No invitation cards are required. Please walk right in. [IBN review of "The Mine"]

For those who do not yet know that I have written a second book, I have. After my first novel “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss”, I felt the need to move as much away as the MIHYAP-RTDM world as possible and try something different. Which is why I put on weight like Vidya Balan did for “Dirty Picture” and explored something totally out of, to use a phrase made popular by Guru Greg, my comfort zone. Thus was born “The Mine”, a psychological-horror thriller, based on an idea I have had for years.

So you ask—what is “The Mine” about? Let me copy-paste the back of book blurb.

At a secret mining facility somewhere in the deserts of Rajasthan, an ancient place of worship, with disturbing carvings on its dome, is discovered buried deep inside the earth. Soon the miners find themselves in the grip of terrifying waking nightmares. One tries to mutilate himself. Worse follows.

Five experts are called in to investigate these strange occurrences. Sucked into a nightmare deep underground, they embark on a perilous journey; a journey that will change them forever, bringing them face-to-face with the most shattering truth of them all…

The greatest evil lies deep inside.

So you once again ask—what is “The Mine” about? Yes. I know. That blurb really does not say much. But that’s unfortunately all I can reveal for now. Kapil Sibal’s orders.

If you want to know more though, may I interest you in an extract from the book, the Prologue, over at the CNN IBN website.

One thing I would like to say about “The Mine” though. It is not a homage to the Ramsay-Harinam Singh-Joginder horror ethos. Many people think that the seriousness that surrounds it is part of the “act” and that any time, Doodhwala Baba or a Khooni Panja will make their appearance on its pages. Let me assure you that there will be nothing of the sort.

The best part of writing a book, at least for me, is the book tour. This time, I will be covering more cities than I did for MIHYAP. Which means I am coming to a book-store near you. Here below is the schedule.

Apologies if you find your city not in the list.

Double apologies if you do find your city there.

January 27, 2012 India International Center, New Delhi.

January 31, 2012 Starmark South City, Kolkata

February 4, 2012 Landmark Infinity Mall, Mumbai

February 7, 2012 Crossword ICC Tower, Pune

February 11, 2012 Reliance Time Out, Cunningham Road, Bangalore

Whatever important you have planned that day, be it a photoshoot with FHM or a Rahul Gandhi rally, please ditch. And come to the event.

What else? Let’s see.

Please follow updates at the Facebook page or alternatively (for those of you who do not like to “Like”) at this blog.   Also watch the trailer if not for anything else but for the fantastic musical theme composed by Prateek Dubey. “The Mine” does not have a non-India publisher (I have not looked for one) but will be available on Kindle from February 2012 for all of you outside the country.

Finally, please do spread the word. Twitter. Facebook.  The works.

Thank you in advance.

So here’s what happened. Narayana Murthy, the big chief at Infosys, complained that the standards of IIT students were going down and held coaching schools  responsible. Nothing particularly earth-shaking about this pronouncement, in every generation, those that have grown old have complained “when we were your age, things were so much better.” Chetan Bhagat, thought-leader and best-selling author and an IIT alum himself, felt sufficiently piqued by this to retort that he who runs body-shopping company should not comment on the standards of others. Such a rap-battle, of course, generated a lot of heat and light in the popular media. Of course then Mr. Bhagat’s new book released to glowing reviews and insane sales and he kind of apologized for his previous statement and all was right with the world again.

Now this is the not the first time the word “bodyshop” has been used in a pejorative sense for an Indian IT company, nor will it be the last. Look at bulletin board postings of displaced American workers or the latest article by some serious men and you will find this “Indian IT companies are about as skilled as those who scout for prospective camel jockeys” disparaging strain running through them.

If “innovation” of the Apple, Cray and Google type be the sole criterion for excellence and anything less be considered “mediocre” then yes definitely Infosys and the others are guilty as charged. But unfortunately that is a very restrictive metric for assessing excellence in the technology industry. Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc are not “product” companies but vendors of services.  In other words, they are not in the business of making general-purpose consumer products like music players, tablet computers or yes even search engines. The way they work is that clients provide them certain requirements and then based on these they deliver customized, technical solutions that satisfy certain quality parameters while meeting time and budget constraints. Comparing them to product companies is like comparing apples with oranges or more precisely comparing Shakti Kapoor with  Ajit Agarkar.

