Cleavage and Bums

Visiting New York after a long while (though technically a long-term resident) from skin-poor India, I suddenly find myself staring into cleavages all the time, in every direction, amazed, sometimes aroused, confused, startled, disoriented . . . Because when a cleavage is really deep, it looks a lot like a bum, and almost indistinguishable from one. And I am not used to seeing bums on people's chests. I mean, I am used to seeing breasts, naked breasts, whole, demi-spherical breasts (glorious things, among God's Top 20 Creations of All Time) . . . not merely the dividing lines. Lost in that line, and in the naked skin on either side of it, I sometimes forget where I am, which end is up, and why this anatomical feature has suddenly risen to the top? Why this reminder of division, of alienation, why this teasing? To me, cleavage without nipples, without the roundness of the breasts, lack wholeness; what happened to the wholistic brigade? Why aren't they protesting this? And the anti-colonialist, anti-Divide and Conquer block?

My friend RN, a rather idealistic and somewhat pious soul, believes this is a capitalist conspiracy, well, perhaps, a male capitalist (redundant?) conspiracy (indeed, according to him and many others, all the world is a male conspiracy, God being a rather reactionary male who hasn't shaved in ages!), and that poor exploited women go to the stores and cannot find any but the cleavage showing tops, and are forced to thus expose themselves to their utter mortification and shame. I wonder if the answer is somewhat more complicated than that. I plan to check this with my (female) sources at the fashion magazines and at Fashion TV.

I suggest an alternative possibility. It is this: The women have us. We, the lost souls, are the exploited. Or should I say, the XXX-ploited? Because after our eyes have unconsciously drifted there, and have stopped there, we awake from our dream, and must sheepishly look away. For, in looking, we have sinned, are guilty, and must await our impending crucifixion.

Richard Crasta books in New York City

At last, my latest books are entering New York City and its suburbs. St. Mark's Bookstore on Third Avenue at 9th Street carries a few copies, and at readings at 5C, in Stamford, Ct., in Queens, and in New Jersey, over fifty copies have penetrated into the American literary landscape, like sleeper agents from a new and somewhat outlaw country. One of them is the "anti-terrorist" book What We All Need, which is in high demand and short supply. Will update this blog in the next few days.

The Stamford reading, at Ralph Nazareth's house, with members of Curly's Diner Poets Group in substantial attendance, was a hit.

Please salute the courage and graciousness of these brave, open-minded, and independent souls--people like Ralph Nazareth and the poets at Curly's Diner--and authors with unconventional thinking and stubborn independence by visiting these stores and buying the books. thank you. Books also available from http://www.richardcrasta.com. Most other online listers of the book obtained their copies illegally, and will not pay the author one cent.

Richard Crasta Reading in New York City

Invitation to my friends, readers, book lovers, and lovers (only the first 100 lovers will be allowed in)

5C Presents

Two Non-Establishment Indian Writers

Richard Crasta & Ralph Nazareth

Reading from their work on

June 4th at 7:30 pm

at

5C

(at the corner of 5th St. and Avenue C in Manhattan’s East Village)

Richard Crasta, born in India, is the author of six controversial and sometimes laugh-out-loud books including the new literary/publishing memoir The Killing of an Author.

Kurt Vonnegut described Crasta’s first novel The Revised Kama Sutra as “very funny”; the novel followed an incredible roller coaster ride involving Nobel Prize winners, the most powerful editor in the Universe (with whom he did lunch), John Updike, John Irving, and dozens of other characters (some connected with Jackie Kennedy, who also appears in the book) including Great Scott (Norman Mailer’s Agent) and the Indian Inventor of the $60 book advance. This story of a once barefooted Indian boy doggedly chasing—or perhaps, hunting down—his improbable American Dream is told in The Killing of an Author, Richard Crasta’s potentially explosive and thought-provoking new book, which has been described as “courageous” and “important.”

The issues Crasta raises in this uncompromising and rare book, distilling 20 years of publishing and writing experience, are universal and concern all of us: what society does to our writers, how we collaborate in the silencing of our own selves, the manipulation of literature and cultures, literary apartheid, justice, doctor-induced drug addiction).

Richard Crasta’s books include The Revised Kama Sutra, a novel, published in ten countries and in seven languages, Impressing the Whites (a ferocious satire), What We All Need (Preface by Robert Roth), and Fathers, Rebels and Dreamers (jointly with Ralph Nazareth). Indian Express called him “the baddest boy of Indian writing.” (The Indian Express). Books presently available only at http://www.richardcrasta.com will be available at the reading.

Ralph Nazareth, poet, publisher and humanist extraordinaire (and in my opinion a greatly under-recognized writer) was born and educated in India. He crossed over to the West when young Americans were flying east on their tragic mission in Vietnam. His poetry, a wide-ranging body of work that includes the book Ferrying Secrets, explores his movement between worlds.

He is a professor of English at Nassau Community College, New York, where he leads PeaceWork, a group committed to peace and justice. He also a volunteer teacher of writing at a maximum security prison. As Managing Editor of Yuganta Press in Stamford, CT, he has overseen the publication of over twenty books by writers from all over the world

Please tell your friends!

5C is a cafe and a community cultural center.

How to Defeat Oppression

Naming Books in the Tropic of Rama

“We love the title,” says my would-be Indian publisher. “It’s a perfect title, so don’t sell out!” warns an American friend.

But is it possible that the perfect title for the Western market, and a title that overturns nearly every Indian cliché, is less than the perfect title for India, where even in the year 2009, women can be dragged out of pubs and beaten up by goons claiming to act on behalf of a major Indian god, Rama? Where a pervasive sexual prudery and fear of social censure persists and inhibits behavior in all but tiny metropolitan pockets? Because India, despite its rapidly declining percentage of premarital virgins, and even though it has come a long way in the fifteen years since my anti-novel was published under its ironic and subversive title, The Revised Kama Sutra, is still a country where a more recent subversive book of mine, What We All Need, can be refused distribution because its jacket displays a woman clad in panties; one bookseller removed it from his display because his wife objected to it. Yes, this is a country where doctors camouflage their copy of The Revised Kama Sutra in a brown paper wrapper (as I reported in an essay titled The Plain Brown Wrapper); others, when gifted the novel, plead, “Please, do you have a newspaper I can wrap it in?”

