Beyond confines: The relevance of genre fiction in India

(Stephen King, one of my favorite writers and a frequent target for critics attacking 'genre fiction'.)

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

Michael Chabon, the American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001, once said, in the foreword for The Best American Short Stories 2005: "Entertainment means junk. But maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. . . . I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, I write to entertain. Period."

Somehow, in our mad rush for categorising everything into neat little boxes, we've lost sight of what exactly it is that whets our appetite for good writing. Everything is high-brow, or low-brow; there are no prisoners taken in this all-important game of nomenclature. If you're not a practitioner of the hallowed 'literary fiction' section of the bookshelf, you're not worth a second thought. And if you're a 'genre fiction' writer, you're a feeble-minded sell-out to the much-hated market forces; the worst kind of populist there exists.

Last week, debutante author Jugal Mody's novel Toke was released by Harper Collins.Toke is the story of a bunch of stoners who try to save the word from a zombie apocalypse, all in the process of "smoking a lot of good shit". Now, this may not sound earth-shattering for followers of 'literary fiction writers or readers', but Mody is unconcerned. In his own words, "At some point of time, fiction started to get divided and categorised. It became all about placing books into various classes like drama, comedy and so on." Mody, who counted The Faculty and Pineapple Express among his influences, began writing his stoner-zombie novel in 2009. "One reason why I always liked old Bollywood movies was that they are really hard to pin down into any one genre. They'd be equal parts comedy, drama, action... you couldn't really classify them into a particular genre, they're just a wholesome product," said Mody.

There are other, mostly economic reasons behind this rush to 'place' books into a particular category. Author Manjula Padmanabhan has written books for both children and adults; her 2008 book Escape defied these convenient tags. While having overt science fiction sensibilities, it was recognised by several notable critics as being very much a part of 'literary fiction'. As Padmanabhan clarifies, the reasons behind this nomenclature are very often economical. "Children's books are often more expensive for publishers to print than books for adults. Also, the space for literature in Indian life is minuscule as it is. When there's just a column's width of words of any kind to spare on books, editors are bound to promote high-minded and intellectual titles in order to catch the interest of buyers who have money to spare on buying books," she said.

Which isn't to say that genre fiction writing isn't good business. In the wake of Chetan Bhagat's success, there has been a glut of mostly romantic coming-of-age stories written by young Indian authors, like Tushar Raheja, whose book Anything For You, Ma'amsoared to the top of the bestsellers list, despite being panned by a large section of critics for being too hackneyed and juvenile. However, books like Raheja's did manage to strike a chord with a lot of readers. As Padmanabhan said, "I believe the majority of young readers today really don't have the vocabulary or patience to read the older kind of novel but why should they? Today's young person thinks in phone-text abbreviations, not full sentences or properly spelt words. So they'll buy books that reflect their speech."

Mody was of the opinion that books such as these had managed to achieve something very, very important – getting people to pick up a book, people who'd hitherto eschew reading altogether in favour of other, more immediate sources of entertainment. In his own words, "I grew up in a Gujarati family and was hence exposed to a lot of Gujarati pulp fiction writers, some of whom still sell a lot of books today. Writers like these have gotten a lot of young people to start reading for the first time, and a lot of these readers moved on to much better writers."

In the interests of a healthier and more inclusive literary environment, it's perhaps advisable to keep an open mind and not seek to pre-judge books on their descriptions. It's better, after all, to read good fiction, rather than reading 'literary' or 'genre' fiction.

The Imaginarium of Mister Dickens

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

“The intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me is one of the qualities that make me different — sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil — from other men.”

                                                --Letter from Charles Dickens to his wife, December 5, 1853

Charles Dickens, circa 1841, was certainly writing like a man possessed. After the raging success of the serialised novel Pickwick Papers (the last instalment of which appeared in 1837), the young writer now had a devoted readership. In the years 1837-1840, Dickens wrote both Nicholas Nickleby and the much-loved Oliver Twist, which was the first Victorian novel to have a child protagonist. In April 1840, the first instalment of his new book The Old Curiosity Shop came out in the short-lived weekly Master Humphrey’s Clock.

The characters in the novel soon became wildly popular, in particular the heroine Nell Trent, an angelic, virtuous orphan ‘of not quite fourteen’. As the story drew towards its end, a strange and wondrous thing began to be noticed, something which underlined the frenzied fan following enjoyed by Dickens. Impatient to find out the fate of their beloved Nell, his American fans would throng the New York dockyards, shouting out to incoming ships the one question which mattered to them- “Is Little Nell dead?”  

2012 marks the birth bicentenary of Charles Dickens- Two hundred years since he was born; a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy", in his own words. His books have never gone out of print, his star has never looked like dimming and his characters have become dictionary entries. A Tale of Two Cities has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling novel of all time, across genre, as writer David Mitchell observed in a 2010 article. Works such as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Great Expectations have enthralled generation after generation of readers, and spawned scores of film, television and theatrical adaptations around the world.

