[www.keralites.net] Books: Moulders and shapers of mind...

 

Yeah, j, me too found the original English classics too ponderous, too descriptive, and too slow moving; to sum up succinctly, too stodgy to my liking. The authors were not at fault, though; their storylines, plots, narrative and writing style perfectly reflected the prevalent moods and milieu, its era and the people.

So I chose to read their condensed versions that cut out unnecessary verbiage making for ease of reading. "Of Human Bondage" - the story of an ordinary boy and his trials tribulations and little dreams - and "Rebecca" - her negative or gray characterization and a woman's inherent vulnerability and her paranoia that her pal might steal her dahling beau - in particular pulled my heart's strings.

Harold Robbins was never rated highly by the highbrow literati and was dismissed as a soft-porn peddler; nevertheless he was one of the most widely read. I found his books exceptionably gripping and readable especially his trilogies on the dream-spinner, Hollywood and the Americans' first passion, Automobiles, that retraced the respective industry's histories and created life-like characters. . I would rate A Stone for Danny Fisher the very best from Harold Robins; when I read it there were tears in my eyes. Oh, how I loved his Carpetbaggers, The Adventurers (set in South America), 79 Park Avenue, Never Leave me, Never Love a Stranger the trilogies on Hollywood viz. Dream Merchants (I forget the other two), Dreams Die First, the Inheritors and on the great American Dream called automobiles - in fact these two series gave me a deep insight into what the US was all about in the early 20th century.. . Arthur Hailey and Sydney Sheldon were highly readable, too. Although Arthur Hailey's Airport was made into a mega hit movie, I relished his Hotel a lot more. Sheldon's Bloodline, The Other side of Midnight and Master of the Game were extremely readable. Of course I have also read the entire Perry Mason series, Sherlock Holmes series, the James Hadley Chase series, and the Agatha Christie series.

My love affair with books lasted a decade half, mid-60's to the late 70's but that with reading continued to flourish - an incredibly wide array of magazines, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Tidbits, Weekend (until the club found them too prohibitively expensive to subscribe!) Reader's Digest (which cost Rs.21 p.a.!) and almost every single magazine published in the country. Of the national periodicals I immensely liked the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly then edited by the irrepressible KS; I adored his editor's page for the contents that covered every topic under the sun, his close encounters with celebs and the high mighty and his travelogues (since he was very popular and moulded public opinion like no-one else he would get invites from far wide) and for his inimitable, incomparable racy style. He remains my first and only icon. Since the 70's my obsession has been to write on as varied topics as he did if not with the same dexterity or felicity over words. How far I have succeeded in my effort I know not..

One's creativity in arts, crafts or other fields largely depends on one's inclinations – it can be called aptitude also, - time available at one's disposal and many a time motivation to do it; inclination and time are interlinked: if you have the inclination you will always find the time, however hard-pressed you are otherwise for time. And at times, it is the motivation in cash or kind - the accolades, the wah-wahs, the seetis or whistles - that make you sweat your brow or tax your brains to bring out your best.

Books: The Moulders and Shapers of mind…2

For long I loved reading the Reader's Digest, the most widely read magazine in the world then – with reason.

The monthly is not topical or on current affairs and usually carries a collection of the best works in journalism on a mind-boggling variety of subjects, not necessarily recent ones, from around the world; the articles are condensed and edited by the magazine's own specialist editors. It also has a book section that carries abridged versions of best sellers. They are all printed with the permission of the authors who are also handsomely paid. It is kind of a collector's item – I had a collection of over 5 years' issues and had to discard them with a heavy heart, as with frequent house shifting I found them too difficult to cart around. However, good reading material is not good enough to ensure financial viability of a redoubtable magazine like the Digest, and with disastrously falling circulation it started following the Marketing Gurus formula No.1: Sex sells and it's not uncommon to find its promos in newspapers and specially-designed wrappers with a 72-point font S.X. and beneath that the blurb in much smaller print, all the things you wanted to know but did not know whom to ask..

The best readable sections in the magi are the page-end "fillers" of mostly anecdotes, punch lines, one-liners and quotable quotes; the humor-in-uniform page related to the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of men in the armed forces; the life's like-that page from the day-to-day life of common people; what's the good word that tested your vocabulary; and the I-am-your-body-part piece that described at length its physical attributes, functions and what could go wrong, of a particular part of the human body under discussion.