Can you or I change this state of affairs overnight? And even if we could do it in a year’s time, would we drop all our other priorities and make this our major cause? If we won’t, why be so bound by the original title as to trump the possibility of thousands of readers from having access to a book that might liberate them (at least temporarily, while reading it), if not just make them laugh, understand, and reflect? Didn’t D.H. Lawrence change his title thrice before arriving at Lady Chatterley’s Lover?

Which is why when an Indian publisher decided to republish The Revised Kama Sutra, which has been more or less off the Indian market since 1997, when I took back its rights, a friend suggested I seize this opportunity to publish the book under a less misleading title, a title less burdened with the sniggering or shady connotations that The Kama Sutra (and the condom that uses its name) unfortunately still harbors for most Indians.

Then I remember the brouhaha caused by the title during its initial launch in 1994, and examined in my essay “The Plain Brown Wrapper” in India Today Plus (reproduced below). Indeed, the title has proved far more problematic than the novel itself. Most intelligent and un-stuck-up readers tend to love at least some aspect of the novel if not all of it; but many of these have quarreled with the title, with questions like “Why did you have to call the book that?”

“A title is only a title,” I sometimes reply. “It is only four words long, whereas the book is over 100,000 words—and only the text of the book is the real book. So how does it matter?”

But apparently, to some, the title does matter, for suggesting a sex manual rather than a comic literary novel of childhood and growing up, of a Catholic boy growing up in repressive Mangalore, dreaming of America, passing into manhood, literary ambition, and visiting the locus of his American dream.

Some arguments for changing the title:

First: We Indians being who we are still don't want to be seen in public, or even by friends and relatives, carrying or purchasing a book titled The Revised Kama Sutra—which might stereotype us as dirty-minded, and provoke strange looks, comments, or questions from ignorant friends/acquaintances/strangers. This greatly restricts the book's readership. As a doctor once said to me, “What will they think?” They are our neighbors, relatives, strangers, colleagues, bookstore salesmen, and even servants—what they think is a major influence and restriction on our behavior in India. And it’s not going to go away anytime soon.

Even Westerners often ask me the straight question, sometimes with a coarse chuckle: "So how exactly did you revise the Kama Sutra?"

Besides, as sex no longer shocks, and is abundant on the Net and elsewhere, my novel’s chief value lies not in its sexual frankness and liberation (though I don’t apologize for it—the sexual comedy symbolizes the human condition), but in its story of childhood, its humanity, its humor, its frankness, its characters, its being a book that, to quote different reviews, is “Dickensian”, “encapsulates an entire generation of Indian men,” and “could be the story of your life.” Many readers potentially attracted by these aspects (indeed some love it primarily for its description of Indian childhood and the tastes of Mangalore, while being less turned on by its sometimes sexually frank later chapters) —are likely to dismiss the book after a quick glance at the title, before having had a chance to examine its contents.

After all, if the title misleads even bookstore veterans, who have often misfiled it in the "Health" section, can one blame the average busy bookstore browser?

Others may indeed be turned off. In barely fifty years, the world has changed from a place with too little public access to too little sexual information to unlimited access to too much—a mountain of information on sexual techniques, as well as illustrations in various erotic movies, magazines, and web sites, including mainstream women’s magazines. Not even a lifetime would be sufficient to soak all of it up. I have still to put into practice one-fifth of what I learned from my first sex manual, and have perhaps read four others besides; why would I need more? The moment my eyes spot yet another sex how-to book, they are likely to jump to the next book.

Also, even when my novel was a relatively hot seller, I sensed that some Indian booksellers resented the title, mistakenly fearing that it might compete with or distract customers from buying their expensive and more profitable illustrated Kama Sutras.

How about the arguments for not changing the title?

One would be: Why waste the goodwill the book has already earned by changing the title at this stage? In answer, the blurbs, the fine print, and the press releases could mention the original title as well as summarize the book’s rapturous reviews. Besides which, the book has sold around 5500 copies in India, mostly from 1994-97 (after which it went out of the general market) and been read by perhaps 20,000 Indians—still a tiny figure by today’s standards (even at the time, the huge and mostly enthusiastic media coverage of the book was not reflected by the sales, partly suggesting the inhibiting effect of the title.), a fraction of its potential market, while Khushwant Singh, in two separate essays in 2006 and in early 2009, called the book one of the few unforgettable books to have come out of India in the past fifteen years and a landmark.

If indeed thousands of potential readers have been deprived of the book, first because of its title, then because of its absence from the market, a change of title is a small price to pay. The original title can be mentioned in small print, and on the back cover. Indeed, the change can itself be a hook to get the media to talk about the book once again.

Also, rather than being a compromise or surrender to fundamentalists, the moral police, or morally oppressive social tyranny, the change constitutes a tactical maneuver on the road to victory; for the book’s text is unapologetically free, and not a word has been censored. If the public wishes to join me in resisting such forces, it could do by improvising on a suggestion made in a television interview: if ten thousand Indian women in thirty major Indian cities walked around town, bravely carrying copies of What We All Need and The Revised Kama Sutra or other books of that kind, openly displaying the book jackets or being seen to read the books, and if they were to do it for a week—if necessary, with bodyguards and police protection—the shame and oppression that now inhibits us would be vastly diminished.

But as that is unlikely to happen, my resistance continues in the text, and the title change constitutes a reluctant acknowledgement of the reality of Indian society, in which you can be beaten up for going to a pub! A change to a more innocuous title (after all, one of the most sexually revolutionary books in the world was tamely tiled The Tropic of Cancer) would be the smart way to defeat the censors, thought controllers, and social tyrants.

