Armageddon of 2019, Redux

I seem to have inadvertently become famous.

Let me explain.

A little over three years ago, I wrote a speculative story about a war between India and Pakistan I predicted would take place in 2019. If you haven’t read it already, you can either click here...

<----------------- or look to the left of the page where it’s right on top of the list of popular posts, and where it seems determined to stay for all time to come.

In fact, at this point I strongly suggest you read it, if you haven’t already, so you know what it is that I thought might happen if India and Pakistan went to war.

It’s a story that’s got me a lot of vituperation, including multiple threats of violence and a couple desiring my death. All, without exception, of these threats were from anonymous persons purporting to be Indian patriots, that is, Hindunazis. I’m fairly certain not one of these gentlemen ever put on a uniform, or has any intention of putting on a uniform and laying his life on the line. For Hindunazis, the keyboard is their weapon and shield, the only thing that gives some validity to their lives.

But even then, a lot of people seem unable to differentiate between fact and fiction, to the extent that I’ve had people asking whether this actually happened. And Arsalan Ghumman, whom I’ve given a role in the story, told me that a Pakistani military person of his acquaintance informed him that this story was written by an Indian intelligence agency (RAW) “element”. Both of us had a good laugh, though it wasn’t funny.  

Yes, you imbeciles, it is a story. It is as much a story as the vainglorious crap you might prefer to read with Ramboesque Indian supersoldiers massacring evil Pakistani terrorists. Only it’s not fantasy, and if it doesn’t fit into your comfort zone, too bad. Nobody put a nuclear bomb to your head and made you read it.

Do I think India and Pakistan might actually go to nuclear war? No. But if India and Pakistan did go to full scale war, it could not, in my opinion, stop short of going nuclear. The reason is simple. In the far north, the frontier along the divided state of Kashmir is mountainous and heavily fortified on both sides. There is no way an Indian attack across the frontier there would achieve anything. Next is Punjab, which is also heavily fortified (I read of one Indian defence account which called the Pakistani fortifications “mind boggling”) . Any Indian attempt to attack there would be doomed. The southern end of the frontier, in Gujarat, is marshy and unsuitable for large scale troop movement. The only place where any Indian offensive has a good chance of success is in the central sector, where the Thar Desert lies across both countries. An offensive across this desert could cut Pakistan in two.

Pakistan is well aware of that possibility, and has prepared by mounting tactical nuclear weapons on short range battlefield missiles, to be used on its own territory. Those missiles essentially make any major Indian offensive impossible, and India cannot counter in the same way because it has no tactical nuclear weapons. It’s threatened to retaliate by nuking Pakistani cities, which is basically the only option open to it. And in that case, Pakistan, which has many more and likely better nuclear weapons than India, can do exactly the same. And then India will suffer massively because almost all of its industrial and economic centres are concentrated in the north and west of the country, within easy rage of Pakistani missiles and aircraft. Modi’s own home state, Gujarat, which is the westernmost Indian province, especially wouldn’t stand a chance.

No, a full scale war is not going to happen. But that doesn’t mean one can’t write speculative fiction warning of the consequences if it did.

[As I write this, I heard of the Indian government claiming it had conducted “surgical strikes” on “terrorist camps” in Pakistani Kashmir. I do not believe one single, solitary word of it, and anyone who does needs a brain transplant. The story is an obvious fabrication by the Modi regime to placate its right wing constituency and claim that it “defends the nation”.]

A few days ago, I discovered that a Pakistani television channel had done a programme based on my story. It’s basically a narration of my story in Urdu, with visuals added, mostly from films depicting the bombing of Hiroshima. It does compress things a lot and makes some errors, but these are relatively minor, not even worth discussing here. The thing is, someone read the story and thought it important enough to make a programme on it. And they did it not as entertainment, but as a plea for peace.

Here is the video:

It is significant that it’s the “warmongering” Pakistanis, who, according to one person who saw fit to comment on my story, only want their “72 virgins”, are the ones who used my story to make a plea for peace, while my allegedly “peace loving” Indian compatriots call anyone who wants peace a “commie traitor” or – as per one Twitter feed – “pro-Paki doves.” It is absolutely no surprise to me, though it may be to some people. India pretends to be peaceful, but it’s a hyper violent country with an enormous chip on its shoulder, which wishes it was a great power and reacts violently to reminders that it is not.

No, the Pakistani channel didn’t ask for my permission to make the programme, though they did show my photo and name. They should have asked, but I won’t make a big fuss on the point.

If it helps give some idiots a new perspective, it will be worth it.

Fidayeen He Wrote

A couple of days ago I got an email from a young lady whom I'll call ZA. This is what she wanted to know:

Mr. Purkayastha, 

I'm ZA, in my first year doing undergraduate degree in Sociology in ******** College, New Delhi. As part of the first project assigned to us, we were asked to do a book review on any fiction/non-fiction and sociologically analyse it. I chose Fidayeen, which I found to be super interesting. I feel it's a book that must be read by more people, especially in the present context. 

