July 21, 2015
by punjacked
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July 20, 2015
by Neelima
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Post myth, the world turns into a very pragmatic place.
Manish Mittal, who works in the finance sector, had read a very different kind of book. All fairy tales were fractured at the 
mention of the book that he had picked up when he was in Berlin. The Art of Thinking Clearly is a massively popular book in a practical country like ours. I had tried reading it but it was a book that saddened me as synchronicity was redefined as delusion. It worked for Manish. “Many of us hold on to irrational decisions for the simple reason that we made those decisions. It’s best to stop before it is too late.”
Being pragmatic is a good thing but sometimes ignorance is bliss. “One good advice in this book is to stop reading the paper,” Abhaya said. “Or stop watching Goswami,” someone added ironically, referring to the angry iconic newreader on TV Channel Times Now.
Shraddha U, a layout engineer with KarMic, talked about Good Omens– there’s a whiff of the weird and the humourous again when Terry Pratchett teams up with guess who? Neil Gaiman. It’s a humorous twist of the Apocalypse. Looks like contemporary writing is about fracturing the norm and literature is seen as a threat by some, mainly because of the subversive trait that reversing plot is.
Sudharsan Narayanan, who works as Partnerships Head at Vantage Circle, has read the entire Discworld series, “Pratchett writes science fiction in ways that no one else does.” He had got a very different kind of book called Napolean’s Buttons: How Seventeen Molecules Changed History— a book for all lovers of interesting trivia. Take the case of tin. It is said that the tin buttons that fell off of coats during the Russian winter may have just cost Napolean the war. Not to forget the spice economy that changed the course of history. “These are the kinds of books that I love,” said Sudharsan, “Like Bryson’s books- have you read Home and A Short History of Nearly Everything?”
Shruti Garodia, a Content Writer, plunged into author Jerry Pinto’s world. Em and the Big Hoom is a book that has received much appreciation and is an autobiographical story of building a life when your mother is mentally ill. Shruti has attended Pinto’s workshops and is a fan of his engaging writing style. “The amazing thing about the book is that it takes a dark subject and fills it with triumph. The book could be very depressing, with its mention of medicine and disease, but you don’t get bogged down by it all.”
Shalini Nahata is the founder of Baltendu Educations and also does reading parties for children. She recommended a book 
edited by Sudha Murthy called Something Happened on the Way to Heaven. “Many people shared their stories for a contest run by Penguin,” said Shalini, “Sudha Murthy handpicked the stories from thousands of entries. You should read this book as all the stories are about loving life, very uplifting.”
The highlight of the party was when Shalini’s son, Arhaan, read out his favorite book and as it is with children, when they say favorite, they mean it. Arhaan knows Ricky Ricotta’s Giant Robot by Dav Pilkey and he knows it verbatim.
More BYOB Party conversations coming up in Part 3.
July 17, 2015
by InstaScribe
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July 16, 2015
by Neelima
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The idea behind the Bring Your Own Book(BYOB) party is to get people from various walks of life to talk about their favorite books. While last time round, we had a variety of books on various topics as diverse as shipping containers and historical fiction, this time we had a few binding threads. One was myth.
We’ve been talking about myth a great deal lately. The problem with myth is that it is prone to reinterpretation and is thereby misunderstood. Aditi Kulothungan, a children’s book specialist and a book marketing expert from Book Sense, believes that what is most important is that myths are taken in context, “There was magic in the lives of those people that is absent to day. This is the Kali Yuga! We have our god men, but I’m afraid the magic stops there.”
The word myth is a magic spell though- the discussion veered to Devdutt Pattanaik’s Business Sutras and Irawati Karwe’s 
Yuganta. Aditya Senguta, a biologist, who spoke about science the last time round was armed with his favorite epic interpretation. “The Mahabharata is one of those epics that you can’t really call heroic. Unlike the Ramayana, the characters are grey; no character is truly impeccable. In Yuganta, Irawati Karve treats the epic in a very non-religious way. She was a sociologist in Pune and the first edition of the book came out in the 1950s. Her daughter translated it in the 1960s but I must tell you that some of her observations would be unthinkable today. Most of the retellings that you hear about are from her observations- it is surprising how much of a bedrock she is to Indian mythological retelling and how little acknowledgement she is given.”
