Today, I came across this too-good-to-be-true(-but-only-at-the-first-glance) offer on Facebook:
Wondering what the catch is, like I was? Notice the wild 'every second book' clause just above the picture? Yes, that is it.
Nevertheless, seeing as I had the whole evening to myself (the girlfriend being out of town and the friends in the immediate vicinity probably sleeping or preoccupied), I thought I might as well go check out books at the nearest Crossword atPhoenix Market City Inorbit mall.
So I did. My greatest fears were realized when the cashier at the store clarified that I'd have to buy a minimum of two books to avail a 50% discount on the cheaper/est one. Which sucked, but since I had hiked at least 1.5 kilometers (low on petrol; that time of the month), I decided to stay on and browse through the new releases just for the kicks (arey isme KICK hai pagli!).
Lee Child, Grisham, Patterson, Higgins Clark: the usual suspects. A few Dan Browns and Chetan Bhagats thrown into the mix, with Crichton, Rushdie and Amish following suit. Familiar titles with their familiar sky-high prices greet me like every time, and I get down to the uphill task of picking and choosing one that fits my budget and my 'biblio-appetite', or 'bib-libido' (Hyphenated Nomenclature 101). It is like the Ryan family welcoming one of its sons back home after a hard-fought war: the happiness of homecoming of one brother is negated by the pain of the death of another. The high prices dampen my spirits but I still go through every shelf, every corner assiduously, letting not one interesting cover slip past my preening gaze.
And then I come across the science fiction section. Here it is, at a glance:
Do you see the problem? Let me help:
Basically, there's no sci-fi in the sci-fi shelf of the biggest bookstore chain in the largest democracy of the world, except Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Before you think this is a problem peculiar to this particular bookstore, let me assure you that it's the same in every Crossword outlet I have been to, including their biggest store in the fucking country. I believe standalone bookshops do a better job at stocking real science fiction than these people.
Genuine science fiction writing is hard to come by in Indian shelves. Not only do we not appreciate foreign writers who have set new definitions in the field - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Dick to name a few - we also do not nurture such thought back home. It is rare that a well told science fiction story ever makes it big in the Indian market, be it literature or cinema. Barring a very few exceptions like The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh and Satyajit Ray's Professor Shonku series (both suspiciously Bengali), I don't recall an Indian author who has ever dared walk down this literary avenue. Our cinema, which has opened itself up to innovation and originality in recent years, still boasts of very few science fiction films that pass off as half decent attempts (please do not mention Love Story 2050). The tradition of speculative writing that transcends the present and the past and boldly writes our future is not just my personal, self-pleasing desire, but the need of the hour for a developing nation such as ours. A nation of dreamers must also produce fiction that is rich in speculation and imagination, grand in design and grounded in hard reality yet not bogged down by it.
Why I do not write science fiction, then, you ask? Quite simply: I do, and I will keep trying!
Disgusted, I passed on the shelf altogether (sorry, James Headley Chase) and headed in the direction of Indian fiction, with hopes of browsing through some interesting homespun stories. I am a sucker for the Salman Rushdie / Amitav Ghosh brand of lyrical literature, yet almost always too broke to buy more than a few of their volumes at once. Hence, my love affair with their writings remains interrupted and incomplete to this day. I wistfully strafe past the shelves containing their works, having stopped long ago to even read the blurbs, lest I read something so good that I am heartbroken to leave a piece of my heart with them in their shelves. It is when I lay my hands on a Sadat Hasan Manto book that it strikes me: most of our regional writers have their famous works translated into English and then fed back to us in repackaged, overpriced editions. Why do we need an English-medium to re-discover what has forever been our own, albeit in our regional tongues? Why have we moved away from our mother tongues to such an extent that our reading habits are only limited to the Roman Alphabet?
Why does a Manto, Chugtai or Premchand have to be translated into English and only then be acceptable to our 'modern' reading palate? Is this phenomenon not the textbook definition of Cultural Imperialism, wherein a people is forcibly disconnected with its roots and then served the fruits of its own toil at a price? The plight of the Indian book consumer in the 21st century is not much different from the Indian handloom industry at the onset of the East India Company, if not even worse. The people back then were at least aware of their decadence; we, on the other hand, are blissfully ignorant!
Why do we allow for such outright imperial hangover to control us even today? Why do our revered leaders and policymakers push for ridiculous and meaningless decrees while we should focus on strengthening our local, existing languages by institutionalizing them and making them more reachable to the masses?
Then again, you might be itching to ask me what I am doing to change this. I am trying. It is shameful that I can communicate better in a borrowed language than my own. The famous Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk (someone who always writes in his native tongue, Turkish), also spoke out in a concerned fashion about this global problem and sought the writing community to address it as one.
