Dreamers + Ocean Vuong

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the little magazine movement had its golden age in India and it’s an idea that I love because it’s so modest and so ambitious all at once. Little magazines were offbeat, non-commercial magazines that were usually literary in their bent and often, experimental. They weren’t looking at catering to the world at large and neither did they want millions of subscribers. But what they did want to do was give their community of readers thought-provoking articles that would challenge, experiment, educate and just be geeky. I’m not sure how vibrant the little magazine world is in other Indian languages today, but in Bengal, it's chugging along cheerfully. Just about 10 days ago, there was actually a mela of Bengali little magazines and hundreds of publishers showed up with their publications. I stare at these like a new kid at Hogwarts. They’re often painfully basic — no images, cheap printing — but they’re full of articles that look interesting and/or radiate the nerdiness of the publishers as well as potential readers. Some are deeply esoteric. Many are weird. They’re almost all concerned with literature and culture. I confess, even if some of the opinions in the magazines set my teeth on edge, the fact that the little magazine is big in Bengal warms the cockles of my heart.

It’s not just little magazines, but indie publishing at large that seems to have dug its heels in here in Kolkata. Self-publishing appears to be thriving, in its own modest way. The numbers will probably never make news, but the books sell and new editions are printed and everyone involved is suitably chuffed (which doesn't mean they're not whining. Of course they are. They're Bengalis. They have to whine a little). My father brought home two volumes on food writing in Bengali and I’ve been devouring them. It’s not that they’re full of revelations or unheard of food trivia (though some of the recipes seem very promising. Like the chicken curry that has minced shrimp in it. Mmm), but they’re opinionated, hungry and fun to read. These two self-published volumes are titled Nunete Bhatete (rough translation: Salt and Rice) and my father tells me they’re very popular. I can totally see why.

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So two weeks into 2018 and I’ve abandoned my first book of the year. It’s not because the book is bad. It’s not. It’s great fun, but a couple of days after I started it, I got Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World. I thought I'd just flip through it, and that was the end of finishing the other book I'd been reading. Knowing Snigdha a little and having followed her writing over the years, I wasn’t at all surprised that Dreamers is excellent. It's precisely as fantastic and depressing as I expected.

Dreamers is a set of seven portraits. These six men and one woman are people whose lives the writer has followed over a period of time. They’re all ambitious and for most of them, the good life isn’t in big cities but in small-town India. For young journalists, this book should be a must-read to appreciate how good journalism works. In an age of snippets, breaking news and screaming matches, we have too little of this slower journalism. There's so much to appreciate about Snigdha's writing and observational skills, even while the people she writes about drive a stake through the heart of hope and optimism.

Divided into three parts, Dreamers begins with stories of incredible ambition and the unexpected, soaring success of the Indian entrepreneurial spirit. From the man who decided there was a fortune in feeding America clickbait to the fixer who finds opportunity in everything from passport photos to demonetisation. Next come those fuelled by anger, including a gau rakshak (cow vigilante) and a student politician. The book ends with the disillusioned. For most of us, these are people we know. Either they belong to our extended circle or they resemble people we’ve seen on television news. They become a little more real and a lot more heartbreaking by the end of Dreamers.

It’s impossible to read Dreamers and not be filled with a sense of unease and you’ll find the people that Snigdha describes have started to squat in your headspace. You feel like you know them and I don't know how you could forget about them when you close the book. They're clawing their way out of such desperate situations, often holding on with sheer determination and nothing more. By the time I’d reached the end of the chapter on Mr Jharkhand Azhar Khan, I felt weighed down by everything I'd read. (Thank you god for Mills & Boon-s). Elegantly written as it is, Dreamers pierces your sense of wellbeing because it shows how horribly broken and rotten the system is. Provided there is a system. If there’s one thing that Dreamers emphasises, then it is how the youth has been failed. We have so little of the infrastructure in place to enable the 600 million(ish) youth who are supposed to power India to a glorious future. What is in place are hierarchies that seek to exploit them, using them as fodder and foot soldiers, or abandon them to benevolent negligence. All the youth have are dreams that are doomed and rage. These are the foundations upon which a new, broken India will be built. Insert shudder here.