What is it about Dickens that makes his legacy such an enduring one? Sudeep Chakravarti (author of the novel Tin Fish as well as non-fiction books like the acclaimed Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country) says, “I actually read Dickens translated into Bangla before reading him in English. I found his stories to be gripping, and I liked the fact that they weren’t preachy. I also liked that they travelled up and down the social and economic ladder, painting characters and situations unflinchingly. Reading Dickens as a child, I found some of these situations to be shocking—but they turned my head!”

Chakravarti was one of the five Indian writers who wrote essays for the British Council India blog earlier this year- A series called ‘What Would Dickens Write Today’, part of the Indian wing of Dickens 2012, their international celebration of his birth bicentenary. The British Council has been coordinating with 50 countries for various educational and cultural events. These included reading sessions with noted authors, screening of Dickens adaptations and also organising creative writing competitions for writers aged 16-21 who submitted pieces inspired by Dickens. The Indian leg of the festivities kicked off at the Kolkata Book Fair in January, where author Vikram Seth interacted with youngsters at the BC Reading Room.    

At the event, Seth was in his elements, waxing eloquent about Dickens, a writer he was frequently compared to after A Suitable Boy- His magnum opus which brought a very Dickensian social realism to an ensemble cast in newly-independent India. “Dickens was not allowed to have (writer’s) blocks”, Seth said. “He had a magazine, which he ran, where he had to produce a certain number of pages every week. Now, the interesting thing about this way of writing- a few pages at a time- is that the audience is waiting. It’s like a serial, say the Mahabharata or the Ramayana; you want to know what’s going to happen next week. People would be absolutely salivating…”   

Seth was echoing the sentiments of the anxious Americans who shouted at incoming ships, demanding to know Little Nell’s fate. However, another, contrasting aspect of Dickens (and every other truly great author) worth pondering upon is the repeat value of his books- If we read and re-read a work, it’s only because it offers enough by way of the familiar, which welcomes us back like an old friend; and the unfamiliar, which draws us inwards, riding on our intrigue, our bewilderment. Even the weakest of Dickens’ works have healthy doses of both. Author Anita Nair highlighted this duality thus- “One of the first Charles Dickens works I read as a child was A Christmas Carol, and I was fascinated by the food descriptions; the turkey, the Christmas feast and so on. Through these passages, food turned into something else”, she said, before adding, “Reading the book became a Christmas tradition for me.”

How do you pick your favourite Dickens character? Here was a writer who could conjure up memorable people (and I say people, not characters) with a few deft brushstrokes. Author Anjum Hasan says, “Dickens' characters have a great capacity for suffering and yet there is always something around the corner that's going to cheer them up. They suffer but they are not sorrowful, at least not his heroes and heroines. I loved that and identified with it when I first read his work.”  Is it Fagin the Jew, then, or Sidney Carton, the ultimate tragic hero? Miss Havisham perhaps or Mr. Bucket, that prince among pre-Sherlock sleuths? I found myself agreeing with Anita Nair when she opined, “Uriah Heep (from Great Expectations) is one of the finest characters in all of literature, along with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert.”

Nabokov, incidentally, taught a course called Masters of European Fiction at Cornell for almost ten years, where he gave a series of memorable lectures on writers like Gogol, Flaubert, Jane Austen and yes, Dickens. To read his dazzling deconstruction of Dickens’ method is a sheer delight, and we shall turn to him, at last, to better understand this magician’s sleights-of-hand. “Despite certain faults in the telling of his story, Dickens remains, nevertheless, a great writer. Control over a considerable constellation of characters and themes, the technique of holding people and events bunched together, or of evoking absent characters through dialogue- In other words, the art of not only creating people but keeping created people alive within the reader’s mind throughout a long novel- this, of course, is the obvious sign of greatness.”

Charles Dickens did not always have a happy life. By all accounts, his childhood was far from merry. As an adult, he had a large family to support which kept him on his toes, writing feverishly. In middle age, he fell in love with an 18-year-old actress and subsequently separated from his wife, something which earned him considerable disrepute in conservative, Victorian England. But through all of this, he maintained a prolific output, producing one gem after another. As Karl Marx put it, Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". While the man himself might have made a drily funny remark or two about his misfortunes, for his countless readers across the planet, the first lines of A Tale of Two Cities sum up the Dickens era best: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."

            

In conversation with Aman Sethi

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian) 

Aman Sethi starts explaining the finer points of the migrant labour situation in Delhi, and promptly cuts himself off. He’s not happy with something he has just said. “Terrible way to start a sentence...” he says. To be honest, it did not feel terrible and Sethi’s nothing if not compelling with his arguments. But you understand where he’s coming from. His debut book A Free Man, published in September last year has its paperback edition out on 3 August and is marked by its obsessive attention to detail, its unflagging quest for precision.

One of the most distinguished works of non-fiction in recent years, A Free Man follows the life of Mohammed Ashraf, an itinerant labourer at Delhi’s Bara Tooti Chowk. A Free Man has been termed ‘novelistic’ by certain reviewers, something which Sethi takes with a pinch of salt. “The moment you try to write a halfway decent sentence, your book is deemed to be ‘novelistic’, which is neither correct nor fair. I wasn’t trying to write a novel, I was just trying to make sure the writing was good.”

