper (or on a website) isn’t the same thing as hearing Kynpham’s clipped, serio-comic recital. It was brilliant, and I look forward to the publication of his haiku-poem book, which is currently in manuscript form.

(Note: that’s an old photo of Kynpham from the 2009 edition of the Jaipur lit-fest)

- When you’re in the mountains, the idea of national identity becomes amorphous. “We pahaari people know each other really well, regardless of the countries we belong to,” author Namita Gokhale told me later that evening, “These Himalayan lands are a nation unto themselves – people who live in the plains can’t understand the psyche.” The theme of mountains and mountain people, writers and readers, ran through the festival, notably in a beautiful session where Gulzar and Pavan Varma (prolific author, current Indian ambassador to Bhutan) performed a jugalbandhi of poetry readings that touched on mountains, trees and other aspects of the natural world. The format had Gulzar reading one of his poems in the original Urdu, and then Varma reading out his English translation.


I liked the informality of this session – the two men would occasionally interrupt each other to comment on how a word or phrase sounds in translation compared to the original, and then flip through the book to decide what poem to read next; Gulzar chuckled shyly whenever the applause became very loud, as it often did. I know many people who feel that it should be enough to experience a book in solitude – that there’s no need to attend a noisy reading at a large public event – but this session was a pointer to what a good public reading can be.

- For me, and for many other Indians present, one of the eye-openers was the very eloquent Tshering Tobgay, who is the leader of the Opposition Party in the National of Bhutan...in addition to being a prolific and engaging blogger (here's his website). At a session about online media, Tshering spoke about his responsibility to keep the people of his country informed about the issues they face (even if he risks annoying the authorities in the process) and to do this, as far as possible, while supporting the positive initiatives taken by the government rather than opposing them just for the sake of opposition. For a country that has subtle restrictions on freedom of expression, and where Internet penetration is so low that there are only around 12,000 registered Net users, his work is pioneering as well as inspirational. If only more Indian politicians were as dedicated to communicating directly – and candidly – with the common man.

I also enjoyed Tshering’s observation that it’s important for a politician to write or blog regularly, “because that forces you to pause and introspect and think about things, which is something politicians don’t always feel the need to do”.

- On a lighter note: in Jaipur two years ago, an audience comprising adoring young school-goers lapped up Chetan Bhagat’s every word. In Bhutan, Chetan had a trickier task: he had to charm an audience that included people who hadn’t read his books. Once again, he pulled it off, combining gentle self-deprecation with sharp volleys aimed at those who are against “populist” writing. I was moderating his session, and when I asked how becoming a high-profile public figure had affected his life (he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people recently), his answer was typical Bhagat. “It gets me interesting assignments,” he said, mentioning his stint as a Miss India judge, “Dozens of women walk towards you in swimsuits, you have to look at them very carefully. Hard job, but someone’s got to do it.” But the real applause was reserved for a short reading that featured Bhagat and a local actress named Kinley Pelden. To the delight of the audience, they read a “bed scene” from Bhagat’s latest novel 2 States, and ended with the demure-looking Kinley enunciating the line “So we’re just fuck-buddies?” Could be a first for a Bhutanese actress at a public event.

- Tisca Chopra, who played the mother in Taare Zameen Par, moderated a session featuring two young Bhutanese filmmakers: director/editor Tshering Wangyel and scriptwriter/director Tshering Penjore. During the audience Q&A, Siok Sian Pek-Dorji, the director of the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy (she also participated in the blogging session), told an amusing story about the film-reviewing culture in Bhutan being so underdeveloped that a couple of years ago a newspaper was taken to court for carrying a short review of a local film. “What gives you the right to say this about the movie?” they were asked. Many of the Indians in the audience giggled at this anecdote, but I was tempted to point out that the state of film-reviewing and film writing in India is not substantially better, given the size of our film industries. (Earlier post on mediocre film writing here.)

- Author Kunzang Choden signs one of her books


I met Kunzang a few years ago when she was in India (an old post here) and I was very pleased to get my hands on her self-published book Dawa: The Story of a Stray Dog in Bhutan. More on that soon. Will also put up more notes on the fest when I have the time.

