Satish Gujral is in Mumbai after three years. At a preview of his paintings and sculptures in the courtyard of the magnificent heritage Deutsch Bank building , the artist and his stately wife Kiran converse with bankers, gallery owners and other art aficionados. Gujral’s exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery begins two days later, amidst a flurry of high profile viewings that include superstar Sharukh Khan, industrialists and fellow artists. For Gujral is, in many ways, a legend.
Extraordinary not only for his vast and versatile artistic talents but also for his sheer grit and gumption. His life story is a fascinating saga- born in Jhelum in 1925 in pre-partition West Punjab, he never allowed an early loss of hearing at the age of eight to come in his way, as he studied art at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and then at J J School in Bombay. It was while studying art at Lahore, where the school’s curriculum included various techniques for stone and woodcarving, metal smithery, clay modelling, drawing and design, that the seeds of his very real versatility were sown. For Satish Gujral is remarkable in the sheer breadth of his oeuvre that stretches from paintings and sculpture to wood work, ceramic, plastic and murals.
You see his magnificent and multi-faceted talent in each sculpture and canvas in this current collection. The paintings feature a series of stunning acrylics of both human and animal figures. Each canvas has an amazing degree of complexity, working at several levels in terms of colour and texture.
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The artist uses multiple frames within the same canvas, creating a many layered effect of mood and meaning as well as a multiplicity of perspective- it is, he explains part of a conscious effort to depict the complexity and strength of his subjects, mentioning Picasso and the Cubists as influences. Gujral’s lines are akin to master draughtsman’s in many senses, clean and free flowing, perhaps an influence of his architect abilities. (He has won several awards for designing the Belgian embassy in Delhi). The use of gold and a vivid earthy maroon as well as vibrant emerald greens in contrast to pale grays and muted whites all within several geometrical loci in a single canvas is striking. Gujral has long been a student of colour and it shows. His exposure to acrylics began many years ago, when he worked in Mexico in apprenticeship to Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros. “I used to make my own colours then,” he says, adding, “And even now when acrylics are so readily available I work with a combination of commercial colours as well as my own colours”.
Another feature that distinguishes a lot of Gujral’s work is the influence of mural art. The artist has long held for the need to discover an individual and distinct Indian style. “A work of art should be like a person,” he declares, “you should look at the painting and be able to tell it’s Indian”. Through it all, the fame and the fortune, Gujral remains essentially his own person and in many ways the anti-thesis of a lot of very media savvy artists of today.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Book Review -Tokyo Cancelled
This review appeared in the Deccan Herald
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
The Publishing Industry in India
This feature appeared in The Tribune
THE publishing industry in India is worth Rs 6,000 crore and is the third largest in the world. Business is also booming. But why aren’t writers being paid what they deserve and why aren’t the prices of books falling?
BOOKS continue to be big business, the world-at-the-touch-of-a-mere-mouse mesmerisation of multi-media notwithstanding. Black and white still sells and how! Whether it is textbooks or general interest publications, the English language publishing industry today seems to have a lot going for it. As literacy increases, the demand for textbooks and other academic volumes continues to rise. As for fiction, world over the Asian subcontinent is definitely ' in'— whether it's Vikram Seth's hefty advance for his autobiography or Bangladeshi born UK-based Booker nominated Monica Ali, writing in English has well nigh exploded today. Mega bookstores like the Oxford Book Shops in Calcutta and Mumbai, Crossword Mumbai, Landmark in Delhi and Bangalore, compete with the famous US-based Barnes and Noble book chain, providing the customer with not just a book but the 'whole reading experience.' There's light and space, softly piped music and the rich smell of freshly brewed coffee to go with the rows and rows of print and paper.
With international publishing houses beating expectations on the street, where do their Indian counterparts stand? "Look around yourself and you'll get the answer", says Ravi Dayal of Ravi Dayal Publishers, adding, "with the proliferation of books and publishing houses, it’s obvious they are surviving and making money." And indeed several large international publishers like Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan and Picador have set up shop in India in the last 10 to 15 years. Besides other traditional heavyweights that include Oxford University Press, Orient Longman and indigenous publishing houses like Rupa and Jaico, a number of smaller niche publishing houses have come up as well. The Indian publishing scene today is populated with small, independent publishers, each with a distinctive profile and a separate specialisation. Kali for Women, for instance, was founded by two women Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia 18 years ago. Beginning out of a garage, it is today a profitable publishing house. So also Katha, an extraordinary non-profit organisation, that has begun to salvage the lost classics of vernacular India, translating them into English with flair and publishing them in beautiful editions. These and others like Tulika (academic and children's books), Stree (women's books), Ravi Dayal, India Ink, Srishti, Minerva, English Edition, Permanent Black (trade and academic books) are all becoming well-known.
