Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Can One Have Intimacy Under The Arc Lights?

You would have had to be blind, deaf — or a hater — to have not heard of Arundhati Roy’s new book. The clamour surrounding it is loud enough to awaken a politician’s conscience. Well, almost.

The media blitz feels like an elitist, ‘literary’ version of today’s deafening campaigns for big-ticket movies. (Almost all of which have failed at the box office, fyi.)

I have managed to silence the hype. It’s taken work, mind you. My current exercise routine has been running for cover as soon as I hear Ms Roy’s unmistakably shy, girlish voice on my phone or comp.

Why, you ask.

Because I ordered the book as soon as it was available. Because I like Arundhati Roy, the writer and person. I like her because she is that rare artist who cannot be separated from the person. Unlike several writers I know who only do the talking, she has been doing the walking, too. All I wanted to know about her, I figured, would be in the book. And anything anyone, including Ms Roy herself, said outside of the book, in my opinion, would dilute, and perhaps even contaminate my experience of it.

My first issue is with what they have been referring to as an ‘intimate’ launch of the book, curated by one Mayank Austen Soofi. I am all for intimacy, mind you. But intimacy demands privacy. One can’t have intimacy and arc lights. Anything ‘intimate’ made public becomes an exercise in exclusion. Intimacy displayed, alas, is vulgarity. And that’s precisely what the campaign felt like to me. It seemed to say ‘Look, the chosen few who gather here with Ms Roy are all special. You are not. But, guess what? Here are some crumbs for you unspecial common folk, catch!’

Roy has been an indefatigable champion of the underdog. It puzzles me that someone like her permitted something like this — a carnival of overdogs — to happen. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, though. Maybe she’s tired, as she should be, with all that’s come with being Arundhati Roy. Maybe she succumbed to the publisher’s plan. Maybe she craved some old-fashioned love and affection.

There is much being said about Penguin Random House’s ‘masterly’ publicity campaign for this book, too. I refer to Antara Baruah’s piece in The Print.

How her brother sang The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’, a line of which is the book’s title. How Roy spent days and days tirelessly signing copies, so as to incentivize readers to buy from stores in the age of Amazon’s tyranny. How, a year ago, the publishers formed a core team encompassing all departments — sales, editorial, product, marketing — to devise a strategy, with nothing left to chance. Because ‘When Arundhati Roy is your author, you start early.’

Above all, how ‘The book is everywhere, but quietly.’

Quietly? Why then have I got cotton stuffed into my ear canal?

All this is wonderful. I’m happy Ms Roy, whose unmistakable sorrow is as much a feature as her striking eyes or ringlets, got to do ‘normal’ stuff, had fun, got hugged, no doubt, indulged herself a bit publicly and allowed herself to be vulnerable in a completely different way from what she is used to.

But I have questions.

How is this a masterly campaign on the publisher’s part? Arundhati Roy has a legion of loyal readers who would have read her book anyway. Even if there had been one tiny news item about it in the back pages of one newspaper. That her new book was out would have organically become ‘news’.

If at all the publishers managed anything with their ‘masterly’ campaign, they got a whole bunch of people who have never read her, and dare I say may never read her still, to buy her new book with their so-called campaign. It profits Ms Roy, as it should. Which is not a bad thing. More importantly, it profits the publishing house. Which is what it’s all about. Not, as they’d have us believe, about their concern for writers, readers, bookshops, and other endangered species.

The book will sell because it is Arundhati Roy. The book would have sold had it been published by Akkupakshi Publications from Amalapuram, and their campaign consisted of their watchman blocking passers-by and waving them into their office.

My question to the publisher: would your brilliant planning, strategy and multi-departmental input work on any other writer? Forget unknowns — which you do anyway — but could your marketing mastery do this with, say, Priyanka Chopra’s book?

As for this campaign to incentivize readers to buy books from stores ‘in the age of Amazon’s tyranny’, I think not. It’s laughable to think readers will suddenly stop buying books from Amazon just because hordes of them bought Roy’s autographed book from a bookstore. People will continue using Amazon as long as it’s cheaper and more convenient. Amazon’s tyranny over the book trade will continue. As will the tyranny of big publishers over writers who aren’t Arundhati Roy (or Priyanka Chopra, for that matter).

Gentle request to Ms Roy: resist being co-opted by big corporations and hangers-on. Be the old you. Give us more books. Quietly.