My question of clarification is very much simple, sir. It is, "What made you write Fidayeen? Or what was the context that led you to its writing?" 

I hope my polite inquiry is genuine, as it's not easy and takes a lot of courage to write on a topic so controversial.

Expecting your reply soon, as the deadline to submit the project is very much near.

Best Regards

ZA

BA(Hons) Sociology, ****** College, New Delhi

As some of you may or may not remember, I wrote this book:

And as it happens I got an award for it:

I thought you might also like to know what made me tick when I wrote this. If you don’t, then don’t read further.

This is how I replied (slightly edited to remove identifiable information and spoilers):

Hi, Ms A.

I’m glad you liked the book. I’ve not much idea what a “sociological analysis” is, but I’ll be waiting eagerly to read your review.

You ask what made me write it. Now, I think you’ll understand well enough from reading it that I’m not a “nationalist” or a conventional “patriot”; I do not believe that everything a country does is fine only because one happens to have been born in it. Especially in regard to Kashmir, I’ve found the situation very troubling on many levels.

Back in 1989 – this will likely have been long before you were born – I was a student in Lucknow when the Kashmir rebellion broke out. Within a matter of weeks, the Kashmir valley had virtually gone out of control. My classmates pulled a publicity stunt of signing letters in their blood and sending it to the prime minister of the day – I think it was just after Vishwanath Pratap Singh had taken office – pledging to “give their blood for Kashmir”. It was an absurd publicity stunt, and of course not one of them ever actually joined the army.

It was around the same time that a friend of my uncle’s, who was at that time a lieutenant colonel in the army (he had earlier fought in Sri Lanka and been wounded by an LTTE grenade) was posted to Kashmir and saw some combat there. I recall meeting him in 1991 or 2 when I was home on holiday and so was he. He showed me photos of his deployment to Kashmir, including pictures of combat, and gave me detailed descriptions of some battles. You remember the battle in the village where Mushtaq and the others are in the house, and then one of them was hiding in a pipe in the field? That’s an almost exact retelling of one of the episodes he’d told me about. He also told me that the army actually did mistreat Kashmiris very badly, and that most of the allegations about the army murdering civilians and torturing prisoners were based on fact.

So at that time I was already deeply interested in Kashmir. I was also not ignorant of military and militant matters – there was an insurgency on in this state at that time, under the terrorist Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) which has now been virtually wiped out but was then very strong. In 2001 I was 50 metres from an HNLC attack in which five people were killed. My first book, Rainbow’s End, was a fictional account of the HNLC insurgency. So I already had a good idea of how it feels like to live in the middle of terrorism and civil conflict.

Around this time I also read several books on Kashmiri insurgency, especially Manoj Joshi’s Lost Rebellion, which is a detailed history of the Kashmiri rebellion from the start in 1989 to the late 90s, and Death of Dreams by Aditya Sinha, which is the authorised biography of the militant leader turned politician Firdous Syed Baba. Both these books gave me a detailed historical and personal insight into the whole Kashmir conflict which I might otherwise not have got, including the machinations on both the Indian and Pakistani sides.

Around that time, the mid 2000s, the first fidayeen attacks started in Kashmir, targeting army and CRPF or BSF camps. This was, of course, not a new tactic; the Japanese used kamikaze attacks in World War II and I’d read a lot about them. Also, suicidal mass attacks had been carried out by the Chechens in Russia in 2001 in Moscow and 2004 in Beslan. But the idea of a small force of two or three men penetrating a military establishment was new to India then. And it was fascinating.

Right at this point I’d like to say something: just as I do not consider kamikaze pilots cowards, I do not consider fidayeen attackers cowards. In fact, and this is without taking into account their aims, I consider them extremely brave people. Unlike those who pack explosives into a car and set them off in marketplaces, fidayeen attackers quite literally sacrifice their lives for what they believe in. And this, obviously, raised the question of why they should do this. What would make a normal human being give up his hopes and dreams and his family to go off on an enterprise which would inevitably result in his death? What is in this belief system that makes them feel that their lives are less important than fulfilling whatever mission it is that they are on?

At this point I was not planning to write any book on fidayeen. However, I was reading on them, all I could, and I kept newspaper clippings and website bookmarks which threw any light on them at all that I found. This was alongside other things I read up on, and to this day I read up on multiple topics that I find fascinating, on which I might or might not write something in future.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with orkut.com. It’s now gone, but in the period I’m talking about – approximately 2003-7 – it was extremely popular, not as much as Facebook is today, but still very important as the first great social network. I met and became friends with several Pakistanis there, some of whom were extreme religious fundamentalists. They gave me a good deal of insight into their thinking, though I was only vaguely planning a book at that point and I had nothing concrete in mind.