The third counterargument—that the title The Revised Kama Sutra itself helped sell my novel to the extent that it did—is preposterous. We Indians will rarely spend our money on a book unless it has been strongly recommended by someone we trust, or have examined the contents ourselves; I myself agonize so much before buying a book, sometimes reading a few pages in the store itself to make sure it will hold my interest. Those who might be misled by the title into buying this book are but a tiny fraction of those who were deterred from doing so by its suggestive title.

So, except for a tiny sliver of metropolitan Indians, the rest of us, even those who are highly educated and liberal internally, think more like my Bangalore friend, a middle class professional and mother, who said: “I tried to gift your book to a woman friend, but she didn’t want to carry it in her hand so I bound it with newspaper and assured her it has nothing to do with the Kama Sutra! Indian readers have this problem and genuinely
think it is about the Kama Sutra and they are afraid to touch it even! It is better you change the name of the book otherwise many readers will miss the book."
So, by titling a book “The Revised Kama Sutra”, are we not robbing the pleasure of those people who are internally liberated, but live in a conservative society, afraid of "what will others think"—these others being their husbands, their work colleagues, the bus conductor, strangers? Doesn’t their right to read the book equal the rights of the ultra-liberated who had access to high education and an upper-class upbringing? Rather than attempting to hoodwink, the toned-down title attempts compassion for and empowers genuine Indian readers living in an oppressive social environment, a shame society, and to save them from the crude comments and disapproval of those who neither read nor buy books, but judge, and act as censors and controllers of behavior, as tyrants.

Besides, why be so shackled by the original title? Every one of over forty laudatory reviews praised the book for its content, its writing, its courage, and its humor—not for its title. Why not trust the book to stand on the merits of its writing? A title is merely five words or so, merely a convenient label; the title could be Richard Crasta's First Novel, and that would be correct too. The book is 90-100,000 words, and only that, the text, can be the real book. And in that text, not a single cu*t or p*ssy has been deleted. Those asterisks, by the way, do not constitute self-censorship, but simply acknowledge the way the world works. You still understand what I mean.

Now that I have spent nearly half my life beating my head against the wall of Indian (and sometimes Western) hypocrisy, and realize that it is only in the 0.1% segment of Indian society, widely traveled, highly educated, sexually liberal and apt to have Western friends, that this hypocrisy is minimal. It was a designer from this elite segment, a Bombayite, who came up with the design for What We All Need—and thanks to his panty-clad brainwave, my potential bestseller, a book that has sold over 100 copies at one bookstore alone, has been squashed, and confined to the warehouse. At every other level of our society, we fear "what will other people think?" Indeed, we even fear our drivers, our cooks, and strangers on the road who might misunderstand and think us to be depraved. If five to ten thousand more Indians have the pleasure of reading my novel because the title is innocuous, like The Tropic of Cancer or The Story of O, why deny it to them?

Summing up: my novel’s text is anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic, unconventional, radical, revolutionary, ultra-liberal, sexually and politically daring, anti-fascist, and original. The best answer to obscurantists and reactionaries such as the Sri Rama Sena, the RSS, those who periodically disrupt Valentine’s Day, or other Indian ayatollahs would be to have millions of Indians read the real book, even if you had to smuggle it into people’s homes under a title such as “The Spiritual Existence” or “Getting Closer to God.” (And also to publish What We All Need—an also-radical book—with a cover design that makes it look like an economics text book.) This would be as honorable a deception as smuggling grenades to Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France: smuggling them inside boxes of apples, say, instead of labeling them “Grenades for the French Resistance.”

(comments welcomed at http://crasta.typepad.com/nge/2009/02/how-to-defeat-oppression.html )

The Plain Brown Wrapper

THE PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER

or VICTORIA LIVES!
[First Published in India Today Plus, 1996]

I know now that Sushmita Sen, the 1994 Miss India (who later became Miss Universe and a film actress) was as out of touch with the real India as I was when she asserted on an Indian television chat show that neither she nor her girl friends would have any inhibitions about marching into an Indian bookstore and loudly asking for a copy of The Revised Kama Sutra.

It simply ain’t so, for as I discovered, the tongue-in-cheek title of my literary, political, and comic novel title made grown Indian men nervous and shy, forcing them to resort to extreme subterfuges.

A few months after the television show, there occurred, in the heart of the real India, the event now known as the Plain Brown Wrapper incident—in which the Principal of one of India’s top medical colleges handed a package in a plain brown wrapper to his colleague, doctor-author-polymath Kumar Arunachalam. The wrapper’s contents? A copy of my contraband novel.

I was surprised to hear about this at first. My American friends had seen no problem with The Revised Kama Sutra as a title, an American agent reporting that it excited laughter in the corridors of editorial power even before the manuscript left her office.

But as I had forgotten (living in America for the last fifteen years), America ain’t India—as even McDonald’s discovered only the other day, forced by circumstances to make a historic compromise whereby it would be doubly embarrassed by the hypothetical question “Where’s the beef?” (its Indian burgers use only mutton, and too bad if you don’t like it, cowboy!) So I was wrong to believe that even though two famous, daring-for-their-times novels—Lolita and Ulysses—had titles as unrevealing of their then-scandalous content as brown paper wrappers, the “literary quality” and serious message of my book would outweigh the sauciness of its title, or that the title wouldn’t stop many potential Indian readers, in this liberated, “post-Shobha De” Age (the term used by a reviewer) from asking for, possessing, or even reading it.

Now I know that despite India’s progress in having a streaking film actress, raunchy songs that demand Choli ke Peeche kya hai [“What’s behind the blouse?”] and a few liberated reviewers who unabashedly exulted in my novel’s sexual (and non-sexual) comedy, we have far from kicked off our Victorian knickers. And that my title was probably an obstacle in reaching my readers.