In their respective niches, Indian IT companies have consistently maintained their leadership well past the Y2K which, if you are old enough to remember, was when the naysayers had said that Indian IT would go bust .  Performance-wise thus, there is absolutely nothing middling about them in any way. For those who would say “Hah even supplying contract laborers to the Gulf  is profitable”, it is the height of ignorance to presume that what Indian IT companies do is move cheap technical labor around the globe. If it was that simple, then anyone from any country could do it. That a company from Malaysia or China or Vietnam (low cost centers) have not beaten them at their model of business over two decades should be proof enough that there is something that these companies (the management and the engineers) have that others do not. Being excellent in this domain means, among other things, leveraging the technical skills of a complex heterogeneous workforce and organizational knowledge to provide IT and software services in a predictable and cost-effective manner. And yes, belying the pervasive image of software coolies doing rote work , there are also intellectual challenges  in delivering IT solutions (cut testing effort by half through the creation of re-usable test automation templates for example or do a data migration for Client B using knowledge gleaned doing something similar for Client A). These, while not as sexy-sounding as coming up with “Google Wave”, are no less important, difficult and brain-cycles-consuming.

The irony in this is that the man who called Infosys “mediocre”  has himself, in a pot-kettle kind of way, been accused of being “mediocre” and far worse. If “innovation” in literature be the sole criterion for quality, then that assessment of mediocrity would be true—-Chetan Bhagat does not blaze any new trail in terms of content, structure, characterization or language.

And here is the thing. He does not have to.

Bhagat is in the business of writing best-sellers and he does it better than any author in the history of Indian writing. And when one does exactly what one set out to do, book after book, it would be immensely churlish to dismiss that success with a flippant  wave of the hand.  He consistently engineers successful books by crafting  stories that strike a chord in his target audience using language that does not tax their comprehension skills and then prices and markets them perfectly. Sure this is a different set of skills than what Milan Kundera possesses, but that does not make it any the less worthy of admiration.

Call them “mediocre” or whatever else makes you feel good, but the truth remains that Murthy and Bhagat have both developed and internalized non-obvious ” business knowledge” that has enabled them to maintain their leadership in their respective niches.

And ultimately, in the market-place of products and services where profit remains the only objective criterion for gauging excellence,  that’s all that matters.

I open at the close. This “I” of course here refers to purse-strings. Not that it has not opened before. The Potter movie franchise has netted 6 billion profits in its decade long run and 20 billion in related merchandize, making it by far the most profitable series of movies ever. And with Deathly Hallows Part 2 pulling down the curtains, one need not be skilled in Divination to know that this one will  net enough Galleons to fill many a Gringotts. As a movie it is strictly workmanlike, moving from one incident to another with little in way of exposition. Like the others in the series, it snips off many of the most critical parts of the Potter saga,  and thus should only be seen by the converted, that is those who can fill in the gaps with their knowledge. At one point of time, the franchise used to pretend it was for those who had not read the books, now it has ceased pretending. Which at least is honest.

Does the final installment have any surprises, anything special going for it? The special effects. Definitely brilliant. Anything else? Gratuitous glimpses of Hermoine Granger’s Sorcerer’s stones. Some good acting from the ever-dependable Alan Rickman and especially Daniel Radcliffe. That’s it? I am sorry to say yes. Hagrid’s heroism at the Battle of Hogwarts is criminally cut out, Fred Weasley’s death is given one-tenth of a second, and perhaps most irritatingly of all, Lord Voldemort and Belatrix Lestrange are made into cartoonish stereotypes of the “Nannie Nannie Boo Boo I am better than you” type as they shout NYEEEAAHHH!! from time to time.

But of course Harry Potter is not about the movies at all, it is about the books. Indeed it is one of the greatest publishing successes of modern times and deservedly so for Rowling is a master at her craft, creating mood, suspense, environments and memorable characters like very few can. Having said that, Deathly Hallows is a novel I have always had mixed feelings about. Sure it is a good book, perhaps even a great book, but somehow I feel it dropped the ball at a very crucial place.

Let me first say what “Deathly Hallows” , the book, did exceptionally well. Two things really.

Dumbledore and Snape.