Then, around 2007, I wrote a story which I posted on multiply.com – another wonderful site which is now gone. It was only a little story, and it was about a boy called Ali in Kashmir who was lame and sitting in a park when he was approached by the narrator. The narrator gets friendly with Ali, asks him questions, and Ali tells him that his sister is engaged to a militant who visits her in the evenings. At the end of the story it’s revealed that the narrator is an Indian intelligence agent and that the whole idea was to lay a trap for the militant. The story wasn’t much but it got a lot of favourable comment from readers, who asked for more stories on Kashmir. I then wrote another one of a small group of militants coming at night into a village because the mother of one of their members lived there. She hadn’t seen him for years but they could only spend a couple of hours before they had to go again. This too was very popular with the readers and it told me that I was capable of, at the least, writing a book on Kashmir. And that was the point when I seriously started thinking about it.

Right away, I realised that the story was much more than just the fidayeen. They had a context in which they operated, the situation in Kashmir; they didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s pointless to just blame them on Pakistan. It was India which created the situation in which they could appear, and if the source was Pakistan, it was still India’s fault for creating the circumstances under which Pakistan could take advantage of the situation. The context, then, included India and the Kashmiri people, and the people included, in turn, the Kashmiri militants. They, strangely enough, did not conduct fidayeen operations, giving their lives for the cause – their cause – while the foreign militants did. This was also very interesting, and required a lot more plot development, including tracing the different psychologies of the two groups. At that point the idea of contrasting two militants – Mushtaq and Abu Hassan – was born.

I did not, of course, choose one or the other of them as “good” or “evil”. I do not believe anyone is fully good or fully evil. I consider them both victims, as I do the Kashmiri people and the Indian soldiers who were sent to fight for it. My own thoughts about Kashmir are really irrelevant to the topic, because I am not Kashmiri, but if you want to know what I think it’s that the state should be given independence from both India and Pakistan. In one small part I mentioned a Kashmiri whose house Raja Bhattacharya was searching and who lectured him on Kashmir. That’s more or less what I think, but as I said it’s not relevant.

Nor was I ever going to write a stupid action book like the Cobra series. I detest action books, movies, and the shallow effort that goes into them. What I wanted, basically, was a fictionalised history of a facet of the Kashmiri insurgency, a little like what the Kenyan writer Meja Mwangi did in Carcase For Hounds about the Mau Mau revolution. I was only unsure if I was up to it.

At this time I wrote the first few chapters of Fidayeen and let it lie for a while. In the meantime I wrote another book – The Call Of The Khokkosh – which has nothing to do with militancy in any form. I may not ever have returned to Fidayeen because I had a bit of a writer’s block on it. My friend Sujay Panyadi (whom I mentioned in the dedication) kept nagging me to finish it, but I didn’t really think I would. I felt I couldn’t do it justice, and assumed that it probably would never get published anyway.

But then the Mumbai attacks of 2008 happened. I know Mumbai very well – it is my favourite Indian city – and also I suddenly found that I knew more about what was going on, due to my research, than the talking heads in the television studios. And afterwards I went right back to the book. I rewrote the chapters I’d written and started again from the start, and the more I wrote the easier it became to go on. At that time an ex classmate of mine who was then a major in the army was visiting town and he told me all about the Indian Army’s counter-terrorist protocols in Kashmir, which I’ve also described. In fact all the research fell into place.

Putting myself into the heads of Sabira, Nausheen, Mushtaq and Abu Hassan, Loveleen or Raja Bhattacharya was no problem at all. I’ve never had any trouble putting myself into the point of view of people with whom I have otherwise nothing in common. I have written stories from the points of view, among others, of a Nazi concentration camp commander, a murderous Zionist settler in Occupied Palestine, at least three separate ISIS men (one of those stories is a novella length detective story) and Moby Dick (the whale). Once I’d done the research, knew what the background information was like, the story itself came easily.

In the end I finished writing the whole book in less than a month – 25 or 26 days I think – and then discovered that I couldn’t find a publisher to save my life. I’ve talked about that on the blog article you read, I think – it was only in 2015 that a publisher could be found brave enough to take it on. I was on the verge of just putting the whole thing online at that point. Now I am researching for a planned sequel called The Black Flag which will bring back ... (names deleted to avoid spoilers) ... and other survivors of the first book, and which will revolve around ISIS trying to infiltrate the Kashmiri insurgency. I will almost certainly be writing it next year. Publication, though, I don’t know.

I hope this account of mine is helpful...As far as your comment about “courage” goes, I don’t think I am particularly courageous. It was a topic that needed to be written on. Someone had to do it. I did. That’s the way I think of it. As such, I’ve been attacked many times over the years for my opinions, including death threats, and if those didn’t shut me up criticism of this won’t.

If you have additional questions I’d be glad to answer them.

Regards.

[If she sends me the review I'll let you know.]

The Ending Story

There’s a special feeling to finishing writing a book. I don’t know how to express it, though I’ve felt it several times before.

The first book I wrote, eleven years ago, was Rainbow’s End. That was a monster effort, taking me a year and a half. I’d write in longhand first, and then after I’d got a few days’ worth of material ready, I’d shift to the desktop and rewrite at the same time as getting it on Word. It was a very time consuming process, not helped by the fact that I literally made every single first time author’s error, starting off with assuming that this was my one chance ever to write a book, so I should put in everything I could.