With a market size that's estimated at Rs 6,000 crore (including books, newspapers, magazines, periodicals and academic journals), India actually ranks third in the world in its number of English publications per year, after the USA and UK. Publishers agree that the potential in this industry is tremendous. As Urvashi Butalia, founder of Kali for Women, analyses," I think the Indian publishing industry is in an exciting phase right now. The earlier profile, which was that 80 per cent of the books published were textbooks and these were the bread and butter books, is changing somewhat, That is to say while textbooks still remain the profit earners, many publishers are also beginning to turn to producing books for the general reader. This is what explains the success of publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins, who produce books for general readers, or books that are known as trade books. J.S. Sethi, who began by book distribution and now runs the publishing firm of English Edition, concurs, "The potential for publishing is very good. English Edition brings out two to three titles a week. As far as publishing houses that publish textbooks go, they have a captive market and are minting money". S.C Sethi of Jaico Publications also echoes these bullish sentiments, "We are doing extremely well and we are one of the biggest distributors of British and American publications in India."
Despite all the good cheer, however, volumes are quite literally abysmally low. Given the almost 20-million-strong English-speaking and reading public, print runs of commercially successful books could be as low as 1000 copies. What are the reasons for this paradox? "Book buyers are few," says Sethi. "The electronic media doesn't bother about books."
"It’s because prices are way too high," says T.S. Shanbagh of Mumbai's Strand Book Store, that old world cramped but comfortable bookstore that's irresistible to every aficionado. Quoting Tagore's Gitanjali: Where knowledge is free/..Into that heaven of freedom, my father / Let my country awake, Shanbagh puts the blame for low volumes and high prices on high margins and inefficient distribution, "The cost of a book may be as much as 10 times the cost of production, the reader often pays for the overheads of five administrations." Publishers in India today, he feels, also do not bother developing local talent, they often reprint international books, and in essence lack that "some little idealism, which is so necessary to this trade." It is this lack of commitment, of concrete investment in the product, the book and its author, that seems overwhelmingly to explain the problem of low volumes. Promotional budgets are low, and marketing professionals almost non-existent. "Whereas bestsellers’ authors abroad have a publisher’s dedicated marketing team to promote a book and make sure the backlist stays in print, a publisher here may have one person who has sold biscuits or toothpaste for the last so many years and is now told to sell books", points out bestselling novelist Shobhaa De. Agrees adman Alyque Padamsee, whose autobiography A Double Life was published by Penguin, "Marketing of books in India is zero and what the book industry needs desperately is professional marketing of books."
P. Sainath, journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, explains that publishing houses need to step out of the "cocktail circuit book launch at India International Centre, Delhi, with 40 people in attendance" and reach out in other ways. Bhawna Somaaya, film journalist and author of books like Amitabh Bacchan The Legend published by Macmillan India, Salaam Bollywood by Spantach and Lancer, UK, elaborates in the same vein, describing her efforts to market her books in the absence of any from her publishers. "For a creative person to be involved in the process of publishing is a huge responsibility and liability."
Other problems include those of piracy, as evidenced by the plethora of cheap photocopied bestsellers available at the traffic lights, that cause the publishing industry an annual loss of Rs 350-400 crore. The problem that was sporadic about 10 years back has acquired epidemic proportions now. "It is not just fiction but educational books like NCERT textbooks of the Central Board of Secondary Education and Andhra Pradesh Textbook Corporation's books for school kids, that have begun to have their pirated editions," said N. Subrahmanyam, Managing-Director of Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd in a recent interview. The amending of the Indian Copyright Act in 1986 , has helped and police raids and prosecutions have been carried out on unauthorised translations and photocopying operations. Piracy has also affected export markets, as S.C. Sethi of Jaico adds, " Indian textbooks are pirated in Bangladesh and Pakistan as well."
In the ultimate analysis, problems of piracy and production costs aside, Indian publishing continues to remain a poor cousin of the West, despite being placed in the most-populous marketplace. Book promotions may cost money but, as has been illustrated so successfully internationally, they make even more money. Here is where stepping out of the traditional promotional model of exhibiting at book fairs, small-scale book launches and making calls to editors to review books can make a difference.
Witness the marketing miracles of Oprah's Book Cub where talk show host Oprah Winfrey discusses her recommended books as well the carefully orchestrated, perfectly executed Harry Potter campaign and it’s obvious that good marketing can truly sell volumes and volumes.
THE publishing industry in India is worth Rs 6,000 crore and is the third largest in the world. Business is also booming. But why aren’t writers being paid what they deserve and why aren’t the prices of books falling?
BOOKS continue to be big business, the world-at-the-touch-of-a-mere-mouse mesmerisation of multi-media notwithstanding. Black and white still sells and how! Whether it is textbooks or general interest publications, the English language publishing industry today seems to have a lot going for it. As literacy increases, the demand for textbooks and other academic volumes continues to rise. As for fiction, world over the Asian subcontinent is definitely ' in'— whether it's Vikram Seth's hefty advance for his autobiography or Bangladeshi born UK-based Booker nominated Monica Ali, writing in English has well nigh exploded today. Mega bookstores like the Oxford Book Shops in Calcutta and Mumbai, Crossword Mumbai, Landmark in Delhi and Bangalore, compete with the famous US-based Barnes and Noble book chain, providing the customer with not just a book but the 'whole reading experience.' There's light and space, softly piped music and the rich smell of freshly brewed coffee to go with the rows and rows of print and paper.