More on the mass-market writers

[Did this for Biblio]

Personal experience tells me that if you’ve built up a reputation as a “serious literary critic” – even if it was entirely unsolicited and you’re not comfortable with the label – the best way to lose credibility is to write something faintly complimentary about Chetan Bhagat. This doesn’t mean proclaiming that his books are great, or even good, works of literature. All you need to do is to be less than sneeringly contemptuous. Write a blog post cautiously suggesting that Bhagat is a decent storyteller, that he knows his readership very well and is good at creating a comfort zone for them, and within minutes the angry comments will flow in. Here, from my blog, is one of the more restrained ones:

“This assertion that CB is a good storyteller is a common excuse that reviewers make when they discuss such low-brow crap. But story telling is meant for children, not for adult readers and certainly not for critics whose job should be to help other readers make an enlightened choice and to serve the cause of literature.”

Now of course, critics have a responsibility to literature. Equally important, they have a responsibility to themselves; to express their honest feelings about a work as articulately as possible – preferably backed with knowledge and context – and to understand that these feelings reflect their own distinct backgrounds, experiences and biases and mustn’t be taken as the final word on anything. But as Bhagat himself puts it, “If you’re a critic with a professional interest in what’s happening in the world of literature, you also owe it to yourself to be aware of how different types of writing connects for different people.”

And this is a man who knows a thing or two about connecting with his readers. In a world far removed from highbrow Internet literary discussions, the Chetan Bhagat session at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January this year was a huge, unqualified success that ended with the author being mobbed by autograph-seekers outside the hall. Throughout the session Bhagat showed his talent for bonding with the audience in his earthy, unpretentious style. They hung on to every word, applauded enthusiastically when he said things like “Love comes first. If there’s a book priced at Rs 500 and you can have a meal with your girlfriend for that money instead, that’s what you should do – unless it’s a book about how to get new girlfriends!” They shyly ventured suggestions on how he could improve his books – and no, the suggestions weren’t that the writing should be more literary; instead, they wanted him to remove the “bad language” and the passages about pre-marital sex, which made their middle-class parents uncomfortable.

“Critics think my books are so safe, that they don’t challenge anyone at all,” Bhagat said to me afterwards, “but as you can see, these books often shock the small-town people who are their primary readers. Whether you like it or not, you have to take into account the responses and feelings of even the most inexperienced readers.” What he’s essentially saying is that there are many different levels at which people in this country engage with the English language, many hierarchies of reading and writing; and that most literary critics only seem to care about the topmost rung of sophisticated readers.

Whatever you think of Bhagat’s books, his success provides valuable insight into the needs and aspirations of a large base of readers whose engagement with literature is still at a grassroots level. This is what the Chetan Bhagat phenomenon has been about, ever since his first novel Five Point Someone, strategically priced at just Rs 95, sold lakhs of copies in a market where you don’t need to reach even the 10,000-mark to qualify as a bestseller. The book’s success helped open the floodgates for a new movement in Indian writing in English. An increasing number of writers are now reaching out to the “casual reader” – someone who wouldn’t normally list reading among his hobbies but who might pick up a cheaply priced novel because his friends have been talking about it; someone who prefers conversational prose and easily recognizable stories and settings to the rigours of literary fiction. After all, this type of writing isn’t about opening the reader’s mind to new worlds and ideas, which has traditionally been one of the functions of good literature; it’s about reinforcing everything you already know about the world and your place in it, seeking comfort in the fact that there are others who have experienced the same things you have. (Many of Bhagat’s readers are youngsters who have studied in IIT or worked in a call centre, which are things he’s written about. Many of his other readers are people who aspire towards those experiences.) Other writers have been quick to follow this trend, and their books invite different classifications (“Campus Novel”, “Chick Lit”, “Lad Lit”), but they are really all about giving casual readers something they can relate to. As Abhijit Bhaduri, the author of the “MBA novels” Mediocre but Arrogant and Married but Available puts it, “I chose a business-school setting because I was familiar with it and no other story had an Indian business school as a backdrop. The characters are all archetypal – people every batch can identify with. One simply had to spin a story around it.”

“What we’re seeing,” says Neelesh Misra, whose Once Upon a Timezone was about a call-centre employee’s long-distance relationship with a US-based journalist, “is the end of pretension for the publishing industry.” But there’s a pretension of a different sort on view now, accompanied by inverse snobbery: the eagerness to take potshots at “serious writers”, the self-serving assumption that any writer who uses descriptive prose and trades in complex ideas must be a “pseudo-intellectual” catering to the demands of the West. “I can’t understand why anyone would write an 800-page novel or spend six years working on one book,” Tushar Raheja, author of Anything for You, Ma’am: An IITian’s Love Story, wondered aloud to me once. “My life has been so eventful that I can easily write 50 books based on my experiences.” It might bear mentioning that Raheja was all of 22 years old at the time and that his book (the second paragraph of which began with the sentence “So ya, returning to the point”) supplied little evidence of an “eventful life” other than what its title suggests.

