Vot, yaar, my book was a masterpiece, yaar

About a week before Tarun Tejpal did the ritual spurned author routine, the Babu met another writer who roundly castigated Indian reviewers...for being unnecessarily kind to books like The Alchemy of Desire. (It's so hard to keep everyone happy, ain't it?) But we sense that now would not be a good time to tell Tejpal that pretty much everyone who reviewed the novel pulled their punches for the worst of reasons: Tarun's a nice guy, even if he does shoot his mouth off, and everyone was on Tehelka's side when they got stomped on by the big, bad government.

"I think between incompetence and malice, almost no decent reviewing takes place in India. Mostly it is the clever, collegiate 'quiz competition' kind of notices that pass off for book reviews. Media journeymen -- out of work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers -- these are the ones who are handed out books. Most of them lack the skill, the craft, the heart, the understanding of the tradition, to assess serious books. They lack the ability to inhabit the intent or ambition of a book. They praise bad books, damn good ones -- all without understanding or reason.
At best, some of the more enterprising ones trawl the Internet and acquire some jargon and some familiarity -- the quiz-master kind -- with arcane literary names. And worse, they mostly write for small backslapping coteries -- again the same kind of collegiate sensibility, strongly reflective of half-knowledge mostly acquired through a few books and having nothing to do with adult lived lives.
Unfortunately, literature is neither a college quiz nor a college canteen caucus of precious-clever girls and boys, giggling over their first planned fornication or their last smart quip. Faulkner and Kafka don't live there; nor do Naipaul and Marquez. They move amid lived lives -- its concerns are different from those of quiz books.
However the sweet thing -- and proof of their incompetence -- is the fact that this reviewing makes no difference to the life of a book. Reviewers in India can neither make nor break a book. In the final analysis, the reviewer here is merely another reader, but cursed with the burden of having to make a telling pronouncement. Into all this thrown envy and malice. A very sad potion is what you get."

Just a couple of observations: you don't get paid much for reviewing--indeed, for all its lip service to literature, Tehelka pays pretty badly. You don't get much glory from reviewing books, either--given that the average print run is about 2,000 copies for a book if you're lucky, 5,000 if it's a "bestseller", the conversation around it isn't exactly booming. To anyone who has a Genghis Khan complex and wants to be a reviewer in order to "make or break a book", we say: go off and find a world to conquer instead, it's more fun.
So why do we review books? I'd love to say we do it to pay our dues or because we love literature or even for posterity, but the truth is we review books because we're addicts. We're hooked on to literature and great fiction, we're turned on by good books to the point where we'll shrug our shoulders and live with a mingy 500-word limit in magazines and papers, just so we can tell readers about something that made us fall in love with reading all over again. I know some reviewers who're failed authors and some reviewers who're very successful authors, and I know a lot of reviewers who're happy to be readers. Why "merely a reader", incidentally? Who's a writer writing for if he's not writing for readers--other writers? Daddy Naipaul? His agent? His dog?
We wade through a great deal of garbage and way too many chalta hai books not to be genuinely happy when something good comes our way. But while we might be polite, for all the wrong reasons, about books written by people who're as decent as Tarun and who've gone through as much in the way of harrassment as Tehelka did, don't try to force us to call a book a masterpiece when it's neither original nor particularly brilliant.