With international publishing houses beating expectations on the street, where do their Indian counterparts stand? "Look around yourself and you'll get the answer", says Ravi Dayal of Ravi Dayal Publishers, adding, "with the proliferation of books and publishing houses, it’s obvious they are surviving and making money." And indeed several large international publishers like Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan and Picador have set up shop in India in the last 10 to 15 years. Besides other traditional heavyweights that include Oxford University Press, Orient Longman and indigenous publishing houses like Rupa and Jaico, a number of smaller niche publishing houses have come up as well. The Indian publishing scene today is populated with small, independent publishers, each with a distinctive profile and a separate specialisation. Kali for Women, for instance, was founded by two women Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia 18 years ago. Beginning out of a garage, it is today a profitable publishing house. So also Katha, an extraordinary non-profit organisation, that has begun to salvage the lost classics of vernacular India, translating them into English with flair and publishing them in beautiful editions. These and others like Tulika (academic and children's books), Stree (women's books), Ravi Dayal, India Ink, Srishti, Minerva, English Edition, Permanent Black (trade and academic books) are all becoming well-known.
With a market size that's estimated at Rs 6,000 crore (including books, newspapers, magazines, periodicals and academic journals), India actually ranks third in the world in its number of English publications per year, after the USA and UK. Publishers agree that the potential in this industry is tremendous. As Urvashi Butalia, founder of Kali for Women, analyses," I think the Indian publishing industry is in an exciting phase right now. The earlier profile, which was that 80 per cent of the books published were textbooks and these were the bread and butter books, is changing somewhat, That is to say while textbooks still remain the profit earners, many publishers are also beginning to turn to producing books for the general reader. This is what explains the success of publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins, who produce books for general readers, or books that are known as trade books. J.S. Sethi, who began by book distribution and now runs the publishing firm of English Edition, concurs, "The potential for publishing is very good. English Edition brings out two to three titles a week. As far as publishing houses that publish textbooks go, they have a captive market and are minting money". S.C Sethi of Jaico Publications also echoes these bullish sentiments, "We are doing extremely well and we are one of the biggest distributors of British and American publications in India."
Despite all the good cheer, however, volumes are quite literally abysmally low. Given the almost 20-million-strong English-speaking and reading public, print runs of commercially successful books could be as low as 1000 copies. What are the reasons for this paradox? "Book buyers are few," says Sethi. "The electronic media doesn't bother about books."
"It’s because prices are way too high," says T.S. Shanbagh of Mumbai's Strand Book Store, that old world cramped but comfortable bookstore that's irresistible to every aficionado. Quoting Tagore's Gitanjali: Where knowledge is free/..Into that heaven of freedom, my father / Let my country awake, Shanbagh puts the blame for low volumes and high prices on high margins and inefficient distribution, "The cost of a book may be as much as 10 times the cost of production, the reader often pays for the overheads of five administrations." Publishers in India today, he feels, also do not bother developing local talent, they often reprint international books, and in essence lack that "some little idealism, which is so necessary to this trade." It is this lack of commitment, of concrete investment in the product, the book and its author, that seems overwhelmingly to explain the problem of low volumes. Promotional budgets are low, and marketing professionals almost non-existent. "Whereas bestsellers’ authors abroad have a publisher’s dedicated marketing team to promote a book and make sure the backlist stays in print, a publisher here may have one person who has sold biscuits or toothpaste for the last so many years and is now told to sell books", points out bestselling novelist Shobhaa De. Agrees adman Alyque Padamsee, whose autobiography A Double Life was published by Penguin, "Marketing of books in India is zero and what the book industry needs desperately is professional marketing of books."
P. Sainath, journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, explains that publishing houses need to step out of the "cocktail circuit book launch at India International Centre, Delhi, with 40 people in attendance" and reach out in other ways. Bhawna Somaaya, film journalist and author of books like Amitabh Bacchan The Legend published by Macmillan India, Salaam Bollywood by Spantach and Lancer, UK, elaborates in the same vein, describing her efforts to market her books in the absence of any from her publishers. "For a creative person to be involved in the process of publishing is a huge responsibility and liability."