I still recall the day I finally completed it. I’d taken the day off work owing to the death of a relative. By that time I’d given up writing on paper first, and begun tapping away directly on the keyboard. I wrote all the morning and into the afternoon, and, suddenly, before I quite knew it, I was within striking range of finishing the whole thing. So I did.

I didn’t sleep for two days afterwards.

The act of finishing that book was so draining that I felt as though I had been scooped out from the inside. Now, elsewhere, I’ve described how, at that time, I was under the insane delusion that one had only to write a book in order to find a publisher. After all, that’s what publishers were for, right?

It took me two full years to acknowledge to myself that I was wrong.

Today, I am no longer proud of Rainbow’s End. It’s execrably overwritten, crammed with pointless subplots, and fairly stuffed with purple prose. I am not exactly broken hearted that it sank without a trace. Someday, if I’m ever famous enough for someone to ask me for a book, any book, I might totally rewrite...and drastically curtail...Rainbow’s End, and get it published. But until then, may it stay buried.

For a few years after the crushing disappointment of Rainbow’s End I wrote nothing in the way of long fiction. For a fairly long period I wrote nothing at all. And it was only after joining multiply.com (a wonderful website, now sadly murdered by corporate greed) did I start blogging, and then writing stories, again.

It was at some point during these years that I read a story by Lucius Shepard, The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule, about a gigantic buried dragon and an artist who sets out to murder it with paint. My reaction was instant – I hated, hated, hated every word of it. To this day, I hate it. And, somewhere in my mind, there rose a desire to write a story specifically as a Take That to Shepard.

It was somewhere during those years, too, that I saw a snippet of a film – I think it was The Neverending Story – which featured a laughing child atop a furry flying beast. The two ideas came together in my mind to make a short story – it was all of some 5000 words long – called Dragonsdawn. I wrote it, exorcised my bile, and thought I’d forget about it.

                                            Yes, this was it.                                  [ Image Source]

Only my readers didn’t. My readers, especially one young lady, insisted on knowing what happened next. And so, against my better judgement, I wrote a sequel. And in order to justify that sequel, I had to expand the original story to about double its length.

And of course that sequel raised the demand for another...

To date I have written four novels. I have already spoken of Rainbow’s End. That was planned from the start, as was my third novel, Fidayeen. In between I wrote The Call Of The Khokkosh – a lighthearted little book of which I’m quite fond, and which took all of three weeks to write, from start to finish. That, too, started with what I imagined would be a one-off short story, and then gathered additional chapters due to reader demand. And, that, too, took like forever before it found anyone willing to publish it.

And when that was over, I remember sitting back from my computer with a feeling of being emptied –I’d written a chapter a day, every day, for three weeks, and I needed the rest. But I’d not worked on the book for nearly as long as Rainbow’s End, and I had correspondingly less of a reaction of feeling drained when I finished it.

Fidayeen was a different matter altogether. This was a book I had worked hard – very hard – over. I’d researched everything I could, and actually kept the first draft sitting in my computer for years...years!...while I decided whether I should continue it. By then I’d no illusions left about publishers, and the repeated heartbreak of pro forma rejection notices wasn’t something I was willing to put up with anymore. But unfinished business has a way of preying on one’s mind, and unfinished business about a topic that’s dear to your heart, much more. At that time I’d no way of knowing it would be my big break.

So I finished Fidayeen, and as I expected, all I got was rejection notices. I remember telling a friend then that I’d never again write anything expecting or hoping for it to be published; I’d rather put it all online because then at least it would be read. But when I finished it, once again, I felt drained and exhausted.

But the next day I was back at my keyboard, writing.

Today – this morning – I finished writing The Day Of The Dragon, which began merely as a fit of pique against an author who’d never, ever, read it. This is the first time I have ever written anything (anything at all) with the clear knowledge that it would be published, because, as I said, my publisher has taken it on, in advance, sight unseen. I am pleased with the results, with my account of the adventures of Batali and the dragon Yamond, but whether it will be popular with readers...well, time will tell.

But what are my feelings now? Do I feel drained? No. I am glad to get this one over with, and I hope it does well with readers. But I’m now thinking of the next two books.

My next novel to go to a publisher will be The Chronicles of Chheechkaduni, which is actually a series of linked stories featuring the adventures of the titular, and very conceited, character...which also grew out of what was intended to be a one-off short story and then caved in to readers’ demands. I’ve already written eleven of the stories. I intend to do a baker’s dozen, and in all likelihood future volumes as well. But since it won’t be a real novel, just stories written over a period of time, I doubt I’d react to it as a novel, even if everyone else might.

So my next writing project- the next full novel – will be the sequel to Fidayeen, tentatively titled Black Flag. I did not intend a sequel. But apparently everyone else expects one. And, reading the book, it seems to me that I apparently had expected to write a sequel as well, given the number of characters whose fate I left uncertain.

