The Reader's Writer..

This post is for my friend and popular blogger GreatBong (GB), whose book "May I hebb your attention Pliss" has been on the stands since the beginning of the year. Not that he is a stranger at all to anyone in the Indie Blogging community (and now in the publishing world), but a post to celebrate GB's success and to uncover the dirty secrets underlying it, is long overdue.

I have known Arnab since my days in Grad School. I always wondered how he saw humor in all the everyday things that would pass the rest of us by like just another day. His sparkling, self-deprecating wit, warped and twisted sense of humor and his relentlessly funny, incessant chatter was enough to turn our little college town on its head.. (or at the very least our Graduate School Dorms - they were pretty miserable save for entertainers like him who cohabited for some reason. And did unspeakable things). I cannot think of anyone who is so equally inspired by good English Literature AND by B-Grade Bollywood movies, Indian pop culture trivia and Bollywood dirt. People very often revel in either, not both.

But Arnab is and always has been well, a bit weird, just like the rest of us. Except he says so and is very articulate about it when he lays it out in a memoir or in a piece of fiction and makes us all chuckle/laugh/roll on the floor at the startling honesty of it all. It feels fantastic to know we are not the only ones who thought/felt/reacted a certain way and that it is ok to laugh about it.

Writers write to connect. I think what people like about Arnab's blog and his book, apart from the trademark Greatbong style and content, is that he has never written anything from this lofty pedestal of an aspiring literary honcho who is too well-read for us, too erudite for us or too far-in-with-cool-journalist-crowd for us. He is, and when he started his blog was, one of us - A regular guy with a job, opinions and a 90's middle class upbringing, who just loves to write, and is so good at it that we think he speaks for us when we agree with him. If we disagree with him, we feel compelled to let him know. He, unlike some other authors, doesn't wear his prose like its piece of jewelery (although him wearing jewelery of any kind is a very disturbing thought in itself). In short, at some point, if you read his posts once you can't ignore him; In any case, with the deliberately and overtly bawdy assemblage of politicians, Mithun movie characters, sadhus, and got knows what else on his blog, how the hell can you ?

Unfortunately though, from what I know of the youngest generation in the publishing industry, pretenses are as important if not more important than true talent. The pretense of heady idealism, the pretense of being passionate and brave to choose journalism as a career "off-the-beaten-track", the pretense of being refined and well read, the pretense of being on a literary pedestal, is all grotesque and obscene and reminds me of a room full of too much nasty smelling perfume that I cannot escape. Hopefully though, the days of the shock embracing second rate talent that results from pretending all the time will be short lived.

Someone from this fine-smelling melee happened to mention that GB's new book is an extension of his blog. Her import I think was that he might as well have blogged the whole book. I think this is a generational bias -I, and the reviewer, still belong to the generation of readers who love their NY times on real paper.It would, still, break my heart if I have to get all my favorite columns online, and have them be only online. We like our book to smell like one. We like to turn its yellowing pages and keep a physical bookmark to pick up where we left off next time. That is just how we all grew up. GB and other writers like him are a part of a paradigm shift in the medium of popular media. His "connection" with his readers started online - they scrolled through to get to different sections of his prose instead of turning pages forward and backward, tabbed through his previous posts to find their favorite post instead of looking up a previous book of his, and left him comments about his post instead of mailing him their letters. I am not suggesting that GB's writing isn't book material, I am merely saying that the existence of prose in a book as we know it today might be short lived. The fact that this might effect writing styles altogether is a worthwhile thought process to engage in, methinks.

I met him recently when he was in New York. I smiled to myself when I noticed he hadn't changed one bit since I knew him in Grad School. He is overwhelmed by the reception from his readers, is thankful for it to have panned out the way it did, is unsure how he as an outsider would fit into the changing landscape of publishing without being different from who is and most importantly, still says as he always has, that he writes because he loves to.

GB, is here to stay. Because he is one of us and he wants things to stay that way. Because what living and breathing all that he writes about will do for GB, tons of deliberate snootiness might not for a whole generation of aspiring wide-eyed authors.