India Uncut

My colleague and friend, Chandrahas Choudhury, a fine writer who shuns cliches, has a grouse with my series on Cricketing Cliches. In an email to me, he writes:

I think you should make a sharper distinction between cliches on the one hand and commonly used expressions on the other. For instance you cite as cliches, in one post, the two expressions "on a knife's edge" and "having it all their way". If one understands a cliche as a trite or hackneyed idea or characterization, one immediately sees why the first phrase is a cliche. It must be noted that "on a knife's edge" is actually an excellent characterization of a situation that is so delicately balanced that it rests - and here we are asked to make a mental picture - as if one a knife's edge. But through repetition and overuse the expression has become what one calls a 'dead metaphor' - it no longer stimulates us to make a mental
picture through which we understand how tense the situation is, and the writer would be better off thinking of some other phrase. The same applies for phrases like "taking the bull by the horns". In general, the more metaphorical the phrase, the more likely it is to become deadened - and thereby give us the sense of being trite - by use.

"Having it all their way," by contrast, is to my mind merely a commonly used expression. If a team really is running away with the game, then I think this is a phrase that expresses the situation quite accurately; and if I were to write about ten games in a row, and all ten games were one-way affairs, then I see no reason why I should not use this phrase every time with justification (of course, I would ideally not want to do so, for variety is the spice of language as it is of life). The same goes for "elegant cover-drive". A writer is perfectly entitled to call cover-drives 'elegant' as long as he does not believe that all cover-drives, just by virtue of being cover-drives, are somehow elegant. 'Elegant' is such a general phrase that one can often use it safely without really falling into error; as a parallel, we often say that 'it's a beautiful day', but are we using a cliched expression then?

Fair point, but I would argue that even a commonly used expression becomes a cliche with repeated use, especially in particular contexts. A cliche is essentially a lazy shorthand that a writer uses, whether it is metaphorical or a commonly used phrase. They deaden prose, and a writer should aim to describe everything he sees in a fresh manner. When he instead uses cliches, he does his readers a disservice.

Consider the "elegant cover-drive", for example. I have seen cover-drives by Michael Vaughan, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Yasir Hameed described in that manner. Now, while all the cover-drives in question were no doubt elegant, they were also different from each other. Surely the writer's duty is to convey that difference, rather than use a broad phrase that tells you nothing. "Elegant" is not a cliche by itself, but it becomes cliched usage in the context of a cover-drive. Every cover-drive deserves better.

Of course, in the course of a report where a writer has no space for detailed description, such shorthands are forgivable, if avoidable. "On a knife's edge", however, is inexcusable. On that, I agree with Chandrahas.

Yesterday five bloggers met. I was delighted to have dinner with Yazad Jal, Ravikiran Rao and Gaurav Sabnis, with Dilip D’Souza joining us for a pre-dinner coffee. I was meeting Yazad and Ravikiran for the first time, and had met Gaurav briefly once before, at a quiz. Yet, although they were strangers to me, I had a sense of knowing them well, having read their blogs for months now. Is knowing the writing different from knowing the writer?

In a brilliant essay in the New Yorker, Louis Menand writes:

Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.

The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.

Being in the business of writing, I meet writers often, and find myself having to shift my perception of the writer after actually meeting him or her. Interestingly, I’ve found that in the case of writers with a distinctive style (or voice), after that initial “small adjustment”, the writer and the writing fit tend to fit together. One of my colleagues in Cricinfo, Dileep Premachandran, turned out to be quite different physically from the imposing figure I expected when I met him, but whenever I read his delightful prose now, I hear his voice in my mind’s ear. And quite the same thing happens with another of my colleagues with a distinctive style, Chandrahas Choudhury. The writing and the writer, in each case, are of a piece, something that is not true of lesser, or less experienced, writers.

So how did my meeting last night change my impressions of the bloggers I was dining with? Well, they did not look as I had expected them to, but as the evening wore on, I found it easy to connect them with what they write. Yazad was intense, passionately answering all the (undoubtedly naïve) questions I put to him about libertarianism, while Ravikiran was thoughtful and softspoken, with not a word out of place – quite as in The Examined Life. Gaurav was candid and straightforward, just as his writing is. I woke up this morning and hopped over to their blogs to see if I could now hear their voices in my mind’s ear as I read them. I found, to my delight, that I could. The people and the writing were now one to me, and it enhances my reading so much.

