#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pullia Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
#
Kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
#
In 1992, the New York Times carried a cover story with the apocalyptic headline, The End
#
It was written by the novelist Robert Kuver, who asked if printed books could survive the
#
age of, quote, video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, stop
#
In the 27 years since then, it would seem that the threats to reading have multiplied
#
There is so much competing for our attention, much of it within the endless black mirror
#
Physical printed books, in fact, were under threat from e-books, which were supposed to
#
have made paperbacks and hardcovers entirely redundant.
#
And yes, there are some signs that the world of books and reading has changed massively,
#
such as the disappearance of bookstores in most of our cities, a matter I cannot stop
#
And yet, it seems that the publishing business worldwide is in pretty good health.
#
Latest figures show that printed book sales in the USA have increased year on year for
#
And publishing in India also seems to be doing pretty well.
#
And I have gotten a small sense of this in the course of the 150 episodes that I have
#
recorded of The Seen and the Unseen.
#
Now you would have thought that podcasts also would threaten the act of reading.
#
But over the three years of recording this show, I found that there's a hunger for knowledge
#
and intelligent discourse out there that is leading people not just to the 2R plus conversations
#
on this podcast, but also to read more and more books.
#
I constantly get messages from listeners about how they are reading more because of the books
#
And that is a matter worth exploring.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is VK Kartika.
#
And I hope she won't mind it if I call her one of the giants of Indian publishing.
#
She began at Penguin in 1996, left to take charge at HarperCollins a decade later, which
#
she ran for yet another decade.
#
And she is now publisher at Westland.
#
In this time, she's been a player in the evolution of India's publishing industry and has watched
#
not just our reading habits change, but also our society.
#
I've been trying to put this conversation together for a long time.
#
But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Like me, are you someone who loves fine art, but can't really afford to have paintings
#
by the artists you like hanging on your walls?
#
Head on over to indiancolours.com.
#
Indian Colours is a company that licenses images of the finest modern art from some
#
of the best artists in India and adapts them into objects of everyday use.
#
These include wearable art, like stoles and shrugs, home decor like cushion covers and
#
table runners, and accessories like tote bags.
#
This allows art lovers to actually get fine art into their homes at an accessible price,
#
and artists get royalties on sale, just like authors do.
#
What's more, Indian Colours now has an exciting range of new products, including fridge magnets
#
with some stunning motifs, and salad bowls and platters made of mango wood.
#
Their artists include luminaries like Babu Xavier, Vazvo X Vazvo, Brinda Miller, Dilip
#
Sharma, Shruti Nelson, and Pradeep Mishra.
#
They accept bulk orders for corporate and festival gifting, but even if you want to
#
buy just for yourself or a friend, head on over to indiancolours.com, that's Colours
#
And if you want a 20% discount, apply the code IVM20, that's IVM for IVM Podcast, IVM20
#
for a 20% discount at indiancolours.com.
#
Karthika, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
Before we get down to the business of books, tell me a little bit about how you happened
#
to come into publishing to begin with, because it's not like a conventional career choice
#
that one really has, so how did that happen?
#
I think like with most people, it happened entirely by accident.
#
I was looking for something to do.
#
You know how in the, what I'm talking about, the late 80s, early 90s, when I was in university,
#
I was in the University of Hyderabad doing an MA, an MPhil, then I came to JNU to do
#
This was all in quest of what to do next.
#
So you're an early anti-national.
#
I am a total anti-national, past, present, future.
#
And being in JNU was like a brilliant experience, but it showed me nothing of what I could do
#
for myself to make a living or to find a vocation or any such thing, because there really wasn't
#
very much out there for a literature postgraduate who did not want to teach.
#
I did try teaching for a semester.
#
They make you do that when you get a fellowship, they say go earn your keep, so you have to
#
But I also did not like the idea of going back to that same space semester after semester.
#
I thought it wasn't for me.
#
I have great respect for people who can do that and keep their energy alive and reinvent
#
themselves every term, but I didn't think it was for me.
#
So it was like, you know, am I a journalist?
#
There was very little television.
#
My fellow JNUites were just beginning to get into that early television stage.
#
So Ashutosh, for instance, was in the hostel next door, and he was seeing this friend of
#
mine whom he eventually married, and everyone was talking about this new Ajtak that was
#
Everything was fresh and unknown, but I couldn't see myself in that either.
#
So a friend of mine went and did a copyated test at Penguin.
#
And he said, I didn't get it, but you know, you know the language well enough to maybe
#
I said, okay, that's a luck, I have to show him I'm better than him maybe, and I'll go
#
And I went off to this office in Nehru place.
#
I wasn't a Delhi, I'm not a Delhi person, I've never lived there before I came to JNU.
#
So anyway, I went looking for it.
#
I went and did a test, and then they called me back for an interview.
#
And David Davida was the publisher then.
#
So he did an interview as well, and they said, come and join.
#
And I had this little wager with myself.
#
I said, if the money they give me is more than what I'm getting as my UGC fellowship,
#
Otherwise, obviously not.
#
I don't even know what this job is about.
#
They offered me 500 rupees more, and I said, oh, that's not bad, let me go and do this.
#
So I went to check it out.
#
And that first week was amazing, because it was like falling into the right place without
#
any idea that there was even such a place out there.
#
And by Friday evening, I remember vividly thinking to myself, this is it.
#
I just want to do this for the rest of my life.
#
And I was done lucky that that happened.
#
So that's how I fell into publishing and never left.
#
And I guess one reason why publishing would have seemed such a fit for you was because
#
I presume you were already someone who loved books.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
How did you start reading?
#
What were the circumstances which allowed you to sort of become an avid reader?
#
What kind of books did you read?
#
Who were the authors you enjoyed reading at that time?
#
I guess it was my mother.
#
In Kerala, when you're growing up, there's a lot of reading that happens outside of comfort
#
I mean, people read in Malayalam, but they also read in English.
#
And I remember my mother had these books.
#
She used to go to the H wheeler stand at the railway station because that was where their
#
So either you had them in the library, like in the village library or the town library
#
If you lived in a city, then you had a bigger one, but you had a lot of libraries in Kerala.
#
And then you had the H wheeler guys.
#
And mom would go to the station and buy those H wheeler stamped two rupee paperbacks, two
#
rupees 50 paisa paperbacks.
#
I still remember seeing those and they're still at home, but they would be random books.
#
Like there would be Maxim Gorky, a lot of Maxim Gorky for some reason.
#
There was the usual Agatha Christie and things like that that came up later.
#
There was a lot of Russian stuff because you remember there were Russian books that were
#
very popular in India at that time and very cheap.
#
So there was a lot of reading of literature that came, strangely enough, a lot of it in
#
translation into English, but read by us as though it was always just English.
#
And I think I grew up with that cupboard of books, which was my mother's and just read
#
everything there was in it.
#
I also remember reading my first Harold Robbins, which my mother quickly grabbed from me and
#
said, never again, do not read these books.
#
And I was like, if you can read them, why can't I read them?
#
But those were like really innocent days where you just read what you got and you were satisfied
#
with that or you went into the library seeking what you could.
#
So from there, I also remember that my school in Hyderabad had a large library, which for
#
some reason, apart from the Russian, the mother, the quiet flows, the dawn.
#
Like we devoured those.
#
I cannot imagine a child in school now reading 500 pages of quiet flows, the dawn.
#
There's no reason to, right?
#
What was there, we read.
#
And I remember discovering Louis Lamour.
#
I mean, there was this rock star cowboy on a horse going out and conquering the frontiers.
#
And the strange thing is when you look back, how little one understood the politics of
#
You read Louis Lamour and you thought this guy was a hero.
#
This white man on a horse was just like doing all the right things.
#
And those so-called red Indians were the guys who, well, it's okay for them to go because
#
And it's so much later that wisdom dawns and you understand what you were absorbing without
#
any sense of the world outside of your own little home and school and library.
#
But I think what it did was it just gave all of us in my generation who were lucky enough
#
to have those libraries reading across the world, roaming the world in these ways without
#
Nobody told us what was right.
#
Nobody told us what was wrong.
#
We had no theory backing us or supporting us.
#
So we just took what we could and we made what we could of it.
#
I'm really grateful I have that.
#
Now when I tell my kids why aren't you reading this or that to the other, and they have very
#
solid reasons for why they should do, because they have all that armory around them.
#
So I guess we were one of the first generations of people who read in English in that way,
#
world literature available to us.
#
So that's where it began, I guess, my reading.
#
No, and I'm just thinking a lot, like I'm also an 80s kid as partly you are, I guess.
#
And I had JP Narayan, the politician on the show before this, and he was speaking about
#
growing up in a village in the 60s and then sort of studying in Hyderabad again, like
#
And one of the things that sort of struck me was how a lot of us as individuals and
#
therefore how society in large is also shaped by the influences we have available to us.
#
For example, today any kid, today your kids, for example, have all the knowledge of the
#
world available to them.
#
In our times, we didn't really have that.
#
And you know, you have your typical cultural influences.
#
You have that one TV station, which is Doordarshan, and you have your All India Radio.
#
And for those who are lucky enough to listen to BBC, and then you have books.
#
And even within that world of books, it strikes me that from what I remember is that there
#
would be a very cliched sort of set of books, which would be standard to the growing up.
#
Like I'm sure both you and I grew up reading, say, Enid Blyton, of course, you know, Hardy
#
Boys and, you know, Tintin and Asterix would have been a treat for us.
#
And how therefore, you know, that becomes almost by happenstance, because there's no
#
particular reason, only those books are available and not so much else, but almost by happenstance
#
that almost becomes a sort of the bedrock of our thinking.
#
In my case, it was, I realized also that my father was an educationist, he was the principal
#
And so when I started, the first time he actually came and gave me a book to read, which was
#
kind of chosen was an Enid Blyton, because I had chicken pox, I was lying in bed and
#
I couldn't do anything.
#
And he gave me the famous five.
#
And I just never wanted to get out of bed after that, because every day I wanted another
#
and another and another.
#
And that kind of discovery of the word that because you're talking about television and
#
radio, we had like no television at all in those days.
#
What we did have was radio and mostly for Vinaka Geetmala and then the cricket commentary.
#
So we'd be like glued to the transistor listening to whatever match was going on anywhere in
#
And that was really our only exposure to anything.
#
Books were all that were there to show us the world.
#
So we were lucky because if we'd had anything else, I doubt we would have had that same
#
kind of passion for books as we were able to have because of this.
#
And given the centrality of books in one, say, imaginative life for people who were
#
fortunate enough to sort of be able to access books, that brings me to my next question.
#
I mean, you know, the rise of Penguin in the 90s and David Davida, of course, is an iconic
#
figure for many people.
#
But tell me a little bit about what Indian publishing was pre that period, pre Penguin
#
You know, how did it function?
#
Where did who were the publishers who operated?
#
Where did they get books from?
#
I think most of the publishers were very much Indian in that sense.
#
I mean, certainly Penguin was a big multinational to come in.
#
There was OUP, there was education publishing.
#
But in trade publishing, there were players like Jaco and Vikas.
#
And they did publish books and there were a lot of first time publishing that they did,
#
which then introduced writers who got picked up by other big publishers later.
#
But it was still quite small.
#
I mean, you had your malgudi days and you had bestsellers like that, which were very
#
much part of the reading circuit.
#
By the time Neeraj Chaudhary had been published, Raja Rao was being published, there was enough
#
substantial publishing.
#
But English was still the language that was beginning to be lingua franca.
#
There were more books being published in the languages than there were in English.
#
And this is also around the time that Penguin comes in, for instance, something very beautiful
#
and in the parallel space is happening, which is Kali for Women is coming up.
#
And that is a completely different sort of the independent press is being set up with
#
And that press obviously is still around in a different way now.
#
So while Penguin flourished and decided to follow the Western model, Penguin was modeled
#
very much on the way Penguin UK would have run or Penguin US would have run.
#
And all that we see now of the way publishing works in terms of how books are acquired,
#
how they are marketed and sold.
#
A lot of it owes itself to that time when things were set in place.
#
Now that could have been done very differently.
#
Maybe we might have evolved a different way of working if we had looked at the way the
#
independent presses were functioning.
#
But these two things came alongside and they both followed completely different trajectories.
#
But I think that late 80s is what set the pace.
#
And it was very, very small.
#
I remember in the early days in Penguin, we were doing something like 40 books a year,
#
then it went up to 50, then went up to 60.
#
But that was still a lot of books to try and acquire because there were fewer people writing.
#
There was a lot more work required to get them to be publishable.
#
And there were no computers in the early days.
#
There was no PDFs to edit with.
#
There was all hard copy.
#
So you would take printouts and then you would mark edits on them.
#
And then the types that I would put in the corrections.
#
And I still remember the really interesting way in which covers happened.
#
So Penguin in those days was an Anand Bazar Patrika joint venture with Penguin UK.
#
So the art department was the Anand Bazar art department sitting in Calcutta.
#
And so a cover would be ideated here, like, you know, this is the book, this is the title.
#
And it would be sent to Calcutta.
#
And there would be someone sitting at a desk there who would draw out a cover and then
#
career it back to Delhi.
