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Money makes the media go around!

I told the girl who interviewed me last week in Bombay that I had no plans to distribute large sums of money to any individual or organisation. I said I'd like to support theatre and other Indian playwrights in some way, but not by throwing money about like a demented popcorn machine. On the 28th of April, the next day, according to my informants in Bombay, a report appeared in Mid-day claiming that I had donated Rs 8.4 million to the cause of theatre in India!

Even if I wanted to, I am not free to spend the money I received from the Onassis Foundation until my tax liability is assessed. And, secondly, money requires careful and thoughtful consideration before it can be disbursed. Or else it gets stuck in some unscrupulous person's pocket. The fact that Mid-day reported the exact opposite of what I said is just a more bizarre example of a general phenomenon: I find I cannot make myself understood to reporters. The harder I struggle to make simple statements, the less sense I make when I am quoted in the press.

According to my nephew, a journalist with a leading business magazine, the reason for this is that money makes the media behave like sharks at a blood-banquet. Dangle a juicy sum of money in press-infested waters, he says, and before you know it, words will fly, private lives get savaged, and innocent reputations float belly-up in a tossing sea of disinformation.

He tells me a story about Ashok Banker, novelist and journalist. On Monday, says my nephew, Banker reported the amazing tale of a Marathi newspaper proof reader called Sunil Sawle, who lived in penury for years, as he struggled to finish a novel. Finally it was done, but no one was interested in publishing it. Then fortune favoured him. He got the novel translated into English, sent it overseas, and -- presto! Nine and a half million-dollar advance, red carpets rolling out in every direction, news media swooping down on Banker with arc lights blazing ravenous for more information about the novelist.

On Tuesday, Banker revealed that it was all a hoax. There was no Sushil Sawle, no nine and a half million dollars, no story. Except, according to Banker, the hackneyed old dirge about the media and its lust for money. No one pays attention to any mere Marathi novelists, he bemoans, unless they appear with dollar scented halos around their names.

The hinterlands of literature are bristling with vernacular Tolstoys, he declares, but no one cares for them or publishes them until they scrape together a foreign award or two. What a shame, what a scandal.

I don't have much sympathy with Banker's point of view. There are a few occasions when scams of this sort are sometimes refreshing: Doris Lessing tried it out a couple of decades ago, by sending a novel to her publishers under an assumed name. No one was interested. She wanted to prove that publishers are too free with their rejections, too fixated on personalities rather than the prose they publish. And she made her point well, though there's no way of assessing the quality of that particular book. Perhaps even under her own name it may not have done well.

But Banker's scam is different. After all, if the Sushil Sawle story had been true, it would have constituted major news. What else can the press do but report it? If a poor man gets a lot of money, it's news.

There is certainly a belief that authors who earn foreign exchange in sudden windfalls cannot possibly have done it on merit alone, there must have been some private pull or push. But there is little foundation for such beliefs. A book will not, cannot, become a bestseller if it isn't genuinely marketable. "Marketable" is not a synonym for "literary" -- but so what? Being marketable is a valid type of merit.

Charles Dickens was highly marketable, and his books have survived the test of time -- but many of them are absolutely squelchy with melodrama and bathos. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of Nobel Prize winners whose work sells only in a grudging manner if at all. It doesn't mean that their work didn't deserve the prize, merely that it wasn't popular.

Banker's scam focuses attention on himself without saying very much about literature, the media or popular taste. It's certainly possible that there are vernacular authors languishing in the wings of literary limelight, but the only valid way of proving that they are there is to bring them out, publish them, market them intelligently and await the verdict of readers.

Newspaper reporters have a hard enough time distinguishing fact from fiction, as I discovered to my distress in recent weeks and months. Spurious news whittles away confidence in the printed word and does nothing but damage for the business of providing newsier views.

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