The evidence?

First, a man on a train asked me if the book was related to the famous Indian company that makes Kama Sutra condoms (multi-colored, multi-textured). Then I received leering, smirking captions and news coverage and journalistic reprimands for my title, even though quite a few of the reviews themselves lauded the book’s irony, comedy, and serious message (the conservative and respected Hindu calling it “an indictment of colonialism” and “hilarious . . . with some serious undercurrents”).

After Dr. Arunachalam opened the famous brown wrapper and took a liking to the novel concealed within, one of his medical colleagues, who regards the vegetarian doctor as a Gandhian soul, saw the Penguin paperback edition lying face up on the latter’s desk. He exclaimed, with shocked dismay, “Nivu sa shuru madidira idalla?”—meaning, “You too have gotten into all this?!” in Kannada.

“Flip it over and see,” urged a possibly nervous Dr. Arunachalam, hoping that the long list of rapturous blurbs from assorted reviewers and “respectable” magazines on the back cover would rescue his endangered reputation by dispelling any suspicion that mine was “that kind of book”—i.e., a book that no Indian intellectual, the liberated doctor included, would be caught dead reading in public. His reaction, he admits, was partly an effort to convince his friend that “I am not what you think I am.”

“Does the title not militate against the very idea of the book?” Dr. Arunachalam remonstrated with me later. “It doesn’t do justice to the book! Because I would say this is actually a sociological text.” He meant that the title had unjustly given an overwhelmingly sexual reputation to the book, which is also an attempt at a complete and frank story of a lower middle class Indian boy, his society, and his repression. He continued: “The middle class that is this book’s primary audience—they are the very people who won’t buy this book because of its title.” So I had been mistaken in my hope that while the Revised gave the idea of revision of a canonical text, the balancing subtitle, “A Novel of Colonialism and Desire”, would signal to readers a novel with a political subtext: the colonization of our minds and our love lives.

“As a woman, if I went into a book shop and asked for your book, it would seem like I was asking for it,” added Dr. Arunachalam’s wife Sujata playfully.

Another friend, Eric Ozario, a Konkani musician and anti-establishment political activist, found himself in a bookstore, unable to articulate the taboo words, Kama Sutra. He finally sputtered, “Give me Richard Crasta’s book.” It’s a good thing I had only one book out at the time.

It is true my book, and especially the title, is partly a subversive attack on our sexual hypocrisy, on our being ashamed and furtive about our bodies and our sexual urges while being utterly shameless about littering, black marketing, and large-scale corruption. And without doubt hypocrisy still rules the land, as Tarun Tejpal pointed out in a splendid India Today essay on the subject. When I told Ozario of a woman friend’s remark that she had read the novel only “partly”, he laughed and said, “You can bet she read the entire novel, and then went back and read the sexual parts thrice. But the hypocrisy of our society doesn’t allow us to admit it.”

Eric Ozario’s own problem with uttering the book’s title wasn’t hypocrisy, but rather a product of our ferociously repressive upbringing, which makes us feel shy and guilty about admitting even a sneaking interest in sex. A pulse monitor would detect, even today, a rise in my pulse rate whenever I say the word “sex”; I would buy many more Penthouses and other raunchy magazines than I do if it weren’t for my own embarrassment at the checkout counter, especially if the store clerk happens to be Indian-looking (as indeed, does happen at some Eighth Avenue porn shops—whether the clerks were Indians or Pakistanis I never got around to finding out). And, having spent over a year trying to convince interviewers that The Revised Kama Sutra was not “that kind of book”, I almost forgot that I actually enjoy sex.

There is a more complex obstacle, I discovered. The so-called middle class is made up of two subclasses: the Sensitive Class that reads book reviews and understands the driving conceit of my book well enough to be likely to read it—were they not ashamed and terrified of the disapproval of the Sniggering Class, the much larger and more intractable subclass who will take at least two more centuries to understand that sex is indivisible from life.

“I may not want to make the 25-year-old female clerk in the book shop who is writing the bill write the words Kama Sutra,” said Dr. Arunachalam, presenting one more hurdle. “And I don’t want her to look up at me as she is writing them.” Sadly, this is indeed the case in a land where barely a handful regard the ancient erotic manual with patriotic pride, while most, particularly intellectuals, abhor it as if it were a four-letter word. In England, I met a young Muslim businessman of Indian origin, an earthy fellow who said he didn’t dare even hide a book with this kind of title in the trunk of his car, because if his father ever chanced upon it, he would be thrown out of the house!

I don’t mean to suggest that socially mandated repression is an Indian specialty; Britain has its own sophisticated variation, and in British bookstores I would sometimes notice the eyes of a man or woman nervously skipping my title while carefully browsing through the books on either side. But it was in India that the title drew the most attention, with one Indian interviewer, a sort of Bhendi Bazaar incarnation of Woodward and Bernstein, endlessly repeating the question, “But why did you really title the novel The Revised Kama Sutra?”

Why did I? I have responded to the challenge with defences improvised for the moment and the mood: the uncompromising frankness that informs my book as well as the original classic, its use as an ironic title that is more of a labeling convenience than the soul of a work, even that it is an anti-title protesting the requirement of labeling, in a few words, a 100,000-word novel embracing a multiplicity of themes. The truth, though, is that it was the title favored by National Book Award-winning American author Tim O’Brien from my brainstorming list that ranged from the outrageously tongue-in-cheek Pelvic Paradise Lost and Desire under the Coconut Trees to the ponderously solemn The Human Condition. It is a horrendous commentary on publishing today that an award-winning author has to pick a title based on how it will attract an editor, but that’s what really happened. And I, the awed tyro, deferred to his judgment.