Amidst all this bluster, it’s refreshing to talk to Bhagat, who doesn’t have any delusions about what he’s trying to do: “I’m not pushing myself in a literary direction, I’m pushing for reach.” But he does think a great deal about the issues surrounding his writing – about the effect he has on both highbrow critics and inexperienced readers. And though he is known for being unassuming and happy go lucky, he admits to sometimes getting defensive when the criticism becomes too personal. “When you condemn me, you judge my reader,” he says. “Many people don’t understand that my books are read by government-school kids who know they have to learn English if they want to get anywhere in life. My books often provide them with an entry point into that daunting world. They would be scared if they picked up a more literary work and saw intricate sentences in the first paragraph.”

This last remark makes it seem like “mass-market publishing” is only about writing books that are simple, fast-paced reads, but the truth is a little more complicated. There is an army of mass-market writers who use big words and convoluted sentences to impress, in the style of the MBA aspirant who memorizes word-lists for an entrance exam without understanding context, or the thesis writer who uses the thesaurus indiscriminately. The work of these authors gets published – with practically no editing or even copy-editing – by low-investment publishing houses such as Srishti, and some of it makes Bhagat’s novels seem like masterpieces of restraint and subtlety. “No other book will give you as many big words for only a hundred rupees” went a description of Tuhin Sinha's That Thing Called LOVE: An Unusual Romance... and the Mumbai Rain (many of these novels have intriguing sub-heads that will remind you of such Hindi movie titles as Baaz: A Bird in Danger). But ambitiously florid though Sinha’s novel is, its claim is put in the shade by other recent publications like Novoneel Chakraborty's A Thing Beyond Forever, which informs us that its central character has “been taken through a cavalcade of exclusive events”, that she has received “copasetic answers” and that “the brush of her rapturous wishes made a surreal painting of utopia on the canvass of her heart, spraying a déjà senti feeling on her” (sic). Or Pankaj Pandey’s The Saga of LOVE Via Telephone...Tring Tring, which includes gems like “I gradually started spreading my tentacles in love”, “Then, started my saturnine days” and “What will Pankaj do in this perplexed and imbroglio situation?” (sic)

Presumably, the above books are targeted at smart-alecky urban youngsters – the “anyways” generation who are willing to see a book as a fashionable pop commodity and for whom talking the cool talk is more important than an understanding of basic grammar. But then, that’s how large the spectrum of mass-market readership in India is: it includes these city brats as well as the small-town readers who diffidently ask Chetan Bhagat to tone down the gaalis in his books. It includes readers who will never pick up anything other than a Bhagat novel but it also includes at least a few people who will use his books as a stepping stone to more varied reading. Either way, it’s a market that will determine the future of Indian publishing and the literary critic would do well to try and understand it, even if he can’t bring himself to approve of it.

Festival notes 5: chatting with Chetan

“That was a fun session we had yesterday,” said Chetan Bhagat as we sat on the Diggi Palace front lawns watching Pico Iyer talking with William Dalrymple, “but I wish they had scheduled it for Saturday or Sunday instead of a Friday morning. Most of my readers are working-class people – they don’t have the luxury of taking time off on a weekday to come for an event like this. Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it was nice that they thought of inviting schoolchildren, and that the teachers brought them along. It livened things up.”

The last sentence is an understatement. The “Chetan Bhagat in Conversation” session at the Jaipur lit-fest was a huge success that ended with the author being mobbed by autograph-seekers and media outside the Durbar hall. The last time I saw such frequent and enthusiastic applause inside this hall while a discussion was in progress was three years ago, when Shobha De held court over an audience that included several college-girls with giant stars in their eyes.

Chetan was also being modest when he gave the schoolchildren credit for livening things up. Actually, it was all him. He was spontaneous, witty in his distinct, earthy style, and connected with his audience in a way that few public speakers manage (it helped, of course, that the hall was filled with people who had read and enjoyed his books). Namita Gokhale and I were co-moderating the session but we were redundant, which is something I thoroughly approve of being when up on a stage. Before the session, I had prepared a token list of questions: about Chetan’s fractious relationship with critics, the vehemence that he seems to invite from people who are obsessed with preserving the Integrity of Literature, and the kneejerk inverse snobbery that he himself has sometimes responded with. But once the session began, I realised that this was not the time or place to discuss these heavyweight matters. What the audience mostly wanted was for Chetan to speak about himself, and to ask him their own questions.