#
And then David would look at it and then do more scrolls and scratches on that.
#
And then it would be careered back to Calcutta.
#
And this is how, I mean, it sounds completely weird now that things could actually function
#
in that way and be successfully done, but they weren't done.
#
And gradually as computers and emails and all of that happened in the mid 90s, then
#
things began to professionalize in a very different way.
#
But all along, I mean, as I said, the family owned businesses that were already in India
#
and were publishing in English, they were going full tilt at it.
#
And they were acquiring books, they were editing and publishing.
#
Marketing was not so much on the horizon then the way it is.
#
But a lot of people were invested in distribution and in bringing books from international markets
#
in the UK and the US and selling them here.
#
So it was all very early days, but you can see the foundation of everything we do here
#
and trace it back to that time, late 80s, mid 80s maybe is a better time.
#
No, and in fact, what you just said about the technology that we take for granted brings
#
to mind something I was just reading yesterday about an author from a few decades ago complaining
#
about how you worked for many years on a book and then lost his only manuscript.
#
And a young person today may wonder how can there be an only manuscript, isn't it, on
#
What are you talking about?
#
And it's reflective of the things like another observation a friend of mine had made was
#
that the generation that is growing up today will never know what it is like to be lost
#
because of GPS and all that.
#
That sense of physically not knowing where you are won't exist, which is almost...
#
I think they're making up for it by being thoroughly lost in the head half the time.
#
I'm sure that's intended for your kids if they are listening.
#
So back then in the late 80s, early 90s, what's the scope of Indian publishing at that point?
#
Like for example, how many books sell?
#
What is considered a bestseller?
#
Is it possible to make a living from writing or is it a thing of passion?
#
So when I joined, it was 96 year end, I think, and the books that we were publishing then
#
were printed like 1000 copies, 2000 copies, 1500.
#
I don't think we ever went over 2000 copies.
#
And if we sold a thousand copies, we were quite happy and a lot of books were printed
#
I think offset printing required that you did them in certain lots.
#
So academic publishing then and even now often does 500 copies of a book.
#
But Penguin was like trying to reach a larger audience.
#
It had more commercial ambitions.
#
So 1000 and 2000 was considered to be the goal.
#
I think that was roughly how it played out until Arundhati Roy happened.
#
And then it was like the sky was just the limit.
#
And suddenly you realized that what you thought of as possibly always going to be a small
#
limited world could conquer the world.
#
And then the numbers and the print runs, they suddenly became in tens of thousands.
#
Of course, even then for a very few titles, but the possibility was there finally.
#
And so the irony is that your average book even now is 3000 copies.
#
So it looks like 20 years down, we are still looking at almost the same number of serious
#
readers in the market who will discover a new book and follow it up and read with intent.
#
Whereas you have the commercial novels, as they call them, the books that are trending
#
being picked up in lakhs.
#
So would it be fair to say that the long tail is basically the same size, but at the best
#
seller end, that has expanded massively.
#
And that best seller end has moved in directions we hadn't anticipated at all in those days.
#
I think in those times, it was still the literary novel that seemed to be the only future and
#
the only kind of star that everybody wanted to reach for.
#
It was a complete surprise to people in publishing that actually what people want to read is
#
not necessarily the literary novel, which is a formal constructed novel of the West,
#
but they want something completely different and individualized for home.
#
And till that happened, I think we were just like walking in one direction and then suddenly
#
it splintered and different possibilities emerged, differentiation on the bookshelf
#
emerged, different categories of publishing emerged.
#
So while everybody was focused on like one kind of thing, either the big narrative nonfiction,
#
which is the biography of a big figure or like big politics or something apart from
#
the literary novel, then it suddenly became about commercial novels, about thrillers,
#
about romance, about spirituality, wellbeing, you know, mass and Venus kind of books that
#
suddenly became the big best sellers.
#
So that differentiation, I think, was a sign of maturing of the market and the maturing
#
of the reader in some way that they had the confidence to choose to read something rather
#
than just go with what was given to them.
#
And almost like a benediction, this is good for you.
#
These are the books you should read.
#
Suddenly became a panic in publishing houses where they said, what happened to the author?
#
When did the reader become center stage?
#
And suddenly when the readers center stage, then you've got to realign your thinking about
#
what you want, what the market wants, and you started thinking about the market as a
#
living, breathing thing only then.
#
All this seems really archaic when you look back, because everything now is geared to
#
Everything is geared to the consumer.
#
We didn't use words like consumer then, right?
#
We just knew that the person who produces the content is the important person.
#
That the consumer could be equally important was not on the horizon.
#
And now the place where I work at, well, consumer is the word.
#
It's always about the consumer.
#
It's about saying, do you know your reader?
#
How are you giving your reader what they want?
#
Stop being the person who decides what the reader wants.
#
So it's a dramatic shift in perception, in the way you work, in the way writing itself
#
Everything is on its head as far, if you looked at it from that point of view, but it's very
#
straight up for someone who's been born in this time.
#
And for a lot of people, focusing on the consumer would almost be infraday, it's like, what
#
And we will be the gatekeepers and the others of good taste.
#
My other question is sort of related to this, that when you get into publishing, obviously
#
when it comes to the heuristics of how do you choose a book or what kind of books you
#
look for, I guess your first basic heuristic is obviously your own taste, what you like
#
and what you don't like.
#
But then you have to go beyond this very fast when you start thinking of the market.
#
And that's especially so in a marketplace that expands as rapidly, like shortly after
#
you come on the scene, then Arundhati's book happens and Chetan Bhagat happens in the early
#
2000s and people are just reading different kinds of things.
#
What is this process like?
#
One thing that I often speak about to fellow editors, which is in journalism, of course
#
not publishing, but to fellow editors and to people who commission podcasts and whatever
#
people who are in that editorial filtering decision making process is that the most important
#
quality you must have is humility.
#
Don't assume that your own taste are necessarily determine what is good or what is bad or what
#
people want or what people don't want.
#
People are very diverse.
#
They want all kinds of things.
#
So you've got to sort of have the humility to step back from your own preferences and
#
biases and be sort of open to that.
#
How was that process for you of developing your vision as an editor?
#
I think publishing is the most paradoxical space in many ways.
#
It's like different forces pulling against each other in almost everything you do.
#
And part of that, I think, is this thing of choosing what you want to publish.
#
On the one hand, yes, what you want to read is what you want to publish.
#
And I would never underestimate that because in many ways the reader and the editor are,
#
especially if you speak about it in situations of say class and location of geography, etc.
#
in a certain ways, you'll find that there are very similar people and maybe what you
#
think is a strong book would resonate with those many people for sure.
#
So the trick, I think, is to decide the identity of that reader and to say, okay, this is one
#
book that I think is wonderful and I'm sure there are like a few thousand people out there
#
who will read it, but there might be another book which I may not read or pick up for myself,
#
but maybe there are a hundred thousand readers out there who will read that.
#
What we would try and do is to find a reader in-house whose taste might resonate with those
#
hundred thousand people as well.
#
So in that sense, I think diversity within a publishing house is the one big thing because
#
you cannot have it as one taste across all editors, all bringing in the same kind of
#
As long as there are different minds at work and different tastes at work, we will always
#
be able to reach different kinds of readers.
#
And the humility you speak of, I think part of that humility is to say you may be the
#
publisher, you may be one of the senior people, none of that matters.
#
If there's someone who's in her first month in publishing who falls in love with the book,
#
one has to also listen to that and say, okay, we don't know this, but clearly if this person
#
loves it, then there must be something to it.
#
And we need to follow that instinct as well.
#
So not being set in one way or deciding for everyone, I think that's the first step that
#
all of us learn in that journey of how to and what to publish.
#
In fact, one of the most, like I came across this awesome study a few years ago when I
#
read Philip Tetlock's book, Super Forecasting, where he talks about how the most important
#
factor for good decision making in any company is not intelligence or education or any of
#
those things you might normally assume, but diversity.
#
That's the most important sort of determinant and therefore it is in every company's self-interest
#
to sort of enhance the diversity of the workplace, not for its own sake, but just in terms of
#
Business, it makes business sense.
#
You have, and what you said obviously speaks to that, but you know, one criticism a lot
#
of people do have of publishing even today is that it's not diverse enough that you find
#
it's kind of homogeneous.
#
It's partly the language we work with, the sophisticated narrative, which is what we expect
#
to publish when we hire editors, as though you're hiring them at the level of literary
#
fiction editors when actually you might want people who are editing Sri Sri Ravishankar
#
or you know, something like that.
#
So now I think all of us are learning that that differentiation is very, very important
#
and you have to have people who think differently and who read differently and who use language
#
There's no point in, I often think this, that there's no point in my going out to try and
#
commission a book that a 17 year old might, you know, completely take to.
#
If I'm really skilled at my job and if I've really read enough and I'm able to put myself
#
into the heads of all kinds of people, I just might be able to.
#
But I think that's really difficult.
#
I think you need to have specialists in every category.
#
You need to have people who develop not only their instinct for that category, but also
#
experience in that category, who can deepen their understanding of the subject while casting
#
around to see what is the broadest base of readership and commission to that.
#
There's a lot more science.
#
I mean, I always used to think publishing was all about art.
#
You know, it was like the final thing to do, getting the politics, the nuance, the writing.
#
That's all there still.
#
I don't think it's devoid of that, but I think that art without the science, the art
#
without the algorithm in today's world is not going to be effective.
#
No, and while I entirely sort of agree with the shift towards keeping the consumer at
#
the center, which I would say is essentially an overdue respect for readers and what they
#
want, are there values that go beyond that?
#
For example, if I may use an analogy, it just strikes me thinking aloud that the editor
#
of a publishing house is somewhat like a zookeeper and you're running a zoo and you've got all
#
But after a period of time, you realize that everyone wants to see the lion and the elephant
#
and the hyena and whatever, and there are certain exotic or even mundane species perhaps
#
which nobody wants to see.
#
So they don't, you know, they're just taking a valuable real estate, they're not worth
#
And then the zookeeper has a choice that does he keep them there or does he remove them?
#
And similarly, are there sort of higher set of values where you say that, okay, for example,
#
poetry may not sell, but I will nevertheless subsidize my poetry imprint with the revenues
#
I get from selling bestsellers elsewhere, because it is important for us to do as publishers
#
and this in a sense is a larger question that also correlates with a similar question you
#
could ask about journalism, that are you going to be entirely market driven or are there
#
some kind of higher values?
#
And to follow up on that, if there are higher values that go beyond the logic of the market,
#
are they inherent in the logic of the profession that is either journalism or publishing in
#
your case, or will they necessarily come from the individuals who happen to be there?
#
So many things to think about here.
#
I don't know if anything is beyond the logic of the market, because what you're saying,
#
the fewer numbers, the failure perhaps of some things is also the logic of the market
#
that's driving it to non-existence.
#
And I think there is a call to be taken, for instance, literary fiction, more than poetry
#
Literary fiction is always going to be a difficult thing to publish, I think, because it is premised
#
on the assumption that there are readers out there who are willing to invest a certain
#
kind of time and intelligence and also effort in reading, and who feel that there is a value
#
attached to that work, which they are willing to explore and imbibe.
#
And as long as that continues to be a difficult space, there will always be the temptation
#
You can do five books in that space, it requires less effort, and you will still make much
#
But I think that is non-negotiable as far as I'm concerned.
#
Part of why publishing continues to be important is because it produces ideas, it produces
#
a way forward for thinking about language, about construction, of thought, of society,
#
of the way we live and the way we dream.
#
These are not things that you can put away at any cost.
#
They need to be there, they need to be supported, they need to be put out in the world for people
#
to receive or not receive.
#
And the interesting thing about publishing in India is that your stakes are not that
#
high in individual books in terms of your investment either.
#
You're not going to go under because you backed one literary novel.
#
It would go under if your entire list was literary fiction and they weren't all of the
#
kind of, I mean, like one of the acquisitions, of course, that too much is getting published.
#
So that I would agree with, that there's no point in putting out books that perhaps somebody
#
else could do or maybe they could just go out into that whole self-published space.
#
Maybe you don't need a mainstream publisher for that.
#
But otherwise, being selective, putting out the best of writing that is available to you,
#
that is, I hesitate to use the word duty because it isn't like the right word in a place where
#
we talk about markets and consumerism.
#
But I think publishing is still old world enough to nurture that sense of duty and responsibility
#
and to say, what are you as a publisher?
#
If your job is merely to make money, then I don't think publishing supports that worldview
#
There are publishers and there are spaces within publishing that do.
#
But from where I'm sitting, I'm seeing it as a job that has a responsibility of putting
#
books into the world that aid a conversation, that aid discourse, that aid intelligent thinking
#
And it could be nonfiction, it could be fiction, it could be poetry, any of these things.
#
The challenge and the other side of the duty and responsibility is to make sure that my
#
company doesn't suffer for that.
#
That the way I publish these books, the way I bring in the right books, the way we package
#
them, the way we sell and market and tell the world why they need to be read, that needs
#
to be done in such a way that you will find the readers for them and that they will go
#
on to maybe get an award or get on short lists or whatever it is that takes to get some more
#
visibility for them and gives the author the satisfaction that her words are being read
#
and appreciated in the way they were meant to be.
