Mr Godin says No. (Is God in?)

Some days, it’s best to stay in bed. Friday, 20 March (not 13, mind you, but the unpropitious New Moon Day nonetheless) was one of them. In the morning, the horrendously expensive family fish tank sprung a leak and had to be put to pasture. Not taking a hint from the admonitory turn of events, I ventured to send an email to Seth Godin asking for his help to get my novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, published. It went out smack at 3 p.m. and read as follows:

Sub: The Last Gandhi Movie: Have I invented the Nuvel?

Dear Mr Godin:

Addressing you as “Dear Seth”, I presume, would perhaps be a tad impertinent. The story I’m about to tell is far from, though. 

At the end of the 20^th century, I bought a book on impulse. How to Mutate and Take Over the World (Ballantine, 1996) by a pair of pseudonymous authors was subtitled “An Exploded Post Novel”. An Amazon reader review (05-01-2002) describes it as “… a mix of email between the two authors, interspersed with email to their publisher, news stories, book reviews (yes, reviews for a book in the book they review, and very poor ones too!), and interviews. We are left no knowledge of what is real, fake or somewhere in between.”

Around that time, I also wrote a novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, but did not work hard to market it except making a rather interesting website (The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire). Unfortunately, the company that made it closed down and I have only a CD of the website with partial contents. It is also still there on the Wayback Machine, in bits and pieces but not really enough of it. By the way, The Last Gandhi Movie shares two devices of storytelling with How to Mutate and Take Over the World: [1] book reviews and [2] author interview by a hostile critic.

In November 2014, I decided to revive The Last Gandhi Movie. It had suddenly dawned on me that it would work better as a novel if there were a counterpoint added to the main text. There are three narrative strands in the now marginally revised main text: (1) Gandhi, (2) movies and (3) the life and exploits of the nameless narrator. I wrote The Last Gandhi Movie with the digitally inclined reader in mind: very short attention span, familiarity with and fondness for clipped email/sms/twitter style of writing, impatience with over-sentimental plotting. The counterpoint I added to the earlier text in November-December 2014 is a literary innovation of sorts (“RetroNotes”). Some may dismiss the RetroNotes as the writer’s “after-thoughts” and/or his attempt to pre-empt the critics. Others may see their role in adding valuable clues of historical, socio-cultural and psychological context to the story telling. At times, the RetroNotes act as the proverbial Devil’s Advocate adding a dash of contrarian pungency to the narrative. At others, they work as an alienation device. By accident, I may have “invented the Nuvel”.

But why am I eschewing the regular publishing route? Mainly because I see more and more publishers abandoning literary fiction for bestsellers and have closed minds to experimental fiction especially. Maybe, I could go with Kickstarter. But my guess is: it works best only for a celebrity writer.  

To give The Last Gandhi Movie a viral shot in the arm and also to test reader reaction, I am planning to upload it to https://www.academia.edu. This website has 18,581,427 academically inclined members and attracts over 15.7 million unique visitors a month according to the ‘About’ page. Among them, quite a few are interested in Gandhian and related studies. This may even help me to find a publisher.

The only time you cited Gandhi was in Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us: “There's no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn't the point. Change is.” 

The Last Gandhi Movie is about changing the way novels are supposed to be written. Perhaps, as a best-selling author, speaker and agent of change, you may vouchsafe to help publish a path-breaking literary innovation. I am aware that you do not do any coaching, investing or consulting. So why should you make an exception in my case? Having sensed your entrepreneurial zeal and curiosity about anything new from your writings, I think just maybe you’ll do it. If not, at least pitch in a few suggestions on how to go about it.

I’ve not attached the text of my “magnum opus” to this email. I would do so only after you give me the permission to send it.

Do I have your permission?

Meanwhile, many thanks for reading the email. I know fully well I cannot rule out the worst-case scenario. You may say No, thank you. Well, Sir, I am ready to take it on my 78 year-old chin. And, grin.

Warm regards,

Sincerely,

Deepak Mankar

At 3:54 p.m., Mr Godin wrote back:

[T]hank you Deepak, for the thoughtful note and for the work you do

I’m afraid that I can’t possibly do your work justice. I’m totally swamped.

Good luck with all of it, sir.

