Booking a hack

Every profession has its occupational hazards. Sportsmen who make their living from rackets tend to develop tennis elbows. Those who mop and sweep one apartment after the other are prone to housemaid's knee. Garbage collectors are not used to looking up while astronomers lose focus on anything below sky-level. And newspaper journalists keep getting asked when they are going to write books even though much of what they scribble has a shelf life of 24 hours.
"When are you writing a book?" is a question which i have never been able to get away from, not even when i confess that a garden variety journalist who covered commodities in general and coffee in particular need not be the next Tolstoy, Shakespeare or Wodehouse.Tolstoy's vision of conflict and tranquillity ran into 1,267 pages even when published under the brief title of War and Peace. My vision, if it can be called that, runs into a few hundred words at the most and almost every article i write has to be padded to meet the required length.
Despite living in an era when the aristocracy patronised playwrights and poets, Shakespeare could make the lives and loves of kings, queens and dukes fascinating for the common man — to an extent where his plays were compulsive viewing though they were staged in 16th-century England where item numbers like the Elizabethan equivalent of 'Munni badnaam hui' and 'Sheila ki jawani' could only be performed by men dressed in women's clothes. "The play's the thing" and "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote. For me, the word 'Play' is something articulated by the umpire when he wants the day's cricket to begin.
Wodehouse pre-empted the possibility of a bloody revolution in 20 {+t} {+h} century England by showing up the aristocrats as upper-class twits who should be laughed at and were not worth the trouble and effort required to guillotine them. My attempts at humour have always had to be prefaced with a brief message that what follows next is meant to be funny.
However, the option of pulp fiction is always there. The only problem is that a journalist who writes pulp fiction leaves himself open to the query of whether what appears in the newspaper under his byline is fact. Retired journalists do not have that problem and their published pulp fiction could even have titillation value, especially if their novels are set in a contemporary corporate or political milieu. The reader could identify the leaders and tycoons in the book with real politicians and industrialists despite the standard disclaimer at the beginning that none of the characters has anything to do with any person alive or dead and that any resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental. And with not just the polity but the corporate world being polarised, there is always scope for a book to be converted into a controversial movie which could further enhance the hack's claim to be an author, especially if the Bollywood version stars one of the four Khans.
The other alternative is to be written about. In his book India — A Million Mutinies Now, V S Naipaul immortalised quite a few Indian journalists while chronicling the insights he had acquired while travelling through a country he had earlier perceived as An Area Of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation. Those who haven't been written about can always claim to be working on the great Indian novel, not to be confused with The Great Indian Novel penned by Shashi Tharoor, the brilliant student who became the United Nations' under-secretary general, who became India's minister of state for external affairs, who became a Page 3 celebrity. And if that sounds like actor Russell Crowe's Maximus — the general who became a slave who became a gladiator who defied the emperor — all one can say is that any resemblance to anyone in ancient Rome is purely coincidental!