The book is also notable for its unwavering focus on the lives of Ashraf and his friends at Bara Tooti Chowk, avoiding the quote-unquote Big Narrative; a sweeping, wide-angle view of the socio-economic mechanisms of a city. (Think Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or Peter Ackroyd’s London) Another recent book which shares this microscopic approach is Katharine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about the Annawadi slum area in Mumbai. “Katherine Boo and I actually have the same editor, Chiki Sarkar at Random House. So we ended up reading each other’s books; I reviewed Behind the Beautiful Forevers for The Hindu. It’s a brilliant work, a book which was just waiting to be written,” says Sethi. “Ever since the start of the New Journalism movement of the 60s, unconventional techniques have been used by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, but for some reason this hasn’t really been explored in Indian writing.”

The linguistic style employed by Sethi in A Free Man is certainly unconventional, a freewheeling mixture of English interspersed with the vernacular tilts of Ashraf and his fellow labourers. At one point, Ashraf says, “There is something Delhi can give you- a sense of azadi, freedom from your past.”  In another sequence, Kaka the tea-seller of Bara Tooti exclaims angrily, “It’s because of you bhenchods. All day long you chootiyas smoke ganja and then complain that the chai is pheeka!” Sethi explains his decision thus: “When I started speaking to Ashraf and the others at Bara Tooti, I saw that their Hindi was flawless. So on one hand, I had this great, evocative vernacular stuff, which I didn’t want to lose out on, but then I couldn’t really write an entire book in Hindi. And I feared that if I left out the vernacular elements completely, it’d be impossible to distinguish Ashraf from Lalloo or Kaka- They’d all sound like me!”

A Free Man does not take the formally easy path that non-fiction books take all too frequently; a philosophy which can be summed up in a line: ‘This is what’s wrong, and here’s how we can make things better.” Instead, it tries, in the author’s own words, “to capture the texture of lived reality.” According to him, this was an easy call to make. “I thought it would be better to think about Ashraf’s world and try to capture it as accurately as possible, rather than self-flagellate as a member of the elite middle-class. The initial drafts of the book were full of rage, but I realised that me feeling bad did not interest even me anymore.”

So is a work of fiction in the offing anytime soon? “I don’t think I’ll be writing fiction right now,” says Sethi. “I actually had a sort of late introduction to the canonical works of fiction. I haven’t really read a lot of Indian fiction, but somehow it seems to me a way of retreating from the real world. And why would I want to do that? I find the real world to be a fascinating place.”           

Jilly Ballistic and graffiti as pop culture 'recycle bin'

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

(Baby Gas Mask Salesman- Subway art by Jilly Ballistic)

Graffiti has often been associated with political protest, a playful way to flip off authority figures with whom one disagrees. Indeed, the 1968 student protests in France, or the Black Panther movement in America employed graffiti as a powerful means to reach out to the common public. When you consider recent times, with a lot of us spending a considerable amount of time in front of our computers, you understand why the art of Jilly Ballistic strikes you with such immediacy.

Jilly, a street and subway artist, has been tagging billboards and other advertisement hoardings in New York with stickers which resemble the error messages, notifications and dialog boxes through which computers communicate with us. A recent work involves the poster of the upcoming Colin Farrell movie Total Recall, which is a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name, a fact which Jilly is clearly not impressed with. Her droll message states: “UPDATE REQUIRED The content of this film is approximately 22 years past the original airdate. Please create new material. Thank you, Jilly Ballistic”.

Speaking about this series of graffiti, Jilly said, “I started street art a little over two years ago, though the computer-based tagging is a recent project. Like most New Yorkers, my commute involves the subway system and everything that comes with it, including staring at ad after ad. I wanted to interact with and answer these advertisements, so I mimicked the error/notification boxes we see every day on our phones and computers.”

Jilly also has other recurring motifs- Like her series of old photographs, often involving people in gas masks, pasted at different locations on the NY subway. These photos, like a particularly disturbing one with a salesman with a baby gas mask, yield surprising results when juxtaposed with the subway settings. In her own words,”These images are undoctored historical photos from WWI, WWII to present day. I place them in site-specific areas in the subway, so they work with the space and the space works with the image. It creates a whole new context/relationship that commuters can determine for themselves.”

Jilly’s work speaks to us in an idiom which is both immediately recognisable and yet maintains a certain distance; a feature associated with the artificial intelligence it mimics. Perhaps this is indeed the way forward for street art, at a time when Twitter and FB dominate our thought-space. As Jilly said, “In this age of 140 characters and one-sentence status updates, graffiti and street art work very well! Before the social media boom, graffiti/street art was a way to get your status out there, tell everyone what was on your mind--and it still is, it's a fast way to get a relatable point across."  

  

The chronicler of Mars bids adieu

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

There's an air of mystique around writers of speculative fiction that is palpable to everyone who has ever looked up at the skies and wondered what possibilities lay beyond. Think Isaac Asimov's famous picture, sitting on a throne with symbols from his work emblazoned proudly, or Arthur C. Clarke's eerily accurate descriptions of supercomputers and nanotechnology decades before either concept came to fruition. Starting from Jules Verne, who was one of the pioneers of the genre, every popular science fiction writer worth his salt has been treated as a cross between a rockstar, an oracle and a messiah.

