I just got this - including the mistake in gender - from HarperCollins:

I’m not much of a horror fiction writer, and when I write something that might qualify as “horror” I stick to the horror of more everyday affairs, such as cannibalism in wartime or the disintegration of a mind under stress. The only horror fiction I recall writing that has anything that might remotely classify as containing a supernatural component is a story I wrote back at the end of 2005, Windfall. It’s still among my favourites from my earlier work, but that’s something for another day.

However, I do enjoy reading horror fiction.      

What’s the name you think of when you think of horror fiction, then? I can’t really speak for everyone, but Stephen King has kind of made himself synonymous with “horror” a long time now. Personally, I think King sucks as a horror writer. I much prefer his non-horror fiction, rare and precious though it is: you don’t come across such gems as The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, or Cain Rose Up from King’s keyboard every day. Several times, after going through disasters like Desperation or Dreamcatcher, I determined to stop reading King; and yet I always returned. The hope doesn’t die that I can still find something worth reading. Sad to say I rarely do, but still…

But King is successful; even though he claims in at least one of his stories that bats are merely rats with wings, he’s still successful. As someone who still has to taste any sort of success as an author, it interested me to speculate on what actually makes King successful. How does one write like him? Well…I read him enough over the years to form a few ideas about how one can write like him and amass enough of a bank account to survive the coming meltdown.

It works if you name brands, apparently. Take this – “Jack sat on the edge of the pavement and looked miserably down at his shoes, clutching his soft drink in his uninjured hand.” Anything wrong with that sentence? I don’t think so. I would have written it like that. However, how would King write it? “Jack sat on the edge of the pavement looking miserably down at his Hush Puppies, clutching his Diet Pepsi in his uninjured hand.” If you don’t know what a Hush Puppy or a Diet Coke is, it’s up to you to scratch your head and figure it out, growing vaguely irritated all the while. OK, so maybe the products he names are all stuff Americans could recognise, but I don’t think that when I write for Indians I’d talk about Sreeleathers or Thums Up.

It works if in stressful situations one’s characters apparently begin talking to themselves or imagining conversations. Here is how I’d write something: “Jack stepped back as the knife slashed at him, fear racing up his spine as he realised that one moment later and his throat would have been ripped out.” And here is King’s hypothetical version of the same sentence: “Jack stepped back as the knife slashed at him, fear racing up his spine as he realised that one moment later and one could say, Hey Jack, how ya gonna sing anymoah widout a t’roat, man?”

It works if an element of the supernatural is injected into anything and everything. Take Cujo, a straightforward story of a St Bernard made a killer by rabies (something unlikely to occur directly – rabid animals rarely press home an attack after the initial bites, but let that pass). Cujo would have been just a story of a rabid dog if written by anyone else – but King, being King, had to bring in the ghost of a psycho killer as a sort of backup to the rabies. Similarly Christine, the story of a haunted old car, had to bring in an additional ghost (the car’s former owner) for reasons beyond my comprehension.

It works if you overwrite. The more you overwrite, in fact, the better it works, especially if you dwell lovingly on the details of how a zombie’s flesh is falling off his bones, and so on. And if you can bring in total irrelevancies (Rose Madder) into the story, well, nothing like it.

I guess I could go on, but I’ll stop here. It’s obvious I don’t think much of Stephen King’s writing, but it works. Or else he wouldn’t sell.

And you can’t argue with success, as they used to say.

I’ve been reading a book which for reasons entirely beyond the author’s control, is rather apposite right now. I decided to review it as a blog entry and not as a review – because I have so much to say on the subject beyond what the author does.

In the last couple of weeks, major clashes have broken out in the state of Orissa between Hindu groups and Christians – most of whom are tribal people who converted relatively recently. These are far from the first clashes between the two groups. The only difference is that this time the Christians weren’t the ones at the receiving end. And the reason for the clashes? Evangelical Christianity had raised tensions on either side. We’ll get back to the reason in a minute. 

You must understand that despite all claims to the contrary, Christianity is not a recent arrival in the Indian subcontinent as a whole.

