COVER STORY
come to think of it!BOARD is nothing...think Gliterature.
Last year, the erudite radio presenter
HrishiK was interviewing Meghna
Pant, an award- winning author who
had recently published How to Get
Published in India. How could a person like her,
who had grown up in South Mumbai, write
about people in villages and small-towns in her
short stories? Meghna took a deep breath,
paused to survey the 100-odd people in the
audience, and said cryptically, “Imagination.”
Yes, of course, a writer needs imagination. Well,
very few will admit it, but a writer could also use
some help from Google.
Meghna gradually lets on: “I’m not anavel-gazing writer, so I often write about
worlds I haven’t occupied, like an orgy in an
ashram, a Dalit garbage collector, or an old man
with a hooker. That’s when Google comes to my
rescue. For those brief moments, it allows me to
inhabit a new world that comes alive with det-
ails,” says Meghna. In How to Get Published in
India, she advises aspiring writers to chuck the
thesaurus. “Perhaps I should’ve also added how
writers shamelessly use Google...researching
facts, detailing, adding meat to that first draft!”
While a writer’s mental mapping of unknown
worlds proceeds with a bit of Googling, the
humbler Ola driver would be totally lost in a
new city. “Our company uses Google Maps for
most of our 110 cities,” says an Ola executive,
on condition of anonymity. “No Google MapsK.S. Dakshina Murthy
JournalistThe musty smell, typical of books stored in
illlit spaces, hit my nose. I peered through
the dim light in the JNU library, trying to
locate a book for an urgent assignment.
I pulled out some books, disturbing the
dust. Coughed and sneezed before I dusted
them carefully and set them on a table.
I was doing my MPhil in international
studies and not many places offered
information on an esoteric subject like
Latin America. This was just 32 years ago.- Yet, looking back, it seems like the
Dark Ages.
More often than not, the books I wanted
would be missing, especially those that
had been borrowed, most probably, by a
colleague working in the same
area. It was the classic case of
the early bird, finders keepers,
first come first served. Friendships paused
at the library doorstep. Once in, you
had to use your ingenuity, mislead your
competitor and grab the book when you
spotted it.
Even in a topnotch university like JNU,
it was difficult to get all the information.
To bone up on an issue, country or
any godforsaken thing, location was
important. Big cities with large libraries
were a prerequisite if one had to succeed
in research.
A job that had anything to do with
information was not easy. As journalists,
one had little option but to seek out
experts to get the lay of the land. It wouldnot be easy
sitting in Delhi to
write about, say, an event
in Sudan. One had to go to the
experts—foreign ministry mandarins or a
JNU professor.
The perspective would always be from
one main source. I chose to write my MPhil
thesis on the “United Nations response
to the Nicaraguan conflict (of the 1980s)”
as the bulk of the primary material was
available at the UN library in Delhi’s Lodi
Estate. One had to hunt out information
like a Rottweiler, swallow and regurgitate
the material as analysis, perspective or
narrative. Now Google that if I am wrong. O“Writers
shamelessly
use Google,
researching
facts, details,
adding meat
to that
first draft,”
says author
Meghna Pant.38 OUTLOOK 22 July 2019