But what the Bhendi Bazaar scribe really wanted me to admit was that I had chosen my title primarily to increase my sales—as if other authors toiled to decrease theirs! I simply answered that on the contrary, many of my literary friends told me they wouldn’t normally bother to browse through a book with a title like mine—while true connoisseurs of erotica would decide, within ten seconds, that my tragicomic literary exploration of sexual frustration, deflation, and comedy was not the ideal object of their desire.

One year later, I was convinced that despite all the millions of words written by jeans-wearing, disco-dancing urban Indian journalists on our new “post-Deist liberation” (meaning post-Shobha De, Shobha De being a writer who had earned herself the label of India’s soft porn queen) and MTV, the fear of being caught doing in public what one desperately wants to do in private, the fear of being demolished by the Disapprovers, and shame, pure and simple—these still rule the land. The last word about the title came from Sujata Arunachalam. “We’re not ready for it,” she said.

I’m not sure if Britain fully was, either, because the only two major British reviews both led off with the clarification that this was not the real Kama Sutra. The Independent’s review, comically captioned “Decolonization and the Swan Maneuver,” erroneously moaned the absence of the Swan maneuver. So, what I had regarded a mere tease of a title—a mere three words out of over a hundred thousand—had disproportionately influenced the content and the emphasis of these reviews. Besides, would many “proper” Britons (including those of Indian origin), whose main fear is being laughed at by other snobbish Britons, ask for a book such as this within someone’s hearing unless it had already been Approved for Intellectual Consumption by the British culture industry? After all, Victoria was our joint Empress!

I know now that I’m not going to change the world anytime soon. And as I would rather reach my readers than be bullheaded about a partly whimsical title, I decided to announce, in my capacity as its creator, the death of The Revised Kama Sutra (I mean, of course, the title; the novel itself, I must admit, may have a life of its own), so that I could resurrect it, in India at least, under a title that would permit those people who are constrained by their environment to keep it by their bedside next to their copies of the more respectable holy texts.

Richard Crasta's Best Blogs and Links

RICHARD CRASTA’S BEST BLOGS AND LINKS
(By “best” I may mean passionate, pertinent, quirky, or which I would like my readers to read at this point of time. This is a preliminary list.)

LINKS:

http://richardcrasta.com/

http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20090126&fname=Cover+Story&sid=4

http://richardcrasta.com/richard_crasta_bio.htm

http://richardcrasta.com/buybooks.htm

Hindu Interview: http://www.hindu.com/mp/2005/10/18/stories/2005101800630100.htm

BLOGS

Little Ayatollahs, or Principles of Free Expression

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/03/four-principles-of-free-expression.html

NDTV Number One

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/12/ndtv-number-one.html

Taslima Nasreen and Me

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/03/taslima-nasreeen-and-me.html

Cover Her Panties?

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2006/03/cover-her-panties.html

The Booker as Control: The Tehelka Interview

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/10/booker-as-control-tehelka-interview.html

My Secret Suppressed Bestseller

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-secret-suppressed-bestseller.html

The Hindu Interview of The Killing of an Author

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/05/hindu-interview-of-killing-of-author.html

Mrs.50 percent? No, baby No!

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/05/mrs-50-percent-no-baby-no.html

Rape, Incest, and Widow Suppression in Bangkok

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2007/01/rape-incest-and-widow-suppression-in.html

Intellectual Skinheads of Britain (excerpt from The Killing of an Author)

http://www.pen.org/ViewBlogPost.php?prmBlogID=570&prmProfileID=21940

The Killing of an Author: Chapter 1

http://www.pen.org/ViewBlogPost.php?prmBlogID=569&prmProfileID=21940

Tales of Shame from Benzoland (excerpt from The Killing of an Author)

http://crasta.typepad.com/nge/2008/12/tales-of-shame-from-benzoland.html

The Crasta Bailout Plan

http://crasta.typepad.com/nge/2008/12/a-chemical-bailout-for-me-obama.html

The White Tiger, Barack Obama, and The Revised Kama Sutra

http://richardcrasta.blogspot.com/2008/10/white-tiger-barack-obama-and-revised.html

NDTV Number One

In these sombre times, some good news: The Killing of an Author has been ranked the Number One book to read now by NDTV, one of the premier Indian broadcasting networks(an excerpt of the book is available at http://crasta.typepad.com ) Number One on a list of books it featured recently. My friends saw it on a few different occasions, and I have seen it once. I am delightfully surprised, and grateful. For I would have been happy with a third place, or a fifth place, or even a mere mention without a ranking. But to be placed first—and with not a single journalist having been treated to cocktails and not a single favor to be realistically expected in return for this mention, unlike the case of most of other books, where to review them positively ingratiates you with powerful publishers and well-connected writers . . . And to have this happen months after I had given up trying to contact or persuade anyone, five or six months after I had sent out books for review: it was simply awesome, touching . . . and it reminded me that there are at least a few persons of integrity and courage in this country, and in this profession called The Media. To you, NDTV, I award my highest ranking: for fairness, integrity, and courage.

Now, to speak of what this means. If one media organization put this book on top of their list, it’s not necessary that other newspapers and magazines—of perhaps forty or fifty newspapers and magazines that had received the book for review—feel the same. And yet, there is an unstated consensus in literary reviewing: certain books, for example a joke book, or a self-help book, or another copycat, self-indulgent, “literary” novel need not be reviewed, regardless of their sales or pedigree; but a serious book by an author with a track record, and a book that makes fundamental and disturbing statements about the culture, the media, the literary profession, the country, and about our integrity—whether you agree or disagree (and feel free to rip it to shreds, if that’s what you really think), it most likely is not a book to be ignored. Because the very existence of the book is like a banner headline, or a voice from the sky shouting CORRUPTION, DISHONESTY IN PUBLISHING AND LITERATURE. It has to be addressed; not to address it is an admission of guilt, or a failure of nerve, character, or principle.

We accuse politicians of cronyism and corruption. But in many cases, we, in the other professions, including media and writing, are Them; and they are reflections of who we are. And the distributors too, who flatly refused to take on my books, and refused to assign reasons.

