{"id":162731,"date":"2013-07-13T22:40:34","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T17:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=162731"},"modified":"2013-07-13T22:40:34","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T17:10:34","slug":"he-luvs-luv-storys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/he-luvs-luv-storys\/","title":{"rendered":"He Luvs Luv Storys"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Connecting
Connecting with the masses<\/strong> Ravinder Singh. Photo: Ankit Agrawal<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nOn the night of 4 March 2006, four friends, batchmates from college who hadn\u2019t met for three years, sat talking on the banks of the Hooghly. The subject of marriage came up. They agreed that however much bachelorhood suited them, their parents had certain expectations of them. They agreed that they preferred to marry the girl of their choice, but noted that all of them were north Indians, working in faraway states, which meant the chance of them finding a (north Indian) soulmate was quite slim. In any case, their techie jobs didn\u2019t give them the time to meet different people. The solution, they realised, was the panacea for all their longing: the Internet.
\nA few weeks later, Ravinder Singh found himself creating a profile on Shaadi.com<\/em>. After sending requests for further interaction to (only Punjabi) women who struck his fancy, he waited for responses. Most of them ignored him and the few that responded \u201cdidn\u2019t appear that good\u201d. Eventually, he lost interest. Until Khushi, a techie and a Punjabi, one of the better-looking girls he had contacted, called him. They talked on the phone, eventually for hours on end. They fell in love. He met her family, her family met his. Then, days before they were to be engaged on Valentine\u2019s Day, 2007, the cab taking her home from work was hit by a truck. After a few excruciating days in the hospital, she died.
\nSix years later, a small crowd at the Barista in a swanky Gurgaon mall waits for Ravinder Singh, now 31, to show up. Waiters pass out cups of Blast From The Past, a new coffee being launched along with Singh\u2019s third novel, Like It Happened Yesterday<\/em>. As we wait, a video starts playing: a \u2018trailer\u2019 for the book, a cartoon version of the author appealing to the audience\u2019s nostalgia, asking them to remember their childhood. It\u2019s a sizeable audience; hours earlier, Singh had been nervous about whether anyone would brave the rain, miss an India-Pakistan cricket match and head to a mall with little Metro connectivity for a book launch (the cricket match has thankfully been delayed by rain). A representative from Penguin India, the book\u2019s publisher, tells me that two lakh copies have already been sold.
\n
\"I
I too had a love story<\/strong>
Ravinder Singh
Penguin (Metro Reads)
206 pp; Rs125<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nSingh is mobbed as he arrives. Curious onlookers ask what the fuss is all about. Ravinder who? The IPL guy? Standing in the back of the room, it\u2019s impossible to see him in person; I have to be content with seeing him through the dozens of phones and tablets taking photos. Throughout the launch \u2014 he makes generic comments on how awesome school life was \u2014 his fans take videos. When he takes questions, he is asked, usually after an effusion of praise, mostly about the book that made him a household name (depending on your household) in 2008.
\nI Too Had A Love Story<\/em>.. \u2014 the two elliptical dots were added at the behest of Jayanta Bose, owner of Srishti Publishers, who prefers his titles to have exactly 19 characters, excluding spaces \u2014 has sold, literally, millions of copies in the last five years. It still appears in bestseller lists, as does its \u2018sequel\u2019, Can Love Happen Twice?<\/em> (also 19 characters, but purely coincidental; it was published by Penguin). It is the true story of his tragic courtship of Khushi, a book he felt he had to write in order to get closure. Working for Infosys in Chandigarh at the time, he had never written before.
\nAfter pouring his heart out, Singh wanted desperately to have his story reach as many people as possible. But he encountered what is now a familiar obstacle, a badge worn triumphantly by successful writers of commercial fiction in India: rejection letters. One by one, all the major and minor publishing houses he contacted refused to publish him. He even tried to persuade a printer in Daryaganj to print 500 copies, but the order was too small. He reached out to an online forum that helps budding authors polish their manuscripts, and tried again. This time, Srishti, a company that has been at the vanguard of the commercial fiction movement (\u201cfounded with the objective of giving a platform to budding Indian authors from various walks of life whose story is worthy of being told to the masses,\u201d says publisher Arup Bose), bought it. It would go on to be their bestselling title.
\n
\"Can
Can love happen twice?<\/strong> Ravinder Singh Penguin (Metro Reads)
224 pp; Rs 140<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nSingh says he is a risk-averse person, that he does not like investing time and money into anything that does not guarantee results. The message he got from Srishti, he says, is that they wouldn\u2019t invest a rupee in marketing a first novel. He would have to get personally involved. The first step was reaching out to Narayan and Sudha Murthy. \u201cI told them that this is an emotional thing that I\u2019ve written. And that here in Infosys, which was my first company, where I had spent six-and-a-half years, I had been brought up listening to their love story, which had been an inspiration. To my surprise, the response came in 16 minutes directly from Narayan Murthy, who I had never spoken to before.\u201d Murthy agreed to write the foreword to the book, and his blurb \u2014 \u201cSimple, honest and touching\u201d \u2014 has been a permanent fixture on every edition of the book. \u201cI didn\u2019t look at it as something that would boost the sales of the book,\u201d Singh says. \u201cI just wanted someone wise, someone whose wisdom we respect, to talk about the book.\u201d He also \u201cconnected with\u201d Shaadi.com<\/em>, the website through which he met Khushi, and the book was launched in Chandigarh by Anupam Mittal, founder and chief managing director of the People Group, which owns the website.