We really must keep meeting like this.

Here's Ernest Hemingway on writing:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

This is from Death in the Afternoon.

It's true of all kinds of writing, of course, not just fiction. Even while reading blogs, I can often sense a writer's weight, and the depth of his knowing, behind the simplest prose. And equally, it is easy to tell when, despite fancy words and dense language, the writer doesn't know his subject well enough.

I'm a huge fan of icebergs.

Update: Rishi points me to Hemingway's Nobel speech. I love the bit about facing eternity.

I was chatting with Scyld Berry, the British cricket writer, in the press box at Mohali, and at one point we decided to call our friend, Chandrahas. We tried one number, then another, no luck. We dialled madly for five minutes, but couldn't get through. Then Scyld asked:

"Does Chandrahas want to be a writer or a journalist?"

"A writer," I replied.

"That explains it," said Scyld. "A writer always keeps his phone switched off. A journalist always keeps it on."

Amit Chaudhuri writes in the Telegraph:

No writer has a given and recognisable audience, except in our dreams and reconstructions of antiquity or medieval history. A writer, sooner or later, has to come to terms with this, in a much more painful and thoroughgoing way than the questioner in the audience will understand. The reader too needs to come terms with it, if they are to have more than a passing interest in what literature does; for the writer not only speaks to the reader, but interrogates the unbridgeable gap between themselves. Any theory of reading that doesn’t take this into account will leave itself open to question.

I'm a little sceptical about the view that literature "interrogates the unbridgeable gap" between the reader and the writer, but never mind that, read the essay. It's a the second of a three-part series; I'd linked to the first part here.

One of the characteristics of much crime fiction is that so many of the protagonists in them are straight-talking buggers. They may be laconic or brusque or in-yer-face, but they tell it as they see it. So why should crime writers be different? James Ellroy, who's written books such as LA Confidential and The Cold Six Thousand, doesn't turn on any false modesty in this interview:

Do you think of yourself as a novelist or as a crime writer?

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

How do you know since you say you don’t read other books?

I just know. There is a line from a wonderful Thomas Lux poem: “You’re alone and you know a few things.” I just know that I am that good.

What about Raymond Chandler, who wrote so evocatively about Los Angeles lowlifes before you?

He is egregiously overrated.

Such hubris, you might think, but I find it refreshing coming from someone who is, well, an acknowledged master of his genre. Literature ain't no sporting contest, but when Ernest Hemingway would describe himself as the "literary heavyweight champion" of the world, you had to think (if you were as much a fan of the man as I am, especially of his short stories) that he had a point there.

It's not, I think, about thinking yourself to be better than everyone else as it is to feel like you're the master of your domain, in complete command of your craft. Indeed, when I read Hemingway, I cannot but feel in awe of how perfect some of his work is, with not a word or punctuation mark out of place, and no artifice or pretensions. As an aspiring writer myself, I struggle to make narratives speak without talking, the way Hemingway could. If Hemingway -- and Ellroy, in the context of the crime novel -- speak of themselves as so many of their fans undoubtedly see them, well, good for them. Why hold back?

Quizman points me to a fun interview of the irrepressible VS Naipaul, who joyously takes potshots at Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and Charlie 'Chuck' Dickens and all Indian writers, some of it quite correctly, and some most unfairly, with a little projection. But he does have words of praise too, especially for the French writer, Guy de Maupassant, one of my favourites as a child. Naipaul says:

[W]hen I began to read Maupassant I was too ignorant to appreciate him fully. Some wisdom is needed, some experience is needed before you see a culture and you see the writers more clearly. If you were talking to me twenty-five years ago I would have said Balzac was the greatest French writer. Now I say Maupassant - a very great man...