Other problems include those of piracy, as evidenced by the plethora of cheap photocopied bestsellers available at the traffic lights, that cause the publishing industry an annual loss of Rs 350-400 crore. The problem that was sporadic about 10 years back has acquired epidemic proportions now. "It is not just fiction but educational books like NCERT textbooks of the Central Board of Secondary Education and Andhra Pradesh Textbook Corporation's books for school kids, that have begun to have their pirated editions," said N. Subrahmanyam, Managing-Director of Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd in a recent interview. The amending of the Indian Copyright Act in 1986 , has helped and police raids and prosecutions have been carried out on unauthorised translations and photocopying operations. Piracy has also affected export markets, as S.C. Sethi of Jaico adds, " Indian textbooks are pirated in Bangladesh and Pakistan as well."
In the ultimate analysis, problems of piracy and production costs aside, Indian publishing continues to remain a poor cousin of the West, despite being placed in the most-populous marketplace. Book promotions may cost money but, as has been illustrated so successfully internationally, they make even more money. Here is where stepping out of the traditional promotional model of exhibiting at book fairs, small-scale book launches and making calls to editors to review books can make a difference.
Witness the marketing miracles of Oprah's Book Cub where talk show host Oprah Winfrey discusses her recommended books as well the carefully orchestrated, perfectly executed Harry Potter campaign and it’s obvious that good marketing can truly sell volumes and volumes.
The Runaway Thriller
This Feature appeared in The Hindu's Literary Review
AS popular art forms go, nothing captures public imagination in quite the same way as the thriller. Beginning with classic whodunnits, serial killers and spies, today's thrillers rock bestseller lists with their excursions into law, medicine, high finance and even religion. Moving from a genre that was wildly popular within its niche, the thriller, once defined both contextually and spatially, has broken all boundaries. The profusion and popularity of high voltage dramas set in court rooms, fast food corporations, hospitals, airports and computer firms is more than just a literary trend — it is a reflection of life as we know it today.
The last few decades have seen a virtual explosion in the genre of the thriller with traditional mystery and detective stories from P.D. James, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwall, spy stories from Ken Follet, Colin Forbes, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre competing with medical and sci-fi thrillers from Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, courtroom intrigues from Scott Turow, John Grisham, Steve Martin and now religious and art conspiracy thrillers from Dan Brown, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's latest blockbuster The Rule of Four. What is interesting though is that these intricate variations on the intrigue theme have each their distinguished predecessors. Sci-fi conspiracy dates back to H.G. Wells' War of the World. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic predecessor of Robin Cook stories like Chromosome 6 and Outbreak. Morris West wrote a racy religious Vatican conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s and lawyer cum detective Perry Mason stars in courtroom conflicts. So what makes this current spate of "specialty" thrillers different, almost a movement as it were?
Layman's manual
The answers to this seem to lie in the world we live in today — one of super specialisation and globalisation powered not just by politics but by micro economics. In this increasingly complex world, the thriller, with its detailed behind-the-scenes descriptions, whether in the esoteric world of banking as in Arthur Hailey's The Money Changers, or the frighteningly immediate yet complex world of medicine in Robin Cook's novels, becomes much more than a riveting airport read. It functions as a unique layman's manual, a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as it were. The same reader who'd follow Michael Crichton's Airframe or his path breaking The Andromeda Strain with fascinated awe would be hard put to pick up the equivalent textbooks on aerodynamics and anatomy. Similarly, the average layman would seldom venture into a jargon filled treatise on various aspects of the law, its loopholes, its provisions and precedents. And yet, as citizens in a democratic society, the rights and wrongs of conflicts, the understanding of how and why a government can order another citizen to pay money, give up their children, even to be imprisoned or put to death are issues of compelling interest. In this context a book like John Grisham's The Chamber is much more than a taut tale, it is an incisive and legally coherent argument against the death penalty.
The current crop of specialty thrillers is also striking in their delineations of grey. No more the black and white or red of political drama or the criminal versus society of the pure detective novel. Today's thrillers engage social themes and ethical questions with gusto whether it is racism and information technology in Hari Kunzru's Transmission or religious conditioning and conspiracy in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Grisham's thrillers trace the murky background of courtroom conflict and big business looking at jury selection and the tobacco industry in The Runaway Jury or law and crime in The Firm. Robin Cook's Fatal Cure attacks the anomalies of the health care system, his Vital Signs explores the issue of in-vitro reproduction and Toxin indicts the fast food industry.
Specialty thrillers today are therefore much more than suspense stories — they are in many senses social documents of fundamental interest, both in the way they pick up on society's current fears and in the manner in which they outline them. Packed with a wealth of circumstantial detail, they appeal to the general reader in their approximation to real life, the information they provide as well as their racy resolution.
New realities
Like modern day film, which gets technically more competent and more realistic, specially in conflict sequences, whether its epic battles or car chases, today's thrillers are truly cinematic. If Arthur Conan Doyle described a surgeon vis-à-vis his clothes and maybe his chambers, today's specialty thriller will get up, close and personal as he picks up his scalpel, glorying in the nitty gritty, the hows, the whys and the therefores. Like modern day science, the thriller investigates everything, and unlike science it has the benefit of an ethical viewpoint. Also unlike science it has the advantage of imagination on its side.
