The longer I live in India the more
depressed I get. It's not that this isn't an interesting country,
with fascinating people and gorgeous architecture and beaches and
shopping and food, it's just that I need my basics. I need paved
roads, uninterrupted electricity and water, efficient garbage
collection – and an intelligentsia that's, well, intelligent. I am
brimming with angst because I've been following the reviews of a new
book and this is what I learned: Every Indian review was either
ignorant, sitting on the fence, or came laced, like arsenic, with the
reviewer's particular baggage. It was all about, in other words, the
person reviewing the book, not about the book itself. I wondered if I
was reading too much into it, whether I should give the reviewers the
benefit of the doubt, and then the international reviews started
coming in.
Every single one has been a rave.
Whether it was The Guardian or the TLS,
whether they were personal blogs or reputed sites, every single
non-Indian review has been a rave.
Every single.....have I made myself
clear?
This is just sad. What does it say
about us, writers, journalists, readers? It says that we are
children, in the worst way children can behave. We are
uncomprehending, unreasoning, spiteful – not to be relied on. Not
to be relied on to read a book and give a critical, honest judgement
on it so that others can decide whether they want to read it or not.
How simple is that? And yet it is not something we can do.
So this means that we can never, until
we grow up as a nation, believe anything anyone says in the Indian
media about someone's book, someone's film, someone's designs,
someone's art, a new restaurant, a mall, even a personality profile
in the feature pages.
Yeah. I'm depressed.
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