Marriage that is HR
October 12, 2008
The Telegraph, of Calcutta, in their edition dated Sunday , October 12 , 2008 writes about the event at CROSSWORD bookstore at Elgin Road, Kolkata in the section called Book Bazar. They call it
Marriage that is HR
“Married but Available, that’s a book, written by Abhijit Bhaduri, an HR employee with Microsoft. No, the book is not about promiscuity. It deals with HR management. Bhaduri, in fact, has a thing for titles. His first book, of which this is a sequel, was called Mediocre but Arrogant.
An intriguing title draws readers. The book launch at Crossword on September 29 had event manager Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee conversing with the author. For someone who works backstage arranging such book launches, it was novel to have Chatterjee taking centrestage, exchanging notes with the author on studying “Eco honours” and following it up with management degree, which both the HR manager and the event manager seemed to have done.”
The Hindu newspaper had already announced the book on 6th Oct 2008 in their piece titled
Made in heaven, available now
| “Married But Available”, the sequel to “Mediocre But Arrogant”, is on the shelves |
HarperCollins India and Crossword hosted the launch of “Married But Available” by Abhijit Bhaduri at the capital, recently. It is a sequel to his debut novel “Mediocre But Arrogant”.
The book traces the protagonist Abbey’s life, amid circumstances that catch him unawares. Read more
Chick Lit and Guy Lit
October 4, 2008
I kind of have a thing about the term “Chick Lit“ or “Guy Lit” for that matter. There is of course a definition in wikipedia to define what this genre is all about. By the way, type in “Guy Lit” in wikipedia and you discover there is no such category. Is that called discrimination or what? More importantly there is a kind of a predetrmined pigeonhole into which we are putting the kind of stuff chicks write or read about. Stuff that guys read or write about. Don’t we all do a bit of everything? I know enough men who found the film Sex and the City good to watch. Enough men flip through Femina as women who buy Car and Driver. Read more
World Book Fair, New Delhi 2-10 Feb ‘08
February 2, 2008
This year should see a spate of Indian books. From graphic novels to cookbooks. From Science Fiction to Short Stories, the publishers are ready to pull out their trump cards. With a growing confidence in everything Indian, the Indian reader is also ready to give Indian writers a chance to share stories that are desi and in a language that feels real. Read more
Meet Tuhin Sinha - author of That Thing Called Love
March 8, 2007
I was in Mumbai last month to attend Kitabfest. The literary festival had loads of authors - probably more authors than publishers, socialites, communicators, media and celebrities. And some readings and some networking - some real desperate networkers who were there just collecting visiting cards without even checking who that card belonged to. Got to admire that for speed of acquisition. There were some who were handing over their visiting cards like people distribute handbills at a railway station.
With Indian authors becoming more visible it was not long before I bumped into one of them. We got talking about his work, hobbies and the experience of getting published. Tuhin is also seeking to act in Bollywood. But mainly it was about his book called THAT THING CALLED LOVE Just finished reading it
AB: Hey I just finished reading your book. Liked the concept of the story and the way you have written it. Almost like a film script. We both share a love for Jampot. You studied there right?
Tuhin: I studied at Loyola School, Jamshedpur.
AB: And stopped at that?
Tuhin: No, then went to Hindu College, Delhi and National Institute of Advertising, New Delhi.
AB: And now you are a scriptwriter too. You do that for a living? I mean no one (except JK Rowling and a few others) survive on the royalties of their book
Tuhin: I am a scriptwriter based in Mumbai. A tele-film called Phir Se, that won me the RAPA award for the Best Tele-film, 2005. That encouraged me to co-script Pyar Ki Kashti Mein a show that was shot exclusively on a cruise.
AB: From Telefilms to movies. Is that the plan?
Tuhin: I am working on two movie scripts for directors, Onir and Subhash Sehgal respectively.
AB: Tell me about your book That Thing Called Love. I love the cover photo.
Tuhin: It’s a story about the dark side of relationships, set in one Mumbai Monsoon. Another way to put it would be that the book delves into the complexities in contemporary urban relationships.AB: How do you describe your writing style? Was it easier writing fiction having written screenplays?
Tuhin: Well, I’ve been a scriptwriter for the last 5 years. So the book I can say was a logical extension/ diversification for me. More honestly, I wanted to break out of the anonymity of being a TV scriptwriter and since I had a story which I felt, had good commercial worth for a novel, I went ahead with it.
