Reading roundup Feb 05 - Feb 19
Small hearts, AI hallucinations, teaching fiction, and just the one arresting simile this time
I post these reading roundups every two or three weeks. First roundup of 2024 here. Second roundup here.
On Feb 10, the editors at Mint Lounge gave Shrayana Bhattacharya, author of the bestseller Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, a full page for an essay of the kind I haven’t seen the paper publish in the last six months or so that I’ve been reading it. The Secondary Market, putatively a research-led essay about ‘the sex lives of India’s Power Uncles,’ turns out also to be a shifty-personal-cunning-heartwarming play with the form itself. It starts with a short-story-like immediacy, in the vein of certain personal essays; delves into some outline of research, details of which it wears lightly; uses the research as a vehicle to provide the volume and colour of the essay’s middle; makes tactical deviations from rank objectivity, giving itself space to utter blunt, subjective truths; and via closure to the personal-essay thread arrives at a conclusion that has the reader nodding, even though on a second read it becomes clear that the conclusion was in many ways pre-determined, requiring for its assertion neither the research undertaken nor the narration of the peculiar personal experience of the writer. But, hey, this second read needn’t only feed cynicism. Yes, Bhattacharya works with a simple truism—that 50+ rich uncles in India can solve a lot but have hearts too small for the endeavour—but the value is in how she makes it come alive through a multi-modal engagement with the idea. The final result is one of the finest pieces a newspaper will publish this year: a piece that combines a journalist’s penchant for spotting a story-site, a long-form essayist’s talent for wading through the story with observations (one imagines a notebook full of noted gestures and remembered lines), and a literary writer’s nous for finding the right beginning and end.
A day before Shrayana Bhattacharya’s A Secondary Market, I found a particularly cruel concurrence in the newspapers. Mint ran a full-page story by Sayantan Bera, titled The Long Wait for India’s First Agritech Unicorn, and The Hindu ran a full-page story by Abhinay Deshpande, titled Ploughing Through the Pain, about agricultural distress and farmer suicides in Maharashtra. Both pieces were about agriculture: the first about some high achievers struggling to reach a billion dollars in valuation; the other about thousands of poor farmers giving up in their debt traps, in their quest to repay a few lakhs in loans. It was impossible to miss the contrast. I have saved one particular juxtaposition—segments from the two articles—for myself as a reminder.
The two men in the clippings above—Shashank Kumar and Sunil Kendrekar—are both delineating what-is in different contexts. Both have applied their intelligence to understand this what-is. There is some predicting in their endeavours, an impulse to size things, or to place what-is in a continuum of Time. But only one is confident about doing well, about being rich; the other has had to take voluntary retirement.
So then: What is good work? How must we choose where to apply to our labours? What is intelligence? Between truth and truth-making, what must we serve?
Yet again I find that only the questions deepen.
In the first week of March, I will participate in a three-day conference at Alliance University, Bengaluru. The broad topic is Artificial Intelligence.
I notice that I am, even to this date, the only Indian writer to write a realist novel which has as its main concern the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence (please correct me if I’m wrong). And I did it four years ago. This is a bit disturbing to me, for it is squarely the realists’ task now to factor AI as a matter of social and sentimental change. Fiction takes time to assimilate things, I know. But this thing is unprecedented, its accelerations mind-numbing. To let it happen without an emotional record of its early years is, to my mind, more dangerous than the dangers of appearing silly while doing so. Too much bandwidth is given to whether generative AI can replace artists, but it is also the artist’s task to see how pervasive the thing already is, how commerce and industry are already making use of it, how it complicates—or argues with fresh meaning for—the most common human terms: understanding, common sense, remembering, making…
Gary Marcus’s substack is the one that I use to cultivate a certain slant that I find is closer to my own, politically speaking.
In post after post, Marcus points out how generative AI is still not there, how its mistakes (called hallucinations) can be dangerous for our future, how 2024 is likely to be the year of make-or-break litigation for Open AI, how ridiculous OpenAI sounds when it says that it needs copyright laws to be relaxed for it to operate, and how guardrails aren’t going to wipe away the plagiarism and copyright issues of generative AI.
Writers reading this: You need to invest time to understand this thing because this thing is investing a lot to understand you.
In a couple of days, I start teaching a Creative Writing course at Ahmedabad University. The prep has absorbed me, and, frankly, I can’t wait to begin. I have never studied writing formally, never even attended anything that could be called a workshop. All my learning has been a combination of reading with intent, reverse engineering the work of others, reading bad stories and theorizing why they don’t work (as fiction editor at TBLM), and committing myself to cycles of hit-and-trial. For this reason, and for the fact that I’ve been in a corporate job all through my writing ‘career’, I believe that I might have something unique to offer. Like this template below, which is adequate to chart Bikram Sharma’s Between Waiting Rooms, my own Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, the Hotstar show called Gharwapsi, and numerous other stories.
The above diagram applies, I think, to stories of those who migrate for work and leave behind family members. An event—a medical exigency, a death, a festival—requires them to return, and they find that what they regarded as their home has changed and that there is no true homecoming possible unless they are willing to redefine home.
Thoughts?
And, at last, the promised simile.
From Shrayana Bhattacharya’s essay The Secondary Market:
Marriage seemed to render his wife matronly, as sexless as cucumber without gin.
Emphasis mine. Bhattacharya is talking, of course, about one of her research subject’s assessment of his wife.
Is a cucumber with gin sexy? This was my first thought after reading this. And if cucumber without gin is sexless, who is it sexless for? For the uncle in question or the writer? I felt that the answer was the latter. It made me think of the subtle differences between how fiction and non-fiction writers add verve to their sentences. In the essay, the sentence probably has to be read like this:
Marriage seemed to render his wife matronly (to him), as sexless as cucumber without gin (is to me/is in general).
Unless already committed to a certain omniscience and presence, a fiction writer wouldn’t want a clause in a sentence to be more applicable to the narrator than the whole. If matronly here means matronly for the uncle, then, in fiction, as sexless as cucumber without gin has to be so for the uncle, too. In nonfiction, though, there is no implicit mandate to minimise the author/narrator, and the simile holds well. We don’t even care who it applies to.
Lastly, yes, I have continued my readalong journeys for War and Peace and the Cromwell Trilogy.
I started a monthly newsletter about reading War and Peace, of which the first instalment went out on Jan 31. Here it is, ICYMI.
Until next time!
Is Ahmedabad University a private university?