I came across the Maupassant stories, all the stories - 1,100 pages. They were in chronological order and quite well translated. It was an education. In the beginning he writes very carefully, not wishing to put a foot wrong. In the middle he is more secure. He does things instinctively and well, and then, near the end of his life, his thoughts are about death, and the pieces get shorter and they are very, very affecting.

There is a character in a Chekhov play who talks about Maupassant and says his talent is almost supernatural, and I have to agree with that, because in nearly every story there is a complete life that is being displayed. And there are so many stories. You wonder where he got the material and it seems so natural and easy. When you read, you can analyse it and see his method. It's very precise geographically and he always gives people a name - very important. There is a line of emotion in his writing, which varies as he writes so you follow the emotion of the writer rather than the banality of how the narrative is going to end. There's no one like him, I think.

There is the brutality of his short life. He began writing when he was thirty, and then in ten years it was almost all over. He was in pain, then mad, so everything he did was done in ten years. He must have worked all the time and yet with a kind of ease. It is a supernatural talent. [The paragraphing is mine.]

Maupassant's most famous story, of course, is "The Necklace," but another little masterpiece that was quite a favourite of mine is "The Piece of String." His work is available online here. Do read, much joy resides.

Help. I’ve been tagged. The Book Tag has finally reached India Uncut, and Yazad Jal is to blame. Anyway, there’s no escaping this, and I do get the (sadistic?) pleasure of passing this on at the end, so here goes:

Total Number of Books I Own: Somewhere in four figures, though I’m not sure if it’s closer to five or to three. Many of them lie stacked up in cartons in my study, waiting for a suitable bookshelf to be built. (Yes, dear, I’m going to call the carpenter today. Yes, I’m a bad pup.) Dozens lie scattered around me, on two study tables, a side table in the bedroom, on the window ledges in my bedroom and drawing room, and in a cabinet in the drawing room. Like many book lovers – in fact most that I have spoken to on the subject – I haven’t read at least half the books I own. But they’re there, and I’ll read them one day.

Last Book I Bought: “Redesigning Humans” by Gregory Stock and “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.

Last Book I Read: “The Renaissance” by Paul Johnson. It’s from the Modern Library Chronicles series, and I couldn’t recommend those books highly enough.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: Oh ho ho, now where to start? Well, here’s a tentative list, but it may well be different next year. Or maybe not.

"Cosmicomics" by Italo Calvino. There is no other writer I enjoy more than this master, whose unpretentious, simply written, deeply moving magic realism is unlike any other writer's. “Cosmicomics” was the first Calvino book I read, about the beginnings of the universe, and it was both utterly surreal and completely believable. Qfwfq, who plays with hydrogen atoms as if they were marbles, remains one of my favourite characters in fiction. I actually like Calvino’s shorter fiction more than his longer stuff, and “Marcovaldo” and “Numbers in the Dark” are also highly recommended.

“The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker. The book that’ll make sense of the modern debates around nature and nurture, and politics and gender, and art and violence. Pinker is one of the great non-fiction writers of our times; here’s a nice profile of his, which originally appeared in Time magazine, by Robert Wright. I’d earlier evoked him here and here, and quoted from this book here.

“The Collected Stories” by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway has far too many unimaginative imitators who write dull, dull fiction, but to judge him by his legion of cheap imitators is unjust. This is a collection full of great short stories, immaculately crafted, simple without being simplistic. This is a book I keep dipping into to learn from. The most important lesson of his work for a would-be fiction writer: show, don’t tell

“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” by Milan Kundera. A ‘novel’ in seven parts, my favourite Kundera book. I shall say no more: read it.

“Essays” by George Orwell. There’s no better book from which to learn how to write essays than this one. He makes it seem so darn easy, and it’s really so very hard. He’s both one of the great thinkers of the last century as well as the finest essayist, and reading this book was both humbling and edifying for me. I’d quoted from this book here.

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs: Yazad tagged some of the people I would have tagged, but never mind, the blogosphere is rich with fine bloggers. So here are my victims:

Arun Simha
Chandrahas Choudhury
J Alfred Prufrock 2
Michael Higgins
Nilanjana Roy

Sigh, there are many others I’d have liked to tag, but the instructions say, only five. But if you, reading this, have a blog, please roll with Book Tag on your blog and let me know.

