Indra Sinha

Indra Sinha, legendary copywriter, tireless campaigner for justice for the survivors of the Bhopal gas leak of December 1984, highly-regarded novelist (his Animal’s People was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize), is holidaying in India with his wife. Fitting in appearances at the recent Jaipur Festival and Kala Ghoda Arts Festival between sojourns in Rajasthan and Goa, he also made time to chat informally with young writers. And to answer a few questions from Peter Griffin.

Tell us about some of your early memories of holidays around the country.
Lots. The beauty of the Western Ghats in the monsoon, visiting the lake palace in Udaipur before it was a hotel, rowing across the lake to the other palace, where Shah Jehan had stayed, to find its empty dome full of pigeons… I miss my grandfather’s village in UP near the Nepal border, smells of straw, woodsmoke, an old travelling cinema kept in a hay barn…

All those years in the UK, and now in France. How often has the Colaba boy come back?
[I have been back] regularly since my association with the Bhopal survivors began in the mid-nineties. I love being in India. The pace of change is amazing, but I love to see things I remember still from the old days, like an old-fashioned bullock cart trundling along, and it was good to see that the forest is still thick on the ghats in places along the Goa road. If there is anything I can do, any organisation I can join or support to help protect the Western Ghats, I would like to do it.

Speaking of change, is it good change or bad that you see?
The pace of change is huge and the wealth in the country is enormous. What is sad and in fact sickening is that the well off seem to have closed their eyes to the vast majority of the population, who do not benefit from globalisation, the booming stock market, et cetera. The long-term result of this can only be fascism and repression; it will be the only way to preserve the continuing luxury of the wealthy at the continuing expense of those who have nothing. Writers have a duty to speak out about this and Arundhati [Roy] has recently written an excellent article on this very point.

Two of your books are set in India—well, four, to count Tantra and your Kama Sutra translation. Written, as they were, in Europe, did the distance aid perspective, or did it get in the way? How did you do your research?
When I write, I am in my imagination. It neither helps nor hinders to be in the place I am writing about, however I like to know the places about which I will write, even though the imagination transforms them. One tries to catch a reality, a feeling, that lies just beneath the skin. Lawrence Durrell was a genius at doing this. He was a favourite and formative influence when I was young.

As an expatriate, and a writer to boot, do you find yourself expected to be the font of all information on the country?
I used to be expected to be Encyclopaedia Indica, but that is less true nowadays. People’s knowledge of India varies enormously. Many people have been here and many more have some family connection. I think people’s ideas are formed largely by the television. Don’t forget there is also a huge Indian population in the UK, so Indian culture, Bollywood, “Indian” restaurants, are all pretty much part of everyday life.

Have you seen any great writing from India?
I loved Siddharth Dhanwant Shangvi’s The Last Song of Dusk, it was arch, amusing, knowing, entertaining—and underneath ran a tale of deep sorrow. The writing about sex is some of the finest I have read.

You’re scheduled to speak at the Kitab Festival. What will you be chatting about?
I propose to devote my Kitab event to talking about the Bhopal survivors who even at this moment are trudging the long road to Delhi in an attempt to get politicians to keep their broken promises. [See bhopal.net for the story.]

Indra Sinha will be speaking at Kitab today, 1p.m., Crossword, Kemp’s Corner. More about him at his website, indrasinha.com. And visit khaufpur.com, companion site to Animal’s People.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 24th February, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India,

Pies and Prejudice [Book Review]

Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North
by Stuart Maconie
Paperback, 352 pages
Ebury Press
ISBN 9780091910228