If you’d like to read an extract, try this one about those who thought they were joining call centres but ended up as professional scammers. More heartwarming is this one about Richa Singh, who shook things up when she ran for the post of president of the students’ union at Allahabad University.

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Booksy news: Westland (an Amazon company) has a new imprint called Context, which will publish "serious, thoughtful, politically-engaged fiction and non-fiction." It will also publish graphic novels. Given its headed up by Karthika VK who was behind some of Harper Collins's most inspired titles, this imprint promises to be a very good thing. Context titles will be out in February. Yay!

If you haven’t read Ocean Vuong, so much beauty lies ahead of you. Earlier this week, Vuong won the prestigious TS Eliot prize for his debut collection of poems, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. He’s only the second person to win the prize for their first volume of poetry. His story is quite fascinating and his words are just magic.

ESSAY ON CRAFT

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.
Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls
of ash, dark as ink,
hammered them
into marrow, into
a skull thick
enough to keep
the gentle curse
of dreams. Yes, I aimed
for mercy —
but came only close
as building a cage
around the heart. Shutters
over the eyes. Yes,
I gave it hands
despite knowing
that to stretch that clay slab
into five blades of light,
I would go
too far. Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me. So I dipped
my fingers back
into the fire, pried open
the lower face
until the wound widened
into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver
with that god
-awful scream
& I was done.
& it was human.


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BLOOMSBURY IN JANUARY
Here are the titles from Bloomsbury's January list that caught my eye.

Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death
Brenna Hassett
Non-fiction

Using research on skeletal remains from around the world, this book explores the history of humanity’s experiment with the metropolis, and looks at why our ancestors chose city life, and why they have largely stuck to it. It explains the diseases, the deaths and the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the metropolitan past, and as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, what we can look forward to in the future.

Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe
Louisa Preston
Non-fiction

As Goldilocks was searching for the perfect bowl of porridge, astrobiologists are searching for conditions throughout the Universe that are just right for life as we currently know it to exist. Did you know that there’s a Goldilocks Zone in space? Well, there is. Find out where it is and more in this book about the hows and whys of astrobiology.

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Daniel Ellsberg
Non-fiction

If you watched The Post, then you know Daniel Ellsberg as the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers. It turns out that he took out more than those few thousand pages. He also took with him a chilling cache of top-secret documents related to America's nuclear program in the 1960s, which are revealed for the first time in this book. A real-life Dr. Strangeglove story.

Poeatry: Poems from the Heart of Farms and a Kitchen
Vikas Khanna
Poetry

I couldn’t help it. I saw the ghastly attempt at punning in the title and was consumed by a need to include it. This, aspiring chef-poets, is how not to title your book even if you're a small-time celebrity and cute. For those who remain earnestly interested, here's what Poeatry promises the reader: “Seen through Vikas’ eyes each individual element ­ be it the simple seed, a stick of cinnamon or a summer’s day ­ is brought to life and takes on hues unimagined.”

Nights of the Living Dead
George A. Romero & Jonathan Maberry
Fiction

Because what is the point of life if it doesn’t give you an anthology of zombie fiction over the decades.

Peach
Emma Glass
Fiction

Something has happened to Peach. It hurts to walk but she staggers home to parents
that don't seem to notice. Peach must patch herself up alone. Steeped in violence and filled with ambiguous characters, this story of rape and revenge isn’t likely to be an easy read, but it’s received great praise from George Saunders and Kamila Shamsie so… .

This is How it Ends
Eva Dolan
Fiction

Two women — an activist and a blogger — have decided that they’re going to camp out at a semi-derelict tower block in London that has been marked for development. They're determined to stall the developers as long as they can with their protest. When a man’s body is found in the lift shaft, a web of lies and deceit comes to light. Only these two women know what happened to him, but can they trust each other? Sharp, tight crime fiction.

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Dear Reader will be back next week. Thanks for reading.