31 Aug 2010 Thinking Out Loud
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Life, Love, Writing  | 4 Comments

If my mother wasn’t a teacher, she’d be a superhero, kicking government official ass by day and saving the world by night. After five months of getting married, and who knows how many weeks of visits to the marriage registration office, Sam and I are now married in the eyes of the law. All thanks to the efforts of my mum and her school friends.

In other news, that sound you hear? It’s the tip tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. After weeks of major writer’s block (aka the rejection that killed my will to write), I’m back to the land of the unwashed who live inside their own heads. The block and the resulting lack of interest in my own career is a long story that I will tell you about once I reach a positive ending, but for now, I’m just happy to be back to writing again. I never thought I’d say this, but blank page, I’ve missed you.

It’s interesting though. I’ve been away not only from work, but also from the Internet, and even I didn’t realize how much of a relief it would be. I hadn’t realized how taxing it was to be constantly connected– checking Twitter instead of reading a book, responding to people’s Facebook updates instead of picking up the phone and chatting. It’s so easy to get caught up in social media and feel that you’re updated on people’s lives because you’ve seen them online, but I found that I ended up calling a few select people on an almost daily or weekly basis because I wanted to catch up with them in the absence of Facebook, and connected so much more with them.

My house, of course, looked spotless over the last month. Laundry was done regularly, curtains that had been lying around the house for months were finally put up, my books have found their places throughout the house, and in what’s surprised even me, I’m loving spending time in the kitchen learning to cook.

This morning though, my fingers are on fire. I’ve finished four tasks on my to-do list already, am confident that I’ll finish at least seven more by the end of the day. Most importantly, I’m writing again.

It feels like I’ve found my way home.

19 Aug 2010 Now in Print: Elle
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Now in Print  | Leave a Comment

I have an article in this month’s issue of Elle’s Indian edition titled “A Bitter Pill.”

By the end of the day today, more than 100 million women around the world will have taken a birth control pill. It’s completely possible that you know not one of them. While the pill has brought sexual freedom and choices to the Wet, its acceptance in India has been dismal. The birth control pill is the preferred form of contraeption in the West, but in India, only about three per cent of women use it, according to the National Family Health Survey.

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Check it out if you get a chance.

18 Aug 2010 What I’m Reading
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: What I'm Reading  | Tags: , , , ,  | 5 Comments

One of the good things about taking a break from everything is the sheer amount of reading you can get done. Here’s what’s adorning by bedside table lately.

Nineteen Minutes, Plain Truth, and Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult: Picoult is one of my favorite authors for the simple reason that while she’s a fabulous writer and can weave together scenes and dialogue like no other, she also has the unique gift of asking the difficult questions and then taking a stab at answering them. Her characters are always faced with very difficult dilemmas. “Your son says the bullying was unbearable. But his revenge was murder. What would you do?” “Your baby is born in secret. If your father finds him, you will lose everything. What would you do?” “Your daughter needs a new heart. The only match comes from a murderer. What would you do?” And if those questions weren’t enough, the themes of these three books are, in order, school shootings, Amish life, and alternative Christian theories. Who says you can’t learn anything from novels?

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller: This novel is Joseph Heller’s last book, published in 2000 posthumously, and I have to say it seems a bit autobiographical. The story is about a novelist, Eugene Pota, who as a young man published a first book that won over readers and critics alike but has had no equivalent successes, not unlike Heller himself. Now he’s at the end of his life and career and he wants to write his last earth-shattering book. This novel is about his quest to do so and the various fits and starts as he attempts to undertake this. I loved this book with the crazy ideas that Pota embarks on, and the glimpse into a novelist as an old man.

Animal Farm by George Orwell: We were getting to a point in our marriage where Sam stated that I couldn’t in good conscience call myself an avid reader if I hadn’t read certain books, including this one. So I did. There’s always a problem with reading books that you’ve known about, read about, but never got around to reading, and that is that they’re almost always a disappointment. This one, however, as you can probably attest yourself, wasn’t. Helps that it was a quick read too.

