Marketing India
There are certain Indians who make you feel good about being a Bangladeshi, who give you a warm glow that despite all that razzmatazz and heavyweight tiffin boxes and big brains like Amartya, they too produce and consume their quota of trash. Shobhaa De is one of them. She is a writing phenomenon, whose books sell all over India, and in Pakistan too (where all the good and high society people fell over each other to fete her when she did a tour there not so many months back), and bring in a hefty chunk of change for her publishers Penguin India. Since I have never read any of her books, I only had a vague idea that she wrote romance novels. That's going by the perhaps less than solid evidence of having seen her on Zee TV a couple of times flaunting her cheekbones.
She was once a film journalist, and the style has stayed with her, as witness the writing in this collection of her articles titled Superstar India: From Incredible To Unstoppable? She picks a topic, any topic, Benazir Bhutto, her Brahmin childhood, old people, Dalits, cricket, NRIs, and dashes off her views. But she is most herself writing on her trips abroad, to Shanghai, London or Bangkok , which can at times be funny, but always is primed to showcase her as a tasteful, charming, older, discriminating crumpet. It is a lethally appetizing diet for the average middle-class English language reader, primarily women, running harried from day to endless day, since it provides, as opposed to the straight porn of romance novels, the more tangible, more 'real life' porn of the romance of the high life. Especially if mixed in with such musings as: "Hate creates votebanks. Tolerance doesn't. It's that simple." Underpinning all this is a not-so-subtle India boosting (witness the title, the big clue!) where the formula is to give the bad news first: Yes, yes, India is smelly with its terrible roads and lepers-beggars, and then the good news: So you think the West is so terrific with its tasteless ham-and-cheese sandwiches and East European migrant waiters with undecipherable accents? Then comes the clincher: So where would you be, in India with its silks and colours and raths, or over there somewhere?
In present day Manmohan Singh's India, with its trendy ads, its singles in 'swinging' Bangalore, its fashion world and Hindi soaps, it is Shobhaa De, not India, that is unstoppable. She's figured out how to market Brand India (40,000 copies hit the bookstores on the first day, which is a huge run for an English language book even in the Indian book market). If you're so inclined you'll enjoy the book.
I couldn't go beyond the first 50 pages, then I skimmed it, but only because the editor of this page said I had to submit a review. No thanks to him.
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