Last week, the world was robbed of one such oracle, the legendary American writer Ray Bradbury who passed away at 91, following a prolonged illness. Many of his works like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, have come to be regarded as classics of the genre; expanding and re-defining our ideas about speculative fiction.

There's a story from Bradbury's childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, which has been told very often. It's a typical 'moment of revelation' story that one comes across so often with regard to writers and artists everywhere. It involves the 12-year-old Bradbury's encounter with a circus magician named Mr Electrico who performed with an electrified sword. As the man himself said in a 2001 letter, "When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"

The next day, the enchanted young boy returned to the carnival ground to meet the magician again, hopefully to pick up the trick for himself. The encounter changed Bradbury's life for good, a cathartic moment, that had a profound influence on his work. Grateful for this divine intervention, Bradbury explained in the letter, "I went home and the next day traveled to Arizona with my folks. When we arrived there a few days later I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day 69 years ago."

With such a brutal work ethic, it should come as no surprise that Bradbury wrote 27 novels and over 600 short stories across a career spanning more than six decades, to say nothing of his numerous plays, screenplays and non-fiction works. Of these, Fahrenheit 451 remains perhaps the most adored – the film adaptation was directed by the renowned French auteur François Truffaut.

Set in a dystopian American landscape, the 1953 novel imagines a future where books are outlawed and "firemen" are people who burn books for a living (the title of the book refers to the temperature at which paper burns). As the official motto of the firemen states, "Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes." Think about The Satanic Verses, or scholar James Laine's biography of Shivaji, and you get an idea about the scary prescience of Bradbury's novel.

His stories, like those of his contemporary Isaac Asimov, often focus on the unexpected and bizarre ways humans react when confronted with alien settings, or unfamiliar technologies. What sets Bradbury apart is a nostalgic air, an intensely detailed way of summoning an instant in time and space – children were his favoured set piece, with their ill-informed notions of permanence and mortality.

In one of my favourite Bradbury stories, The Veldt, two children get a little too enamoured of a virtual reality toy, to the increasing dismay of their parents. Stories like A Sound of Thunder and All Summer in a Day also focus on the inevitably tragic consequences of being hung over about an irretrievable past.

In a coincidence that even he couldn't have possibly scripted better, the day Bradbury died was also the day the Transit of Venus took place, a rare astronomical phenomenon, which happens once every 243 years. Perhaps rarer still is to come across a writer who captures the imagination of the reader like Bradbury does; it is this quality which will ensure that he will, in the words of a certain Mr Electrico, "Live forever!"

Outlaw No More: How Dylan went from maverick to establishment man

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

On Tuesday last week, the leader of the free world seemed more than a little star-struck. Presenting the Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honour awarded by the White House) to Bob Dylan, President Barack Obama said, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. All these years later, he’s still chasing that sound, still searching for a little bit of truth. And I have to say that I am a really big fan.” Reminiscing about discovering Dylan’s music in his youth, Obama mentioned, “I remember in college listening to Bob Dylan and my world opening up because he captured something that -- about this country that was so vital.”  The legendary singer-songwriter was his usual stoic self through all the fanfare, eyes hidden behind dark shades, as he sat in the company of Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and astronaut John Glenn, among others.

This is the latest, and unarguably the most prestigious award yet given to the 71-year-old Dylan, who has won 11 Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a special citation from the Pulitzer prize jury, and numerous other honours during the course of his nearly five-decade-long career. British bookmakers Ladbrokes even made him a 5-1 favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. However, on the night that the very first of these awards came his way, Bob Dylan found himself embroiled in a bitter controversy, leading up to his being branded a traitor and a communist sympathizer . All of which is a wee bit different from the President of the United States waxing eloquent and expressing unabashed fanboy sentiment for the world to see…

On the night of December 13, 1963, the 22-year-old Bob Dylan was given the Tom Paine award by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, recognizing the firebrand young artist’s contribution to the civil rights movement. Earlier that year in May, Dylan had released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album overall, but the first one comprising of primarily original material, including such iconic hits as Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. The impact of this album could hardly be overstated- as critic Janet Maslin noted in Rolling Stone, “These were the songs that established him as the voice of his generation—someone who implicitly understood how concerned young Americans felt about nuclear disarmament and the growing movement for civil rights: his mixture of moral authority and nonconformity was perhaps the most timely of his attributes.”

The increasingly reluctant messiah of a burgeoning folk song movement, Dylan turned up to receive the Tom Paine award- visibly drunk, slurring his way through one non-sequitur after another, until finally, he said something which would haunt him for a long time to come- “I got to admit that the guy who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly where... what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too... I saw some of myself in him.” Coming just three weeks after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, on November 22, 1963, this remark proved to be too much for the audience to handle, and Dylan was soon booed off the stage.

