By the book: more thoughts on adaptation

[A version of my latest column for GQ magazine]

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This is an unusually busy time for movies based on high-profile novels. Deepa Mehta’s film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is finally ready, as is Ang Lee’s adaptation of another Booker-winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Meanwhile the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s marvellous The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been given cinematic life by one of my favourite directors Mira Nair, and Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqi are in the process of adapting Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel Sea of Poppies.

Naturally the release of each of these films will be accompanied by much hand-wringing and cries of “but...but...but...” by viewers who have read the books (and by some who haven’t read them but have mastered the enviable art of speaking knowledgeably about them nonetheless). Each of us will at some point morph into a version of the comic-strip goat who, after chewing on a roll of celluloid, says ruminatively to his companion, “The book was better.” Questions of faithfulness to the original will be raised, omitted passages will be bewailed, shock will be expressed at the casting of this actor in that role. Midnight’s Children in particular will be closely dissected, since Rushdie’s novel is nearly as much of an Unavoidable Baggy Presence for Indian Writing in English as Ulysses was for 20th century fiction; even a flawless film might easily be weighed down by unreasonable expectations.

Personally I try to judge movies based on what they achieve with their medium's techniques, rather than as slavish illustrations of literary works. But I confess to a flicker of trepidation about the adaptations mentioned above, because some of the things I most like about these books don’t seem easily translatable to film. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for instance, is marked by a distinctive first-person voice: the protagonist, a Pakistani man named Changez, addresses an unnamed American tourist in a courtly, almost ingratiating style. (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”) This narrative has a stylised, off-kilter quality that makes it difficult for the reader to know exactly what Changez’s intentions are (in an interview, Hamid told me the effect he was reaching for was “that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play”) and what effect he is having on his listener - so that even the simple description of someone putting his hand into his jacket pocket is laced with the possibility that he might be reaching for either a business card or a weapon.

With Life of Pi, the potential pitfall is one that is especially relevant to the fantasy (or part-fantasy) genre: a book lets you imagine its characters and incidents for yourself while a film gives them immutable shape. (I mostly loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but its depiction of the flaming Eye of Sauron in the final sequences was problematic; presented as a roving, Twentieth Century Fox-style flashlight, Tolkien’s bodiless villain lost the chillingly abstract quality he - it? - had in the books.) Martel’s novel – about a teenage boy adrift on a lifeboat with a fearsome Bengal Tiger – gets much of its force from the irresolvable ambiguity of the narrative: is Richard Parker the tiger a real presence or is he an invention, a wish-fulfillment device that allows young Pi to focus his thoughts and survive a difficult ordeal? But the movie, by its very nature, has to literalise the book's central voyage, and if you see a large tiger on the screen once, it is difficult to be subsequently convinced of his unreality.

The adaptation that most intrigues me though is the Sea of Poppies one. Rizvi’s film is provisionally titled Afeem (19th century opium trade being central to Ghosh’s story) and anyone familiar with her debut Peepli Live knows she can bring the required sensitivity to this tale of people from various backgrounds journeying across the ocean, driven more by despair than expectation. ("Both Peepli Live and Sea of Poppies are stories about the psychological effects of migration," she told me during a recent chat.) But the most riveting thing about Ghosh’s novel wasn’t its plot – it was its use of language. Its lascar sailors (“who came from places that had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”) speak a dynamic hybrid of tongues, made of words picked up from various countries, and the European characters who have been living in India for generations use phrases such as “He turned a ship oolter-poolter” and “It would never do to be warming the coorsey when there’s kubber like this to be heard”.

To my mind at least, such details work better on the printed page than on the screen (where, if not handled exactly right, they might too easily devolve into tedious slapstick). However this is, as always, dependent on the quality of the treatment, the casting and the performances. During our conversation, Rizvi mentioned that most of the script would be in Bhojpuri – something that is singularly appropriate for this book – and it was nice to read a blog entry by Ghosh expressing enthusiasm for the project. Authors aren’t always the best judges of movies based on their work, of course, but of the adaptations mentioned above Afeem sounds like the one that is most worth warming the multiplex coorsey for.