AB: How did you go about finding a publisher?Tuhin: Well, Rupa and Penguin were the first publishers whom I approached. I approached them with just two sample chapters but they didn’t seem interested. Thereafter, I approached almost all known publishers whose books I could find at leading bookstores. I would find out their numbers from the ‘just dial’ service and call them up. I believe in destiny and when something is destined to happen, it does happen. I mailed my entire manuscript to Srishti on the evening of 2 nd July last year and by morning next day I was told they were going ahead with the novel.
AB: What is the role of the author in the book becoming a commercial success?
Tuhin: The author has a huge role to play. That’s because the book like any other product or brand has to have a specific positioning. Commercial success depends a lot upon attractive packaging. And at least in the Indian context, the onus for the marketing exercise rests almost entirely upon the author. Moreover the profile of an author has changed a great deal of late. Nowadays, authors are a lot more interactive. There is a definite effort on their part to reach out and interact with their readers. This, no doubt, tends to involve readers a lot more. It’s also a good trend because I’m sure it inspires newer people to take to writing.
AB: What should one look for in a publisher?
Tuhin: A lot of things: a) compatibility in terms of creative sensibility b) editing and production standards as established by the publisher’s previous books c) distribution network or distribution tie-ups of the publisher d) marketing capabilities. Having listed these, let me be frank enough to add that a first timer is not in a position to choose. The sheer incentive to become published author would make you go for whichever publisher is willing to accept your work.
AB: What does a publisher look for in a manuscript?Tuhin: I don’t think I would be the right person to answer this question. From whatever little my experience has been, I think Indian publishers are of two kinds. One who would go solely by content; And the other, who rely entirely upon PR agencies doing the job for them. There again, the cost of PR is never borne by the publisher. AB: The role of the editor in the making of a book
Tuhin: The editor has a pivotal role to play. Many publishers, unfortunately, go only for copy editing. However, in my view, it’s equally important for the editor to have a good story sense. Content editing only improves quality manifold.
AB: If your book was not a commercial success would you still continue writing?
Tuhin: Yes.
Jai Arjun Singh writes in Man’s World (January 2007 )
January 19, 2007
Jai Arjun Singh’s blog posts this piece written for the magazine Man’s WorldbyJanuary 2007Posted below is a feature I did for the latest issue of Man’s World magazine. It was meant to be about books that are commonly classified as “lad lit”, but a related story that I find much more interesting (and which I’ve incorporated here) is the number of writers who are targeting the mass market – reaching out to the kind of reader who might pick up a cheaply priced novel because of the easily relatable characters and settings in it. The attitudes of some of these writers are very revealing. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery, for instance: the assumption that “literary” must necessarily be synonymous with “pretentious”, and that the best reason (the only reason?) to write a book is to sell thousands of copies and become famous quickly. I couldn’t help thinking about my recent interviews with Vikram Chandra and Raj Kamal Jha: Chandra saying he would be pleased if his book found just one reader with the “same heart”, Jha saying he felt lucky if 4-5 people appreciated something he had written. The mass-market writers would probably snort at these statements.Working on this story was another reminder that many of us who read/review for a living and move in lit-circles tend to lose sight of the possible directions IWE (Indian writing in English) might take in the next few years. I think there’s scope for more indepth features about the increasing democratisation of Indian publishing.Here’s the story.