England, to me, looks way too small to have a North, so this book is an education. My perceptions, I realised, cringing, are just the kind that I take voluble delight in castigating when I hear them in non-Indian accents about India. The England I know through books, movies and TV is London, plus stray other cities, plus an interchangeable bunch of counties in which thrived the Yorkshire dales and quaint accents of James Herriot’s stories and the never-was-land of Wodehouse. I know better now.
Maconie knows his subject intimately, and loves it unabashedly.
He explains the essence of Northness thus: Northerners, he says, are “different, we think; harder, flintier, steelier. We are the ones who turn the air-conditioning down in the meeting room, who want to sit outside the pub in October, who order the hottest curries, the strongest beer, the most powerful drugs. We like to think we’re different, and we cherish our prejudices.”
We go walkabout, from city centre to pub to concert to museum, as he chats merrily about wars, football, architecture, food, popular music (yup, the Beatles), Marx and Engels (“Eleanor [Marx] was married to Karl of course, who by contrast was a bit of a lardarse with rubbish hair who nicked all Freidrich’s ideas”), George Orwell, industrial decline, renaissance, Transcendental Meditation (“as it’s a trademark, TM™”), biting insults peppering even-handed overview. The cultural differences between North and South and the even lesser known (to the outsider) rifts within the north itself are fascinating. The rivalries of the natives—Lancashire and Yorkshire, Liverpool and Manchester—were ancient history, or jovial football rivalries to me, not simmering pressure cookers that explode every now and then even today. But no, it’s no sociological treatise, and it’s not a tourists’-eye view of the sights. This is from the inside, living, breathing, reminiscing with a chuckle or a sigh.
He’s a witty man, is Stuart Maconie. And he’s made a pretty good career out of it; the author note says he’s “known to millions,” with a reputation both in broadcast media and in print. And that’s one of the problems I have with the book. Not the fame; the wit. I will choose a funny read over high lit any day, but he never stops. Reminds me of some chaps I know, always the wise guy. It gets tiring, difficult to take in a book-length dose. I’d have enjoyed it more as, say, a weekly half-hour radio programme. More seriously, it’s a book that gives one the feeling that while it’s written from the inside, it’s also written for the insider. So many in-jokes, obscure references, untranslated argot that I kept flipping to the back, vainly looking for a glossary.
In this age of search engines and short attention spans, perhaps those quibbles are irrelevant. So read it in short spells, stay online while you read, and it’s worth your time.

Published in Outlook Traveller, August 2007.

Tags: Outlook Traveller

Typd w/ 1 thumb

A year and a bit ago, on the blog I run for my online writing community, Caferati, we ran a jokey contest, the world’s first SMS Poetry contest. The prizes weren’t KBC-class. – just free Gmail IDs, quite in demand at that time. The world didn’t break down our door, but many of us began playing with the challenges of the form.

Then, last January, the Kala Ghoda festival featured an SMS Poetry contest, also billed as the first in the world. While it got more responses and coverage than my wee contest did, pangs of envy were assuaged by Caferati members winning the top three prizes.

Now, having established my guru/seer credentials, I will now waffle on a bit about the form.

But first, disclosure. I have since discovered that both the Kala Ghoda festival and Caferati were wrong. The first SMS Poetry contest was run way back in 2001, by the Guardian, in the UK.

Right. Moving on…

SMS poetry is verse short enough to fit into the 160-character space that cellphone standards for text messages support. No, technological advances like multi-part SMSes that permit messages three times that length are not considered kosher by the purists.

Scratch that. “Purists” might give you the wrong impression. If there’s one thing this verse form doesn’t do, it’s delight that breed.

You see, it isn’t just the very short, more established forms like haiku and senryu, limericks, clerihews and grooks that find their way here. SMS verse creates a space very much its own. The cre8v contractions, abrevs, & delibr8 misspelngs dat help U cram much mo in2 a text msg, there4 gettng mo bang for yr buck (or two rupees for out-station messages, five for international) are not just permitted they’re practically de rigeur. And no, it’s not just dropping vowels. That’s for wussies. Tricks like no space after punctuation,using numerals to replace syllables that sound like them (42n8 for fortunate), a capital letter when you want the sound pronounced (QT for cutie), accepted short forms like w/ for with, and acronyms borrowed from online chat (BRB for be right back) all add to the delightful mix. And you’re helped along significantly by the illogical spelling that English is notorious for. Just spell ’em the way they’re pronounced: like gud for good and nyt for night.

A wonderful example is the poem that won the Guardian competition:

txtin iz messin,
mi headn’me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she’s african

SMS, and SMS poetry, may not be advancing the language. But they certainly stretch your creativity, and they’re fun. And hey, they’re better than corny SMS jokes.

Oh yes. One more thing. Mr Moraes, please forgive me for that title.

Peter Griffin co-moderates the online writing community, Caferati, which is helping the Times of India Kala Ghoda Arts Festival run two contests in the Literature and Writing section this year: Flash Fiction and SMS Poetry. See http://www.caferati.com/contests/ for details.

Published in the 29th January edition of Times of India, in the Bookmark section.

Tags: The Times of India, Bookmark

Attention Deficit Fiction

Too many TV channels. Too many newspapers. And there’s the wide, wide world of the internet, breaking geographical barriers, putting more information at our fingertips — quite literally — than any generation before this could dream of.