[Earlier posts about book-to-movie adaptations: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; notes from the Times of India lit-fest; A Kiss Before Dying; R K Narayan on a movie set]

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.)

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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.

"The freedom to say unpopular and shocking things"

Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie – a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position – has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them [...] There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture.

From the statement read out by Hari Kunzru during his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival two days ago. Also read Hari’s post about the events of that day, including the short Satanic Verses readings by him and Amitava Kumar, and the subsequent intimation that they might be in serious legal trouble if they stayed on in India.

I didn’t go to Jaipur this year, but – like everyone I know who cares about freedom of speech and worries about the increasing hegemony of the easily offended (the "bleeding-heart illiberals" as Rukun Advani cleverly put it in another context recently) – I’ve been feeling very dispirited about the events of the past few days. (This report about the police fabricating a terrorism threat was particularly mindboggling, but also completely believable.)

Earlier today in Jaipur, Nilanjana helped organise a petition to unban The Satanic Verses; I’m sure an online version of the petition will be up soon, do look out for it. Meanwhile, here are some relevant links: a fine piece in The Hindu about “the slow-motion disintegration” of a secular state; a clarification by JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple; and Salil Tripathi on India's "sepulchral silence".

Update: the online petition is here. Please sign and spread the word.

Lunch with (and thoughts on) Amitava Kumar

[Warning: schizophrenic post, probably confused and varying in tone – which can happen if you’re meeting a friend for lunch and a chat but also end up writing it out as an interview for a newspaper, and then blogging it at even greater length. I first met Amitava Kumar in 2004 when his book Husband of a Fanatic was published. In the last couple of years we’ve corresponded regularly on email and through our blogs, and would have caught up anyway when he visited Delhi a few days ago for the launch of Home Products. But Business Standard’s “Lunch with BS” section provided the opportunity to mix work with pleasure. This is a longer, more casual version of the piece that appeared in the paper today.]


“Let’s go to Karim’s,” Amitava Kumar suggested in his email when we were fixing up this lunch. “One or two greasy parathas and an oily rogan josh will be the proper cure for my jet-lag.” Unfortunately, when the day comes, we need to find a place closer to the guesthouse where he’s staying, so we opt for the Gulati restaurant in Pandara Road – not as iconic as Karim’s but distinguished enough, and more likely to be quiet and have empty tables. Besides, we can always put in a special request for extra oil in the food.

On the way to the restaurant, he asks me to stop the car so he can take photographs of some faded posters of wanted criminals and terrorists on a nearby wall. “I’m working on something about arrests and entrapment,” he says, “and I’m interested in the language used to describe terrorists, and how we are expected to recognise them – after all the 9/11 hijackers were anonymous in appearance, they didn’t look like stereotypes.” (We joke about the descriptions on the posters. “Wears shirt and pant and carries China pistol,” says one helpfully. So if you’re a terrorist and in the Golf Links area, wear shorts. And don’t carry a China pistol.)

Settling into the cosy north Indian family atmosphere of Gulati, we order a non-veg kebab platter, some yellow daal, and a half-portion of tandoori chicken – the last in honour of a passage in the book that Amitava had mailed me a few days earlier. He draws my attention to the song playing in the background, “Aage bhi jaane na tu” from the classic Waqt. “Does it occur to you that this music is quintessentially for a restaurant like this, with its associations of a woman in a green sari, singing in a ballroom…”

An established essayist, writer of non-fiction and Professor of English at Vassar College, NY, Amitava is in India for the launch of his first novel, Home Products. He likes channelling his small-town Bihari side when he talks, throwing in a juicy colloquial cuss word, for instance, in the middle of a serious discussion on post-colonial theory. At other times he speaks with a careful, almost exaggerated politeness, and it’s fun to watch the contrast between these two sides; to anticipate the shifts in tone. I take out my tape recorder (because you can’t eat kakori kebabs with one hand and take notes with the other) and he comments on journos who have an aversion to taking notes – “Mere bache mere paas laut ke aayenge aur unki shakalen bilkul alag hongi.” (“My own children, the sentences I have spoken, will come back to me with new faces. They won’t look like me.”)