There are many retellings indeed- Karna’s Wife and Sita’s Sister by Kavita Kane were mentioned by software engineer Kanica Jindal. These were similar to a book that Jaya talked about called Mahabharati- which is a Hindi retelling of Draupadi’s point of view. Now Draupadi is a representative of polyandry in a society. Though she was wedded to the five Panadava brothers because they had to share whatever they received as per their mother’s dictum, her heart was only with one man, Arjuna. “Incidentally Karwe talks about how Arjuna was more in love with himself, and the man who truly loved Draupadi was Bhima,” said Sengupta. This is in a nutshell the story of the acclaimed Malayalam classic Randammoozham by M.T. Vasudevan Nair.
Fairy tales did not fall far behind during the discussion. While once fairy tales summoned names like Grimm’s and Hans 
Christian Anderson, today the word fairy tale translates into Neil Gaiman. Aditi was spellbound by the twisted fairytale of Snow White meets Sleeping Beauty in the The Sleeper and the Spindle, and the characteristic metal ink illustrations by Chris Riddell. If you really want to start with Gaiman and you don’t know where to begin, Aditi advises to start with Coraline, of course the entire Sandman Series.
Fractured fairytales make interesting conversation. In a way the fairy tales started out as dark, I’m guessing they were scary tactics to get unruly kids to behave. Now fairy tales have been sanitized and you don’t want your children to be exposed to the horrid wolf or child molester in Little Red Riding Hood or the terrifying Baba Yaga of Russian folklore. But reversing the story entirely by making the three little pigs evil and the wolf good or throwing the truth at the kids the way Lan Smith does in The Stinky Cheese Man is outright hilarious. Some fractured tales reviewed here.
Shruti Garodia, a content writer, had an interesting take on how to tell your children stories if you didn’t want to frighten them. “You could contextualize the stories and customize it depending on how old they are. So as they grow older, you keep twisting the tale. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are books that have dark echoes to them and they seemed so much more different when I read them when I was older.”
“I remember how upsetting the real version of the Little Match Girl was,” said Aditi,” but that’s the story I would want to share with my children. Children should know the truth as they are exposed to so much.”
And that’s the kind of story kids want to listen today. “Imagine a book like The Fault in our Stars. We have two dying protagonists,” said Aditi. There are many more where that came from- Dorothy must Die, Love Letters to the Dead, The Perks of being a Wallflower (which did you like-the movie or the book?)
Sick lit is the in-thing now, especially for the younger generation, while myth has floored older folk. Have you been reading anything on these lines this week? Tell us about it.
July 15, 2015
by InstaScribe
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July 14, 2015
by punjacked
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July 13, 2015
by Neelima
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We talked about mythical fiction in India last week.
So what is the future of mythical fiction? Is it here to stay?
Today mythical fiction in English has high market value. Saw all the marketing behind Amish Tripathi’s latest Scion of the Ikshvaku? Writers like Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattanaik, Anand Neelakantan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Rajiv Menon, Kavita Kane, Krishna Udayshankar, Samhita Arni and Nilanjan Choudhury have recreated and reimagined the world of myth.
I talked to IIT and IIM graduate, Nilanjan P. Choudhury whose debut novel Bali and the Ocean of Milk received wide cri
tical acclaim and was a brief best-seller. There he uses a myth as the premise of an otherwise contemporary tale. While he is familiar with the rich mythical fiction of his mother tongue Bengali, he talked about the mythical fiction in English that he found appealing,” It was Ashok Banker who started the trend with his Ramayana series. R.K.Narayan is another favorite.”
Nilanjan Choudhury believes that myths are here to stay as India is not ready for something as radical as a contemporary sci-fi tale in the league of Star Wars. Myths fall into a framework that people are comfortable with and people identify themselves with various mythical characters- there’s a King, a Queen and a Demon that suits each type of individual. So now, there is room for a retelling and a re-creation of the old stories to suit new times.
Reminds me of the novel that became the staple of all titles in India: The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor- again a retelling of the Mahabharata using a contemporary stand point. Lots of fiction has emerged by juxtaposing the new with the old.
Mythical fiction is escapist. The west has their fantasy genres and Gen Y has gaming—mythical fiction survives in India because everyone wants to escape into a fantasy world where Good prevails over Evil.
