Books and Blogging: My Side of the Story

This presentation was made at the Panel Discussion on The Digital Public Sphere: Books in the Age of New Media, Oct. 15, 2009, Iowa City Public Library as part of the 2009 Obermann Humanities Symposium PLATFORMS FOR PUBLIC SCHOLARS. Professor Teresa Mangum at the Department of English, University of Iowa invited me to this, and I had the privilege of discussing with important literary personalities. Translated into direct non-roundabout speech, it means that I was overwhelmed, and scared, and frightfully unsure of what I was going to say. There was essayist Scott McLemee, and the International Writing Program’s Director Chris Miller as the other speakers. And then, Joseph Parsons, Acquisitions Editor of the UI Press was the moderator.

Scott McLemee made points about the emergence of the public sphere in the context of the digital discussions–I have a whole page of notes, but nervous to type it out for fearing of going wrong with the transcriptions. I have never scribbled so furiously since I heard my Chemistry teacher at school go about the structure of Benzene. Heavy, but wonderfully well-articulated academic discussion. Chris Miller was much more down-to-earth, speaking from experience and personal history, and you will certainly know how much I love that. He spoke about reviewing books for Public Radio International’s The World program. Some bits of that talk (called Talk is Cheap) were truly hilarious.

Here’s my stuff:

I review one or two books every fortnight for The New Indian Express. And since I have just finished my doctoral thesis, I can safely say that I read about twenty books a month, if only for research purposes. I faithfully post all these reviews on my blog, leaving the door open for discussion. Readers tell me they have gotten lazy since they go around selecting books with the kind of reviews I write. Some urge me to be more spiteful, more vicious and develop an acidic style of attack. Many of the readers stray into my blog looking for a review of some book, then they chance upon my poetry, and taken an interest in my writing and activism. I love all of this. Teresa, in an email, asked me if blogging about books led to relationships with authors? I love that prospect too, but right now, they are all just friends. Facebook friends, to be precise. Let’s leave it at that. Translating got me into enough entanglements, so you see, I am playing it safe this time around.

Why did I get to blogging in the first place? I started blogging in 2002—when it was really not such a craze—I called my web-log Impudence, and it was typically at Blogspot, and I pulled it down two years later when I lost my anonymity and was stalked. That is another story for another day.

But, the democracy to speak up and speak out ensured that I was back to blogging again. Big media houses which own the major publications rarely give opportunity to Dalit (ex-untouchable) writers, and there’s an absence of Dalit/anti-caste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India Shining myths, and that’s the work that gets into print. So, I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet: how anyone can write and be read/heard in the virtual space. I was not writing because anyone was commissioning me, I didn’t have to follow other people’s diktats, I could speak my mind. Google and tagging ensure that I can get heard without having my own column in any newspaper. Sometimes its helped me bring some happenings to light—such as the recent inside story of Dalit students being beaten up at a law university in Chennai (the mainstream media merely reported it as a “clash” at first) and so on. Blogging on feminist issues, with a caste perspective, was also something that I set out to do, because feminism in India forgets that caste exists at all, and that women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy do suffer more. Blogging about literature and books ensured that I got a larger audience–and consequently I got into the print media in a big way. Now, I review books for a major national newspaper. And, on an average day, my blog gets anywhere between 250-300 hits, which I guess is pretty modest for someone at the start of her writing career.

Since the cost of establishing alternative media in India is extremely high, activist groups have taken to the Internet in a big way. There is a hunger to use the potential of this media, and human rights defenders are doing it the right way. The campaign to free Binayak Sen; the exposes on state terrorism, fake encounters and police atrocities; the virulent speed in which fact-finding reports can be circulated; the ease with which the LGBT community in India came together and organized their shows of strength in every major city—these have all been possible because of the digital sphere and the space for social networking, discussion and dissemination that it allows.

For a few years, I was collaborating with Tamilnet.com, the only independent website that reported from the Vanni, the battle-zone, Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged territory. The news-site is banned in Sri Lanka, but proxies provide people a way out to retrieve some of the real information. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils across the world access that website on a daily basis. Just one single website in English, along with a couple of others in Tamil, had the power to destroy and dispel one of the worst disinformation campaigns ever undertaken by a state. Not just that, it binds them together as a community. Even if the absolutely paralyzed and impotent international community did nothing to stop the genocide of fifty thousand Tamils in the course of a few months earlier this year,  they at least acknowledged and addressed the fact that innocent civilians were being slain as part of a ruthless cleansing campaign. Were it not for the advent of online publishing, I doubt if the truth would have ever been told.