To sum up the story of my visit to the bookstore, I ended up buying this rare beauty for a mere 50 bucks:
Written by the guy who penned our National Song, I look forward to reading it and rekindling my own habit of Hindi-reading for once. It won't make a world of a change, but at least एक शुरुआत है!
While cashing out, the cashier asks me, "Sir, और आपकी दूसरी किताब?" I gave him my are-you-fucking-shitting-me smile and walked off...for good.
Nevertheless, seeing as I had the whole evening to myself (the girlfriend being out of town and the friends in the immediate vicinity probably sleeping or preoccupied), I thought I might as well go check out books at the nearest Crossword at
So I did. My greatest fears were realized when the cashier at the store clarified that I'd have to buy a minimum of two books to avail a 50% discount on the cheaper/est one. Which sucked, but since I had hiked at least 1.5 kilometers (low on petrol; that time of the month), I decided to stay on and browse through the new releases just for the kicks (arey isme KICK hai pagli!).
Lee Child, Grisham, Patterson, Higgins Clark: the usual suspects. A few Dan Browns and Chetan Bhagats thrown into the mix, with Crichton, Rushdie and Amish following suit. Familiar titles with their familiar sky-high prices greet me like every time, and I get down to the uphill task of picking and choosing one that fits my budget and my 'biblio-appetite', or 'bib-libido' (Hyphenated Nomenclature 101). It is like the Ryan family welcoming one of its sons back home after a hard-fought war: the happiness of homecoming of one brother is negated by the pain of the death of another. The high prices dampen my spirits but I still go through every shelf, every corner assiduously, letting not one interesting cover slip past my preening gaze.
And then I come across the science fiction section. Here it is, at a glance:
Genuine science fiction writing is hard to come by in Indian shelves. Not only do we not appreciate foreign writers who have set new definitions in the field - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Dick to name a few - we also do not nurture such thought back home. It is rare that a well told science fiction story ever makes it big in the Indian market, be it literature or cinema. Barring a very few exceptions like The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh and Satyajit Ray's Professor Shonku series (both suspiciously Bengali), I don't recall an Indian author who has ever dared walk down this literary avenue. Our cinema, which has opened itself up to innovation and originality in recent years, still boasts of very few science fiction films that pass off as half decent attempts (please do not mention Love Story 2050). The tradition of speculative writing that transcends the present and the past and boldly writes our future is not just my personal, self-pleasing desire, but the need of the hour for a developing nation such as ours. A nation of dreamers must also produce fiction that is rich in speculation and imagination, grand in design and grounded in hard reality yet not bogged down by it.
Why I do not write science fiction, then, you ask? Quite simply: I do, and I will keep trying!
Disgusted, I passed on the shelf altogether (sorry, James Headley Chase) and headed in the direction of Indian fiction, with hopes of browsing through some interesting homespun stories. I am a sucker for the Salman Rushdie / Amitav Ghosh brand of lyrical literature, yet almost always too broke to buy more than a few of their volumes at once. Hence, my love affair with their writings remains interrupted and incomplete to this day. I wistfully strafe past the shelves containing their works, having stopped long ago to even read the blurbs, lest I read something so good that I am heartbroken to leave a piece of my heart with them in their shelves. It is when I lay my hands on a Sadat Hasan Manto book that it strikes me: most of our regional writers have their famous works translated into English and then fed back to us in repackaged, overpriced editions. Why do we need an English-medium to re-discover what has forever been our own, albeit in our regional tongues? Why have we moved away from our mother tongues to such an extent that our reading habits are only limited to the Roman Alphabet?
Why does a Manto, Chugtai or Premchand have to be translated into English and only then be acceptable to our 'modern' reading palate? Is this phenomenon not the textbook definition of Cultural Imperialism, wherein a people is forcibly disconnected with its roots and then served the fruits of its own toil at a price? The plight of the Indian book consumer in the 21st century is not much different from the Indian handloom industry at the onset of the East India Company, if not even worse. The people back then were at least aware of their decadence; we, on the other hand, are blissfully ignorant!
Why do we allow for such outright imperial hangover to control us even today? Why do our revered leaders and policymakers push for ridiculous and meaningless decrees while we should focus on strengthening our local, existing languages by institutionalizing them and making them more reachable to the masses?
Then again, you might be itching to ask me what I am doing to change this. I am trying. It is shameful that I can communicate better in a borrowed language than my own. The famous Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk (someone who always writes in his native tongue, Turkish), also spoke out in a concerned fashion about this global problem and sought the writing community to address it as one.
To sum up the story of my visit to the bookstore, I ended up buying this rare beauty for a mere 50 bucks:
While cashing out, the cashier asks me, "Sir, और आपकी दूसरी किताब?" I gave him my are-you-fucking-shitting-me smile and walked off...for good.
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