Of late I have noticed that we have so many lit-fests, we possibly run short of books to discuss. Good thing that micro-blogging is today regarded as legit manuscript, just like extreme eating might one day vie to be an Olympic discipline, providing much fodder for the empty hay-sheds that are most craniums today.
But India, oh glorious India. Incredible, nay I say indelible, incredulous India, we love literature. We love it more than any other country ever can. And this is not just some government official holding forth in a rant about the GST, I have substantial, weighted evidence to hold my theory down. Here are a few pointers as to why we embrace literature, classic and contemporary, like no other population on Earth.
1. Harry Potter: We had Potter mania before the series was a seedling in JK Rowling’s head. Traffic on our roads is more Quidditch than the game in the book itself. And the men of our country have peed in 9 and 3/4th urinals since the inception of western toilets, Swachh Bharat be damned!
2. Shakespeare: From Marlowe to Bacon, princes to pauper playwrights, the conspiracy theories abound and yet, nobody, not one true Hindutva-lovin’ soul worth his beef-abstaining and religion-preaching guts, has proposed that Shakespeare was, in fact, pure Indian. No, not Rabindranath Tagore, but the real Shakespeare. He was as Indian as Jesus Christ, or like the Taj is a Shiva temple. For who else but a maha-sanskaari could write a whole love saga about two souls who were not destined to marry due to a long-standing family disagreement? Their honour killing is merely read by others while we have imbibed it into our lives. I say we henceforth call the Bard by his original name, Shekhar-pyaare . His other stories live on in the endless saas-bahu sagas of our times.
3. Roald Dahl: Recently, while re-visiting this author, I realised that once again we’d missed a candidate for Ghar Waapsi . For he was more Indian than any other author of his times. Why? Because he made up words, just like we do. Vocabulary and dictionaries are for the bookish and boring. We find dogs like ‘Pomarian’ of great ‘ intrust’ and when we go on holidays we follow our ‘itinary’ and check into ‘hotulls’ . We ‘prepone’ things and we eat our soups in mathematical proportions like ‘one into two’ or ‘two by three .’ Dahl, surely, wouldn’t have been biffsquiggled by our gobblefunk.
4. Douglas Adams: Finally, to round off this absolute gem of a list, I have hunted down the late Douglas Adams. He wrote that to travel through interstellar space all you need is a copy of ‘the book’ and a small towel which could double up as many things: head scarf to food source. Our local gamcha seems to be precisely that, from a bedspread one day to a towel the next. Today, we even honour our eminent figures by putting a gilded one around their necks. And when we visit someone at their house we definitely don’t turn up with anything more than a hand towel and a bedside book thereby requiring our hosts to provide everything, as if we less visiting and more moving in. And thus Adams’ legacy lives on, here in metropolitan India.
I could go on with examples from literary archives that are ever so beautifully woven into our Indian diaspora. Who knew that the fictional vagaries of the great minds of times gone would manage to find umbrage in the vestiges of our quotidian lives?
This column is for anyone who gives an existential toss.