A while later, as I start to respond to something he said, he picks up the tape recorder and turns the recording side towards me. It’s a quick, matter-of-fact gesture but it bespeaks a meticulousness that reminds me of one of the things I admire most about his non-fiction: the attention to detail, the level of engagement with things around him. In his essays and books this often takes the form of nuanced commentaries on the writing process, and careful analyses of what other writers are trying to do.

In the preface to his celebrated literary memoir Bombay-London-New York, Amitava wrote: “This book bears witness to my struggle to become a writer.” Today he is a well-known literary figure but one gets the sense that the struggle to write, to understand how to write, is an ongoing process for him. This theme finds echo in Home Products, the story of a journalist, Binod, trying to write a film script about a murdered poet, but exploring a number of other stories in the process.

Recounting a line by James Baldwin (“Every writer has only one story to tell”), Amitava says, “I’m convinced now that the only story I have to tell is the story of how to find the words to put down on the page, or how to tell your own story – the story of how you came to be. My idea is that at the end of Home Products, the reader should find that the book Binod was trying to write is this very one, the one the reader is holding.”

[If this sounds confusing, read some of Amitava’s articles here, especially this one.]

Another striking feature of his writing, also reflected in his personality, is the natural, unforced humility. This is markedly different from the show-offish attempts at self-deprecation sometimes seen in other writers. Reading Amitava’s work I often get the impression that that famous quality, the Writer’s Ego, is entirely absent in him; one waits for cracks to appear in what is – surely has to be? – a façade of self-effacement, but it never happens.

For example, in one of his articles, he mentions contacting Rahul Bhattacharya, the talented young cricket writer and author of Pundits from Pakistan, and asking him to elaborate on something he had written. At 44, Amitava is nearly a couple of decades senior to Bhattacharya, and writers are famous for getting more guarded and less accessible as they grow older; it’s difficult to imagine many others of his age and stature openly showing such interest in the work of a much younger man.

Amitava makes no attempt to hide that he’s flattered when I mention this. “Tum aur tumhara pyaar!” he says before getting serious: “The humility, as you put it, may have come from my longtime admiration for George Orwell. I was very much influenced by his honesty and candour, and I wanted to be like that.” Relating the genesis of Home Products, he says he was impressed by a similar candour in the actor Manoj Bajpai. “He told me that he used to wet his bed as a child,” he says, “and that reminded me of Orwell, who was equally unflinching in his descriptions of his own weaknesses.”

In the book, the character of Neeraj Dubey, a small-town actor who makes it big, is based on Bajpai. What prompted Amitava to move away from his comfort zone and tell this story as fiction? “I started off wanting to do a non-fiction book about Bajpai, but then I realised that the guy has told me about wetting his bed but would he tell me if he had a relationship with his aunt? So one has to make that up. Because there are other rooms in the house, and only a fiction writer will enter those rooms.”

Besides, writing fiction carries its own sense of power. “It gave me a thrill,” he says, “to create a wedding night scene where the guy starts talking to his wife about her Geography marks. Making up a conversation like that was a huge delight, and I wish others the same.” The leap from non-fiction was interesting in other ways. “A non-fiction writer wants to explain everything, but the fiction writer must be more restrained. For a long time, I thought fiction meant that one needed to add dramatic details to what had already been collected through travel and research. What I learnt, however, is that writing fiction is more about taking things away and letting the silences stand.”

Does he think of himself primarily as an academic, an essayist or a member of that much-discussed club, the Indian Writer in English? “I’m opposed to the IWE acronym,” he says, chewing on a mutton burrah. “Recently a friend told me that the language in my book seemed to melt away into Hindi. That felt good – I can’t really think of myself as an Indian writer in English.”