Some book-section stories still remain fresh in my memory – "Roots" where the author traces his family tree back to 4 centuries and discovers his ancestor to be, Kenta Kinta, in Africa who came to America as a galley slave, the stunning success of the book opened upon a veritable flood of people wanting to trace their roots; "Tora Tora", the graphic tale of the Pearl Harbor attack – incidentally which was the code name given by the Japs for their surprise attach; "Battle of Mid-Way", one of the fiercest battles in the Pacific Ocean where the Japs were soundly thrashed and it also proved a turning point in favor of the US; and "The Man with the Rusting Knife", the remarkable story of an unorthodox, unlettered Brazilian doctor who worked medical miracles successfully performing surgeries on chronic patients who were given up by the modern-day medicine men. Even though people abhor death * destruction, war stories surprisingly have a timeless appeal. More proof, Winston Churchill's "World War II", his account from the ringside, became a runaway hit and fetched him the Nobel Prize for literature. Churchill is rated the best orator of all times and his fiery speeches in British Parliament during the War years stirred the nation that stood stupefied with the reverses suffered from the German Juggernaut; his brushes and broadsides with Bernard Shaw were famous and put the celebrated playwright on the mat many a time with his quicksilver repartees.

Humor has to be subtle to make the reader enjoy it all the morel as the adage goes, "brevity is the soul of wit". Alas, we do not have too many, if there are any at all, humor-writers; what pass for humor or comedy here is all too slapstick.

RK Laxman, through his cartoons, does it occasionally, though he seems to have lost his earlier verve, pungency and biting sarcasm. Of course, he is well into his mid-80's.

Suresh Nair with the Bombay Times specializes on spoofs – imitating the mannerisms and peculiar traits in film personalities and celebs and caricaturing them; at times they are readable.

The one and only true humor-writer in India ever was Busybee aka Behram Contractor. His "Round About" column carried the evening tabloids, first Free Press Bulletin (from the Free Pres group) and later Evening News (from TOI stable) that bristled with grisly crimes in the cityscape, entirely on its shoulder. Of course, the column was a take from the "Around and About" in the London now-defect weekly, Weekend, which was my all-time favourite mag.

The cast of characters in his column was representative of a cross section of the Bombay's aam admi and they regaled the readers every day with their antics; in fact the column became a daily fix with the Bombayites those days. Busybee resigned from TOI and joined forces with Khalid Ansari, then head honcho of the now defunct "Sportsweek" to found Mid-Day. Later he quit it too and started his own eveninger, Afternoon Dispatch Courier, which turned out to be a damp squib and paled in comparison to Mid-Day. Busybee passed away a decade ago.

Books: Works of Art…3

The series on the adventures of Huckleberry Fin (what a contrived name!) and his friends always made fascinating reading. Though the book tom-tom "friends", there were only two main characters, of whom Hucklebury was the second lead - the first lead's name was Tom Sawyer. But the couple of books on Huckleberry's adventures took the cake for some fantastic original tales.

The knowledgeable among the old-timers says the best editor of the TOI in the last 70 years was NJ Nanporia. By the time I arrived in Bombay in the late 60's he had left the TOI for greener pastures; however I remember reading a brilliant piece of his in the Illustrated Weekly in 1976. TOI editors, the erudite Sham Lal, and the best political commentator, Girilal Jain, will remain fresh in my memory - Sham Lal for his superb prose and Jain for his crystal clear political analysis; Jain was an excellent extempore speaker too with a booming, baritone voice, qualities that Sham Lal lacked. Those days Wednesdays were reserved for the editors and readers lapped up their masterly analyses on topics then currently raging. Sham Lal's book reviews would appear on Sundays.

The most readable piece in the TOI used to be the 3rd edit penned by a short guy, M.V. Mathew, a Malayalee Syrian Christian chap who died a bachelor before he retired from the TOI. He had a masters in English literature. He embellished his works with gems in the form of quotable quotes, by the dozen, from English classics to illustrate or drive home a telling point – I used to wonder how the little fellow could pull all those quotes as if from his hat and drop them at apt places. His masterly edits remained a must-read for me - I had a fine collection of them. Those who didn't have the privilege of reading his stuff sorely missed what fine writing is all about.

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