The Brighest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes: Okay, I have to admit that I couldn’t quite get into this one. I found it a bit too long-winded for my taste, and by the time you got to the end, you’d already figured out what the big suspense was, so there was a huge let down. It also just wasn’t as funny or touching as her usual fare. You might want to pick it up though for a good long day of easy reading if you’re already a Keyes fan. If not, skip this. It doesn’t compare to her earlier work.

Caught by Harlan Coben: I’m all caught up now, having read all of Coben’s books. This was just released this year, and as always, my work day was shot. You can’t pick up a Harlan Coben book and then expect to put it down midway (when will I learn?). Anyway, I loved that characters from Coben’s Myron Bolitar series made an appearance in this one. If you’re new to his work, I’d suggest working from the backlist. Start with his novels from the early nineties and work your way up.

17 Aug 2010 Back from a Break
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Life, Love, Writing  | 2 Comments

In some ways, the last few weeks have just flown by. I am now a proud aunt to two as-yet-unnamed baby girls, one who is not even a week old. Both girls arrived two weeks early, one by an emergency c-section, and both have quickly become aunty M’s favorites. (My best friend and my sister-in-law are doing well.)

In other ways, time has stood still. I’ve been taking time off work to figure out what I want to do next with my career. Having achieved most of the goals I set out to and not having reached the next stage yet, I’m in a bit of limbo. I’ve been meaning to slow down the pace of work for a while now, but doing what I do, the market is such that it’s almost impossible to do that without taking a huge pay cut.

So, with a lot of hope and a few tears, I’ve been trying to figure out my next step. Journalism? Books? Both?

It’s been stressful, trying to change paths a bit. I’m at that stage in my life and career where I’m not constantly taken over by work. I reply to e-mails once a day, I take time out to read, watch television, cook, play with the cat and relax with my family. In some ways, the go-go-go nature of journalism no longer appeals to me. But the only way I’ve ever identified is as a journalist. Without that label, I feel lost.

“I didn’t marry a journalist, I married you,” Sam said to me the other day, as I fretted about how I felt I had no identity left were I to even consider taking a detour from journalism. And that’s been the hardest part of it for me. I’m used to reinventing myself, but having come this far, there’s more to lose.

So I’ve been drawing, decorating, visiting friends, and just laying low. Letting the words come to me instead of chasing after them and hunting them down.

It’s been a good break. But I think it’s time to get back to work now.

20 Jul 2010 Scaling Back
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Life, Love, Writing  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment

In between writing letters (of the official kind) and sifting through paperwork, I’m having a nostalgia-filled day today. I’d put together Hindi songs from the 60s and 70s for my father recently, and this morning, one started playing on iTunes.

I knew it was going to be a good day as soon as it came on.

I’ve decided to take a break from the blogging every day routine. My husband may mock me for saying this, but even I don’t have that much to say. I’m still going to be blogging regularly, which means probably two or three times a week, but I think I’m going to take it easy in the must-publish-a-blog-post-at-6-a.m.-every-day department and just write when I have something to talk about.

I am finishing up the Freelancing Fact or Fiction series and I’ll start posting once I’m done writing it. I’m guessing it’s going to be the last series I’ll ever do on freelance journalism for this blog, seeing as I’ve pretty much said everything I have to say on the topic. But I am slowly shifting my focus to books (there, I said it), so there are still many interesting discussions to be had.

In the meantime, let me tell you how I discovered my favorite author, Harlan Coben. In 2005, I used to listen to radio show called Writer’s Roundtable in which the hosts interviewed successful fiction and non-fiction writers about the art and craft of writing. The show was also uploaded online and could be downloaded and listened to at leisure. Well, I was thinking about books back then too (we always do, don’t we?), and I heard Harlan Coben speak on that show. That very day, in a move very uncharacteristic for me, I shut down my computer, walked a mile to the nearest bookstore and bought two of his books– Tell No One and Gone for Good– and finished them both over the next three days.

I’m not sure they have the show any longer, but I recently came across the archives and realized what a treasure trove this page is. I’ve always said that if you want to learn, you have to learn from the greats, the ones who’re at the top of their game. If you want to learn good journalism, read Pulitzer winners, if you want to reach the masses through your fiction, learn from the New York Times bestsellers.

