Inside the Confessional

India’s first big blog-to-book phenomenon Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan prides herself on her honesty, says ANASTASIA GUHA

IAM NOT GOING out very much right now, I stay at home and watch TV in the evenings,” says 26-year-old Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan. This is a departure of sorts; two weeks before the launch of her book You Are Here, published by Penguin Books, one imagined Madhavan, a self-professed single girl about town, would be… well, about town.

By the arguably crude standards of online hit-counters, Madhavan’s blog is popular. At over 8.5 lakh hits, there is no running away from the fact. Her writing on her blog is in the vein of successful books like Belle de Jour, The Sexual Life of Catherine M and Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl but her subject matter is nowhere near as incendiary. Yes, there are sexual encounters, all-night clubbing, angsty boytalk, mentions of ovulation and its distressing byproducts, all suitably drowned in vodka. But really, so what?

What is it about this brand of writing, this confessional style, which is so compulsive? Part of it has to do with the voyeuristic instincts that lead us to the office cooler and the nearest Stardust — for the latest gossip, fuelled by the perverse fascination of watching people willingly, even eagerly, exposing themselves in public. The other has to do with these writers’ ability to write, to draw us in, to communicate their compulsions. And of course, they are eye-wateringly honest; that is, after all, what they are selling.

“I think my writing is fantastic,” says Madhavan, rapidly following through with an impish giggle. She says she has developed a voice though her blog over the last four years, but thinks the real reason her writing stands out is that “I really don’t bullshit; I take pride in being completely honest with myself and with other people.”

Madhavan started blogging whilst in a dead-end job to relieve her boredom. You Are Here traces a year in the life of 25-year-old Arshi, a Delhi girl who has a bad job and lives alone. The book is a product of the blog, which caught the attention of editors at Penguin. Diya Kar Hazra, the book’s editor explains: “It was hard work getting Meenakshi to sit and write — given her busy calendar. But she is great at creating mood and she has a confessional style that makes you read on. I would call it a single- in-the-city book.”

Smells deeply sitcomesque. “Saying my lifestyle is like Friends or Sex and the City is patronising. Global India has a definite culture of its own, and I am a desi product,” Madhavan says, clearly resentful of the “Westernised!” slurs flung from across the street. Metaphorically, of course.

Being brought up by literary parents and being an alumnus of schools like Shiv Niketan (famous pupils include Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi) and Lawrence, Lovedale, and finishing off with a literature degree from Lady Shri Ram College, must have its advantages. Her mother, literary critic Sheila Reddy wonders “if she (Madhavan) realises that my generation paved the way for her.” Reddy talks of being told she was bringing up a misfit, but says she believed that a change in society’s attitudes was nigh.

It is strange to hear the same words come from mother and daughter — their indignation about You Are Here being labeled as chick lit — “It is such a lazy label; then Jane Austen should be chick-lit as well.” Anyway, “it is not the kind of writing I want to do for the rest of my life,” Madhavan announces.

Modern confessional writing has been both rubbished as authorial catharsis and lauded as rigorous and discursive. Whether You Are Here adds to the canon or whether it lives up to the promise of the blog is going to be a matter of opinion. What is more certain is that its author admits to being somewhat of a frothy concoction, nothing more and nothing less. •