‘We can’t do very literary stuff’“What we’re seeing,” says Neelesh Misra, “is the end of pretension for the publishing industry.” The journalist-cum-author is talking about a new movement in Indian writing in English: the growing number of writers who are reaching out to the “casual reader” – that is, someone who prefers easily recognizable stories and settings, and conversational prose, to the rigours of literary fiction. Misra’s own first novel, Once Upon a Timezone, is a case in point. Despite a low-profile launch, it had sold over 8,000 copies as of early December, a very impressive figure for the fiction market in India.“People who didn’t read earlier are picking up books now,” says Misra, “and they want themes and characters they can relate to.” Many urban Indian youngsters should be able to relate to his fast-paced story about Neel Pandey, who dreams of going to the US but ends up working in a Delhi call centre and forming a long-distance relationship with an American journalist.Misra is in his 30s, well-ensconced in his job as a senior editor with the Hindustan Times, and proclaims that he’s “primarily a journalist who also happens to write books” – but his views are shared by a much younger man who hasn’t even embarked on a career yet. Tushar Rahaja, 22, recently graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the author of Anything for You, Ma’am – An IITian’s Love Story, says he and his friends can’t connect with a lot of contemporary fiction. “I know many people who don’t read simply because they find it very boring,” he says. When Raheja wrote his debut novel, he relied on his visual sense and a flair for recording casual conversations: “I knew I couldn’t do very literary stuff.”This movement away from “literary stuff” is catching on. Traditionally, one of literature’s strong points was supposed to be that it could make you uncomfortable – by opening windows into new worlds, challenging the reader to (at least briefly) understand characters who live and think differently. Much of the new writing on the Indian literary horizon performs the opposite function: it’s about reinforcing what you already know of the world; seeking comfort in the fact that there are others who have experienced the same things you have (even if it’s something as basic as having an argument with a girlfriend at the Barista in Green Park market - you know, the one that’s just around the corner from Evergreen?). And as it happens, much of this writing is currently in the form of stories about the lives of confused young men.Dude lit: a facile classificationMany new books deal with the coming-of-age experiences of a male protagonist – the ups and downs in studies, friendships, romance and career. In recent months, apart from Once Upon a Timezone… and Anything for You, Ma’am, there’s been Abhijit Bhaduri’s Mediocre but Arrogant, about a youngster named Abbey who lives and learns in a Jamshedpur management institute in the early 1980s (don’t miss that the book title spells “MBA”) and Tuhin Sinha’s That Thing Called Love (TTCL), centred on the ad-sales manager of a matrimony website and his quest for true love.This commonality has led these books to be classified as “lad lit” or “dude lit”, the Boy’s Own Club riposte to Chick Lit. But the authors themselves resist being slotted. “These are terms propounded by the media,” says Sinha, pointing out that his novel deals with the lives of a motley group of characters, not just one male protagonist. “In a broad sense, I suppose it can be called lad lit. But personally, while writing it, I was least concerned about what category it would fit into.” Besides, he says, the feedback he gets through his website and on email comes from both male and female readers.Chetan Bhagat, whose bestselling Five Point Someone and http://www.chetanbhagat.com/ontcc/thebook/synopsis.php have been vanguards for the genre, is more aggressive. “Chick lit refers to literature that is read primarily by women. But ‘lad-lit’ is read by men and women both, what is so laddish about it?” he asks. “Some journalists like to slot items into snappy sub-categories, and so do the marketing divisions of publishing companies – that’s how this compartmentalisation happens.”Abhijit Bhaduri says Mediocre but Arrogant wasn’t written to fit a genre but flowed naturally out of his own experiences as a business-school student. “I wanted to write about the experience of growing up in India in the 1980s and I chose a business-school setting because I was familiar with it.”
Similar sentiments are voiced by Sudeep Chakravarti, whose Tin Fish captured the ethos of Mayo School in the mid-1970s, a milieu the author had experienced firsthand. For all the recent media hype, “lad lit” is simply a jazzed-up term for the good old-fashioned Bildungsroman, which is the sort of book a first-time novelist – still struggling to find a comfort zone in fiction – often writes.Reading is cool. So is writing. But ’serious’ equals ‘pseudo’So while it’s interesting that stories are being told from the young male perspective, the more notable thing about these books is that they constitute a new approach to writing and publishing – one that’s opposed to the idea that reading has to be a solitary habit, confined to a select few. Through pricing strategies and through the accessibility of their writing, these authors are targeting a mass readership and they make no bones about it.A couple of years ago, Rupa & Co’s gambit of pricing Bhagat’s Five Point Someone at Rs 95 famously paid off: in a market where a mere 5,000 sales are enough to classify a novel as a “bestseller”, Five Point Someone sold lakhs of copies. Youngsters who would otherwise never have listed “reading” among their hobbies were buying the book – not just from regular bookstores but even at railway stations and traffic crossings. This is a strategy that other publishers have picked up on. Srishti Publishers has marked Raheja and Sinha’s novels at Rs 100 (in fact they are marked down even further at some bookstores), while Once Upon a TimeZone (HarperCollins India) and Mediocre but Arrogant (Indialog Publications) are both priced at Rs 195 – which is still quite low given their higher production quality and better editing.
“I told my publishers I didn’t want my novel priced at more than Rs 100,” Raheja tells me. Reason? He can’t imagine why someone might want to spend Rs 500 or more on a book “when he can go out with his girlfriend a couple of times and enjoy himself with the same money”. The obvious jokes aside (people who read have time for girlfriends?), this indicates a thought process that’s very different from that of purveyors of literary fiction. It’s the thought process of someone who’s willing to see a book as a pop commodity, something that provides instant gratification the way a quick meal at McDonald’s would – rather than as a pathway to intellectual stimulation. But then “intellectual” is a bad word in these circles anyway – it’s synonymous with “pretentious”, and invariably preceded by “pseudo”. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery on view: the eagerness to take potshots at “serious writers”, the simplistic and self-serving assumption that any writer who uses big words, long sentences and descriptive prose must necessarily be insincere or catering to the demands of the West. The writers who target a mass-readership can’t understand why anyone would be “self-important” enough to write an 800-page tome, or to spend six years working on one book. “My life has been so eventful that I’m sure I can already write 50 books based on my experiences,” says Raheja confidently.
