Publishers wrath

Friday, November 24, 2017

Which ever one of you is digging posts from 2011, please go kill yourself.

I looked the stats up today-because what better plans than a reality check- only to be surprised by some motherfucker who's digging stuff from all the way back when I was in undergrad.

I tried reading some of the stuff I had written back then. Pretty sure I'm down with cancer. What's funny is that I had more readers then, than I have now, despite not putting a face to this page for a little over eight years. Sucks to be me, eh?

Earlier today when I was stuffing my face with protein enough to cure malnutrition in the remote districts of Telangana- a problem one "CTB" is trying to address in a mind numbing way to earn monies (partly encouraged by the work place and partly by me), when I got down to watching Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017, dir Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari).

I remember trying very hard to manage to catch a screening at a theatre but somehow doing books on a deadline was more of a priority in life. The only solace, however, was that my mother dissed the film left, right and center and that kind of helped me get over the fomo I had while trying to survive the work.

The film, by the by, is utter nonsense. Waste of time and digital bits, this film made me question (and answer the same questions) as to why publishing is doomed and how we all completely deserve a new plague.

The premise centers around this printing press owner/closet writer who self publishes a sob story on the life and times of his erstwhile love, who's now married to some dude who got no screentime to begin with.

To be honest, if you're that dude and your competition is a writer with a dimple, you deserve no screentime and no girl in the end. Guys with the dimples do it better.
However, this is a film and the screenplay writer decided to be fair so they offered the dimple-less dude that chick in the plot.

Where was I? The sob story writer yes.

Our tragic hero publishes his magnum opus and continues to drink himself to death.

Now, as a publisher, I can safely say the bigger tragedy was his book not doing well, in the absence of a well devised marketing plan but the softie in me disagrees. It's because the dude was in love, that's probably why his book was shit.

When you're in love, anything you do is shit. You write shit. You eat shit. You read shit. You create shit.

Everything is shit when you're in love.

I haven't seen a person with favourable kind of love, the one that works out well for them and they proceed to make good art.

Either you can make good art or love. In this case, the dude chose to be in love and wrote shit. What happened next, will blow your mind.
(no, I swear. It's incredibly dumb)

The girl, a spitting personality of the girl our tragic hero has written about, stumbles upon this book in an amazing set up of when she's attempting to run away from her house. She bargains with the bookseller and buys the paperback for under 100 bucks- perhaps the only real moment in the film.

She reads and discovers that the tragic hero has literally described her- because when I'm self-absorbed and I claim a dude has written a whole poem for me I'm being laughed at but when a film character says a failed pulp fiction is based on her then she's right, woohoo, let's do a whole film on that plot.

I digress, but coming back to the most amazing part of this film. The girl tries her level best to find the author. How she does it is the highlight of my day.

She goes to the bookseller, the guy on the railway platform and asks where she can find the author.

Unskilled couth, if only she had read some more books in her life she'd know the publisher's details are in the copyright page and on the cover and that she should have just contacted them without hesitation.

Then again, what happens next is just mind blowing.

Because this is a film, the seller happens to be publisher/author's friend and decides to tell the dude. The dude aka the tragic hero in turn stalks the girl slyly to find out that she's pretty young thing and he should have some fun for the lack of hobbies.

He decides to engage this girl in letter writing by pretending to know the author.

Now here's what. All this shit was okay, but it's not normal to engage with someone and not know it's them, if you claim to like/love their work.

If a dude helps me out of the way, for no fucking reason, reaching out to the man I'm crushing on and he ends up sounding just as similar as the author, the researcher in me would be alarmed.

Why is the dude helping me?

Why is the man so invested in my business?

Why does he sound awfully similar to a dude whose writing I'm fussing over on Saturday night?

I guess when they say I need pot to calm down, they're not wrong. I should get some because this fucking film has really pissed me off.


I guess some people get a dimpled, published author with a book dedicated to them in entirity while the others continue to be skeptical losers in their bedroom, writing about unbelievable fiction.

You Might Also Like


Hos in Different Area Codes


Stalker Count