Throughout the series, Dumbledore always reminded me of Gandalf. Too much of him actually. They look almost the same (same white beard, same flowing gown), radiate the same kind of understated power and when they open their mouths, they speak gently and carefully choose every word.

Its in Deathly Hallows though that one gets to see how different these two giant wizards from two different worlds are.

J K Rowling  ,during the course of an event at Carnegie Hall,  let slip that she had always portrayed Dumbledore as gay. Now for obvious reasons, since Harry Potter is after all a mainstream young adult’s book, she could never explicitly show Dumbledore’s sexuality. But she does throw in a lot of hints—-about Dumbledore’s intense friendship with Gridenwald, the friendship that turned into enmity after the mysterious death of Dumbledore’s sister and Dumbledore’s reluctance to engage in battle with Grindenwald. Says something, doesn’t it? Ever since he sidesteps the question of Harry as to what he sees in the mirror of Erised, I have always perceived an air of epic sadness about Dumbledore and while much of it might be regret at the death of his sister, there is something else which Rowling never says aloud but leaves the reader to fill in, should he want.

What makes Dumbledore so fascinating though is not the gay love story that is never told but his manipulation of people. In his early days, Dumbledore believed in totalitarian rule of wizards over Muggles, in the interests of the “greater good”. Only later in life, after his mysterious falling out with Grindenwald, did his political opinion change. But he never lost the arrogant belief that he, and only he, was wise enough to know what this “greater good” was.  People like Potter and Snape became pawns, pawns to whom he would reveal only that much as was needed in order to get them to act as he wanted them to, in essence depriving them of choices they could make if they were given all the information. Dumbledore, behind the mask of geniality, is somewhat inhuman and cold, not being averse to using people in order to attain his higher ideals, a fact pointed out by his estranged brother Aberforth. No where is Dumbledore’s hard- hearted edge brought out better than in in the conversation with Snape Harry retrieves from the pensieve. In it when Dumbledore informs Snape that Potter has been protected for so many years just to be used as a suicide weapon against Voldemort, Snape, otherwise always very respectful in front of Dumbledore, cannot help but exclaim in shock, “Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter”. In a way Dumbledore himself was very aware of this dark control-freak side of him, which is why he refused the Ministry of Magic three times. Yet he could never truly change.

Now Gandalf may be “Gandalf the Grey”, but he is never this grey. And definitely not gay. Give me Dumbledore over Gandalf anyday. Way more nuanced.

Then of course there is Snape, Harry Potter’s most-loved character, a marvelously etched anti-hero, with by far the greatest emotional depth of anyone else in the series. The dilemma of Snape is fascinating—–Harry Potter, a single entity, captures all that he has ever loved (Lily Potter) and everything he has ever hated (James Potter). On one hand, Snape seeks revenge for James Potter’s bullying and humiliation of him by reflecting the same behavior back at Harry Potter. At the same time, he wishes to atone for his role in Lily’s death, the only person in the world who ever treated him like a human being, by being Harry’s protector. I have always admired the small things about Rowling puts into the Snape character like the fact that he is a skilled Occlumens, an ability that helped him to hide his treachery from Lord Voldemort’s intense mental probing. It is only natural that Snape, reviled and laughed at all all his childhood and without any friends, would be skilled at locking his mind up from the world in contrast to popular and loved Potter, who try as he might, is unable to master this skill.

Many fanboys were cut up at the way Rowling kills Snape, expecting a grand encounter between Snape and Voldemort. But I think Snape’s death, inglorious and silent as it, was perfectly in consonance with his character. Snape is the dark knight, not for him the dazzlingly heroic exit. Leave that for the heroes. All he gets, as the reward for his bravery, is the searing pain of Nagini’s venom locking his body up and a final glance at Lily Potter, as reflected in the eyes of her son. History may remember the heroes but the readers, the readers, will always love Snape.

Which brings me to the biggest weakness of Deathy Hallows.

Lord Voldemort.

For much of the series, Lord Voldemort is in the background. When he appears, it is in short unexpected and terrifying flashes—drinking the blood of an unicorn or inside an enchanted book or inside a graveyard. In Deathly Hallows, he gets extended time and after all the brilliant build up, he is a let-down. We were told that Lord Voldemort is a master at manipulating people, which he does by playing on their weaknesses and insecurities. Unfortunately all we see is him doing in Deathly Hallows is cursing this person and then the other, like a spoilt rich kid dealing with indentured slaves, more Azgar Jurrat than the most evil wizard in history. And when he finally dies, it is essentially because of him not properly understanding the theory of wands.