This sort of publishing on the internet has its payoffs too. I think E-books actually ease the cruel war against terror. A Catholic priest in Colombo told me stories of how Sinhalese soldiers doing a routine check on the local seminary in March this year checked for guns stashed inside hardback, hand-bound Bibles. If that Holy Book were just an unread PDF file, whatever threat could it pose? For the sake of argument, had Satanic Verses been released merely in its zipped version, whoever would have read it through? And what would the zealots have burned on the streets when they sought a ban? And what would I have religiously lugged around with me, as a hefty style statement, in order to impress a certain older man?

A book is no longer a material thing that you can use to flaunt your knowledge. It has outgrown its handiness as a pillow or a paperweight. Forget the dilemma of choosing the right shade of burgundy that would work well with lipstick-kissing your collection of poetry! Books, in their 21st century digital avatar cannot even be autographed. They have lost their fresh scent, their serrated edges. The loss of personality has ensured that books are no longer independent entities. It is time for them to collectively call upon a shrink. Or they can fall back upon their cosmic power, their new-found God-like ability to exist without any beginning or end. Reading one book is no longer just reading that book. Something in it prods one to look up for more, to chance upon tens and hundreds of other books. Every book entices you into its exclusive lair. But walking away has never been easier. Information is now served in its sexiest scrambled form, and extracting just a little something from that whole system is quick, but also cumbersome. And I somehow believe that the way a book is read presently is certainly going to radically affect the way in which books are written. Google-addicted audiences demand and deserve nothing less, I guess.

Yesterday, I met a young man as fierce and weird as me. I met him online of course, on Facebook, and by the time it was our fifth conversation there was talk of snipers. And he recalled sniper alley in Sarajevo, asked me if I had read Kurt Schork’s famous and heart-wrenching dispatch, spoke of correspondents being killed while reporting from conflict zones, selected Dan Eldon’s story in Somalia as the most tragic of that lot, condemned the necessity to make a biopic on him. And then we both laughed at the fact that the said biopic was going to star Daniel Radcliffe. Until the Harry Potter reference, I had to simultaneously google in order to keep up with this charming, but overloaded guy. But believe me, I managed to come out pretty unscathed, with no ruin to my reputation as someone well-read. Even of course, if the reading did take place way past the eleventh hour. Had the said conversation been taking in a coffee shop, or at the college library, I can imagine how wide-eyed and tongue-tied I would have been.  Thank god for the internet, for its explosion of knowledge, its enormous ease of access.

Would this presentation ever have been possible without the web? Where else in the world can ideas be bounced around with wild abandon, where else would people have the opportunity to offload all their knowledge on another hapless soul whose only sin was to have a green button indicating availability to chat. And above all, where else could anybody get away with preparing a whole essay and never having referred to a single book to do so? In which other world, would an author shamelessly admit to this?