If you’re a writer, and you name doesn’t happen to be Seth, the chances of anyone buying, and actually reading, your door-stopper magnum opus are, well, rather slimmer than your manuscript.

Today’s world wants its entertainment bite-sized. Even the traditional short story, usually upwards of 2000 words, can seem like an awfully long commitment to make in a world with so much information and entertainment jostling for your attention.

Flash fiction (also referred to as short-shorts, micro-fiction and other fancy buzz-names) could have almost been designed for this age, but digging around on the web tells me the genre’s origins date back to Aesop’s fables. So I won’t — or can’t — waste your time with a scholarly tracing of its history.

Flash stories are defined by their length. There isn’t a standard definition of what that length should be, but under a thousand words is safe. Most practitioners peg it rather lower, with maximum lengths of 500 words, even as low as 200. There are sub-genres that specify even lower, and very exact word counts, like the current online meme, “55ers,” which are stories exactly 55 words long, no more, no less.

Whatever the word count, it is generally accepted that they must be stories in the conventional sense, with conflict and resolution, protagonist and supporting cast, distinct beginning and end. Except that with the word-count restrictions, much of this is usually implied in the work rather than explicitly stated.

Is there a market for Flash, then? Most certainly. Many print publications and zines pay for Flash work they publish. None that I know of in India, but that’s bound to change. Plus there are contests (see the footnote to this article for one near you) with prizes on offer as well. If you want to study the genre, once more, the web is your friend. For the price of your internet connection (or for free, when you’re goofing off on your office computer), you can trawl through zines, free sites, writing communities, author showcases, and of course, blogs.

To whet your appetite, I’ll leave you with what I’m assured is a piece of classic flash by Ernest Hemingway, which takes the genre to the extreme. Here it is, reproduced in full.

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Peter Griffin co-moderates the online writing community, Caferati, which is helping the Times of India Kala Ghoda Arts Festival run two contests in the Literature and Writing section this year: Flash Fiction and SMS Poetry. See http://www.caferati.com/contests/ for details.

Published in the 29th January edition of Times of India, in the Bookmark section.

Tags: The Times of India, Bookmark

Bookmark this [Cybertrack – 2]

Literary Traveler http://www.literarytraveler.com/

“Explore your literary imagination,” says the site’s tagline. And, even though I disapprove of people who spell “traveller” with only one “l” (them that pays the cheques rule, sez this writer), I must tell you that there’s plenty of great reading on this site, if you’re a lover of both travel and books.
Literary Traveler’s main offering is articles about writers and the places associated with them. Some are obvious: Hemingway and Pamplona, Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoa, Neruda’s Isla Negra in Chile. Others less so, like James Joyce and Trieste, or the “dismal swamp” that Robert Frost almost never came back from. The quality of writing is high and most articles come with links to more information on the location or the writer. You can search according to the places written about, or check the authors’ names to see if your favourites find a mention. The site attempts to earn its keep with ads, yes, but they’re not intrusive, and you do get the feeling that it’s one of those increasingly rare animals, a genuine, old-fashioned labour of love. One assumes its founders also get revenue from their listing of Literary Tour Operators (you can, if you choose, do a Jane Austen tour or wander the haunts of the Beat poets in the San Francisco Bay Area). Oh yes. There’s also a newsletter to subscribe to. Quibbles? The locations and authors covered are mainly in the USA, with some representation from Europe, with the rest of the world, and its literature, going largely unrepresented.

Published in the October edition of Outlook Traveller, in a column called Cybertrack

Tags: Outlook Traveller, Cybertrack

So you want to start a (clears throat) blog

It’s been the buzz all year, this strange word that sounds, as someone I know said recently, like something stuck in one’s mucus membranes.

Never mind them technophobes. The facts are that “blog” was the most looked-up word in an online dictionary last year, that bloggers were Time’s People of the Year, that world media has started taking notice, that corporate bodies began thinking of them as marketing tools, and that everyone and their second cousins want to give you their blog URLs.

So what is a blog anyway? It’s a hybrid word, short for “web log,” and at its most basic, it is a website with dated entries, usually in reverse chronological order.

From there on, they’re what you want them to be: guides to interesting web pages; diaries; confessionals; showcases; conversations; soap boxes, pulpits; dashing white chargers to gallop to crusades on; whatever rocks your boat.