“Academics make a profession of knowing things and I don’t want to be the person who always knows. Everything doesn’t come accompanied with footnotes. Academia is about being politically correct – offending no one – but in a world full of offences it’s sometimes good to admit that you carry hate in your heart. My conscious choice in writing has been to admit incorrectness, to make space for faults.”

“So I guess I’m left with being an essayist – or just a writer! Have some burrah,” he adds, “it’s lovely.” And then a non-sequitur – “When you write your article you must include this sentence: ‘While I was praising Amitava Kumar, he exploited the situation and ate up all the kebabs’.”

As people stream in and the decibel levels in the restaurant rise, our talk becomes more general. We touch on his love for Indian food (“Nothing like a warm roti,” he says, “Do you know how to make rotis? Neither my wife nor I know – big disadvantage”), his hometown Patna (“it’s changing fast – Gurgaon isn’t the only megapolis in India!”) …and Salman Rushdie who, displeased by some of the things Amitava has written about him, refused to share the stage with him when he was invited to speak at Vassar College. (Amitava blogged about the incident here.)

Does he think of the Rushdie of today as more a P3 celebrity than a serious writer? “I do, yes,” says Amitava, “and that’s the short answer. The long answer is: he’s a very important figure for us (contemporary Indian authors working in English). Baap hai woh. Aur baap ko gaali dena buri baat hai.” A meaningful pause, and I can anticipate what’s coming next. “Lekin chutiya baap hai. Baap agar roz daaru peeke ghar aayega toh aap usko kitna respect denge?”

[I’m not translating the above into English. You get the spirit of the thing only in the original.]

After a hurriedly consumed fruit cream dessert, it’s time to go – Amitava’s book launch is in the evening and he’d like to grab some shut-eye before then. “When I was living in Delhi as a student,” he says, “I would walk across to Pragati Maidan to watch Shyam Benegal saab’s films. And now he’s going to be releasing my book!” You’d normally expect these words from a first-time author, a launch virgin, but coming from Amitava Kumar they don’t seem at all unnatural.

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A few more quotes that I couldn’t fit in:

On his use of the first-person in essays about other people’s work

The “I” is linked with the “eye”, which is looking at the world. When one of my students comes into class and says he wants to write a story about a guy who goes to the moon and meets a dog and such-and-such happens, I said to him, ‘Whoa! How about coming down to earth and looking at the lives of people around you – there are so many fascinating stories there. Find out what happened to your mother when she was a waitress at that restaurant.’

On post-colonial studies

I have benefited from it, and I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but allow me (he says very deliberately), allow me to at least bark at the hand that feeds me. Post-colonial theory has analytical value – in terms of studying inequalities and so on – but it is also very narrow and not willing to change. In fact I tried to call it by a new name, “World Bank literature”. This could refer to the “literature” produced by the WB itself – the reports etc – which we could consider Literature! Or it could refer to the literature in the countries where the WB exists.

More on moving away from the political correctness of academia

If you’ve read my recent piece on rape – it’s a disturbing thought that a woman should run away with her rapist, and it’s awkward to even discuss such a thing. But these things happened during Partition – there were women who didn’t want to leave the promise of a new life.

Absolutely the last post on the Jaipur festival

Here’s the link to a fly-on-the-wall piece I wrote about the fest for Business Standard. Includes stuff I’ve already put up here and here (especially the “Session Snippets”) but I’ll still post the whole thing a little later – because the BS website, there’s no polite way to say this, is crap. Para breaks are random (because of a ridiculous notion some people have that no one will read a paragraph that’s more than 5 lines long), words that are supposed to be italicized/in bold aren’t, and the links keep changing. I was told more than a year ago that improvements are underway but it doesn’t ever look like happening (which, to be fair, is true for the world in general).