Here’s the link to that show. Enjoy!

16 Jul 2010 On Elitism and Reading Choices
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Life, Love, Writing  | Tags: , ,  | 10 Comments

There’s something that’s always been part of the Western publishing landscape, which is now seeping into India as well. It’s called elitism. You know, the attitude of a few that literary authors who write one book in five years are special and talented, and crime writers or those horrible romance writers who “churn out a book a year” don’t deserve to be read. The scratching of the head ensues when Dan Brown’s books sell millions and your friend, the avid reader, has never heard of Rohinton Mistry.

“Popular fiction” has become something to be mocked, looked down upon, and readers of it regarded with distaste. This is something that’s prevalent in music (”Celine Dion fans are ignorant and don’t know good music”) and in India, at least, everyone’s favorite punching bag is the author Chetan Bhagat.

Now before I go further, let me tell you about my reading choices. Well, everything. I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, and the Nancy Drew series, moved on to those wondrous romance novels, graduated to chick lit and crime fiction, and now read pretty much everything under the sun, including Rohinton Mistry, Marian Keyes, Amy Tan, Harlan Coben, Haruki Murakami, Pankaj Mishra, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Robbins, Taslima Nasrin, Arundhati Roy, Jennifer Weiner, Sidney Sheldon, Amitav Ghosh, Nisha Minhas, Jhumpa Lahiri, and the back of my juice box. In fact, I’ll try any writer once.

I did pick up a Chetan Bhagat book a couple of years ago, didn’t really enjoy the story or the writing, and hence, didn’t buy any more. Purely personal taste, nothing against the author or his genre. I’m just not a young twenty-something Indian working in a multinational company and have already answered for myself the questions Bhagat’s characters are asking, so I don’t identify with their struggles. I also didn’t like the writing style.

But does that mean Bhagat’s books don’t deserve to be published? Does that mean all his readers are classless brainless idiots? No, of course not. One of his books just got made into a major movie, and he’s got hundreds of thousands of fans. Can we really say that hundreds of thousands of people don’t know what makes a good story or good book?

And what is a good book anyway? Isn’t it something that speaks to you, moves you, or just makes you laugh? Who am I to tell anyone that Arundhati Roy should move them or speak to them more than Chetan Bhagat? Who am I to say that reading a novel about sixteenth century China is a better way to spend an afternoon than reading a novel about a woman in LA who can’t find love?

This article in the Indian Express caught my attention as I was pondering these issues a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who’ve been around me for a while, you know how mad I get when someone uses multiple exclamation marks, so the fact that a published author would say, “Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes doesn’t (sic) matter that much. I am not writing a (sic) literature,” makes me want to poke a hot knife in my eye only so that the pain of that can erase the pain of this sentence, but this author is a bestselling writer and his book is in the eighth print run (whatever that means; what if they’re only printing 1,000 copies per run?). Will I read him? No, absolutely not. Will I look down upon people who do? No, never.

I understand that publishers and authors have a responsibility to their readers to give them a quality product, and by quality I do mean not completely abusing the English language, but I do have a problem with people who look down upon readers who choose to read something that the literati don’t approve of (yes, I’m looking at you, Maureen Dowd).

As readers, we should demand quality standards from our publishers, but don’t hate the author. Good on them if they were able to take that risk of sitting down and writing an entire book despite their lack of sophistication of language and then actually get it published and sold. I’m guessing these authors (the Indian ones) aren’t raking in the millions, so it’s important to understand that there is a market for their work and that they’re able to tap into it. But I just don’t understand the hatred against Bhagat on Twitter and other social media. So you don’t think he’s a good writer and shouldn’t be as popular as he is. Um, so?

As writers we work by and because of market forces every day. What the masses are reading and what they may or may not like is an important factor in what we’re able to sell. Can we really afford to look down on millions and say their taste doesn’t matter?

I, for one, can’t and don’t want to. I don’t like Bhagat’s books and won’t be reading them, but isn’t it a tremendous achievement that his books got people talking, and more than that, reading again?

As a writer, I’d like one day for my books to be able to do the same.

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