#
So it's a double-edged thing.
#
You need to do it, but you also need to do it smartly and to make sure that you don't
#
publish a book that then goes nowhere or just sinks.
#
That's no good for anyone.
#
So it's a daily challenge to put the good book out there and get it to sell.
#
But even if you don't sell it all, even if you just break even, I still think it's something
#
that we have a responsibility to do.
#
So give me a sense of the economics of it.
#
Like when you talk about how the stakes are not too high and by backing one literary author,
#
we won't necessarily go broke.
#
And you know, even if we break even, it's something we're doing.
#
What is sort of break even?
#
Like how many copies does a book need to sell for it?
#
So I have taken on a novel that I think I would have to sell something like 5,000 copies
#
to earn out, say, the advance for the author.
#
And if I end up selling 2,500 copies, I will be writing off a certain amount of money that
#
should be earned out by the advance and is not being earned out.
#
But I would have broken even in the sense that overall, I may not have made the usual
#
7 to 10% margin, which is all publishing margins are, I may end up with zero, nothing gained,
#
But as long as the advance has been reasonable and premised on that first print run, we're
#
okay if you sell roughly 60% of that print run.
#
And do you find other publishers also, you know, share this sort of sense of you didn't
#
want to use the word duty.
#
So this sense of duty in a sense, it's not a bad word towards keeping literature, poetry,
#
all of these genres sort of alive in some way or the other while one goes about the
#
business of selling books.
#
I think a lot of them do.
#
The conversations I have with my colleagues and other publishing houses is often how to
#
do this balancing act, how do we sell books, but how do we also do books that we really
#
deeply care about and feel should be published.
#
It's a battle that everyone is fighting, and I know very few people who don't care about
#
There are some who have taken the conscious decision that, okay, somebody else in-house
#
is doing that part of the job.
#
My job is to bring in the revenue in a certain way, and I will do that.
#
But I think even in doing that, they contribute to that larger idea that publishing still
#
has a job to do that is beyond revenue.
#
And for as long as we can keep that as center stage, I think we'll all be the beneficiaries
#
And how have your sort of own reading taste evolved, you know, over this entire journey?
#
Because you obviously start off with a set of preferences, but then you have to widen
#
your reading as a matter of professional duty.
#
You just have to pretty much read everything.
#
And how does that evolve?
#
So I think I started out by reading everything.
#
So that was probably the best thing I did for myself as an editor unknowingly.
#
So I never felt a sense of hierarchy in my reading.
#
Nobody ever told me and I didn't feel that reading Enid Blyton was less than reading
#
I didn't know the difference.
#
But I think a lot of my understanding of publishing and the kinds of books I want to do come from
#
my years in university, especially Central University in Hyderabad.
#
We had a fantastic set of teachers who through literary theory at us for you can imagine
#
someone coming out of an undergraduate course in a conventional college comes to a university
#
where the faculty is like just come back from doing PhDs in literary theory in the US.
#
And they come and tell you the author is dead.
#
And I mean, even that notion that the author is dead actually is like from 10 years ago,
#
you guys just discovering it now.
#
We'd never come up with words like feminism in such a way as in that space.
#
And you suddenly discover that it's not just pleasure that you're reading for, but that
#
there are processes that go into reading and analyzing that pleasure that allow you to
#
then understand how to construct a book differently and to make that pleasure possible for someone
#
This seems like something that wasn't intended at all by my teachers.
#
They thought they were teaching us for, you know, to make educators of us.
#
And as I got into publishing and as I started working on books, I think all of these theoretical
#
understandings and political understandings of the text of trying to struggle with a Derrida
#
or a Spivak or reading Canadian writers and American and Australian writers and trying
#
to understand how they use language so differently, it knocks everything out of you.
#
Any learning that you thought was to be taken seriously.
#
All you know is that it's a blank slate every time you open a book and what you get could
#
surprise you or could disappoint you.
#
But every single work is an experience in itself.
#
And I think if you can open a book, every manuscript that comes to you in that same
#
way and say, I don't know what to expect from this, but whatever it is, let me read it in
#
Let me read it as what it sets out to be, not what I would like to read or what I would
#
like to see, then I think you're already better off in your editorial approach.
#
I mean, you will go to it with a more open mind than if you had standards of excellence
#
that had to be met in a certain way and only in that way.
#
So what I'm trying to say is that the reading that I did expanded into reading about writing
#
and reading about reading.
#
And there was a lot of poetry in that.
#
And I had extraordinary teachers.
#
My supervisor was a Maharashtrian who read Kipling with great enthusiasm and showed me
#
how to read historical fiction in a certain way.
#
I did my MPFL on Mary Renaud, this wonderful historical fiction writer who's got this fabulous
#
And so I worked on that.
#
And now when I edit historical fiction, I'm grateful I had that.
#
I had Hoshang Merchant as my professor.
#
He read American poetry to us and talked about gender in a way that was very distinct from
#
Tejaswini Niranjana, who was my introduction to feminist reading, who does a completely
#
different reading of gender than him.
#
So when you get thrown into a space like that where people are coming at you with ideas
#
that are so different, each of them has a position and each of them fairly fierce in
#
You just can't approach a text either neutrally or objectively, as they say.
#
You have to fight with it a little bit, like you struggle with it.
#
You dig deeper if you can.
#
And so as it happens, I think the very first book I commissioned as an editor at Penguin
#
was a collection of queer writing edited by Hoshang.
#
And that was an eye opener in itself, the kind of text that came in, the way we worked
#
I think one of my dearest memories from that time of surprise in publishing and writers
#
was God David had said, yes, go ahead and commission this book.
#
And Hoshang had given me a list of his wish list and I was adding to that.
#
And then we were writing off letters to people.
#
And I remember we were sitting in this little conference room we had where all the commissioning
#
editors were sitting, there were about five of us, with David.
#
And suddenly there was this call, we had landlines only, and somebody was calling from the reception
#
to say there's someone for me.
#
And I was like, who is it?
#
And I said, Vikram Seth.
#
And I was like, Vikram Seth, why don't you talk to me?
#
And I remember being really nervous and shaky about even taking this call.
#
And he was calling to say, I got you a letter about inclusion in this anthology you're doing,
#
and I'm very happy to be in it.
#
I just thought I'd call and tell you myself.
#
I was floored that he thought it was important enough to do this.
#
I'm floored listening to this.
#
And I was like this young editor on my first commissioned book.
#
So it is an amazing world.
#
Every day you come upon people who surprise you, who make you think about all the best
#
And each time something lets you down, you find two other people or two other situations
#
that quickly bolster you and say, no, no, no, all is good, it's better.
#
And I think that is the best thing about being in publishing, these people around you who
#
whose books you read and work with, sometimes you don't work with ever, but they enrich
#
So you were speaking about, you know, learning how to read, for example, and a few days back
#
I reread Harold Bloom's book, learning how to read and why I think it's called.
#
And whenever people, for example, tell me that they can't understand poetry, for example,
#
though they're otherwise readers, I give them a copy of Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook because
#
that's such a lovely book and it really helps you appreciate poetry so much better.
#
Somebody posted a tweet, a poem from that, the bride and the bridegroom, what was that?
#
The bridegroom embracing the world and the bride embracing, embrace, amazement, something
#
It was beautiful lines.
#
So that's again, a heck of a book.
#
So just asking you about like one, obviously the nature of how you read a book changes
#
as you elaborated upon when you are an editor, when you're a publisher, changes completely.
#
You just, you know, you find different depths.
#
But if you had to, for example, advise my listeners who might be earnest readers, you
#
know, on the subject of what should they read to enhance the way they read, what are the
#
recommendations you'd have?
#
Yeah, I don't think there are any particular texts that can help you read.
#
Reading is its own learning.
#
The more you read, the many kinds of texts you read, analysis of it would help if you
#
are in the frame of mind to be receptive to that.
#
But otherwise, just exploring texts and as many kinds of texts as you can.
#
Reading poetry today, reading a novel tomorrow, reading a graphic novel the day after, reading
#
The good thing about our digital experience now is that you can Google and say, what are
#
the 10 best books in each category?
#
And it's interesting that there are many cliches in there, but there's usually very, very good
#
recommendations in there.
#
So you can find practically any kind of book you're in the mood for.
#
And I don't think there's any substitute for that reading.
#
There are a few books that can tell you how to read as well as the books themselves can
#
And I also think that poetry is an invaluable guide to how to read and to write because
#
it's almost like a laboratory where you're shaking up the words and reconfiguring them,
#
throwing in something different, something new, a comma in one place and not the other
#
can change the way you breathe that line.
#
And that changes the way you write or read that line.
#
And things like that only come to you when you as you keep reading, like nobody will
#
be able to point that out to you in the way that you can point it out to yourself if you
#
But if you had to read a book on, say, grammar, you know, like you read, leave shoots.
#
Which itself contains many errors, but you read that kind of book and you say, hey, this
#
This isn't like all hard work, right?
#
But then you read one essay like The Death of the Author by Roland Barth and you have
#
to rethink the way you thought about reading altogether.
#
And I think that essay for me was like a changing point, a turning point where all the old ideas
#
go out to the window and then you realize that you need to find a different way to read
#
To me, one of the biggest educations in how to read is crime writing.
#
Because when you read a crime novel, which is really well written, I'm talking about
#
the near literary crime fiction, which so much of it actually exists, you can almost
#
unpack the way the structure works, right?
#
You can see where the red herrings were because you will remember them.
#
You will see how language shifts in terms of description, atmosphere, to the crispness
#
of dialogue, to light and sound and shape, all the things that go into making something
#
of complete experience, it's all there in crime fiction, in the best of crime fiction.
#
And when you read that, in a way, it's like reading poetry because a lot of it is also
#
about exploring other worlds, other countries, other cultures.
#
So much of your understanding of culture can come from crime fiction, which is very close
#
to the ground in those places and looks at the underbelly of things and the governance
#
and all of that, that I think you arrive at an understanding of how text works.
#
And even if you're not a crime fiction fan, I think if you are a reader and if you're
#
an editor, I think it's great learning more than reading a book about how to read or write.
#
And I absolutely agree with you, especially about poetry, just looking.
#
I think poetry, if you're reading carefully, forces you to look at language with a granularity
#
that then enhances your understanding of it and your use of it if you're a writer.
#
And with crime fiction, I guess, again, using an economist term, one could say that the
#
incentives of a crime writer are very functional.
#
He has to keep the reader hooked.
#
The imperative for him is to keep moving the action forward, but also he wants to paint
#
as rich a world as he can within that constraint.
#
So you do see a lot of...
#
And also remember that some of the best crime fiction then ends up being a series with the
#
same character having to be true to that same character, but plot changing every time, enough
#
of a deepening of character that you will continue to find new things in each book.
#
So I'm reading a Jack Reacher at the moment, which I think that man is like the kind of
#
man I'd like to be some day, just walking off into the wild with one set of clothes
#
and one toothbrush, and that's all he has.
#
And he just lives every day in that moment.
#
It's like a philosophy of life, which you don't expect to find in crime fiction, which
#
And all of these kinds, from the P.D. James on where it's beautiful, it's literary, and
#
the individual in that English countryside is very different from the ex-marine in America.
#
But somewhere it's the same hunt for meaning.
#
It's the same search for the things that will make life worth living.
#
And I think as they are in literary fiction, crime fiction articulates that hopelessness
#
and the need to stay, survive, and hope.
#
Because every time somebody dies, somebody's trying to find an answer to why.
#
And in that finding, you also find a reason to live.
#
And I think people underestimate what crime fiction can do to you, not just in terms of
#
how to read, but also in terms of what they take away each time from a really sharp novel
#
So why did I just go on and on about crime fiction?
#
No, and that's actually a very profound observation.
#
I was reminded, for example, of Sehwal and Walu, who, of course, the remarkable series
#
starting with, I think, Roseanne was the first book, and they came at the crime series not
#
just with the sense that let's write an interesting crime series, but also with a vision of the
#
world and a vision of what society is and should be.
#
And so occasionally, every 50 pages, there will be this irritating paragraph which rants
#
But quite apart from that, I think they set the trend for a lot of the sort of crime fiction
#
which follows, which kind of brings me to a related question that, where is the Indian
#
I mean, I know there's quite a lot of it, but surely in different disparate sort of
#
ways, Suryendra Mohan Pathak kind of way, and stray literary attempts here and there.
#
It isn't yet a sort of full-fledged segment.
#
There have been books, Anita Nair's Gowda series comes to mind, Arjun Gend and his historical
#
So, of course, there's writers located in the West who are writing within Indian situations.
#
I think it's starting up in a more sort of concrete way, but I worry that the visual
#
world actually is not allowing that to grow so much because there's so much great crime,
#
so much great action on your screens all the time, your Netflix and Prime and whatever
#
else you're watching, that I feel like a lot of our good, possibly good crime writers are
#
probably writing for those spaces now and are not so interested in the book, which gives
#
them much less in terms of readership or numbers as opposed to the viewership.
