Arnab Ray's Blog, page 13

A Legend Is Born

Like most Indians, I had no idea of what a Produnova was till a week ago, would never have been able to tell it from a Supernova or a Kournikova.

Now I know.

Thank you Dipa Karmakar. You are now a legend and an inspiration. That does not mean, we as a nation will remember you, of course we won’t, unless we have Farhan Akthar or Priyanka Chopra playing you in your biopic, with the script written by Shobha De or Chetan Bhagat, each of whom will then go on to make more money off your name than you will manage in a lifetime.

But thank you, because for those few seconds when you floated in the air, you inspired us, a nation with little culture of sports or physical exercise, at least compared to the world, to soar, before we came down to the bitching and backbiting and snarky people that we usually are.

Dipa Karmakar came forth. She did not win. Who cares?

Yes I have already heard that.

For one, the context matters. Being fourth in the cricket World Cup is not the same as being fourth in the football World Cup. Being fourth in the cricket World Cup in 2016 for India is not the same as being fourth in the cricket World Cup in 1975. And being fourth in a gymnastics women’s event is not the same as being fourth in many other events at the Olympics.

Sorry boss. Not all sports are created equal. Not even at the Olympics.

And here is the final kicker. A flat-footed girl, overcame the sexism and prejudices and the overall mismanagement and lack of infrastructure that characterizes all of our Olympics sports, and that too from a state which most Indians won’t be able to find on a map of their country, to shoot to 2nd on the roster after the sixth contestant, to settle to 4 finally, in gymnastics, and yes read that again gymnastics, is pretty legendary awesome.

But what about PT Usha? What about Milkha Singh? They came fourth in track and field, we are told, and only if they had come third, we would have been China in the Olympics. But no. It’s not they to blame for India’s wretched position in sports in the community of nations, those champions did what they could. It was the failure of their generations, and those that came after that, to take the spark they lit and turn it into a fire. Maybe the country doesn’t think Olympic sports was important enough. Maybe there were other priorities. But whatever the reasons be as to why India is where it is in world sports, to somehow use that to disparage the performance of an Usha or a Singh and now a Karmakar is Indian whining at its worst. No one cares for the struggles of these people for four years, or bother to tune in to National athletics events on TV or horror of horrors, attend an event in person and cheer for them, and then they wake up and expect medals, and if that isn’t a sense of false entitlement I don’t know what is.

So well done Dipa Karmakar. Well done.

I shall not forget.

[Picture: Indian Express]

 

 

Zakir Naik and Free Speech

In 1999, the Ku Klux Klan wanted to have a rally in New York City. The City refused to grant them permission. The Klan ultimately did have their rally, no small reason due to the support they got from the unlikeliest of quarters, black Civil Rights groups.

This Voltarian “I may not agree with what you say but I shall fight till death your right to say them” is a principle every free speech fundamentalist parrots, but very few stand by them consistently. It’s easy to stand for free speech as long as you agree with it. But the rubber truly hits the road when you come face to face with opinions that you consider despicable. Do you then stand by the right of the individual to express what he wants to say, as Black Civil Rights groups did, or do you run to Mummy government asking for duct tape and a room with no windows?

Zakir Naik is such a test. Since sometime during the 2010s, I have been following the preachings of Zakir Naik, marveling at his unapologetic Islamic supremacist world-view, with a sense of revulsion that I reserve for flying cockroaches and half-boiled eggs and centipedes mating. Every other religion is wrong and his is perfect, and women may be beaten at the husband’s behest, and the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was a lesson for Buddhists, and a variation of “If loving Osama, the enemy of those who make Islam their enemy, is wrong, I don’t want to be right”, and all this is just him clearing his throat, getting started.

So when “the nation” or rather that one person who claims to represent it on prime-time asks for banning him and taking his Peace TV off air, I have to, with infinite reluctance, as a free-speech fundamentalist, support Zakir Naik’s right to say what he does without being gagged for it. This is a grey area, but as far as I have seen or heard, Zakir Naik never directly gives a call for violence or for war, in the way that a Hafeez Sayed does, which would then put him squarely in the area marked as hate-speech and subject, in my opinion, to legal sanction. Not that Naik does not skate close to the red line, for instance look at his dancing around death for apostasy in Islam, but he never gives an overt call for action.

He is smart that way.

Zakir Naik isn’t a recent phenomenon. He is well-known, has been provided a platform on national news channels,  is as mainstream as mainstream gets, and continues the messaging and the techniques of his “guru”, Ahmed Deedat. Nothing new anywhere. No one seemed to have a problem with him for all these years. Now that we hear that he was the inspiration for the Dhaka attacks, not that he directly planned or executed them, the call has been raised for him to be banned. The “inspiration” or “provocation” argument is a slippery slope, shifting responsibility from the perpetrator of the evil to supposed external stimuli, and, once accepted, can be used to regulate or ban chow-mein, cell-phones, short skirts, item numbers (all external stimuli held responsible for violence against women), or cartoons of Prophets and books written by Salman Rushdie and Tasleema Nasreen and then by extension, pretty much everything else. What Zakir Naik does is again qualitatively different from shouting “Fire in a crowed theater”, where the natural legally-justifiable reaction should be to run. Not here though. No matter what Zakir Naik may say or imply, the criminal act starts the moment you enter that restaurant and start slicing necks. Not before.

India’s laws are, if you go by the letter, not very favorably inclined to the likes of Naik. Anyone who promotes disharmony between religions is subject to legal sanction, and Zakir Naik is pretty much dead to rights on that one. But then I have argued before on the blog that I believe that Indian laws provide too many restrictions on free-speech, which allows anyone, prominent media figures and owners of educational institutes and political figures, to shut down pretty much anything they don’t like, by exercising the power of a lawyer letter and a day in court. I favor something akin to the US First Amendment, and before you point out that Zakir Naik was refused entry to the US and so how can they be for absolute free speech, let me say that this is for that reason only, the US does not want Naik to enter the US and use the power provided by its laws to carry on his proselytizing activities. And since he is not an US citizen, that is a legitimate thing for the US to do. Alas, we in India do not have the choice but to bear him, he being an Indian citizen.

The problem with banning someone like Naik, besides of course the principle of it, is the sheer impracticality. His videos will circulate and be hosted on Youtube and people who had never heard of Zakir Naik before will now do, and he will be on the cover of magazines as a “victim” of India’s intolerance, the dog-whistle of choice for the opponents of the current regime. Also Zakir Naik preaches to the choir. The irony is that anyone who actually gets “influenced” by his supremacist ideology, is already convinced, and if it’s not Naik, it will be someone else. There is no shortage of his ilk on Youtube.

But this I can say for Naik. At least he is honest. In that he says what he means.

Far more insidious in their messaging, and hence more dangerous, are many of our media personalities, who under the garb of neutrality and moderation, spin a false narrative, as evidenced by the recent image-makeover of a dangerous terrorist into an idealist rebel, that de-legitimizes the rule of law and demonizes the notion of India as a nation.

Of course I would still support their right to free speech, as I do Naik’s and Kamlesh Tiwari’s.