From my own rather modestly attended book launch in March 2008 at India International Centre, I was taken along by a well-connected friend to visit a fairyland book launch of a book by a poet whose father is a powerful editor. What a difference I noticed. The upper-class crowd at this launch was love-bombed with poetry, music, and loads and loads of delicious kebabs, wine, beer, and cocktails—for three hours, the food and drink never stopped. It was so lavish, the cost of the party could easily have been thrice the cost of printing the book—and perhaps thirty people bought the book, which was selling at a price that was a fraction of what each guest could have imbibed in food and drinks that day (and forget about the entertainment value, and the cost of renting the fairyland venue).


So that was where all the journalists and literati and publishing fraternity had gone. That and to one more function at which the Vice President of India would be attending. Yes, if the Vice President was there, there would be classy cocktails and food, along with power honchos doing their ritual puffing of chests, and there were contacts to be made.

Sure, do your honors to the Vice President, and to Bacchus, the God of Wine, and also to the Belly God. (You won’t find me easily refusing a good meal either.) But why of perhaps ten thousand journalists in world capital that is New Delhi could only one or two turn up for my book launch, resulting in just one report two weeks later?

For nearly six months after that, a rather cynical smooth operator had me dangling on a hook, promising me a fully sponsored and glitzy launch with all expenses paid. He said that that was what it took to rope in journalists and good publicity: plenty of good food and drinks. And in the end, I realized the game: he was trying to sell his wine, and trying to get the sponsors to pay for the wine he was selling, as well as the food and drinks, as well as making commissions on the sponsorship. He was using me to make money—and when the sponsors refused, he dropped me.

Still, to look on the positive side: It's precisely because I am not powerful at the moment that this endorsement is ten times as valuable (because it suggests integrity and professionalism of a high order) as any that came for The Revised Kama Sutra some years back, and I at least had the implied (if not loudly expressed) endorsement of a well-known publishing house.

Let us therefore praise integrity and honest journalists. Because, not just our brave commandos who rescue hostages, but anyone who performs an act of integrity and courage, who bravely does their job, needs to be presented with a rose by his/her fellow citizens.

Here, NDTV, is yours (it's a virtual rose, so you can't see it--but it is meant with all my heart).

A Post-Religious, Post-racial, Post-National Society

The tragedy of the attacks on Mumbai have clarified this for me with even greater force: to have peace on earth, we need not just a post-racial society (the kind of society Americans think they have, and may partly claim to have achieved, with Obama’s election), but a post-religious and post-national society.

The ugliness of the idea that the Mumbai terrorists (as some reports had it) would focus their murderous energies on people of particular nationalities, while sparing those who happened to be Muslim, or who belonged to other nationalities— it could simply have not been possible in a world that was post-national (and therefore, nobody needed passports), or post-religious. It was as ugly and nefarious as the idea, floated by a group of countries meeting somewhere in the Middle East, demanding that the Somali pirates return Saudi oil tanker, not because piracy and holding people hostage and threatening to murder them was wrong, but because the tanker’s owners happened to be Muslims!

Much as I sometimes recognize the beauty of a certain religious leader or philosophy (elements in Christianity, Hindu philosophy, and Zen Buddhism, for example), in practice, religion results in division, otherness, murder, and genocide.

I once again proclaim myself as a citizen of the world, and of no individual country; my Indian heritage, and my American residence, are simply part of my journey through the planet that is my home; I carry a passport not because I wish to, but because I am forced to, by authorities I am powerless to resist. If nations no longer mattered, if borders no longer existed, would it really matter whether Kashmir was in anyone’s hands but the hands of its own people? We should have a lot more interesting and rewarding things to do with our time and resources than to maintain borders while paying the true price: endless fear and endless war.

If those who us who wished to practice religion did so, in private and in small groups, without identifying ourselves publicly as belonging to this or that religion, that would be a first step towards a post-religious society.

Without passports, and without identifying religious marks, there is of course the possibility that haters target others based on their appearance: their race, where it is obvious (and people do indeed make a whole lot of mistakes). This is where we need work, the work of education and propaganda, having first identified, in each country, the deep causes and origins of each kind of racial prejudice. Meanwhile, another way to encourage a postracial society would be to encourage love and marriage between different races, even with government or philanthropic grants where possible, and of course with full state protection.

If this seems somewhat artificial, an attempt to engineer reality, at least it's preferable to the reality that I saw on television.

Advice to Obama from a Tanned-American

Dear President Obama,

When Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a left-handed compliment praised your tan, I as a fellow tanned-American instantly understood where this was coming from. As an international traveler, I have personally experienced this hundreds of times: how Europeans will pass by me, sometimes on a narrow pavement, or in a lost Third World hotel in which we happen to be the only two foreigners, as if I didn’t exist, as if I were completely invisible. Sometimes they pass by me within two or three inches, barely avoiding a collision, but absolutely devoid of any emotion, smile, or flicker of recognition (of a fellow human being) in their eyes. (Once in a while I appreciate it, of course, because the seat next to me in a bus or train does not get taken until there are no more seats left; but the truth is I am most often more afraid of them than they are of me.)

So your election is a historic opportunity not just to attend to America’s selfish needs or to correct some bad economic policies, but to fight racism worldwide: because racism is an international problem no less serious than failing banks or the environment.

Remember that the decisive vote in your election was cast by colored people. Many whites voted as they would have anyway, the Democrats for the Democrats, and the Republicans for the Republicans, with the not as racist young and highly educated whites sometimes crossing over to vote for you, while many hardcore racists crossed party lines to vote for McCain. But the crucial swing voters were the colored people who stood overwhelmingly by you, and who form an overwhelming majority of the world’s population. This and your own multi-racial background confer on you an unprecedented legitimacy and mandate to attack the universal problem of racism. And to bring on a postracial, postreligious, and post-national society, though I speak mainly of the racial component in this particular blog.