It arrived in the first century of the current era (it’s claimed the Apostle Thomas himself brought it, but since there’s no way to prove that, there’s no need to place any relevance on that bit) and never got much in the way of converts. It stayed restricted for well over a thousand years to small pockets on the coasts, even though Christians were never persecuted or restricted in preaching. It was just not a typically “Indian” religion, I guess, and because Christians took such care to keep themselves apart from Hinduism they weren’t submerged in the Hindu pantheon as most other foreign imports were. Still and all, Christianity in India is a good two millennia old, older than Christianity in Western Europe. It’s as Indian a religion as any, by that criterion. However, as I said, it remained restricted to the coasts – until the Dutch came along, and then the Portuguese, the French, and most of all the British. The Portuguese had already begun trying to convert the Mughal Emperor Akbar (who had a lot of fun, if reports are to be trusted, stringing their priests along) to Catholicism, but their possessions in India were small and even there the conversion efforts weren’t too successful.

The real push for Christianity came in the mid-nineteenth century when British power was expanding exponentially in the Indian subcontinent. The earlier British were all too happy to “go native” – they took local wives, put on Indian clothing, learned Indian languages, and sometimes converted to Islam as well. But as British hard power increased, the British came to think of themselves as a superior master race ordained by god to rule “lesser breeds without the law”; and, naturally, the master race’s religion had to be superior to that of the subject people.

One of the major triggers behind the War of Independence of 1857 was the increasing attempts at conversion by Christian priests of Hindus and Muslims; the British got such a scare as the result of that conflict that the thrust of conversion was directed away from the mainstream religious groups towards the marginalised – the many tribes and the lowest castes of the country.  

I live in a state where about 70% of the population is Christian (and about 54% of the population of this town is Christian). Since Christianity is a relatively recent arrival (since the mid-nineteenth century) in these parts (and even later in other parts of North East India) it might repay study if we see how the religion has affected the large part of the population who converted to it…

In Meghalaya (the state where I live) much, but far from all, the population of the majority Khasi tribe has been Christianised – mostly by Catholics. The original Khasi religion, Niam Tre, still exists, though, and still has a substantial number of adherents, and the Khasi culture hasn’t been totally obliterated even among Christians. Things are different in the two states targeted by Baptist missionaries, Mizoram and Nagaland, where virtually the entire tribal population was converted to Christianity and the original culture (with the exception of tribal dances) was ruthlessly suppressed (even the traditional Mizo drum was banned). I guess that’s an indication of the differences between the Catholic and Baptist ways of doing things.

Now there comes a time when you hit the law of diminishing returns – when virtually all the people of an area have been converted, further conversion efforts are pretty much a waste of energy. The majority of India’s Hindu population had proved remarkable in its resistance to conversion; Islam in any case prohibits Muslims from converting to anything else; and no one seriously minded so long as Christianity in India remained restricted to the periphery, the North East and the extreme south. But the missionaries, starved of subjects to convert, then turned to the tribal peoples of the heartland. That was kind of hitting close to home.

You see, the most identifiable political trend in India in the last two decades has been a move towards right wing Hindu fundamentalism, a trend that has had a precursor in Weimar Germany in the 1920s when the Nazis were just getting started. Any right wing fundamentalist movement, of a necessity, needs a target. The Muslims already were a target. But the problem was that the Muslims constitute enough of a chunk of India’s population that they can’t be completely ignored – and they can hit back. The Christians were a much softer target.

As it was, resentment levels were already high against evangelical Christianity and converts even in states like this one where religious clashes are as yet unknown – the average Niam Tre believer has only contempt for the Christian convert. This is despite the fact that missionary Christianity is on the back burner here. The Hindu fundamentalists had much more of a fertile ground for exploiting resentment in the heartland where the missionaries were much more active. There were many clashes, culminating in the burning alive of an Australian missionary cum social worker, Graham Staines, and two of his children in 1999 by a mob led by a Hindu fundamentalist known by the nom de plume Dara Singh.  

While the Indian constitution allows freedom to preach and propagate one’s religion, conversions by “coercion, fraud or allurement” are banned in many states. It happens, though. I know of one case myself. An elderly woman who was the only non-Christian in a village near this town was under considerable social pressure to convert. When she refused, mysteriously, every night stones would be flung at her house. The village church’s priest advised her to convert so he could pray for her and banish the evil influence. She converted and – hey presto! – the stoning stopped. Now is that a miracle or what?

Answer: what.