The two ISISs

I read this often, in social media updates and in tweets from blue-tick media mavens, that an overwhelming majority of ISIS violence is on Muslims (in this case 90%) , and so, by an extension, what are you non-Muslims getting your chaddis in a bunch for? The dissonance, in the above statement, stems from the overloading of the word ISIS in popular discourse, used as it is to refer to both a group in the Syria-Iraq region and also to radical Islamic fundamentalism in general, where the kill count of the former, or more precisely per-centage of Muslim on Muslim violence, is used to make a point about the latter.

But before we get into all that, let’s first talk about ISIS, the organization. It is intellectually lazy to call ISIS a radical Muslim group, especially when someone is purporting to have a serious discussion. Of course it is that only, but that’s not what defines them. The ISIS, more precisely, is a radical Sunni Muslim organization that espouses Salafism, a philosophy of intense Islamic fundamentalism. Salafists emphasize a return to the roots of Islam, to the rule of the rightly-guided Caliphs (the first four leaders of the Islam faith, after the death of Prophet Mohammed), in a very literal way. Which is why they seek to establish their vision of medieval utopia in the lands they control. They are kind of like auditors, in that they are extremely literal in their interpretation of standard operating procedure and standards. For instance, they take Islam’s strictures against idol worship to extreme levels. They are violently against music, even music that is Islamic and religious, and sometimes against even their own places of worship, as is evidenced in the recent attack at Medina.

This however should not be spun, as it is done, that they are against Islam. Of course they aren’t. They are against practices in Islam they believe are un-Islamic, practices that the rest of the world, including a majority of Muslims, think are perfectly Islamic. This naturally puts them against many Muslims. Shias and Sufis are particularly hated, and so are homosexuals and liberal Muslims of all sorts. Even many Sunnis, who might consider themselves to be orthodox enough, but do not meet the standards set by Salafists, lie squarely in their crosshairs. And as the ISIS has shown, time and time again, the distance between “against” and “I will kill you using methods that would be considered extreme in a Saw film” is a very short straight line for them.

One of the fundamental tenets of Salafism is that the rulers of the Islamic world, post the reign of the rightly-guided Caliphs, have allowed Muslims to deviate away from the original moral ideals of Islam, and, if that was not bad enough, have allied with enemies of Islam, like the West and the Jewish state of Israel, to  cling onto power. This is why for more than a century, Salafist preachers have found themselves in jail, and on death row, in Sunni Islamic countries like Syria and Egypt. Salafists have always been anti-establishment, where the establishment is defined as a Muslim Sunni Arab government, their message of returning to a hypothetical state of medieval purity attractive for Arab Sunni Muslims, disgusted by the corruption of their governments, and their failure to solve the overwhelming Arab problem of the last hundred years. Palestine. This is a point often missed in many word-riots in the media, the fundamentally Arab identity of ISIS, and this is why any beyond-perfunctory understanding of who they are killing and why they are killing them requires you to understand Arab & Middle Eastern politics.

In the 1920s, the House of Saud scouted the sands for hardy nomadic tribesmen, proselytized them with a local strain of Salafism called Wahabism, named after a certain Muhammed al-Wahab, and converted them into a militia called the Ikhwan, which they then used to assert their hegemony over an area, where the discovery of oil, had opened up many wars. But soon the House of Saud found themselves in conflict with the Ikhwan, because the Ikhwan felt that the Sauds were, and you may want to be sitting down when you read this, not Islamic enough, because they had done things like bring in modern automation, and had sent their princes to the land of non-believers, namely England, for study and fun. Over the years, the conflict became more marked, leading to the Ikhwan revolt, which was put down savagely by the House of Saud. In 1979, another group of Wahabi fanatics, calling themselves al-Ikhwan as a shout-out to the original Ikhwan, seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, leading to an armed conflict with the House of Saud once again.

The reason I give this brief history is to establish, that the most orthodox of Arab rulers, the House of Saud, has had persistent problems with Salafis (in the case of Saudi Arabia, the word Wahabi is used), a problem they have sought to solve by throwing money at Wahabis, by financing their proselytizing activities in other lands, under the assumption that if they are engaged elsewhere, they won’t come creating trouble in their backyard. So yes, the Saudi ruling class have killed a lot of ISIS-like people over the ages, probably more than anyone else, but does make them tolerant or less of an enabler or honestly, significantly better, than the ISIS?

I am going to go with no.

Now to specifically ISIS. ISIS rose as a result of the US invasion of Iraq, that overthrew a secular (by the standards of the area) Sunni leader Saddam Hussein. The Shia majority of the country welcomed the US invasion, stoking Sunni fears of a loss of hegemony. Sectarian violence broke out, and combined with the rebellion in Syria, led to large territories with minimal control, and ISIS rose to fill in the gap.

It is thus only natural that most of ISIS’s conflict would be with other Muslims, whether it be Shia groups or Sunnis who fought for the Iraqi army or Syrian army against them.  The region has never been known for ethnic and religious diversity, and for good reason too, but the kind of savagery heaped on the Yazidis, specially Yazidi women, should be enough to convince anyone with an open mind that for the ISIS, all their enemies are not created equal. That Muslims, mostly Shias and Sunnis who fought for the other side, form a large majority of ISIS’s victims is simply because they are the vast majority in the regions in which they operate.

Which brings me to the fundamental confusion. ISIS the group is different from ISIS, the global Jihad brand.  ISIS, the group, with its very successful social media campaign, an irony given their Luddite roots,  has caught the attention of many Islamic groups all over the world, with very different political compulsions and goals. and thus created ISIS, the brand.

In Kashmir, the raising of ISIS flags is the adoption of the supremacist brand of Islam, rather than a deep acceptance of Salafi principles. A Kashmiri militant’s enemy is the Indian government and the Kashmiri Pandit, he has no history with the troops of Bashar-al-Assad, nor does he want the fall of the House of Saud. The same way, the ISIS leader, sitting in Mosul, won’t be able to point out Kashmir on a map, and wouldnt even care for the struggles of non-Arab Muslims of any denomination, unless for strategic brand-building reasons. And yet both are being referred to as ISIS in the eight o clock news, which is where the confusion originates.

Similarly, when a bunch of rich Dhaka boys, bored with their life of privilege, take a crash course online in Salafi philosophy, take some pictures and send them off to the ISIS social media people, they end up appropriating Arab headgear and their names, but are unable to lose their Bangali identity. That is why they go around the restaurant butchering guests, they ask “Are you Bangali?”. In their fundamentalism-addled brain, the Salafi philosophy has been cross-producted with their Bangali identity, leading them to equate “non-Bengali” with “non-Islamic”. Were their victims 90% Muslims? I am guessing, given their criterion of releasing people who could reside the Quaran, possibly not. What about the Paris bombings? What about the Florida night-club shootings? What was the religious distribution of the victims there? One can go on, but the point, I believe has been made.

