Bad books drive out good books

Some of you might remember a principle from your economics classes = 'Greshams law' - which says bad money drives out good money.

A similar thing seems to be happening with books today. Bad books drive out good books.

Let me explain.

The fall of Indian writing which can be traced back to 'The Inscrutable americans' by Anurag Mathur. This was the first simple language low IQ book about a horny Indian boy in USA, and it struck a chord with many first time readers, who were turned off by the depressing, turgid, self absorbed and unreadable prose from the 'serious' indian writers.

Anurag took it down the 'dumbing down' path and wrote a simple book for the less sophisticated crowd. . I had a discussion with R Sriram of Crossword on this, and he was very clear that this was because a much larger amount of people - the non serious readers - could read and enjoy this kind of book. This made this a huge hit with the college crowd in the nineties.

Among this college crowd was a wannabe litteraeur from  a corporate background - Chetan Bhagat.

 He sparked off a massive change in Indian publishing which will go down in history as Chetan Bhagats revolution.

Chetan wrote a book from the heart -'5.1 someone at IIT'. It was crappily written and plotted, but at least it was from the heart. It became an unexpected best seller, due to its easy paced language and identifiable characters. It fulfilled the basic need of written entertainment - it identified, it engrossed, it entertained. Rupa also played ball by launching at an incredible price of 95 rs - accessible to all. the average penguin book was about 200- 300 bucks.

A combination of factors - the uniqueness of the book, the zeitgiest of the times, the burgeoning college and young professional audience, the allure of the 'IIT' branding, the pricepoint, exploding word of mouth, all combined to make it the highest selling book in indian english history. BOOM. Never before had the publishing industry seen anything like this - it left the entire industry shell shocked.

It made enough money for an IIM A investment banker in Hongkong to leave his hugely paying job and come back to India to take up writing and gyaan baazi full time - that kind of money. The first indian book to be optioned for a movie.

It was a publishing and writing wet dream.

CB could see a good thing when he saw it, and using his management skills, he  identifying his target audience and writing for a large  populace - call center people in '1 night at a call centre' ,   Cricket and religion in '3 mistakes of my life' - intercaste marriages in '2 state' and the social revolution in '2020'  - all making him a juggernaut of the Indian writing scene in his thirties.

All this when the entire traditional reading, writing and publishing fraternity sneered at him. 'Pop writing' , they said, 'no substance'. Not a patch on Rushdie or Naipaul or Ghosh. A Justin Beiber of indian writing.

But hey - who the fuck cares? He was the king. He was selling. The masses loved him. and most importantly - people realised that this was the way to bypass the traditional literature scene completely. Screw the intellectual mofos and the elitist editors and reviewers.

People realised that you dont need to write good literature to be a success - you just need to be simple in your language and write about college, and price it cheap.

A shit storm of crap books ensued.

This lead to a range of writers writing about their college lives, and even a publisher who specialised only in such books -  a bengali owned firm called Srishti publications. Soon you had books on IIT, IIM, JNU, REC, Delhi college, architecture colleges - you name it.

These books made it big too -see these books in the flipkart best seller list 'Life is what you make it', 'I too had a love story', 'Horn ok pls' 'oh shit not again' 'you were my crush' etc etc. Walk into any shop and see the piles of these books.

So a number of people jump on the bandwagon with more such books with pathetic writing and plot, shoddy copyediting and overall book quality, and more newbie readers go for them. The book shop owner sees this and starts promoting these books in their stores at the expense of more traditional books - and the vicious circle continues, finally resulting in a bookshop having only crappy bestsellers, and a generation of readers who have grown up reading only crappy books and thus have no taste whatsoever.

A normal wellwritten traditional type of book has very little chance of success now, because no one will want to take the effort of reading it, therefore Book shops wont stock it, therefore the publisher will not be able to afford to publicise it, and therefore it wont sell. Therefore the bookshop wont stock it. therefore the publisher will not print it. therefore, such books will not be available at all.


The cycle is complete. The bad book has driven out the good book.