Seth

I read the reply about half an hour later and expressed my gratitude at 4:31 p.m. thus:

Thanks, Mr Godin. You are prompt and forthright. I appreciate it. Thanks again and regards,

Deepak Mankar

There the matter rests. As I was saying earlier, some days it’s best to stay in bed.

Sepia tone.

In the 1967-released Bonnie and Clyde, when Clyde meets his brother, the film is still in full colour. But when Bonnie overpowered by nostalgia and missing her mom terribly finally takes the gang to meet her family, Arthur Penn shoots the entire Parker family reunion in sepia tone. Why?

If only I could've emulated Penn I would have done that very thing to this press note I found in my old papers. It’s about The Last Gandhi Movie website’s performance between 09-09-1998 and 30-06-1999. It’s also about a gambit that failed owing (in retrospect) to the lack of timely follow-up and inability to provide sustained support mainly because of inexperience and over-optimism. I thought I would reproduce it here for nostalgic reasons:

32181 hits in 295 days* is ‘jolly good show’ for a niche Gandhi novel website.

Mumbai, 20 July:- He wrote a novel, ‘The Last Gandhi Movie’, cross-p0llinatin Gandhi’s life with Hollywood lore. Then, instead of chasing literary agents and querying publishers, he opted for the internet route, to take the pulse of fiction readers. Last September, as soon as the site was up, he sent out ‘visit this book site’ e-appeals to some of the readers who had posted book reviews at Amazon.com, in addition to ‘listing’ his site with search engines and directories.

Interest is where you find it.

The Internet is a great leveler. Ask nicely and you shall be given. ‘The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire’ at www.addgandhi.com is a living proof of it. Here, you get to read sample chapters of the novel and e-mail them to friends. You can also meet the cast of characters – a bevy of unusual suspects, get to know the chronology of events, and play an interactive role-switch game. A fair proportion of the people who visited the site came from search engines like Alta Vista. They asked to be taken there out of interest or curiosity is what it means. The highest point in the hits curve coincided with the time span when the e-mailing was done. The next high point came when the posting to search engines and directories was intensified. No banner advertising, just e-mailing and site listing!

What they have been saying about addgandhi.com.

Here’s an assortment of comments from the site visitors. “Who is publishing The Last [Gandhi] Movie? When and where will it published? Who is your target audience? Your site is graphically very exciting.” (neeta@eartheweb.com, 05-11-98) “… if you are the maker then you have it in you. The very essence of looking at things differently, think separately and mere fun of speculating ‘What ifs’ and ‘What if nots’. I really do like your style and appreciate your work.” (anirvan.sen@tipeur.ge.com, 12-11-98) “I checked out your site and it’s interesting. I’m not really into role-playing games or Gandhi, but I enjoyed it just the same. I’ll visit again…” (infringer13@ hotmail.com, 24.10.98) “I very much look forward to your forthcoming novel. Please keep me apprised of its publication schedule.” (hharwood@sps.edu, 23.10.98) “Hi, I really liked your site. I heard about it from a friend… Very interesting, will it be published?” (sing2@fas.harvard.edu, 23.10.98) “I was pleasantly surprised at your site. I do intend to read your novel some time … where can I find it in bio-degradable format?” (s_bandyopadhyay@mgmt.pudue.edu, 20.10.98) “… your site is lovely, informative, and with attitude.” (india2.0@hindustantimes.com, 14.09.98) “Brilliant site by the way, haven’t laughed so much for a long time and that was only after visiting it for a short time … can’t wait to get back and see what else is there.” (010544.255@compuserve.com, 15.09.98)

No bells, no whistles.

In keeping with the essential simplicity of Gandhi, the site is devoid of gimmickry. The only concession to the ‘movie’ of the book title is a preamble with a smiling Gandhi on a ‘screen’ pop-up. The tone and the writing are upbeat and literate like the novel it showcases. The site has RSACi’s seal of approval for content, has a link to Amazon.com via a books and music section and a Recommend-it link as well. Deepak Mankar who wrote the novel created the content. DBS Internet Services Private Limited designed and host the site.
[*From 09-09-98 to 30-06-99]

To date The Last Gandhi Movie remains unpublished. You can find the scattered remnants of The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire at http://digbig.com/5badqn, though.

The Mind of MK Gandhi.

