A new Crossword bookshop is coming up on Hill Road. Ain't that wonderful?? Like the advent of multiplexes brought with it the 'multiplex movie' phenomenon, could the spread of chains like Crossword be ushering in a 'bookplex' one?
Certainly the kinds of books being written in English for Indians has undergone a change. The 80s and 90s saw the Salman Rushdie-Arundhati Roy variety off books which were based in India but written for the international audience - with a spillover Indian readership.
Today, you have a new generation of books and authors with no literary pretensions. They're just good timepass reads about people, places and things the urban Indian can connect with. And surprise! many are written by b school graduates. Which is what my piece 'A Novel Pastime' published in the latest Businessworld magazine looks at...
By day, they are investment bankers and brand managers. By night, they toil away at their keyboards, tapping into their own experiences to spin out slice-of-life stories that appeal to 'People Like Us'.
IIM Ahmedabad graduate Chetan Bhagat relived his IIT days in Five Point Someone. Swati Kaushal's stints at Nestle and Nokia provided rich fodder for Piece Of Cake, a light-hearted tale set in corporate India. And that's just the beginning. July 2005 sees the launch of Mediocre But Arrogant, a story of love and life in the fictitious Management Institute of Jamshedpur (MIJ).
You can read the rest of my story here (free registration required)
Bottomline: MBAs turning to writing is actually not that surprising because many Indian B-school graduates are simply exceptionally bright individuals who followed the easiest path available to them. Anyone who's been on an elite b school campus will vouch for the many potentially great singers, writers and film makers lost to the world of business.
Or then again - as these novelists prove - maybe not.
This was an inevitable fallout of the MBA becoming a very aspirational part of the Indian psyche. DNA's ad on 'I am not from the IIMs' or the amount of buzz when ET writes about post MBA salaries is a good indicator. MBA degree is almost a get rich scheme of sorts at times. Add to that an oversupply of MBAs and lot of vela time at MNC offices (one similarity between all the writers u mentioned in ur article).. u have a ready market plus lots of budding writers.
ReplyDeleteHey rashmi, the link to Business World is Erroneous...
ReplyDeleteAn average Crossword is way smaller than an average Barnes and Noble store . A Barnes and Noble store also has very good reading spaces and I have seen many African students in the US studying there. Many including me used to love reading all the magazines at the B&N stores and the storeowners had no problem with that. Would really like to see Indian book stores evolve in this fashion.
ReplyDeleteAs for Indian writers, I have a feeling that all Indian writers deliberately try to make Indian sexuality the centre of gravity of their writing. The sexual elements brought in "The Inscrutabe Americans" and "Five point someone" were rather unneccesary and seemed to be deliberately playing to the gallery.
I have been close follower of Crossword. earlier-23 years back the service level was high. But with expansion complecancy has set in. The new store employees don't have same enthusiasm as earlier.
ReplyDeleteThe new stores are smaller in size also.eg.powai,shivaji park. Hence number of books has reduced and it has become more of a stationary shop.
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ReplyDeletehi rashmi
ReplyDeleteim (unfortunately) in the MBA program at the University of Maryland (online e-commerce specialisation)....plz visit my Blog at
http://windh2o.squarespace.com
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ReplyDeleteOpinions on such matters as quality of B-Schools posted in such forums is based on individual expectations and perceptions. That is why mags like IT conduct SURVEYS and express a more generic opinion rather than publish personal ones.
ReplyDeleteFor any more personal opinions about XL do visit http://borntoxl.blogspot.com and find a different view (might even go for a "generic opinion" here in "jampot")
again an obscure comment in your archives
ReplyDeletebut yeah do not forget samit basu - the simoqin prophecies and the manticore's secret ...
such wonderful books
given the fact that he himself is iima drop-out ... and yes a truly remarkable sff genre book that even my amma applauded ...
shriram
I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
ReplyDeleteBut even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
Read more How to write a novel