Consider: the solution to the world’s problems lie not with economic pundits, but in the hearts of men. You try to address the evil that lies in the hearts of men, and everything else will follow.
Because of our hardhearted indifference and even hostility towards others, especially to those who look different from us, there is no goodwill, no peace on earth.

Let it not be said that you had the chance of a century, and that you blew it because you wanted to be all things to all people, and especially to the white majority. For when do you think that blacks and colored people, who have not had a black President or unapologetic champion in over two hundred years of this nation’s history (Abraham Lincoln being a gigantic and transcendental exception, despite his color), will get the next chance of having one of their own in the White House? Possibly not in another fifty years!

But how can I do this? (You ask yourself.) True, you are officially the president-elect of the United States of America, and I am aware of some of your limitations (as I have acknowledged in my other blog, “A Proud Obamerican”).

And yet, while Clinton or FDR would also have been capable of coming up with good economic solutions to a crisis such as this (and did, especially in FDR’s case), you have a historic mandate surpassing either of them.

You have been elected president of the world. Or at least a vast portion of it. There is no other American presidential election that was as closely followed, and whose results were as universally celebrated as this one, and this goodwill, telegraphed to the American electorate for months before the actual election, helped in your election, because Americans were tired of being hated by the world, and knew in your hearts that by electing you, they would again gain the world’s admiration and love.

I hear the objections of the realists, the pragmatists: you’ve got to work with the System, you will compromise and achieve only a fraction of what you set out to do, because that’s politics. (Already, in some of your cabinet choices, they see evidence of your backtracking on your promise of radical change.) So what can you do?

Inspire the world: and say to the world, Yes you can!

Clearly declare that you plan to be the best one-term president that you can be, and one of the best there ever was, and that you will fearlessly do what you think is the best for the country and the world while paying zero attention to opinion polls or to the thought of winning the next election. That you have decided to be satisfied with a one-term presidency, and that only a huge popular movement to get you to run for reelection will change your mind, that you will make this decision only one month before the party’s convention in August 2012, and that until then, the word “election” will not escape your mouth except in a neutral, impersonal context.

Stop trying to pretend you are a cowboy (all that macho talk about smashing Al Quaeda is unnecessary). You look silly trying on that cowboy hat. Be proud of who you are, that you are different, and live up to the promise and hope you inspired in billions worldwide. Forget the next election—it’s much better to be an awesome, world-changing one-term president of the world than a corny, second-rate, two-term politician-president of America.

Other American presidents before you have tried to enforce human rights in other countries, while violating them at home, in their militaristic foreign policy, and at Guantanamo. Human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights: they are all important. But you have the moral standing to do something different: create an International Commission for Racial Justice and Against Race Prejudice. Let this commission send cabinet-level emissaries to every major country, trying to persuade them to combat racist prejudice, and rating countries according to their level of racial prejudice and racial justice. It may insult some nations, it may cause some disturbance and some anger towards the United States, but it will force some soul-searching. China, Thailand, and Japan, for example, are the some of the more racist countries in Asia (and India is probably one too); you know about Africa, where being the wrong race might be enough reason to be killed; in many other countries, the relative fairness or darkness of skin color is a subject of fine distinctions, with beauty being associated with the fairer skin color. It would be worth running advertisements in their newspapers and their television channels showing the faces of all the different colors of America with the banner headline: All of these are Americans.

Yes, you can! For much of racism is based in ignorance, and on stupid, ancient ideas and fear. And ignorance is what prompts this question that frequently confronts colored Americans: “But where do you really come from?” Or, “You can’t be an American; your skin is black.”

And remember, America is far from post-racist just because one half-black man was elected president. When you become President, there will be not a single black member of the Senate, whereas ideally there ought to have been at least eleven.

The battle is not won, it has only begun. It will not be won until not a single person on earth is judged on the basis of his color or racial background or religion or nationality, but only on his qualities and worth as a human being.

This is not a battle for colored people alone. Every human being will benefit from the acceptance of this principle: women, minorities, the handicapped, all people who believe in justice. And people will have hope. And they will have a stronger reason not to pollute, not to waste, not to destroy the environment. Because they would see that the earth belongs to every human being equally, not just to a few based on the color or shade of their skin.

Sir—no, that sounds a bit too deferential to this democrat and egalitarian, so can I call you Barry? Barry: you have already impressed the whites (though without following all the commandments of my book Impressing the Whites, which focuses mainly on writing and publishing—and where, as in parts of The Killing of an Author, this subject is addressed with greater complexity). You did what I and millions of others could not, you made it! Congratulations! Now that you have done it, don’t set out to do it again and again. Instead, set out to impress the browns and blacks forever, and to impress the stamp of your extraordinary personality on posterity as a president for all ages.

One last bit of advice, Barry. Be very careful, and let not your populist tendencies allow you to take unnecessary risks with your security, to spontaneously drive around in open motorcades or press flesh with strangers. (Which is another reason why I ask you not even to desire a second term as president.) It would take just one racist—and there are millions of them, and many of them are also worshippers of firearms—to shatter the dreams of billions of people world over, a shattering which would take decades to recover from.

A Proud Obamerican

Celebrate with me, my friends, lovers of justice worldwide. A universal hug to all who are as elated as I am at Obama’s election. For in the election of Barack Obama, America may have proved itself to me, and justified a bit of my former faith in it, some of which has not entirely been extinguished by eight years of Bush and other very bad policies.

I am not one who, like John McCain, will use patriotism as a stick to beat others on the head with, and who claimed that he was so patriotic his country never had to prove anything to him. Patriotism is the war-cry, the song of scoundrels, scoundrels who are busy helping themselves to the nation’s public funds and resources as fast as they can to enrich themselves. In the 21st century, patriotism is a stupid, stunted, puerile, mentally retarded emotion.