Update (June 3): I've listed some other Indian Book-Taggers here.

This article was first published in the Indian Express as "Windbag and the willow". Note how my blog helped me in forming the ideas that went into this piece; I'd explored the subject of cricketing cliches all through my blogging in March.

THE next time you watch a cricket match, listen to the phrases that pop into your head with every piece of action. Have you heard these words before? I don’t know about you, but I am assailed by familiar phrases and sentences when I watch cricket, and I recoil each time one pops into my head. I am a cricket journalist, and it is my job to describe every game of cricket that I write about in a fresh manner, to give the reader a clear picture of what happened. And yet, that is so difficult.

Cricket writing, and commentary, has a dialect of its own which consists of lazy shorthands, cliches that do not evoke what happened in the field of play, but regurgitate banal expressions that dull our mind. It is difficult to escape this dialect, to write outside it, because we have been exposed to it repeatedly over the decades, and we reflexively think in this dialect whenever we watch cricket.

Here are some of the common forms that it takes. One, there are the descriptions of play, or of a situation. These could consist of dead metaphors, like the batsmen being ‘‘on a leather hunt’’, ‘‘using the long handle’’ and ‘‘taking the bull by the horns’’, as the match ‘‘teeters on a knife’s edge’’, as the bowlers ‘‘feel the heat’’. They could be phrases that were innovative when first used in this context, but now evoke nothing, such as when we talk of batsmen ‘‘taking control of the situation’’ or ‘‘tearing apart’’ the bowling or ‘‘seizing the initiative’’, as bowlers try to ‘‘tempt the batsmen into indiscretion’’ and ‘‘snatch the momentum’’.

They could be common descriptions, such as of a man who plays a ‘‘captain’s innings’’ or another whose ‘‘feet are stuck to the crease’’, as the ‘‘the game meanders towards a draw’’. And then there’s the hyperbole: ‘‘it’s all happening here’’, the ball ‘‘sped to the boundary like a tracer bullet’’, and ‘‘when he hits it, it stays hit’’.

Two, there are the aphorisms. ‘‘Form is temporary, class is permanent,’’ they say, adding, ‘‘When you’re in form, make it count.’’ After every bad decision someone is sure to write, ‘‘It all evens out in the end.’’ (That is not just a cliche, but also false.) And every twist in a match is sure to be accompanied by talk of ‘‘glorious uncertainties of the game’’.

Three, there are the adjectives. Certain cricketing nouns always seem to go with particular adjectives, which is why we talk of ‘‘fiery spells’’, ‘‘elegant cover-drives’’, ‘‘crisp driving’’, ‘‘lionhearted spinners’’, ‘‘gritty customers’’ (also a dead metaphor), ‘‘needless run-outs’’ (which run-out isn’t?), and ‘‘metronomic accuracy’’. These are objectionable not because they are inaccurate, but because they do not convey the particulars of a circumstance. Michael Vaughan, Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Yasir Hameed all play ‘‘elegant cover-drives’’ that are different from each other, and it becomes the duty of the cricket writer to convey that difference.

What shocks me as a reader, and saddens me as a writer, is how in many Indian publications mastery of this dialect is considered a virtue. And television has actually sanctified it. For celebrities-turned-commentators, in fact, who have received no training in writing or commentary, the easiest way to cope is to pick up such shorthand. And if you learn the dialect, you are at least never at loss for something to say, for every situation evokes a basket of cliches to choose from. Perhaps this is an art in itself, if an ignoble one, but it does the game, and its followers, a disservice.

Regardless of whether we are writers, and regardless of the context of cricket, the language we use reveals the way we think. Are our ways of thinking fresh? George Orwell, in his famous essay ‘‘Politics and the English Language’’, wrote: ‘‘Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.’’

Replace ‘‘political regeneration’’ with ‘‘the enjoyment of cricket’’ and that sentiment still holds. And that is why I get angry when people say that cricket is a dying sport. The game is not dying for faults of its own, but we are killing it with the ways in which we think about it, and speak about it.

