Publishing is dead; long live publishing!

Consider it: you’ve invested a lot of time – perhaps years – and labor to write a book, and have it read by some top agents and editors. The book is great, and you can write, most of them tell you, but in the end all of them reject you. Why? Some hint obliquely that the book does not satisfy today’s marketing condition. Bottom line: your book lacks the quality of a blockbuster.

Is Salman Rushdie spent as a novelist? There is speculation about it, but on reading “Shalimar, the Clown”, I strongly feel he’s not. Not yet at least. The creator of “Midnight’s Children” can still deliver.

His earlier novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” disappointed me. But this time I loved the prose, voice, theme and even the drama of the novel. I enjoyed every bit of Shalimar.

“Was any poet ever house-arrested by anybody?
There might be politics about a poet,
There might be violence and fire on account of her,
But nobody ever house-arrested her, no country ..”
-- Taslima Nasreen

So, what is sacred in “Sacred Games” by Vikram Chandra?

The book is mainly about Ganesh Gaitonde, a Bombay mafia don, but also about Sartaj, a police officer. Yes, it’s a cop and robber story, but laced with literary flavour, and you’re sometimes gripped by Chandra’s robust narrative with insights into life and surroundings – so much so that you feel you’re into a literary fiction, which it’s not.

It’s a compelling cross-genre novel. Though about 900 pages long, and quite hefty, I read through the entire book, skipping pages here and there. Chandra has a way with words, and uses indigenous slang effectively.

For the past fortnight I have been trying to write about a genocide that just happened in Nandigram of West Bengal, India - not far away from my home. Anything I crank out looks like banal or lame. Though I’ve got over my initial shock, and have placed the event in its right perspective, and analyzed it, I continue to get the writer’s block. For sure, a genocide demands real, strong, pithy words for its narrative, which I can’t summon right now.

Let me line up some facts instead.

On March 14, Nandigram, an emerald country in Bengal, saw an unprecedented carnage when the leftist government, in power for thirty years at a stretch, killed 14 people, mostly women, to teach the innocent farmers a lesson. The farmers had been protesting, for some time, the acquisition of their land by the government for Special Economic Zones now being touted as the great Indian Hope for the people.

So, Saddam was hanged as expected. But why in so much hurry? Seems like something nasty and unbearable was disposed off in quickest possible time to celebrate that “Oh, what a relief!” moment.

George W. Bush was in bed when Saddam was being executed. Was it his conscious decision to get into sleep to put a lid on his guilty mind? Once awake, he must have seen the footage of Saddam hanging on TV. How did he react to it? Did he enjoy it?

Saddam deserved punishment for his mass-killing and other brutalities, a death penalty for sure, but why execute him in this hasty, hush-hush, summary fashion? It looked very much like revenge-killing, bereft of any sanity or semblance there of. The sight of a formidable figure falling dead, neck twisted and face down, just seconds after he was seen alive and composed, is ghastly and shocking. Who is it who told our civilization has not yet crossed its adolescence?

Ever since his admission that he served in Nazis’ notorious Waffen SS in World war II, many people – among them many writers, literary critics, politicians, historians, Marxists – have been attacking Nobel-winning writer Guenter Grass in a vociferous way.

Noises they make are mainly about his morality. So, how could he keep such a ‘crime’ under wrap all these years? Is he not an imposter who got away with a ghastly crime? How could he play so long a moral guardian to Germans in particular and the humanity at large? Should not the Nobel committee revoke his Nobel prize for literature now? Et cetra.

Bloggers in India experience it for the first time: a government censor in a country known to be the world’s largest democracy.

Post 11/7 Mumbai blasts, the Government identified 17 websites spreading messages of religious hatred and decided to take action against them. It gets the Internet Service Providers to block users from accessing these sites. But what happens actually is the blockade of entire domains, which host those sites, affecting thousands of bloggers along the way.

Is it any effective way of dealing with the hate-mongers? If the Indian service providers block you, the savvy users know how to reach the site using a by-pass, a Pakistan server in this case. Besides, how do you clamp down on the bloggers who have a positive role in today’s restrictive environs of the traditional media?