The National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee had good reason to feel aggrieved. After all, these were the people who had been fighting-and often winning- several landmark legal battles just after the McCarthy Era, on behalf of artists and civil rights activists. (Before the Lee Oswald comment, Dylan had mentioned his satisfaction at “celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities (Committee)”) For Dylan (who, like his idol Woody Guthrie, had already started to come under the scanner of McCarthy acolytes for his alleged Communist sympathies) to thus publicly embarrass them was a PR nightmare and then some. And in any case, why was Dylan feeling so very uncomfortable with the good people of the Communist Party?

On Talkin’ World War III Blues, one of the songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he laments,

“Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand
I seen a man. I said, 'Howdy friend,
I guess there's just us two.'
He screamed a bit and away he flew.
Thought I was a Communist.”

On the famous cover of the same album, Dylan appears, walking arm in arm with Suze Rotolo, his then-girlfriend, a self-described “red-diaper baby”; born to parents who were working-class Communist Party activists. It was Rotolo who had helped Dylan with some of his earliest political songs, his “finger-pointing” songs as he called them. In critic Robert Shelton’s biography No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Dylan is quoted as saying, “She’ll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her ‘Is this right?’. Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked the songs out with her”

However, Dylan’s increasing frustration at being typecast as a writer of “protest songs”, as well as the deterioration of his relationship with Rotolo (immortalized in the song Ballad in Plain D) was about to precipitate a shift away from acoustic folk music. In his own words, “It is a fierce heavy feeling thinkin’ something is expected of you but you don’t know what exactly it is... it brings forth a wierd form of guilt.” Dylan’s fans, as well as fans of the folk music movement in general, viewed electric or amplified music as the enemy- trashy pop, a by-product of Big Bad Corporations who were out to control you. Eventually, on July 25, 1965, Dylan kicked off his performance at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric version of the song Maggie’s Farm, backed by a rock band.

The legend which is most frequently told about that day involves Pete Seeger (the folk music hero who was among a bunch of artists sanctioned- blacklisted from TV appearances- for being Communist Party members in the 1950s) trying, unsuccessfully, to cut off the electric cables with an axe. (Both this legend and the night of the Lee Oswald comment have been dramatized in the 2007 Todd Haynes biopic I’m Not There) Seeger only admits to saying, “Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now.” At any rate, the crowd didn’t take too kindly to the new, electric Dylan- once again, he was subjected to heckling and booing. He did, however, return to play a couple of acoustic songs as a conciliatory gesture. It seemed as if no matter what he did, Bob Dylan would find himself in the eye of a storm, and no matter how hard he tried to steer clear of politics (“I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”), politics would hound him as long as he wrote and performed.

Over the years, Bob Dylan has proven to be difficult to pin down: his persona has been as fluid and as improvisational as his ever-changing live arrangements. That he has mellowed down only proves that he is human like the rest of us- In an April 2011 tour of China, Dylan stayed away from making statements, and did not play any of his most famous protest songs, something which, surprise surprise, drew sharp criticism from many commentators. But then again, what even seasoned critics sometimes fail to grasp about Dylan is that it is this chameleon-like tendency, this capacity to constantly assimilate new and novel elements in his music (and his public life)that makes him the most enduring musical icon of the 20^th century. In this regard, director Todd Haynes’ casting of six different actors (including, most famously, Australian actress Cate Blanchett) to portray different aspects of Dylan’s life in the film I’m Not There has to be lauded as a genuine stroke of genius. The film ends with these lines as voice-over:

“People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. 'Course, the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.”

Bob Dylan’s Presidential Medal of Freedom is well-deserved: Indeed, one might argue that it has been due for a while now.

On V Sanjay Kumar's "Artist, Undone"

Writing about art and artists has always been a slippery slope. In 1998, the Scottish author William Boyd released a book called “Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960”, the biography of a hitherto neglected Expressionist painter, discussing his work, his friendships with Picasso, Braque and others, and his tragic suicide at 32. The book had a blurb by the doyen of American letters, Gore Vidal, as well as one by rock legend David Bowie, who claimed to own one of Tate’s last surviving works. Bowie even read from the book at the lavish launch party, where a sizable cross-section of Manhattan’s glitterati and art world were quizzed on this forgotten artist. Critics nodded and hummed on cue, and some old-timers even claimed to have attended Nat Tate retrospectives back in the 60s. Which was all fine- except that Nat Tate and all of his paintings were entirely fictional, part of an elaborate literary hoax pulled off by Boyd, with a little help from Bowie and Vidal. The incident left a lot of people very red-faced indeed and all because they were too proud to admit their ignorance.

Clever conceits like this feature prominently among the better portions of V Sanjay Kumar’s debut novel “Artist, Undone”, a very screwball take on the world of contemporary Indian art. Harsh Sinha, the self-described “foul-mouthed Bihari” protagonist sees a painting called “Fat, Fucked and Forty” and becomes convinced that he is the subject of the painter’s grim vision. After spending a small fortune to purchases the painting in question, and taking a sabbatical from his advertising job in Mumbai, Harsh leaps headfirst into a world of idiosyncratic artists, collectors, curators and critics. 

This, however, happens only after his wife Gayathri shows him the door in favour of the artist next door, Newton Kumaraswamy, a well-known Lothario and “famous thief”- his body of work being entirely derivative of the much-acclaimed, erotically charged paintings of Francis Newton Souza, the real life Indian artist who died almost a decade ago in March 2002.

