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.