Every so often, say about thrice a week, I walk into office to find two or three new books sitting on my desk, sent by various publishers for the purpose of review. Since books are reviewed by another section, which also receives the same copies, I often don’t know what to do with mine. Most of the time I give them away to colleagues; occasionally, I retain the odd book to make the bookshelf at work look respectable. I never bring such books home because I do not want to mix books bought with hard-earned money with free copies. In any case, the writers I like to read are either dead or no longer write.
But I must say that I always tear open the packets containing these books with the greatest delight, as if scraping the silver coating on a scratch card, hoping to strike gold. The end result is the same as scratching a card: you land up with something you don’t want. The books I receive are mostly works of fiction by Indian writers: the publishers are invariably reputed but the authors are usually unheard of, even though many are described in the blurb as ‘bestselling’.
Once the delight of tearing the packet wears off, I find myself gripped with worry. Every month, if not every week, at least 10 new writers are introduced in the market and 20 new books released: so how does one stand out in the crowd and, more importantly, remain in public memory, that too at a time when bookshops are shutting down and the book-reading public has found distraction in the form of the smartphone?
When I decided that I wanted to be a writer someday — this was in the late 1980s, when I was still in my teens — there were precisely four Indians who had secured fame by writing in English: R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Khushwant Singh. Younger writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth had only just arrived on the scene. They were all respected figures, but not household names.
Shobhaa De was probably the first writer to become a household name: a glamorous woman writing about sex in her novels titillated the Indian mind. Even then, she didn’t quite succeed in glamorising the profession of writing — that happened when Arundhati Roy won the Booker. The lay Indian, who saw writing as the vocation of day-dreamers, suddenly saw the recognition, respect and reward attached to it.
Today, one in every five English-speaking household boasts of a writer or an aspiring writer. You no longer hear people saying, “I will write a book someday”; they are actually going ahead and writing them, many of which land on my desk — and many other desks.
Tomorrow my novels — if and when I write them — too will join the glut and land on the desks of people who wouldn’t have heard of me. There’s no way I can tell them, “Look, my work is superior, please give it special treatment”; if I do that, they will retort, “Oh yeah? Every writer thinks like that.”
Writing is undoubtedly a lonely profession, but today so many people are treading that lonely path that it’s quite a crowd out there. So how does one stand out? That’s worrying me.