Harsh takes potshots at just about everyone who is a cog in the wheel in the art business- from hack artists to arcane, inaccessible critics and hare-brained collectors. Says Roongta to Harsh after the initial rounds of market research: “Guru, I have learnt that craft is not art. What is art is not tightly defined but it excludes more than it includes. Our intricate carpets are not art, all these wonderful stone “murtis” are not art and these classic pichwais and gilded Chettinad paintings are also not art. Basically that rules out my entire house, my whole neighbourhood and my entire colony.” These quirky initial exchanges do raise a few laughs out of the reader, but ultimately the book flatters to deceive. The novel’s pivotal character, the artist Newton Kumaraswamy (a portmanteau of Francis Newton Souza and the art historian A K Coomaraswamy perhaps?) is perhaps symptomatic of both its strengths and its ultimately fatal weaknesses.

Much is made of Newton’s “borrowing” from his illustrious namesake Francis Newton Souza. The outrageous exploits of Newton at his exhibitions make for intermittent fun. However, sadly for the novel, loopy, grim rhetoric about the concept of originality in art lets down what could have been a genuinely fascinating character. Far too often, the author sets up a chapter or a scene nicely, only to lose the plot as it were, simply because of lazy writing, one feels. Sample Newton talking about his determination to continue “ripping off” the dead master: “All art is a form of thievery. We steal. And we record it for all to see… (…)Only empty vessels boast of originality. I too drank of that Holy Grail and spat the spit of centuries.” This syndrome is also manifested in the form of certain tics or devices which are repeated ad nauseam throughout the book.

Like the one-sentence paragraph, which the author clearly adores.

It is a powerful device when employed fittingly.

When overused, it can be very, very annoying.

The author does throw up minor attractions our way every now and then- Artist, Undone uses a number of striking pieces by contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya (whose 2009 oil and acrylic painting “The Wall” dedicated to Rahul Dravid fetched Rs. 57 lakhs at an auction) and Tracey Emin. The use of our gut reactions to art as a source of mirth does not work everywhere, but some scenes utilize this situation in an unexpected manner. Another pleasant surprise is the appearance of Arun Kolatkar’s “The Cupboard”, a poem taken from “Jejuri” his iconic collection of poetry.

In the final equation, however, the author V Sanjay Kumar fails to tie his characters’ stories in a cohesive manner. The gags begin to lose their sting halfway through the novel, and before you know it, a succession of unfunny minor characters lands the book in the doldrums, on which note it hurtles to a rather uninspiring end. Which is a pity because one gets the distinct impression that the author had bigger plans for at least two of the major characters, but somewhere along the assembly line those plans, like the titular artist, simply came undone. 

Calypso chutney, cooked a la Wasseypur

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

I am a hunter and she want to see my gun /When I pull it out boy de woman start to run/Hum hain sikaari, paackit mein lambi gun/Dhaayen se jo chhoote tan-mann howe magan..." These are lines from the song Hunter featured in Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur, an example of the 'chutney' music genre, a dazzling, foot-tapping mixture of calypso beats spiced up with lyrics from English, Hindi, Bhojpuri and Caribbean Creole. This music originated in the Caribbean region after a mass exodus of Indians from Bihar, UP, etc. to the West Indies.

For Gangs of Wasseypur, the makers wanted a sound, which would combine Bhojpuri argot with contemporary sensibilities. The essence was to bring a touch of the exotic without losing out on the accessibility of the music. Varun Grover, the lyricist for Hunterexplains, "Our music director Sneha Khanwalkar wanted to bring this genre to Bollywood music, and she travelled to the Caribbean in search of songs and voices that would sound authentic. Vedesh Sookoo, one of the singers for Hunter is one such voice."

Hunter has already soared to the top of the charts, riding high on its in-your-face, bawdy lyrics. The sexually charged nature of the lines draw from the Hindu tradition (still observed by the Hindu Indo-Caribbean community) called matikor, an exclusively female ritual where women instruct the bride-to-be about sexual matters in a playful, satirical manner through song and dance. Chutney music, which began as an expression of protest against colonial oppression, thus later became a powerful medium for women's rights as well.

As Drupatee Ramgoonai, one of the most successful artists in chutney music puts it, "In my own story as an artist, it was a form of liberation for Indian female singers, especially in my country where music was a male-dominated sphere. I was able to break all racial, ethnic and even sexual barriers."

The other song in Gangs of Wasseypur where the chutney music influence can be seen is called Womaniya (the female suffix –iya is a typical Bhojpuri affectation). Written and picturised as a typical matikor ditty, with the raw, uninhibited voices of Rekha Jha and Khushboo Raj lending it a robust, earthy flavour, the lyrics are cheerfully naughty and catchy. Lines like "Badle rupaiya ke dena chavaniyaa/Saiyyan ji jhaptte, to hona hiraniya/O Womaniya" refuse to get out of your head.

"In Bihar, each caste has its own different dialect, different style of music and so on. We knew that for a song like Womaniya, we had to be liberated with the lingo; it couldn't have been a nudge-wink affair. In reality, when women from this part of the country gather before a wedding, their songs even include abuses showered upon their in-laws. Of course, we couldn't include all that because of the Censors," opines Grover, who says writing this song required the least amount of research for him.