The crisis we find ourselves today is less from ISIS the organization, which is largely contained in a small area and will not expand, but ISIS the brand. Islamic groups, and damaged individuals,  across the world, who adopt the brand do to serve their own political interests or to provide a religious justification for their homicidal agendas. Just as we can do without targetting an entire religion for the activities of a few, as Donald Trump and Islamophobes of different hues say we do, so too can do without the semantic sleight of hand of trivializing the threat of ISIS, by conflating the organization in Syria-Iraq by the name of ISIS with the global brand of radical Islamic fundamentalism which goes by the same name.

World War Three

[Image courtesy: Indian Express]

The fall of the USSR, as a superpower, ended global war as we knew it. The overwhelming superiority that the United States commands, and continues to, in terms of conventional and nuclear capabilities make it impossible for nation-states to engage it directly in the field of battle. The age-old imperative for armed conflict, the conquering of rich lands and capturing natural resources, is no longer realizable in the world of the coalition of the willing, as Saddam Hussein found out in 1991. This, and the nature of the modern economy where wealth lies no longer comes from the ground, save for oil, makes industrial espionage and cyber-attacks directed at large corporations, a more strategic pathway for grabbing the resources  of others, than  charging forward with armies of horses and swords.

So, on the face of it, we should be seeing a period of physical peace, with conflict migrating largely to cyberspace, with nation-states and criminal gangs as actors.

And yet we are, and I use the words with full realization of their import, in the middle of a Third World War. The theater of this war is global, as World Wars are by definition, from Nigeria to Bali, from Sudan to Paris, from the USA to Australia, from India to Spain. The life of every citizen is in danger, whether it be in the lounge of an airport or out in your favorite restaurant, tending sheep in the mountains of Afghanistan or walking to a school in Nigeria. And while we do not see casualties on the scale a Hiroshima or a Leningrad or a Dresden, The Third World War, more than makes up for that by virtue of its longevity and inscrutability, subverting as it does every assumption history has taught us about wars. And the reason why the one with lesser power, if we go by traditional metrics of military might, is winning is because America and the world at large chooses to fight the war in a way that they have been used to.

With tragic consequences.

For this is not your grandpa’s war.

For one, the enemy has no centralized command and control, no cut off the head of the serpent, no Hitler’s bunker to storm. Which means you kill Bin Laden and you get Baghdadi, and if you kill him out will pop some other exotic name. ISIS may be reduced to a rump, and so may be the Taliban, but that does not lower the intensity of the global Jihad, because ISIS or whatever acronym is popular at the time, is never really in control of the war. World War 3 is franchised, in the way soda conglomerates are, where you have franchisees, bottling and distributing, and then sticking the label at the end to become the brand. ISIS or Al-Qaeda are primarily that, a fancy sticker with a good marketing budget, and of the global Jihad organizations, ISIS understands this the most. Which is why their videos of decapitations and stoning and burning and throwing off tall buildings are so professionally produced, they are developing their brand in a way that corporations, and forgive the pun, would kill for. In contrast, Al-Qaeda is still grainy VHS tapes and old men droning on incoherently, the Blackberry to ISIS’s iPhone.

Second there is an almost invisible line between combatants and non-combatants. One side does not wear an uniform, one side does not live in garrisons, one side does not march in formation. Targeting them through conventional warfare, as is done in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq, causes high collateral damage of non-combatants, which then provides the other side a narrative of victimhood which they can leverage to recruit and expand their war. Trying to pre-empt strikes using pro-active policing and restrictions on flow of people across borders leads to charges of targeting and profiling, which again strengthens the victimhood narrative. Killing the radical Islamist post-terror-strike also ends up as a victory for the other side, because unlike conventional forces, the tactics of the radical Islamists do not include an escape plan. They fight to die, and therein is their victory. Or so the messaging says. Despite all this, The West keeps fighting the war of the 1940s, spending billions on conventional warfare, the so-called “shock and awe” demonstration of overwhelming military might, and that only aggrandizes the defense industry and their political backers,  while being largely ineffective for the war at hand.

Third, the motivation of the enemy is amorphous and varied.  Yes there is a vaguely articulated aim to establish an Islamic caliphate or the liberation of Palestine, but that does not explain an attack in Paris or in Dhaka or why well-educated privileged men from Europe are running off to Syria.  For some, the global Jihad is a way to live out fantasies they cannot in a civilized world, to murder, maim and rape with impunity, under the comforting cocoon of an ideology. Kind of like the movie “Purge”, except it’s every day. For others, rich urban young men, it is simply a way of becoming famous, the quickest way to attain world-wide notoriety, even though it comes at the cost of death. The more violent and lurid the executions, the greater the social media capital. And for a few, its lashing out at supposed Western evils, like promiscuity, where the underlying pathology, if we care to go through their social media postings, is not getting enough of the evil themselves.

The path to global Jihad is many and it is this diversity that makes it impossible to solve or root out, at a fundamental level. You cannot regime-change it. You cannot hearts-and-minds it. You cannot buy, kill or hug your way out of it. To make a pop culture analogy, the war is being fought as if the opponent is the greedy Penguin, who operates on conventional perceptions of gain and loss. Except it is the Joker, and no one, definitely not he himself, knows why he does what he does, except to “see the world burn”.

And finally, in today’s world, victory lies in perception. It was the Vietnam War that first brought this home, that you could win on the ground and yet lose, if the other side seizes the messaging high-ground. This is where the forces of global Jihad have chalked up their greatest victory. While every act of brutality they commit increases their support-base, which is why they spend so much time on publicizing them through slickly shot videos, every act of violence they endure and the collateral damage that such acts inevitably bring about also, and here is where the paradox is, strengthen their narrative of victimhood. In other words, they cut both ways. Their opponents however are hamstrung by having to appear to stand on the moral high ground. That is why they have to lie to go to war, and use rendition to perform torture, and use elaborate structures of secrecy to hide that which happens in every war, the indiscriminate killing of innocents. Except that the subterfuge is invariably caught, and they end up looking bad, and, yes, you guessed it, it helps the PR department of their enemy. Now this is some shit that General MacArthur and Eisenhower never had to deal with.

If all this sound dire, it is. The Third World War is a war without end, and like diabetes and genital herpes it cannot be cured but only controlled, and that too at great personal sacrifice, like eating vegetables or, in this case, through restrictions on civil liberties.

This is, of course, that stage of the article where I am supposed to propose a solution, or at least one that hasn’t been tried or you the reader haven’t thought of, but I cannot.

All I can do is to ask for those reading it to be thankful to be alive tonight. And to take heart that, unless you are in Syria or Iraq or right next to the Boko Haram, that you are more likely to die from a heart attack or from a side-impact collision than World War 3.

That, I am afraid, is about all the positivity I can offer.

[Update: My next two books, Sultan of Delhi Ascension and Mahabharata Murders, are releasing October and December, 2016]

 

 

The Interview

[This is a work of fiction. Resemblance to anyone alive or dead is purely coincidental]

Danguli leans back into the comfortable board-room chair. “For coach, I am going with Anil Bumble. Great slide deck, nice bar graphs, professionally formatted strategy document, vision plans, effort tracking tools, and, what can I say, he has a good brain for “Anil-atics”.” Danguli allows himself a sideways grin, “Kya PJ mara yaar”.