What?

Epic villains ultimately meet their end due to some basic flaw in their character. In Harry Potter, Voldemort’s flaw was that he does not understand the concept of love. But his ultimate downfall does not come from that. It comes primarily because of an intellectual deficiency, almost like Darth Vader coming to fight Luke Skywalker to find that lighsabers need to be charged every week. This is particularly jarring considering how Voldemort is built up as an Einstein among wizards. Another thing I felt that weakened his all-knowing aura was how was not able to feel the fragments of his soul being destroyed (they rectified this somewhat in the movie). It’s not as if Rowling cannot paint evil characters—-Dolores Umbridge, with her Madhuri Dixit-style Hum Aapke Hain Kaun “ahem ahem” and a nasty sadistic streak, is severely disturbing. But Lord Voldemort falls far short of Dolores Umbridge in menace and this, in my opinion, dilutes the essential conflict at the heart of the saga.

Another thing that waters down the final impact of Harry Potter (and a few critics have pointed this out before too) is the rather upbeat, crowd-pleasing ending wherein Harry Potter ends up a suburban dad. I am not saying that Potter should have died in battle (that would have been predictable) but the elemental evil he had touched should have left some effect on him. Like how the burden of being the Ring bearer ultimately leads to Frodo’s demise. Evil is defined by its persistence and in Harry Potter, it is absolutely vanquished (JK Rowling concludes with the fact that the scar on Potter’s forehead has never burned ever) which kind of makes you wonder—was Voldemort really that evil or just a poseur who got a nose job like Koena Mitra?

However disappointing Voldemort may have been in the end and consequently a bit of a let-down Deathy Hallows, there is no denying that it is still a wholly entertaining book. Unlike the film with its name of course. While I remember a tightness in my heart as I turned the last page of Deathy Hallows, all I will recall of the movie will be a tightness in my forehead brought on by the 3D glasses.

And a Voldemort-type face in my mind with the tag “studio executive” on his lapel saying “The saga of Potter will only truly have finished when none here are loyal enough to pay up in his name”.

Horrors.

Many of you may (or may not) know about my second book, “The Mine” (publisher: Tata Westland), set to release January 2012. So since I will be off for a little vacation, I thought of leaving you with something about it.

After “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss”, I was sure about two things. First of all, my next project would be radically different in tone and content from anything on the blog. Second there would not be even a bit of “humor” in it. I use quotes around humor because I have always been wary of being tagged as a humor writer. Humor, for me, has been principally a device, certainly not a ends in itself. Putting it in another way, I write on a variety of topics. Sometimes I use humor to make my point. Many times I do not. For MIHYAP I had used humor. For the next, I had decided I would not.

I have always been fascinated by the horror genre, mainly because of how viscerally people react to it, almost as physically as they react to humor. You never choose to be scared in the same way that you never choose to laugh. They both happen. Just like that. So horror it would be for my second novel. More precisely horror-suspense.

“The Mine” is based on an idea that had first come to me during a long, dreary Greyhound bus ride from Buffalo to Detroit, the perfect atmosphere for a scary yarn, way back in the winter of 2004. In 2010, right after MIHYAP was released, I started expanding on that idea and soon I had a fully fledged story-line. Since I am not a full-time novelist and also write in fits and starts, “The Mine” took me about a year to finish, through multiple revisions, edits and “Oh damn I should re-write this scene once again”s. It is still not finished as it now will go to the editor for the first round of editorial comments. The draft as it is now is about 81,000 words and should come out to about 325 pages or so.

So what is the book about? Well I am keeping things intentionally vague here but here is what the book blurb, as it stands, says.

During dig activities at an ultra-secret mining facility, an ancient place of worship with disturbing carvings on its dome emerges from the depths of the earth.

Soon terrifying waking dreams are pushing the miners to mutilate themselves.

Five experts are called in to investigate these strange occurrences. Sucked into a nightmare deep underground, they embark on a perilous journey; a journey that will change them forever, bringing them face-to-face with the most shattering truth of them all…

The greatest evil lies deep inside.