"I studied at an engineering college, IT-BHU, and had a lot of friends from Bihar, UP, etc. And of course, the first things which you learn about a new language are all the cuss words," says Grover with a chuckle. With artists like Khanwalkar and Grover, who are unafraid of stepping out of the usual Bollywood mould, one can hope to see a lot more of these exciting, experimental tracks. For now, we can all revel in the heady taste of Caribbean chutney, cooked a la Wasseypur.

The letters of Harper Leaf and Madeleine Weathers

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

When was the last time you wrote a letter just for kicks? And I mean an actual, physical letter, something which is derisively termed 'snail mail' these days. For most of us, the answer to this question would lie inside a closed box, a covert stash, perhaps a chapter of our lives which is all but forgotten. But for artists Prashant Miranda and Kalpana Subramanian, writing letters is second nature.

Taking on the handles Harper Leaf (Prashant) and Madeleine Weathers (Kalpana), the two have been writing letters to each other for almost 18 years now. These letters are often about travelling, nostalgia, their respective works; all of these letters are also in verse. Frequently featuring illustrations by both artists, these poems are both an intensely personal project and a paean to a fading aesthetic tradition. Explaining the genesis of their correspondence, Miranda said, "Madeleine and I met at NID (National Institute of Design) in 1994. The connection was immediate and we've been friends ever since. The correspondence actually began between her and Franc. N. Stein (Shamik Majumdar), and was initially written in prose. I made a guest appearance in that original book, and the rest is history."

The choice of alter-ego was mostly arbitrary, although as Subramanian mentioned, "I think Madeleine suggested mystery to me, after having heard a story about a strange house. Weathers had the element of nature and time that I find inspiring."

These letters, which have been put on the blog harpermadeleine since September 2008, do not follow a chronological order. (In one of the entries, Weathers wrote, "No apologies for the non-linearity of our lives...") Miranda, talking about the rationale behind this decision, said, "We've realised that some letters are applicable to our lives at different junctures and have truths in them that continue to speak to us over the years. So irrespective of space and time, these letters hold true, and the ideologies and philosophies that we address still have meaning."

Many of the poems are marked by genteel humour and a perpetual sense of wonder that is almost child-like. As both Miranda and Subramanian mentioned, their correspondence has been a calming experience, something which has kept them going through tough times. Also, over the years, the duo has tried to mix it around, as far as the letter-writing process is concerned.

What then, are Harper and Madeleine trying out right now? "Now we're trying out a different experiment... I have a Harper Leaf book with all my letters to Madeleine; she replies in her book, and when that is done, we exchange books. There is a log on the last page of the book that keeps track of the places and dates that the letters are written," clarified Miranda.

Much before electronic mail and social networking sites swallowed whole the business of keeping in touch with one's loved ones, letters were worth their weight in gold. Can one really put a price on the letters between Gorky and Chekhov? Or between Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot for that matter? One only hopes that more artists like Harper and Madeleine revive what is increasingly looking like a lost cause.

Subramanian seemed optimistic about seeing a book-length version of Harper and Madeleine's letters in print someday; and also about the practice of letter-writing in general. "As long as creative people continue to document their exchanges in some form or the other, there will always be a window into their world. It's just that the tangible, personal quality of traditional letter writing is something unique that cannot be replaced."

Sex, death and candy

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

The popularity of webcomics has been gaining momentum for a while now. While the medium remains firmly in the niche/cult zone, a few like Penny Arcadeand XKCD have managed to convert this into financial success in recent years. One of the more remarkable and long-running webcomics, A Softer World (ASW) is published by Canadian writer Joey Comeau and his compatriot, photographer Emily Horne. The mostly three-panel ASW, which began in February 2003, has over 800 strips now, with fresh editions appearing thrice a week.

ASW employs a deceptively simple juxtaposition of real world photographs (Emily Horne prefers to photograph unposed subjects) coupled with Comeau's intense, poetic and often macabre text. The themes on display revolve around sexuality, death and existential angst, with occasional strips delving into quirky, screwball humour. Talking about the tendency for webcomics to be typecast pretty quickly, Horne said, "There are those out there who pigeonhole our work as being aimed at mopey teens or the universally-derided catchall 'hipsters', but we've always covered topics we found interesting. Sometimes that means sex, death, and even candy."

Nobody who has read an ASW strip can deny that it is most certainly literature. It has, in the past, been compared to the haiku style of Japanese poetry – for its brevity and impact. But in the rarefied air of literary circles, all comics-including webcomics have found it difficult to gain acceptance. ASW writer Joey Comeau noted the hypocrisy of this judgmental tendency often displayed by writers. "Margaret Atwood said that she doesn't write science fiction because she writes literature. When I want to read a certain type of book, genre helps me to find it. Genre books can be more like literature, to be certain, but I think it's wrong to assume that makes them more valuable rather than simply different," he added.

