14 minutes of fame

As mentioned earlier, I was at the India Habitat Centre on the evening of Friday, December 14th as a participant at the Young Writers programme that was part of the ongoing Delhi International Arts Festival. It was also my birthday that day. I turned 32, an age some of you might find too advanced for me to be considered as a young writer! Anyway, the other two participants, Amandeep Sandhu (Sepia Leaves) and Advaita Kala (Almost Single), are around that age too, so I guess that’s ok.

So there were the three of us, and Shrabani Basu, author of Spy Princess, and Nafisa Ali up on the dias in the Stein Auditorium for nearly two hours. I hadn’t prepared a talk, so I fumbled up there, the reading we had to do went better (I read from pp.47–51 of my book), and I managed to get a few laughs during the Q&A round at the end. Surprisingly, I was told my performance was pretty good.

Thanks to all the people who turned up, especially my friends and relatives—and as for those of you who didn’t turn up, I expect you to do so next time, though I have no idea where or when that may be! Here’s the Indian Express’s story on the programme. Anuj Bahri, who some of you might remember from an earlier post of mine, later took a small group of us up to the Habitat Centre bar on the sixth floor for drinks after the event. The perks of being an author you see. The actual birthday party was a get-together at a friend’s place on Saturday night; they told me I would have to do a reading for them too, but thankfully I was spared!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shillong and northeast India, and who might have thought of it as this otherworldly place after reading my Scorpions post, here’s a reminder that the simmering frustration and resentment found all over today’s India is present in my part of the country too. The events described in the linked article took place in Guwahati, just 100 kilometres from Shillong, 18 days before the Scorpions’ concert. The rally in Guwahati, the concert in Shillong: two different worlds.

jet city woman reaches shillong

Trying to fit too much into 24 hours can be tiring. On Friday, after a long and busy day at the office, I had to take my motorcycle through the evening rush hour traffic from Panchsheel Park to Connaught Place for the book launch of Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head, published by Penguin–Zubaan. Parking your two-wheeler in CP’s inner circle is a thing of the past: now you have to drive into a dusty grotto of a parking lot beside the entrance to Pallika Bazar. The launch was held at The Attic, a small artsy place somewhere inside Regal Building. It has walls daubed with what seems like cowdung, along with spotlights and speakers for performances. There were about thirty people present; I knew only a few, like Anita Roy of the feminist publishers Zubaan: Anita was at Dorling Kindersley earlier, which is where I work now.

Anjum Hasan started out by reading an excerpt from her novel, which is set in Shillong: it turned out to be about a character called Aman Moondy who listens to Pink Floyd and is trying to get into the civil services. Anjum may have spent nearly a decade in Bangalore, but listening to her talk there was the unmistakable Loreto Convent/Pinemount School twang from Shillong. Later there was a discussion between her and Siddhartha Deb, with Deb asking her about things like identity and otherness and that small town called Shillong. I had to leave halfway through the discussion to get back to Panchsheel Park to attend a year-end office party. There was nobody else from Shillong there at The Attic. I hope Anjum’s book does well. The office party was fun.


The unnamed narrator of my novel while wandering through Delhi with the mystery woman Naina would have seen sights like these:

“She? Fast flour mein.”

Holy Spirit: Give your drink that divine touch.

Do turn up at the Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre at 7 p.m. on the 14th of December 2007; i’ll be there as a last-minute addition to a ‘Young Writers’ programme which is part of the Delhi International Arts Festival. There should be drinks (i’ll have to confirm this), and you can watch me giving my first ‘talk’. The 14 th is also my birthday, so i’d be very pleased to see you there, and so will my publishers and the organisers.


In other news: Jet City Woman has at last reached bookstores in Shillong, the other main setting in the book after Delhi. The book was listed in the new releases section of The Pioneer last-to-last Sunday, and of the Business Standard last Saturday. The first review appeared last Friday in the Assam Tribune, which is published from Guwahati. For some reason the books section isn’t listed on their website, so I’ve asked a cousin from Guwahati to send me a copy of the paper. The Hindustan Times and the India Today group’s new newspaper Mail Today are supposed to carry a review of the book one of these Sundays. A review in Tehelka also looks likely. Keep watching this space to see what the critics have to say about the book.

Managed to catch Khoya Khoya Chand on Sunday evening at a nearby PVR, then came home and watched Capote on Star Movies. Both movies are about men who took the written word with the utmost seriousness, both are set in the 1950s–1960s, and both are about the pain of transforming life into art. And in both movies the female lead (Nikhat, and Harper Lee, respectively) comes off looking better than the selfish male writer. So should you watch Khoya Khoya Chand, or Capote? That's up to you, but you should read the novel written by this male writer. Jet City Woman it’s called. The rediff.com review of the former movie is interesting for the strong reactions the reviewer manages to get from his readers: go through the discussion board and you’ll get the idea.