Lamb among wolves.

Reading an excerpt of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Man Booker nominated The Lowland http://nyr.kr/17RVhVo the other day, I remembered a long-lost old friend. His name was Shyam Guha. He was an Art Director in the Calcutta office of Clarion-McCann. http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ I got to know him rather well in the late sixties and early seventies. We became friends working together on ad assignments on most of his fairly frequent visits to the Bombay office.

Shyam was a gem of a human being. He was probably the only innocent and guileless Bengali I came across in Clarion’s Bhadralok mafia during the eleven years, seven months and four days I worked for the agency. He was loved – nay, revered – by all the studio guys although none of us could quite fathom the reasons for him being invited once too often to Bombay because we had a surfeit of Art Directors and Visualizers of our own.

Rumour had it that the guys sent by the head office suits were spooks trained to keep an eye on the locals and report back. None of us believed it of Shyam, though. In fact, we used to look forward to his visits eagerly. I used to rib him about the spooks business and he would take it sportingly. There was definitely some truth in the 007 rumour, though. There definitely were spies from the Bong skies among us. One of them was a suit who chewed the bones as well as the meat of a chicken dish served to him. I can vouch for this trait confidently as he used to come home to dinner at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ at times. The other was a creative guy who would visit us occasionally and spend the whole working day strolling around the office presumably trying to catch snatches of conversation in the corridors and at the water fountain.

As for Shyam and I, sometimes, we would taxi down to the Strand Book Stall during the lunch break for a quick browse. I remember Shyam gifting me a copy of the Marguerite Duras screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour, a Calder & Boyars paperback with the signature black and white cover. Shyam also regaled me with his tales of almost daily after-work tippling at the legendary Calcutta landmark, Olympia Bar http://bit.ly/15YWMfH in the company of his like-minded colleagues.

His other repertoire of stories included those about the Naxalites who then were a recent addition to the Calcutta scenario. Both of us were sympathetic to the cause these urban guerillas were battling for. Shyam did not seem to know any of the Naxals or their families personally. He also had not witnessed any of the street battles. What he was passing on to us was chiefly hearsay although his narratives were always compelling and riveting. Whenever he came home to dinner, this was one topic of conversation Ujwal and I used to look forward to listening.

During his Bombay sojourn, Shyam usually lodged with the Bombay Resident Director, Subrato Sen Gupta, now deceased. The Sen Guptas apparently did not have a spare latch key for the front door of their palatial Neapean Sea Road flat. So Shyam had a curfew to observe whenever he planned an evening out. He had to be back and in bed by 11:00 p.m., the family retiring hour, exactly one hour before the witching hour. This deadline was the theme of our favourite parting shot every time he took our leave hurriedly and distractedly after dinner.

By the time I decided to quit Clarion in 1976, Shyam’s visits to the Bombay office had petered out. We lost touch with each other because both of us were bad letter writers. The “out of sight, out of mind” bug was also probably at work.

I picked up the threads of the Shyam Guha episode once again much, much later. In the late nineties, to be exact. I got acquainted with a Calcuttan on-line because of my column on the Hindustan Times website at that time. Well educated and cultured, she was married to a widely-connected advertising guy. She happened to mention Prasanto Sanyal and other denizens of the Clarion Bhadralok in one of her emails. I promptly asked her if she could get her husband to trace the whereabouts of Shyam. Much to my chagrin, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, her spouse hit a dead end in his pursuit of my will-o’-the-wisp. There was no Shyam to be found. It seemed he had retired from Clarion long ago and moved bag and baggage out of the metropolis for terra incognita.     

     

How to “read” a book before buying.

