Travel writing exposed 21 April 2008
Posted by bornonacusp in Readings.add a comment
I like travel lit, and Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu and multi-authored Stories from Nowhere remain my favourites of this genre. Reading travel stories not only allows me to live these writers’ lives vicariously, they actually help, too, during the times I go on my own travels.
Thus I find the controversy surrounding the book, ‘Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?’, of great interest.
See, there’s this Lonely Planet writer who decided to spill the beans on the methods he utilised for his research trip to Brazil, in the book to be released April 22. According to Amazon’s editorial review ahead of the book’s release, the guidebook writer, Thomas Kohnstamm, promises quite a nonchalant, funny, account of his adventures in Brazil, making no bones about his misadventures and the unglamorous side of travel writing, including sexual romps and making a quick buck from illegal drugs.
Kohnstamm’s stories are everything but funny, however, as far as Lonely Planet the company, is concerned. Lonely Planet has preempted the book’s release by issuing statements proclaiming that Kohnstamm is nothing more than a “rogue element.”
But then, in Lonely Planet’s internal online forum, a piece by another writer — leaked to a newspaper — described Kohnstamm’s book as “a car crash waiting to happen.”
This piece in Australia’s The Age puts things in perspective. In this essay, Chris Taylor, who has done books for Lonely Planet, discusses Kohnstamm’s ‘revelations’ in the context of the stiffly competitive world of travel writing.
Taylor says the huge proliferation of guidebook titles in the market in recent years has come parallel to the rise of the internet.
“In times past, the only way to research a guidebook was to actually go there — the alternative, plagiarising another guidebook, was, and still is, difficult to cover up. Today, you can sit at home and Google the town you might otherwise be exploring on foot, and hopefully some random blogger has done the legwork for you.”
The result of this huge market, he says, is that of publishers cutting budgets for actual research. At the same time, travellers like you and me have become smarter, using the internet to acquire information — like the professional guidebook writers.
Taylor: “The result: the death of the guidebook, at least as a reliable source of information of what’s happening in a place real time.”
Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing 17 April 2008
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi, Readings.add a comment
“Writing is so humbling, there’s no confidence involved. It helps to have some experience, a greater degree of familiarity with the process of writing. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.”
Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri has written her third book, Unaccustomed Earth. I’ve read one of the stories in the anthology (excerpted two weeks back in a daily here in Delhi) and can’t wait to read the rest of it. No matter what critics might say — that she has become “a brand” after the Pulitzer and thus can sell books no matter if they’re good or not — I adore her.
Read the entire Outlook interview, where she talks about her two passions: her writing and her children.
I have a dream … 26 February 2008
Posted by bornonacusp in For Film Buffs, Readings.add a comment
… that of writing a screenplay.
And that’s why I love reading screenplays.
It was in 2002, I think, when the fascination began after seeing The Hours — the Oscar-winning movie about three women of three different generations whose lives are threaded by Virginia Woolf’s novel, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. Having found the movie entertainingly disturbing, I thought the screenplay would be an even more satisfying experience. So I ran to the University library to scour for a copy of the screenplay. Needless to say, reading it gave me such a singular pleasure that I remember to this day.
Again I was reminded of my screenplay-penning dream, coming across this New York Times article excerpting from the screenplays of three movies which were in the running for the Oscars given out yesterday: Juno, Away from Her, and No Country for Old Men.
I have not seen any of these three films. (Of those in the Oscar race, FrenchBeard and I have only seen Michael Clayton, which we liked a lot. Might write about that later.) And getting a glimpse of these very brief excerpts from their screenplays excites me more than a video trailer, no matter how sleek.
And my dream continues to spin.
On my shelf: Delhi Is Not Far 7 February 2008
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi, Poetry, Readings.add a comment
“The India that I love does not make headlines. The India that I love comprises the goodwill and good humour of ordinary people.” – Ruskin Bond, Anglo-Indian writer, from the preface to his The India I Love.