#
And also, of course, in terms of less money, they earn much more writing that same thing
#
for somebody else who's going to make a big production out of it.
#
So I don't know how much perseverance there will be in that community of crime writers.
#
In fact, that's a question I was saving for the end.
#
So before we go in for our break, I'll ask it anyway for a little early since you brought
#
the subject up, that a lot of creative people, a lot of imaginative people who would otherwise
#
have taken to writing books now have other options for their creative juices.
#
They can work on a web series, they can even go into filmmaking or there are so many options
#
I mean, I remember thinking when I first saw The Wire all those years ago, absolutely loving
#
it because of its novelistic sweep, the way it slowly unfolds and it's not like a, typically
#
I think of a film as something like a short story that you've got that one linear strand
#
and maybe one or two others, but that's about it.
#
The Wire build this novelistic universe and carries it through for seven seasons.
#
But then that also means that people who have the urges to build worlds like that and to
#
go that deep and to talk about those things don't necessarily have to turn to pen and
#
Is that something you see affecting books in the future or you are like, no, there's
#
a space for everything we'll manage.
#
I think there's a space for everything.
#
I think there's a space for people who want to write for that space and also write books.
#
I also know Amish, for instance, is a writer I work with as well.
#
And in this context, I remember Amish saying that he still wants to keep writing books
#
because he feels that is his individual space where his mind, his thinking, his philosophy
#
of life is what he's working on.
#
It isn't what will fit somebody else's idea of what works on screen.
#
It isn't that there are multiple screenwriters and dialogue writers and all of these people
#
who are going to come into the picture and take your idea and make it something else.
#
It's like if you want the purity of your own words and your own thoughts, then perhaps
#
the book is the only place where you can get that kind of concentrated individuality rather
#
than something on screen, which is obviously the effort of multiple minds and multiple
#
So apart from the book, I doubt there's any other place.
#
No, in fact, I think of like two kinds of tragic opportunity costs that come in.
#
One, obviously, is that the screen plays so much better.
#
And once you get drawn into that and then you start living that lifestyle also, it seems
#
a waste to give it up and write a book.
#
And also the other thing that I have found from living in Bombay, though I never myself
#
have tried to put a foot in the film world, but what I see around me is that maybe one
#
out of 100 projects will get through.
#
So a lot of the work that a writer does could basically be wasted.
#
Either it doesn't get made or if it gets made, it gets made badly and it's not something
#
you can own up to and years can pass by like that.
#
While if you write a book, however bad, it is still your own product.
#
Like Amisha told you, that's where his own individuality comes.
#
And also I think what happens very often and you know many more writers than me, so you'll
#
be able to tell me if this observation is valid, is that a lot of writers when they
#
start out aren't necessarily good writers, but they'll muddle through one book and they'll
#
muddle through another and then at some point in time, just by doing repeatedly, they get
#
And that initial self delusion about how good they are when they weren't good actually makes
#
In a sense, you can say they fake it till they make it.
#
And you know, and we were talking crime fiction.
#
I mean, there are so many crime series I can think of which start off in a very iffy way.
#
The first two or three books aren't quite there.
#
And then the writer solidifies in the voice and then it just becomes something else entirely.
#
I mean, Siowal and Walu actually being an exception to that because I think the beginning
#
The beginning was stunning.
#
Is there something to that?
#
And then is there the danger that the two or three books that a writer might need to
#
sort of find their feet and become better?
#
They don't happen because maybe after the first one, the guy just says, okay, let me
#
And then, you know, and that's like the show is called the scene and the unseen.
#
So maybe, you know, that is the unseen that what doesn't happen.
#
I think that's one of those things in publishing, which has now become a story to remember and
#
to hold on to, to prove that things can change, which is you will have a writer who's done
#
maybe two books, which haven't sold very much, which are 2000 copies maybe.
#
And if the editor and the publisher will persevere with them, then sometimes a third or fourth
#
book might hit it so big that there's no looking back.
#
I think Bridges of Madison County is one of those stories where the writer did not really
#
And then suddenly there was this multi-million copy seller and things changed, right?
#
Now if that person had given up at that point and said, I'll go write for another forum
#
or the publisher had said, I'm sorry, I can't afford to keep you any longer.
#
Things could have been very, very different, but I think there are enough stories in the
#
past and in our own kind of mythologizing of the past that allows for people to hold
#
on to hope and say, if not now, the next time, the next time, and you go on like that.
#
And as I said, as long as they're not doing just that, as long as they have other sources
#
of work and income and all of that, they might still persevere because they care deeply enough
#
And because those hours that they spend with their characters and in their own minds and
#
on the paper, I think they attach a certain value to it, which they would not give up
#
And in that sense also publishing, I think is a slightly odd and paradoxical space because
#
look at where it comes from, you're a writer.
#
You sit alone at your table, at your laptop, whatever, and you write quietly just for yourself
#
When it comes to me as a finished book, I'm sitting there quietly by myself absorbing
#
this text with nobody else interfering.
#
There's no sound, there's nothing.
#
I'm making up the sounds for these people, I'm making up the voices, I'm breathing in
#
the gaps and I'm providing all the visual atmosphere, everything.
#
But what is the publisher gearing up for?
#
These two isolated acts at the end, these quiet moments, but what lies in between is
#
a completely public system of selection, distribution, marketing, selling, putting a lot of noise
#
into everything which has to begin and end in quietness.
#
And I think that paradox is exactly the nature of all that we do around books, that they
#
are always forces pulling completely in opposite directions.
#
What one wants to do, what one ends up doing, what comes in between, they're all contradictory.
#
And yet we have to make peace with this chaos and arrive at something that will last for
#
Because what is the difference between that piece of journalism or that bit of movie making?
#
You often find that movies can be dated because you have a visual, a look to that space.
#
And 10 years down, people are wearing different clothes, there's different things happening.
#
So either you treat them as classics and working in that time, whereas in a book, like, you
#
know, if I go and watch You've Got Mail Now, which I happened to do accidentally the other
#
day, and I thought, oh, this is such a different old world movie, you know, everything was
#
But I can read a book, which is Jane Austen in England in that time.
#
And because I'm the one who's providing the acoustics for this in my present time, it
#
will always be a contemporary work, because what I attach to that word, the meaning of
#
that word may have changed over hundreds of years.
#
But what it is now is my word, my meaning.
#
So I read it for myself.
#
I don't have to stick to the sound or the effects of what is available to me given by
#
So in that sense, you reinvent text and reinvent in solitude what is not possible to reinvent
#
when it's a public act offered in public spaces.
#
So I think that's what makes publishing special.
#
I think it allows you to create work that has the capacity to last in ways that probably
#
nothing else does except a great work of art.
#
And it's wrong to underestimate the finished, that final book, which may seem like a dead
#
object to a lot of people, but I think it's ever going to go away.
#
I mean, the nature of paper might change.
#
It might come from another kind of recyclable recycled paper than it is today.
#
But I cannot for the life of me imagine a world where people would not value quietness, solitude,
#
your own ideas, your own mind.
#
And to put yourself at the center of your world, which is what everyone aspires to do,
#
a book allows you the room and the system almost to say, this is all right.
#
This is a good space for you to be in.
#
And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be quietly with yourself.
#
And the book is part of that experience.
#
I completely agree with you.
#
I mean, you've described the magical reading form more eloquently than I could manage.
#
But then there is also that other thing that it is not quite true that unlike a film, a
#
book doesn't date or change in what it brings to the reader.
#
Because what I find increasingly happening and often to my distress is that there is
#
an overlay of contemporary politics being applied to books of the past and the way you
#
For example, Janet Blighton, who we both grew up with, and Gollywog, and all this talk of
#
racism and white privilege and so on.
#
And to some extent, I understand that as we evolve as people and our prisms and our values
#
evolve that will naturally affect the way that we read.
#
On the other extreme, I sometimes think that we go too far in doing this by overlaying
#
this veneer of contemporary political values on an age and a time when they didn't really
#
exist and you sometimes just have to give the author the benefit of her contemporaneity.
#
No, I agree with you entirely.
#
I think one has to learn to read things within their context.
#
And that is the most important thing.
#
Without context, you have nothing.
#
Just as you have your own context, that writer had theirs and you have to build bridges between
#
So I think the way to tackle that is really not to say don't read, but to say come up
#
with reinterpretations.
#
For instance, for me in terms of reading, one of the vital moments of discovery I remember
#
was Jean Gris's White Saga Soci.
#
I had read nothing like it before.
#
I had not realized you could even do this.
#
A reimagining of Jean Gris.
#
And the reimagining of that character just, I mean, it was a hugely political act.
#
It was a deeply feminist act.
#
It was every ism you can think of was in that slim book.
#
And that I think is what I would value.
#
That somebody says, I don't agree with that worldview of that writer who wrote it in that
#
Yes, of course, it was a product of that time.
#
But let me think about it from my time and see how I might tell it differently and encourage
#
and inspire other people to read it differently and leave that old text alone for what it
#
Let the Mahabharata be the Mahabharata of whoever wrote it then.
#
You tell your tellings now.
#
You prioritize and centralize whoever you want to and write it for your time.
#
But I agree with you that censoring and re-editing old texts for sanitizing or for concealing
#
a truth that is valuable in itself.
#
And sometimes just knowing that that's what was done is enough to make you want to think,
#
never do that in your own time.
#
I think that is a mistake to erase the past in that way.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and when we come back, instead of erasing the past,
#
we'll go back to your past because we really haven't spoken much about your journey through
#
So I want to talk a little bit about that after this quick break.
#
Hey everybody, welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network.
#
If you aren't following us on social media, please make sure you do.
#
We're IVM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
Also quick reminder, please do fill out our surveys at ivmpodcast.com slash survey.
#
It's a listener survey.
#
We're trying to understand more about who's listening to our stuff.
#
What kind of things you would like to see from us in the future?
#
What you have been seeing so far?
#
What do you think of it?
#
All kinds of different stuff.
#
Also who you are, right?
#
So I mean like all kinds of different stuff.
#
Just please do come in and fill it out.
#
It would be really helpful.
#
That's ivmpodcast.com slash survey.
#
I want to thank our sponsors this week, Cambly, Intel and Storytel.
#
Remember sponsors are what make this stuff possible.
#
So if you enjoy the content, please do thank our sponsors.
#
We have two new shows releasing this week.
#
Lakshmi Krishnan, better known as Literary Chills on Twitter, talks to agents of literary
#
culture on her show Lit Nama.
#
She plunges deep into new genres of literature born in the digital era as she talks to the
#
performers, storytellers, bloggers, poets and writers.
#
New episodes are out every Tuesday from 10th December.
#
The Traveling Professors Diary is hosted by Siddharth Deshmukh.
#
It's a show about a curious human being with an eagerness for travel and observation.
#
He visits colleges such as Micah, SP Jain, Symbiosis, Flame, Upgrad, TalentAge and spreads
#
the digital gospel of design, marketing and business transformation.
#
Episodes are out every Tuesday and Thursday starting 10th of December.
#
On Cyrus Says, Cyrus is joined by the man who writes the famous Amul hoardings, Manish
#
He talks about his life in advertising and bonds with Cyrus over their love of Bappi
#
On Mr. And Mrs. Binge Watch, Janice and Anirudh deep dive into season 2 of Jack Ryan.
#
They discuss how it measures up with other globe-trotting spy shows.
#
On The Origin of Things, Chuck narrates a story about the achievements, awards and the
#
rules that were changed by a particular bank.
#
On Tapri Tales, meet the character Sameera who talks about Azadi Ka Room, woven by our
#
What is Azadi Ka Room and can we find it today?
#
On the Filter Coffee Podcast, Karthik is joined by co-founders of the News Minute, Dhanya
#
Rajendra and Vignesh Velour.
#
Together they talk about the initial days of the News Minute and give their viewpoints
#
of how news is provided in India.
#
On Advertising is Dead, Varun is joined by Chief Digital Officer at Hansa Security, Nishad
#
They talk about how marketing is converging around a digital customer hub.
#
On Golgappa, Tripti is joined by Anish Vyavare, a spoken word poet who talks about his love
#
for poetry and recites some poems about food.
#
The Habit Coach completes one year of great habits.
#
Ashen is joined by Urmi Kothari, the host of the Kinetic Living Podcast.
#
They talk about her fitness journey and her philosophy behind exercising.
#
And with that, let's get on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene On The On Scene.
#
I'm chatting with BK Karthika about Indian publishing.
#
Karthika, you were just telling me about how in 97 when Arundhati Roy hit the Indian publishing
#
scene, everything kind of changed for Indian publishing.
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
I remember that it was unusual in that there was a story attached to how she had nearly
#
published with a publisher in India and then not published with them for personal reasons.
#
And how there was so much excitement about her finding an agent who was so thrilled by
#
it that he flew to India to meet her.
#
These were all quite extraordinary.
#
They were extraordinary in that time that there were things like that happening around
#
So it was hard to understand, to grasp at that time.