Abhijit Bhaduri and Neelesh Misra are relatively measured in their attitude to literary distinctions. “I want to avoid talking down to readers or getting into fancy descriptions,” says Misra, “but I do think of my work as middlebrow at least. If I write something, it should meet a certain quality requirement.”
Bhaduri, who counts Rohington Mistry and Arundhati Roy among his favourites, says, “The casual, conversational style of writing appeals to a large mass of people, but literary fiction has its own place.”
ConvergenceSignificantly, many of these writers have a strong online presence, with personal websites and blogs that help in promoting their books. “My Ryze page helped spread awareness about TTCL,” says Tuhin Sinha, “When you don’t have a professional PR agency working for you, the Net is the best option.” This medium also helps the writers to bypass the critic (another bad word!) and interact directly with that more important beast – the reader. For as Raheja puts it, “Critics use words that are out of the public domain. They are distanced from what they write about – they don’t know how much effort one puts into writing a book or making a film.”Another interesting thing about this new lot of novels is that many of them are practically ready to be transferred to the big screen. (As a boy tells his girlfriend in Anything for You, Ma’am, “When God is giving us such a good chance to live a movie, why should we despair? Right now it is a perfect script for a masala movie.”) This isn’t surprising, for on the whole these writers have closer ties with Bollywood films than with literature. Sinha, for instance, is a Mumbai-based scriptwriter whose work includes serials like Pyar Ki Kashti Mein. “The scriptwriting experience has helped,” he says. “I’ve been told my book is very visual.”Similarly, Neelesh Misra has written songs for Hindi movies – notably “Jaadu hai nasha hai” from Jism and “Maine dil se kaha…” from Rog – as well as a couple of scripts. His book ends with a very movie-like coda about what eventually happens to the various characters (sample: “Meenal Sharma and Sonia Shah are now India’s first legally married lesbian couple”). And Raheja’s ultimate aim is to make a film and oversee most aspects of the production. “I hate collaboration in art. Ideally I would like to do everything myself.” He draws an imaginary marquee in the air with his hands: “It should say Written by, Directed by and Music by Tushar Raheja.” Chances are that film versions of most of these books will be underway soon – which in turn should open the market even further.
But as Bhaduri says, “Today it’s lad-lit, tomorrow we’ll have teen lit or even kid lit. Eventually it’s all about giving the reader something to identify with.”
Purists and critics will continue to be sceptical about this new writing, but for good or for bad it seems to be working. The coming months should see the playing out of the conflict between mass-market writing and literary fiction, especially if the larger publishers start accepting more manuscripts with an eye on what appeals to the untrained reader.(BOX WITH STORY)
Tempting as it is to put all these books in the same bracket, they do vary in quality. Once Upon a Timezone… and Mediocre but Arrogant are a cut above the others. The former is a good airport read, but it also makes interesting observations about the changing nature of relationships and communication in today’s world – especially in the way the protagonist and his US-based girlfriend become close long-distance despite lying to each other about important things. Bhaduri’s novel (soon to be followed by “MBA” sequels, starting with Married but Available) is well-plotted and benefits from the illustrations, done by the author himself, which are like the doodles you’d see in any college student’s notebook.
On a lower rung in terms of writing quality and production values are Anything for You, Ma’am and That Thing Called Love, both of which are earnest first-time efforts but cringingly awkward in places. When a young couple spends time getting to know each other over coffee in That Thing Called Love, the author notes, “They soon realised that their coffee had been over for sometime. They’d been instead sipping the magic of their interactions.” It’s the sort of amateurishly constructed sentence that one is immediately tempted to condescend on – but then, who is to say there isn’t a market for such writing? This manner of basic, school-level playing around with words is exactly what might appeal to a lovelorn young man who has never read a novel before and casually picks one up at a roadside stall for “timepass”.However, even the most indulgent reader would have to squirm at a sex scene late in the book, when a boy “pulls off a girl’s bra to discover that her lofty boobs did indeed meet the idea he had of them”. (“Lofty” boobs? Really? Where was the editor? But I forget – assembly-line books don’t waste much time on the editorial process.)
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