About the prolific output of ASW, the duo explained that they have not strictly stuck to one method of working. Sometimes it's Comeau who sends a bunch of story ideas to Horne, who then looks for a good visual fit and designs the comics; while on occasion, Horne sends finished strip designs for Comeau to caption.

As Comeau puts it, "Both ways are fun, and lead to slightly different feeling comics I think."

Nidhi Chanani's "Everyday Love"

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

Blame Kafka. Blame Dali. Blame every self-respecting young writer or artist who has ever reeled off the word "postmodern" ever-so-casually, most likely to impress a pretty young thing over cocktails. Blame whoever you like, but it has to be said that contemporary art is dominated by works which hammer home a Larger Message through irony, allusion, surrealism or any one of the do-it-yourself bag of tricks used and abused ad nauseum. This is just one of the many reasons why Nidhi Chanani's work hits you like a breath of fresh air. A freelance artist and designer based in San Francisco, Chanani's Everyday Love series of digital paintings has a cult following on Facebook.

Achieving a watercolour-like effect with her scanned paper textures and digitally created brushes, Chanani masterfully depicts merry, content couples, children and often cherubic animals as they laugh, sing and share, or simply stop and stare at the gifts life has to offer. In her own words, "When I decided to pursue art, I simply wanted to make people happy. I began to create an image every day and share it with friends and family, and I called that everyday love. I see it as a way to connect with an image that feels like coming home."

Born in Kolkata and raised in suburban California, Chanani already had a degree in Literature when she quit her 9 to 5 job in order to join the Academy of Art in San Francisco. However, she dropped out after more than a year to start a freelancing career. While acknowledging the fact that her stint helped with the basics, she points out, "I don't believe that art school is essential. In all creative pursuits there is a point where you must trust yourself to break away from school, mentors, books, and simply create."

Chanani counts Craig Thompson, Marjane Satrapi and Gene Yang among her influences, all of whom shot to fame after publishing autobiographical works which did not shy away from the darker aspects of their authors' respective childhoods. But unsurprisingly, Chanani isn't one to jump on the bandwagon. "I created a 200-plus page graphic memoir of my life. I had a very traumatic childhood and in the end I decided that highlighting that part of my life isn't how I want to share my story. It will never be seen by the public but I am happy that I created it," she explains.

Despite her prolific output of digital art, Chanani manages to find time out for more traditional mediums; her brilliant wood burnings can be seen at her website. She hopes that in the future, the art community starts giving due credit to digital artists. Like a true maverick, she remains quite happy with the artistic path she's chosen. "Looking at my romantic, whimsical artwork won't start a revolution, but I did make a conscious decision to create the kind of work that reminds people to stop, look and see that beauty is everywhere," she adds.

The 'fickle' visual landscape of Kostas Kiriakakis

Kostas Kiriakakis' monsters seem, paradoxically, to be quite humaniform: a gnarled old troll, bathed in sunlight, peeks at you from behind a tree in a forest with a long-suffering expression. Clearly it's hard work being a troll. A buxom woman with the head of a pig stares right back at you, her curves as defiant as the fleshy snout she sports. The American photographer Diane Arbus, famous for her portraits of giants, dwarves and other assorted 'freaks', made sure her subjects stared unflinchingly back at the camera as if to say, "This is what I am and I've made my peace with it." A similar normalising air pervades Kiriakakis' canvas, out of which flow monsters of every kind imaginable.

An independent artist born in Crete, the southernmost island of Greece, Kiriakakis recently moved back to his home island. Ask him about his penchant for monsters and he says, "I think monsters for me have always been an endless source of inspiration and fun. When photography first came into play, painters moved away from capturing nature to things like abstraction, surrealism, symbolism...the sky was the limit. The essence of a monster, on the other hand, remained untouched by all this. A monster is never really there for you to see, and that's exactly what I find to be so pure and simple about them."

His website Kappa Fanta welcomes visitors to 'The somewhat fickle visual landscape of one Kostas Kiriakakis'. Stylistically, 'fickle' is the right word, for Kiriakakis' work encompasses several radically different styles. This is amply demonstrated by Gothic posters reminiscent of artist Dave McKean's work, or a Yamaha ad rendered as a parody of the Mughal miniature style. While these are, at the end of the day, tributes, Kiriakakis' playful, mischievous humour shines through. Speaking about his fondness for fan art, he says, "I've always thought of fan-art as more like fun-art. You keep these certain elements that maintain the soul of an original work and put everything else in a blender with all sorts of other stuff."

Kiriakakis' output until now has been thin on comics and full-length narratives, something which he attributes to his late exposure to comic book creators like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. However, he's working on changing that. One of his stories was featured in the 2012 edition of Flight, an annual journal which features work by upcoming artists. A day at the park, a one-shot comic posted on Kappa Fanta brings the talents of Kiriakakis the writer to the fore. The story features two monsters; one with a box of Questions and the other a collector of Answers.

Speaking about this timeless debate between dissent and certitude, Kiriakakis says, "There is something inevitably elitist in thinking that it's up to artists to 'ask questions', although it sometimes feels like the truth. Maybe creative people are just taking on to themselves the 'burden' of making the Question serve mankind instead of just themselves. And, oh boy, what a burden that is!"