Zounds! Truth to tell, I’ve been waiting all my life to use this expletive in the right context. I remember it being an often-used favourite of Porthos in the Classic Comics/Classic Illustrated (the series died a long time back, I gather) rendition of The Three Musketeers (1941). It caught my eye – and my fancy – there rather than while reading the Cassel’s yellow-jacketed edition of the Dumas classic. My use of “Zounds!” in the present case is more than justified in my shrewd estimation. It expresses my feeling of delight at having resisted resolutely the temptation of using a clichéd heading for this post, e.g., “Never judge a book by its cover.” (Frankly, though, I’ve followed that advice profitably on several book buying expeditions.) This “Zounds” also gleefully acknowledges my having finally stumbled upon the opportunity to fearlessly write “Zounds!” As you can see, the brief and to-the-point title I chose has just the right tinge of intrigue added to it by the read in quotes. As it must have dawned on all my intelligent and perceptive readers  by now, I am about to deliver, in my capacity as a veteran book reader and bibliophile of long standing, a how-to-do-it-yourself sermon on picking really worthwhile books in a bookshop or a book sale. Skip it at your own peril, boys and girls, especially if you don’t want to live the rest of your life buying and reading trash.

Here, now then, in brief, is my modus operandi of book buying. Once I enter a book shop or a book sale and start browsing, I allow an attractive book cover or an alluring book title to catch my eye. If the book seems to be within the ambit of my varied and catholic interests – and limited budget (yes, I tend to be a somewhat price-conscious book shopper which explains my preference for Strand Book Stall and book sales which the late and lamented Arun Kolhatkar too used to frequent probably for the same reasons), I pick it up and read the blurb on the back cover and elsewhere. (Glancing furtively over my shoulder to make sure nobody’s looking; I also take a hurried whiff of its new-book “fresh from the press” fragrance. Fungal hallucinogens alert for those of you who crave the “old book aroma”: Research suggests that sniffing old books infested with fungi may give the unsuspecting sniffer a “high”. http://bit.ly/S4545W)

I’m rather partial to relevantly catchy book titles, I must sheepishly confess. Maybe the copywriter in me is to blame for this blemish. Let me also add that, in most cases, I have not regretted falling for the alluring charms of such a come-hither. A recent example is my purchase of Martin Lindstrom’s Buy.ology (Random House, New York, 2009). The copywriter in me found the book utterly delightful and extremely enlightening – worth much more than the Rs.425/- less 20% price I shelled out for it in Strand Book Stall. Another rewarding purchase going merely by the front-cover names-dropping is Laurie Rozakis’ Comma Sutra (Adam Media Avon, Massachusetts, 2005), also from Strand. A third example is Patrick Scrivenor’s I Used to Know That ENGLISH (Michael O’Mara Books, London, 2010), bought in an Ashish Book Centre sale not so long ago.

I would be lying through my teeth were I to claim that I have never been laid astray by a tempting title. A glaring example is Stephen Markley’s Publish This Book (Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2010) that was tagged by the publisher promisingly as “Humour/Memoir” but turned out a dud and a drag and a waste of money and time. It is not badly written, mind you. It has its moments of genuine humour but is so stretched out that it tests the reader’s patience to the fullest extent without rewarding him commensurately in return. As the Good Bard would have likely said, “Much Ado about Nothing”, or rather nothing much! Could I, as an unpublished author, have wanted to share the agony of an about-to-be-published author’s rites of passage through purgatory?

If the blurb has whetted my appetite for further enlightenment, I go to the publication details which include the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and copyright information (in other words, the publishing history of the book in my hands). This is printed behind the title page also known as “verso”. I’m always interested in knowing when the book was first published and which edition of it I’m holding in my hands. I do possess quite a few first editions although I’m not a first-edition collector in the real sense. The price permitting, I prefer hardbound books to paperbacks; likewise, new to second-hand; likewise, genuine to contraband, i.e., pirated. (Recently, however, New York Times told me that a hardcover book’s spine could be an ideal hideaway for bedbugs and their eggs. http://nyti.ms/UFnyc0 The University of Washington Library was among the first few to discover this menace. Question: Could the bedbug menace be used to promote ebooks?)

What I usually do after reading the publication details is to turn to the back of the book looking for an index. Show me a book with an index in its tail and I will show you a book that’s brimming with its own importance as a future reference source. Jokes aside, I adore simply books with indexes. They’re mostly non-fiction, though. An index makes it easy for me to quickly locate those parts of a book that I enjoyed most when I first read it and which I now want to reread. An index, in other words, is akin to a Jurassic Park imitation of a website’s own internal search engine, after all. Other telling backend clues to the writer’s presentation skills and dedication to his subject are an appendix (or appendices), a compendium of footnotes, glossary and a further readings list.

