It’s a tough time to be a writer or wannabe author in India these days. If you write against the government, you are likely to be stripped of your citizenship, and if you support it, you’ll be in Arnab Goswami’s B team, or sharing a room with Sambit Patra in Gujarat Bhavan. Or, even worse, you could end up like Tavleen Singh, whose sacerdotal efforts at the altar of the presiding deity of Indian politics didn’t pay off — her son lost his citizenship anyway. So, what is one to do? The safest course, I feel, is to do a Chetan Bhagat and write only about ‘The Girl in Room 105’ or pen motivational stuff with misleading titillating titles, like that other bestseller: ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’.
The other problem I’ve encountered is this: what does one write about? History is a prohibited zone, because the RSS and the late Dinanath Batra started re-writing it, with novel inputs provided by the Supreme Court, no less, in some of its judgments. Mythology is no longer available as Amish Tripathi has already mined it till there is nothing left to explore there but the question: was the live feed of the battle of Kurukshetra conveyed to Dhritrashtra via Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu? Sardar jokes are a no-go area, like the area around Parliament Bhavan, as those poor chaps from JNU found out a couple of years back; the mountains have been denuded of all their tales by Ruskin Bond; the British era has been subjected to repeated biopsies by Shashi Tharoor and William Dalrymple; nobody reads about sports these days because everyone is hooked to biopics; romance is confined to Twitter and Instagram and has to be compressed into 140 words: who has time for a novel? War books are unlikely because even though Messrs Modi and Munir both threaten it, nobody is actually pressing that blue button anytime soon. Moreover, no two Indian Generals can ever agree on whether we won or lost a war, including Haldighati.
One potentially promising area is memoirs by bureaucrats, and quite a few are rushing to the printers, having suddenly remembered their stellar contribution in pushing us onto a 8 per cent growth path. But they are bogged down with their training, confusing ‘penal’ with ‘penile’ (as in the Indian Penile Code), concluding each chapter with ‘submitted for approval, please’ out of sheer habit. Their tomes do seem to bear out the unkind observation of Christopher Hitchens that everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay!
Why do chaps persist with writing, given the hardships involved? You just have to attend every literary festival to be noticed, which is pretty tough considering that they have now started organising them even in Jhumri Tilaiya and Kotkapura.
You’ll never make it to any bestseller list because of Amish Tripathi: he’s the BJP of the Indian literary universe with an almost two-thirds stranglehold. What is the Competition Commission doing, and why is he not being hauled up for monopolistic practices, or at least for forming a cartel with Chetan Bhagat? Both should be banned from writing for at least three years so the rest of us can keep the wolves, if not the cows, from our doors.
Ruskin Bond once said that India has more writers than readers, which explains how publishers act. Influenced by TV channels, they insist on the seamier stuff. One guy in Daryaganj I submitted a proposal to did to my manuscript what dogs down the ages have been doing to lamp posts, and then advised me instead to write a kiss-and-tell book about politicians I have worked with, replete (he suggested with a wink) with awards of dubious contracts, girls in rooms other than just 105, booth-capturing techniques (this was before the age of the EVM, which has rendered all previous practices obsolete) and other such staples of governance. It would, he assured, sell like ‘hot Kates’ — I presume he meant hot cakes.
It appears my books are as popular as ice cubes in the North Pole. At times I wonder, did they even print the books?
But maybe I’m being too harsh on them. Now, I have a fairly large extended family, even if I were to discount the guys who are either in judicial custody or have jumped bail, and they can also read though writing requires more effort. Members of my social circle are more law-abiding and some even pay their taxes. But very few want to buy my books — they expect them to be dished out as gifts. I don’t mind giving them away — nobody’s buying them anyway — but then I rarely get any feedback. Nobody tells me whether they liked the book or used it as printed toilet paper. Except, of course, from the good wife. I asked her about my last book and Neerja replied: “Uh, you really want to know?” “Sure,” I replied cheerily, though not very truthfully, “I’ve always valued your advice.”
“OK, then, two comments: one, there are far too many conjunctions.” “What’s wrong with that?” I queried, “the idea is to stitch the story together.”
“Nope, the road to Hell is paved with good conjunctions.” I digested this Sadhguru-type statement. “What’s your second observation?” I asked. “Your style belongs to the coitus interruptus school of writing,” she intoned.
“Huh? What exactly is that supposed to mean?” I shouted.
She was calmness itself, like a teacher talking to a naughty child. “See,” she explained, “you use too many punctuation marks, especially the exclamation mark. It disrupts your rhythm, interrupts the flow, and delays the gland, sorry, I meant grand, finale.”
So why do I keep writing stuff that no one reads and not seek reemployment as an adviser to the Minister for Open Defecation Free Himachal? Well, it’s partly because my networking skills resemble those of Obelisk, and partly because the queue of retired Chief Secretaries lined up for the job is longer than the line outside the Moolchand metro’s Sulabh Sauchalaya, but mainly because, as some wise man once said: you are what you write. He was spot-on, you know: writing bilge is better than advising about it!
— The writer is a retired IAS officer