Fact and fiction
It is this provocative blend of fact and fiction most recently exemplified in the best selling Da Vinci Code that makes it so unique. Set against a backdrop of organised religion already reeling under allegations of long hidden conspiracies of silence, of excesses and of abuse, the events in the Da Vinci Code use a fascinating mix of religious geography, iconography and art history to uncover a secret conspiracy. From ancient history to technology, thrillers today dip into different areas of special research to construct concepts simultaneously novel yet frighteningly believable. In a world beset by religious fundamentalism and conflict as it hurtles towards progress, this heady combination of different specialist ideas, their consequences and resolutions seems one way of understanding reality — whether it is molecular manufacturing, biotechnology and the behavioural science of bees and ants in Michael Crichton's Prey or the combination of venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses in Hari Kunzru's Transmission.
AS popular art forms go, nothing captures public imagination in quite the same way as the thriller. Beginning with classic whodunnits, serial killers and spies, today's thrillers rock bestseller lists with their excursions into law, medicine, high finance and even religion. Moving from a genre that was wildly popular within its niche, the thriller, once defined both contextually and spatially, has broken all boundaries. The profusion and popularity of high voltage dramas set in court rooms, fast food corporations, hospitals, airports and computer firms is more than just a literary trend — it is a reflection of life as we know it today.
The last few decades have seen a virtual explosion in the genre of the thriller with traditional mystery and detective stories from P.D. James, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwall, spy stories from Ken Follet, Colin Forbes, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre competing with medical and sci-fi thrillers from Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, courtroom intrigues from Scott Turow, John Grisham, Steve Martin and now religious and art conspiracy thrillers from Dan Brown, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's latest blockbuster The Rule of Four. What is interesting though is that these intricate variations on the intrigue theme have each their distinguished predecessors. Sci-fi conspiracy dates back to H.G. Wells' War of the World. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic predecessor of Robin Cook stories like Chromosome 6 and Outbreak. Morris West wrote a racy religious Vatican conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s and lawyer cum detective Perry Mason stars in courtroom conflicts. So what makes this current spate of "specialty" thrillers different, almost a movement as it were?
Layman's manual
The answers to this seem to lie in the world we live in today — one of super specialisation and globalisation powered not just by politics but by micro economics. In this increasingly complex world, the thriller, with its detailed behind-the-scenes descriptions, whether in the esoteric world of banking as in Arthur Hailey's The Money Changers, or the frighteningly immediate yet complex world of medicine in Robin Cook's novels, becomes much more than a riveting airport read. It functions as a unique layman's manual, a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as it were. The same reader who'd follow Michael Crichton's Airframe or his path breaking The Andromeda Strain with fascinated awe would be hard put to pick up the equivalent textbooks on aerodynamics and anatomy. Similarly, the average layman would seldom venture into a jargon filled treatise on various aspects of the law, its loopholes, its provisions and precedents. And yet, as citizens in a democratic society, the rights and wrongs of conflicts, the understanding of how and why a government can order another citizen to pay money, give up their children, even to be imprisoned or put to death are issues of compelling interest. In this context a book like John Grisham's The Chamber is much more than a taut tale, it is an incisive and legally coherent argument against the death penalty.
The current crop of specialty thrillers is also striking in their delineations of grey. No more the black and white or red of political drama or the criminal versus society of the pure detective novel. Today's thrillers engage social themes and ethical questions with gusto whether it is racism and information technology in Hari Kunzru's Transmission or religious conditioning and conspiracy in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Grisham's thrillers trace the murky background of courtroom conflict and big business looking at jury selection and the tobacco industry in The Runaway Jury or law and crime in The Firm. Robin Cook's Fatal Cure attacks the anomalies of the health care system, his Vital Signs explores the issue of in-vitro reproduction and Toxin indicts the fast food industry.
Specialty thrillers today are therefore much more than suspense stories — they are in many senses social documents of fundamental interest, both in the way they pick up on society's current fears and in the manner in which they outline them. Packed with a wealth of circumstantial detail, they appeal to the general reader in their approximation to real life, the information they provide as well as their racy resolution.
New realities
Like modern day film, which gets technically more competent and more realistic, specially in conflict sequences, whether its epic battles or car chases, today's thrillers are truly cinematic. If Arthur Conan Doyle described a surgeon vis-à-vis his clothes and maybe his chambers, today's specialty thriller will get up, close and personal as he picks up his scalpel, glorying in the nitty gritty, the hows, the whys and the therefores. Like modern day science, the thriller investigates everything, and unlike science it has the benefit of an ethical viewpoint. Also unlike science it has the advantage of imagination on its side.