#
It was only later after everything played out that you realized how significant all
#
But at that time, it was like a new wave of confidence for writers and for editors and
#
for readers and for just about everyone, because it was like a ratification of and a validation
#
of what was considered to be literary by us, what was considered to be good writing, what
#
I mean, if all of these things culminated in a book that won in those days the biggest
#
prize of all in literature in the English speaking world, then we had to be doing something
#
I mean, the writers had to be doing something right.
#
Readers were getting something right.
#
Publishing houses were doing this right.
#
Though, of course, the story of that is that a little publishing house was actually set
#
up to publish that book because she wanted that to happen, which in itself was unusual,
#
right, that you have so much confidence in one book that you would set up a system to
#
So a lot of things changed with that.
#
It also meant that in a strange way, we started getting clones of Arundhati Roy submitting
#
manuscript left, right and center.
#
Usually everyone was writing novels about Kerala, about family, about relationships
#
set within an India that was not really a westernized India.
#
So many new directions seemed to open up.
#
At the same time, I think the problem also that it gave us was this firm notion that
#
that literary novel of that kind was the thing that had to be.
#
So for instance, in the UK, a lot of writers were suddenly given large advances because
#
they were all going to be like the next Booker Prize winning novelist and large advances
#
suddenly came into the picture in which they hadn't earlier.
#
I mean, Penguin was still one of the few publishing houses then that was giving advances to every
#
writer, but a lot of publishing didn't.
#
And if you think about it, I almost wish it hadn't changed because think about publishing
#
as a business model and it is deeply flawed.
#
You are writing a book, which you haven't like perhaps written only a proposal for you,
#
haven't really written very much off.
#
I am an editor in a publishing house and I'm saying to you, I want to publish this book
#
This could be two years from now, three years from now, whatever.
#
And I'm going to give you this money as a kind of sealing of an agreement that you will
#
eventually finish this.
#
So I'm investing money in something of which there is nothing to show at the moment.
#
And then two years down the line, maybe three years down the line, you will give me a manuscript
#
which I will publish in another six months, eight months, a year for which I will then
#
get paid by the market in this endless cycle of no payments or near payments, which could
#
be within three months or six months or eight months or a year.
#
At the end of a year or two years, I might be sent all these physical copies back from
#
the market saying, well, they never sold.
#
And my investment was made three years ago.
#
And at the end of that period, I've got nothing to show except some returns which then are
#
in the warehouse and which one might be forced to destroy because they're shopsoiled or can't
#
So everything is strange and beats logic.
#
I don't know of any other industry that works in this manner, which defies logic and defies
#
the odds and still continues to survive.
#
And the strange thing is that from then on to now, we have found no other way to do this.
#
We continue to be in the cycle of investment without possibly any sign of return for the
#
So in some ways, I guess it began in that period when big advances seemed all right
#
because you thought you had this large print run that was possible at the end of it and
#
large lacks of readers who would want to read that copy.
#
So from what might have been like a 15,000 rupee advance, which was very standard in
#
those days, I remember even like the best international writers who had publishers in
#
the US and the UK, you would write out a contract where it's a 20,000 rupees advance.
#
And that was fine because that was all really you hoped to earn.
#
Suddenly you were adding zeros to that and you were saying, oh, we should do two lakhs.
#
And we all just were banking on the fact that something would take off.
#
So where we were much more careful and cautious and realistic, it became a little bit more
#
And because there was enough competition by then and other publishing houses were setting
#
up and there was more everyone trying to zero in on that little pool of writers that was
#
there in the English language at that time, everyone was trying to up the other and give
#
a little bit more money to get that writer and the book.
#
So we ended up where we are now, which is very unrealistic figures, unrealistic estimations
#
of sale and very little to show at the end of it as proof that this system works.
#
So there was a time when I said everything changed positively when the book happened
#
But after that many years, I'm beginning to think there were problems that came off that,
#
which we are now discovering the depth of.
#
So let me just try to sort of think aloud a little bit and unpack this whole effect.
#
In a sense, it kind of goes back to that earlier issue of heuristics that we talk about that
#
how do you decide what is a good book and how do you decide what to commission and what
#
kind of books to change.
#
And I guess what happens with The God of Small Things is that there's suddenly the survivorship
#
bias where there is this book written in expressionistic language set in an exotic locale that seems
#
to work and therefore because that one book has done so well and won the booker, then
#
it is natural for publishers to want more of the same and you give advances chasing
#
And because in publishing, unlike in other businesses, like for example, web series is
#
our commission today pretty much the same way, but you know, the lifeline is much shorter.
#
They play out in a much shorter span of time.
#
And I guess with publishing is taking two or three years and therefore for two or three
#
years you don't know that your investments been a waste and you have a lot of books in
#
that language about, you know, those kinds of things coming out and they are wasted.
#
And what also that seems to do is it seems to have what economists would call the crowding
#
out effect that because there is so much money chasing this particular kind of book, which
#
there is, you know, the notion that this is a kind of book which will win awards and which
#
will sell and which will bring glory and so on and so forth, that perhaps there is less
#
money left to chase or left to fund other writers who are writing different kinds of
#
Is that sort of an accurate summation of what kind of went down?
#
I think that's what happened.
#
And in the process, we also discovered that there were some great writers amongst us and
#
some great books were published and a lot of first time writers found support in a way
#
they may not have otherwise, which I think is the most valuable thing that happened.
#
Because then the next generation of writers had a different felicity with the language,
#
a different brashness with the language, wrote for the world more confidently without doubting
#
themselves in the same way, not, I mean, I think all writers doubt themselves, but not
#
doubting that they could be as good as anybody else.
#
And that was really, really the best outcome of that period.
#
But what that crowding out did, I think was also very important to notice that there were
#
certain kinds of writing that never did come out enough that people didn't pay enough attention
#
And that is why I think the next shift is Chetan Bhagat.
#
Because that was, to my mind, looking back, that was a direct revolt against the ivory
#
tower existence of that English literary space where the reader was a certain kind of person,
#
a privileged person, a person whose notions of what was acceptable and civilized was very
#
different and where there was no recognition of the fact that there are multiple cultures
#
and languages and so many other things happening outside of the metropolitan Indian city.
#
And then I think we got to a place where it wasn't about what comes before, that is the
#
writing, the publishing, the editing.
#
It was about what happens after, which is the marketing.
#
And that shift really redefined everything in publishing as well.
#
And I guess what Chetan did was, of course, one, he took themes which resonated with common
#
people like life in an IIT or an interstate love affairs or whatever, the kind of topics
#
that he's chosen sort of resonate with many more people.
#
And second, there was a marketing and did that sort of massive success that Chetan had
#
and then that people that are similar writers after him also build their markets, the Ravindars
#
and the Durjoyas and all that.
#
Did that then change those within publishing to sort of re-examine your own values of what
#
makes a good book and what kind of book are you looking for?
#
Do you start reading a little differently and asking yourself more questions?
#
When Chetan first did the rounds of the publishing houses, I mean, everyone knows that he was
#
turned down by most people who didn't see this.
#
I think the fact that a writer had a PowerPoint presentation about how to sell the book, it
#
just went against the notions of every literary editor in any publishing house because they
#
thought that it had to come as a consequence of a great book you sold.
#
It was all supposed to be organic.
#
It was like you couldn't put a system in place to manufacture sales.
#
These were all not good words.
#
They didn't exist in our vocabulary.
#
We were supposed to find the best and the best would automatically sell, which we know
#
is not the truth at all.
#
There was a certain naivety in publishing.
#
There were a lot of young people in it with little experience of publishing who just,
#
I think, lived in slightly idealistic spaces in their own heads and everything around them
#
supported that idealism that said a good thing would find its way to the world in the right
#
Chetan changed that for sure.
#
There was a lot of resistance even later.
#
Everyone wanted to think it was a flash in the pan and yes, of course, this happened,
#
but there was cynicism in that people questioned the ways of selling and was this the right
#
way to sell and market a book and can a book be a product?
#
Marketing and editorials would get into fisticuffs about marketing saying, well, it is also like
#
a button or a piece of chocolate.
#
You've got to sell it and you've got to find the right ways to sell it.
#
An editorial would probably think this was really not the right way to talk about it.
#
I still know senior editors in publishing houses who will say, we don't like the word
#
We don't like the word consumer.
#
Can we please talk about readers?
#
Can we talk about how we used to be at one time and not change it so drastically?
#
In fact, this kind of snobbery is rife in that ultimate performative space, Twitter,
#
where people will say, oh, you cannot refer to books as content or whatever.
#
Unfortunately, that doesn't really hold good anymore.
#
We've got to rethink it.
#
I think that kind of rethinking was forced by the success of the writers that we mentioned
#
because then you also discovered a second market, second, third, whatever you want to
#
call it, which is outside the metros.
#
Nobody had imagined that these books were going to reach readers in places outside Delhi,
#
Bombay, Madras, whatever.
#
Suddenly, you're saying, who are these people?
#
Who are these people that we never think about, who we never planned for?
#
What do they want to read and what is their comfort level with the language?
#
What is the tradition of reading or the background in reading they're bringing to this?
#
Because all along, we'd assumed that the reader who reads our literary fiction or any fiction
#
at all was already trained in the classics.
#
In some way, they had read a lot before they came to it, so you always had to better.
#
You always had to ride on those shoulders and create an Indian text that came from the
#
Western liberal tradition, which, if you think about it, is pretty nonsensical because your
#
experience is rooted here, your writing has to come from here, which is the other marvelous
#
thing that Arundhati did.
#
She wrote from here, off here, with language homegrown in many ways, experience homegrown,
#
so it changed everything then.
#
When you discovered that people wanted to read writers like Chetan because they also
#
wanted to be seen to be reading, seen to be reading in English, seen to be carrying a
#
book that was written in English and saying, I have the ability to read this, this was
#
bringing a different sense of how society worked, how individuals wanted to be seen
#
and how the entire tradition of writing that we had thought we were building on was completely
#
These were people who may have read a lot of writing in other languages and then come
#
So their idea of a text and their idea of what makes a text work could be very different
#
from what an English speaking, English reading editor in a publishing house thinks of as
#
the foundation for a book.
#
These were completely drastic readings that had to be done and I don't know if we've succeeded
#
even now because that lack of diversity within publishing houses, the kind of people who
#
come to publishing in English language, there is still that sense of, I don't want to call
#
it snobbery because that's belittling what is much more than that.
#
There's a sensibility there which is different.
#
But I think editors are coming to terms with that, publishing houses are coming to terms
#
with that and what is helping is bilinguality or trilinguality.
#
I think a lot of editors in publishing houses now have access to more than the English language
#
and are consciously aware that they have to be part of other worlds and other cultures
#
to be better at their job in an English language publishing space, which is a completely different
#
thing from what it was 15 years ago where you kept looking for that Western educated
#
Oxfordian, you know, like the experience had to be of being able to access sophisticated
#
narrative in the West in order to be able to do well here.
#
But now I think most of us who speak to colleagues in editorial departments, all of us value
#
the person who can tell us more about Malayalam or Telugu or Tamil or Bengali than someone
#
who can tell us what the best of American writing is doing now because that we know
#
But this is much more that you have to be of that place and not too many learn to occupy
#
So that diversity is bringing in the next level of thinking we need.
#
I guess, you know, when the future of Indian literature is written in the future by a future
#
historian, she will inevitably have to grapple with the question all historians grapple with,
#
which is a great man theory of history, Carlyle's theory that, you know, do great men, Carlyle,
#
of course, use the term great men, but do great people shape history or are there currents
#
of history which are independent and, you know, whatever great people emerge from that,
#
it's purely happenstance.
#
And in that regard, I'm sort of wondering that, you know, the massive explosion of readers
#
outside the metros in small town India at around the time Chetan Bhagat came up, would
#
you say that that hunger for reading English and being seen to be reading English was an
#
inevitable consequence of post liberalization in India, the way it was developing in any
#
case and Chetan just happened to be at the right time at the right place or do you think
#
Chetan really did play a huge part in sort of making it fructify sooner than it perhaps
#
That old thing, if Chetan hadn't come along, we would have had to invent a Chetan because
#
the time was such that something had to shift for us to find our own bearings and not allow
#
it to drift into a space where nobody actually belonged and nobody could anchor it in anything
#
So what Chetan did was, I think, recognize what was going on and feel strongly enough
#
about it to put himself on the line because I don't think it was an easy job to go out
#
there and say, I'm a writer is always a tough job to go out there and say, I'm a writer
#
who thinks I can sell a hundred thousand copies at a time when nobody did that.
#
That is audacity of the sort that you would not even dream of for the most part, but he
#
did and that allowed everything to change quite dramatically.
#
So I would think it's a combination of things and if it hadn't been Chetan, someone else
#
would at some point have done it like later Amish came along and transformed that other
#
space of mythology and retellings.
#
If he hadn't, I guess somebody else would have.
#
But the important thing I think is that now things have settled into a space where that
#
wave is over and interestingly, very few have followed in that space.
#
Like you still have Chetan Bhagat at the top of the bestseller charts week after week after
#
It is quite extraordinary.
#
A decade in, he's still on top, right?
#
And that so many other writers who try to write like him, haven't stayed there.