For me, a cast-of-characters listing is a useful indicator of the likely quality of content. When there is a huge galaxy of characters populating a novel, it is a real help to have a reference point to which you can keep returning to reorient yourself if and when you have kind of lost your way in the narrative. Most reading – and, of course, performing – editions of plays have a cast-of-characters page by definition as it were. I fondly remember – and sorely miss – the early Ellery Queen mystery novels with their long cast of characters, a cast-of-characters listing to match and, last but not least, the challenge to the reader to name the murderer (or “the perp” in contemporary lingo) before the Master revealed all. Some of the early Agatha Christie novels had the c-o-c listings too. I used to own all those wonderful Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie mysteries mostly paperbacks. I can almost see those scrumptious Ellery Queens in their signature Penguin paperbacks in a green-with-a-white-centre-band jacket. Alas, I lost all that precious caché out of sheer carelessness. 

Before I say adieu, take a look at this: http://bit.ly/Y17srx

Gulp! Merritt of the Pulps, I presume?

I met the ghost of the late Abraham Merritt on the Hornby Road pavement in 1954. I was 18 then and he had been dead and gone for 11 years. I used to go there frequently to hunt for bargain book buys. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. I distinctly remember picking up at least three of his novels: The Moon Pool, Burn Witch Witch! and Seven Footprints to Satan. All of them were paperbacks published by Avon Books, an imprint I don’t come across much these days. I was a total genre-illiterate then. (In fact, I doubt if I even knew the meaning of ‘genre’.) What probably attracted me to Merritt was the back cover blurb extravagantly promising weird and mind-blowing story lines in the comics/pulp novel style. In hindsight, I was a pulp junkie back then without quite knowing the name of my ailment. Recently when I saw the movies of The Shadow and The Phatom on the idiot box, I got a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Now I know why. I used to be a regular visitor to the pulp realm once upon a time, see? If memory serves, The Moon Pool is an expedition-into-a-lost-world fantasy in the best escapist tradition – contrary to the sci-fi genre tag on the back cover of its Collier Books edition which I subsequently purchased probably at the Strand Book Stall out of sheer nostalgia but haven’t so far read. Burn Witch Witch! is a horror novel about witchcraft while Seven Footprints to Satan combines horror with mystery and detection. At the time of reading Merritt, I used to be also a regular watcher of the B-Grade black and white sci-fi movies with flying saucers and alien invaders in them. I don’t think I ever thought they were in the same category as Merritt’s alternative worlds. Not having read H Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I also did not make the connection between them and Merritt. Project Gutenberg considers The Moon Pool meritorious enough to deserve an inclusion. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/765. (The novel was written in 1919. Merritt’s second wife, Eleanor, renewed the copyright in 1947. Now it seems to be out of copyright – which explains the sudden upsurge of interest among publishers to bring out special editions such as the University of Nebraska Press's Bison Frontiers of the Imagination Edition, for example.) P.S.: Considering that I was a flying saucer flick fan, I should have been reading Ralph 124C 41+, the sci-fi novel by the so-called ‘father of science fiction’, Hugo Gernsback. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/revealed-at-last-my-shameful-neurotic.html. It is said to contain predictions of wondrous inventions to come including electronic music, fluorescent lighting, glass skyscrapers, helicopter buses, jet planes, jukeboxes, liquid fertilizer, loud speakers, micro-film, night baseball, organ transplants, plastics, radar, radio directional-finder, radio and television networks, solar power, stainless steel, synthetic fabrics, tape recorders, tear gas, the word "television", tin foil, vending machines and voice prints. As things turned out, I could not have read Hugo Gernsback’s magnum opus. Its debut was in a serialized format in the world's first radio magazine, Modern Electrics in 1911 in the US and I guess it was never brought out as a solo novel except recently in tandem with a Merritt trio. http://www.handango.com/avantgo-channel/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=141&platformId=2&productType=2&productId=161163&sectionId=3700&catalog=30&topSectionId=-1 .