Fact and fiction
It is this provocative blend of fact and fiction most recently exemplified in the best selling Da Vinci Code that makes it so unique. Set against a backdrop of organised religion already reeling under allegations of long hidden conspiracies of silence, of excesses and of abuse, the events in the Da Vinci Code use a fascinating mix of religious geography, iconography and art history to uncover a secret conspiracy. From ancient history to technology, thrillers today dip into different areas of special research to construct concepts simultaneously novel yet frighteningly believable. In a world beset by religious fundamentalism and conflict as it hurtles towards progress, this heady combination of different specialist ideas, their consequences and resolutions seems one way of understanding reality — whether it is molecular manufacturing, biotechnology and the behavioural science of bees and ants in Michael Crichton's Prey or the combination of venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses in Hari Kunzru's Transmission.
Book Review - India in Mind
http://www.the-week.com/25may01/lifestyle_article5.htm
From Australian writer Robyn Davidson’s toilet travails with the Rabari nomads in the Thar desert to Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan quest for the snow leopard, India in Mind is a literary map of sorts, multi-dimensional in diverse perspectives that range from Rudyard Kipling to Mexican poet Octavio Paz to ‘beat’ gay writer Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (‘naked saddhus who don’t talk, crosslegged smoking dope/ to overlook the corpse meat-dolls’).
The collection is remarkable in the breadth of subjects it encompasses, with Hermann Hesse’s spiritual mysticism and Andre Malraux’s philosophical ruminations on Ellora and Elephanta cheek by jowl with Somerset Maugham’s portraits of the vina player and the Dewan of Travancore and Bruce
Yet it is a collection that disappoints—despite vivid descriptions of people and places, the characters remain cliched caricatures and slightly ridiculous in their attempts to measure up to western standards. Mark Twain’s bearer, whom he names Satan, V.S. Naipaul’s unreliable Kashmiri hotelier Mr Butt or J.R. Ackerley’s distracted maharaja. Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s stories are exceptions, yet, tellingly, Jhabwala’s patronising Margaret memsahib and Scott’s supercilious Mrs Grigson are not Indian.
Mostly, however, what you miss is a sense of the unexpected—an insider’s intimate view of the depths below the colourful vibrancy of the streets of Varanasi or the tombs of the Tughlaqs. You miss the belongingness of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy, the affection of Ruskin Bond or the matter of factness of Jim Corbett.
India in Mind is a collection whose literary credentials are impeccable—an expert and diverse selection accompanied by Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to each writer, which makes for interesting reading, yet it remains naggingly unsatisfying and somewhat uninspiring.
From Australian writer Robyn Davidson’s toilet travails with the Rabari nomads in the Thar desert to Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan quest for the snow leopard, India in Mind is a literary map of sorts, multi-dimensional in diverse perspectives that range from Rudyard Kipling to Mexican poet Octavio Paz to ‘beat’ gay writer Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (‘naked saddhus who don’t talk, crosslegged smoking dope/ to overlook the corpse meat-dolls’).
The collection is remarkable in the breadth of subjects it encompasses, with Hermann Hesse’s spiritual mysticism and Andre Malraux’s philosophical ruminations on Ellora and Elephanta cheek by jowl with Somerset Maugham’s portraits of the vina player and the Dewan of Travancore and Bruce
Yet it is a collection that disappoints—despite vivid descriptions of people and places, the characters remain cliched caricatures and slightly ridiculous in their attempts to measure up to western standards. Mark Twain’s bearer, whom he names Satan, V.S. Naipaul’s unreliable Kashmiri hotelier Mr Butt or J.R. Ackerley’s distracted maharaja. Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s stories are exceptions, yet, tellingly, Jhabwala’s patronising Margaret memsahib and Scott’s supercilious Mrs Grigson are not Indian.
Mostly, however, what you miss is a sense of the unexpected—an insider’s intimate view of the depths below the colourful vibrancy of the streets of Varanasi or the tombs of the Tughlaqs. You miss the belongingness of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy, the affection of Ruskin Bond or the matter of factness of Jim Corbett.
India in Mind is a collection whose literary credentials are impeccable—an expert and diverse selection accompanied by Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to each writer, which makes for interesting reading, yet it remains naggingly unsatisfying and somewhat uninspiring.
The City and its Stories
juhujournal
By 2030 two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. No wonder then, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY, that the city is acquiring a literary identity of its own in modern imagination.
SHASHI ASHIWAL
Cityscape: A montage of joys and miseries...
THE city has always been an important backdrop for the story, from the bleakly industrial London of Dickens' Hard Times to the Baltimore of Anne Tyler's finely nuanced everyday world. Now it becomes protagonist in a new genre of books that hail it as centre-stage character — from the recently launched Bombay by Suketu Mehta to the critically acclaimed The Weekenders, a collection of stories set in Kolkata.
This trend is indicative of the increasing importance of the city. At a time when the urban population has for the first time in the history of mankind overtaken the rural population and is projected in U.N. population studies to account for two thirds of the world's population by 2030, the city is under intense scrutiny. Increasingly, it is acquiring a literary identity, its stories multidimensional maps where fiction, history, sociology and geography come together in fascinating accounts of people and pavements.
