PULP WRITES BACK

Say, you had to fill a bookshelf entirely with our favourite fun books by Indian writers in English, which ones would you chose? The original bestselling campus novel, Inscrutable Americans, would go right in. If you aren’t a literary snob, you would slip in Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone there with due reverence. A couple of Shobhaa Des would go in too. A Suitable Boy could scrape in if it weren’t so darned long. There is something to be said for Salman Rushdie’s humour in Midnight’s Children, but that would be really stretching it. That’s about it, isn’t it? A sad shelf of four, maybe five books. Well, the reason for your scanty collection is that all these years, in all their wisdom, publishers and writers have handed us only The Great Indian Novel. In its pages were all the big issues, from the coming-of-age story of the nation to the plotline of postmodern angst. For that other traveller in us—the one hungry for the rollicking good yarn or the silly romance—it had nothing. But scan the bestseller lists of the past year and a half, and you’ll see your shelf filling up.

NUMBER CRUNCHING
Bajaj’s slim paperback about a Washington-based investment banker who descends on the IIM-Bangalore campus to find some good old “meaning in life” is the toast of the publishing industry this season. Described by some as the “IIM-wallahs’ Indian August”, it was launched last month bang in the middle of the big launches—Amitav Ghosh, Chetan Bhagat, Shobhaa De. Within 10 days of hitting the stores, it sold out its first print run of 5,000 copies. In Indian publishing, that’s a big deal because for decades now, that rather modest figure has persisted as the benchmark for a bestseller. The bigger deal is that in the last 18 months, several popular or mass-market books by first-time writers have cantered past that mark, quietly and without the noise of five-star launches. Print runs are up and so are sales figures.

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