I've always thought highly of MK Gandhi. My unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, has him as the thematic pivot. I recently read Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates. It perturbed me and gave me serious misgivings. This narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering. His charisma was undoubtedly legendary. If he was obsessive about truth, how come he said/wrote different versions of an event to different people? If he was a god-fearing person, how come he believed the worst of his friends and associates time and again? Also, he was in the habit of praising a person to high heaven for a while and then suddenly cutting the ground from under her feet. He was so deeply involved in and on the centre stage of national politics for most of his adult life. How then did he find the time, the emotional resources and the energy to behave like a virtual puppeteer controlling the lives of those in his fold and under his care? All this seems nothing short of weird to me. His tryst with brahmacharya too is an enigma. He seemingly had an extreme revulsion for sexual intimacy. There was a deep emotional scar left on his psche by his failure to be present at his father's bedside at the moment of his death because he was partaking carnal pleasure with his wife. This is usually trotted out as the reason for his guilt feeling. This reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Proper Studies: "Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt." And: "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." (Attributed by Peter J. Mayhew in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution. Also attributed to Edgar Wallace. http://digbig.com/4xypc.) In tandem, both seem particularly apt in Gandhi's case. Maybe, Gandhi was a bit like George III in Alan Bennet's dramatic and cinematic versions of his life. In a group reading of Shakespeare's King Lear in the asylum, he suddenly realised why others thought him mad and regained his sanity. http://tinyurl.com/3hqeev. Time for yet another of Huxley's accidentally Gandhi-centric pearl of wisdom (this time from Texts & Pretexts): "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves." On this score, maybe Gandhi was found wanting. And, what about the persistent speculation about Gandhi's tantric leanings as reflected in his brahmacharya experiments with his women associates as guinea pig? There is a cogently reasoned study by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho, Was Gandhi a Tantric? http://tinyurl.com/4qdcg2 which nearly convinces one of the likelihood. After reading Girja Kumar's book, taking Gandhi at his own words seems a bit dicey to me. Even if we find him innocent of prurience, we cannot always believe in the consistency of his utterances. Dr Sushila Nayyar told Ved Mehta that "brahmacharya" was a latter-day invention of Gandhi to ward off criticism of his interaction with his female intimates. Earlier, she used to sleep naked with him for reasons of nature cure (p.41 of Girja Kumar's book). What can we make of all this? Perhaps, the answer is as simple as the moral of this Zen tale. Nan-in, a Japanese master of the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. When serving his guest tea, Nan-in kept pouring even after the cup overflowed. The professor after watching could contain himself no more: "The cup is overfull. No more will go in." Said Nan-in: "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculation. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Milord, I rest my case.

Rakish.

Ever wondered what rakish (ray-kish) meaning smart, sporty, flashy, breezy, jaunty, dapper, natty, debonair, dashing, snazzy, raffish, devil-may-care (according to Collins Essential Thesaurus 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2005, 2006 cited by The Free Dictionary: http://tinyurl.com/65zmrm) looks like? All right. Follow me closely. Insert a Royal Wedding (1951) DVD into a DVD player. Press ‘Play’. Fast-forward to the scene where Fred Astaire, after accidentally bumming a light off her on the street, follows Sarah Churchill (right, Winston’s second daughter) to the theatre not knowing she is in his show, spots her among the actors waiting for the audition to start, asks an assistant to find out who she is and to start dancing. He then parks his butt on the back of the nearest seat in the auditorium and turns his torso slightly forward so can he watch her. Happy with her performance, he tilts his hat – there you go – at just the right rakish angle and grins rakishly. He has found love. Also, not to be missed is the Fred Astaire solo You're All The World To Me in which he literally dances on the walls and ceiling of his room. This optical illusion was made possible by a custom-made set quipped with mechanical rollers. Incidentally, Royal Wedding was directed by Stanley Donen who also co-directed and choreographed Singin’ in the Rain.