“Last time you looked at a bunch of fancy graphics on screen and got so excited, we got Chappall”. WWF Laxman says, adjusting his hair.

“There is a difference.”

“What? The font size?”

“No”, says Danguli with a smug grin, ” This time I am not playing.”

Laxman leans forward. “I still think we should go with Bom Moody”.

“No no”, Danguli shakes his head animatedly, “One Modi in Delhi is enough. No need for another.”

“See I have worked with him at SunSet Hyderabad. I mean it’s not an easy team to coach. In batting, Sunset Hyderabad are like David Warmer and the Mohun Begun Second Eleven. If it had not been for Prashant Sharma, we would have won the title earlier, see even the greatest captain India ever had can’t go better than bottom of table with him. Now imagine how good…”

“No I said no. I see him and I remember Chappall. Australian too and that chap was also always so moody.”

WWF Laxman looks to his side and said ” Eh Bhagwandulkar, what do you think?”

Bhagwandulkar is absent-mindedly doing something on his phone. “Think about what?”

Danguli slaps the table with his palm lightly “Are you not paying any attention to what’s going on here? You think this is Rajya Sabha?”

“No no”, Bhagwandulkar shakes his shoulders shyly, “Was just trying to understand how Snapchat filters work. You are saying…”

“Well we wanted to know what you had to say about Bumble…”

“Ailaa.” Bhagwandulkar suddenly standing up, his face frozen in terror, “Kahaan hai woh? Naheen naheen kya bol re le…”

WWF holds Bhagwandulkars hand and says “He said Bumble, not Bambli.”

“Oh” Bhagwandulkar smiles apologeticaly, “Danguli’s Bengali accent aur mai bhi thoda distract tha, I heard some other name. Anil Bumble, Haan woh to baarabar hai. We both mentors on Mumbai Manoos team. Both Hambani ke haath. No problem.”

Just then someone knocks on the door. Danguli gets up and opens it to find a person standing there.

“Chaa laya? With thin arrrowroot biskoot as I asked?”

“Myself Venkatesh Pasand. I am here for interview.”

“Interview?” Danguli scratches his head, ” I dont think you were shortlisted for this stage.”

Venkatesh Pasand looks at him vacantly, “Shortlist? When did that happen?”

“Oh you are so slow,” Danguli says exasperatedly, “We initially had a longlist and then we made it to a shortlist.” Seeing a letter in Pasand’s hand he grabs at it and reads through it.

“This is a letter from 1993, saying you have been shortlisted for bowling trial. This is 2016. Oh by Dull-Miyan…”

And right then, a confident gentleman brushes past Pasand and enters the board-room. He is carrying a ream of papers, and a laptop.

“Hello, I am Randeep Patil.” The new arrival says in a deep baritone , “I am here for head coach interview”.

Danguli looks at the new arrival with suspicion. “Powerpoint hai? Strategy document? Vision statement, data analytics demo?”

He shakes his head. “Nope, don’t do computers. Too old for that.”

“Then what’s that laptop for?” WWF asks.

“A laptop?” What?”

WWF points to the IBM Thinkpad Randeep Patil has in his hand. “That”

“Oh this is just my paperweight. So that my CV does not fly away in a Randy Storm.” Randeep Patil hands Danguli the sheaf of papers.

Danguli flips through the pages nonchalantly, “Bollywood films.,, I see,” and then he says “There is nothing here I can use, just pages and pages of your scores. I mean this is like Bhagwandulkar’s authorized biography, just paraphrasing of scorecards, how does it help me?”

“Oh”, says Randeep Patil, adjusting his Aviators, “for you I have this.” He hands Danguli a few envelopes.

“Recommendations. From Bibroto Roy and even…” He pauses for effect “Debashree Roy”

“Sit down” says Danguli, pensively, “I am afraid we can’t do anything without a Powerpoint”

“I used to field at point and I used to wear Power shoes. Both in the 80s. If that helps.”

Danguli sighs and says “You need to do better than that.”

“All right then” Randeep Patil says, “Remember World Cup 2003?”

Danguli nods. “Yes”

“You WWF. Do you remember World Cup 2003?”

WWF looks at Danguli poisonously. “No”

“All right, in World Cup 2003, I was the coach for a minnow side. They made 225. Then when India started chasing, the minnow medium pacers started seaming the ball around. India was 3 for 25. Danguli, if you remember, you were not having a good World Cup…scoring runs only against minnows”

“Yes yes go on”, Danguli says impatiently.

“So then when you came into bat, I told my minnows to bring in spin. Spin and slow medium pace. I told them that Danguli has fast bowlers for lunch, but his Achilles Heel so as to say was slow bowling, specially spin bowling. And so…if you remember….you made a century….and…”

WWF says, “Is that what you call good strategy? You told them the exact opposite of what…..”

Danguli gestures to WWF to stop talking. “Hmmm” He says looking through the voluminous CV, “I get what you are saying. Your coaching skills may be in doubt, but not your commitment to Team India.

Suddenly the conference room AV system starts ringing with the incoming Skype call sound.

“What? Who is that?” Danguli asks, and right then, on the large screen TV comes up an image of Kavi Shastri. He is in speedos, lying on a deck chair, with a large colorful cocktail in hand. On coming onto the screen, he yells “Are you ready?”

Danguli is shocked to see Kavi Shastri like this. “Where are you? Were you not supposed to be interviewing with us?”

“I am now in Bangkok. Because that’s what the doctor ordered.”

“And you had to go to Bangkok. “Danguli says slowly, “Now?”

“Something’s gotta give Danguli. I thought, why not interview from here and after that, I will let loose my cat among these pigeons.’

“I would have thought” Danguli says, “that this interview would be more important to you than some time in the sand.”

“Thigh thapa thigh thapa ke Thai. You know what they say about Thailand and Bangkok. Its the land of…”

“Yes Yes I have heard that PJ before. In college.” Danguli says with a mock yawn. “So I am guessing you have no Powerpoints or mission statements or. laptop…”

“I do have a flash drive and I can flash and flash hard.”

“No thank you”, Danguli says, “No need for you to flash. So, why do you think you should get the job?”

“I have been thinking, and I don’t know maybe it’s because of where I am, is that India lacks good hookers. And pullers too. I will start there. Make Indians better against the shorter ball.”

“And you think that is the biggest problem India has?” Danguli asks.

“Definitely. Look at Suresh Rona. Can’t play the short ball. Can’t blame him, he has this other senior in the side he brings up every time we had this discussion. Like him, he was left-handed. Like him, he would hop around every time the ball rose chest-high. You wouldn’t happen to know who I am talking about, would you Danguli?”

WWF smirks in his seat. Bhagwandulkar keeps playing on the phone.

Kavi Shastri laughs. Like a tracer bullet. “Oh Danguli, Komon Ache Kolkota?”