And, of course, Kashmir has not been resolved, and maybe never will.

So...

What's Going On

I have been preparing my next book (The Day Of The Dragon) for publication. I actually wrote this as a four part series of stories before Fidayeen, and naïvely thought all I had to do was format it into chapters to turn it into a novel. A rereading soon showed that:

1. My writing style has changed almost unrecognisably over the years, and what I wrote then makes me cringe now. 

2. Four middle-length stories (each about 15000 words on average) aren't nearly long enough to make a proper book, and there are several plot gaps that need to be filled in.

3. While my publisher has accepted this book sight unseen, without even asking for a plot synopsis (thereby earning my gratitude), I do feel duty bound to give him a book that's of a standard to make me happy.

Together this means I'm being forced to rewrite this from the ground up though - unlike when I rewrote Fidayeen, totally changing the fate of one very important character - I'm not going to change the basic plot in any way.

All in all this means that my primary writing for the next month or so will focus on this project. I'll do a cartoon or a story once in a while in between. Like this one, which is the only comment I shall make on recent events in you know where:

The Vital Difference

Note to Readers

As per the suggestion of friend and reader Michael WME, yesterday's story has been submitted to the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction. As such, I have removed it from the blog. If Asimov's Science Fiction rejects it, I shall reinstate it here on the blog. If it does accept it, well...wish me luck.

Personal stuff

Just an update for readers:

I've been overworked and exhausted, but that's not the reason I've not written anything the last few days. That's because

1. My laptop was  in for repair.....again.

2. I have been reevaluating my self-worth. It seems to me that I'm measuring myself by the amount I'm writing and as such I've been forcing myself to keep writing even when I need to do other things for my own good, like read or sleep. Writing has become a kind of substitute for having a life, and simply put it can't go on this way. I cannot keep on obsessively pouring out words  without going insane, so I need to force myself to back away a little. The obsessive writing isn't good for quality either. I deleted my last story after finishing it, without posting.

3. I've drastically reduced my time online. People are making me, quite literally, nauseated. The process of dumbing down seems to be accelerating to landslide levels. I've reduced my Blogspot reading list by half as a consequence.

I'll be back to writing in a day or two. 

Fidayeen is now on Amazon.com

Click here, and please spread the word! Make me famous!

Update on Fidayeen

As some of you may possibly be aware, a publisher recently saw fit to inflict a novel written by me on the world. This is called Fidayeen, and on 24^th January I was in Lucknow for the official release.

Here are a few pictures:

On the 21^st February, Fidayeen won the Best Fiction Award at Lit O Fest 2016, Mumbai. I wasn’t there in person, but here’s a picture anyway.   

Maybe the media will finally now take notice of the fact that I exist...but I won’t hold my breath.

Now, I didn’t write this article just to boast. Fidayeen operations – in which a small number of attackers infiltrate a military base or some other installation, and keep fighting till they’re overwhelmed – are, after a hiatus of several years, picking up in number once again in Kashmir. They’re highly effective in that they force the security forces to tie down troops in protecting their own bases, making it more difficult to control the cities and countryside.

This is important because, in today’s Hindunazistan, where majoritarian fascism is the way this government rolls, the people of Kashmir (who spent a decade slowly returning to a semblance of a modus vivendi with India) are once again being made to feel like barely tolerated foreign interlopers. Separatism, which was dying out, is picking up again. 

See, here’s the problem – you can, possibly, keep a people forcibly crushed down and subjugated by military force...for a while. But, unless you can actually convince the people that their best interests lie in accepting your rule in return for whatever quid pro quo you can provide, they’ll never be yours. You’ll always be an outside oppressor, holding them down with main force.

Well, so what? So this – sooner or later, something is going to happen which will make it impossible to hold them down any longer. It may be economic collapse, defeat in a war, famine or internal turmoil, or a combination thereof; but history shows definitely that all nations go through cycles, and, increasingly, as resources run out and global warming disrupts agriculture, these cycles can be expected to become more frequent and violent. Sooner or later, India will be unable to hold down Kashmir by force any longer.

At that point, what happens will depend on the attitude of the Kashmiris towards India. If India is interested in keeping the (part of the) province – for whatever reason – it had better be able to make the Kashmiris feel wanted. Otherwise, its loss is inevitable. And what will India do then? Flatten the mountains of Kashmir with nuclear weapons?

Yeah, right.

Of course, like all other advice, it’ll all fall on deaf ears.

They don’t call ‘em Hindunazis for nothing. 

Note: Fidayeen should be available on Amazon.com (as opposed to Amazon.in, where it already is) within the week.

The Great Big Kashmir Novel Extravaganza: Fidayeen!

Hey guys and dis-guys.

Some time ago, if you recall, I'd said that I had written a novel called Fidayeen, on the separatist insurgency in Kashmir? What, you don't recall it? Well, you can refresh your memory here.

Well, guess what? It is now available for purchase.