There were lots of quotable quotes from him, most of which I neglected to take down. Commenting on his spurts of defensiveness, Chetan said, “I’m a sensitive person, and I do sometimes react if people keep saying ‘He sucks. He sucks.’ It’s almost like a style statement for me now!”

During the session, I brought up my conversation with Tushar Raheja a couple of years ago (see this post about mass-market fiction) – about Raheja wondering why anyone would spend Rs 400 or Rs 500 on a book when he could go out for a meal with his girlfriend for that money, and how this indicated a growing willingness among some readers and writers to look at a book as a product like any other. It was, of course, the decision to price Chetan’s first book Five Point Someone at Rs 95 that directly led to the opening up of a new market.

“Well, yes, I always say love comes first,” Chetan quipped. “If there’s a book priced at Rs 500 and you can have a meal with your girlfriend instead, that’s what you should do – unless it’s a book about how to get new girlfriends!” Loud cheers followed. But on a more serious note, he immediately pointed out that for many of his readers in smaller towns, Rs 95 in itself is a fairly substantial price for a book. “And the margins are still big – large bookstores like Crossword keep 40 of those 95 rupees.”

“I’m learning new things about this country all the time,” he said, “Someone who had read one of my books wrote to me from a town called Durg, and I didn’t even know where that was. I’ve also learnt that my third book, The Three Mistakes of My Life, has been more popular in smaller towns than the first two books were – because those readers can’t relate to call centres and IIT campuses.”

While we’re sitting on the front lawn the next day, a group of girls come up to Chetan and shyly ask for autographs. One of them haltingly says that she loved all his books, but that she wishes there wasn’t so much abusive language in Five Point Someone: “I wanted my father to read it but he got angry and said he could not read something with so much bad language.”

“I’ll try and get the publishers to produce a U-rated version,” says Chetan, smiling.

When they leave, he says to me: “See, reactions to any book take place on so many different levels. Literary critics think my books are so safe, and that they don’t challenge anyone at all, but the fact is that these books often shock the middle-class people who are their primary readers. Whether you like it or not, you have to take into account the responses and feelings of even naïve readers. In Five Point Someone, when I had the two lovers engage in pre-marital sex, I got so many responses from people who said they liked the book but felt that Neha should not have “given up” her virginity. There have even been readers who know so little about novels that they don’t realise this is fiction: I get letters reproaching me for ruining Neha’s life by telling this story. ‘Tumne Neha ki zindagi barbaad kar di, ab uss se shaadi kaun karegaa?’ (‘You’ve spoilt Neha’s chances of getting married.’) I don’t know how to explain to them that this is a made-up story.”

I’ve known Chetan for a few years now, and have always thought of him as someone who thinks a lot about the issues surrounding his writing – about why critics feel the way they do about him, about what his success tells us about the nature of English-language reading and writing in India. Of course, I don’t agree with some of his views, and I suspect that he doesn’t have much time for my stance that reviewing is an essentially personal act, not a public service; that you have to be honest to your own feelings about a work rather than try to extrapolate what it might mean to “the majority” of readers or to a hypothetical reader with different tastes. Whenever the subject has come up in the past, the talk has gone nowhere.

But here’s a straight transcription of some of what he said to me the other day. These are not the words of someone who doesn’t think about what he’s doing, or about his place in the larger picture:

“A lot of people don't realise that taste can be used to run other people down. But all of our tastes are a product of our environment, the families we were born into, our upbringing. If I’m from a sophisticated background I might have exposure to the finer points of Japanese cuisine. But a traditional Jain family won’t know anything about it – does that mean these people are dumb?

I don’t have a problem with criticism, but some of it gets nasty and personal, and then I do feel like hitting back. When you condemn me, you judge my reader, and my readership is huge. It’s like saying that the democratic choices that have been made by a whole lot of people are wrong.

Many people don’t understand that my books are read by government-school kids, for whom English is very much a second language, and who know that they have to learn it if they want to get anywhere in life – beyond a point you can’t be successful if you don’t know English. And my books often provide them with an entry point into that world. They would be scared if they picked up a more literary work and saw complicated sentences in the first paragraph.

Let me give you a hypothetical situation – try to visualise it. Imagine that for whatever reason, your life takes a turn where it suddenly becomes very important for you to know French in order to get ahead in life. So you start learning it, work hard at it, persevere for weeks and months. Once you’re done with the basics, someone gives you a French novel written in a simple, conversational style and you get through it – this makes you feel like you’ve got somewhere, gained some sort of acceptance into a world that used to be closed to you. Then you pick up the newspapers the next day and see that critics everywhere have written that this book is utter crap, that only an idiot would like it. How do you feel then? And what service is such a review doing?