English arrived at the playground a bit late, says Choudhury. The myth was retold as we saw in Part 1 of this mythical sojourn. Neelakantan mentioned how English writers of mythical fiction in India could never make the cut while the Indian language writers could. Choudhury explains why,” Obviously as native language speakers, these writers could take more liberties with the language. Writers were part of communities who treated their gods and goddesses like family members. They were all on this long journey together and they could be playful. There’s a lot of satire in regional language literature which is absent in English mythical fiction in India. It’s far too serious and everyone is playing it far too safe for obvious reasons.”
Choudhury has shifted genre for now. The Case of the Secretive Sister is his second novel and the first adventure in the Chatterjee Institute of Detection series. He feels that intelligent satire focusing on the epics may be a challenge, be it in the creation or the reception of it, but there’s no ruling out him visiting this space again.
Looks like mythical lore won’t be a thing of the past and will probably become the next big thing in Bollywood cinema land. Good stories never can come to an end.
July 10, 2015
by InstaScribe
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July 9, 2015
by Neelima
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When I think of myth, I think of the delightful comic strip series Amar Chitra Katha created by Anant Pai. I think of my grandmother who cared to share. It sounds cliché but it’s real. Myth is so much a part of the story telling process that I’m not surprised that mythical fiction is now the biggest fad around in English writing in India.
Indian mythical fiction in English may be a relatively new phenomenon, but in Indian languages there has been a continuous output of retellings of the old epics. Why not? There are far too many characters in the Indian pantheon and everyone has a story to be told and retold.
At the BYOB party we had last weekend (update coming up soon), almost everyone shared book after book that delved into multiple points of view of the Indian epics. In case you are new to the Mahabharata, it’s about a family at war-five brothers called the Pandavas vs their one hundred cousins, the Kauravas. That’s a lot of plotline and this is just one epic- we have the Ramayana, the Panchatantra, the Avatar stories, the Goddess Stories, the Puranas,etc.
In fact, most winners of the Jnanpith award (a prestigious literary award in India) have written their adaptations or interpretations of the Ramayana or Mahabharata in their respective languages.
I spoke to Anand Neelaknatan, writer of the acclaimed mythical fiction Asura, about the current myth fad. He doesn’t see himself as only a mythical fiction writer. He’s writing for TV now, has signed up for a Romedy film in Hindi and his next book
Devayani will be a fantasy thriller with a hint of mythology.
“I grew up in a place where Puranas and art, debates, drama and music were all part of life. I have heard most of the stories before I read them, as most people do in rural India. There is no field in India in the present, past or the future where myths will be irrelevant. Indians have always been great storytellers. We have experimented with all sorts of story-telling techniques and have given the world most of its well-known stories.”
He believes that myths cannot be rewritten in English effectively enough. I think this goes for the mythical tales in all languages.
”English lacks the nuances that this kind of literature needs as it developed in a different culture in a different era. Indian English is a very nascent language and has had to develop its own idioms. The queen’s English fails to convey most of our emotions in writing in an effective way.
When my character addresses another character as You, it does not convey much. In any Indian language, the form of you used conveys the social status, the character’s relationship to the narrator, the chemistry between them and many more things. An Aap (Hindi) is not the same as Tum or Tu, a Thangal (Malayalam) is not the same as Ningal or Nee. Each form of address conveys many things, which a plain You cannot. This is just a small example.
Another difficulty is that even very common phrases in English jars with our culture. For example, when we say, it was a warm welcome, it sounds artificial. In a cold country, the guests would be pleased with a warm hearth. In Indian languages, we say we received a “Sukha Sheethal” welcome or the equivalent of that, which when translated gives the opposite meaning in English- a very cold welcome. Rain means romance for us, but in English, the word rain conveys dark, brooding, bleak emotion. When we read, these nuances may not be visible, but in our subconscious mind it could be jarring. Indian English is groping in this confusing alley and unless it develops its own way of evocating emotions, writing will not rise to the level of an M.T. Vasudevan Nair or S.L.Byrappa or many other masters.”
Having said this, Neelakantan believes that the writing should continue as only time will tell which stories will be truly remembered as commercial success is but a small instance in the entire cosmos.
Only the story matters in the end.
July 8, 2015
by InstaScribe
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