Reading Keep off the Grass

Yesterday, I walked to the Landmark to read a book. A particular book.
The author was a fellow-alumnus but that didn’t mean anything. Irritated by one his media gimmicks, I had attacked this author in this blog some time ago on the basis of just a blurb on the book and still felt guilty about it. Besides, the hyper-publicity the media machinery had built around the book and the decent reviews he got from most casual readers had done its work. I read a couple of interviews and the guy seemed decent and down-to-earth; he talked about soul-bending experiences and restlessness and being inspired by my favourite Indian writer.
So I went and read.

Why do you write a book about it when you’re not even serious about it? The two hours I spent bent over the book, while great works beckoned me all around, was like trying to listen to a man talking without thinking what he’s talking about. in both the act of prattling and this book, what is talked about is not important – but the – Look I’m talking – is.
I won’t even judge the book on its literary merits – like Chetan Bhagat the author is on the defensive even before you get to pick his book. I myself am a philistine as far as theory of literature goes, but I do believe good reading is not only about style, it’s about substance. It’s about honesty.
This book is a fundamentally dishonest effort.
The book starts with the protagonist, who’s just lived the Indian wet dream of having screwed a blonde and left her begging for more, launching into a path of self-discovery when she asks him when he plans to go back to India, Pak, Bangladesh or wherever he is from. And so the hero does: after a painful (for both the reader and the protagonist) conversation with a father who seems to be cut and pasted from Harold and Kumar.
The purpose of the blonde is to get screwed – there is nothing more about her other than a reference to her job and her liking for investment bankers – and the purpose of the father is to be a caricature of a first-generation immigrant Indian father. They are not deliberate caricatures of the Simpsonian/MAD irreverence and stereotype-questioning liberalist modes; they are caricatures because the author never really bothers to fill the colors to the desultory lines he’s sketched around them.
In my alma mater, the author meets a Kargil-ka-sipahi (nothing less my folks) and a cool dude (two pages follow describing the inherent genius of his IIT pedigree: a page and a half more than the pages that the author gives to any other character.)
Regarding the confused identity of the ABCD protagonist, it comes across as convincing as Shabbir Khan doing a Rafi.

There were two phrases that I caught straight from English August (I just completed another of my annual perusal of the work a month ago) – and the descriptions of the India the protagonist sees is heavily borrowed from the book too. This I am not averse to actually since EA is the sort of book that inspires a new vocabulary to define the Indian everyday experience. Only the effect most of the times was seeing an adaptation of your favourite movie scene in a Mukesh Bhatt directed/ Bharat Shah produced movie.
Sadly, there are a couple of places where the author does score. But it’s only because all of us do have some eloquent wisdom in us.
Not all of us are literary giants – not all of us are the Gabriel Garcias with fantastic tales to tell. I have read Shashi Tharoor a lot despite the fact that I think he’s not the foremost of the writers writing on India. But it’s his honesty of effort that makes me want to listen to him.

I questioned my judgement: as someone once told me, it might be just plain jealousy. I went back to Google – determined to find an echo to my own feelings about the book. Ultimately, I found a short review where the writer describes the effort in the words “As if the author was just writing to finish the book and wanted just see himself in print.“
I read about a book a couple of weeks. That means 25-30 books a year. In the 20 years ahead that probably remain with me, I will read another 500-600 books: such a woefully short number. Do writers like these understand the value of the space that they have squatted on and destroyed?
Two questions:
1. Why write a book when your heart is not even into it
2. Why publish this (this for the publishing house) desultory effort
I have a lot more to write on this theme which I will write shortly. I will go and finish the book in the evening today.