[Originally written for Factordaily]

The word ‘disruption’ is a prime example of language that I like to call “business Powerpointese”, but if there is any context in which the use of the phrase “in need for disruption” may be excused, I would say it is in the world of commercial publishing in English in India.

Because this is an industry that really needs disruption.

Because no one is really happy.

Or I should say, in keeping with the spirit of using buzzwords, that none of the business’s stakeholders are happy.

First, let’s take the consumers.

Many find the over-abundance of titles like ‘7 Day$ of Luv@Twitter’ or ‘I Fell in Love with You and Then I Fell in Lust With Her’ on bookstore shelves off-putting, while others feel Chetan Bhagat is not writing books fast enough (somewhat like George RR Martin). And everyone, regardless of whether they swear by Ravinder Singh or Ravindranath Tagore, complains about the lack of choice when he or she walks into the bookstore.

Then, bookstore owners. They complain about the poor return-on-investment on books (“they sit on the shelves for too long”) and, if that’s not bad enough, online retailers who do not need to invest in display and have VC capital to underwrite losses, provide price-points with which they cannot compete. Which means closing shops down or books ceding shelf-space to the stuff that sells — Playstation games, soft toys, and compilation CDs of Arijit Singh.

Ask publishers and they reflect the concerns of retail. There are too many books, too few shelves, too much inventory lying in warehouses, and too few orders. And so their focus inevitably shifts away from quality or originality to the marketability of the author and the sexiness of the genre.

Which brings us to the last piece of the puzzle. Authors.

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There are two Fans.

One, if you look a bit closely, is about the relationship between the devotee and the God (and no I am not talking about the Sachin biopic), of the blurred lines between devotion and fanaticism.

Gaurav Chandna, a small-time superstar impersonator and obsessive mega-fan of Aryan Khanna, the in-film surrogate of Shahrukh Khan, takes a pilgrimage to Mumbai, hoping to get “five minutes” from the object of his devotion. But once there, he realizes that his God is not interested in giving “even five seconds of his life” to him, and that his over-the-top gestures of devotion are not only not appreciated but leads to his idol pulling strings and getting him beaten up in jail. The rejection leads him to turn on Aryan Khanna, as he embarks on a journey to destroy his God and at the same time, seek his acceptance.

This Fan goes to places most conventional mainstream fare from the Hindi film industry does not. First of all, it takes love, obsessive love, away from the man-woman sexual dynamic, and transposes to another context, as addictive, and potentially as destructive.

Faith.

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An India-Pakistan cricket match is not like every other game. Cricketers say that all the time “It’s just another game”, and I understand why they do. But we know it’s not true.

It’s like saying your first kiss is the same as the ones that came after it. No one is buying it.

Because like a first kiss, an India-Pakistan cricket match is an anchor-point in your life. Not all games, but definitely some.

As time passes and one day merges into the other, like an endless march of India-Sri Lanka matches, it becomes difficult to find yourself in your own past. It’s then that you need these little anchor points, to which you can fly back at a moment’s notice when you feel the need to be nostalgic, and this need, as any forty-year old will tell you, increases as you grow older.

At least for me, so many of these anchor-points are cricket matches and out of them so many India-Pakistan encounters.  What exams was I preparing for (or not) when Sohail taunted Prasad? Who did I watch that game with, you know the one with Rajesh Chauhan? How did I dance when Dada defeated the Pakistanis in Toronto?  How did I jump up, in that mixed crowd of Indian and Pakistani fans at Stony Brook,  that first Shoaib Akthar over in 2003? What went through my head when time froze and Misbah turned his bat around for that scoop shot?

That’s what makes India-Pakistan cricket so special. It’s not the humiliation of a country or a settling of long-standing political scores, and I just hate when the media frames it in those terms, but those little moments that make sense, not in just in your life, but in the lives of others. It’s as if the lines of millions of Indians meet at those anchor-points, and then hurry along their respective trajectories. It’s what makes them so powerful, so emotionally intense, this resonance, for only at these anchor-points that we the millions become one, running the exact same gamut of emotions, asking the same questions (“Why isn’t Dhoni playing Bhajji on a spinning Eden pitch”) and making the same jokes about AB Junior.

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