Cricket is full of dramas, epiphanies, epic passages of play that reveal and celebrate the qualities that make us human. It is we who refuse to see cricket the way it is, and reduce it to banality.

Jason Fry writes in the Wall Street Journal (can't find the link online, I'm afraid; it's subs. anyway):

Like most doting parents, my wife and I love to take pictures of our three-year-old son. Like most toddlers, our son loves to look at pictures of himself.

The combination of the two has been responsible for countless boring slide shows over the generations. But here's a new wrinkle: We have a digital camera. Now, it's all too common for Joshua to notice the flash, instantly stop playing with Lego or swatting baseballs or romping on the jungle gym, and ask to see the picture.

It's infuriating: My kid stops playing to look at a picture of himself playing. Worse, I know where he learned it -- because, I'm embarrassed to admit, I do it too.

Last month, during a beach vacation, I caught myself flipping through pictures taken just minutes or hours before, with friends and family in the same room. I stopped, horrified, only to find myself doing the same thing the next night. How did I spend my vacation? In part, by reviewing that same vacation while it was in progress.

Yes, sometimes we do need to learn to leave technology behind. For example, my laptop gave up on me a few days ago, and until I buy a new one -- having decided on a Lenovo, I'm now looking for a good dealer -- I'm restricted to blogging from office. Now, blogging, or at least surfing and reading a lot, was what I regularly did every night before going to bed. But now, without that option, I actually read a bit. Spend time with the partner. Watch a movie. (We saw Abbas Kiarostami's wonderful Ten last night, ten months after I got the DVD.)

Indeed, the last time I took a holiday, I wished that I could just leave my cellphone and laptop (and my cares!) behind. However, there's India Uncut, and as long as I'm writing this, I can't escape technology or be totally carefree.

Interestingly, Fry also cites blogs as one of the technologies that "tempt us to shift back and forth from living life to observing ourselves living it." He writes:

I co-write a blog about the New York Mets, and have felt this double vision at work. Watching a baseball game, I sometimes feel my blogger antennae perk up at potential turning points. I find myself rehearsing blog posts; sometimes I even write down impressions and chronicle key at-bats. Which is entertaining, but it isn't watching the game the way I did perfectly happily for nearly 30 years.

Well, yes, often the first thought that strikes me when I read pieces on the web is "Is this bloggable?" But the flipside of that is that in searching for things to blog about, I read much more than I otherwise would.

Also, it isn't just new technology that does this. In my years as a cricket journalist, whenever I watched a cricket match that I also had to write about, I watched it differently than I would as a fan. One looks hard at the details, notices patterns, files away phrases and lines for later use, and I'd be structuring my report in my head as I watched the game, both of them evolving simultaneously. That's not a result of the technology, but of the task itself.

(Article via email from Shrabonti, who asks:

Do you feel like that sometimes, as if constantly taking notes on life means you let life itself pass by? Or do you feel it enriches the experience of living because you notice things that would have just flitted past otherwise?

Well, both, I suppose. Who can tell. A writer's got to do what a writer's got to do, and I'm not sure I believe in free will when it comes to this.)

I enjoy nothing more than a good literary feud. AN Wilson, the British writer, has just been superbly bested in one, as this New York Times article relates.

My my, such fun. Acrostics bring joy. Bevis Hillier, whose review of John Betjeman had been trashed by Wilson a couple of years ago, has admitted to being the perpetrator of the hoax. Undoubtedly, it would have not only have brought Hillier the satisfaction of having outwitted an enemy, but will enhance the sales of his books as well. Merriment comes.

(PS. See the first letter of each sentence of this post to find out the truth about me. And ah, NYT link via email from Ravikiran.)

Why? Well, because Mallika Sherawat is doing something. Consider these incredible lines from Indiatimes:

Whatever she does, it makes you sit erect. Whatever she wears, it titillates you. Her intention is clear to make your attention pin-pointed on her sensual parts. She is sultry Mallika Sherawat, who always says it script demands. [Sic, naturally.]