“See that’s the problem. All these years, you can’t even pronounce three words in Bangla and yet you insist on saying them. Again and again. You lack preparation. You lack ability. You lack class. Your commentary is like your cricket, repetitive and limited. And …”

Kavi Shastri laughs out loud and slaps his Thais on the thighs. Then he starts singing

“Yeh pyar ka Nagma hai, maujo ki rawaani hai,

Zindagi aur kuch bhi nahin, sirf edged and taken hai”

Shastri turns his face to WWF, “PJ sun. What’s Danguli’s favorite food nowadays? Corn on the CAB. ”

WWF smiles. Danguli turns his head and gives an angry glare.

“Aur ek PJ sun. What gaali if you give Danguli he gets really angry? Bokachoda-non. ”

Danguli takes a deep breath, and gets up from his chair.

“Arre what are you doing?” Kavi Shastri says, “Complete the interview no?”

Danguli takes a step out, and then another, and says “Just practicing the art of leaving.”

“What about my job? At the end of the day, Kavi Shastri is the winner. Always. Hard luck to Bumble but I have the experience, I have the captain’s trust, I have the Pawar… ”

Danguli shrugs. “You should have showed a bit more seriousness about this interview.”

“Why should I? I have the Board in my pocket. What can you do?”

Danguli smiles, shakes his head, and says, “Only what I have done to every left-handed slow spin bowler for the last twenty years.”

 

 

On Globalization, Trump and Brexit

I grew up in Communist Calcutta, a city of load-shedding black and  Jyoti Basu’s dhoti white.  If there was a category level 5 bad word above bokachoda and chudir bai champakali, it was the word globalization, the hooked talon of the imperialist, or so the Red brothers said, one that they would bury into the chests of our workers and peasants of the Third World and proceed to spill out their entrails.

A few people, among them my father, then a professor of Economics at IIM Calcutta, had argued the other way, that it was the West would be disrupted most by globalization and the so-called Third World would stand to benefit at their expense.

Fast forward decades and it is the imperialists and the free-marketers that are hunkering down in their bomb shelters to contain the radioactive fallout of globalization, with Uncle Sam, the standard-bearer of democracy and cut-throat capitalism, now flirting with fascism and socialism, and Union Jack, the people who brought to you imperialism in the modern world, voting to throw off the foreign yoke and gain “independence”.

As usual, Baba, you were right.

Strange things have happened this year, the political equivalent of the worlds coasts being submerged by rising sea-water. A once-New York-liberal, with as many bankruptcies as East-European wives, whose knowledge of the Bible is as as extensive as his knowledge of the theory of relativity, who a year ago was known simply as a reality show trainwreck of the KRK type, has become the putative nominee of a party with a strong traditional Christian base. And it was not a tired dragging over the finish line, Trump has obliterated the opposition, a roster that was one of the strongest assembled in decades, reducing to smoldering embers the political careers of at least three men, who would have been the nominee any other year.

The scion of America’s most powerful political family whose war-chest was known to be infinite. Low-energy Jeb.

The man considered to be the future face of the party. Sweaty Marco Rubio.

And the darling of the base, whose Christian zeal even the Crusaders of the middle ages would find excessive. Lying Ted Cruz.

On the other side of the fence, an almost-unknown, save outside the circle of C-SPAN and nightly talk shows, who has for decades been a socialist, a political strain of thought, that in America has been as popular as Bajrang Dal would be for the royal family of Saudi Arabia, has come awfully close to derailing a presidential campaign that had been decades in the designing.

And in Britain, in a shock referendum, the country has voted to leave Europe, a possibility that till a few days ago had been dismissed as alarmist.

There is a common driver for all this, and it’s not the man who was driving Salman Khan’s car.

It’s the free flow of goods, services and people. It’s globalization. And its economic and political fallout.

 

On my side of the Atlantic, both Trump and Sanders have tapped into wrath of the post-globalization American, angry that the American Dream, the imaginary compact the greatest nation in the world had with its citizens, wherein if you worked eight hours a day, even as a high school dropout, you could buy a house, have two cars, rear three kids and play baseball on the weekends, is but phantom memory from the 50s and 60s, found only in black and white faded photos, torn pages of Archies comics and in insomniac dreams of Florida pensioners.

In 2016, Americans are working longer hours, often multiple jobs, for less pay and less security,  once-prosperous metropolises like Detroit resemble post-apocalyptic zombiescapes, and “Third World problems” like the lack of clean water plague cities like Flint.

And that’s not the saddest part. It’s that Americans believe that the American dream will be restored once they put the right person in charge, that all it needs for the jobs to come back to America from Mexico and China is a leader with the right intentions.

When people want to believe something with all their heart, history tells us that there will always be a professional con-artist coming in to scam them. And if there is one thing Trump is damn good at, it’s conning people. To be honest to Donald Trump, he is not the only politician peddling snake oil, after all who has the guts to tell the people that this is the new normal, that things are likely to get even worse rather than better.

What however makes him unique and also supremely successful is that the “make America great” again lacks even a cursory attempt of being nuanced, reflecting as it does the wisdom of the mob, raw and xenophobic and hateful and unapologetically so.

Bomb the hell out of the world, kick out all Mexicans, block all Muslims from entering the country, kill the families of terrorists, conquer the Middle East and grab their oil, and force Mexico and China to pay back for what its taken from us. Simple.

Con artists, from palm-readers to penis-length-enhancers, know the trick. Your mark already has a solution in mind. So just say what they want to hear. When a man comes to the astrologer he is expecting a ring. When a woman comes surfing to a dietary supplement webpage, she is looking for a magic pill.  Wear the ring and your business will get better. Rub this oil and you become Ron Jeremy. Two spoons of acai berry and you get the body of Hale Berry. Vote to get out of EU and, bingo, NHS gets fixed and before you can say “Bob’s your uncle” you have Pax Brittanica.

Simple solutions to problems that have none.

Bernie Sanders too treads a somewhat similar path to Trump, but because his crowd, young college-educated white men and women is different from that of Trump’s, his breast-enhancing cream has a different formulation. Take the stuff away from those who have benefited from globalization and hand it out to those who have not. Or as he calls it “paying the fair share”. So his prescription is free health care, free college, free this and free that. He knows that the way the American system is structured, Hell will freeze over before the Congress will ever allow even a very diluted version of what he proposes to pass, but like Trump supporters, Bernie’s don’t really care for the fine print, as long as they find their own personal solution reflected in their hero’s words.

The battle in US politics today is no longer between Republican and Democrat, but between those who want to destroy the globalized system and those who want to preserve it. By putting Hillary into the ring, the Democrats seem to have put themselves on the wrong side of history. fielding a candidate who is, by her past record, Ms. Globalization herself. While a Bernie vs Trump matchup would have been a knockout for Trump, with Hillary, his numbers are more even (recent polls show him tying with Hillary in swing-states of Pennsylvania and Ohio)  and with the threat of Bernie’s angry fans moving over to the other angry man in the contest, the possibility of a Trumpolypse looms large.

