Indian Authors: All Hype, No Substance

When I told my friends that I am gonna bitch about Indian authors, they got all patriotic and sentimental and asked me to think and write positive. I almost relented until I realized it’s my friggin' blog and I damn friggin' will write what I want, but yes! I don’t lie though I am infamous for speaking my mind and giving everyone a piece of it!!!

I am not saying that all Indian authors are bad, and now that’s the sad part coz the real good ones--for lack of giant publishers backing them or lack of PR skills-- are overshadowed by the quasi-literary authors earning a cool million dollars as an advance (thanks to Godwin) to produce a book that’s incomprehensible for it’s purely gibberish!

Let me start with the Nobel-prize winning author Naipaul. At an awards function, he thus spoke, “I would like to thank all the prostitutes who gave me company when my wife was way (or sleeping in the next room)” [I am not too able to reproduce the line verbatim but then again is it worth memorizing such a line?]. Now I am not holding his promiscuity against him when I say I don’t like his writing. The House for Mr Biswas was anything but entertaining about a loser’s life in Trinidad. It was apparently a dark comedy but I failed to understand that book and was glad to throw it away after a few hundred pages not dying to know how it ended.

Next in line is Salman Rushdie, who has the distinct honor of winning not only the Booker Prize but also The Booker of Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, and who never ceases to make headlines—from writing a book denouncing the prophet to getting a fatwa issued to remaining alive only to marry yet again (this time to Padma Lakshmi) to getting separated yet again, his life is anything but dull. But despite his hectic schedule he finds time to discover words that can otherwise be found only in The Advanced Oxford Dictionary for Non-English speaking Morons. I tried The Fury, The Ground Beneath her Feet, and now stuck with Midnight’s Children while wondering what part of his upbringing caused him to wreak such vengeance and so decidedly and repeatedly on readers who picked up books either to gain knowledge or to kill time. When you read Rushdie, you either want to kill yourself for your abysmal vocabulary or want to kill him for flaunting his uncolloquial vocabulary.

When you think Booker, you think Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things. Rushdie would be proud to call her his protégé cos she writes as obtuse as he does. I am beginning to think that perhaps that is the criterion for winning a Booker Prize. The only people who rave about this book are Americans, who will rave about anything Indian but will strip search a Sardarji mistaking him for a Taliban, and our own Mallu brothers who are plain jingoists. Thanks God that the Narmada project is keeping her away from penning another Big Bore Book.

The other lady now synonymous with Booker is Kiran Desai. I have heard such mixed reviews about that book that I know which one to belive. Since I am yet to read The Inheritance of Loss, I’ll spare her for the moment, but Ms Desai beware coz I will be BACK!

So let’s move on to her mama dear, Anita Desai, who shares the distinct honor of having three of her works nominated for Booker but yet not making it even once. One of the books that made it to the Big B was Fasting, Feasting, which for its obscurity and plain silliness almost made it.

The other author who was famous for his groundbreaking work that later served as a Bible for all ABCDs was Anurag Mathur with his famous The Inscrutable Indians. People still think that it is the most hilarious book while I think someone changed the meaning of the word “Hilarious” since I last looked up a dictionary. Confound him for I can never ever use So long in the traditional way.

How can we leave behind the author who opened my eyes to the world of Indian authors: Chetan Bhagat, an IIT + IIM grad who wasn’t content making big bucks working in an investment firm but came back to India to make some more big bucks churning out potboilers such as Five Point Someone and One Night at the Call Center. He was a guru to the generation that was not only portrayed in the books but who also managed to read the books that glorified them. Methinks the only reason those books ever got read was coz it was priced at Rs 90 and it was sold for much lesser by vendors on the footpaths!

To be continued….