Book learning

A few months ago, I was closely associated with a book that made a little bit of a noise, more than most other projects that I make part of my life. It is now out, launched with some fanfare in various parts of the world and I thought this would be a nice forum to write about it, especially now that all that I felt about the process of creation and introduction to the rest of the world has faded into a little box in my mind that will be opened only when I am no longer stirred by its contents.

The book, published by Mumbai based India Book House, is called Lights Camera Masala, in a deliberate and cutesy twist to the conventional. It is essentially a collection of photographs supported by reams of text – or perhaps the other way around – all nicely packaged into a fun, gimmicky, attractive and noise-making whole. It is, as you may have figured by now, all about Hindi films, from the POV of two would-be filmmakers, who set out to discover just how mad the big bad world of Bollywood can be. It has a pouting Abhishek Bachchan on the cover and in various avatars on various pages inside, but it does satisfy almost every woman’s (and many men’s) need for male pulchritude with some mind-blowing photos of the very dishy John Abraham, along with some other representatives of the huge industry that is India’s very significant contribution to world cinema.

It all began some years ago when the publisher showed me her catalogue. At the time, she pointed out a listed book that had a leaping Hrithik Roshan on the cover and I told her I wanted to be part of the process of getting it to bookstores. It was many months later that she called again and said that it was all going to come together and would I be involved, as editor. I had been working with a Bollywood website for a couple of years and was keen to put the knowledge I had gained through that experience to good use – producing a result that would look good on my resume.

It was, in most ways, a fun assignment, albeit an excessively hectic one, though only in fits and starts, somewhat like the egg that the curate is said to have eaten. I finished the core of the editing just before I changed jobs, then more of it after my mother died, and the final proofs when I was deep into what I moved on to. And there were problems that I couldn’t even start enumerating – money, sponsorships, deadlines, language, captions and, in a stunning last minute bombshell, even the entire concept of the book that had been created, which clashed dreadfully with the original plan. In the rush to keep job, sanity and editing standards intact, we managed to keep out tempers cooled, our egos subdued and our opinions to ourselves and brought out a book that is, to say the least, well worth the effort.

It isn’t as if there are no mistakes. Or no hard feelings. Or even no hurts. But, in spite of all the problems involved in creating something that blends the talents of so many people, Lights Camera Masala is a book I am proud to meet and include in my inner circle of accomplishments. Do read it!