#
So it seems now that that time too is perhaps over.
#
We are waiting for the next thing to happen, but nobody knows what that next thing is and
#
it's very difficult to predict what it could be.
#
And also as we can see in front of us that reading itself is becoming challenging, writing
#
is becoming challenging in this space.
#
What is it that is going to take that space and suddenly sweep all the rules away?
#
One doesn't know, but it's going to come at some point.
#
Where is the Chetan Bhagat who will disrupt Chetan Bhagat?
#
One possible reason for why Chetan continues to be where he is of course is that he's almost
#
become like a self-reinforcing meme in the sense that he is a person for a certain class
#
of people, a certain category of people, it is cool to read.
#
And therefore that self reinforces itself that, you know, there are households which have
#
only six books and earlier back in the day they would be like they'll have Paulo Coelho
#
and they'll have whatever.
#
And now Chetan Bhagat is always a mandatory part of that and this reinforces itself.
#
And I'm not saying this with any trace of derision.
#
It is better for a household to have six books and to have no books at all.
#
And this is fairly remarkable.
#
And so this friend of mine who lives in Hyderabad, in fact, and he is often on the admissions
#
committee of different IIMs and so on.
#
And he told me that whenever he's on an interview panel, he'll always ask the person a question,
#
And whenever they say reading, which apparently 60, more than 60% of them do, his follow-up
#
question will be, what is the last book you read?
#
And for 80% of them, it will be Chetan Bhagat.
#
And I think my friend said this not with an entirely positive implication, but this can
#
I mean, one way, of course, is that these are just people pretending to be readers and
#
they're taking the one name that everybody takes.
#
But the other way is that, let's not look down on them because they haven't been privileged
#
to have the kind of childhoods we have where we've had access to so many books and been
#
They want to read and they gateway into the world of reading Chetan Bhagat, which is remarkable,
#
which is also a conventional view of his in the past that he's introduced so many new
#
people to reading and that's surely a good thing because they'll go on to read books
#
Is that something that has happened or is happening?
#
There was a hope at one time that this would happen, that they would read something which
#
was easier to access and then they would go on and climb the next rung to something that
#
But I don't think there's anything that, no data that tells us this is happening.
#
What it's telling us is possibly that they read and they said, okay, now we've been there,
#
we've done that, now off we go to watch something or do other things that have nothing to do
#
with reading and no, we're not seeing that ladder.
#
So it's not been the most, what is the word I want, I mean, it's not like somebody built
#
a foundation on which other people are able to stand up and climb and go on.
#
Which was a great hope.
#
But foundation remains a foundation and what is to come is still...
#
And it's probably important, but we don't really know how yet.
#
No, I also think that this gateway to reading in English is a really important thing because
#
what do kids in most situations do?
#
They go to school, they read that school textbook in English and there's not very much to recommend
#
reading further if you're only reading that.
#
So to find something that's entertaining, that appeals to them, that relates to their
#
worlds and at the same time allows them to feel that they've gone a little further in
#
that experience, it's remarkable that there just isn't enough material in that space.
#
And why isn't there enough material in that space?
#
My own feeling is that translations are the space we must look to and build to get that
#
experience because if I'm a person reading in Malayalam and I read my English textbooks
#
and then I go on to read, maybe I may not read the big Malayalam novel even then because
#
now I am a person who has neither language properly.
#
I don't have my Malayalam well enough because now I'm going off to live somewhere else and
#
I don't have my English well enough, but if I have to choose to read, maybe I will choose
#
to read in English because that is the way of aspiration and growth and all of that.
#
In which case I might choose to read a novel that applies to me closer, which would be
#
the novel which is written in Malayalam in translation English.
#
And maybe that gateway would be a powerful gateway too if we allowed ourselves to build
#
it up and that would be a very, very meaningful gateway because that's not a gateway into
#
a culture that is alien or that opens up worlds that we would aspire to.
#
It's a world that is very real, where we came from, where our families continue to live
#
and where we hope there is also a future and not just the past.
#
So I think it's about a market economy and an editorial and marketing machinery, all
#
of which that has to come together and say, can we now focus on shifting the gateway to
#
our own languages and maybe use English as a point there of entry into reading in English
#
and not just leave Chetan Bhagat to be the one person who occupies that space.
#
And that's really interesting because you know, you point out that there is a gap there
#
where there aren't enough people at that entry level sort of gateway to English reading thing
#
and Chetan Bhagat came and that's great, but there should be more than that.
#
And at the same time, were there publishers, like I imagine in the late nineties, there
#
would have been many publishers asking themselves, how do I find the next Arundhati Roy?
#
And similarly, were there many publishers saying, how do I find the next Chetan Bhagat?
#
And how much of that question is then saying that just as Chetan Bhagat was a manufacturer
#
entity in the sense that he manufactured himself, he came with a power point of how I shall
#
How much was there that sense that the next Chetan Bhagat also has to be manufactured
#
Like, is this a quest that publishers sort of went down?
#
I think one, a brilliant example of that building on Chetan Bhagat is the Srishti publishing
#
I think what they did was to say, let's create a mass market entity and every book we publish
#
And much like say a Mills and Boon brand did one time, you knew what you were getting when
#
you saw that brand, right?
#
Which is the thing that the large publishing houses have lost out on.
#
Now, if you pick up a book from a major publishing house, you will recognize the logo and you
#
ascribe to it certain qualities.
#
You will say, oh, this will be a well-edited book.
#
This will be error-free.
#
Perhaps this will be well-packaged.
#
One assumes that there is a certain requirement for this book to exist.
#
All of that is true, but there is no guarantee of what the content will be like and whether
#
there is any similarity to something else that that publishing house did because each
#
one is publishing so many kinds of books.
#
But Srishti created a brand that said, whatever you pick from this list, you know exactly
#
what you're going to get and it's going to be a novel that will entertain you or which
#
will be easy to read, which you will enjoy.
#
And so pick just the brand.
#
Don't pick necessarily the writer or the book.
#
And I don't think anybody else has actually done that in the English language space.
#
Were they sort of successful?
#
I think they were very successful there.
#
The difficulty with that is that when a small publishing house cannot back the writer in
#
terms of the aggressive marketing that they're often looking for, then they migrate to other
#
publishing houses that offer them more money.
#
But I think even now, any book that Srishti does will find space in certain stores and
#
people will pick them up and walk away.
#
I remember when I was in HarperCollins a few years in, my colleague who was the sales person
#
in the North, he came to me and he said, ma'am, you have to publish books like this.
#
Like, this is what sells.
#
I went to Lucknow and they told me that this bookshelf that every now and then they have
#
to replenish like 25 copies of each book because people just walk in and look at it and they
#
just buy it and walk out.
#
They don't want to know who the writer is.
#
So the thing about publishing is obviously that we are not able to brand ourselves, right?
#
As publishers, we often have to brand the writer.
#
The writer is the brand.
#
So if you're publishing a writer today who's not published before, you have to start building
#
that brand from scratch for that writer and identity has to be built around them.
#
Then the next time they write a book, if they choose to write in the same genre, you have
#
ease of marketing, but they might choose to write a completely different novel, especially
#
They write a completely different thing the next time.
#
And then you have to start all over again building that brand.
#
So each day, each writer, each book is a different proposition altogether.
#
Whereas if you have a brand which says, this is what I am very clearly, then you don't
#
have to worry about who the writer is, how well known they are, what social media profiles
#
You are giving the brand the identity and that is so much easier to market as a whole.
#
But at the moment, all of us are struggling with this fact of expansion of multiple categories
#
within each publishing house.
#
And how on earth are we to say, what are we?
#
How do we identify ourselves?
#
I guess you could have an imprint which does only that.
#
So for instance, I started up this imprint with a colleague, which is called Context.
#
So Ajitha and I do that at Westland.
#
And we think of context as this literary imprint, as an imprint that does very politically engaged
#
content in fiction and nonfiction that hopefully will do some experimental work as well, etc.
#
So we identify ourselves like that and we try and build a list like that.
#
Then we have something called Westland Sport, which is clearly a sport publishing imprint.
#
We'll have a business imprint next year.
#
So things like that you can do, right?
#
So then people go into a store and they will see it and they will say, okay, this is a
#
We know what to get from here.
#
But when you have sort of intangibles where you have a novel that is just a great read,
#
a brand is difficult to sustain on books like that.
#
And yet those are the books that you really wish more people would read because they are
#
the books that you want to curl up with on a summer afternoon and read.
#
But how on earth do you brand that then?
#
There you have to brand the writer so that people know if Bridget Jones is written by
#
Helen Fielding, then anything she writes hopefully will be as entertaining and as smart as that.
#
So I'll walk off with it.
#
So each time a publicist works on a book, I think they have to work on the content,
#
the book and they have to build the writer.
#
So it's extremely complicated bringing that book to the reader is each time a challenging
#
No, in fact, just as an aside for the past few months, you guys have been sending me
#
books from context and you know, it's actually got that very clear identity in my mind because
#
from what I have seen of the context books, some of which are featured in the show and
#
I've really enjoyed is that they all engage with contemporary India, which is why that,
#
you know, even the branding of context seems to me to be sort of very spot on.
#
Now you were talking about sort of the different categories that you have to deal with within
#
And a lot of this is something that's again evolved during your time in publishing.
#
You know, you've sort of, you know, through the 2000s and you had all these new categories
#
like nonfiction, like the sort of historical writing that William Dalrymple and Ram Guha
#
do sort of also explored and these new appetites kind of come up. Tell me a little bit about
#
your process of discovery of these new appetites as a publisher.
#
I think one of the instances that actually was a learning for me and a category learning
#
for ourselves as publishers was when we published Sarnath Banerjee's first graphic novel, because
#
I remember that when that was first published, there was no graphic novel publishing.
#
Morijit Sen's book was the first that came out, but that was not something that went
#
out into sort of trade so much.
#
So there it was like saying what on earth is this work?
#
What is this meant to be and how on earth are we going to sell it or get people to receive
#
Similarly, I think there have been points at which we've said, okay, so if you're doing
#
say Ananuja Chauhan, when Zoya Factor first came out, I had a colleague Yogesh in Harper
#
who was very aggressive about, let's sell it, he said, let's put 20,000 copies out.
#
And I still remember, I think it was Ananth who was then at Penguin and now in Harper,
#
who called me and said, you're doing a novel which is like 20,000 print run.
#
I'm not sure he was talking about Anuja or he was talking about another writer called
#
Sam Bourne, who also we'd put out very aggressively.
#
And we were like, yeah, we did that.
#
And it must have been foolhardy when you look back at it, but it worked.
#
I mean, Anuja is a phenomenon and sometimes I think you get lucky.
#
You bring out a book that is in a category that doesn't quite exist and you get the right
#
person at the right time and then you can like really build on it.
#
But it doesn't always work because you might also then find yourself saying, okay, the
#
next big thing is a historical fiction based on the fact that the big historical novel,
#
the big historical romance is really big in the West.
#
But you will find that there are a few writers who do really well.
#
I remember publishing Indu Sundaresan whose Feast of Roses and that whole Noor Jahan Mughal
#
world of big glamorous court and romance and so on did really well, continues to be in
#
print like what 15 years after they were first published.
#
But it's taken 15 years after that for this sudden resurgence of writing around the Mughals
#
and popular history and so on.
#
There was very little at that time.
#
So one didn't think this time would come either.
#
But at that point, it made sense to publish one writer who was doing that.
#
So I think the categories have evolved with more people discovering that their own tastes
#
match with say one writer somehow.
#
It's like Vikram said, when the Suitable Boy came out, a lot of people suddenly said, oh,
#
this is exactly what I wanted to read and I didn't know I wanted to read this.
#
I think that's the same sort of discovery for an editor.
#
When I read Serious Men, the manuscript by Manu Joseph first, it was like, oh, I always
#
wanted to read a really well-written novel set so deeply in our own world.
#
And I haven't read something like this for a long time.
#
And when you feel that sense of discovery and excitement, you know it will be shared.
#
And it's a matter of just finding a way to reach those people who will share that excitement.
#
So yeah, over the years, I suppose from poetry, to graphic, to literary fiction, to young
#
adult writing, which again is a very small category, but occasionally you have that one
#
I didn't know it existed in India.
#
You know, the thing is it exists for books that are coming in from elsewhere.
#
So everyone will read Harry Potter and Harry Croydon and all of that.
#
But we still to find that breakthrough here.
#
So till a Suitable Boy came along, nobody thought that big literary novel would have
#
a great audience in India, but it suddenly found that it had.
#
Similarly, I'm just like waiting for that young adult novel that will just grab everybody
#
and say, oh, and opens up the market.
#
That is one category that has not found anything yet that has truly revolutionized the numbers.
#
And how much of writerly success, like as a publisher, you know, whenever you publish,
#
you always have a sense that these are the guys I think will do well and these are the
#
guys who may not do so well.
#
And how much does reality conform to that?
#
And to what extent does the success of writers, what is the role that Luck plays just happening
#
to take off and hit the right guys at the right time?
#
I think Luck has a lot to do with that.
