How to earn writing a bad name. Almost single-handedly.

"Every book is a failure." (George Orwell)

"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred." (Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum)

"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down." (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts." (Charles Dickens)

This piece – a case study of sorts I guess – is about an intrepid person. She started her working life as an advertising model and soon graduated to writing copy in her mentor’s ad agency. Not much later, he launched the bitchiest Hindi cinema-related magazine with our heroine at the helm as the editor. There she acquired the skills and insight and sharpened her claws. All this would help her become the No.1 Page 3 journalist later on. In the meantime, she survived a bad marriage and saved herself in time from getting hitched to a not-so-well-placed firang. Then came the biggest coup of her life. She married a highly successful and affluent businessman who would always keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Her career as a journalist too thrived. The only thing lacking was that, along the way, she never learned to write well. But she made up for it by her formula of “stealth and secrecy” and “dirty” writing. Then David Davidar, a Penguin India publisher, happened to her. This story about him, likely apocryphal, sums up what he thinks of her. Once, it seems, he heard the staff there guffawing her manuscript. Cease and desist, he admonished, her books pay your salaries. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080512&fname=Booksa&sid=1. Short of opening a Division called Pornguin India just for her, Penguin India rightly treats her as the only star they have in their stables judging solely by the sales of her sloppily written but racy novels and assorted non-fiction. After writing several novels laced with a surfeit of sex most of the titles of which start with the letter S, she decided to turn respectable and got down to writing a book of letters to her children, a marriage manual, an autobiography and so on until finally David “inspired” her to write about resurgent India, the way she tells it. That’s when I suspect the trouble started. Noticing suddenly that she was about the same age as India, she may have got a bad case of what is commonly known as delusions of grandeur. Else, can you imagine a shrewd operator like her going into the wildly narcissistic “Mein Hoon 60+ Mother India, yaney ki asli Bharatmata in a frilly pink taffeta dress” mode? And, insouciantly spouting stuff like “I am India”? And, then, after a bad review from a top-of-the-line national Indian magazine, going into a ballistic frenzy with: “The particular review … is a personal attack on me. The person who wrote it is a wife-beater; a freeloader; a frustrated has-been and a menace to society. There are other ratings that have already put the book on the best-seller list. So do I really care about that interview (sic!)”? http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/May112008/books2008051067312.asp. By the way, at http://shopping.sify.com/shopping/book_detail.php?prodid=15650603&cid=2, her India book is categorised as “Fiction”. It’s not a figment of my imagination. Check it out. But say what you may, our intrepid heroine’s books including this one seem to sell well against all odds – bad reviews, for one – like Bollywood movies. The reason for it, according to Prof Makarand Paranjape of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), http://makarand.com/acad/CulturalWorld-SystemandIndianEnglishLiterature.htm is that “if you can't write well at all”, make people want to “own” you. “The book is the next best thing; in any case, it is a symbol of her. She markets herself, not her writing." That probably explains why she is on the cover of Superstar India: From Incredible To Unstoppable (please read the Charles Dickens quote at the beginning). And, if the critics are to be believed, that is the best part of the new book. But please don’t forget that, notwithstanding her detractors, her Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, Sultry Days and Second Thoughts are “course material in the University of London. Her work features extensively in Comparative Literature courses at Universities abroad and within India.” http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/29/asia/india-panel.php. Does all this remind you a bit of The Perils of Pauline?

Pain and suffering.

Is Art always and without exception a child of pain and suffering and deprivation? Can an artist never be someone who has had a normal – even a “boring” – childhood as Alan Bennett has repeatedly pointed out? An artist as a tortured soul suffering in the Nether World is the fashionable take and a much touted figment of popular imagination as well as a conscious and deliberate media spin. A deprived background adds a dramatic edge to the story no doubt but need not be the fact of the case. Sunil and Nargis Dutt surely did their best to give Sanjay a happy childhood. He turned out the way he did despite it. Now there is a media conspiracy to whip up sympathy for him by projecting him as a tortured but noble soul loved by one and all. His recent Gandhigiri-spouting Munnabhai screen avatar is put forward as an additional proof of his being a good but misunderstood human being. Even if all this is taken at face value, does it condone his role in the Mumbai blast case? I no longer belong to the eye for an eye school. But the Indian State surely cannot afford to take a lenient view of the digression and make an exception for an individual citizen for the sake of its very existence. That’s the way the cookie crumbles as the saying goes. However, the point I’m making is that the art born out of suffering seems to be a false premise. Just as much as the rosy-hued portrayal of an artist as a rootless person, a born expat or émigré, an outsider – the other trendy self-delusion much favoured by Salman Rushdie – happens to be. Art can be a way of earning money like anything else people do for the same purpose. If you happen to be good at what you do, it may even turn out to be a fairly lucrative and comfortable way of doing so. And who knows Time may decide to forgive you all your trespasses and faults as it did Yeats in Auden’s view:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Auden.index.html.

Truth to tell, there was a time in my life when I too flirted with the artist-as-a-tortured-soul and artist-as-an-outsider self-delusion. I even affected what I thought of as an arty mode of dress, khadi kurta over denim jeans. (I was no stranger to jeans of course as I had adapted them as my favourite garment of comfort in my early youth. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/02/gruelling-test.html.) I also started frequenting art shows and craft stores regularly. I used to visit Contemporary Arts & Crafts when it was a first-floor walk up – with a wooden floor and down-to-earth prices – opposite the Bombay University near Kala Ghoda as well as the old Bombay Store on Phirozshah Mehta Road. I was a regular at Wayside Inn, another Kala Ghoda landmark that disappeared quite recently. Arun Kolhatkar and George Fernandes too used to frequent the moderately priced eatery. More truth to tell, I was attracted to copywriting because I thought it was a creative field. Along the way, I dabbled in writing for children and was successful at the very first try. The ditty book I did with Sanat Surti (I See, I Think, I Sing) published by Thomson Press as a Sunflower Books paperback in 1972 won the National Book Trust Award. The second book (The Cloud & the Kite) – we tried selling it to a Japanese publisher – never made it. I lost the comprehensive dummy of the book soon and along with it the children’s writing yen. I continued to do well at copywriting and won a few awards as well, though, fortunately having shed the copywriting = art notion. It’s just business writing – a fairly comfortable way of earning good money if you’re good at it. Experience shows that the Auden hypothesis applies to good copywriting too. Amen to that.