I know, I know. You aren't interested in books, or while you're all right with a 3000-word short story, you don't have the patience to wade through a nearly 300-page-long novel. I understand.

However, what about your friends, relatives, and enemies, huh? What if they want to read a 300-page novel on Kashmir and you're depriving them of the opportunity? Could you live with yourself if you did that? Huh? Huh?

[Angry panting sounds as Bill wipes away furious tears.]

Oh, right, you're all willing to buy it now. How sweet of you. Sincerely. I appreciate it.

So where can you buy it?

In India, it is available on:

Amazon (India)

Shop Clues

Flipkart 

Pustak Mandi

Or, you know, you can just go downtown and buy it in the book store. They actually still do exist.

I think.

If you're an overseas prospective buyer, don't despair! You can get it direct from the publisher, Amresh Singh of Panther House Publications. Here are the contact details, which involve all the effort of tapping away at a keyboard for a minute or so:

Email him at itsamreshsmsm@gmail.com

or

 WhatsApp him at +918419850445


And then bloody well read it and review it. It's...the least you can do, and it'll give you an excuse for a blog article too.

Next weekend I should, unless the skies fall - or, you know, I get droned - be in Lucknow to formally release the book. Photos will be, hopefully, taken, and posted here, and you will be expected to see them too.

Gah! What more I have to do to get attention around here - dance naked but for an ISIS flag?

No, that's too much like cruel and unusual punishment, even if you all deserve it. And don't deny that you do.

Cover for Fidayeen

I told you a while back that I've finally found a publisher for my Kashmir terrorism story. Here's the cover. Not exactly what I wanted but I'm assured that it will be marketable.

Kind of an important annnouncement

OK, everyone, I have something to say.

A few years ago I wrote a novel on the insurgency in Kashmir, Fidayeen. It took me a while, with a break of a couple of years in between, after which I dumped most of the first draft and changed a lot of things, including the fates of the main characters.

Then I went around looking for a publisher. Although by this time – circa 2010 – I’d realised that I was never going to get famous, and that most publishers were essentially rip-off artists, I had hoped that – Kashmir being rather a hot topic in the world of Indian novels – it would get some interest.

Of course, I was soon disabused. The publishers were more than happy to glut the market with badly-written Tom Clancy rip-offs, but anything in my style was apparently mot unwelcome. You know, a rejection of militarism and jingoism, and trying to see both sides of the problem.

I wonder why.

Anyway, to my own surprise I’ve finally found a publisher. It’s a new publishing house, just founded this year, 2015, and coincidentally from Lucknow, where I lived for years. It’s probably because it’s so new that it had the cojones to pick up the book, unlike the big boys. When you’re young you take risks. You know how it is.

It is hoped that it'll see the light of day fairly soon. The publication will begin with a print edition followed in four months by an ebook and in eight months by an audiobook. 

What's it about? Well, it describes a twenty four hour period in the lives of certain people in Kashmir sometime in the mid 2000s, when the insurgency was still at its height, though the indigenous Kashmiri part had almost completely been stamped out. Chief among these certain people are:

1. Mushtaq, alias Commander Azim, a Kashmiri rebel against Indian rule.
2. Sabira, his mother, and Nausheen, his sister.
3. Raja Bhattacharya, an Indian Army counter insurgency commander.
4. Abu Hassan, a Fidayeen suicide attacker.

The Kashmir rebellion, a tragedy that doomed a generation, is still not over. I thought it needed some more sensitive handling than vainglorious Ramboist rubbish. We’ll see if I succeeded.

The next step is cover design selection and so on. I am not going with the stereotypical “action book” cover. I’ll post various possibilities as the publisher presents them to me. I’ve passed on my ideas.

I’ll keep you all informed of what happens as it happens.

Once Again on Writing

Yes. I am about to bore you again.

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Once upon a time, back when I was in school, I read an essay in English Literature class. I don’t recall much about it – there were one hell of a lot of essays we’d had to read, some of which were utterly awful, and most of which I was more than glad to forget, but I remember that this one was about writing. And the one sentence I recall most clearly is this:

“Some books are unjustly forgotten; none are unjustly remembered.”

This was, you can safely assume, written in the era before marketing campaigns, social media promotion, and the kind of publishing industry which makes its money out of authors and not the books they sell. It was written in the era before content went to hell and packaging was all that mattered.

I know exactly what I am talking about.

Now, it may sound like boasting, but is the exact and literal truth: I am a pretty good writer. There are plenty of things I can’t do – so many that I have even written an article about some of them – but I can write. And those of you who have been reading me for a while have been kind enough to say so, on more than one occasion.

So, I should be a well known and successful writer, shouldn’t I? You’d guess so, right?

Guess again.

Let me say it once and for all: good writing is not easy. The writer has to come up with plots that are at least relatively original, with characters who are, in the context of the tale, believable, and writing that can’t either be bland or descend into the morass of purple prose. And all this has to be done in a terse enough format to keep reader attention, which is all too prone to wandering off towards a TV show or Fakebook. And then it requires revision and editing to iron out plot holes and streamline the story, which takes even more effort.