#
I remember when I joined Harper, this was the time when I talked about Anuja.
#
There was another writer, Kaladwait Akala, whose first book came out.
#
There was Karan Mahajan, Karan Bajaj, sorry, not Mahajan, whose novel that came out.
#
And we were hitting 20,000 to 30,000 to 40,000 copies of those books because the time was
#
Amitabh Babakchi's first novel above average.
#
I remember that first year it did some 25,000 copies and all of this was completely out
#
But the time was right.
#
The numbers were right.
#
And everyone wanted to read that next step up on the commercial novel.
#
You know, and I think a lot of it has to do with Luck.
#
It has to do with finding that.
#
And then you'll find that you've done brilliant books, which everyone thought was like the
#
best in the genre, which a few hundred people read or a couple of thousand people read were
#
greatly reviewed, beautifully reviewed, but they just did not sell beyond that.
#
Can you name some books which are favorites of yours, which you wish had done much better?
#
Well, I can tell you one book that we published last year, which was Revati Lal's Anatomy
#
of Hate, which I think is a striking instance of a book that has everything to recommend
#
that real politic, heart, new ideas, all written in a way that just goes beyond what you have
#
in that genre at the moment.
#
And of course it was wonderfully reviewed.
#
Recently Biblio put it on their Outstanding Books for the Year and all of that.
#
But why are the readers not backing it in the way that it should, you know, it's a mystery.
#
Why something, I know that after a certain point it's also by the profile of the writer.
#
Like after a certain point, anything that a certain writer writes, we'll get that first
#
The first 10,000, 20,000 copies will move.
#
But why is there a reluctance to back unknowns?
#
Why is there not, even with marketing machinery behind it, even with reviewers backing it,
#
there's something about luck there that seems to suggest that it's beyond you.
#
And yet I'm convinced that books like that will last.
#
We'll go on to get into citation spaces, we'll go into reading in universities, and we'll
#
find a different way to remain alive and relevant.
#
Then maybe influence future writers who will...
#
That means all of that could happen.
#
But here and now you wish it had that other hit of luck that would take it further.
#
No, and Revathi's book, which I enjoyed a lot, is of course an intensely political book,
#
which also brings me to a question which I think, especially in the last few years, publishers
#
must have had to grapple with, which is the pressures of politics and the temptation to
#
self-censor something so you do not get into trouble.
#
I'll quote from a piece you wrote for Caravan a few years ago, quote, when the system seems
#
to connive with the mob to prevent free expression and dissemination of content, what is a publisher
#
The easy thing would be to follow the letter of the law and not test the ideals, if one
#
could call them that, or patience of any part of society.
#
An insider's account of life inside an ashram in southern India?
#
A novel that dramatizes caste conflict in Uttar Pradesh based on a real incident?
#
Potentially provocative.
#
A study of the violence implicit in religious conversion in different parts of India?
#
An erotic fantasy that stars a young Muslim girl?
#
A definite cause of anxiety.
#
And so it could go on, a seemingly endless list of dangerous subjects and, by extension,
#
The other way to respond would be to take the route further north.
#
Instead of throwing water on the wood, even before the flame is lit, to sit down and plan
#
Beautiful, very moving words.
#
Explain what you mean by sitting down and planning the fire.
#
You have not shied away from publishing books that could be controversial.
#
What is your approach then?
#
How do you deal with this?
#
I think I have one clear rule, which is that you do not break the law.
#
As long as what you've got in that work is not defamatory, not libelous, not doing something
#
that the law says is not acceptable, that is the one clear line to take.
#
But the law is also so open to interpretation, right?
#
So your legal team will help you interpret it in the way that it should be, hopefully.
#
And I think we have some very bright PR lawyers and we have an intensely sensible team in
#
house which shows us what's all right and what's not.
#
But I also think I honestly don't give a fig about people being offended for this in this
#
way that is this nebulous can be interpreted in any way offense.
#
You know, we've had this recent instance of that pug, I mean, the turban tying book.
#
Have you read about that?
#
So they had to pull back the book from the market and so on.
#
And I think that's a real shame.
#
I mean, forget self-censorship.
#
If you can't make fun of yourself, if you can't have fun with things around you, question
#
them all the time, then we're just sliding into a space where you only walk the straight
#
And what does that bring to anyone anyway?
#
As long as you have enough people supporting you in taking that step which says, I've broken
#
no law, but I am going to ask the questions through my author or whoever is writing that
#
book that need to be asked, do it.
#
Because that's the only reason to be, I mean, the older you get in the profession, the more
#
you have to ask yourself, why are you doing what you're doing, right?
#
If you're doing this to be genuinely engaged with what matters around you.
#
And I do think that since 2014, I have particularly felt much more troubled and much more intent
#
on trying to do whatever little bit one can to keep the conversation alive about the things
#
Then the only route open to me is to publish books that I care about in that space and
#
to find writers who write about things that matter.
#
That doesn't mean that if I see a good book, well argued and written well from another
#
political point of view, that does not have a place either.
#
It does, but I must admit I bring a different heart and a different commitment to the books
#
that talk about democracy and the Republic and India in ways that I hold dear to myself.
#
And thankfully, if you can find the right writers and get the right books, then there
#
are enough readers to sustain that as a saleable proposition.
#
So it's not bad business either.
#
Of course, there are this point of view of diversity, for instance, there are people
#
in a publishing house who will have very different political points of view.
#
And you can't as a publisher say, no, no, no, we will only publish what I believe in.
#
So obviously there is always space to publish right, left, center, whatever.
#
But that is the sheer beauty of it, right?
#
As many readers and as many points of view as there are, the more you can put out, because
#
the most important thing is also, I think, to understand what the other side is saying
#
and to engage with it intelligently rather than to dismiss it as something not to be
#
That is a grave mistake.
#
And which is why I want to see more publishing, for instance, on the right, by people who
#
believe in that worldview, because I want to understand what it is before I can knock
#
No, and that also enriches the discourse if you can work with a writer whose views you
#
may not agree with, but you help him get the best version of his views out.
#
So what kind of strikes me here is, and I'm just looking at sort of journalism as an analog.
#
And what one sees in journalism is that more and more you see the really big sort of entities
#
like the major mainstream newspapers and so on play it safe, self-censor when they feel
#
And one understands why that is because they have business imperatives that go beyond the
#
They are in all other kinds of businesses.
#
The government can put pressure, threaten rates, ask for their tax returns again and
#
There are a million ways of putting pressure.
#
And what you see is a bunch of young publications which are bravely fighting the good fight.
#
People like Scroll, Wire, Alt News, whatever we know who they are.
#
And in publishing, on the other hand, the standard you have taken is that, no, it is
#
a big people who should fight because we have the legal resources to actually fight this
#
So let's do the right thing.
#
And it strikes me as a worry that, you know, it's great that you should say that, but you're
#
an individual and a lot of this is coming from personal conviction, but is this kind
#
of approach something that can survive in the system beyond individuals like yourself?
#
I think it can and I think it will because for one thing, the pressures are not the same,
#
especially within English language publishing, right?
#
I don't think this could be said of publishing in Hindi, for instance, or in other languages
#
where the voter is very close to that language and to that culture, whereas I think the establishment
#
does not care as much about the English language publishing space because they also know that
#
in some ways it is still an echo chamber and it is not going to drastically change the
#
Much as we'd like to think that we can achieve that, I think we are often talking to converts
#
who are already thinking along the way lines we are.
#
So it's a kind of revalidation.
#
Sometimes it's like talking to yourself over and over again, which is also important to
#
But the day it becomes a matter of urgency that this conversation of a book with a reader
#
in the English language will actually change a vote or turn a vote or make constituencies
#
of those people, I think that is the day we will face genuine pressure.
#
At the moment, that pressure is not so big that we can't resist.
#
It just takes a strong legal team.
#
It takes some public support and you can get past it.
#
But when it comes to religion, then obviously there are problems because sometimes it's
#
simply a matter of you're saying, even if I'm within a publishing house that can protect
#
me, there are other people in that publishing house and stones can be thrown at anyone and
#
somebody can be taken off to jail as representative of that publishing house who had nothing to
#
do with the choice I make as an individual.
#
And that is an unfair passing on of responsibility.
#
So there will be times when you have to take the call and say, well, this is done, but
#
maybe we just can't live up to it beyond the point.
#
And so we have to succumb to the reality of it.
#
Thankfully, in my own experience that hasn't come to be, there has been no such thing,
#
but I see it around me.
#
I see publishers and editors who've had to go through that experience and it's very difficult.
#
So far from sitting in judgment on anyone who has to either self-censor or pull back
#
books or whatever, I'd say the problem here is that we don't have enough support when
#
People don't care enough to step out and fight that battle.
#
I mean, when Perumal Murugan said, I'm dead as a writer, it took a court to say, do what
#
you do best, which is right, and go back and do it.
#
And he's now one of our best-known writers and the best writers we have.
#
But there was support for him.
#
There were people who went out and said, this is an important battle to fight.
#
His publisher, Kannan Sundaram Kalachawada, stood by him and they went to court with him.
#
If it takes a few individuals to back publishing in a certain way, it also takes only a few
#
individuals to fight the battles that matter as long as they are supported enough by the
#
And I think if we don't see the necessity for that in this time, we're never going to
#
see it again because we're not going to have the freedom to see it again.
#
So we'd better stand together.
#
No, and I'm just thinking aloud, but it strikes me that there might be a good sort of self-selection
#
at play here in the sense that the people who would have been likeliest to come into
#
a thankless profession like publishing in the 80s and 90s and who are therefore senior
#
in the industry now are people who would have been prolific readers and deeply engaged with
#
critical thinking and so on and therefore are likelier to fight back against any kind
#
of oppressive climate coming from somewhere.
#
Is there perhaps something to that?
#
I imagine there is because we did grow up in a time where these things were the things
#
you fought for and you continue to fight for them.
#
But I also think that in a strange way, the people who are now coming into it are coming
#
into it at a time when there is an urgent need to think like this and to rethink where
#
And therefore, I'm also hopeful that the urgency we did not face then, we came to it gradually,
#
they will be aware of it from the very beginning and they will set up their goalposts and set
#
up their games and boundaries already knowing that these are important terms to guard and
#
that these are important terms to fight for.
#
And as long as they also have an old guard standing by them, I think they will grow into
#
people who will protect the ground for us.
#
That's really heartening.
#
Let's kind of move on now from politics to a subject that is less worrying, which is
#
People read for different reasons.
#
People might read for performative reasons.
#
If something wins a Booker Prize, a lot of people who buy it will buy it because I have
#
I feel intellectual just by having it.
#
People may read for escapist reasons, which are great reasons, which is why I started
#
reading, for example, people might read to learn more about the world.
#
People, I mean, it's the best way to learn more about the world really.
#
And people might read to sort of enlighten themselves and so on.
#
Or people might, you know, in the case, you know, as a suspicion was about many Chetan
#
Bhagat readers, they might read to learn the language better, which is also great.
#
Looking through the sort of the different kinds of reasons why people read, have those
#
sort of changed, you know, over the last sort of 25 years that you've been in the business?
#
There's one clear difference I see in numbers, which probably tell us what people are reading.
#
And that is this whole new market for the spiritual book, for the book by the gurus,
#
for the book by the religious or not necessarily religious, but reformist ashram living teachers
#
of how to live and how to think and how to make yourself whatever you want to be, et
#
Hundreds of thousands of copies are being sold of those books and the bestseller charts
#
Which means people are turning to the DIY in a different way from which in which they
#
were turning to them earlier, which was like the Dale Carnegie, how to improve, how to,
#
you know, be better at your job sort of thing to some kind of great need to have systems
#
of peace seeking and meditation and, you know, rejigging your insides and all of these things
#
And the numbers show that they come from a very Hindu space.
#
They come from a very mainstream space, if you want to call it that.
#
And they are obviously backed by systems, by organizations.
#
So there is a certain way in which they are organic and going to readers, but they're
#
also institutionalized.
#
So that is a new world for us.
#
It's been the last few years that we've seen this market really develop into big numbers.
#
For the rest of it, the categories haven't surprised us.
#
I mean, they're still the same old categories.
#
Like I did an episode with Akshay Mukul a while back on his great book on the Geeta
#
And, you know, the big revelation in that book was how much of an organized movement
#
that was about getting that kind of literature out there and getting people to read it and
#
Is this in a sense an extension of that or is a lot of it just an organic quest of a
#
lot of people now sort of having the means and the spare time to be able to actually
#
read books and having those same urges and English being aspirational and growing where,
#
you know, they're sort of, I mean, I'm assuming many of these would be readers who don't otherwise
#
That's why I said that in that way, they are the new category of readers who are like people
#
discovered Chetan Bhagat and how to read in a certain way.
#
They discovered these and said, oh, I enjoy reading these books.
#
I enjoy reading them in English as well, because it's not about the language.
#
It's about what's being said to me and I get what they're saying to me.
#
So I think there are many among those people who have come to them organically in their
#
own time in life, their own age or whatever it is that drives them to it.
