Writing the Great Indian Novel

So many of my friends want to become writers. More often than not, they are deep into writing the great Indian novel - or the great American novel, in some cases – and have been doing research on whatever subject they plan to write on for ever since I first met them, sometimes when we were in nappies together in the same baby ward. None of them has really got beyond a first draft and if they have, even getting published, few have met with any degree of success, if they ever managed to spell the word right, that is.

Me, on the other hand, refuses to begin. I do not even think about it, in fact. While I do not doubt that I am a decent writer, I do not believe that I have in me the makings of a full scale novel, or even a shorter version of an opus that may, to some, seem magnum, while to others it is a mere half bottle. I don’t want to be a popular beverage, to continue to mangle the analogy, but I do want to be a cru that is not just rare, but far beyond the realm of easy accessibility. And that, by the way, is not to say that I should be incomprehensible, but merely that I need and want and aspire to be so good that there is no way in which I and my writing can be compared to whatever else is already available, or will be easily enough.

Whew.

Having got that off my conscience, it may interest you to know that I have been toying with the notion of writing a book. On what and when and how is all stuff of which I have absolutely no clue, but it would be fun to get started on at least those questions, if not the book itself. It will not be, I assure you to avoid the hazards of sounding like I am contradicting myself, a novel, certainly not a Great Indian one. What it will be, if it ever will be, is a vaguely bizarre, offbeat, funny, convoluted, fantastical, mad, crazy, eccentric adventure that only I could go on in my own head. Whether it will actually ever happen I cannot predict, but it has been started on various occasions in various ways, with various characters in various states of sanity. All to little avail, if any at all.

So the other day when I was talking to a dear friend of mine, we chatted about writing that famous Great Indian Novel. Neither of us ever will and neither of us even want to. But we made a good start, with all sorts of oddities creeping into our sentences even as we mused on the permutations of characters that live life in a plot of exceeding strangeness. Somewhere along the line there was Subhash Ghai, master-director, who was creating a story that somehow escaped reality and wandered into a series of worlds that went from borderline oddball to maximally unbelievable. And in and out of the framed there were characters that faded into wild fantasy. Where they went, what they did and who they were, I cannot remember, but I do know that we enjoyed every comma that we pounded out on our respective keyboards.

So that was my stab at the Great Indian Novel. Maybe I will take a real one at some vestige of a book, like I said earlier, once I get up enough go to get up and get going on it. All I need is a shove from a not too gentle encouragement. Maybe a nine-figure contract from a publisher?