Reflections on popular Fiction

Q: How is your writing different from, say, a Jhumpa Lahiri, a Neel Mukherjee or a Jeet Thayil?A: I think we are writing for different people. We may be writing about the same things, which is India. And we may all be Indian. But I think they are writing for a different audience. I am writing for a different audience. People say they are very good writers. Much better than me. So maybe that is the case. I don’t know.(from Book talk: an interview by Ankush Arora  http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2014/10/10/chetan-bhagat-half-girlfriend/).

This is how Chetan Bhagat differentiates his writing from that of contemporaries like Jhumpa Lahiri and Neel Mukherjee.But as a reader who finds books by both Bhagat and these authors referred to at the same place, be it on Flipkart or amazon or at the bookstore at the neighbourhood mall, I really feel let down by Chetan Bhagat. I bought novels by both Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee last month and read them in the same week.

Q: We have an India-origin author once again in the race for the Booker Prize. Have you read Neel Mukherjee?A: No, I am dying to read it. Listen, these are brilliant authors. I write for very different reasons. I want every Indian to pick up an English book. Every slum girl or kid to pick up an English book. And for that I have to write a certain kind of a book.
That is what Bhagat thinks but behind every writer the inherent desire is to be read by a large audience.Dickens and George Eliot were best sellers and so are Rushdie and Coetzee. Actually Bhagat is insulting the intellect of his readers when he says he is writing for a particular set.Just like a driving license, reading ability comes at a certain level.If you can read Chetan Bhagat, you can read Neel Mukherjee as well. At least Mukherjee gets his Calcutta and Midnapore right and writes a credible story where you wait with anticipation for the turn of events more so than in Bhagat.And just as when one learns to drive in a city, she can gradually take to the highways, so too can the reader growing up on CBSE English Core and communiccative English learn to enjoy so called serious fiction.

Random Jottings after reading Neel Mukherjee and Chetan Bhagat in the same Week.

"...a cloudy suspension in all that clear amazement and disbelief that could only be called envy as if a fellow prisoner had been released and he left behind to serve his sentence." this is a part of a sentence from Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others( London: Chatto and Windus,2014), chosen at random. To the readers who are familiar with the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" coined in 1817 by Coleridge it will perhaps suggest that the writer read English while at the University.Even a trained reader has to carefully interpret what the writer has written.When compared to the writings of a close contemporary also writing in English, Chetan Bhagat, one wonders who these writers are writing for. Chetan Bhagat, perhaps has even this group of liberal arts graduates as his readers in mind but Neel Mukherjee?

While this question would require a longer study, the fact that Chetan Bhagat in his extra literary pursuit talks about the serious writers, the lit crits and so on means that he is also concerned about a group of people who while some were trying to get into an IIT were reading a book a week, often more and talking about them.This group has always been there. From Ravi Babu with his zemindari to Amitav Ghose with his day job.Even Chetan Bhagat started as an investment banker. If Neel Mukherjee went to Don Bosco School and Jadavpur followed by both Oxford and Cambridge, Bhagat went to an IIT followed by IIM and lived in HongKong and Singapore.So what essentially makes one different from the other?There have been writers like Saul Bellow who have studied engineering but have written what is taken as serious fiction. There have also been writers like Dan Brown and John Grisham who while professionally trained have written for a larger popular audience.

Yet, when one reads Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee in the same week, one realises how much liberty Bhagat takes with facts and the use of a language.While he is writing fiction, facts in his fiction often far from actual facts.  Harbhajan Singh gets his hattrick in the wrong innings, Sociology is taught at St.Stephen's College, the Dumraon Royals are shown as having a Maithil Brahmin surname and so on. The lack of research and not getting facts right  are perhaps what make the lit crit unhappy with Chetan Bhagat but also restricts his readership if not in serious numbers, then definitely in its width among those who have grown reading books, Harry Potter to Dan Brown and on to Rushdie and Coetzee.

Around a month back, this column had noted that while the west Indies and Australia were rebuilding,Pakistan were a pale shadow of their former stature.How wrong an estimate this has proved out to be.While Pakistan has performed well both with bat and ball, Australia have shown that they are  still frail on batting friendly slow turners and the West Indies lie in tatters.