Sigh. But before you complain, check out what the Indian Express has to say about Celina Jaitley's reaction to the bomb blasts in Mumbai:

Celina was very traumatized after seeing the whole scene. She can’t talk about it without crying. So it’s everyone who was affected by the tragedy. But it’s the never say die spirit of Mumbai which makes us bounce back time and again!

Note how adroitly the writer comes to the conclusion stated in the third line of that excerpt. And for even more ludicrosity, check out this ANI piece, the writer of which doesn't seem to know the difference between 'groupie' and 'group'. Such fun.

(Previous posts on Purplocity/Verniness: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.)

In an excellent profile of Andy Grove, Richard S Tedlow writes in Fortune:

Normally, our society observes a division of labor. Musicians don't critique, and critics don't compose. Quarterbacks decide on Sunday, and fans deride on Monday. It is the singular ability to inhabit both roles at once—subject and object, actor and audience, master and student—that sets Grove apart. And it's why, for everything that has been written by and about him, we have yet to appreciate his biggest legacy. Andy Grove is America's greatest student and teacher of business.

Quite. And I believe that the attitude of constantly wanting to learn new things about what one does is the key to excellence.

In all the professions that I've been in, I've constantly run into people who want to be writers. Now, everybody who wants to be a writer starts out, because he or she is starting out, as pretty bad at it. Some people then read a lot, and observe the craft of other writers, and write incessantly, and, crucially, are constantly self-critical. They're the ones who get better at what they do.

And then there are those who fancy the thought of being a writer, and who take the easy way out by deluding themselves that they already are outstanding talents, and that people who don't recognise this are either jealous or stupid, and publishers who don't publish them are either idiots or evil capitalists. These are the guys who'll write trash year after year, never get better, lash out at constructive criticism because it threatens their sense of self, and form close communities with other such people so they can all reinforce each other's 'genius' and bitch about the world.

They're also just the sort who'll point out that I have no credibility saying all this, and although that is a fallacious way to argue, they'll be right. After all, what have I yet written that is of any worth? So I'll shut up here and get back to work, and learning. Tra la!

Tyler Cowen points to a Washington Post story about how Amazon is signing up with authors and retailing their short stories for 49 cents per download. These are works, mind you, written exclusively for retail in an electronic format. Authors who have signed up for these include bestselling writers like Danielle Steele and Robin Cook, as well as the likes of Pico Iyer and Daniel Wallace.

I think this is an outstanding step in retailing books. Short stories hardly have a market these days, and short-story compilations don't sell much. By enabling readers to buy a story at a time at this fairly low price, Amazon is going to incentivise readers who might otherwise have been wary of spending US$ 10 for a compilation. It's great for established writers as well, who might well be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making them good money without having to go through a traditional publishing cycle.

Less well-known writers, of course, still need traditional publishers to market their works and turn their names into brands, even if it has become easier to self-publish. Perhaps Amazon should figure out a way to give any writer a way to create works that they can retail through an Amazon storefront, leaving the marketing of the book to the author. Let the means of (profitable) publishing reach the hands of the authors, and let them figure out how to attract people to their storefronts. The long tail of publishing will then get a lot longer.

Update: I wrote to Chris Anderson of The Long Tail for his views on this, and he wrote back:

I'd say that this actually would have no effect on the Long Tail at all. Self-publishing and electronic publishing has been available to all for a while (see lulu.com) and all the services provide an ISBN number, which allows any writer to be available on Amazon. So nothing new there. And the authors Amazon picked are all Head writers, ie, those who have no trouble getting published.

I think the low pricing is quite interesting, however. It should certainly grow the market for short stories.

"If you meet the Rushdie on the road, kill him." That's the first of Hurree Babu's "Brave New Rules of Indian writing". Read the rest here. Long may the noble Hurree's dhuti stay starched.

On a tangent, I don't understand these debates about great Indian novels and Indian writing in English and so on. A good book is a good book, and a good writer is a good writer. Leave 'Indian' out of it. It's a word of clay: it has no shape, and it has any shape you want it to have. These are silly, pointless debates.

VS Naipaul says:

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.

