{"id":199116,"date":"2013-10-18T18:30:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T13:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=199116"},"modified":"2013-10-18T18:30:24","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T13:00:24","slug":"guns-dont-kill-people-bad-prose-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/guns-dont-kill-people-bad-prose-does\/","title":{"rendered":"Guns Don\u2019t Kill People, Bad Prose Does"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Grisham
Grisham in the making?<\/strong> Ravi Subramanian<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nIt\u2019s one of the most clich\u00e9d pieces of advice given to new authors of fiction, both literary and commercial. Write what you know<\/em>. It\u2019s good advice; one of the worst things a new author can do is seem inauthentic. Indian commercial writers certainly follow it to the T, with a conveyor belt of engineers writing about being engineers, bankers writing about being bankers, college students writing about being college students.
\nIn Bankerupt<\/em>, his sixth book (in six years; \u201cIf you want your books to be read, you have to constantly be producing work,\u201d he says), banker-author Ravi Subramanian drifts from Twain\u2019s maxim by penning a tale that, despite its title, has only a tangential connection to banking. Instead, it is about two subjects that Subramanian cannot legitimately claim to know<\/em>: the murky US debate on gun rights and the murkier waters of the politics in American academia.
\nSubramanian readily acknowledges that he knew little about the issues. \u201cI knew about banking,\u201d he says during a phone interview, \u201cbut I had only interacted with Indian academics.\u201d He read up on the subjects in order to seem authentic, read Glenn Beck in order to understand the motivations behind the gun lobby, spoke to professors he knew in the US to understand the pressures of getting tenure. He even sent his manuscript to a number of academics to ensure there were no obvious logical errors.
\nBut there\u2019s the thing about \u2018write what you know\u2019. Author Nathan Englander calls it the \u201cmost misunderstood piece of advice there is\u201d. \u201cWhat it is, is empathic advice,\u201d he says in a video on the website Big Think. \u201cIt is advice about feeling.\u201d What Subramanian has done in Bankerupt<\/em> is lay out the primary contours of the gun debate and weave them into a thriller. Logically, Subramanian assures me, there is nothing wrong with Bankerupt<\/em>. But emotionally, he is consistently off-key.
\nSo we have the Bollywoodesque opening image of a weeping Bill Clinton confronting a portrait of Thomas Jefferson after the Columbine massacre. “‘You,’ he said. ‘You are the one responsible for this, Mr President. You. Thomas Jefferson. I blame you.'” (Jefferson\u2019s crime, the book explains, was insisting on an inviolable Bill of Rights, which gave the US both freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.) It\u2019s a clumsy, cartoonish moment included both for \u201centertainment\u201d as well as exposition.
\nThankfully, the melodrama is restricted to that one scene, and the book immediately moves on to the murder mystery at its heart. A conscious decision, Subramanian says, keeping his audience in mind. \u201cNormally, people are willing to give you a few chapters before deciding whether they will continue with the book.\u201d Continuing to talk about what is essentially an alien issue for his primarily Indian readership would have put off readers. The debate shows up later in the book, where the characters tell each other, and the reader, what the various issues are (thus ignoring the second most frequent piece of literary advice: show, don\u2019t tell). These conversations, however, are the opposite of that opening outburst, sterile pieces of exposition that never acknowledge the deep emotions that fuel both sides of the debate.
\n
\"Bankerupt
Bankerupt<\/strong>
Ravi Subramanian
Penguin,\u00a0320 pp; Rs 299<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nBut then again, Bankerupt<\/em> is not really about gun rights, or academia, or even banking. It is, like Subramanian\u2019s previous books, a morality tale against greed. It\u2019s a good thing, gratifying even, for a banker to be writing about right and wrong, but he has been criticised in the past for being too simplistic about it, for creating characters who represent either extreme, and having bad things happen to the bad guys in the end. Subramanian, who is noted for listening to his readers, has, after taking into account some of the negative feedback, toned down the moral absolutism somewhat. Also, when he talks about greed from the point of view of a professor bending the rules of academia for greater research grants, he is genuinely interesting.
\nBut Subramanian himself may justifiably be accused of bending the rules for greater sales. \u201cThe John Grisham of banking,\u201d the Wall Street Journal<\/em> calls him in a blurb on the cover. It\u2019s actually a title he came up with himself. In an interview with Khushita Vasant for the Journal\u2019s \u2018India Realtime\u2019 blog, the introduction mentions that his website says that it is a title he aspires to; at no point does Vasant actually call him that. The phrase is, however, mentioned in the headline \u2014 \u201cMeet the \u2018John Grisham of banking'” \u2014 which Subramanian and his publishers printed as a blurb for his previous book, Bankster<\/em>. In Bankerupt<\/em>, the word \u2018meet\u2019 is conveniently dropped, as are the quote marks, making it sound like a ringing endorsement from a reputed international newspaper.
\nWhatever be the propriety of publishing such a claim, it is a title that has come to be associated with Subramanian. For a writer of commercial fiction, those are big shoes to fill. Bankerupt<\/em> is easily Subramanian\u2019s best effort till date, but if he is to come anywhere close to Grisham\u2019s skills at providing insight, information, drama and, above all, authenticity, he has a long, long way to go.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In writing about gun rights and academic malpractice, Ravi Subramanian strays from his usual subject to decidedly mixed results<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":199122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8464,8040,8465,7056,8397,8466,7675,8467],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199116"}],"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=199116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}