"Open" sesame...

Aniruddha Bahal is unlike any journalist I know of. While his claim to fame rests largely on the sting operations he carried out for Tehelka.com, Bahal is also an accomplished author and writer who has worked with both India Today and Outlook. For a brief period in 2008, he also hosted the irreverent Tony B Show on Channel V.

ANIRUDDHA BAHAL

Five years ago Bahal founded the online investigative journal Cobrapost, which was responsible for Operation Duryodhana (also known as the "Cash for Questions" scandal), in which his team secretly caught on camera several MPs accepting cash in return for asking questions in Parliament.

Bahal's life as a novelist began in 2003 with Bunker 13, an espionage thriller. Last month, he published his second novel, The Emissary, a 500-page tale set in ancient Greece. Why ancient Greece? How did the idea originate? And how did he write this story without first visiting Greece? That is what both media students and aspiring writers will want to know. Obligingly, Bahal has written a detailed account in a recent issue of Open, in which he explains how Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul nudged him towards history:

“It is essential for a writer to read history. It widens the scope of his imagination, amongst other things. But what kind of travel writing are you reading?” he [Naipaul] asked with some sternness.

Naipaul’s gaze can rattle one in the best of times, and right now he seemed to be calibrating whether I was someone he should be wasting time with.

“Well, I was going through a lot of Ryszard Kapunscinski and Bruce Chatwin,” I said, shakily hoping the names would pass muster and get me past some duffer classification that his gaze seemed inclined to thrust me into.

Naipaul’s gaze mellowed as he heard me belt out a few Kapunscinski titles: Shah of Shahs, Imperium, Another Day of Life. “That’s good,” he said. I felt like I was sliding out from the gutter. There seemed a warm hum of approval. The conversation veered elsewhere.

That’s the point that I decided to brush up on history.

You can learn a lot about generating original ideas and about doing the right kind of research by reading Bahal's highly entertaining article here.

(Contrast Bahal's working style — I am tempted to call it "laid-back" — with that of Jonathan Franzen, hailed by Time magazine in a recent cover story as one of America's best novelists and whose fourth novel, Freedom, has just been published. Here's an excerpt from the profile-cum-interview by Lev Grossman:

(If Franzen finds prepublication media attention difficult, at least he doesn't have to deal with it very often. It took him seven years to write The Corrections. You'd think that having done it three times (his first two novels were The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion), he would find the fourth easier. But no. Freedom took him nine years. "It was considerably more difficult," he says. "It was a bitch. It really was."

(Read the article to get a good insight into the writing process: "Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist".)

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TISHANI DOSHI

In the same issue of Open, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi pays tribute to Chandralekha, one of India’s most controversial and celebrated choreographers, whose "refusal to separate art and life inspired my parallel careers, one drawing upon the other".

Doshi writes: "My twin lives of dance and writing have flowed in and out of each other fairly seamlessly. Dance taught me the rigour and physical discipline that every writer needs, and poetry and literature in turn added dimensions and depth to the dance".

What does this tell us? That writing, even full-time writing, does not really have to be a "full-time" occupation. That is the beauty of being a writer — there are so many other cultural options that you can indulge in simultaneously. (Don't tell that to Naipaul, though.)

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I have saved the best for last.

HEMANT MORPARIA

One of our most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. In his well-founded critique in the same issue of Open, Morparia lists seven reasons for India's poor track record in producing good cartoonists. What's exceptional about his argument here is the quality of the writing: each item in that list, for instance, runs on, and leads, to the next item — you have to read it to appreciate it.

And he tops it with a brilliantly telling cartoon.

Read "Death of the political cartoon" and revel in some sparkling originality.

• Photos courtesy: Outlook; Sunday Times (Sri Lanka); Cartoonnews.blogspot.com.  

STRIP SEARCH
Speaking of cartoons, I have always wondered why most of our daily newspapers give such short shrift to the good old comic strip. And why the majority of comic strips hail from the good old US of A. Don't readers turn to the funny pages first any more, as they used to do in the good old days? And are there no Indian comic strip artists who are good enough?

Writing in in Outlook's 15th anniversary issue, Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author, offers a convincing answer to that second question:

Publishing Western strips is not merely cheaper, it also permits a newspaper to dodge the issue of socially relevant humour. When Blondie throws a jar of mustard at Dagwood’s head, Indian readers are unlikely to think “Oo! Husband abuse!” But if a sari-clad, middle-class, middle-brow Indian Blondie were to follow suit, Indian readers would very likely howl with righteous disapproval. In Bombay’s Sunday Observer edited by Vinod Mehta, where Suki made her debut in a strip called Doubletalk, readers whined about her constantly, calling the strip a “horrible eyesore”, “Double Gawk”, “dragging and brazenly repetitive”. The reason I was able to carry on was that I had my editor’s full support. That was almost three decades ago. Today? I don’t know which newspaper editor would champion a lowly strip cartoonist against sustained reader-rancour.

Read her enlightening article here: "Strip the skin".