India in Black and White

Gautam Bhatia's 'tabloid' book is a harangue of articles, advertisements and misinformation.

It's called Whitewash, but architect-author Gautam Bhatia's latest book is one of the blackest satires on Indian life that I've read recently.

It's a far cry from the books he's written in the past, largely based upon his experiences as an architect. Instead, Whitewash is in an innovative tabloid format, and Bhatia uses pen and column space to vent his spleen on anything and everything that bugs him about living in India.

Last week, when we met to talk about his book, he said, "The only kind of writing I can do is if it stems from intense love, or extreme hatred..."

After reading the book, I feel it must be love, not hate, that actually gave birth to this book. It wouldn't have been so funny otherwise.

"(It is) 256 pages of a personal harangue of articles, advertisements and misinformation "" a sort of yellow pages of the social and political life of today..." he writes in his introduction. It's thicker and better bound than any tabloid, but certainly looks and reads like one.

Just like a tabloid, Whitewash doesn't follow any real sequence: instead, it's divided into sections pretty much like those one would see in a newspaper or a magazine, on business, economy, law, media, gender relations... Each section is a compilation of articles, fictional tenders, mad ads and tongue-in-cheek reviews, all linked to one another thematically.

"I believed that this seemingly unstructured layout with no narrative sequence which normal books have, would best capture the sheer madness of daily Indian life," said Bhatia.

The result is a series of articles and mad ads which make you laugh, yet leave you feeling a little uneasy for having laughed at them. Like, for instance, there's a review of a riot, pretty much on the lines of a film review (its catchline: "now playing at a neighbourhood near you..")

Bhatia reports that the "riot director" is so excited about the tremendous response his riot elicited in Goa, he's planning to take his "show" to other Indian cities with mixed populations... The pages on law are peppered with ads highlighting the extreme lawlessness prevailing in our society today.

Then there's the cover of Whitewash, which features an ad for loans from "ICICICI", to buy alfonso mangoes, asparagus and other exotic vegetables the Indian middle-class aspires to eat.

Since the flow of the book is so intentionally fractured, it isn't the sort of thing one would curl up with for a good long read.

"It's not supposed to be that way," says Bhatia, "I'd imagine it having a prominent place in someone's bathroom library...for it's the kind of book you could pick up, read a few pages of, and not feel compelled to see how it ends!" In this sense, the book has few precedents.

"As far as I know, this is the first full-fledged book of its kind in the tabloid format," said Rukmini Sekhar of Viveka Foundation, publishers of Whitewash.

Writing the articles, Bhatia said, wasn't so hard in retrospect. He drew heavily from the diary he's maintained over the years, in which he's written about anything he found funny, interesting or, in his case, annoying.

"It began as an architect's journal, but when I re-read it, I found most entries had less to do with architecture and more to do with life in general," said he.

Few of those entries, he realised, had been written on a desk. Some had been hastily penned in a bus stop in the hills, others at an airport somewhere in the world, and some while reading the newspaper.

As a student in the US in the seventies, Bhatia had read a tabloid-book he'd found interesting. So he decided to try compiling his writings into a similar format.

Initially, few publishers took to the idea of a tabloid-book: "I spent over a year trying out different publishers, who kept wanting me to tone down both the format and the content...neither of which I wanted to do." But when Sekhar saw his manuscript, she was instantly enthusiastic.

"I felt the tabloid form allowed us to pack in many more ideas and visuals which, of course, have enriched the book tremendously," said she, "but more importantly, the sheer absurdity of it all wouldn't have come through so effectively in a regular novel format!"

However, even she must have balked at the enormity of the editorial task ahead when she saw the huge number of ads and articles to be put together into a meaningful collage.

"The initial manuscript was 600 pages long," said Bhatia, "it took all of Rukmini's editing skills to pare it down to a more modest 256!" What was even harder was to put together all the little bits of writing on one page, so that they made some sense together. In the introduction, Bhatia calls Whitewash "a piece of literary noise" "" in many ways, that describes it pretty accurately.

The response, limited so far, as the book has just become available in select bookstores this week, has been positive.

Sekhar said she laughed all the way through the editing process: "it certainly made the project great fun to do!" "The guy who xeroxed my manuscript found it funny, and wanted me to send it to all our politicians," said Bhatia, "so I guess he liked it too."

To order Whitewash, contact The Viveka Foundation, 25C DDA Flats, Shahpurjat, New Delhi 110 049. Or email at viveka4@vsnl.co