In other words, writing is a bloody hard job. It isn’t an enlarged version of What I Did On My Vacation that one wrote in school to satisfy the teacher.

And it’s not just this, either. Writing, actually, takes time. It takes one hell of a lot of time, much greater than it takes to read. And where does this time come from? Unless he or she belongs to one of the vanishing breed of full-time authors, the author steals this time from himself or herself – the time he or she would normally spend in such normal activities as going out with friends, reading, resting, or sleeping (or sleeping with someone, come to that). A dedicated writer is someone with no social life, no spare time, no close friends – unless he or she is extremely lucky, and they are very supportive – and a dedication to the writing that has long passed the stage of being healthy and descended into a cross between an obsession and an addiction. You write not because you want to, but because unless you write, you can't breathe or eat or sleep without being wracked by the guilt of not writing.

Again, I know whereof I speak.

So, after all this, when one manages to turn out something which – by any standards one applies – ought to count as good, solid work, even if not genius-level, one ought to be able to sell it, right? Publishers ought to compete with each other for it, and make enough of a name for the author that he could think of chucking the day job he despises and take to writing full time? Right?

You know the answer.

All right, I’ll admit, I’m embittered and disillusioned. It took time for me to acknowledge, even to myself, that I would never become famous. It took time to realise that I could write well, even excellently, but I would always belong to that category of authors who remain “unjustly forgotten”.

But I am human, and I can’t suppress my anger when I see – as I’ve been seeing since I first began trying to get published, some eleven years ago – the kind of utter, undiluted, pure and concentrated bilge that is put out on the market by allegedly “mainstream” publishing houses. I have seen books put out by publishers who informed me that their fiction quota for the year was over – books so trite that not only could I have written them with my eyes closed, I would never have written them anyway because I would have been ashamed. I have seen formulaic, stale, rehashed tripe get famous because the author was “marketable” – had a pretty face and a good body, maybe, or was already well known as an ad man or a minor celebrity. I have seen all that, and I have been angered and disheartened.

The culmination came a few weeks ago, when my novel on jihad terrorism in Kashmir, Fidayeen, which I’ve been trying to get published since 2009, was rejected once again. Apparently, it’s not “marketable”. Well, if being “marketable” consists of writing Bollywood-style action-movie trash with jingoistic plotlines and cardboard heroes, then I agree it’s not “marketable”. But I couldn’t live with myself if I wrote to fit the tastes of the “market”. I’m a writer, not a whore.

I wonder if Hemingway, for example, would have found a publisher today. Or Mark Twain. I don’t see anyone daring to touch Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, with its scathing anti-militarism, or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, come to that. But they’re perfectly happy to publish zombie trash or teenage vampire romances.

More and more often these days, I find myself wishing I could give up writing permanently. I’ve tried; more than once I’ve tried. Once I even managed a month or six weeks without writing a word. But as I said, it’s a cross between an addiction and an obsession; in the end I came crawling back to the keyboard again.

Ultimately, writers are not normal human beings.

At least not if you consider “normal” to include people like that woman who wrote, if you can call it writing, Fifty Shades Of Grey.    

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*This is the thousandth article to be posted on this blog. I would like to thank all the people who read what I have to say, even though, I’m sure, I end up rubbing you wrong sooner or later, in some way or other. Perhaps I kill off a character you liked a lot, or maybe I tell you that your favourite politician is a blood-soaked mass-murdering child-killer. But you keep on reading me.

Thank you, all.

The Great Big Horrorshow That Isn't

I had a rather strange experience last night.

This is not in itself strange. I keep having strange experiences. But this was enough out of the ordinary that I thought it worth mentioning.

I just finished reading The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 22, edited by Stephen Jones. It’s a yearly collection of the alleged best horror stories published in the magazines; this particular collection dated to 2010. 

I tend to buy collections of horror and science fiction stories for two reasons – to read for entertainment, and to read to find out what the competition is doing.

Usually, when I read these collections, I find that I say to myself that so-and-so is a story I could have done better myself, or a story that is so putrid that I wouldn’t have touched the idea at all. Usually, out of fifteen or twenty stories in the average collection, about six or seven would bring out that kind of reactin in me. But not this time.

No, this time, for the first time ever, every single damned story in a book is beneath my standards. I won't even say that I could write these stories with my eyes shut. I would be ashamed to write them at all.

I don’t mean to boast. I don’t even ask you to take me for my word. This blog contains, er, a few pieces of fiction written by me, as you may have noticed. This book, too, is available for purchase. Get hold of it, read it, and read my own stories, and compare them. Then draw your own conclusions.

I’ll be totally frank here – just one story in the entire book, City of the Dog by John Langan, came even close to something I would find minimally acceptable as a plot, and even then  it was badly overwritten and telegraphed its “surprise ending” by the first third of the story. As for the rest, vapid meandering through the minds of depressed and/or hallucinating characters, with no plot and no denouement, don’t qualify as stories. Nor do crudely-written zombie fiction or tales of things happening without explanation or resolution. 

