Day: September 17, 2011

Now, even the Djokovic guy is feeling good! (This was written before his USOpen triumph!)  Article follows:

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

Maybe it’s back-to-school fever, but everyone I know seems besieged by pessimism. I’m distressed by water shortages, the state of the labor movement and the Somalian famine, which may needlessly kill 700,000 people this year. Friends are overwhelmed by their memories of 9/11 and of the horribly blown opportunities to use an excruciatingly painful event to move us towards a better place.

Issues pile upon issues: the president’s failure to even initiate the change we thought we heard him promise. Ill parents and unemployed children. Irene, and the inevitable questions about climate change. The wipe-out of farms in the Northeast. All of this was bad enough, and then that chest-beating Djokovic won the U.S. Open.

I got my Everything-Is-Going-Wrong feeling. It was time for a call to Charles Kenny.

Kenny, a Brit who lives in the District of Columbia and has a sharp mind, a quick wit and the fancy title of senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, has come to my rescue before. Once, when I was trying to counter the ubiquitous but historically incorrect notion that population growth will make it impossible to feed everyone on the planet, I asked him his view, and he replied, “The bottom 650 million people, planet-wide, live on an income roughly 1/100th of the richest 650 million, which means that each one percent rise in the incomes of the richest has the same impact on consumption and resources as doubling the incomes of the poorest. So if you want to stop runaway exploitation of the earth’s resources through population control it makes the most sense to sterilize Americans and Europeans, because they’re the problem.”

Remembering this kind of original, unusual and radical thinking, as well as the stuff that fills Kenny’s book “Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and How to Improve the World Even More,” made me reach for the phone. “Help,” I said. “I’m depressed about the progress of the human race.” (I didn’t tell him about Djokovic.)

“Relax,” he said. “We’re doing pretty well; only a couple of things are going in the wrong direction. We are, it’s true, storing problems for later by destroying our stocks of biodiversity, using oil, land and water at unconscionable rates, and chucking CO2 in the atmosphere, so it’s not entirely a rosy picture.

“But never,” he continued, “has there been a time in history when the average human could live so long, where food has been as plentiful, where newborns have a better chance of surviving. It’s really hard to think of an important area where things aren’t better: literacy, gender equality, the absence of slavery, the rights of minorities.”

Is it, as I’ve long suspected, that we (humans) always believe that we (individuals currently alive) are experiencing the worst time ever?

No hesitation: “Yes. Certainly the Romans thought that, and there’s a long tradition of pessimism, especially” — he said this without cruelty — “amongst the writing classes. Nearly all really poor people around the world, those with the right to complain, don’t; they say ‘yes’ when asked if life is going to be better for their kids. It’s the luxury of the well-off to be depressed.”

My friends and I qualify, evidently. I’m not confident my kids will be better off, though my family history would indicate otherwise: my grandparents fled the anti-Semitism of early 20th century Europe to live in slums in New York, but died untortured and well-fed, with mostly thriving children; my own parents lived through the Depression and hungry childhoods, World War II, and the disappearance of dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, but have survived happily in a way few of their antecedents could have dreamed. I’ve seen war and misery and hunger and injustice, certainly, but experienced little of that directly. My big complaints are not about my own bad luck but about that of others, and about how much better things could be than they actually are.

It’s hard to feel positive when the wild-eyed optimism of 2008 — remember? crying with joy? dancing in the streets? — has folded before a reality in which the difficulties and horrors of the first decade of the millennium remain not only unresolved but undiminished. And so, I demanded of Kenny, even given worldwide improvement, what could you possibly say about the States, where health care, education, immigration, food, the environment, social services and more are all being strangled by forces of reaction and the corpocracy?

He yielded, a little: “The short-term picture….” He groaned: ugh. “But the trends are good. We know how to fix global warming, and carbon taxes will work even if they begin on a local level. Food will continue to improve, too. Immigration issues will be resolved.

“Even the safety net … We’ll wind up raising the retirement age, which will help both productivity and Social Security. Or we could start giving people more days off; the 35-hour-work-week isn’t a bad idea. Business won’t like that, but if we give incentives and introduce it gradually, they’ll live with it.”

O.K., but famine?, the pessimist persisted. “Famine,” he said, “is no longer an act of nature but one of war. People only starve in places like North Korea or parts of Somalia, where evil people are in charge.

“That famine still exists is a terrible thing, something that keeps the world from being a more wonderful place than it is. But it’s a more wonderful place than it ever has been.”

There. Don’t you feel better? I do. Except for the Djokovic guy.

Did I mention I am appalled!  Article follows:

 

Piyal Adhikary/European Pressphoto AgencyCollege Street book market in Kolkata, India in February 2010.

“Language is no barrier to writing a novel,” author Animesh Verma told the Indian Express newspaper in a 2010 interview, a statement that caused many novelists and book lovers to recoil in disbelief.

“Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes doesn’t matter that much,” he went on to say. “I am not writing a literature.”

Indeed, many of India’s young – and best-selling – authors are no longer aspiring to write Booker-worthy novels. Instead, they’re writing free-flowing narratives on the travails of daily life in second- or third-tier Indian cities that resonate with the millions that live in these oft-forgotten towns.

Many of these barely-edited books, written in a colloquial style and the mishmash of Hindi and English known as Hinglish, are quickly outpacing sales numbers of Booker winners, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in a country where the benchmark for achieving best-seller status, until now, was a meager 5,000 copies.

Mr. Verma’s novel “Love, Life and Dream On: An IITian’s Story of Romance,” which was published by Srishti Publishers in January 2009, was an immediate hit.