Which brings us to the second place to look for the perfect visual interpretation of “rakish”: the Broadway Ballet interlude in Singin’ in the Rain (1951). Here’s an account of it from my unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie (pp. 28 -29):

“What a fabulously marvellous place for my hat to perch on?’ is the question writ large on Gene Kelley’s face as he glides to an abrupt halt on bended knees. He stares dumbfounded at his hat as it dangles invitingly from a green pump on an arched foot emanating from 1952’s sexiest stockinged leg emanating, in its turn, from Cyd Charisse’s emerald green-sheathed torso. Wow! This is what CC does in reply. She blows smoke through her nostrils with a half smile. She puts her hand on her hips. She elevates said leg, foot, pump and hat from a horizontal to a near-vertical position, sending all over collective BPs soaring in the bargain. Once Gene has retrieved his hat and his breath, she arises majestically from the chair she’s straddling to join him in an erotic – by the fifties’ standard! – rendition of the Broadway Ballet in Singin’ in the Rain. Born with an appetizing given name, Tula Ellice Finkles (for Pete’s sake) in Texas, this statuesque and icily chic combination of Scottish, Irish, French, English and Red Indian bloodlines had had ballet training that she put to good use in so many MGM musicals in the heyday of that genre in Hollywood. Va-va-vroom!, as Uncle Sam would eloquently put it. Me too.

Somewhere along the way in the action described above, Gene Kelley too does a Fred Astaire (whom he admired tremendously and co-starred with in Ziegfield Follies in 1946) with his hat, tilting it at a rakish, devil-may-care angle, if memory serves. Check it out.

Wireless in Mumbai.

One thing has always foxed me. While we took to British spellings readily, why didn’t we adapt the favourite British nomenclature ‘wireless’ instead of sticking to ‘radio’? Could it be because our radio was not wireless in the good old days? For instance, our first radio at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html was a multi-band, valve-powered Bush, not the more popular Murphy. It was bought just after 1947 from a huge radio showroom at Opera House which is now no more. It had a green ‘magic eye’ to show whether the listener had fine-tuned the station. If memory serves, it was a gimmick, pure and simple. But the point to note is that it was by no means wireless. There used to be an aerial wire not quite stretched diagonally between two poles at the opposite corners of our terrace. The bottom end of it was inserted in a slot at the back of the radio set. The aerial used to be quite a nuisance especially in the kite-flying season snaring the guide thread whenever we flew kites from the front terrace rather than the one on top of the flat, next to the tiled roof. I remember consulting a weekly or fortnightly guide called (probably) The Listener after the eponymous BBC weekly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Listener known for its literary content. The desi programme guide used to list systematically all the All India Radio stations in three columns on every page. The transmission would start around 6.30 a.m. and would close down at 11.00 p.m. There used to be a couple of breaks in the transmission along the way. I remember listening to Nehru’s famous eulogy at Gandhi’s funeral (“the light has gone out of our lives”) on our radio. http://www.eulogywriters.com/ghandi.htm. I wrote a moving section about it in my still unpublished novel on Gandhi and Hollywood, The Last Gandhi Movie http://www.addgandhi.com/original/. Our Bush radio also brought us endless hours of entertainment including Binaca Hit Parade on Monday evenings from Radio Ceylon and, later on, film songs on Vividh Bharati. In the fifties, the transistor radio debuted in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio. Our first transistor radio set was a Philips bought in 1967 after I started working on the Philips Radio account at Clarion-McCann. It had a built-in aerial as well as an extendable one and worked on battery cells. So, finally radio had turned wireless. The FM era was still far, far away, though.

All this brings to mind what WH Auden wrote:

Let all your last thinks be all thanks:
… … … … … … … … … In boyhood
you were permitted to meet
beautiful contraptions,
soon to be banished from the earth,
saddle-tanks loks, beam engines
and over-shot water wheels.
Yes, love, you have been lucky.

('A Lullaby', April 1972)

How very true.

Baby pictures and other wonders.