\n
\"Like
Like it happened yesterday<\/strong>
Ravinder Singh Penguin
(Metro Reads)
216 pp; Rs 140<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nPhrases like \u201cconnected with\u201d flow easily from Singh. He\u2019s a consummate networker, and highly serious when it comes to establishing himself as a writer. Earlier this year, he quit his job at Microsoft \u2014 which he joined after getting his MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad \u2014 to focus on this career (he says he\u2019s busier now). \u201cThere was a clash of mindsets. One day, I would be at a Jaipur Literature Festival, signing books, meeting my readers, having access to the author\u2019s lounge. Then the next day, I\u2019d have to report to a boss.\u201d He moved to Gurgaon to be close to the supply chain of the Indian publishing industry; he plans to branch out into publishing, much like an actor would turn to production in order to leverage his brand value.
\nIn many ways, he is the archetypal writer of Indian commercial fiction. As a North Indian male professional, he fits the demographics perfectly, even if he didn\u2019t graduate from an IIT. The son of a Sikh priest in the small Odisha town of Burla, his values are very conventional, with the institutions of family, marriage and even his job being rarely challenged in his writing. When I ask him about his politics, he makes vague statements about autorickshaws not going by metre and corruption in land registries. He believes privatisation is a force for good: \u201cImagine if the it industry was run by the government.\u201d He\u2019s not much of reader: \u201cI only read light sort of books.\u201d He has no use for the traditional structures of literature \u2014 though he does admit that the credibility an appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival affords is a good thing \u2014 focussing his efforts not on gaining the approval of the gatekeepers, but on reaching as many potential readers as possible. The only true measure of an author\u2019s success, he believes, is the number of his readers.
\n
\"Under
Under my umbrella<\/strong> Singh\u2019s account of his real-life romance has sold millions of copies. Photo: AFP<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHis prose is what a reviewer may refer to as \u2018workmanlike\u2019, with clunky grammar and endless clich\u00e9s, a common criticism of the genre. It is a lament that is by no means restricted to India; commercial fiction worldwide has for decades prompted highbrow critics to proclaim the death of the English language. Yale professor Harold Bloom, for instance, famously described the Harry Potter series as emblematic of the \u201cdumbing-down\u201d of culture, part of \u201ca vast concourse of inadequate works\u2026 [that] crams the dustbins of the ages\u201d. It is also a charge that writers and publishers counter with practised ease today, so many times have they been asked the question. Kapish Mehra, managing director of Rupa, says a colloquial language is necessary to connect with a readership that consists mostly of an upwardly-mobile, largely small-town youth that wants its own stories told in a language that they understand. Srishti\u2019s Arup Bose says they work \u201cwith the understanding that not everyone can write a Booker-winning work, nor can everyone understand it. We just gave millions of youngsters what they had been craving to read.\u201d Or, as Animesh Verma, author of Love, Life and Dream On and I am Broke\u2026.! Love Me<\/em> (19 characters each, guess the publisher), succinctly told The Indian Express<\/em>, \u201cGrammatical errors, spelling mistakes doesn\u2019t matter that much. I am not writing a literature.\u201d
\nThere is merit in what Mehra, Bose and even Verma say. Castigating first-time authors for not observing the established rules of style when writing for first-time readers smacks of elitism. (Granted, these readers will likely not, as Bloom wrote, advance to more difficult pleasures, but blaming these writers for that doesn\u2019t work in a society where the forces of commerce overcoming the forces of art is not a recent phenomenon.) But there is much to say about what they have to say. The publishers I spoke to all insist that there is great diversity in the books they publish, but most examples of the genre are badly-written bildung-sromans, often autobiographical \u2014 in many cases, with suitable alterations \u2014 with some amateur philosophising that reads more like the conclusions achieved during a night of boozing. Vaishali Mathur, senior commissioning editor at Penguin India, concedes there is \u201clittle innovative thinking happening in terms of plots, writing styles and genres. If a trend catches on, you will find almost everybody wanting to do the same.\u201d
\nFor Ravinder Singh, though, there seems plenty of room on the bandwagon. Plans are afoot for a new initiative that will invite budding authors to submit ideas for stories, with the three best entrants given the opportunity to work with their idol on fleshing out novels of their own. \u201cEverybody has a story,\u201d he says at the book launch. \u201cMost people do it in 140 characters on Twitter. Some write a novel.\u201d A collective sigh of despair emanates from the nation\u2019s ivory towers.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ravinder Singh knows what young India wants. His books may be crass, they may be simple, but, he tells Ajachi Chakrabarti, millions of readers can\u2019t be wrong <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":162757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,7056,8365,7641],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}