Provocative mix
Truth is stranger than fiction, and the city's provocative mix of both has a special appeal. It is, for the storyteller, the ultimate inspiration. Here's where Oceans of Stories and the Arabian Nights come together in a rich multiplicity of voices, immortalising both the prince and the pauper. The modern metropolis has an epic sweep, its many worlds both co-existing and colliding. Its juxtapositions, the poignancy of its unsung heroes and their immense isolation amongst the crowded streets, rather like Coleridge's ancient mariner with "water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" reveal life at its most powerfully ironic. The rickshaw puller, the bar girl, the taxi driver emerge from the choruses of grand heroes as icons of everyday existence — plebeian yet potent. So Monica Ali, in The Weekenders, writes of Deepak, a lost little boy who "works" in the carriages of trains that steam into Howrah station. The late Arun Kolatkar, that quintessential Mumbai poet, wrote in his Kala Ghoda Poems of the drunks and the dogs of the city and of the "Old Woman" showing us life "through the bullet holes she has for her eyes". The city is where emotions run high, where the minutiae of everyday, acquire in the retelling a status that is larger than life. Suketu Mehta's stories of the city, of hanging out in hotels and beer bars with Sena local bosses Sunil and Amol and shooters Satish and Mohsin, in five star hotels and cafeterias with Mona Lisa the bar dancer and with young unemployed Girish in his slum, prove fascinating in the context of the concrete pavements of that teeming, multitudinous city, Mumbai. Everyman is no longer faceless; his story is interesting as well an intriguing blend of fiction and social history. The appeal of such stories lies in their embrace of the marginalised many — of the cross dancer Honey, whose spectacular dancing skills earned her thousands every night at Mumbai's Sapphire Bar (Suketu Mehta's Bombay) and of Razia, Panna and Vimla , eunuchs who live in an old Mughal haveli in the gullies of Old Delhi, in William Dalrymple's The City of Djinns, among other such in-your-face but oft-ignored inhabitants.
The city emerges as a space where history and the contemporary story resonate, as William Dalrymple in The City of Djinns meets Pakeezah Begum, the youngest descendant of the Mughal Dynasty, in a ruined haveli near Faiz Bazaar, and visits tombs, palaces, graveyards and gardens in search of the stories of the generations of emperors and imperialist who held court on those very premises. Jerry Pinto recalls in the anthology Mumbai Meri Jaan the day during the Second World War in 1944, when the battleship SS Fort Stikine exploded and he saw a headless horse and Timeri Murari tells of the history of the Hindu Building in The Unhurried City Writings on Chennai. City stories are part reminiscence and part folk tale and the nostalgia of these personal metropolitan stories make history come alive in a way no text book ever could. So also journalist Pinky Virani's book on Mumbai, Once Was a Bombay, talks of Rozena growing up in of Mazgaon, of Pakya the shooter for hire, of politician Chaggan Bhujbal and film fight master Veeru Devgan, while simultaneously tracing the rise of gangsterism and religion in local politics.
This is history at its best, and social studies too. The story of the modern city is really the equivalent of the great battle tales of yore. For it is contemporary warfare at its refined best, deadly despite its deceptively civil veneer of good behaviour. The story of the city is that of constant conflict, as Kiran Nagarkar exclaims in his quirky tale of the Bombay chawls Ravan and Eddie — "They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour off a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump".
A riot of colours
You are impelled to read such city stories, because the city is a geographical entity you know, or want to get to know, a place where the streets have a name. The metropolis is a complicated character — no blacks and whites here, it's a virtual riot of colour — a montage of joys and miseries. And like the bazaars of the East, long the staple attractions of the traveller's tale, the many colours, sights and sounds of the city signify everything vibrant and diverse — an emblem of what life at its best should be. Nothing can quite beat the bubbliness of the bustling city. The liveliness and energy of the everyday streets is only surpassed by the many modern day extravaganzas. For, like ancient Rome and its gladiators, today's cities play host to colourful spectacles, marches, processions et al. William Dalrymple describes with much fascination the crowded spectacle of the partridge fight, also the majesty of the Id prayer, Suketu Mehta tells of the Ganapati celebrations in Bombay, the bull slaughter at Id and Sameera Khan describes "Muharrom in the Mohalla" in Bombay Meri Jaan, as colourful illustrations of this joie de vivre.
There are truly "six million stories in the naked city" , as Jules Dassin exclaims in his film starring New York and perhaps that explains why we seek to understand its soul.
By 2030 two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. No wonder then, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY, that the city is acquiring a literary identity of its own in modern imagination.
SHASHI ASHIWAL
Cityscape: A montage of joys and miseries...
THE city has always been an important backdrop for the story, from the bleakly industrial London of Dickens' Hard Times to the Baltimore of Anne Tyler's finely nuanced everyday world. Now it becomes protagonist in a new genre of books that hail it as centre-stage character — from the recently launched Bombay by Suketu Mehta to the critically acclaimed The Weekenders, a collection of stories set in Kolkata.