Ruskin Bond is in his 70s, but he writes with such innocence you can hardly tell. An everlasting curiosity for what is normally obscure; a wisdom to know what is essential, what counts, in what seems to be an ordinary life.
Delhi Is Not Far tells the story of a struggling writer in a fictional small Indian town called Pipalnagar — a composite, the author says, of various real small towns across the country — and the people whose lives intersect with his own, on his way to pursuing a longing for journeying to Delhi.
I first met Ruskin Bond through FrenchBeard, who gifted me a year ago with the writer’s collection of short tales, Time Stops At Shamli. And you just know when you like an author, right? Whether it’s the subjects they write about, or their prose, or simply the way their stories relate to your own — you can always tell when you’ll go back again and again to their work. Ruskin Bond is one of mine.
Here’s a poem of his from The India I Love:
Come Roaming With Me
Out of the city and over the hill,
Into the spaces where Time stands still,
Under the tall trees touching old wood,
Taking the way where warriors once stood;
Crossing the little bridge, losing my way,
But finding a friendly place where I can stay.
Those were the days friend, when we were strong
And strode down the road to an old marching song
When the dew on the grass was fresh every morn,
And we woke to the call of the ring-dove at dawn.
The years have gone by and sometimes I falter,
But still I set out for a stroll or a saunter,
For the wind is as fresh as it was in my youth,
And the peach and the pear, still the sweetest of fruit,
So cast away care and come roaming with me,
Where the grass is still green and the air is still free.
Ian McEwan comes to India 28 January 2008
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Ian McEwan, shortlisted for 2007’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction and author of Atonement, is in India for the Jaipur Literature Festival.
In an interview with Hindustan Times, he speaks of his first visit to India (“I’ve never been with so many people at once, and yet I felt relaxed and ignored”), his view of fiction writing (“All fiction is localised. You write about things around you”), and why he thinks he should not be given congratulatory remarks for the Best Picture win of Atonement at the Golden Globes (“People have come up to me to congratulate about the Golden Globe, which is nonsense. Now what if the film was very bad? Would I have got the brickbats? No, and rightfully not. So why should I get the bouquets if the film is great”).
Read the HT interview here.
(McEwan’s photograph from BBC News.)
The Dalai Lama and Burt Bacharach 5 November 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Muni-Muni, Readings.add a comment
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.”
That’s a really old song by Burt Bacharach, and for some might be a bit trite. But if you think about it, it says something profound.
This was the song that kept running through my head while reading a recent essay by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader. In his piece, copied below, the Dalai Lama tells of his optimism about the future.
“As late as the 1950s and ’60s,” he writes, “people believed that war was an inevitable condition of mankind and that conflicts must be solved through the use of force. Today, despite ongoing conflicts and the threat of terrorism, most people are genuinely concerned about world peace, far less interested in propounding ideology and far more committed to coexistence.”
But how do you build compassion? From where will people derive the inspiration to be more kind, to care about the rest of humanity and desire a better world?
The Dalai Lama says we can start by seeing that we all are one: “Today, more than ever, we need to make this fundamental recognition of the basic oneness of humanity the foundation of our perspective on the world and its challenges.” It does not matter what your religion is — or whether you are a believer or not, to begin with.
“What matters is that one be a good, kind and warmhearted person. A deep sense of caring for others, based on a profound sense of interconnection, is the essence of the teachings of all great religions of the world. In my travels, I always consider my foremost mission to be the promotion of basic human qualities of goodness — the need for and appreciation of the value of love, our natural capacity for compassion and the need for genuine fellow feeling. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people.”
Read his essay below, or here, in Washington Post online.
My Vision of a Compassionate Future
By The Dalai Lama
Brute force can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom. The thousands of people who marched in the cities of Eastern Europe in recent decades, the unwavering determination of the people in my homeland of Tibet and the recent demonstrations in Burma are powerful reminders of this truth. Freedom is the very source of creativity and human development. It is not enough, as communist systems assumed, to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. If we have these things but lack the precious air of liberty to sustain our deeper nature, we remain only half human.