Conveniently ignoring, for the purpose of this column, the now rapidly-expanding tribe of blogs that focus on visual content, I’ll risk another sweeping generalisation.

A blog is essentially about words. And your readership – indeed, whether you get read at all, aside from you, yourself, and your alter ego – depends on a combination of your subject matter and how good you are at stringing words together.

So, given that, should writers – serious writers, professional writers – blog?
I’d give you a guarded “yes.” For several reasons.

If you take your blog seriously, it’s daily writing calisthenics. There’s only one way to become a better writer, and that’s by writing. And feeling the obligation to blog means that you park your butt in front of a computer and write. And since someone might be reading you, you better write good, you know?

Blogs are also a good way to try out new ideas, workshop your writing, and to get feedback. Feedback is not guaranteed, of course, but there are ways to get yourself noticed and commented on. That, however, is a subject that could take up an entire column’s worth of space. Besides, it’s pretty easy to go looking for how-to lessons. The Lord Google knows that the web is crawling with blogging gurus.

Being creatures of the web, blogs, by definition, are not limited to geographic boundaries. The world is very much your oyster. Not just with readership. Advances in blogging applications make it easy to collaborate across the miles, or to band together with like-minded writers from around the world, to put together a whole greater than the sum of its parts. (Personally, I have found this a very effective method, and I’ve midwifed collaborations that have met with moderate to phenomenal success. Though not strictly an example of a writers’ collaboration, the tsunamihelp set of blogs only became a world-wide clearing house for information on the disaster because they were a group of dedicated people acting in concert.)

Then, of course, there’s the recognition bit, very important for the up-and-coming writer trying to make a mark. Here, as with feedback, just being good is no guarantee that you will get any. But again, there are ways to break through, though you’d better be consistently good to keep your audience.

Oh yes, blogs can actually make you some money. Not a fortune, I hasten to add, but an ad programme can bring in a few bucks. Provided your content is compelling enough to bring in the readers.

Other business models have been floated. Like using your blog as an advertisement for your other writing. Or actually selling your other writing online, through downloadable documents, for example.

And of course, there’s the Holy Grail. The book contract. Publishers are always on the lookout for the next phenom, and many popular bloggers have parlayed their online success into fat publishing contracts.

There is, however, another side to all these arguments.

Blogs can take up an awful lot of your time and energy. It can certainly get in the way if you need to do a lot of Real Writing. The writing that pays the bills. That editors and publishers will write cheques for.

William Gibson, one of the few Big Name authors who runs a blog (at least one of the few who does it under his own name) has an opinion you might want to consider. Just before his blog went into a long hiatus, he posted this entry.

“…the thing I’ve most enjoyed about [blogging] is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.”

So, should you blog? I’d say give it a try. After a while, you’ll figure out if you’re getting – or on the way to getting – pleasure, fame or money out of it.
If not, hawk deeply, and eject it from your system.

The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com/, and has founded, runs or contributes to several collaborations, which you can find links to from his blog. He founded the collaborative South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog, which created blogging history and gave him 15 seconds of fame in January ’05.

Published in an edited version in Man’s World, April Edition, in a section called Writer’s Lives.

—-box–

Authors who blog.

Internationally, there’s Gibson, who blogs sporadically now, at http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/archive.asp, and Neil Gaiman at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp.

In India, Manjula Padmanabhan, author and illustrator (Kleptomania, Mouse Invaders, Mouse Attack, Hot Death,Cold Soup, Getting There, Harvest, Hidden Fires) blogs at http://marginalien.blogspot.com. Samit Basu (The Simoqin Prophecies) writes http://samitbasu.blogspot.com and http://pututhecat.blogspot.com.

Many of the new breed of Indian journalists are blogging too, about books, politics, opinion, or just for fun. A quick sampler: http://akhondofswat.blogspot.com/, http://dcubed.blogspot.com/, http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/, http://kitabkhana.blogspot.com/, http://knownturf.blogspot.com/.

Errata:
I screwed up in the People of the Year thing, as Amit pointed out to me. Darn. My only excuse is that for the last few days of December and most of January, I read very little that wasn’t Tsunami-related.
And in the print edition of this piece, I managed to get Samit Basu’s URL wrong (I put in ducksrule.blogspot.com). I did attempt to make amends by tying to set up a blog with that URL that would have a redirect link to his blog, but sadly, it was taken.

Tags: Man’s World