Update here's the piece, minus the Session Snippets:

“I get the impression,” poet Jeet Thayil deadpans, “that India has discovered the literary festival and is going to make up for the past with a vengeance.” Thayil is referring to the sudden preponderance of lit-events being organised in the country, but he might as well be talking about the blink-and-miss pace of activity at the one we are at — the Jaipur Literature Festival, held in the Diggi Palace between January 19-21. Inside the hall, a few feet from where we are standing, a reading-cum-discussion is underway, one of many scheduled for the day. We are by the lawn outside, near the little book-stall and coffee-stand, having decided (like many others) that it’s impractical to try and attend each session; it makes more sense to choose your events and spend the rest of the time soaking in the general atmosphere.

The Jaipur festival allows for such an approach, being relatively informal in its structure — the sessions are free-flowing, not centred around a specific theme, and the event descriptions usually not more elaborate than “So-and-so well-loved author reads from her work and speaks with so-and-so”.

Of course, informality does start to disappear as an event gets bigger in scale. At last year’s edition of the festival it was possible to meet someone like Hari Kunzru at the door as he left after his reading, and shepherd him to a deckchair for an impromptu five-minute interview. This year things aren’t so simple. With a larger audience and (more pertinently) larger media representation, authors tend to be chary and stick to their own comfort groups — though it’s ridiculous to suggest, as some news reports did before the event, that Salman Rushdie has a security contingent accompanying him around. The man is usually surrounded by a clique of friends, fellow authors and festival organisers, but it isn’t uncommon to see him blithely entering the hall all by himself and occupying the nearest available seat.

The quality of the actual events stays consistent most of the way through, though minor irritants do show up. Pramod Kumar, former director, Jaipur Virasat Foundation, is candid about the areas that need to be improved on. “We’ve had seating problems, especially for the highest-profile events,” he says, alluding to the Kiran Desai and Rushdie sessions where the audience spilled over onto the lawn; Desai’s conversation with Barkha Dutt was especially frustrating for those who didn’t get good seats because the TV set installed outside the hall played Twinkle Twinkle and the acoustics weren’t up to par. “I’m also disappointed by the lack of questions from the audience,” Kumar says, though this does also stem from the need to hurriedly wrap one session up so the next one can begin.

At any rate, you can be assured of strange and wondrous sights at a literary event spread over three days, especially if you’re uninitiated to cocktail book launches and the lit-party circuit. For starters, the image of the author as a reclusive beast cooped up in a room with pen and Muse goes rapidly out the window. There are games of one-upmanship between writer and writer, agent and agent, journalist and journalist, and various permutations of these. There is groupism, bitching, backstabbing, canoodling. Two heavyweights who might not be very happy to run into one another are steered away at key moments by the organisers. Wannabe writers pursue publishers and agents with large manuscripts in their hands. Caferati, the online forum for aspiring writers (http://www.caferati.com/), has its own stall set up in one corner, where there is much (good-natured) hard-selling of the group’s first book, the self-published Stories from the Coffee-Table.

At the other end of the lawn a schoolgirl talks excitedly on her cellphone: “Haan, uncle? Rushdieji mere peeche baithe the!” Other students take photographs inside the hall with flash-enabled cameras (despite a strict injunction not to) and whisper loudly to each other: “Damn, I clicked that guy’s picture instead of that guy’s! Which of them is the main guy for this session?”

And in the midst of all the fun and frivolity, there are even some provocative discussions about literature — authors reading from and talking about their work, sessions that cover legacies from the past (in the form of a moving homage to the late poets Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar) and possible directions for the future (Penguin India editor Ravi Singh cautions that all the talk about explosive growth in Indian publishing is “ridiculously overstated — the average print runs for mid-list books hasn’t changed in the last 10 years”, but Zubaan publisher Urvashi Butalia is more optimistic about the increase in the number of bookstores, genres and the growing importance of literature for young people).

One of my favourite moments came when authors Ira Pande and Namita Gokhale, cousins, began a session by chattering jovially amongst each other and then apologising to the audience: “Sorry about this, when Namita and I get together we turn into a Johar Mahmood show and forget all about the audience.” However, this didn’t stop the ladies from embarking on a thoughtful conversation about the work of Pande’s mother Shivani, the acclaimed Hindi writer. In the final reckoning, this balance between intimacy and serious discussion is what makes the Jaipur festival a success.

