THE BESTSELLER PLOT: ONLY CONNECT
All reading is escape. Fiction pulls you out of your reality into another, slightly disturbing, universe. But the pleasure in stories that reflect back your life and its fears, be it dropping grades or finding Mr Right (between the two you have the grave concerns of the campus and the chicklit novels) is something else. It is what’s making the young Indian reader (18 to 35, urban and middle-class) give in to the rather unheard of impulse of picking a book over a KFC meal.
It helps that the books are priced just right, Rs 95- Rs 195 and that Indian writers are beginning to tap the many absurdities and obsessions of India’s middle class—swathes of life that have till now been ignored by “serious writers”. There is Smita Jain’s insider’s account of the K-serial cottage industry in Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions. In The Zoya Factor, you have Chauhan bottling a bubbly concoction of IPL, romance and a goodluck charm—a Bollywood blockbuster formula if ever there was one. (Not surprisingly, many of the bestseller authors have been approached by filmmakers.) The campus novels work simply because, yaar, there is no bigger Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in middle class India than A Good Career, na? For the thousands of youngsters who get snapped up the IIT/ IIM-prep factory every year and the hundreds who get in, Chetan Bhagat and Co speak to them in a language they can understand. It is fiction for People Like Us, written by People Like Us.
And we speak like this only.
This is chubby, curly-haired Zoya of The Zoya Factor, brooding about life: “I obsess a little about being ‘cool’, because, hello, when people ask me where I stay I have to look them in the eye and say Karol Bagh…Which is agony in advertising because when all the snooty advertising types think Karol-Bagh-type, they imagine a pushy wannabe in chamkeela salwar-kameez with everything matching-matching.” No, no postcolonial angst about writing in English here.
Abhijit Bhaduri, whose Mediocre But Arrogant (one book that is not embarrassed of its target audience, get the MBA link?) was published by a small-time publisher based in Lajpat Nagar, Indialog, and went on to sell 8,000 copies, says, “I think writers have a greater confidence in the language in which we speak—and this is a result of the confidence in the idea of India.” His next, Married But Available (MBA again), has been snapped up by Harper Collins. “I don’t need to add a glossary to my book to explain what rosogulla or machher jhol is. I am confident my readers understand. I don’t write in chaste English, because we don’t speak that way,” he says.
Agrees Nilanjana S. Roy, editor of Westland Books, “The more significant change is that neither publishers nor writers are under the pressure of attempting only the big, literary novel. So what we have are stories that emerge from many, different aspects of being Indian.”
The stories are set in new India—its cafes and multicuisine restaurants, its offices and snarky bosses, not just its exotic spice bazaars. “For years, all the popular fiction we read was set in places we aspired to be in. The exotic locales of Mills and Boons novels, for instance. Now, we have our own aspirational settings to explore,” says Karthika. Adds Kala, “It’s a quotient emerging from our own experience, not something we import, or blindly turn to the West for.”
The literary worth of some of such attempts is questionable and with an accessible, familiar language peppered with Chal yaars and Bindaas boss, comes a lot of bad prose. But Balakrishnan of Crossword Bookstores has a succinct retort. “For critics, the language used by writers like Ravi Subramaniam or Chetan Bhagat might be the biggest weakness. For readers, that’s their selling point.”

... contd.