The relationship of the individual with globalization is complicated. On one hand, all benefit from it, cheap Walmart goods and Burger King dollar menus. And then, they are victims too, of having to train their replacements and of having to vacate their cubicles for “foreigners” or having to see their jobs being shipped off to other countries. It is only human to be drawn to simplistic solutions like Brexit and Trump, and to hold people responsible for one’s problems rather than amorphous economic systems. While many of their supporters are undoubtedly racist and xenophobic at their core, to color all those behind Trump and Brexit with the same dark brush is not only an intellectually illiberal stance, just like tagging all Muslims as potential terrorists, but also a strategically bad one, because it only ends up making people scared to express their opinions on globalization and immigration lest they be tagged racist, and scaring people into silence pretty much leads them to cling on to the person not vilifying them. In this case Flaming Orange Hair.

If there is anything good that may come out of Brexit is that people outside the UK will understand what happens when you vote from your heart, and not from your head. The devil is in the fine print, from iTunes Terms and Conditions to the implications of leaving the European Union. As vast sections of those who voted for leaving EU now start understanding the economic damage they have wrought, for that second of joy at having given those “bloody immigrants a black eye” (and this includes a large number of recent immigrants too),  they are getting the sensation of being handed the bill the day after a night full of mayhem in the hotel room.

Voting for Trump because “I hate Hillary because she stands for the people who took my job” is somewhat like that.

You may break Hillary’s heart for sure.

But she will still have her Goldman Sachs millions.

And globalization, well, it’s not stopping any time soon.

You however will be left with the shitty life you have. And you will have Trump.

Good luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Udta Punjab–The Review

Thanks to Pahlaj Nihalni’s ceaseless attempts to win Modiji’s Number One chamcha award and Arvind Kejriwal’s equally persistent attempt to make pretty much everything about him, and the pre-release brouhaha fitting perfectly in with the narrative of “intolerant as North Korea”, which in the absence of a functioning opposition has emerged as Modi’s biggest enemy, an idea rather than a party, Udta Punjab was political even before it hit the screens.

And once you have seen it, you realize, that regardless of what came before it, Udta Punjab was always going to be political, intensely political.

Everyone knew Bihar had no law. Thank you Prakash Jha. Everyone knew that Bhais rule Mumbai. Every Sanjay Dutt film tells us that.

But Punjab? Wasn’t it, for the rest of India, the land of plenty, of rustic simplicity, of sarson da khet through which lovers ran into each other’s arms, of “Singh is King”s, jolly bhangra-dancing and loud-laughing, of hearts bigger than the outdoors, of bravery, friendship and love?

Not any more. Broken buildings and broken men in their shadows, catatonic from drugs, politicians handing out bottles of drugs in lieu of blankets, the police under the control of politicians and the drug-mafia (beat the driver, as a wisened cop says, but don’t damage the trucks of the drug-transporters, because, as we know, in Punjab, a truck is personal), toxic intoxicants available in neighborhood pharmacies,  violence and sexual slavery in place of dance and love, and foul language that would make Gulzar go “ma di behen di”.

How did that Punjab become this Punjab, how did the sylvan fantasy become this post-apocalyptic dystopian nightmare?

Questions will be asked, by those whose idea of India is from what they watch in films, and the answers, they will find if they care to follow up, will be political.

In that respect, Udta Punjab is a success. Films, not all but at least some, have to be political, they need to shock, they need to provoke, they need to show the world as it is, they need to trigger conversations, and they need to be reviewed by Kejriwal.

And Udta Punjab does all of it. Excellently. That and the music. Excellently.

Where it falls short of greatness is the way it tries to interleave the four character-arcs, in a way reminiscent of other iconic narco-dramas. It tries to do a bit of “multi-perspective deconstruction of the drug-trade” like Traffic and a bit of “descent into a personal hell” like Requiem for a Dream, and it tries to do a bit of dark comedy too, and some romance, and ends up having too many balls in the air at a time to make it all work. It succeeds in one of the threads, Alia Bhatt’s, because she puts in a command performance, despite the mildly inauthentic Bihari accent, and because she has the most fully-realized character arc. I realize that for many Shahid Kapoor’s character, the conflicted bumbling fool of a rock-star, will be a favorite, but at least for me, it was largely a caricature, like an over-acted street-play on the effects of drugs, his motivations and conflict ill-defined, though he does have some great lines which makes his scenes eminently watchable. The real problem is with the Kareena-Diljit Dosanjh part of the film, the investigation formulaic and cliched and too much Deus Ex Machina, with Kareena (by the way, when did she start asking to be credited as Kareena Kapoor Khan)’s character reminiscent of the Sekhar Suman character in Tridev, never something to aspire for in a serious film. Diljit is a natural hero, with a Ranbir Kapoor vibe, but despite the starpower he exudes, he is bogged down by the weakest quadrant of Udtaa Punjab, Kareena Khan, who often seems to be, for the want of a better word, in the wrong film, as if she wandered off the sets of another movie shooting next door, and I kind of shut myself off during her scenes, wanting to jump ahead to Alia Bhatt story, and that is as much a testament to Alia Bhatt’s acting chops as it is a indictment of Kareena Khan.

But be as it may, Udta Punjab is definitely worth a watch.

Is it however worthy of some of the encomiums that have come its way?

That is too political a question to answer.

 

 

The Bhodrolok and the Trinamool

“If none of us voted for Trinamool, how did they win?” When I got this message on Whatsapp from a friend, I couldn’t but help suppress a smile. It went on “Everyone I talked to are disgusted with Didi, and yet, how does it keep winning bigger and bigger every time.”

There was a time when those outside the state could not understand its politics, like how it kept voting for a moribund CPM government for over thirty years. Now even those inside don’t quite understand why.

But they should. They should understand it very well.

You see, when he uses the pronoun “us”, my friend is referring to a very small niche: Calcutta-based middle-to-upper-middle-class sub-class (scientific name: Bhodrolok) that congenitally suffers from an exaggerated perception of it’s own political influence. When they took the forefront of the fight against Buddhadeb over Nandigram, or felt they had, they had this expectation of “poriborton”, which was nothing but a projection of their fantasies of an Utopian Bengal onto someone (and I never tire of saying “I told you so”) who was an embodiment of the best, or the worst depending on your point of view, of the very political ethos they were ostensibly seeking a “poriborton” from.

And now that they see that things, for them and this is worth italicizing for them, have gone for the worse, they are angry and hurt in a “Maine Pyar Kyon Kiya” way, their rhetorical question laying bare a deeper truth.

That they have been made redundant politically.

Mamata Banerjee’s formula for success is the V 2.0 of the CPM’s. Unlike the Congress, where one particular surname eats up most of the fruit and throws the seeds and maggots to those below, CPM and now TMC flows down the fruits of power to the rank-and-file, with how much you get from the system being proportional to how much you put into it. So if you walk in a procession to Brigade Parade grounds you get two slices of toast, if you make your own banner you get a rosogolla to go with the toast, and if you provide muscle then you get your little syndicate, or as it is called “jobs for the boys” where all real-estate products and services have to be procured from select vendors blessed by the party else “I am sorry you are Maoist”. The biggest prizes of course go to to those that can bring blocks of votes—imaams and local clubs of lumpens, with compensation proportional to provided benefit.