Quick now. What’s the ideal tv fare to go with a lunch of boiled rice with shrimp curry (preferably green made with coconut milk) and crisp fried bombil (Bombay Duck)? In my book, it’s a segment from one of those movies with precocious kids, at times babies, as the chief protagonists pitted against totally inept, bumbling villains, usually burglars with a huge grudge against the youngsters. I especially relish the portions where the villains get their comeuppance quite violently from the unlikely traps unwittingly laid by the kids as I crunch at the tasty morsels of the crisply fried succulent bombil. But I draw a line when it comes to the first pictures of the Brad Pitt and Anjelina Jolie co-production pre-sold to People magazine for a reported preposterous $4.1 million http://13thfloor.imdb.com/news/sb/2006-06-07. My doubts are about what’s so special about the baby that People magazine should be willing to pay such a gargantuan sum for the US publication rights. It seems Hello!, the European gossip magazine, paid a further $3 million for rights outside of the U.S. The entire sum is earmarked for UNICEF and other assorted charities. So, the intentions are obviously noble and humanitarian. My problem with the pricing is obviously a matter of my perception, I’m ready to admit. I love babies. Here’s what I wrote (on the dedication page of my as yet unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie) about Avantika whom I saw as a just-born babe: “For Avantika who has been eyeing her world with unabashed curiosity ever since she arrived here.” What prompted me to write these words was the vivid memory of the first look she gave me. “Who could this bloke be?” she seemed to be asking herself, as her alert gaze followed my waving hand. I know it was only my mind playing the game but I tell you her first look was something else. Maybe, People and Hello! magazines expect something out of the world in the first picture of the Namibia-born baby girl, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt. Yes, that must be it. http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1184497,00.html.

Wise and worldly? Or, other worldly? Take your pick.

I’m wary of people who compare Sonia Gandhi to the so-called Mahatma and Jayaprakash Narayan for renouncing’ power at the last moment when Congress replaced the BJP as the prime mover at New Delhi in the last election. My own reading is, MK Gandhi was not interested in wielding it once India became independent. On 15 August 1947, he was in fact praying and fasting in Calcutta. He had gone there to quell the massacre of the innocent. That day, by the way, also happened to be the fifth death anniversary of Mahadev Desai, his principal secretary and close confidant from 1917. (This part of our history is succinctly and tellingly depicted in The Last Gandhi Movie, my unpublished novel.http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/back-from-oblivion-last-gandhi-movie.html.) Narayan too was probably not power-enamoured at the end of the Emergency when a Janata Party government was swept into power by an anti-Indira wave. With Sonia, the decision to say No to the prime ministerial crown was probably motivated by her anxiety to avoid a near civil warlike situation and also perhaps personal safety. To me, it seems a worldly-wise decision, not a saintly one. But I could of course be totally wrong in my reading. Because she “told her MPs she had decided to listen to her ‘inner voice’.” – in an MK Gandhi-like pronouncement. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3721863.stm. Her reference to ‘conscience’ had prompted a VHP hate spam e-mail with ‘Whose conscience?’ in the subject line. It seems ‘conscience’ is the prerogative of the chosen few: the practising Hindus who want to demolish mosques and build temples in their stead. And, if you happen to have been born outside India, you’d better not even utter the sacred word with your infidel tongue.

Back from oblivion. The Last Gandhi Movie.

The ways in which the universe functions never fail to amaze me. I had bitched before online about how the website for my unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, so kindly hosted by the earlier marketing team at DBS Internet was killed when that team suddenly left the company. I didn’t have a back-up copy – because I didn’t take care as is my wont to be vigilant and provide for the worst. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anyone who had that precious commodity. So, I said to myself “So what? It ain’t the end of the world no way.” Or something of that sort. (Nope, I didn’t. But it sure sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?) Anyway, I carried on regardless. (As if I had an alternative!) Vinay Satyan who had finally managed to shape the website wrote from the US where he’s now working to ask about the virtual whereabouts of The Last Gandhi Movie. I directed him to The Wayback Machine http://www.archive.org/ where a few scattered remains refused to perish. http://web.archive.org/web/*/addgandhi.com/*. Then suddenly out of the blues (or greys, if you feel The Last Gandhi Movie ought to be in grainy black and white – not glorious Technicolour) popped up an angelic apparition (or so it seemed to grateful me). Now this particular Angel used to be so fond of football – like all Bongs, I reckon – that he promptly started threatening to stay up late to watch the Euro Championship (mid-2004) and root as always for Germany. What’s more, he promised in the same breath to burn a CD of The Last Gandhi Movie not only for me but for Vinay too. (He used to be with the marketing team that quit from DBS Internet.) The Angel is no more, people, but The Last Gandhi Movie is back. You can see it in its entirety (well almost) at http://www.addgandhi.com/original/. [Please turn off Popup Blocker or its equivalent software to enjoy the beginning.]