Why should the missionaries be so desperate to convert, anyway? Because conversion is big, big business. Despite the formal Christianity necessary for political office, Europe has about abandoned Christianity if church attendances are anything to go by…and this means that church collections are way, way down. Every little bit helps. With further economic recession looming in the West, the only place to go is Asia. At the same time, missionary funds come on the basis of headcounts – how many people a missionary manages to convert will determine how much money he will receive. I know of one pastor of a church called the Evangelical Free Church of India who uses the funds he receives from the parent church in the US to buy a fleet of SUVs and go for vacations abroad every year – and at the same time makes his “flock” turn over a percentage of their earnings to him as a tithe. It’s all about the money, honey.

The author of the book I’m reviewing is a politician by the name of Arun Shourie, one of the more intelligent and more articulate writers of the extreme Hindu right. The book is called Harvesting Our Souls and aims to expose the missionary agenda. Shourie does a pretty good job, if you read the book from a Hindu right wing viewpoint, of carrying through his stated aim. Fortunately, I’m a neutral in this, being an atheist. Still, I admit, so long as Shourie sticks to eviscerating the missionaries he does an excellent job, and his research so far as Christianity is concerned is immaculate. I’d give him four stars on those points, but only on those points.  

Shourie starts off with a review of anti-Christian “incidents”, including the Staines murder, which he, predictably enough, tries to downplay or even argue is the fault of the victim – because he, Staines, carried out conversions, he deserved, the implication goes, to be killed. He goes into detail about the motives of missionaries and why they tend to target the poor and illiterate rather than the well-educated who might be inclined to ask questions.

Shourie then gets stuck in with gusto into the Bible, exposing the many, many inconsistencies, discrepancies, and flat-out contradictions in this book which allegedly came from God direct (as the missionaries still claim), as well as the myth of the Virgin Mary. On this point I’m in total agreement with him. The versions of the Bible available in India to the layperson never, ever, mention any of these contradictions, nor do missionaries of my acquaintance (Catholic or Protestant) admit of them in public.

After that Shourie goes on to discuss the Old Testament’s blood-soaked deity (whom he’s careful never to refer to as YHWH or to talk of his chosen people as “Jews”; being a Hindu fascist he’s an extreme admirer of “Israel” and has no desire to annoy any “Israeli”) and this deity’s tantrums towards his own people. He ends with a brief discussion of the plight of converts: their social condition remains broadly unchanged.

Central to Shourie’s thesis are several assumptions, some of which are completely, demonstrably false, and some of which are at the least highly contentious. His core assumption, of course, is that Christianity is a “foreign” religion – which it is not – and that somehow or other Christians cease to be Indian or begin to have extra-territorial loyalties.

It is true that many Christians during British rule (though much less than all) wanted the Raj to last because being Christian, they thought, gave them status and they feared being submerged in a Hindu sea. But the Raj is six decades in its grave and surely anyone still hankering after that time should have died or left by now.

It’s obvious, of course, that if national law conflicts with religious law, the former should prevail: this is a point that Shourie makes. But his suggestion isn’t the Chinese model where the church is taken over by a national body independent of movers and shakers abroad, like the Vatican for instance. Of course he doesn’t suggest that model: Shourie never misses a chance to take gratuitous potshots at China. Shourie doesn’t really make a suggestion – he leaves it to the reader to draw the conclusion that Christians are foreign fifth columnists who must be crushed.

As I said, this book is pitched towards Hindu readers who already hold right wing views. It isn’t meant to be read by someone with a critical mind. Unfortunately, in my case…

The next assumption Shourie makes – in fact he repeatedly and explicitly states it – is that while the Bible was compiled over centuries by a variety of authors, Hindu gods (whom he always calls “our gods”) like Rama and Krishna apparently have existed for much longer. This is poppycock. Each of those Hindu deities evolved slowly over time, and Krishna is of actually more recent origin than Christianity. So much for research where one’s own side is concerned!

Shourie finds fault with some segments of the Christian church for “Indianising” rituals by removing footwear, prostrating before the cross, using incense, and the like. Apparently instead of appreciating an attempt, however belated and limited, to try to indigenise itself, this is seen as a grave threat. It is. It might make Christianity more acceptable to the people, and to the Hindu fundamentalist, what could be worse than that?  

