NOVEL ADVENTURES

"Publishers want a variety of settings and it's exciting these days. Lots of people are reading and a lot of new readers are emerging," says Subramanian. "Typical readers are working people who want settings and characters they can resonate with. They want to read about people like them. And when I wrote Keep the Change, I wanted to stick to a setting I knew because then I could focus on my characters rather than veer off into another world."

That's what Kanika Dhillon, scriptwriter and assistant director with Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment, is doing too, with her first novel due out in September. "My book is called Bombay Duck is a Fish because everything in this city of dreams called Mumbai and this industry called Bollywood is very deceptive," says Dhillon. "Especially to an outsider who is from a small town and is trying to survive the city and the industry. I have observed it and lived in it, so I could write about it with a sense of realism."

WRITING NOVELS IS one thing. But are these novels any good? Well, every reader has her or his likes and dislikes, so that's difficult to gauge. Still, it's important to remember that in India, publishing in English isn't something that's grown organically. It's an industry in which many of the big players are internationally owned, who believe that India, with its interest in English, makes a good market. So naturally there's always much argument about what Indian publishing is about, how good it is, how much sense it makes and where it's going.

Source : Hindustan Times Brunch : 25th April 2010

« Back