This is from "The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home", a feature by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. It's a good read, and contains some provocative views on terrorism, Islam, Joseph Conrad ("Actually, I think 'A Bend in the River' is much, much better than Conrad"), and India ("there are no thinkers in India").

I believe that writers lose a lot when they are seen in the flesh. In the old days the really popular writers were totally anonymous, just a name on the book cover, and this gave them an extraordinary mystique. [...] I believe that this is the ideal condition for a writer, close to anonymity: that is when his maximum authority develops, when the writer does not have a face, a presence, but the world he portrays takes up the whole picture. Like Shakespeare...

Italo Calvino, in "Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings".

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

Ashok Banker, in an interview with Sonia Faleiro, says:

I don’t think I’m a very talented writer, but I have passion. What I lack in stylistic or linguistic dexterity, and sheer artistry, I make up for with fecundity, fire, and feel.

He's right. That isn't a boast or false modesty, but honesty, a rare quality when the most common failing of our species is self-delusion.

I must confess here that I am not entirely a fan of Banker's writing. I haven't read his recent series, and I read "Vertigo" and "Byculla Boys" years ago. The quality that struck me most about "Vertigo" was passion. It was honest and in-your-face writing, devoid of pretence, with no attempted literary flourishes or suchlike. The book didn't say, as so many Indian novels in English do, "I write so well, look at me." It said: "This is the story I have to tell. Listen."

Banker's passion for telling the story and nothing else also manifested himself in the way he dealt with the world, and his disdain for the press and the trappings of being a writer. He speaks about all that in the interview with Faleiro, so go read that to get more of a feel for what the man is about.

Amit Chaudhuri writes in the Telegraph:

At readings by Indian writers in English, two related questions, or some version of them, will invariably be asked by a member of the audience, whatever the setting — bookshop, university seminar or literary festival. The first question is, “Which audience do you write for?”; and the second, “Are you exoticizing India for a Western audience?” I don’t know why people don’t tire of asking these questions; but I notice that all kinds are interested in asking them — among others, the type whose reading consists almost entirely of recent fiction, an odd mixture of The Da Vinci Code, Pico Iyer, and Vikram Seth; people who read almost nothing but magazines, and whose views on, and affective response to, writers derive not so much from books, but almost entirely from what’s circulating about those books and their authors in print; and people in academic disciplines like cultural studies or literature, to whom, especially since the rise of the former, and the latter’s surrender to the former’s protocols, such questions are bread and butter.

Later in the piece, examining the origin of the criticism of the Indian writer in English and the shift in this criticism, Chaudhuri writes:

English, then, is part of the problem; the act of writing in English was, in India, potentially an act of bad faith, and a residue of the old suspicion regarding the motives of those who write in English remains and is still at work among us. But the focus in those earlier attacks on Indian writers in English, such as the famous one led by Buddhadev Bose, was artistic practice, even if that practice entered the discussion negatively, with a metaphysical fatalism; it was apparently impossible for writers to fully and deeply address their subject except in a language that was their “own”. By bringing the audience into the picture, the emphasis and the debate shift from writerly practice to cultural, social, and economic transactions — from the mystery and riddle of the creative act to the dissemination of texts and meanings, by publishers and newspapers, in the academy and in bookshops, from meaning to the production of meaning.

The whole debate about why some Indian writers choose to write in English is such a masturbatory waste of time. You should read a book for what it is, outside the context of whether it is written in the writer's "mother-tongue" or who it is supposedly written for or the level of financial success and hype it has received. If you like it, if it does something for you, good. Otherwise, move on. Writers don't write with taxpayer's money, and no one has the right to question them on what language they write in or who they write for. If you have a problem with someone "exoticizing" India, don't buy the book. Simple.

A few months ago a friend, Chandrahas Choudhury, introduced me to a fine writer I'd never heard of before called Ryszard Kapuscinski. The first book of his that I read was called The Shadow of the Sun, and that started me on a rewarding journey of discovering other books by him. So what did Chandrahas tell me about him that compelled to buy that first book? Read it for yourself here.

I've just boarded the Rajdhani Express to Mumbai, by the way, and will be on a train till tomorrow early morning. So no more blogging for today.