#
I also think there is an institutionalized way in which that reading is being propagated
#
and nurtured, which is to do with our own society at the moment, which is to do with
#
what is seen to be good to read and which prove your allegiance to a certain way of
#
And you know that this is only going to get you kudos and brownie points and there's no
#
downside to being seen to be reading this stuff.
#
So I think you do fall in with the system while sometimes also finding that one book
#
or two that actually makes a difference to your own life.
#
Are there sort of political and social implications to this in the sense that you're not just
#
picking up that spiritual book for your personal peace of mind or whatever, though that might
#
be a reason in many cases, but also out of a tribal sense of belonging to a community
#
and a way of thinking and a way of living and that book reaffirms that.
#
I think it does do that and I think there are a lot of people out there who feel a little
#
lost in their own lives, perhaps lost in not having communities around them, which is why
#
they seek out others to belong to.
#
And when they do, then these texts and these readings and remember, I would not underestimate
#
the WhatsApp universes we occupy now because there's a lot of little wisdoms and little
#
videos that do the rounds that somebody said something which made a lot of sense to you.
#
And then you say, oh, and you go into the book shop or you browsing online and you suddenly
#
see a whole book by that person.
#
And you say, I'm sure there's something there for me and you buy it and you may not read
#
it cover to cover, but there will be little nuggets, there will be little things in it
#
which you will apply to yourself.
#
So you will then next time buy another one by somebody else may be in that same category
#
because it gives you something which is a learning, which is something that you want
#
for yourself in this really vital way, which you may not have felt at another time in your
#
life, but you certainly do now.
#
And if there's something there that, you know, is part of your value system, buying it is
#
like an affirmation of who you are in a sense.
#
This is where I kind of belong.
#
Let's talk a little bit about eBooks.
#
You know, when the Kindle first came about, I mean, I was just an evangelist because for
#
me books were the words that an author writes, you know, the rest is packaging.
#
And I also, you know, being of the age, I am do feel nostalgic for the particular packaging
#
in which we read our books.
#
But at the end of the day, it's wood pulp, it's paper, it's just packaging and the words
#
And I imagined rather naively that after my generation dies out, all the kids will just
#
And that's not, that's clearly not happened.
#
I mean, the physical books are selling more than ever.
#
Is this something you foresaw or, you know, why do you think this is?
#
I think that in the beginning, everyone in India also thought we'd follow the path of
#
And in the US, for instance, they were looking at something like 50% of the market being
#
eBooks and 50% physical books.
#
I think this was around 2011 when eBooks outsold, but then it flipped back.
#
Then it started to climb back.
#
And while we were pitching ahead, so I remember when you made your five year plans, you'd
#
say five years from now, you would have like 50% eBooks and 50% physical, et cetera.
#
And you thought you were planning technology towards that, et cetera.
#
And suddenly it changed and you started to see that 50% going back to 40 to 30 to whatever
#
it is now, maybe 25 or 35.
#
And you realize that that is something that you're not going to reach the 50% before going
#
You're probably going to climb gradually up to like 25, 20% at the most and stay there
#
is the feeling we have now.
#
And there is in India for sure, every publisher is still banking on selling physical books.
#
There's a little bit of an exception once in a while.
#
I mean, there are certain kinds of categories.
#
For instance, I remember when Abdul Kalam's books first came out and eBooks were starting
#
to be popular, there were a lot of people who wanted to read his books outside of India
#
And for them, the eBook was easier.
#
So you had some books and I remember this Marathi publisher telling me that the Marathi
#
reading diaspora were buying a lot of eBooks of the big novels in Marathi.
#
So there were pockets where you saw that this could be the future.
#
But each time then the numbers came down to, okay, 5%, 7%, 10%, whatever.
#
And it never really became a challenge to the physical book.
#
And I think that's where we are at now.
#
We're not even anticipating a future at the moment where the eBook will take over.
#
And give me a sense, I mean, perhaps I should have asked this question right at the start,
#
but give me a sense of how readership has evolved in India through the years that you've
#
been part of the publishing industry, just in terms of numbers.
#
Like do more people read now?
#
Do more books get sold?
#
Have there been sort of a crisis?
#
I think books, every year we do sell more books than the previous year.
#
There's no doubt about that.
#
The children's market has been growing steadily.
#
There are years, I mean, several years where retailers have said they have grown by like
#
25% over the previous year.
#
So that is obviously you can see why, I mean, there are more children, there are more children
#
coming in through the language systems into English.
#
That's our only demographic dividend.
#
Yes, there's no doubt about that.
#
So that is definitely a growth.
#
Educational publishing, school books grow by sometimes 100%, 50%, 100%, depending on
#
That is also explicable.
#
You know how many more students are joining schools, how many more schools are starting
#
But in the choice space where you are actually choosing to read a book because you want to
#
spend time with it and not for any compulsion, I think even that space has been growing.
#
As I said, sometimes in this category, sometimes in that.
#
But if you look at the overall picture, the bestseller has gone from being 5,000 or 10,000
#
to 100,000 or 50,000 copies, which in itself is a marker of how much more we
#
expect our better books to do.
#
So while your average book, as I said, may still be 2, 3,000 copies, when you say something
#
is doing well, you do not mean 3,000 or 4,000 anymore.
#
When you say a book is doing well, you're actually saying, well, at least 10,000 copies
#
have sold and not at a really cheap price, maybe.
#
When you're talking about a book that is a mass market novel, for instance, which is
#
like a 200 rupee book or a 250 book, then you're not even going to look at 10,000 copies
#
Then you're only going to talk about it as a bestseller when it's reached like a 50,000
#
So in that sense, yes, everything is growing.
#
Everything is looking better year after year.
#
Most publishing houses are able to grow to some percentage or the other every year.
#
It's not static like it is in several Western publishing houses.
#
The question is only, are we growing in the right segments according to ourselves?
#
Are the right books or the books that we think deserve to be selling more?
#
Are we getting the best writers the space that they should get as opposed to books that
#
are just being churned out and read and republished or whatever without enough care to them?
#
So those are questions that I think will always exist.
#
I mean, there'll always be filters that some want to apply and there'll always be gateways
#
that other people want to break open.
#
But I think all of it coexists.
#
There will be some in this segment and some in that and together they will grow.
#
But you can't knock out one for another.
#
And speaking of filters, how has discovery changed over these last 25 years?
#
Like back in the day, you know, your discovery I imagine would be one of three ways you read
#
about a book in the newspaper, maybe through a news review and a book review.
#
And there weren't many of those.
#
You'd hear about it by word of mouth or you'd see it in the display of your local bookstore.
#
While now I think that ways of discovery must surely be so much more disparate.
#
And especially in Bombay, I hardly go to a bookstore anymore and when I do, I'm usually
#
I'm ashamed to say I'm just looking in my Amazon and making lists of books that I want
#
to acquire in whatever form.
#
How has the discovery changed?
#
And following on from that, how does a publisher then cater their marketing to how people discover
#
Like is social media really a big part of that?
#
Do you then find yourself chasing influencers and getting them to write books simply because
#
they are influencers, which I imagine would be a wrong reason, but from one point of view
#
I think it has changed.
#
I mean, of course, there's the usual old ways, friends recommended, universities recommend
#
it or you find it in a bookstore, et cetera.
#
But a lot of people now are finding that they're browsing online and coming up with a book
#
that they then chase down to see the reviews.
#
And Amazon five-star reviews by 300 people will drive you to buy a book in a way that
#
I think you would have not thought possible earlier because there was still that sense
#
that the reviewer who's a professional reviewer who writes for it in a sanctified space like
#
a newspaper has a view that is more to be respected and to be followed up on by purchase
#
But now people are saying, I actually, I don't care who said it, I trust these hundred people
#
on because those are like, they have no stake in anything.
#
I believe that they're speaking what they want to say and what they actually believe
#
and I'm willing to go by that.
#
So a lot of people will buy a book after reading online reviews, which is a whole new thing,
#
which means that your marketing, as you said, has to be geared towards online discovery.
#
It can't just be POS in stores, can't be visibility in bookshops alone.
#
It really needs people to look at a post by someone and follow the link to buy the book
#
right then and there because it's possible.
#
And when an influencer like, say, Ashasi Tharoor says, I don't remember the last time he said
#
this, but when he does say, I loved this book and puts up something by the author, I am
#
absolutely sure that a lot of people would follow that and go buy the book immediately.
#
We see spikes when an influencer who's like a major influencer says something positive
#
about a book on Insta or Twitter.
#
We see that people go online and buy the book.
#
We don't see that spike so much in the stores, but we see it as an almost instinctive response
#
that, oh, then I want it and I am able to buy it immediately online, so I will do that.
#
So we do invest a lot more time and money and effort in getting our social media right,
#
and following the right people on Insta and Twitter and Facebook to get that.
#
A lot more Facebook live chats happen when you're launching a book, Twitter bloom is
#
used to have conversations with writers.
#
So there is that sense that the real committed reader who goes to a bookshop, who actually
#
makes the effort to go to a bookshop, will discover the books that they need to discover.
#
We don't need to worry about them so much, but it's the others that you want to get,
#
the ones who are not committed, who could choose to read or not read and would be completely
#
almost licentious in their, you know, they can read something from the US or the UK or
#
India or Europe or whatever, how do you get them to focus on the book that you want them
#
Who will read something and love it and say, wow, I didn't know I needed this.
#
And once they say that to five more people and once five more people read it and put
#
up great reviews, and then five other people protest that and there's a little bit of an
#
environment of, you know, we are reading and actually engaging with this book, then it
#
will take off differently.
#
You know, I think back on how I used to sort of read books once upon a time that let's
#
say I'm taking a local train from Andheri to Churchgate 20 years ago and I'll carry
#
And today if I'm on a commute that long, I'll be looking at my smartphone and I'll be on
#
Twitter or I'll be listening to a podcast perhaps, which is not necessarily a bad thing
#
and doing things like that.
#
Or when I go to bed at night, you know, I'll have a little bit of bedside reading going
#
on and now most people are essentially turning off their blue screens and hopefully, you
#
know, in some cases reading the Kindle on their phone, but that's less and less likely.
#
So I'll sort of, I've taken up a lot of your time, I'll end this episode by asking you
#
a question I ask all my guests about whatever subject we're talking about, that looking
#
at publishing specifically and reading in general over the next 10 to 20 years, what
#
gives you hope and what gives you despair?
#
What gives me despair is the people I see around me, including my children, who do not
#
think books are the mainstay of their lives and who think books are perfectly dispensable
#
and that what they get from YouTube or from whatever else they are engaged on the smart
#
screen is absolutely good enough for them.
#
I don't know how long those things last, whether they are phases and maybe they will change.
#
Maybe they secretly read every day, this is just a posturing for you, they're rebelling
#
Possible, but I mean, they're just reflective of a whole community of people out there who
#
I think read less than I would like them to.
#
But you know, the thing is, when I was growing up or you were growing up possibly or other
#
people our age were, I don't think our mothers or fathers read stories to us.
#
I think they told us stories when we went to bed.
#
But somewhere along the way, we decided that reading a book to a child was like the best
#
way to educate them and bring them up to date with, you know, life and times of the world
#
And then when we saw that they were reading less, we decided that, oh my God, we have
#
completely transformed and the society is no longer reading.
#
But when were they reading?
#
We tend to think everything in our life is the standard by which everything else has
#
And that's partly why we think reading is so important.
#
But if you look at it another way, as long as the stories continue, as long as people
#
will use narrative in their own ways, whatever those ways are, and they will continue to
#
get people to think through those stories, bedtime or in school or just the way we talk
#
I think that's good enough.
#
I think its form is only so important, whether it's a printed book, whether it's on screen,
#
whether it's written or told or watched.
#
I think the story is the heart of the matter.
#
And that's what gives me hope that as long as the story is required for us and as long
#
as we love the story, we will continue to find new ways and more interesting ways to
#
And a book is one part of that, and I think we should stop prioritizing form over content.
#
And as we change, as lives change around us, people will find different ways of packaging
#
the story, but I don't think the story is going away.
#
And that's what gives me hope.
#
These are very wise words.
#
I agree with you entirely.
#
And I would add to that by saying that it's okay if you don't read as much as your parents
#
think you should, as long as you spend that time listening to podcasts.
#
Kartika, thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
I really enjoyed chatting with you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Kartika on Twitter at kartikavk.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of the Scene in the Unseen at sceneunseen.in, thinkpragati.com
#
The Scene in the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
#
Postgraduate courses in public policy begin in January.
#
The last couple of years, I've actually taught a module on how to write op-eds.
#
So let that be reason enough to sign up.
#
You can get more information at takshashila.org.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
#
Hi, I'm Saryo Natarajan.
#
And I'm Alok Prasanna Kumar.
#
And we are the hosts of the Ganatantra Podcast.
#
On this podcast, we speak to academics, social scientists, journalists and activists to find
#
out what's actually going on in Indian politics.
#
On this podcast, we stay away from personality politics, intrigue and gossip, and instead
#
focus on the data, research and analysis that drives all this.
#
So tune in to the Ganatantra Podcast where new episodes are out every Wednesday on the
#
IVM Podcast app, website or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