As part of promotion efforts, I have also made a short “movie-style” trailer . There is also a website for the book

I guess I am a bit nervous as release-date gradually approaches. Horror-suspense is a genre not much explored in Indian publishing and we (i.e. the publisher and I) are, in a way, stepping into the commercial unknown. Perhaps even more importantly, as an author, I  am exploring a side of my writing that I never have and there are always a few butterflies associated with wandering outside one’s comfort zone.

There will be further updates on my blog as the book progresses through the publishing process. Please support me and “The Mine” by spreading the word (a share on Facebook of this post would be nice) and oh, as an aside, please join (i.e. “Like”) the new “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” page on Facebook (they are removing the old group).

And please do wish me luck. Lots of it.

Ever since I was in high school, I have wanted to write. But I took up engineering since good Bangali middle-class boys did that. Six years ago, I had graduated with my PhD but my career as a writer was as happening as Uday Chopra’s acting progression as a Bollywood hero. Virtually ever unsolicited article I would ever send would be rejected. The prospect of having a book published, far less for it to go on to be in the Bestsellers Lists [Link and Link], was as distant a possibility as of Anil Kapoor ever walking onto the stage during an Oscar presentation.

It was then, when my dreams were all but dead, that  RTDM came into my life or my life came into it. Whatever it be, helped to a large extent by luck (after all connecting with a large audience is largely a matter of providence) the blog attained some popularity. Media opportunities started coming in. In 2008, Harper Collins approached me to write a biography of Mithun Chakraborty. Since such a project, serious as it was, would need an extensive presence in India requiring interviews from people like Mrinal Sen to Kanti Shah, something I was not able to do given my present employment, I had to beg off with regret. Instead I pitched the idea of “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” and sent in two sample chapters. Harper Collins commissioned the book and the most exciting year of my life commenced, incidentally just around the time Mr. Hirsute Kapoor did walk the Oscar stage, showing once and for all that God does have a sense of humor.

I had thought of MIHYAP as an experiment wherein there would be no central story and the narrative would be a mixture of fact and fiction. Each chapter would showcase a different style of doing humor, styles I had acquired while blogging at RTDM—-the bullet list (National Terror Strategy), the diary (Morocop and Poltu), the flashback (Sexual Frustration), the fable (the Kasab story), the personal experience (Indian wedding), the stand-up style rant (Five Things That Piss Me Off), the how-to manual (the Management Institute), the simple story (1-900-Hotties), mock pedantry (Gunda and Loha).

The effort was appreciated by many [Link, Link , Link and Link] and also savaged [Link].  Here also it was my experiences at RTDM that helped me take the praise and the virulent criticism with equanimity—-after all every post gets the same treatment does it not?

And here it is that RTDM has had the biggest effect on my life.  Not only has it given me a chance to live my dream, but it has also changed me as a person—-given me some of my best friends, taught me to better structure my thoughts, allowed me to be more level-headed in front of conflict and criticism and matured me as a person.

So it is today I say thank you to everyone here at the RTDM community. Silly sentimentalism. Perhaps. But indulge me a bit will you?

It is also today that I announce that for my second book, I am going be as different from RTDM as possible. No there will not be a sequel to MIHYAP, despite the temptation to repeat what has worked commercially.

Horror, like humor, has always fascinated me because they both produce very visceral reactions despite being stylistically poles apart (only geniuses like the Ramsay brothers and Harinam Singh can fuse the two, albeit unintentionally) .

And so horror-thriller will be what I will be attempting next, which I have been told is a significant risk for me as an author since it is not the genre I am associated with.

The working title for the book is The Mine. It is yet unsold to any publisher. I am half-way through my first draft with the plot already fully articulated.

Here are two concept art pieces produced for The Mine—first one by Saurav Mohapatra (ignore the Summer 2011…this book will not be ready before 2012) and the other by me.

Wish me luck. For the Mine and for the journey ahead.

On March 19th, in Elgin Road Crossword, May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss had its Kolkata launch event. With Bipasa Basu’s alma mater nearby, one could not but feel overwhelmed by the intellectual shadow cast by memories of her presence, in the same manner that one is overawed when in Shantiniketan. Helmed by Rimi Chatterjee, the event went off excellently with attendance being so considerable that the manager of Crossword said she had not seen such a crowd for a book event in that store. Ever. Not the kind of crowd seen at one of Bipasha Basu’s “Beeri Jalaile” lit-events on New Year’s Eve but still quite good.