Yes, if you were a white male worth a few million dollars, with access to a few hundred million dollars more of your wife’s fortune, as John McCain was, America has never had to prove itself to you.

But black and colored people, minorities, and the oppressed and unfashionable races and countries of the world, have over the past few decades had many reasons to be cynical and suspicious of an America which has claimed its divine right to bomb them whenever its president, however crazy, ignorant, or crooked and devious, claimed it to be in the American national interest. And that’s only for starters.

In 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, I had written and tried (unsuccessfully, sabotaged at the last moment by a British-funded NGO publisher) to publish a collection of essays called Lord Bush of Iraq. Lord Bush, who escaped my book, I now anoint as Saint Bush of the World Pantheon, because with all of Barack Obama’s talents and innate virtues, he wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell had we not had eight years of a president as atrocious as Dubya. Had he been only half as bad (which would still be very, very bad from the world’s point of view), the Americans would have, ouch, once again put a Republican president in the White House, no matter how stark raving mad.

Yes, this Obamerican (I am truly a citizen of the world, feel that we all ought to rise above identifying with any country; but for this brief moment, I call myself an Obamerican), who for years had to suffer discrimination based on his appearance—white people turning away or looking away or being unfriendly, and in some cases, police cars stopping to take a closer look—can now walk proudly. And ask, in turn, of the white racists (a minority, unlike the millions of fine people in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln) who continue to behave in this stereotyping fashion (and who almost elected John McCain): How many black or brown men have killed presidents of the United States? None. How many black or brown men have burst into schools or shopping malls and shot dozens of innocent people? None, or nearly none. So why are you so afraid of me, and why shouldn’t I be afraid of you?

Having said all this, I am a bit disappointed with Obama that he made some political concessions: softening his stand against guns, sounding too militaristic and truculent in an attempt to show he was not too soft, and using the world patriotism in his victory speech. But that was the politician in him—and this election couldn’t have been won if he didn’t have some politician in him, that’s not the way America runs, and life is not fair—and the politician in him is only 20 percent of the whole, unlike McCain, in whose case the politician is 90 percent.

I acknowledge the graciousness and also the eloquence of Dubya Bush’s congratulatory speech—it’s probably the best speech he ever gave and delivered, even if it was certainly written by a speechwriter, who had plenty of time to compose the speech, as the victory looked pretty certain for at least a week before the election. No one is all black or all white—I say this fully aware of the irony of such a statement, because in the recent election, black was white and white was black. Still, Bush has every reason to be gracious: he stole the election twice, cheated his way into office, and escaped being impeached, and he would probably like the president not to reveal some of the secrets he finds . . . To me, he’s still a war criminal.

I dream of a post-racial society, I often cultivate friends from other races who send off positive vibes, and would like never to write on the subject of race ever again; but to those who wish not to hear of it, or not to discuss it, I think we allow the evil to continue, like those Americans and Britons who looked the other way as Jews were being sent to Nazi camps, though they welcomed the Jewish geniuses who helped make America’s first nuclear bombs. To those who say that we now live in a post-racial society, that racism has been defeated and is now history, I say: Stop! Not for most of us! It is disturbing to note—and a measure of the distance we yet have to travel—that the entire South except Florida, along with an entire block of Midwestern states voted for McCain, a candidate who was so much worse and more unbalanced and un-presidential, besides having a rather cuckoo running mate, who had a 35 percent actuarial chance of becoming America’s next president. It is redeeming to note that so many white people transcended the old rules and voted for a black man, but he was overwhelmingly the superior candidate (with qualities such as vision, integrity, fitness—physical, emotional, psychological, and intellectual—for the demanding task of the presidency, global understanding and intelligence). In the predominantly white nations of Europe, Obama was favored by more than 4 out of 5. So why did 46% of Americans voting, or at least the 30% of them who did not have a conservative religious background, vote against Obama?

Also, Obama may think he cannot directly address the racial cause, because he has been elected America’s president, the president of the entire country, and not just of colored people. In fact, he might go out of his way to demonstrate how non-racial and post-racial he is, and to be dismissive of the race issue. Because he thinks he has to prove, to those who may still harbor secret doubts, that they didn’t elect a black man, but just the best candidate. He would feel that he needs to have the nation united behind him, not divided on racial lines, because the task in front of him requires the cooperation of all.

So, precisely because of his good intentions and the nobility of his nature, he may even end up doing less for blacks and colored people suffering injustice than a white president with a strong conscience and empathy might have. Indeed, blacks may suffer a setback because the election of a black president may be a kind of message to the enforcers and to policy-makers that prejudice no longer exists, and that taking measures to prevent it are no more necessary. Others, racists and white supremacists for example, may take out their anger and outrage at a black man’s election on those who are too weak to hit back.

If I were in his place, I would of course consider it to be a historic opportunity not just to put in place programs for all people, but also to be an unabashed Savior of colored people, who haven’t had a champion in a long, long time. But then, I didn’t win the election.
And yet, I am going to exercise my democratic right and give him some advice: Yes you can!

And now for the literary side of racism, the subject of literary apartheid, which I believe is still strongly entrenched, with white people dominating the global publishing industry and ultimately determining who will be heard, who will be powerful and rich, and who will die.
My best and most coherent writings on this subject are in my book Impressing the Whites, which was published in 2000 and which is still 80 percent true, despite a few dents such as the relative success of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. And the theme is reinforced with a true story in my most recent book, The Killing of an Author—and yes, as most Germans looked the other way while Jews were being sent to the camps, most have looked the other way rather than read and discuss this book. And I say to the publishing Masters of the Universe: You have heard the people speak. You have heard the world speak. From this moment on, to repress uncensored, unbending, truthful colored voices is not only wrong, it is indecent. Obama’s election may be the start of the healing that Colored America needs. But you cannot forget the stories of those who have suffered before him—or for that matter, any real stories, no matter what they are. At least: record them, give them a hearing, before moving on.