The next error in Shourie’s polemic isn’t really an error. It’s part of the Hindu fundamentalist agenda. All these millennia, mainstream Hinduism didn’t bother about the sects and the small religions of other peoples. The tribes had religions which had nothing to do with Hinduism (like Niam Tre, which I mentioned) and they were left alone. Since the Hinduism of the upper castes is highly resistant to change or conversion (the typical Hindu belief is that all religions lead to the same source) the missionaries were trying to convert among the tribes with their small, isolated religions. Suddenly, in these last couple of decades, the Hindu fundamentalists have declared that these people are all Hindus and must be “brought back into the fold” by re-conversions. It’s like Hitler discovering the trials and tribulations of the Volksdeutsche, the German expatriates of Eastern Europe.

What Shourie, of course, never attempts to answer is why people should want to convert at all. Surely not all of them were “coerced” or “allured” towards Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism? Surely there is a vast amount of resentment among the people at the bottom of the Indian caste system and among those altogether outside its limits, like the tribal people? Maybe it would make more sense to address these problems than rape nuns and burn priests alive? If you read Shourie, the question isn’t even approached. Nor does he try to think about why Hindu organisations don’t try and match the undoubted social services the missionaries provide in areas where there are no schools or hospitals or anything at all.

As I said, I’m a neutral, so I kind of enjoyed reading this book and watching one set of beliefs I detest take on another set I despise. “A plague on both your houses”, I said, and would have reached for the popcorn if only there hadn’t been real humans dying.

Oh, and the overall rating? Four stars for taking the Bible apart. Zero stars for everything else. Verdict? Two stars.      

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?

Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.

What laws can the Senators pass any more?

When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,

and sits at the greatest gate of the city,

on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.

And the emperor waits to receive

their chief. Indeed he has prepared

to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed

many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out

today in their red, embroidered togas;

why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,

and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;

why are they carrying costly canes today,

wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,

and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as always

to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;

and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest

and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).

Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,

and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.

And some people arrived from the borders,

and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

Back when I was about thirteen I discovered the worlds of Arthur C Clarke. It started off with Childhood’s End, a book that explored the topic of the end of mankind – though, in typical Clarkish fashion, the end was merely another beginning.

After that I plunged into the world of science fiction, full time – I would read any and all I could get, and looking back, much of it was awful trash. But, you know, being a true-read fan and all, I swallowed most of it hook, line and sinker.

A typical sentence from one of the earlier stories might go something like this:

Xth, the Pelgium smuggler from Venus, took his ray gun and fired at Mike, who ducked behind the flth lizard’s body and fired back with a solar grenade. The spaceship, meanwhile, reached warp speed and flipped into the fifteenth dimension…

Cringe making.

All right, that wasn’t any of the Big Three : Clarke, Asimov, or Heinlein. Nor was it the second line – Ray Bradbury (one of my personal favourites, especially for his thundering descriptive passages), Edmund Crispin, Brian Aldiss. But there was enough trash being written by the likes of Michael Shaara and AE Van Vogt (to name just two of the authors I love to hate) to compensate for them all, put together. But I didn’t think of it then.

Oh, there were the weak ones. There were all the tales where any alien races that encountered each other ruthlessly and immediately began shooting each other to pieces, where the only objective of any alien that earthlings encountered seemed to be to eat/enslave/exterminate those earthlings. There were all the old tales (still to be found in my boyhood) where the mad scientist constructed a spaceship in his garage and set off for Venus, encountered people living on comets, and other dreadful rot. But there were also stories like Clarke’s An Encounter with Medusa, the best single other-planet exploration tale I have read to this day. It still impresses – I read it again a few weeks ago, and it’s as good as ever.

For the rest, though, the Golden Age of science fiction is dead.

I still read the compilations of Gardner Dozois. I also still finger through science fiction anthologies on bookshop shelves. But I almost never shell out any of my money for them.

Why not?

Well, first of all, real science fiction is as dead as the dodo.

Read back to the fiction of the sixties and seventies, when the pulp garbage of the Shaara/Van Vogt genre was dead but the Big Three were at their best. You could read those stories for themselves, and enjoy them as stories (so long as you ignored the incongruity of a future society seemingly all comprising white Anglo Saxon Protestants from Minnesota, with a Hispanic thrown in once in a while). But today? The stories that are called science fiction are either fantasy stories – not really science fiction at all, even if they are set in future worlds, because their appeal lies in things that have nothing to do with their settings (my favourite example of this would be all the stories in George RR Martin’s Sandkings anthology, especially In The House Of The Worm and Windwalls). Mostly, these are entertaining. Those that try and stay true to science fiction, though, are so obscure as to be not worth the read. Rambling plots that arrive at no known destination, overlong and mawkish digressions, no, not worth it, no thanks. There are a few exceptions, of course, but those are mostly one-off performances. There is not a single science fiction author I would consistently grade as even acceptable today, forget good.