If you’re a critic, you at least owe it to yourself to be aware of how art connects for different people. But there is so much nastiness directed at my work. A reviewer writing about my third book for a prominent newspaper began by proudly announcing ‘I haven’t read Chetan Bhagat’s previous books but I went to my editor and asked if I could review this one, because I wanted to slam it.’ That was the first sentence of the review!”

(More on Chetan soon. In full disclosure, he wasn’t the festival’s biggest draw on the day of his session: that honour belonged to a certain Mr Bachchan who made an appearance on the front lawns an hour or so after our session got over.)

The new Chetan Bhagat, and thoughts on 'entertainment'

(A tense moment as the jabberwock contemplates this big announcement he is about to make - an announcement that might easily drive half his readers away for good.)

Oh what the heck, it’s not like this is a paid site. So here goes: I thought Chetan Bhagat’s new book was pretty good. There, I’ve said it. I have nothing to fear anymore.

No, I won’t go on about how it isn’t great literature etc, because that should be evident to anyone (even though it’s rarely evident what "great literature" is exactly). It’s something the author himself makes a point of saying in his every interview (to the extent that he’s almost too defensive now about the fact that his work doesn’t have any literary pretensions - even his narrators say things like "if you’re expecting something posh and highbrow, you won’t get that here").

I won’t talk about the book’s plot either - in the unlikely event that you don’t already know about it, read about it here. In any case, if there’s one book that doesn’t need any more publicity, it’s this one - it’s going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies regardless of what any critic or blogger says about it (that’s largely thanks to Rupa’s smart, and brave, marketing strategy of pricing it at Rs 95, something that worked phenomenally well for Five Point Someone). It’ll far, far outsell many vastly better-written books, and so maybe I should feel guilty about writing a post about it.

But there are a couple of points I want to make about Bhagat’s writing:

- I think CB is a good storyteller, more gifted in that respect than many people who are, technically speaking, "better writers". And this can be as vital to good writing as erudition or command over the language. Though his writing is conversation- rather than description-oriented, he has a definite gift for characterisation; his little observations about people and relationships are the mark of a perceptive mind.

- Importantly, I think one night at the call centre is a slight improvement on its predecessor, and that’s always a good sign. The writing is tighter on the whole and the funny, seemingless effortless one-liners (which Bhagat has a knack for) work better here. Also, it required more research than the first book, for which Bhagat had drawn on his own experiences at IIT in the mid-1990s.

(Note: the "God" section of the book didn’t work for me - it wasn’t as syrupy as it might have been but it was still too preachy for my liking. Nor was I too sold on the parts about "saving the call centre by working on American fear".)

Many authors use the "I’m not literary" defence - it’s often a way of shirking responsibility, of keeping people’s expectations of you as low as possible so they won’t be disappointed. But very few of those authors are as readable as CB is, and in the final analysis readability does count. This is the second book of his that I finished in a single sitting despite being pressed for time. That’s not something I usually experience with pulp/non-literary fiction, regardless of the authors’ claims that their aim is to provide a fast, easy read.

P.S. Indirectly related to this post. When I met Bhagat yesterday, he went through the "I write to entertain" routine as well. While I understand why people feel the need to make the "serious v entertainment" distinction, I don’t relate to that kind of talk. It’s very annoying, for instance, if you’re discussing Bergman or Godard with a friend and someone pipes up with a, "Oh, I only watch movies for entertainment." That’s insulting – it’s based on a pre-judgement of what "entertainment" must be, and an assumption that some of us are forcing ourselves to watch "boring" films for some lofty purpose only we know about. But my foremost criterion for judging any film/book is that it should provide me enjoyment. For instance, my ever-shifting list of 20 favourite films usually includes both Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and George Lucas’s Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back, and both films entertain me.

The most concession I can make is that different films/books entertain us in different ways: that on some occasions more than others the fun quotient is increased by the knowledge that you’re being intellectually stimulated as well. But that’s about it. I’d feel very sorry for someone who forced themselves to plough through a book they didn’t like just because they thought it would improve their mind. For heaven’s sake, we’ve all been through enough of that forced crap in our school and college days.

(Conversely, I don’t think there’s a law on earth that says you have to be entertained by an Adam Sandler or David Dhawan film. I’ve been bored stiff on many occasions.)