Let’s go to
the A-List table,” said an author at Neemrana, some years ago
and left the table where a couple of poets and other Indian writers
were sitting.
And while we can
sneer at his social climbing, the media aren’t much better. A
weekly news magazine said that the Kitab festival has no A-list authors.
I don’t know what that means. I think it means: no millionaire
writers. I think it means: none of the Big Advance Boys. I think it
means: if you’re writing a book and you have some ideas, we of
the media have no time for you. Only call us if someone is willing to
pay you a few hundred thousands or more.
We don’t invent
the A-list any more. The marketing johnnies decide. Take the case of Kaavya Viswanathan |
What happened to
the idea of the book itself? What happened to the idea of the counterculture,
that there could be something we were interested in that has nothing
to do with how many dollars someone thought it was worth? What happened
to the idea of the underdog, championing the cause of other literatures,
other voices? Where did it all go? Has the market truly begun to dictate
our minds to the extent that we can ignore the whole of Poetry Live
Mumbai at the Kala Ghoda festival: the whole event, its inventor Simon
Powell; the poets who came from England, Gillian Clarke and Simon Armitage;
the poets who came from various parts of Mumbai; the poet who came from
Pune; everyone; because they don’t write what is fashionable?
Have we sold ourselves the notion that the bestseller is actually literature?
And here is the
bitterest vetch that we will all have to swallow. We don’t invent
the A-list any more. The marketing johnnies decide who is the A-List.
Take the case of Kaavya Viswanathan. She wrote a book that was pretty
awful. But lots of noise was made about it because it got her a six-figure
advance. It did not matter that the book was a Valley Girl romance in
disguise. It did not matter that it did nothing to language or with
language. The entire press had multiple orgasms, spewing great gobs
of ink over the money. Stop a moment.
Who was the fool
at Little, Brown who decided to give her the money? A publishing contract?
Sure. A couple of thousand dollars? Certainly. Who decided that this
was worth a million dollars? Someone in the marketing department probably.
Someone who thought, “We need someone to bring in the brown dollar.”
Then they hand her this huge advance so that the media will notice.
We duly took notice.
Had she not been
unveiled as a plagiarist, she would have been A-List.