Of penumbras and KRAs

[Have spent the last few days putting together longish feature stories about the literary festival and such, so it was a nice break to do this lightweight “My Week” column in personal diary-form, for the Sunday Business Standard.]

Friday
A freelance writer is more likely to be going to bed at 3.30 AM than waking up at that time, but I have to be ready for the early-morning drive to Jaipur – I'm going with a group of friends (fellow bloggers and journalists) for the annual literary festival and have decided to take my car, having suffered motion sickness on the bus journey last year. Co-travelers offer to share the driving if I get tired, but my insides can stand a long road journey only if I’m behind the wheel myself. (This makes life very complicated. Midway through a journey from Shimla to Kalka once, I had to ask a startled cab-driver to stop and allow me to drive the rest of the way.)

Once on National Highway-8, I briefly regret my decision as we find ourselves in the middle of a bizarre (for this time of day) traffic pile-up just outside Gurgaon; I ruminate darkly on all the things I've heard about improved roads and infrastructure. Later, alarm bells ring when we see a long line of trucks heading back towards us on our side of the road, but the traffic clears and there are no further problems. Unfortunately we reach Jaipur only around 11.30, having missed a session I badly wanted to catch - the one featuring domestic worker-turned-author Baby Halder.

In the next three days we attend readings and discussions, laze in deckchairs on the Diggi Palace lawn, chat with writers and publishers and go out for non-literary dinners each night (note to anyone visiting Jaipur: try Cafe Kooba, it's excellent). While shopping in the Walled City, a prominent blogger friend who shall remain unnamed is miffed when a crafts store assistant asks him in polite English if he "would like to try a sari". (Immense emasculation proliferates.)

Saturday
At an otherwise excellent session featuring author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with editor/critic Anita Roy, I hear the former use the phrase "the Penumbra of the Self". Having long believed that "penumbra" was either a gruesome inner body part or a six-headed mythical monster, I am stunned into reverential silence. These literary festivals really do expand one's mental horizons, even if the coffee is below par.

“I am truly mesmerised!” the short balding man in the audience says to the beautiful poet who has just finished a reading. “You seem obsessed by the human body. Can you tell me your worldview please?”

Sunday
Jade Goody, who said all those mean things about Shilpa Shetty, has been evicted from the celebrity house and India has once again chastened the rest of the world with its Moral Superiority. A newspaper quotes Shetty's family as saying "good has triumphed over evil, just like in Bollywood films". I shake my head so hard it falls off.

In the evening we are entertained by a stream of quotable quotes by Salman Rushdie as he holds forth on faith ("my mother developed religion in her old age – but it was like arthritis"), censorship ("you can't burn a thought"), the Indian Army in Kashmir, and many other topics.

Monday
I reach Delhi around 12 PM after another long morning drive, and with fever and a bad cough to show for my pains. The rest of the day is spent staring listlessly at the TV screen. Outstanding match between two of tennis's finest youngsters, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray, and I wonder philosophically whether you get more brownie points in the afterlife for writing a dozen good books, winning a dozen Grand Slams or participating in a dozen reality shows.

The "We support Shilpa" messages on the tickers of news channels read: "My sentiments, and the sentiments of millions of We Indians, have been offended". Seeking comfort in numbers, what? I consider possible National Mottos to go with our national anthem and national song: "I am Indian and my sentiments are always hurt." Pleased with this small contribution to the national cause, I sleep, only to be tormented by nightmares about Amit Chaudhuri's penumbra chasing me through a cold and dark forest where the trees are all painted in the national tri-colour.

Also
The features department in office is abuzz with talk about a grand new concept called "Key Result Area" (KRA), conceived by the human resources team as a way of measuring employee performance. It sounds very promising, but a senior editor tells me the acronym makes much more sense when you add the letter "P" to it. Another sniffs, "How can you quantify a writer's work or reduce it to cold figures?" It feels like I'm back at the lit-fest.