Questions were varied and interesting with my favorite being “Why are Bengali men so bad at approaching women?”  Now I dont know when I became the expert on analyzing the pick-up techniques of Bengali men, but my answer was on the lines of “Bengali men are mortally afraid of being rejected. Hence they find it tough to start a business or approach women.” What I didnt mention was that Bengali men also lack good pick-up lines since “Why don’t we go to my place, say Hello to my mum and have some lau-sukto?” somehow have stopped working in recent times. [Telegraph coverage of event, (HT also covered the event but HT Cal doesnt go online)]

On March 25th, the good folks organizing Kolkata Twestival kindly asked me to be the chief guest at their event. Now as most people know, being a chief guest or sobhapoti or being asked to distribute prizes is a fantasy of every Bong man, a state of things beautifully brought on screen by Satyajit Ray in Porosh Pathor where Tulsi Chakraborty, dreams of giving a chief guest speech —”Desh-ke tule dhorte hobe.” (We have to lift up the country). So of course I readily agreed.

The venue had a small stage and a number of chairs and the moment I stepped onto the stage, I felt as if I was in an old Bengali movie, each of which would have a mandatory scene wherein the hero/heroine sings in exactly this kind of milieu while Sukhen Das, the ever-sacrificing elder brother, dies of cancer of lungs, heart, throat (not of kidney since he already donated one to get the youngest sister married and the other to pay for middle brother’s “Bilet” [London] education) all the while telling one and all not to disturb the singing brother/sister with the news of his impending death. Resisting the urge to sing ” Anek jamano byatha bedona ki kore gaan holo jaani na” (I know not how my pent-up sorrows came out in song)  from Parabat Priya in a Tapas Paul/ Tennis Ball style or to make eyes at the camera Aparna Sen style and belch out “Aache Gour Nitai Nodiyaate” [Gour Nitai is in Nadia], I concentrated on the job at hand—to make some coherent points and to answer the wild variety of questions as appropriately and accurately as possible.

The best thing of the evening, besides the enthusiasm of the organizers, was the fact that more than Rs 17,000 was raised for charity (Concern India). [Above picture courtesy @_samiran]

Now for book. MIHYAP sold out at Oxford Kolkata. Crossword Kolkata ordered a fresh stock. And Crossword at Saket Delhi is also sold out of the book for now. They said new orders have been put in place. It is available at the main Landmark store in Bangalore (confirmed) and in several major places in Mumbai. Chennai and Hyderabad I am still not sure. May I request people there to please order through Flipkart whose service is excellent and price very reasonable.

And so now I check out to make the long flight back.  Stay good everyone. And more importantly, keep it khulla.

The “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” launch event in Kolkata is on March 19th at 6:30 at Crossword Elgin Road near to the place (Bhowanipore College) where Bipasa Basu studied. I will be in conversation with Rimi Chatterjee . Please feel free to attend and bring along a friend or two. And no need to RSVP as per above poster.

On March 21st, at Cafe Coffee Day (CCD), Park Street at 4 pm, I want to do a blogmeet/tweetup/ where as promised before, the interactions will be of a more “personal” nature (interpret that as you wish). Originally my plan was to do it at T3 but it seems T3 has closed down. To coordinate, my cell number is 8981122343. [Map here]

Share ]]> http://greatbong.net/2010/03/18/may-i-hebb-your-attention-pliss-kolkata-event/feed/ 20 http://greatbong.net/2010/03/07/may-i-hebb-your-attention-pliss-delhi-launch-event/ http://greatbong.net/2010/03/07/may-i-hebb-your-attention-pliss-delhi-launch-event/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:22:53 +0000 greatbong http://greatbong.net/?p=7155

Caption 1: Since neither Gulshan (jo ladkiyon ke saath shaadi karta hai par honeymoon naheen manata) from Gunda nor Gul Panag showed up at my launch, the only Gul that khila-ed was “Gulmohar”, the hall in India Habitat Center where the event was held

Arriving an hour before the event, with a broom and a bottle of phenyl, I waited a while before meeting panelist no 1 Jai Arjun Singh, who would later on in the evening prove that siring babies is incontrovertible proof of a rocking sex life. He would be  soon joined by panelist no 2 Sidin Vadukut, the Shakeela of English writing and best-selling author, who greeted me with a “Long time no see” before we both came to the realization that we have never actually met before. At least in this life.

