The whodunits don?t matter

Now the books are off the shelves, all deals are off, and the Kaavya Viswanathan saga appears to be over, at least for now.

Now the books are off the shelves, all deals are off, and the Kaavya Viswanathan saga appears to be over, at least for now. Unless, of course, she decides to come clean (on a quiet, private platform like, say, Oprah) and reveal who exactly compiled the list of quotable passages from various books and stuck them into Opal Mehta.

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Did she do it while the dozens of other people involved in making the book turned a blind eye? Or was it done for her while she played with half a million dollars, blissfully unaware that this wasn’t the same thing as having an Ivy League application packager do up her Harvard essays? That’s one revelation that would open up truckloads of worm cans.

For me, the most interesting aspect of Kaavyagate was the sinister presence of the book packagers, those shadowy figures in the background, spinning their turntables and churning out novels, making them mass audience-friendly, multi-media-franchise-friendly and bigger, better, broader brands.

I remember, while in junior school, being hugely disappointed when I found that the Hardy Boys were created not by a dashing gentleman named Franklin W. Dixon, but by nameless drones in Edward Stratemeyer’s publishing sweatshops. I didn’t read any more, not as part of some complicated form of protest against exploitation of writers, because I was about eight at the time, but because these had become books which were, in some way, wrong.

Today, I’d like to think that the books I read are all written by the people whose names are on the cover. And I’d like to think that most successful books in the world today are written by their authors — though it’s widely speculated that a lot of really famous writers get their work done by teams of researchers and unknown writers and editors who can mimic their styles properly. Books that are clearly ghostwritten aren’t so much of a problem. I mean, no matter how big a fan you might be of pornstar Jenna Jameson, it’s probable that her fascinating life could be more ably chronicled by someone else. Footballer Wayne Rooney, a dashing young man whose literary background probably consists of signing lots of huge contracts (which makes him a role model for writers all over the world, really) recently got a multi-million pound deal for a series of books, which will be written by well-known celebrity ‘autobiography’ ghostwriter Hunter Davies. This is public knowledge. It’s not nice, clearly, but at least it’s honest. Books will sell more if their authors are known stars. But the real writer gets to take some credit as well.

People will read ghostwritten work for its entertainment value, even if they know it’s fake — the global publishing industry has a long and occasionally glorious history of open ghostwriting, no doubt drawing some inspiration from that other hub of intellectualism and wit, professional wrestling, where millions of red-blooded fans follow the exploits of their stars everyday while knowing fully well the matches are staged. Pretending the book is written by someone who hasn’t really written it, on the other hand, is just a huge insult to the collective intelligence of readers. And if you plagiarise existing work by committee, as in the Kaavya fiasco, it’s arrogance to the point of stupidity, and the fact that it was fans outside the industry who brought the whole thing crashing down indicates there’s some justice left in the world.

Part of the reason why everybody and their uncle got so involved with Kaavyagate was that for a lot of people who read, a book is the only form of popular art/entertainment with industrial/institutional backing where you can still hope to find an individual’s voice, not a presentation made by a group of people, which is what even the best films are.

We live in a world where few people can remember a time when popular musicians had voices of their own, wrote their own songs and weren’t just pretty faces pulled in by music corporations after every other aspect of the music had been prefabricated or outsourced elsewhere, to finish the package that would appeal to the appropriate segment

of the market. Where even protest in music has gone corporate, with rock and rap stars being selected in reality TV shows, and then further packaged to target the dissatisfied segment of the viewer spectrum — and throughout the entire process, millions of people actually sit and applaud as the conveyor belt moves on.

We celebrate the packaging, the fine-tuning, the completely commercial considerations that create our idols. The packaging of mainstream movies is, of course, a universe within itself. Which is why the people to watch in both these industries abroad are no longer the stars, but the Svengalis behind the scenes, who catapult unknowns to stardom, but own their lives in the process.

In India, we don’t get to see too much of the power mechanisms that shape our own very powerful entertainment industries. Since we haven’t even evolved to the point where we have a) called in pest control experts to remove the underworld, b) understood that it’s wrong to blatantly copy other peoples’ work from start to finish, it’s unlikely to expect, for several years, a degree of openness which would allow anyone outside our entertainment industry to have any idea who the real puppeteers are.

Kaavyagate is shut for now, and everyone I know who’s still opening Opal is doing it to try find more passages from other books and get their moment in the sun, to get some amusement out of being cheated into buying the book. Sure, plagiarism is evil and must be punished. But there’s more to it. To find that your fresh, original new voice was not fresh all along is a betrayal of your trust. But to find that your fresh, original voice was prefabricated by a bunch of suits is like finding a football team in your girlfriend’s closet.