Where the CPM differs from TMC and Didi is that the CPM, while playing this game, remained a party of bhadralok, or to be more specific, upper-caste, educated men in particular with a taste for caviar and wine and and Camus and Sartre and good Spanish literature. Hence their rhetoric and their metaphors were aligned perfectly with what the bhadralok were comfortable with hearing. Grabbing someone’s land and distributing it among party faithful sounds much cooler when it is called “land reforms” and leads to a case study in EPW than just “Maa Mati Manush”. Which is why Basu or Buddha would not be caught offering namaaz or making Yusuf Pathan dance or publishing the kind of verse Didi proudly puts her name to, because they were too bhodrolok for that.

Boddo barabari, they would say.

With Didi it is different. Unlike the CPM, her party has no ideology except unquestioned obeisance to Didi. In a way it is not much different from bowing to Lenin and Marx, but the bhodrolok felt more comfortable with the intellectual heft of that than the gigantic posters of Didi that dot the Calcutta cityscape without relent. Didi is many ways the ultimate testament to the establishment of a Communist society in Bengal, a proletariat ruler who wields absolute power with no tolerance for dissent and who shows big business their place (namely sends them out of the state), and yet she is too “telebhaja” and “Bangladesh is border of Pakistan” to be respected in the way Buddha and Basu were.

But Didi does not care. While she is open to throwing a buddhijibi a few scraps his way if he is willing to prostrate himself in a “Tohfa kabool ho” way, she knows that the Bengali intelligentsia are and have always been politically irrelevant. They do not vote in a bloc, and while they may carp in a few newspaper columns and generate more noise than votes, she can always dismiss them as media conshpirashy and her flock would have no problems with that. Far better to take oath in name of Ishwar and Allah, and by this get the undying gratitude of Park Circus without doing a single tangible thing for them, than to pine for bhadralok approbation.

After all, what’s the bhadrolok going to do? All they can do is to leave the state, as they do in thousands, every year. But come poll day, who are they going to vote for?

The CPM? That’s a brand beyond rescuing.

The Congress? Yes. Next.

The BJP?

Let’s see. On the face of it, it could be them. After all, they are primarily a middle-class party, or to use the proper term favored in Calcutta intellectual circles, a party of the petty bourgeoisie, that puts nationalism and development in its messaging. Except that the BJP has historically been perceived as a UP-Bihar party, whose obsession with temples and cow-protection and vegetarianism-as-a-surrogate-for-nationalism find no resonance in Bengal where even Brahmins eat meat. The BJP, to put it blandly, is a swear word among the bhodrolok of Bengal. The BJP also has really never taken Bengal seriously, and there is no greater testament to that than fielding P C Sarkar and Bappi Lahiri as candidates.

Yes.

When you put Bappi Lahiri as a candidate, you are basically telling the electorate “We dont’ take ourselves seriously” and when you put P C Sarkar on the ticket, you are relying on magic to win the seat. Now with Roopa Ganguly and Babul Supriyo, they have crossed the joke-punchline level, though it will be years before they can seriously pose a challenge to Didi’s juggernaut.

So all that’s left for the bhodrolok is to raise their hands and wonder what happened, and then go and vote None of the Above on the day of the polls.

Welcome to poriborton. Welcome to obsolescence.

Do you have any problem?

 

 

 

Scenes from An Election

If, like me, you have sat through hours of Bengali marriage videos of others (mostly uncles and aunts), you would be more than aware of the song that always plays in the background: “Laaje ranga holo kone bou go, Aaj mala bodol hobe e raate” (The new wife has gone red with shyness, Tonight the garlands will be exchanged). And if there is any picture for which that song is appropriate, it is this. Politics, they say, make strange bedfellows, and stranger still, is when they have pictures taken like the one above. The alliance between Congress and the CPM is one that is at the same time bizzarre, given their history in Bengal politics, as well as irrelevant, given that Mamata Banerjee will win. If there is any tragedy here it is that of Buddhadeb, arguably the best Chief Minister of Bengal after Bidhan Roy, being brought out of his political crypt and being made to “marry”, like some Kuleen Brahmin senile of a century ago, a man-child, perennially in his political training pants.

For Bengali men of our generation, the second greatest Ganguly was Rupa Ganguly. (And I am not considering Kishore Kumar here) The rest of India may know her as the lady who played Draupadi in the original Mahabharata TV series or walked away after having the lie-detector buzz on her in “Sach Ka Samna” or starred in some T-series produced movies, but we have always seen her as God’s attempt to compensate us for allowing thirty-five years of CPM rule. Originally from CPM, she has now, like virtually everything in the state, been flipped, and is now BJP’s new face, and thank God for that, because we have had enough of poor man’s Kumar Sanu aka Babul Supriyo being the sole celebrity of the party. But to see her like this, breathing fire and brimstone, a far cry from “Amare dhoro kyan kolosh dhoro” from Padma Nadeer Majhi and Antarmahal, is sadly discordant, like Virat Kohli reciting a Tagore poem. A new Didi might be in the making here, because this was Didi twenty years ago, and the possibility fills me with dread.

Like the Australian cricket team of the 2000s, Didi will win, the only question is by how much. And she will do it despite “conshpeeracies” and “popaganda” and “bhandata” by Maoists, communal forces, those who claim to be raped (as she had declared the Park Street rape as a “sajano ghotona” [a set-up]), laws of Physics, and ABP. Because she has Ma Sharada on her side, and the moral highground of secularism. And as shown in the picture, even the high priests of secularism are awestruck, in a “Bhala uski kameez meri kameez se secular kaise”, crowding around her like scientists around a rare ore discovered from the bowels of the earth. If there is any tragedy here, it is that the quantum of cash used to *allegedly* bribe TMC party bigwigs (of course it is not true, it is a conspiracy by video technology) in the Narada sting, a measly five lacs, speaking volumes of the amount of money that is considered significant in Bengal. In Andhra or Maharashtra or Gujarat, even the guard at the door won’t stand back for five lacs.

For me though, amidst the inevitability of a Bengal election, the most interesting thing was the schism of the Bengali Buddhhijibis. Once united behind Didi against Nandiram, the rainbow coalition has split into two, in a kind of Marvel Civil War way–those who are satisfied with what has been handed out to them and those that are not. One went to meet the Chief Election Commissioner to protest against TMC’s strong-arm and then immediately, TMC mobilized another bunch to go to the CEC and pooh-pooh the other bunch, with Abhirup Sarkar, loyal FAN to the government, actually saying that “the kind of violence we have seen in the elections so far is really like school kids having a fight”.

From TOI

A three-and-a-half-year-old child has emerged as the face of political violence that blights Bengal. Her arms and legs bruised, she sobbed: “They came and beat me with lathis (Ora amakey lathi diye merechhe).The toddler, who has not yet started pre-school, represents all that’s wrong with Bengal’s politics, where many politicians -irrespective of their party colour -use violence and intimidation, instead of ideas and ideology, as the route to office.

The child’s family was targeted apparently because her maternal grandfather is a polling agent for CPM candidate Nirjharini Chakraborty, who is challenging TMC heavyweight Mukul Roy’s son Subhranshu. On Sunday evening, with only hours for voting, alleged TMC goons stormed into Barindra Lane of Halisahar -a traditional CPM base -to terrorise residents. Six of them barged into the child’s house and started swinging their lathis.