Private World of Cricket

For much of the twentieth century a private club called MCC managed the England cricket team.The matches other than tests that the team played was for the MCC. The tours up to 1976-77 were of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Indian Cricket is run by a private society called the BCCI. Similar private bodies run cricket in several places.It is because of this that international Cricket had been organised on International basis but were actually like two or at times three clubs   competing with each other.The World Cup in 1975 started a trend for an International tournament but the same teams which played bi laterally started  playing in a multi team event.Cricket actually found its equivalent of the FA Cup and not the Football World Cup.For this to happen, cricket will have to welcome teams and organisations not wishing to be affiliated or not affiliated to these private National bodies.

WIPA

The West Indies cricketers must be an optimistic lot. From the days of Dinanath Ramnarine as President of WIPA, the cricketers have hoped the players' associations are able to control the Board to give them the best playing conditions.They even indulged in Player strike but the Board played a third XI and lost to Bangladesh at home. Now the association is headed by Wavell Hinds but WIPA and WICB appear to be on the same page. Bravo has written saying that he and the team have lost confidence in WIPA. The question then is, Who does WIPA represent.I can only think of BCCI who at present are bank rolling WICB and the Indian players and not the West Indies can have much leverage.

As the Wset Indies and India prepare for an interesting second match of the series and Australia begins their match against Pakistan, we can see a pattern emerge. The West Indies and Australia are clearly keen on rebuilding.Pakistan are noe losing the plot and are a reminder of what a good team they once were.

A New Season begins.

A new Indian cricket season has begun.By stealth as it were. Neither List A nor First Class cricket has commenced.There was a Mickey mouse tournament in which several Indians played but the series involves only ODIs and Tests.The last time an Indian origin player was captaining the west Indies in India, Malcolm Marshall was discovered.Let us hope, this will be one series from where the West Indies will rise from their mediocrity.

It took India nine years of playing One day internationals before they won an ODI against the West Indies at Berbice. It will not be the West Indies' first in India but the impact of a series win in tests could be  their Berbice moment.

Chetan Bhagat's Imaginary World

Chetan Bhagat's Half Girlfriend( Rupa, 2014) is a story about a basketball player and his making a half girl friend even while he is waiting for the basketball trials for admission to st.Stephen's College in Delhi.The Girls' trials are on at the Basketball courts and it is here that he meets Riya Somani, also a basketball player.The novel tells the story of Madhav Jha, from Dumraon royal family in Bihar, and his quest for his ultimate Holy Grail: Riya Somani. While  Bhagat manages a passable story, he makes hash of an opportunity of doing a decent campus comedy.

The last time Bhagat was writing a campus book, Five Point Someone (Rupa,2004), he was able to at least give glimpses of the life inside an IIT. From Ragging sequence to the competitive atmosphere and difficulties faced by his characters add to the thematic complexity of that novel and rounds off a  love story. However,there is no attempt to enter the class rooms or show the protagonists actually studying or for that matter taking part in any meaningful basketball match or tournament.This is a shortcoming which becomes obvious as the writer harps on St.Stephen's college and its elitism so much from the admission interview stage itself, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Yet, the author introduces us to only three each of Riya and Madhav's friends and that too in a very sketchy way. Even Madhav is presented in a manner in which we do not know how much of Sociology, he has picked up in the three years.

Sociology Honours is the course Madhav is supposed to be doing at St.Stephen's. As Delhi's St.Stephen's College has never taught the course, the college in question becomes purely fictional.If it is so, Bhagat's naming of a residence block after Principal Rudra of St. Stephen's college appears to be very creative indeed.However, it is obvious that Bhagat wants to focus on St.Stephen's but he has not done any research. Research has not been  done about the way interviews are conducted or the sequence of Sports quota interviews. However, Bhagat talks about the novel being about Bihar. Even then, no research has gone into how a Madhav Jha could be found in Dumraon. The Dumraon Royal family belongs to an entirely different caste than what Jha would signify.Moreover, the Dumraon Royals went to schools like Doon and Rajkumar College, Rajkot. A scion of the family would have come to St.Stephen's after 10-12 years of English medium education and the whole novel actually ends up reflecting a lazy and arrogant attitude in showing a slice of Indian life not the way it is but the way Chetan Bhagat imagines it to be.

One of Bhagat's least successful novel which comes apart at every place and there is no underlying theme as even the love is not described properly.If Madhav actually loved the girl, he would scarcely be talking clinically about her with his friends.Half Girlfriend, then is an attempt to cobble together a novel without giving too much thought to either the real world or the fictional worlds of Delhi's University enclave and Buxar's Dumraon.