Rujuta Diwekar is another author who writes in “Mumbaiyya English,” an English riddled with slang unique to Mumbai. Her first book “Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight” (Random House, 2009) has sold over 200,000 copies and her second book was given an initial print run of 75,000.

Compare that to Aravind Adiga, whose Booker-winning “The White Tiger” only had an initial print run of 30,000. Not bad for an author who claims to have read only three books in her entire life. Ms. Diwekar’s first publisher, Random House, initially launched her book with 5,000 copies. When the publishing house asked her to edit her style to a more international, less informal tone, it didn’t sit well with her, she told Outlook Magazine, and she switched to Westland, a less prestigious house, soon after.

“There are so many diet books I come across which you have to read with a dictionary by your side,” she said in in a recent interview.

Asked about Ms. Diwekar, Shailaja Raaj, head of publicity at Random House India, said “we at Random House have a policy to not comment on such things, but just to let you know, we made the book a bestseller!” Random House “has a history of authors not leaving us and she is probably the only author who did,” Ms. Raaj added.

It’s an exciting (or frustrating, depending on your point of view) time in the Indian publishing industry. Local authors, who seemingly don’t want to be bogged down by rules of grammar and spelling, are not only nabbing big publishing deals starting at 100,000 rupees (about $2,090) or more, but huge print runs, as well.

Literary elites sniff that these books are of poor quality. The language and story lines tend toward 90’s-style Bollywood masala, with shallow characters playing out absurd plot lines. The books, unfortunately, remain largely unedited.

A distaste for the dictionary is what fills pages with dialogue like this awkward passage, from mega-best seller Chetan Bhagat’s forthcoming book “Revolution 2020”:

“Yeah, of course. One should enjoy,” I said as he cut me.

“Next year I will make five crores.”

I realized he would keep forecasting his salary until I demonstrated suitable awe.

“Five crores!” I said, my voice loud and fake.

Gopal grinned. “Baby, eat this, for I have made it,” is probably the T-shirt slogan he would choose.

Or this stream-of-consciousness passage, from “I am BROKE….! LOVE Me,” by Animesh Verma:

But soon in the harsh terrain of economic turbulence, company started to lay off employees. There was a panic in the entire finance sector. Money comes with happiness and departs by snatching everything from life. Lots of relationship was broken, many lost their girl friends coz girls do not want to stay with losers. Many lost the hope of living and killed their family, many lost their temper after losing money on the stock exchange but still some relations survived in the turbulent weather and these were the relations who were genuine and lifelong. Many kept on searching for new jobs and then I had my own story.

Many of these best-selling authors are unknown outside Indian borders and often take pride in claiming they have no literary aspirations.

“I’m on top of the best-seller list, same as Amitav Ghosh. But nobody is going to interview me as they do him,” Rashmi Bansal, author of three books including “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” which sold 300,000 copies and was translated into eight languages, said in an interview with Outlook magazine in July 2011. “It doesn’t bother me as long as I’m reaching real people.”

Despite having self-published her first two books, in contrast with Ghosh, whose trilogy sold for approximately 4,400,000 rupees at auction, she does reach more small-town readers than does Ghosh, whose success and literary talent still affords him more prestige among elite or literary circles than it does with a lay reader.

Chetan Bhagat, of course, is where it all started. Named one of Time magazine’s Top 100 for the year 2010, “his tales of the lives and loves of India’s rising middle class have made him the biggest-selling English-language author in India’s history,” the magazine said.

His book “Five Point Someone,” released in 2004 by Rupa & Co, opened the floodgates for publishers to sell cheap mass-market paperbacks that could be read in one sitting. These books told Indian stories in a language the average Indian could understand, and at 100 rupees, were priced low-enough to be affordable to the average middle-class youngster.

Yet, the grammatically forgiving style may also have been the point. In India, approximately 100 million people speak English. However, most of this English is spoken in a heavily accented, localized and informal style. By incorporating this style, authors have connected with readers who were eager to find books that spoke to and about their lives rather than those from diaspora writers whose struggles they couldn’t identify with.

At the top of this wave are small publishing houses like Expression Publications and Srishti Publishers, as well as newer ones like Westland. And in true Indian fashion, where success follows, superstition can’t be far behind. For Jayanta K. Bose, the publisher and owner of Srishti Publishers, it is rumored that it is essential that the titles of his company’s books be only 19 characters long.

This is publishing, desi-ishtyle.

Has bad writing in popular literature made you laugh or cry? Leave us your favorite examples in the comments.

Go Green, Recycle Love, Make Peace.

Contributed by Smriti D. Isaac to the Orange Wall Peace Project

To “go green” refers to a conscious effort to be environmentally-friendly. One does this by way of recycling our natural and manufactured resources– everything from water, glass, paper, and plastic.

Here’s yet another “product” that may be recycled: love. Recycle the love as best you can, and as often as you can! And how does one do this? You send the love back that you receive, and your recipient in turns either returns it to you, and/or another. Spend a lifetime engaged in such recyclement, and you will make yourself a better person and the world a better place!

A few caveats to consider for recycling the love: consider putting aside your envies and jealousies in order to rejoice in the fortunes of another; also, put aside your ego and step into the shoes of the other; next, give each person the benefit of the doubt; and finally, break down all walls that would alter your view– build bridges instead to go back and forth!

Recycle the love for a lifetime, and you will make the world a better place! It is, after all, the *only* thing that survives us.

Smriti D. Isaac in her own words, is A Learner and Sharer who builds bridges on the side.