Then, science has so rapidly overtaken fiction that even reading one’s old favourites is wince-worthy. Any of you know that old Asimov story The Martian Way where Martian colonists get water from the rings of Saturn? In that story, hundreds of years in the future, reporters use – get this – writing pads and pencils to take notes during press conferences. Asimov not just failed to appreciate the nature of Saturn’s rings (they’re made up of granules of ice, not mountains as he said) but totally failed to imagine the tape recorder. And has anyone of the time, even one person, ever written a description of a cell phone?

I once tried to write a science fiction tale (I actually wrote it, called it The Fist Of God, and junked it) – I junked it because it failed (to my own perceptions) the laugh test. I had to introduce so much meaningless “technology” that it made no sense to me – and I was the one writing it.      

And of course there is the bad science. There are the stories that are bad science from the beginning, in the sense that the authors ought to have known they were writing rubbish (a classic example: Orson Scott Ward’s “ansible” which allows instantaneous communication across the universe…strewth! Where did Einstein ever disappear?) And there are the stories where the science was thought all right then but went bad later, such as those set on a Venus covered with oceans (The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth) or a Mercury that showed only one face to the sun (Brightside Crossing).

And there were the stories that simply failed the “suspension of disbelief” test, such as Larry Niven’s tale of a manned spaceship being sent to investigate a neutron star (Neutron Star) or the many tales of far future worlds with impeccably modern white heroes with clearly identifiable American genes (Star Trek, anyone?).

But, still, science fiction did fulfil one purpose – for those of us who liked to read it, and stuck to reading it, it made us think. We may have rejected the visions of rebellious toasters or perpetual motion machines, but we had to think of why we rejected them. Most other fiction doesn’t promote thinking.

If for nothing more than that, I still read science fiction when I can find any of it worth reading.

Back when I was a kid, the reading habit wasn't trained out of children before they had a chance to pick it up. I was 12 before TV arrived in this part of the country, and then the standard of programming was so uniformly awful that I never had a desire to learn to watch it.

I was far from alone. We were virtually all of us like that.

We read voraciously. We read everything we could lay our hands on and then, by the age of ten  or before, we were already discriminating. Hairy Crackpotter didn't exist then, of course, but I seriously doubt if he would've tempted us; our tastes ran much more towards Alastair MacLean by way (around age seven or eight at the latest)  of Richmal Crompton's William Brown series, the Hardy Boys and the Enid Blyton novels, and then, by age 13 or thereabouts, Arthur C Clarke, and - usually - a fairly brief foray into Westerns. I read Roots at fifteen and How Green Was My Valley around the same time.

We learned to know the difference between serious writing and brain candy. And by fourteen or fifteen, those of us with any flair for it at all were trying our hand at writing stuff of our own.

But was this reading appreciated by our parents?

You've got to be kidding.

If I'd got a rupee for every time I was told "there you are with a story book again in your hands instead of studying" I'd be at least a millionaire by now...

They always called them "story books". Anything that was outside the curriculum was a "story book". And if you got caught reading one the least you'd get would be a glare and a reaming.

I passed at least two examinations because of my extracurricular reading which had equipped me to answer unexpected and unconventional questions, but that hardly mattered to them. If my dad were now alive, he would not have thought much of my efforts at writing semi-professionally, though he was a reader himself.

It's just that books were meant to be written by other people. And we, as kids, were supposed to study. What the hell were we going to school for, anyway?

Well,at least they could not stop us from reading, even if they tried. But we had no TV worth the watching, we did not have playstations and mobile phones and video games, and i don't think our lives were any the poorer for that.

I certainly would not have been writing this blog today if I had not learned to read for pleasure.

When I see today parents feel proud of shoving their children all day from class to class to tuition, never allowing them a moment of freedom, all I can think of is the awfulness of that tragedy.

One Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code can't undo it.