(I thank all my friends who helped me shaped this presentation. I owe special thanks to Ravi Shanker, my friend-in-need whom I never stop bothering; his inputs were most valuable).

~~~~ End of article~~~~

The happiest part of the night was the $100 voucher to buy books at Prairie Lights. Thank you Teresa.

And the saddest part, was an American man, almost in his sixties, walking up to me and asking, “They got your leader, didn’t they?” and I would have cried then and there, had he not said (seeing my reaction perhaps), “But it was great. For 25 years nearly, he put up a pretty fight.” I am so shaken as I write this, but I think that’s all that matters. That one fights. For rights. For as long as it is possible.

I review one or two books every fortnight for The New Indian Express. And since I have just finished my doctoral thesis, I can safely say that I read about twenty books a month, if only for research purposes. I faithfully post all these reviews on my blog, leaving the door open for discussion. Readers tell me they have gotten lazy since they go around selecting books with the kind of reviews I write. Some urge me to be more spiteful, more vicious and develop an acidic style of attack. Many of the readers stray into my blog looking for a review of some book, then they chance upon my poetry, and taken an interest in my writing and activism. I love all of this. Teresa, in an email, asked me if blogging about books led to relationships with authors? I love that prospect too, but right now, they are all just friends. Facebook friends, to be precise. Let’s leave it at that. Translating got me into enough entanglements, so you see, I am playing it safe this time around.

Why did I get to blogging in the first place? I started blogging in 2002—when it was really not such a craze—I called my web-log Impudence, and it was typically at Blogspot, and I pulled it down two years later when I lost my anonymity and was stalked. That is another story for another day.

But, the democracy to speak up and speak out ensured that I was back to blogging again. Big media houses which own the major publications rarely give opportunity to Dalit (ex-untouchable) writers, and there’s an absence of Dalit/anti-caste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India Shining myths, and that’s the work that gets into print. So, I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet: how anyone can write and be read/heard in the virtual space. I was not writing because anyone was commissioning me, I didn’t have to follow other people’s diktats, I could speak my mind. Google and tagging ensure that I can get heard without having my own column in any newspaper. Sometimes its helped me bring some happenings to light—such as the recent inside story of Dalit students being beaten up at a law university in Chennai (the mainstream media merely reported it as a “clash” at first) and so on.

Blogging on feminist issues, with a caste perspective, was also something that I set out to do, because feminism in India forgets that caste exists at all, and that women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy do suffer more. Blogging about literature and books ensured that I got a larger audience–and consequently I got into the print media in a big way. Now, I review books for a major national newspaper. And, on an average day, my blog gets anywhere between 250-300 hits, which I guess is pretty modest for someone at the start of her writing career.

Since the cost of establishing alternative media in India is extremely high, activist groups have taken to the Internet in a big way. There is a hunger to use the potential of this media, and human rights defenders are doing it the right way. The campaign to free Binayak Sen; the exposes on state terrorism, fake encounters and police atrocities; the virulent speed in which fact-finding reports can be circulated; the ease with which the LGBT community in India came together and organized their shows of strength in every major city—these have all been possible because of the digital sphere and the space for social networking that it allows.

For a few years, I was collaborating with Tamilnet.com, the only independent website that reported from the Vanni, the battle-zone, Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged territory. The news-site is banned in Sri Lanka, but proxies provide people a way out to retrieve some of the real information. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils across the world access that website on a daily basis. Just one single website in English, along with a couple of others in Tamil, had the power to destroy and dispel one of the worst disinformation campaigns ever undertaken by a state. Not just that, it binds them together as a community. Even if the absolutely paralyzed and impotent international community did nothing to stop the genocide of fifty thousand Tamils in the course of a few months earlier this year,  they at least acknowledged and addressed the fact that innocent civilians were being slain as part of a ruthless cleansing campaign. Were it not for the advent of online publishing, I doubt if the truth would have ever been told.

This sort of publishing on the internet has its payoffs too. I think E-books actually ease the cruel war against terror. A Catholic priest in Colombo told me stories of how Sinhalese soldiers doing a routine check on the local seminary in March this year checked for guns stashed inside hardback, hand-bound Bibles. If that Holy Book were just an unread PDF file, whatever threat could it pose? For the sake of argument, had Satanic Verses been released merely in its zipped version, whoever would have read it through? And what would the zealots have burned on the streets when they sought a ban? And what would I have religiously lugged around with me, as a hefty style statement, in order to impress a certain older man?

A book is no longer a material thing that you can use to flaunt your knowledge. It has outgrown its handiness as a pillow or a paperweight. Forget the dilemma of choosing the right shade of burgundy that would work well with lipstick-kissing your collection of poetry! Books, in their 21st century digital avatar cannot even be autographed. They have lost their fresh scent, their serrated edges. The loss of personality has ensured that books are no longer independent entities. It is time for them to collectively call upon a shrink.

Or they can fall back upon their cosmic power, their new-found God-like ability to exist without any beginning or end. Reading one book is no longer just reading that book. Something in it prods one to look up for more, to chance upon tens and hundreds of other books. Every book entices you into its exclusive lair. But walking away has never been easier. Information is now served in its sexiest scrambled form, and extracting just a little something from that whole system is quick, but also cumbersome. And I somehow believe that the way a book is read presently is certainly going to radically affect the way in which books are written. Google-addicted audiences demand and deserve nothing less, I guess.

Yesterday, I met a young man as fierce and weird as me. I met him online of course, on Facebook, and by the time it was our fifth conversation there was talk of snipers. And he recalled sniper alley in Sarajevo, asked me if I had read Kurt Schork’s famous and heart-wrenching dispatch, spoke of correspondents being killed while reporting from conflict zones, selected Dan Eldon’s story in Somalia as the most tragic of that lot, condemned the necessity to make a biopic on him. And then we both laughed at the fact that the said biopic was going to star Daniel Radcliffe. Until the Harry Potter reference, I had to simultaneously google in order to keep up with this charming, but overloaded guy. But believe me, I managed to come out pretty unscathed, with no ruin to my reputation as someone well-read. Even of course, if the reading did take place way past the eleventh hour. Had the said conversation been taking in a coffee shop, or at the college library, I can imagine how wide-eyed and tongue-tied I would have been.  Thank god for the internet, for its explosion of knowledge, its enormous ease of access.

Would this presentation ever have been possible without the web? Where else in the world can ideas be bounced around with wild abandon, where else would people have the opportunity to offload all their knowledge on another hapless soul whose only sin was to have a green button indicating availability to chat. And above all, where else could anybody get away with preparing a whole essay and never having referred to a single book to do so? In which other world, would an author shamelessly admit to this?

(I thank all my friends who helped me shaped this presentation. I owe special thanks to Ravi Shankeran, my friend-in-need whom I never stop bothering; his inputs were most valuable).