This trend is indicative of the increasing importance of the city. At a time when the urban population has for the first time in the history of mankind overtaken the rural population and is projected in U.N. population studies to account for two thirds of the world's population by 2030, the city is under intense scrutiny. Increasingly, it is acquiring a literary identity, its stories multidimensional maps where fiction, history, sociology and geography come together in fascinating accounts of people and pavements.
Provocative mix
Truth is stranger than fiction, and the city's provocative mix of both has a special appeal. It is, for the storyteller, the ultimate inspiration. Here's where Oceans of Stories and the Arabian Nights come together in a rich multiplicity of voices, immortalising both the prince and the pauper. The modern metropolis has an epic sweep, its many worlds both co-existing and colliding. Its juxtapositions, the poignancy of its unsung heroes and their immense isolation amongst the crowded streets, rather like Coleridge's ancient mariner with "water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" reveal life at its most powerfully ironic. The rickshaw puller, the bar girl, the taxi driver emerge from the choruses of grand heroes as icons of everyday existence — plebeian yet potent. So Monica Ali, in The Weekenders, writes of Deepak, a lost little boy who "works" in the carriages of trains that steam into Howrah station. The late Arun Kolatkar, that quintessential Mumbai poet, wrote in his Kala Ghoda Poems of the drunks and the dogs of the city and of the "Old Woman" showing us life "through the bullet holes she has for her eyes". The city is where emotions run high, where the minutiae of everyday, acquire in the retelling a status that is larger than life. Suketu Mehta's stories of the city, of hanging out in hotels and beer bars with Sena local bosses Sunil and Amol and shooters Satish and Mohsin, in five star hotels and cafeterias with Mona Lisa the bar dancer and with young unemployed Girish in his slum, prove fascinating in the context of the concrete pavements of that teeming, multitudinous city, Mumbai. Everyman is no longer faceless; his story is interesting as well an intriguing blend of fiction and social history. The appeal of such stories lies in their embrace of the marginalised many — of the cross dancer Honey, whose spectacular dancing skills earned her thousands every night at Mumbai's Sapphire Bar (Suketu Mehta's Bombay) and of Razia, Panna and Vimla , eunuchs who live in an old Mughal haveli in the gullies of Old Delhi, in William Dalrymple's The City of Djinns, among other such in-your-face but oft-ignored inhabitants.
The city emerges as a space where history and the contemporary story resonate, as William Dalrymple in The City of Djinns meets Pakeezah Begum, the youngest descendant of the Mughal Dynasty, in a ruined haveli near Faiz Bazaar, and visits tombs, palaces, graveyards and gardens in search of the stories of the generations of emperors and imperialist who held court on those very premises. Jerry Pinto recalls in the anthology Mumbai Meri Jaan the day during the Second World War in 1944, when the battleship SS Fort Stikine exploded and he saw a headless horse and Timeri Murari tells of the history of the Hindu Building in The Unhurried City Writings on Chennai. City stories are part reminiscence and part folk tale and the nostalgia of these personal metropolitan stories make history come alive in a way no text book ever could. So also journalist Pinky Virani's book on Mumbai, Once Was a Bombay, talks of Rozena growing up in of Mazgaon, of Pakya the shooter for hire, of politician Chaggan Bhujbal and film fight master Veeru Devgan, while simultaneously tracing the rise of gangsterism and religion in local politics.
This is history at its best, and social studies too. The story of the modern city is really the equivalent of the great battle tales of yore. For it is contemporary warfare at its refined best, deadly despite its deceptively civil veneer of good behaviour. The story of the city is that of constant conflict, as Kiran Nagarkar exclaims in his quirky tale of the Bombay chawls Ravan and Eddie — "They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour off a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump".
A riot of colours
You are impelled to read such city stories, because the city is a geographical entity you know, or want to get to know, a place where the streets have a name. The metropolis is a complicated character — no blacks and whites here, it's a virtual riot of colour — a montage of joys and miseries. And like the bazaars of the East, long the staple attractions of the traveller's tale, the many colours, sights and sounds of the city signify everything vibrant and diverse — an emblem of what life at its best should be. Nothing can quite beat the bubbliness of the bustling city. The liveliness and energy of the everyday streets is only surpassed by the many modern day extravaganzas. For, like ancient Rome and its gladiators, today's cities play host to colourful spectacles, marches, processions et al. William Dalrymple describes with much fascination the crowded spectacle of the partridge fight, also the majesty of the Id prayer, Suketu Mehta tells of the Ganapati celebrations in Bombay, the bull slaughter at Id and Sameera Khan describes "Muharrom in the Mohalla" in Bombay Meri Jaan, as colourful illustrations of this joie de vivre.
There are truly "six million stories in the naked city" , as Jules Dassin exclaims in his film starring New York and perhaps that explains why we seek to understand its soul.
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