I'll tell you the truth - I'd even prefer Stephen King to these, and you know what I think of him.

Is that the best horror writing out there? I find it hard to believe. Even a read through the net shows much, much better material, often by rank amateurs like myself.

But you know the real horror in this?

These people have their stories in a book called Best New Horror. I, and other horror writers you can read on the net whose works are infinitely superior, don’t.

On that level, it succeeds as horror quite well, thank you very much.   

Just a reminder to my readers

...to those of you who have missed this post, that a lot of material I'll be posting here over the next weeks will be rescued writing from Multiply, since that site is going down as of 1st December. You don't actually have to read them all, but seeing as I thought they were worth salvaging, you just might want to.

Important message for my readers

To all my readers here on Blogspot: greetings.

Right, so after that somewhat ominous sentence has set the tone, let me assure you that I’m not about to conscript you into any private army or anything of the sort. I may be evil but I’m not that cruel. Yet.

No, what I wanted to tell you all was that I know you go out of your way to read the stuff I write and post, a lot of which is drivel (no, don't bother protesting; a lot of it is drivel, take it from me, and I am the guy who writes it). Your reading me, and your thoughtful and insightful comments, are the reason I feel any desire to continue to write, and I wanted you all to know that I appreciate it. Here’s how much I appreciate it: a lot.

A very, very, very great lot.

So by now you’ll probably be thinking I’m going to spring an announcement that it’s time for me to move on, sayonara, etc. No such luck. The opposite, in fact.

I am about to spring more drivel on you. In fact, I am going to drown you in drivel.

Muhahahahahaha.

OK, seriously, now, this is what:

Since December 2005, I’ve had a website on Multiply.com, where I’ve posted videos (including of metal music, my dogs, and myself goofing off), photographs, and over 2400 items of original writing. In the last year, though, there have been distinct signs that Multiply (which had changed hands a couple of times) was losing interest in social networking and blogging. Before, they used to “improve” the site at regular intervals (most of these “improvements” weren’t exactly helpful, but at least they were trying) and try out new features. But in recent months they’ve turned into a marketing site for Indonesia and the Philippines which only hosted blogs and networking on the side. Since no new blood was joining as old members dropped away, it was obviously only a matter of time till they pulled the plug.

Well, as of yesterday, the Multiply management announced (and that in a highly unprofessional manner, relying mainly on the grapevine for the word to go around) that they are closing their blogging and networking services on 1^st December. They claim that they want to concentrate on e-commerce, and they're excited about it. Fine, and all the best of luck to them (not really. I want them to crash and burn. Ha ha). Anyway, though they claim that they’ll provide some kind of migration tool for people who want to save their posts, I’m not holding my breath.

No, instead of asphyxiating on my own carbon dioxide, what I’m going to do is sift through those 2400 posts over the next few weeks. Some of it is pure rubbish, and I’ll discard it (in my early days on Multiply I’d write rants on traffic jams or the prickly labels on shirts, and I am not kidding about that). Some other stuff is simply outdated, like, oh, my thoughts on the judicial murder of Saddam Hussein or some bygone football world cup. Then there’s stuff which was so badly written as to be not worth the keeping. But there will be some worth saving, and even if it’s just five percent of the total, that still comes to over a hundred posts, and you lot are going to be forced to read them.

Shall we take time out for another Muhahahahaha?

Well, yes, I am going to continue my normal writing too; so don’t assume you get a holiday from that. But in the meantime I’ll be hunting for another social networking site (after all, this is hardly one) and I’m open to suggestions.

All right, you can run for cover now. You can run, but you can't hide. The deluge cometh. But that's what you get when you choose to read me.

It's your own damn fault.

Erratica

“His hard, throbbing manhood slipped easily into her warm, enfolding wetness, his eager yearning matching her ecstatic sighs. They moaned and arched together, their pleasure coming in waves, like the rhythm of the universe.”

All right, that was me. Now, again, this is me:

“His fuck pole pounded in and out of her love hole.”

I have this thing about erotic writing. Most of the time I can’t read it without getting intensely irritated.

The problem is that most erotic writing, actually, isn’t. There are some rare and precious exceptions, but those are precious because they are, damn it, so rare.

As for the rest:

At one end is the self-conscious coyness of the genre known as bodice-rippers, whose authors speak of a love which dare not, apparently, write its name. What the hell is wrong with these people? It’s like, they decide that they have to take the plunge and write about sex; then they stick a toe in the water, shiver, keep the toe in the water, and write from that level. Classic example: Jean M Auel’s Earth Children series, all but the first (and only readable) volume, The Clan Of The Cave Bear. That was a good book. From volume two, The Valley Of Horses, she seems to have run out of ideas and padded it out with “sex”. Not sex, mind you; I don’t have anything against sex. Just “sex.”

And on the other hand there’s porn. Which is porn.

Gah!