Presently we had people trickling in, among which included a person who asked me if the MD of Harper Collins was going to be there. Scratching my head, I thought for a second whether I should try to pretend to be the MD of Harper Collins but then I saw my commissioning editor Saugata Mukherjee standing close by which is why I let the opportunity pass. Presently Nilanjana Ray Roy, the moderator of the panel , the Sachin Tendulkar resident expert on book launches and famous for once blogging under a male nom de plume (Hurree Babu, brother of Pakachika Raja Babu) [Yes you heard that right.  A woman taking name of a man. You see, the world of blogs is very different from the world of chat, where 100% of the men are men and 99% of the women are men] arrived and immediately we went into a huddle laying down the ground rules.

Which actually were none.

The photographer from Harper Collins called me to one side and took some photographs which was the longest I had posed for pictures since I got married. The only pose I was not captured in was the Deepika Padukone Liril-wannabe pose from Phir Mile Sur but that I suppose wasn’t a bad thing.

Caption 2:  Signing books at event.Very sign-tific.

After signing a few books (there was a table outside where books were stocked), I took my position on the stage. The urge to deliver a speech in Mamata Rail Budget style was immense.

Caption 3: My editor dispels all doubts as to my position in the management hierarchy of Harper Collins

The panel started with a book reading. A book reading is dreadfully difficult to pull off unless you have the voice of Obama and the facial expressions of Rakhi Sawant. Since I have not been so blessed, I kept my reading short. As a precautionary measure, I had told my parents beforehand to laugh periodically after two minutes, preferably when I was speaking in order to gently nudge the crowd in the proper direction. The reading being finished, after a rather generous or perhaps polite audience response, the group discussion started in right earnest.

Caption 4: Making a point

The discussion of course was highly intellectual and abstruse, even more dense and pedantic than is the norm in literary book releases with post-modernism, Dada-ism, Pakistani zombie movies, Zahereelay, trolls, freedom of expression and the divinity of Shahrukh Khan being topics of active discourse. In the middle, Sidin did that thing which has become de-rigeur in most literary launch events— he asked the audience if there was anyone there who had unprotected sex. Not a hand went up which confirmed my worst suspicions. Everybody in the audience believed in “protection”. In other words, not a single libertarian in the whole crowd of close to a hundred people. Sigh.

Caption 5: There were times the panel stopped to listen.

The audience had in its ranks multiple book authors like Gulu Ezekiel and of course the redoubtable Samit Basu, who is fast emerging as a male mother hen ( technical term: father cock) for first-time authors. Needless to say, the audience had  many things to say and frequently jumped right in. I enjoyed the questions a lot though I believe someone missed a trick by not asking for an Ipod for asking the first question.

So intense was general participation and sawaal-jawab that after about 2 hours into the event, Saugata had to ring the bell and stop the fight.

I hung around for some time (or as they say well-hung) signing books. Quite a few of them. While I loved doing this, what I didn’t so much enjoy was the fact that I couldn’t spend any time with many members of the audience whom I had really wanted to meet for long. Apologies for that, especially to those who took time off from work on an office day to come out to support a friend. Much appreciate the gesture.

Caption 6: A warm thank you

And so final words. Thanks to everyone who attended.  You get double thanks if you bought the book at the venue or have already pre-ordered. There are a number of online stores selling the book (links on left side-bar of blog) out of which one is shipping to 50 countries. There is one more book event, this time in the land where all trains run to i.e. West Bengal, in the fair city of Kolkata at Crossword, March 19th. Hope to see several of you there.

Till then, stay khulla.

[Uploading the video for full event (it was recorded on AVHCD and needs conversion using 5-min-free video converters) is a pain given the net speeds here. And so I have the first 15 minutes (Video 1, Video 2, Video 3) which includes my small reading section.]

Update: A picture of Sidin (holding a copy of my book May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss) is henceforth attached.