Out-of-the-box ideas – boxed!

To my delight, I recently located this review filed by me on February 7, 2004 a thttp://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3AOH1V0YEH3WO/ref=cm_pdp_profile_reviews/102-3668932-4279329?ie=UTF8&sort%5Fby=MostRecentReview

'Parlour cards' smacks of after-dinner liquer and Cuban cigars - not my cup of tea (pardon the mixed metaphor!) mainly because I don't move in those haloed Page 3 corridors. I bought After-dinner Freud and After-dinner Shakespeare - sight unseen as it were - mainly because the form of packaging and presentation fascinated me. It was only later at home that I discovered what a treasure I had stumbled upon unwittingly. Dr Joseph Aguayo and his Editors have picked out pertinent and pithy brush strokes from Freud's life to create a quick mental sketch of the last of the deliverers of "the three blows to man's pride". For instance, Card #22 tells us that Mrs Freud thought her husband's ideas were "a form of pornography". Don't waste time reading the review. Get your own set of the parlour cards and enjoy! (No, I'm not on the payroll of Becker & Mayer who helped to shape these brilliant 'packaged books'.)

P.S.: I recall that I bought both the delightful products from Strand Book Stall a few years back at (probably) Rs.100/- (about $2.50) each.

P.S. #2: My earlier review of God of Small Things is however missing at the Amazon website. It’s now members only’, I guess. The surviving reniew was written after I bought Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability a couple of years back.

Legendary story telling. Wire to wire.

Born to write. Poetic prose. Word magic. Sorry, I’m bogged down in clichés trying to tell you about one of the greatest reads I came across in a long, long time. I sensed this was it when I was glancing at the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend in Strand Book Stall. I’m almost as good a judge of books as Tom Smith, Seabiscuit’s trainer, was of horseflesh. No empty boast that one, believe you me. There’s first-rate story (and history) telling in those 314 tightly written pages, not a word wasted. By contrast, another ‘legend’ book I read recently about Kishore Kumar paled in comparison. It seemed overwritten, plodding, bordering on hagiography. Maybe, I’ve a weakness for well-crafted narratives where every well-chosen word adds to the forward march of the story and reading pleasure. More about the Seabiscuit book at http://www.seabiscuitonline.com/index1.htm. More about the KK book at http://kanaad.blogspot.com/ (16 July 2003 post). By the way, what makes Seabiscuit so special is that Hillenbrand researched and wrote it while suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome all throughout the four years of toil. Her grit and courage matched her subject’s, stride for stride, till the winning post. Seabiscuit was on the NY Times bestseller list, at No.1 for about a month.

‘Making’ news. In the literal sense.

No news is good news? Not anymore, folks. These days, on a slow- or no-news day, they try to ‘manufacture’ news. And, they sink to ludicrous depths too doing it as I noticed last monsoon. It was midweek and raining quite heavily. At a certain traffic junction I pass quite frequently, the business in the pirated version of the latest Harry Potter was as brisk as ever. Then, in the evening, I read in an eveninger splashed on the front page a ‘scoop’ about this everyday happening treated like a ‘sting op’. Headlined predictably “’Dirty’ Harry”, it revealed the price charged was Rs.600/-, Rs.295/- lower than the official rate. The week before, I’d noticed The Strand Book Stall quoting Rs.674/- for the real thing. The sting operator’s office is within easy walking distance of the famous bookshop where the present President of the Indian Republic used to shop regularly once upon a time. http://www.strandbookstall.com/store/. All of which made me pause and think. Who got the most out of the sting op? The new learning, if any, for the hapless reader seems far outweighed by the free publicity for the pirates. Rowling seems to be the definite loser in the bargain. Dirty Harry, indeed! Learn what ‘sting op’ means: ’http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_operation. (Did you realize that an ‘agent provocateur’ – and in computing, a ‘honey pot’ – are akin to a sting op?)