The child’s mother protested. The goons started beating her up without caring that she was cradling the baby. The child clung to her mother and was injured. “The goons didn’t for a moment bother to think that the child could get hurt. They just went on the rampage,” said Debasree. On the way out, the goons beat up her 16-year-old son and father as well

 

Exactly. School kids having a fight.

And finally this. From the lady with the second most famous helicopter shot. But good one though. There is nothing that Bengalis get more passionate about than saving fish, so that they can land up on their plates cooked with mustard. But not even this is going to save Bengal for more years, and most likely more decades, of “poriborton”.

Weep, my beloved state, weep.

 

On the future of Indian publishing in English

[Originally written for Factordaily]

The word ‘disruption’ is a prime example of language that I like to call “business Powerpointese”, but if there is any context in which the use of the phrase “in need for disruption” may be excused, I would say it is in the world of commercial publishing in English in India.

Because this is an industry that really needs disruption.

Because no one is really happy.

Or I should say, in keeping with the spirit of using buzzwords, that none of the business’s stakeholders are happy.

First, let’s take the consumers.

Many find the over-abundance of titles like ‘7 Day$ of Luv@Twitter’ or ‘I Fell in Love with You and Then I Fell in Lust With Her’ on bookstore shelves off-putting, while others feel Chetan Bhagat is not writing books fast enough (somewhat like George RR Martin). And everyone, regardless of whether they swear by Ravinder Singh or Ravindranath Tagore, complains about the lack of choice when he or she walks into the bookstore.

Then, bookstore owners. They complain about the poor return-on-investment on books (“they sit on the shelves for too long”) and, if that’s not bad enough, online retailers who do not need to invest in display and have VC capital to underwrite losses, provide price-points with which they cannot compete. Which means closing shops down or books ceding shelf-space to the stuff that sells — Playstation games, soft toys, and compilation CDs of Arijit Singh.

Ask publishers and they reflect the concerns of retail. There are too many books, too few shelves, too much inventory lying in warehouses, and too few orders. And so their focus inevitably shifts away from quality or originality to the marketability of the author and the sexiness of the genre.

Which brings us to the last piece of the puzzle. Authors.

Unless you have dimples that make schoolgirls go weak in the knees, or the ability to put your love-pain into words, or endless money of your own to throw at your book, or, best of all, have been dubbed “literary” and are therefore no longer judged on quotidian concepts like sales but by presence on panels at Jaipur Lit Fest and spots on long and short-lists, life is very tough. You will be lucky to get a publisher who puts your books on the shelf, and luckier still to find it on-display after it has been published.

The naive response to this is typically “but nobody reads books any more.” This is not really the case. A large number of Indians, mostly young, are consuming English books at a far greater rate than their fathers and grandfathers did, which explains why more English books are being published than ever before. The problem if we take a slightly deeper dive, is that the market is skewed.

This is a bit of a rough estimate, but just about 20 authors have written 80% of the books sold in India, cornering advertising budgets and shelf-space. Add to this around 10 lit superstars whose books are usually on the shelves regardless of sales. After this comes the long, long, Venkatesh Prasad-like tail.

What this front-loading means is that as readers, you are not going to discover new voices unless you fall on the floor and twist your neck and look at the bottom shelf, near the dark corner, next to the rest-room, and as long-tail authors, you are going to have to jump that much higher, and write in certain genres and not in others, and settle for lower advances and sales-percentages.

I know I have mentioned him too many times and it hurts me as much as it hurts you, but Chetan Bhagat once said he does not compete with other authors anymore; he competes with mobile games and God.

Okay I made up that last part about God. But seriously, he is onto something.

Consider this. The reason budget point-and-shoot digital cameras have lost so much ground over the last few years is that people almost exclusively use their mobile phone cameras. Why? Because it’s an inconvenience lugging a camera along all the time, even one that fits into your pocket. Just like it is to carry a physical book around.

The demands of modern life are such that we rarely get extended chunks of downtime, when we can curl up with a good book. We get free time in scraps and pieces. Sitting at the doctor’s office. Riding in a cab. Early to a client call. And if books aren’t there when we need them, we just play Candy Crush or trawl through our ex’s Facebook profile.

Ah, a pitch for ebooks, you say as you roll your eyes dramatically. As any publisher will tell you, it’s not as if ebooks sell a huge deal either. They don’t because publishers take the word “ebooks” literally and plonk in electronic versions of their print books on Amazon and Flipkart and wait for the money to flow in.

Of course business doesn’t work that way.

Both iPod and Zune were music-players. But what distinguished the iPod from its competition were two things — the ecosystem and the UX (and yes, I have used yet another over-used buzzword: UX or user-experience).

Which is why UX (optimized for mobile) + ecosystem (the content) has to be the thing for electronic books. Did I forget anything? I did.

One of the joys of visiting book-stores, especially the big ones, used to be of discovery. Of new authors and genres. Picking up books on a whim. Flipping through the pages, and then buying. Traditional ebook publishing, except the “Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought” line at the bottom, provides little by the way of true discovery. By leveraging the power of tracking an individual’s reading habits, his ratings and reviews, and those of his friends, data-analysis engines can provide the kind of personalized recommendations that even the old bookstore-owner, who had known you and your father and your grandfather, would struggle to provide.

It is this “big data” (is there any buzzword I haven’t used except ‘out-of-the-box’?) driven approach that drives services like Netflix, which is as important a factor of its success as its library of movies and the UX.

Juggernaut, Chiki Sarkar’s latest venture, has based its entire business model on this: the ecosystem, UX and discovery troika. Which is why when I had five publishing bids for my latest novel, The Mahabharata Murders, I was excited to go with Juggernaut. The fact that they were also going to bring my book out in print was the added cherry on the top, because, hey, people still read paper books.

A platform like Juggernaut allows me to experiment the way I have wanted to for a long time — pricing models like pay-per-chapter; a kickstarter on top that will allow readers early access to books; and having digital rights management (DRM) built into the platform, so that I don’t have to bother about my PDF wandering around the Net like Taher Shah with angel wings.

Also, collaborative fiction. Interactive storytelling. Mixed media. The possibilities are endless.

However, the biggest challenge for mobile-publishing will remain habit. No matter how much you try to convince people of the cost of maintaining an extensive collection of books (and having just moved from Maryland to Chicago, I know how much it costs to transport books), and of the cost to the environment of paper, you will be brushed away with a little speech about how comforting it feels to read a “real book” and that “electronic is not for me”. This is to be expected. The user-experience of reading a book has not changed over centuries, and it’s this ossification that manifests itself in the romanticization of the reading experience; the so-called comfort of cradling a beautifully bound volume, or the smell of paper. Maybe it will take a new generation, one that grew up with mobile phones, to abandon the fetishization of the past and take the firm leap forward to a future that promises not just convenience, but also greater choice, greater diversity and greater value.

But for now baby steps. Disruptive baby steps